Surely you mean

"the average person could escape the majority of needless wasteful tension if they were just willing to use words ... "

since I am sure there is some person out there who overuses "average" when they really mean "all", yes? And yet you didn't choose to have that word. Why? Was one word so costly to you?

PU may well apply (to a certain extent) to almost all pre-menopausal hetero/bi women, but the case is much more clear cut for women who are also relatively young, culturally-western, hetero- or bi- sexual and relatively attractive, because that's the subgroup of women where extensive field-testing of the concepts has been done.

The possibility I advanced was that "women are happier if they are communicated with honestly, treated as equal partners in a relationship, given signals that they are high-status in the form of compliments and "romantic" gestures and so forth". This does not seem to me to be the same thing as saying that women are happier with "a partner who does nothing but worship [them]"

Actually, it's my observation that men who consciously make an effort to do what you said, actually end up doing what I said, from the point of view of the people they interact with.

That is, they are poorly calibrated and overshoot the mark. (Been there, did that.)

You also are asserting without evidence that the kind of relationship I just described would not be fun if you were actually in one, which seems to me to contain implicit status attack, since it assumes that I have never been in such a relationship and hence that I am speaking from a position of epistemological disadvantage compared to yourself.

Hm. Sorry - the important piece left out of my explicit reasoning is above: i.e., that people who think they are "communicating honestly", et al usually end up doing something completely different; it's the absence of that which I implicitly assume you've had... and which is AFAICT a less common experience for men (with no implied connotations about status) if for no other reason than that women are on average better socially calibrated than men.

Would I be far wrong if I guessed that your data set for this implicit assumption is based on interacting with a significant number of PUAs?

Yes, you would. ;-)

The kind of people who have long-term relationships based on honesty, equality and support are probably unlikely to self-select for participation in PUA forums and hence their experiences and viewpoints will be under-represented in those circles compared to their prevalence in the general population.

Data point: I have been married for 15 years and would not classify myself as a PUA in any sense, although based on what statistics I've read about men in general, I would have to consider myself to have had above-average sexual success (though not drastically so) before I got married -- largely due to behaviors PUAs would've described as social game, direct game, and qualifying. (However, the terms didn't exist at the time, as far as I know -- this was pre-internet for the most part.)

At no time were a lack of honesty, equality, or support a part of what I did or sought, so I'm not sure why you think they are anathema to PUA goals.

PUA literature, like so many other things, is largely what you make of it. When I look at it, I find the parts that are positive, life-affirming, and utility-increasing for everybody involved. So your objections look to me like strawman attacks.

One thing I have observed is that once I've read the parts of PUA theory that sound good (i.e., more politically correct), I find that on reading the less politically-correct things, they are actually advocating similar behaviors, and simply describing them differently. Some use more inflammatory and controversial language laced with all sorts of negative judgments about men and women; others emphasize empathy and helping men to see things from women's point of view (without an added heap of patronizing the women in the process).

And yet, when it comes right down to it, they're still saying to do the same things; it's only the connotations of their speech that are different.

IOW, ISTM that you are arguing with the misogynistic connotations of some fragment of PUA theory that you've encountered; I disagree because the connotations are AFAICT superfluous to functional PUA advice, having had the opportunity to compare misogynistically-connotated and non-misogynistically-connotated descriptions of the same thing.

This is something that PUA and self-help in general have in common, btw: they are best read in such a way as to completely disregard connotation, judgment, and theory, in favor of simply extracting as directly as possible what precise behaviors are being recommended and what predictions are being made regarding the outcomes of those behaviors. Only after determining whether the behavior produces the predicted result, is it worth exploring (or refuting) the advocate's theories about "how" or "why" it works.

Case in point: "The Secret" and other "law of attraction stuff", much of which turns out to be scientifically valid, if (and only if) you completely ignore the nutty theories and focus on behavior and predictions. Richard Wiseman's research into "luck theory" actually demonstrates that the behaviors and attitudes recommended by certain "law of attraction" proponents actually do make you luckier, by increasing the probability that you will notice and exploit serendipitous positive opportunities in your environment.

If Wiseman had simply dismissed "The Secret" as another nutty new-age misinterpretation of physics, that research couldn't have been done. I suggest that if you seriously intend to research PUA (as opposed to making what seem to me like strawman arguments against it), you follow Wiseman's example, and break down whatever you read into concrete behaviors and outcome predictions, minus any theories or political connotations of theories.