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polymathwannabe comments on Open thread, Feb. 01 - Feb. 07, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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You're assuming PUA theory is an accurate description of the details of romance.
It's less a map of the territory, and more a set of directions for getting from point A to B, with hints at the geography. Depending on the specific flavor, it's more accurate than some, less accurate than others.
For an average heterosexual man, the overall thrust of the advice (be confidently dominant) is more-or-less correct with regard to the average heterosexual woman, and significantly more correct than the standard modern advice men receive (be humble and nice). The actual details advocated in PUA vary by flavor, but cluster loosely around "correct" (unfortunately often falling into the uncanny valley of human relations, as nothing is more off-putting than something that is almost, but not quite, right).
And implementations... well, the general gist is right, and the details are close to right, but hand that to somebody who doesn't understand why they're doing what they're doing, and you get something terrifying, because now you're several degrees off of "close enough" and firmly into the territory of "this person isn't behaving like a person", which is more or less exactly what the word "creepy" conveys.
I think that a few sections of PUA provide a well-developed and accurate system for navigating one of the sides of female sexual/romantic psychology in a certain subset of the population. To be specific, I believe the original Roissy is a good example of someone who developed a solid system for gaining the genuine interest of physically healthy women looking to activate their short-term oriented feelings of sexual infatuation and romantic enjoyment.
With that said, however, I don't think my post assumes that PUA theory is accurate (though my phrasing may have revealed my bias). It merely assumes that a significant number of people don't want to see convincing-sounding detailed descriptions of how the sexual- and romantic-escalation process works (whether or not the descriptions are true), and that many within that group use feelings of anger or annoyance to get those descriptions out of their head before they destroy their inner atmosphere of magic and mystery, or make the beautiful relationships in their life feel dry and mechanical.
RooshV, Julien Blanc, and perhaps 'manospherians' more generally, are not representative of typical PUA advice. (Notably, most PUAs would not advocate 'surprise BDSM' as Julien Blanc did.) Clarity is probably right that 'manospherian' sympathies are not well-regarded, but this has little to do with PUA itself.
For reference, who would you say is representative of typical PUA advice?
These days I would point to /r/seduction on reddit as a good example. Notably, the now mildly-infamous '/r/TheRedPill' section split off from the '/r/seduction' folks arguing that they were being too PUA-focused and apolitical, i.e. they were not focusing enough on 'manosphere' concerns.
Interesting point about the split.
One way to understand what kind of people these communities attract is to consider "what's in it for them". Most people who are focused only on understanding sexual/romantic dynamics well enough to get a girlfriend they're happy about being with will dip their feet into the community for a few months or a couple years and then disappear. It's the perpetual failures, and more importantly the people with a political agenda, who stay.
Roosh wrote Bang in 2007! That's a long time ago. He's in his 30s now and openly says that he's not interested in closing with a high number of women per year anymore. I don't know what your opinion is, but my impression is that Roosh's early work was pretty solid in terms of the basic mechanics of going from the approach to the close (though nothing past that, like LTRs). But nowadays his agenda is political, and I assume you're saying that PUA (e.g. r/seduction) is apolitical and practical, whereas the manosphere (e.g., RooshV Forum, r/TheRedPill) is political and focused on macro trends.
Kind of unfortunate I guess. Almost everything in the "manosphere" comes directly from the original Roissy of 2007-2009 (e.g., this post). Even The Misandry Bubble is just Roissy Macro written with more academic patience and less penetrating intelligence. While Roissy's practical system was also quite good, most people in the manosphere have given up talking about micro dynamics with any sort of insight. It gets pretty shaky with charlatens like Rollo Tomassi, who seem in it only for the political agenda (and consequently have their head in the clouds).
The reason I say it's unfortunate is because they've really made no progress since Roissy and a few other people (e.g., Ricky Raw here) laid the macro groundwork all those years ago. They're just getting louder and more active politically. Too bad the real Roissy didn't have the discipline and desire to use his intellectual power for something more rigorous. And nobody has stepped up to take his place. All we have now is the lightweights who talk practical and the counterfeit heavyweights who like to make a scene in the public sphere.
Well, the political agenda is also a natural evolution. After getting laid enough times, it gets dull. Also if one is at all philosophically inclined, one notices that the very existence and need for PUA is a symptom of how dysfunction certain aspects of society are. Thus one is naturally led to politics.
That's what I was getting at, though I didn't mention the mechanism. People who are not philosophically inclined will tend to learn the basics of PUA, get a bit of success going, and then go back to their life. Those who are, well, there's a natural evolution which leads into politics related to growing older, losing interest in closing with many women per year, and so forth.
I suppose mentioning the "perpetual failures" in the same sentence and also using the negative-connotation word "agenda" may have made it seem like I was criticizing PUA practitioners who develop an interest in the political side of PUA theory. But I meant nothing of the sort. I myself have a strong philosophical demeanor and a deep interest in understanding the current tides of human organization and the pathologies underlying the modern-day erosion of proper societal coordination.
If you read "The Feeling Good Handbook" than it claims that vunerability is central for love relationships. There are PUA people like Mark Manson who are pro-vunerability but Roosh certainly isn't.
Quite a lot of PUA behavior leads those people to not living long-term relationships because the PUA paradigm prevents them from opening up and being vulnerable.
'Vulnerability' is a highly ambiguous term, though. You can definitely show an 'emotional' side (good!vulnerability) without slipping into unattractive 'beta/doormat' mode (bad!vulnerability).
In what way does the PUA paradigm prevent people from opening up and being vulnerable?
You may have the causality backwards. PUA is a tool for creating short-term sexual attraction, and the men most invested in improving this tool will be men geared more toward short-term relationships than the average person. Rather than PUA causing men to lose out on the joy of long-term relationships, it may simply be that the community is disproportionately populated by men who's thinking was already firmly oriented toward short-term flings.
Basically people close down if you tell them to force themselves to approach strangers in relatively hostile enviroments. That what the resident person I know who wrote a book on comfort zone expansion and who run a weekly meetup on comfort zone expansion has to say on the topic.
PUA trains man to consistently reflect on whether their behavior is attractive and then change their behavior based on that reflection. Commonly that means that a man thinks he isn't supposed to show weakness when he's in a relationship. It trains the idea that if the man stops engaging in PUA type behavior his girlfriend will cheat on him. That creates resonance with fear of the girlfriend leaving that prevents opening up.
Two of key people in the game are publically out as being depressed a decade afterwards. Tyler and Mystery. That even through those two have actual success in attracting woman and they make a lot of money coaching people.
Herbal/Tynan isn't but then he stopped the PUA lifestyle, by his own account lost skills and is now seeking a wife to settle down with. Losing skills is quite interesting because it indicates that the skills are superficial and not deeply rooted. The fact that Mystery reports still having approach anxiety years after being a PUA is another indication of a failure to actually do deep changes.
I haven't actually meet Mystery or Tyler in person but I do know over a handful of people who make money with selling products to the PUA demographic and who see PUA often as causing those effects. Basically most people linked to MALEvolution think that way.
Let me summarize in my own words some of the points in your post:
Many members of the PUA community:
take it too far and believe that newbies should immediately dive head-first into doing uncomfortable and anxiety-producing approaches in often-hostile environments. (Which causes these newbies to wall off their real selves and hide behind manufactured personalities.)
are paranoid about girls cheating on them and think a single slip into beta-provider mode may seal a crushing and depressing fate. (Which prevents them from opening up and showing vulnerability, which is required for escalating into a love relationship.)
believe that showing weakness in a relationship is always and everywhere a poor tactic. (Which causes the same problem as the last bullet.)
are depressed even if they have had a lot of success attracting women, as evidenced by two of the key individuals, Tyler and Mystery, encountering this issue. (Which shows that PUA working for seduction doesn't necessary mean it works for a good life.)
lose a sufficient amount of skill after a short enough time out of the game to suggest that they failed to create deeply-rooted changes in themselves. (Which stands as more evidence that PUA teaches people how to put on an act rather than how to truly improve themselves.)
Am I on the right track?
Although I agree with you on all of these claims, I don't agree with you on what I perceive to be the overall argument you're constructing, which is that reading a large selection of material from the PUA community is unlikely to be a good way for a man to better himself in the realm of achieving genuine connections with women he desires either sexually or romantically.
Before I continue: Have you read HughRistik's writing here on Less Wrong?
Yes. Let's start by explictly stating my position: There are man who get into PUA and develop skills that make it easy to get laid. Those aren't the majority. There are other man who get damanged by PUA and get hold back in their development.
A bit of what he actually wrote on LW but I don't think the majority of the linked articles. But let's take one http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/04/26/do-women-know-what-they-want/
That post basically argues that woman don't know what they want.The evidence that it brings is that the mating preferences that woman give out when you give them a questionaire don't match what other studies found in a controlled experiment.
That's a bad belief to have. It prevents guys from having deep conversations with women about their desires. If you look at the Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller point of view as articulated on http://thematinggrounds.com/ one of the aspects that a guy can learn by actually listening to woman is woman's desire for safety. When a guy goes on a date his biggest fear is getting rejected. Often for woman a big fear is getting physically violated.
That's not something that the mating priorities questionaire that HughRistik cites or even gathers data on.
In some sense you could argue that Mating Grounds is PUA material but Tucker Max would take that as an insult as he consider PUA to do more harm than good. I think a guy who wants to get layed will do better by taking that book than by taking one about 2008 PUA.
Mating Grounds about PUA:
Other more substantial things that are wrong about PUA from my perspective:
The language. Terms like k-close and f-close serve to disassociate emotions. Just because a word like sex is charged with emotions doesn't mean that it should be avoided. If man feel uneasy about speaking those words they should explore their relationship with those words instead of replacing it with more constructed language.
Treaing woman as numbers. It prevent deeper relating.
The PUA theory of physical escalation. I consider it much better to feel into what feels good to both parties of the interaction than to focus on an interlectual ladder of physical escalation. If you have a group of people who actually feel into what's right, you can have events where men and women dance naked together. Those events suffer greatly from people who operate with the PUA mindset.
Well, you're certainly right that the people who stay in the community are likely unrepresentative of the average. But there are many people who stay because they're seeking to be PUA wingmen/coaches (either amateur or paid-for), or simply to improve their outcomes and their understanding of seduction- and social dynamics. To some extent, this describes 2007!Roissy and 2007!RooshV too, but even then they were quite controversial and 'political', in a way that many others in the community would have found distasteful and unhelpful.
The flip side of it though is that if the 'heavyweight' political folks are right about what they infer from PUA micro dynamics (I'm far from convinced about this, but we can assume it for the sake of this argument) there might not even be much need for further work on the micro side. Overall, PUA has seen remarkably little change since 2007, though there's definitely been a welcome emphasis on 'inner game' and 'being a natural' as being the next level, and low-level tactics and tricks as useful training wheels that can eventually be dispensed with to a large extent.
Good point.
I don't see the connection. Even if the coordination system of society is falling apart, that doesn't mean that men can't enjoy the fruits of PUA ability in the short term. Why would Roissy Macro being correct not leave room for further refinement in the practical art of seduction?
In the US that might be true, when looking at the people I know in Germany who make money in that industry, a lot of them say that the 2007 PUA stuff creates more harm than good.
Instead of getting told to force myself to do approaches that make me feel unconfortable I get told that it would be good for me to do more non-violent communication style expressions of my own desires.
But even in the US there are people who speak at PUA conferences and take the label of PUA as an insult and claim there are there to get the people away from PUA style thinking.
So how does that actually help with seducing girls? Because that sounds like it simply decayed into yet another "generic self-help movement".
The person in question does write articles about how to get girls to have sex in the bathroom of a nightclub and make his money with the blog hosting those articles. That was the specific personal advice he gave me at the end of spending 10 days at a retreat in nature together.
Actually changing the substance through "generic self-help" seems to work better for the goal of getting woman than focusing on learning tactics for getting woman.
The idea of learning a bunch of techniques to change woman into liking you instead of working to change yourself doesn't seem to be successful.
Makes sense then. He got to know you quite well, and realized that a 'direct' style would work best for you.
That's not really what's happening, though. The techniques are there to change the image you're presenting and ensure that it reflects you at your best and most attractive. That's why 'the inner game' (changing yourself) and 'the outer game' (changing your social image/approach) are largely seen as complementary and mutually reinforcing.