A low-status take on PUA
At first (middle school/early high school), I didn’t ask any girls out because I was playing dumb status games and it was easy to make fun of my classmates for their early attempts at romance. As I became obese and developed mental health problems in high school, I couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to date me. And the parts of me that told me I was unlovable were validated the first couple of times I did screw up the courage to ask someone out - not only did I get rejected, but I was rejected a couple of times in especially embarrassing ways that stayed with me for a long time (not that I was especially blameless in this, it’s just what happened).
So - cut to me in early college: lonely, overly analytical, poor social skills (at least around flirting/romance), and, by this point, mildly traumatized and thoroughly scared of rejection. A predictable thing to happen at this point is that I would be attracted by the pickup artist (PUA, which I’ll also use for “pickup artistry”) “community” (in quotes because it’s really more an industry than a community). Fortunately, this did not happen, but it might have, because PUA is marketed squarely at people like me. The book that popularized PUA in modern culture, The Game, was written while I was in elementary school and I’ve never read it, but I did read a few reviews to write this and one of my favorite quotes is:
The point was women; the result was men. Instead of models in bikinis lounging by the Project Hollywood pool all day, we had pimply teenagers, bespectacled businessmen, tubby students, lonely millionaires, struggling actors, frustrated taxi drivers, and computer programmers—lots of computer programmers
- Neil Strauss, author of The Game, talking about PUA
I would have fit right in. But I also noticed a lot of reviews saying things like: “I doubt [Strauss] has anything helpful for anyone except those men whose emotional maturity stalled at age 15” or describing PUAs as “pathetic,” “sinister,” and “puerile.” I struggled with a lot of self-hatred for a long time, and I’d like to write the thing that I wish I’d read back in early college, on pickup artistry and pickup artists - coming from a place of deep love for the person I was.
As I try to do that, I’ll note that the tremendous contempt reviewers have for The Game comes despite Strauss himself pointing out multiple times that the book is explicitly a commentary on how PUA is ultimately unfulfilling (despite or because of the fact that, at least for Strauss, it was effective in allowing him to sleep with a lot of women). Strauss has since published another book, The Truth, about inner work and relationships, which I’m eventually hoping to read. Since I haven’t read The Game, I’ll withhold judgement on how rational the reviewers are, but I’ll say that writing this piece required me to spend a fair bit of time working through an irrational urge to distance myself from PUA as much as I can. To a certain extent, this protected me from getting into PUA and was a good thing, but attacking already suffering people to protect your status isn’t how you make the world a better place. And so, without further ado:
Some PUA-like Thing is Good
Imagine a 3D graph showing some scalar-valued function of two variables. On the x axis is your level of social skills (as related to romance - how good you are at flirting, reading signals, etc). On the y axis is how often you hit on people. The z axis shows f(x, y), a function giving the change in how comfortable people are as a result of you hitting on people (alternately: how much utility/value you’re adding to the world by hitting on people).
The optimal place to be on the curve is not (0,0,0)! More than this, even if f(x, y) did attain its maximum value at (0,0,0), which I don’t think it does, helping people to learn social skills efficiently as they hit on people should produce less discomfort overall. Some people are already very efficient at learning social skills, and some are not. I don’t think the inefficient people are creepy losers who deserve to die alone.
To be very explicit: I think some thing that teaches clueless people when and how and where to flirt, and what other people might be looking for, would be good for the world. That being said…
PUA Itself is Not Great
Having acknowledged that all PUA-like things, even good ones, will be vulnerable to accusations of creepiness, PUA seems creepier than it has to be. I associate PUA with weird dudes with hats and goatees either aggressively and awkwardly hitting on clearly uninterested girls or, if they’re good at it, manipulating girls into having sex as much for the pleasure of exercising power over someone through manipulation as for the sex itself. A big part of the problem here is that PUA, to overgeneralize, seems to be built on the idea that the only way girls would be interested in you is if you somehow tricked them into it.
This makes sense when you consider that PUA is an industry, where the most influential people have something (a book, a workshop, a course) they want to sell you. They know that their typical prospective customer has low self-esteem and already specialize in exploiting low self-esteem, so of course they play on your sense of inferiority. This doesn’t get corrected because the powerful stigma attached to PUA-like things creates a moat around the community; more “moderate” versions of PUA aren’t worth the reputational cost of promoting them and don’t survive.
Attempts to disclaim this within PUA typically go something like “well of course it’s all about your personality and stuff, but you need to learn these tricks or you’ll get rejected before girls have a chance to see your personality.” I think this might be a reasonable point in favor of making some deliberate attempt to learn social skills, but PUA somewhat undercuts itself by (in my reading) going way beyond just stopping you from instantly disqualifying yourself.
Rejection is a scary thing, and I think PUA embodies one of the two approaches I’m aware of to getting over your fear of it: going full sociopath, where rejection isn’t scary to you because you refuse to let the interaction you’re about to have have any kind of impact on you. You never get over your sense of being fundamentally unlovable (in fact, you reinforce that sense every time you trick or manipulate someone into sleeping with you), but maybe you get laid.
Trying to Imagine a Better Version of This
If I’m going to write the essay I wish I’d read when I was starting college, there has to be some affirmative advice. So what would PUA look like if it wasn’t based on the idea of tricking people into sex? First, I think it would still have to acknowledge that certain lifestyles and habits are almost universally more or less attractive (eg: good hygiene). It’s perfectly legitimate to decide to change these to be more attractive; it’s also perfectly legitimate to decide not to, or to change your mind once you’ve decided. In any event, making the decision consciously is useful as a way to clarify and pursue your priorities.
Second, it’s important to acknowledge that no one wants to make women uncomfortable (and prioritize this in practice!), while also acknowledging that “I don’t want to make people uncomfortable” is a common excuse to avoid discomfort yourself. As a matter of process, this might look like prioritizing inner work while also taking into account that endless inner work with no actual action is an easy failure mode for many people. Getting this right is super important, because “I’m making women uncomfortable” and “I’m inherently bad and no one would ever accept me as I am” are common, mutually reinforcing stories. Zooming out, some people might generally spend a fair bit of time figuring out what kinds of things they feel ethically OK with doing while also keeping in mind that their desired endpoint on the 3D curve mentioned above is a better world than the one they live in (even if only because they themselves are better off). That said, one thing I think PUA actually does well is pushing people to just approach other people they’re interested in. In the age of dating apps, hitting on people in person is a ridiculous advantage. Tinder is currently selling a service that will let you pay $500 a month to message two people a week without first having matched with them. You know what else allows you to hit on someone without competing for a right swipe? Walking up to them and saying hello.
Lastly, I think it would be designed around the fact that 90% of interested people are fundamentally confused about the world in important ways. I’m guessing with zero data, but I’d bet the PUA breakdown is 90% people with mild mental health issues/poor social skills and 10% psychopaths who love manipulating people and just want some tips. In some ways, PUA in its current form seems to be about converting members of the former group into members of the latter. New PUA would be significantly about inner work and getting comfortable with the feeling of being shot down.
Outro
I met my wonderful girlfriend three years before we started dating. She was seeing someone else, and I had no interest in hitting on someone else’s girlfriend. The hilariously ironic thing about our relationship is that, over the time we knew each other, I got more and more confident hitting on other people, but she was the one with the guts to call me and ask if I’d noticed that the vibe between us had gotten to be more than just friendly since she broke up with her boyfriend. I am so tremendously glad that she did.
So I guess that last advice I’d give myself is: don’t worry too much. You have absolutely no idea how anything will turn out.