this 1,600 or so words is part of an epic(ish) series on pick up artists, The Seduction Community, and hey, the whole damn world. That-which-came-before is below:

1. I’m Not Picking On Pick Up Artists. Much.

1.5 Interview with a Former Pick Up Artist

2. wherein I take a (temporary) break from bitching about pick up artists

______________________________

In my last essay, I wrote

…we’re all trying to get the same thing.

Together.

But maybe that isn’t quite true. At different times, we want different things. Women want different things than it is expected that women should want; men, too. It is pretty damn difficult to say, definitely, categorically, Women are this and want this or Men are that and want that. That sort of binary approach to gender and desire pretty neatly renders everyone outside of those constructions and intentions invisible.

Like: if ciswomen want x and cismen want y, what do transwomen and men want? And what happens if you’re a woman and you don’t want a man? What if you don’t identify with either gender? What if you’re queer? What if you do identify with what it means to be a stereotypical woman, but don’t necessarily want a boyfriend or a serious relationship?

Obviously, the Seduction Community doesn’t deal with any of that or anything outside the realm of hot chick/must fuck.

~

Dating is a numbers game so it isn’t fundamentally offensive that PUAs advise their students to approach lots of women.

Women, after all, work the numbers by looking hot.

And therein lies the fucking (literally) problem.

• “Hot” is, essentially, youth – and is therefore pretty temporary and a risky foundation for feminine identity.
• There is an entire industry dedicated to teaching women that we are not attractive.
• There is an entire society dedicated to teaching women that we have no worth beyond our looks, our ability to dispense sex, and, possibly, create new life. But once we do that, the first two are shot, so society can feel free to indulge in mama-targeted misogyny.
• You know why there is misogyny in the Seduction community? Because there is misogyny in real life.
• Still, when  I encounter misogyny in the Seduction Community, it freaks me out because it is so naked and explicit. The Seduction Community overtly embraces the paradigm that young, thin, curvy is a woman’s worth. These women are  “HBs” = hot bitches. Everyone else is a “fattie” or “warpig”. Women are rated by their attractiveness (0-10), called “targets” and talking to them is called an “approach” or a “set”. All of these terms chess-ify human interaction and dehumanizes both parties. The man running the set becomes the wizard behind the curtain twiddling the knobs -

(and I think we can safely presume from the lessons of Oz and real life that wizards are lonely. Neil Strauss wrote that the more success he had with women, the less he respected them, which doesn’t sound terribly fulfilling)

- while the woman is just matter to manipulate. It is a science experiment and experimenting on human beings usually requires an ethics committee. I demand an ethics committee.

I also get the sense –from the forums and the language – that some PUAs feel that men are getting screwed by women who are The Keepers of The Pie and therefore have the upper hand in dating and sex.

(This is not unique to the PUA community. See, for example, the superbowl ads that amount to what Mary Elizabeth Williams calls “an annual evening of misogyny punctuated with occasional outbreaks of football”; or even the current debate in the fem-o-sphere about hook up culture.)

The very basis of the PUA methods is inversion. PUAs examine how women attract men and then mirror those techniques. They model women in order to secure the thing they want that women have: the power of sexual selection.

~

Men feel screwed. Women feel screwed. We’re all feeling screwed by each other, and by the world.

Some of it feels like a reaction against sterility and routine. We’re lusting for authenticity and creation. We suspect that we’re alienated from our wildness and our humanity, our flesh biology and imperatives, our appetites and desires, our spirits, communion, and communities. We’re fleeing corporate world; we’re making cartoons and books and blogs and art; we’re manufacturing community; we’re connecting with the divine feminine and the sacred masculine; we’re railing against commutes and building cottage industries. Maybe we’re resisting scale and reasserting the primacy of intimacy. Maybe we want to be together on our own terms rather than warehoused in cubicles and condos.

~

This anguish – about men and women, sex and commitment, intimacy and power, and nature versus the human world – is old. It reminds me of Rousseau’s Emil and Sophie, his fictional, idealized versions of men and women in his new world.

Of course, Rousseau, who wrote the Social Contract – examining the bases of political cooperation – was fixed on figuring out Woman and Man. What kind of citizens will our democratic societies need?

Answer XY: Emil. Ideal Man. Educated to be self-governing. The goal is moral mastery and individual self-sufficiency: The Citizen.

Answer XX: Sophie. Ideal Woman. Educated to be governed by her husband. The goal is to complement The Citizen.

It is an age-old story: when we’re trying to figure out our world and our future, we turn first to figuring out women, men, sex, love and babies.

Every political philosophy and most religions start with organizing sex.

~

A friend of mine told me the following story:

He’s given vibrators or sex toys to several girlfriends as gifts. And every time he has, he noted, the relationship ended. So, he told me, he thinks maybe he should not give sex toys to girlfriends any more.

I told him – all future girlfriends, you owe me a debt of gratitude, please send cash – that his conclusion was based on crap logic. Correlation is not causation. He’s single, so in fact all of his relationships have ended – not just the ones in which sex toys were exchanged. I doubt the problem vibrates.

(Which is not to say that the common denominator is him – I don’t think a history of ended relationships indicates pathology. Instead, I think it indicates being wise enough to move on when it isn’t right.)

I think this urge, though – to rationalize, systemize, isolate variables, invent causation, define a methodology – is pretty understandable.

And that’s what pick up artists do. They attempt to systemize attraction. They try to structure magic.

By most accounts, it seems to work, initially.

~

Let’s be clear:

• Men trying to get laid: ok
• Women trying to get laid: ok
• Relationships: ok
• Casual sex: ok

My issue with PUAs isn’t the pursuit of sex. I take issue with the community’s basic conception of what women are, what they are for, and why and how they are valued.

In essence: sex, sex, sex, preferably all while looking like a “hot bitch”. (Nothing against hot bitches.)

If that is all women are, and are meant for, then why are women bothering with all this education and creating and you know, thinking?

Which bring us to the the New York Times trend section.

It seems like a non sequitur, but it is not. The NY Times trend section could easily be known as “Ladies, you know it is all your fault.”

Mixed martial arts and Jesus? You made church too womanly and anti-bloodsport. Ballstealers, all of you.

Can’t get a boyfriend at college? Blame feminism. This is what happens when you get ideas and an education.

Got a hot career (thanks, college!) but can’t get married or, if you’re married (phew! Close call, that one) and you’re having problems with your earning-less-money husband? Blame your career and your buying power. ‘Cuz men don’t like it if you’re successful and money can’t buy you love, you uppity bitch. Booyah!

About the money/career/successful thing as a barrier to romance:

Really?

Because I don’t know any man who was turned off by me being, you know, self-sufficient. The cool guys I’ve liked and even loved always thought it was hot that I have ambition.

Once, when I was in the middle of a really challenging project, with a really challenging co-worker. (By “challenging” I mean we were having a pissing match that I was determined to win.) I was talking about how I fixed the problem and my beau at the time looked at me and said “that just turned me on.”

Another time, when I was talking about resolving a problem with a sort-of-bf-who-screwed-me-over, I described how I dug in my heels and got mine, a guy friend told me “that’s so hot. Hearing about you fighting back and winning makes my dick hard.”

That is hot. Only weak people – and I use people, not “men”, because this truth is universal – are intimidated by strength.

And all this handwringing about monied career chicks not getting any lovin? (New York Times, I’m a-talkin’ to you.) I call bullshit, especially in sexy cities where an aged bungalow costs a million bucks. Two fat paycheques are way better than one.

~

So the Seduction Community is just a way to talk about what the NY Times is so confused about: just what exactly are our gender roles these days? What do we do if our usual gendered shorthand doesn’t work, either for describing gender itself or the aspirations or temperaments of people? And, more pruriently, who’s doing what to whom?

~

Again, this is an old question.

The women everyone from Pick Up Artists to the New York Times seems to be longing for – the ideal mate – is Rousseau’s fictional Sophie: intelligent but decorous, educated but subservient, beautiful but without vanity, and absolutely, essentially feminine.

And she did not end well.

No woman who exists as the complement to another or for the purposes of another ever does.