PUAs and Us Others: Never the Twain Shall Meet

I have made known, a time or three, that I disclaim moral, spiritual or political affiliation with the PUA-Gamer community. And for quite a while, I have wanted to compose a long article that would explore the reasoning behind this. But I have procrastinated -- mainly because I find the subject distasteful and depressing.  But I have done well to put off that project, for it has given me time to hone my thoughts to a point of ideal brevity and clarity.

There is, I submit, an essential conflict between the PUA-Gamer community on the one side, and the MRA-MGTOW-Masculinist grouping on the other. This conflict is irreducible -- meaning that it cannot be resolved or even effectively patched over unless one side or the other discards its worldview and philosophical outlook.

Very well. For convenience, I will call the MRA-MGTOW-Masculinist group the 3M sector, and the PUA-Gamer group the PUA sector. And the core difference between these sectors is easily summarized. Quite simply, the PUA cultural ethos is grounded in the oppositional binary of sexual winners v. sexual losers. In their scheme of things, you are either a player or a "poor desperate chump"; there is no in-between,  no intervening gray-spectrum, and more significantly, no alternative taxonomy of any kind.  These categories are force-fitted as a social definition, and your self-definition counts for diddly.

By contrast, the 3M community believes that the sexual winner-loser binary is immoral,  perverse and unbrotherly, and ought to be put out of operation as a societal paradigm. This conviction is reinforced by the observed behavior of  PUAs, who wish to impose their cultural frame upon the entire pro-male world, and to define their own relationship to the rest of that community accordingly. In short, they wish to dominate the pro-male world and to remake it in the PUA image. And so PUAs have gotten the name of being crass manipulators, power gamers and philistines, and are generally cold-shouldered by vanguard members of the the 3M sector.

All right. The grubby little secret is, that the PUAs are controlled by women. That is the only conclusion you could ever draw about men who make the pursuit of sexual encounter socially mandatory. I say "controlled by" women because, in such cases, women (through no fault of their own) are the controlling factor. And in the PUA universe, you must align to this controlling factor as the price of social validation from your male peer group. Either that or be a "poor desperate chump" -- regardless if you are actually poor, actually desperate, or actually a chump.

It is small wonder, therefore, that high-minded 3M people will shun the PUA world like a sexually-transmitted disease.

Some PUAs might object that they are actually teaching you to control women. But that is only a subtle dodge, to obscure the central fact that whoever joins the PUA community in the first place, does so with the expressed purpose of engaging women in the first place. And engagement, with any object at all, entails a dimension of control BY that object that would be absent in the case of non-engagement.
 
If you consider that the PUA community started life as a business venture whose purpose was to make money, much will fall into place. To this very day, it bears the stamp of its mercantile origins. The idea is to sell a product, and as modern marketers will do, it encourages a need for this product whether the product is necessary or not. And that is why you will never get the PUA culture to allow, on its collective mind level, that the pursuit of sexual encounter is optional -- i.e., that one is permitted to opt out.  For starters, such a notion is irrelevant in such a setting. But more significantly, it is taxing to entertain such a notion at all in such a setting.  To do so, would undermine, and eventually dissolve, the entire PUA raison d'être.

Individual PUAs will sometimes disown the winner-loser binary on an intellectual level, but nowhere is this principle conspicuously posted as a bylaw, or generally talked about with any sense of its importance, among PUAs as a group. For the PUA community recruits from the mainstream population of  "average Joes" whose values are conventional, whose morality is naturalistic, and who might be troubled with a philosophical thought once every three months. In other words, just the people who would be amenable to such manipulation as we have described, and disinclined to think outside of that particular box.

PUA is backward-looking, reactionary, counter-revolutionary, rooted in the age-old social pecking order, among men, which makes women a controlling factor in men's lives. Accordingly, PUA is of more service to feminism than to men. Think for a moment -- PUA wants men to be controlled by women. Likewise, feminism wants men to be controlled by women. This would suggest that PUA and feminism have much in common.  In fact, it would suggest that the PUAs are half-feminist in their cultural DNA.

It would also suggest that the PUA relationship with feminism is paradoxical. And observation bears this out, given that the feminists hate the PUAs even though the PUAs are a tremendous help to them. This, as I say, is paradoxical. And since it will do us no immediate good to contemplate that paradox, I will proceed to other matters.

The PUA sector sells its product by manipulating the age-old male fear of either not getting laid, or being perceived as not getting laid.  Both fears, in traditional mainstream culture, have operated powerfully on the male psyche. But neither one is necessary. Neither one is inherent to the nature of existence. It is possible in either case to cancel the fear, or the sting of the actual occurrence, by a subjective decision. What really feeds the fear or the sting, is the objective behavior of other people, and their ability to transcend your transcendence. As a certain psychiatrist once remarked: "Things don't get you down. People do!" These are words of liberation which belong on the list of ten best things ever said -- right next to "cogito ergo sum", and "suffering arises from craving".

But yes, the last thing we would ever do is heap additional pains and burdens upon men -- who as you know are being treated like garbage already, and don't need any more problems than they've already got. As for the PUAs, if they would behave symbiotically, and respect 3M sensibilities, and knock off the cynical, shit-stirring, backstabbing, power-grabbing behavior which has so often marked them, then we would have no problem with them. But sadly, we have seen through them, and we see that they are incorrigible just as feminists are incorrigible. We know they won't change because, by the nature of things, they cannot.

We are uninterested in debating the merits of PUA pickup and seduction techniques. Whether these techniques actually work, or whether they are snake-oil as many have suggested, is of no present concern to us. Our present concern, is to make clear why we consider the PUA community unfit for political affiliation, and to stress that we ought to distance ourselves from these people in view of  numerous efforts by feminists, the general public, and the PUAs themselves, to conflate PUA with the 3M community. To counteract such conflation, we ought to generate a consistent anti-PUA rhetoric so that our "signal",  as it were, will override  the "noise".

And now, my concluding words. If you throw away what is bad about PUA, and keep only what is good, you will end up with a good, honest life coach who offers good, honest dating advice and would never use fear and social shaming to manipulate you.  Likewise, if you throw away what is bad about feminism, and keep only what is good, you will end up with a good, honest liberal humanist who wants only the best for everybody and would never use fear and social shaming to manipulate you. You see, in either case you would be throwing away what is essential to the thing in question. For both PUA and feminism, their essence is their badness -- and whatever is good about them is only a cover story to camouflage what is bad about them.

And that is the last thing I've got to say about all this. Take care.