Jerks will be jerks

Is this what dating rituals are now? The man tries to make the woman feel like shit about herself?

I know it didn’t work here – but it works elsewhere?

Happy to be out of the dating scene. Worried about what my children will have to endure.

A private club in Dakar for Westerners sounds exactly like a place where an attractive woman would be assumed to be the trophy of the most senior man in the room and an unattractive one to be his relatives.

So the pathetic negging has extra incentives: a bed-warmer and networking!

Is this what dating rituals are now? The man tries to make the woman feel like shit about herself?

I know it didn’t work here – but it works elsewhere?

It varies every which way.

The physicist Richard Feynman wrote about it, based partly on his own experience soon after WWII. I’ve never done it except by accident. My explanations are that some women want approval so much that once they notice they’re being disapproved by somebody who only wants sex with them, they’ll do that for the approval. And some women surrounded by men who flatter them to pick them up, find the one who doesn’t flatter them stands out from the crowd. And probably some women recognize the technique and go along, the way they’d go along with a lame pickup line if they’re in the mood.

I talked with a number of pickup artists when I researched NLP. They didn’t use this method, their method was to talk to women they were attracted to, describe their philosophy of mutual pleasure with no strings, no commitment, and no craziness, and if the woman was not interested then smile and politely say goodbye and try the same line on some other woman. They claimed very good results but I didn’t actually watch them do it.

I have not had any extended conversations with pickup artists who use negging, but my speculation is that the ones who do it, want to think they are manipulating women into having sex with them who otherwise would not. When it succeeds they feel like they’ve won some special victory, and when it fails they figure anything else would have failed too. It is a psychological crutch for men who think of women as something other and alien. They feel better to have a magic ritual which is supposed to prevent rejection and which allows them to talk to women despite their fears.

People from other countries might not be following Australia’s recent Pick Up Artist incident.

An apparently (in)famous Pick Up Artist tried to visit Australia recently.

People were not happy about this.

Then our government declared Pick Up Artist techniques such as you mention are intolerable in Australia and then our Immigration Minister proceeded to cancel his visa and deport him, while the police announced his departure on Twitter and the Police Commissioner deplored him:

““We can confirm Julien Blanc left Australia overnight,” Victorian police said on Twitter. “His assistant is also due to leave shortly.” The pair had planned to stay until December.

The immigration minister, Scott Morrison, said Blanc’s visa was cancelled Thursday night.

“The matter was raised with us and we had it investigated and this fellow looked at,” Morrison told Sky News on Friday.

“This guy wasn’t putting forward political ideas, he was putting forward abuse that was derogatory to women and that’s just something, those are values abhorred in this country.”
…
Victorian police commissioner Ken Lay, who has consistently worked to end violence against women, was so disturbed by Blanc’s behaviour that he released a statement Friday condemning it.

“I’ve seen Julien Blanc’s work,” he said. “To me most of it appears to be deeply disturbing and offensive. Labelling women as objects and actively promoting the abuse of women degrades the dignity of our whole community.

“We want to assure everyone that we have been paying close attention to this issue and appreciate that so many community members have expressed concern.””

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/nov/07/protesters-force-us-pick-up-artist-julien-blanc-to-quit-australian-tour

Kicking this Julien Blanc dude out of Australia is pretty outrageous. No different than the sort of hysteria in the 00s against radical clerics and the likes. There’s pretty much no constituency anymore for old school live and let live liberalism; our political culture is just a collection of leftist and libertarian authoritarians, completly illogical disgruntled conservatives and PC anarchists who’d have you shot in the morning.
(this isn’t a comment on the OP, which I enjoyed, only the case ZM linked too)

engels – I don’t know, it doesnt go into too much detail in ZM’s link and (although this doesn’t do my position much good) it’s the first I’ve heard of him. But still, I dont see that as being a reason to ban him. The men who will go to this bootcamp are his ideological stormtroopers. They have signed up to this vision of the world completly. Their perspective won’t be changed by Julien Blanc not getting in. They have multiple other means of buying what Blanc is selling. At the very best, it’s a meaningless symbolic victory, but what does it symbolise ? That most liberal countries political cultures aren’t capable of putting up with divergent perspectives,(I agree that the perspective is repulsive)
Plenty of radical Islamist preachers have advocated assualting women (by any reasonable definiton of assault) , hating gays, upturning the political order of the West. It’s a problem, but a minority one, and worth keeping some perspective over. Better tackled through education, ignoring or making fun off than banning orders.

their method was to talk to women they were attracted to, describe their philosophy of mutual pleasure with no strings, no commitment, and no craziness, and if the woman was not interested then smile and politely say goodbye and try the same line on some other woman. They claimed very good results

I used to know a guy who did exactly that & he claimed good results, too. Well, I say ‘exactly’ – what he did was walk up to girls and say “Do you fancy a shag?”. The first one might tell him to eff off – the first ten or twenty might tell him to eff off, for that matter – but by the end of the night he’d be on a promise.

What gets me about guys like those NLP Jedis is how terribly terribly seriously they take the business of being a creep. I’m reminded of that Hollaback street harassment video, and in particular of the first comment I saw on it, one place where it was posted. This bloke says, “I work very long hours and I choose not to date at work (because I am Mr Ethics), so I pick up women on the street, because otherwise I would never get my end away at all, and that would be Wrong. And hey, sometimes a woman tells me to get lost, so I back off and no harm done, but you know what, sometimes they really love it – sometimes a woman’s just waiting to start a relationship with a random male stranger, even though she doesn’t realise it. It’s like all those films you see, it really is. So, you know, calling it harassment and all, what the hell?”

As well as turning a discussion of street harassment into one about how awful it would be for this one guy not to get laid – which is quite a trick in itself – I was really struck by the way he turned himself into the good guy, when all he’d described himself doing was basic, instrumental, exploitative sexual predation. The idea that he might get to know some people (of the opposite sex), become friends, and move on from there to the whole sex thing just never seems to have pinged his radar.

PUartistry is repulsive but the ev-psych world view of this post doesn’t really seem like much of an answer to it (just my two trollish cents).

I don’t think it’s repulsive in general except for the public health issue. Some people use repulsive methods.

The ones I met seemed OK. In public situations, they approached women who didn’t mind talking to them. They explained their libertine philosophy. One-time hopefully-pleasurable sex, no consequences, no expectations. They made their offer if the woman hadn’t already told them to go away yet. If she agreed, probably she was OK with it. If she said no thank you, she liked the idea but not today, then they politely said goodbye. If she said it was a good idea but not with somebody she found personally repulsive like them, they called over one of their friends to try and politely bowed out. If she said no, she didn’t do that kind of thing, then they politely said goodbye. If she said “How offensive! What kind of woman do you take me for?” they said “A liberated woman who makes her own choices, now please pardon me I must be going, no need to take more of your time.”. They did not want to seduce women who would be upset about it afterward, so they tried to quickly find someone who wanted what they honestly had to offer.

People who randomly approach women and try one trick after another to make them say yes, have to be incredibly annoying. This particular incident gave Maria the chance to get back. The guy tried to damage her self-confidence, so she damaged his badly. ‘Little jerk. Is he even old enough?’ It didn’t do the world a whole lot of good — the implication being that the little jerk will someday grow into his full powers. But it got him out of her hair.

(Like when you find chewing gum in your hair. The sooner you get it out, the better. There must be a thousand ways to do it other than threatening it with a knife, but most of them involve other disadvantages. Peanut butter, WD40, mayonnaise, lemon juice, baking soda, tooth paste — You didn’t ask to have chewing gum in your hair in the first place and then it’s hard to get rid of.)

ZM,

I never heard of Julien Blanc but wow, good for Australia. I followed your link, and then a link within that article and ended up at a video of him giving a seminar to other white men about how to behave with Tokyo women. Just grab the back of their head and apply their face to your dick, says he, demonstrating. And then it shows him doing so, over and over, in public situations so you think, surely nothing is happening. But he says he had a very good time in Tokyo. Scary stuff—he looks like a big guy.

This routine use of force reminds me of the Jian Ghomeshi case that is unfolding here in Canada, where a well-known public personality has been accused of repeatedly assaulting women he dated (he claims they wanted to be beaten). Unsavoury things are coming out about his behaviour to his colleagues, too. Maybe the most surprising thing about it, to me, is that he thinks it’s okay. He didn’t see anything wrong with squeezing a woman’s neck until she couldn’t breathe, for instance, or beating another woman on the head with his fists.

I once saw negging used as a strategy on a lady friend of mine by an Irish builder who had a track record of wife-beating. She introduced us in a pub and he tried to involve me in his conversation with her: “Don’t you think her hair would look so much better if …” Yeuch!

” That most liberal countries political cultures aren’t capable of putting up with divergent perspectives,(I agree that the perspective is repulsive)”

Assault is illegal Ronan and he isn’t a citizen. So he is advocating illegal activities while a guest in another country.

/Let me play the worlds smallest violin.

MPA – I’m not saying we should be losing sleep for this dude. Mine is more a larger philosophical perspective, like Aristotle and shit. ; )

I get an awful lot of that, actually. Like in The Social Network where he keeps insulting his girlfriend. (I associated that with guys who weren’t actually techies but I later found out moved in the same circles in high school as Sorkin did. FWIW.) Is it a deliberate pick-up thing now? I thought it was just what certain guys did to show who was boss, or something. But then I’m probably plainer and older than you are, Maria.

So, my understanding is that the “Pick-Up Artist” or PUA thing is a variation on guys just trying to have casual sex. The thing that distinguishes the modern PUA version is general contempt for the woman’s agency, and attempting to denigrate, confuse, upset, and cross boundaries in a way that makes her socially uncomfortable about sticking up for herself. (I think some of this stuff crosses the line into tortious assault, and almost definitely is sexual harassment in most U.S. jurisdictions.)

It’s absolutely contemptible, and these people ought to be castrated.

There’s apparently a really weird hate-fest between the PUA groups and the Men’s Rights groups, as the MRA’s seem to believe that women are suckered by PUA folks and thus there are no “worthy” women for the MRA guys’ attentions. God only knows what these people have instead of brains.

Speaking as a recently single man in his late 30’s, who never dated much in high school or college, it seems possible to date–or even just to hook up–in an honest, ethical, consensual way as long as you’re respectful, kind, honest, trustworthy, and thoughtful to people.

It seems to me a pretty common thing among theater types, the drama coaches I’ve known, they were the type to do just that, try to produce a bunch of little H.L. Menckens, going around trying to be gadflies. Trying to get those passive, wishy-washy women to “man up” and act like people, with (correct) opinions. But not just them, definitely men who were definitely not picking on me, whether family members or gay.

J Thomas @ 5

NLP: Please tell me this means natural language processing, like you were trying to model conversations, not neuro-linguistic.

Imo nothing wrong with sexual libertarianism and picking up partners in public places (if you can do it without pissing lots of other people off). The repulsiveness consists in misogyny, manipulation and attempt to apply conservative ideology, half-baked Ev Psych theories and corporate management techniques to the project of controlling partners’ behaviour in intimate relationships. Afaics it isn’t uniquely sex anyway and many of the men it appeals to are sexual conservatives seeking long-term relationships.

Great Dissent article: Cock-Blocked by Re-Distribution: A Pick-Up Artist in Denmark
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cockblocked-by-redistribution

If she said “How offensive! What kind of woman do you take me for?” they said “A liberated woman who makes her own choices, now please pardon me I must be going, no need to take more of your time.”.

Dear God, that’s even worse. He approaches her in a way she finds disrespectful, she tells him so, he tells her she’s wrong to be offended – and leaves, ego intact, before she has a chance to say anything else. Awful, manipulative, passive-aggressive dickery.

I can understand these guys working so hard on maintaining their self-esteem – the basic starting-point of “I go looking for casual sex with strangers and I am a thoroughly nice person” must generate some heavy-duty cognitive dissonance. But I don’t find it pretty.

First of all, well played ma’am.

And second, as disgusting as this sort of thing is, with a little training it’s not too difficult to use the opportunity for a well-earned ju-jitsu smack down just as Maria did.

But that one did show up. Stranger still.

“First of all, well played ma’am.”
+1!

#35 Phil

“If she said “How offensive! What kind of woman do you take me for?” they said “A liberated woman who makes her own choices, now please pardon me I must be going, no need to take more of your time.”.”

Dear God, that’s even worse. He approaches her in a way she finds disrespectful, she tells him so, he tells her she’s wrong to be offended – and leaves, ego intact, before she has a chance to say anything else. Awful, manipulative, passive-aggressive dickery.

What should he do? Should he hang around and argue with her? Do you figure usually she’d like that better?

They have different opinions about morality or something. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have approached her. When he finds out, he backs off. She has time for the last word. Given that he is what he is, how could he do better?

“RF made him feel exactly like Salieri did in the play – how can all this divine music be coming out of that total arsehole?

My mother, who worked with him on the Manhattan Project during the war, thought he was one of the nicest, kindest men she ever met.”

Amazing how this happens. I really think it all comes down to first impressions. Maybe he was tired or sick when he first met the person who thought he was an asshole? Or maybe he had just gotten some great news when he first met your mother? These first impressions then coloured their perception of his behavior going forward.

Or maybe he had an evil twin?

This xkcd seems appropriate:

http://xkcd.com/1027/

engels @ 33

Thanks. That is a great article in Dissent.

“Up until reading this post I had never encountered the concept or practice of negging – this is extremely depressing in a what is the world coming to kinda way.”

Well if it makes you feel better I don’t think it is actually that common out in the real world. I have never seen it in person. Though truly if it happens at all that is too much.

sigh – that should have italics up to the 4th paragraph. My comments start at “Uhm…”

The disappointing thing about ‘The History Man’ was that it worked for Howard Kirk.

I have to say that back when I was single, the couple of times I experienced the kind of negging Sasha Clarkson describes, I took it as a definite sign that I was in the Friend Zone, as the guys call it.

It looked like NLP was mostly about social cues. People let social cues limit them, and by ignoring the cues you can sometimes break through some limits. If you want to learn from somebody, and you pretend you’re actually them, you learn faster. I tried it, it worked for me. A lot of it was about identity, about accepting other people enough to sort of merge with them.

I noticed an interesting social thing at the Usenet site. The NLP teachers got their students to pretend to be them, and to hold the utmost respect for them, since the students learned fastest that way. It also stroked the teachers’ egos a whole lot. But then at the end of the course the students were supposed to go out in the world and use their new skills to do wonderful things. The salesmen and diplomats etc had no trouble applying it to their jobs. But a whole lot of people felt like what they wanted most in the world was to be NLP teachers! They were still identifying with their teachers. And the result was that there was a surplus of NLP teachers and even the most prestigious of them had trouble getting enough students to pay the bills.

One NLP student, Ross Jeffries, stopped to think. He looked for a better market than just compete with everybody else for NLP students. He instead taught Speed Seduction. He would sign up lots of men who didn’t know how to talk to women for a $2000 seminar in Hawaii. He and his open-relationship girlfriend Kimmy taught them how to pick up women. As near as I can tell what they taught was what anybody would teach about that – meet women, be friendly and approving, make an offer, if it doesn’t look like it will work out then politely retreat and try again with someone else. But they taught like it was a secret technique that would manipulate women into sex. The students were ready to believe that, because they thought they needed secret techniques. And the techniques worked, of course. Most men who’re ready to ask, say, ten women to have sex with them will find one who will.

Ross invited other NLP teachers to come give talks at his seminars. The most prestigious, senior NLP teachers did that because they needed the money. It rankled them that they were the best, while Ross was the boss with the money….

Now we are entirely in territory where lines are blured, where all comes down to cultural context. Where does private space start and what is it about? What behaviour is trying to get at someones ego and what is just socially expected honesty. The guy described in the op could have just been German, honesty norms and all that…. Not that it necessarily has the cultural desired effect in Germany, i m rather bad at taking it myself, but its still far more normal and people are far less hurt by it on average when they are used to it.

[aeiou] Kind of reminds me of the behavior of a couple of dsquared’s multitudinous sockpuppets in Belle’s comments the other day.

[aeiou] Yep.

“Yep.”

?

[aeiou] Of course it is true, and there’s no rational reason for doing it.

66: being propositioned by a stranger may be offensive, but if the guy takes no for an answer, it’s orders of magnitude better than being deliberately insulting on the theory that women like that.

@33: The same creep profiled in that Dissent article (Roosh Valizadeh) has now jumped into the whole #gamergate mess with both feet, because of course he did. There seems to be some serious synergy between PUAs and gamergaters – even though it’s actually about ethics in games journalism.

At the link, there is this lovely excerpt from Roosh ‘s “Bang Iceland”:

While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she legally couldn’t give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated. I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.

To call these guys slimeballs does a disservice to molds and fungi.

J. Parnell Thomas,

I’ll ask again since you didn’t reply in the other thread, what handle were you commenting under when you were banned?

@64 & @67:

I believe he’s implying that you’re actually dsquared under an alias. An accusation which would be laughable if not so… actually, no, it’s just laughable.

“I believe he’s implying that you’re actually dsquared under an alias. An accusation which would be laughable if not so… actually, no, it’s just laughable.”

Me? I wish I was that good a writer.
/though laughable is a little harsh ;-)

Ronan:

Kicking this Julien Blanc dude out of Australia is pretty outrageous. No different than the sort of hysteria in the 00s against radical clerics and the likes. There’s pretty much no constituency anymore for old school live and let live liberalism

As that Octopus meme says: Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. You obviously haven’t checked out this guy’s actual written artifacts. He has produced a pictogram which is literally a guide to domestic violence and control.
“Use coercion and threats…Use intimidation… Use isolation… Use children(!)…Use economic abuse…”

http://d22r54gnmuhwmk.cloudfront.net/photos/2/yn/ov/fdYNoVzirtADWxW-556×313-noPad.jpg

“Live and let live” is only relevant here if you’re of the dominant gender and don’t give a hoot about what might happen to others as a result of this – the phenomena shown on that diagram are already all too common, they do lead to injury and death, and it is not just some kind of theoretical discussion. And then there’s the video advocating, or rather training for, actual sexual assault, as Lynne points out.

It’s not a case of “a larger philosophical perspective, like Aristotle and shit”, it’s a kneejerk acceptance of a straight-up advocacy of violence towards others, because you’re unlikely to be one of the unlucky people on the receiving end of any resulting behaviour.

(Maybe dsquared at #18 and MPAVictoria at #21 have explained this better already).

“MPAVictoria at #21 have explained this better already)”

I think you explained it better than I did Helen. Thank you.

Helen – I was joking with the Aristotle reference, and I accept the dominant gender qualification .. but I still don’t see how, plausibly, the sort of men who would attend one of his lectures are not going to behave in exactly the same way despite his ‘bootcamp’ being banned. So it is, IMO, still a symbolic (and relatively meaningless )victory. They still have access to this ideology and set of theories from multiple sources. (this is leaving aside the fact that my normative preferences, as stated above, are for openness even with repulsive ideologies and characters. I accept that my position is influenced by various identity privileges as well)
TBH though, having looked more into his ‘theories’ and ‘positions’ over the day I can see the other side on this (Im not 100% sure where I stand on this as a general rule, or on this case specifically)

It’s the example given in the thread

MPAVictoria @45

“RF made him feel exactly like Salieri did in the play – how can all this divine music be coming out of that total arsehole?

My mother, who worked with him on the Manhattan Project during the war, thought he was one of the nicest, kindest men she ever met.”

Amazing how this happens. I really think it all comes down to first impressions.”

It may also come down to who is forming the impression. A professional rival is more likely to be defensive and threatened than someone who is not competing. The social class of the observer is also relevant. Feynman was not particularly ‘genteel’.

Ronan(rf),

” .. but I still don’t see how, plausibly, the sort of men who would attend one of his lectures are not going to behave in exactly the same way despite his ‘bootcamp’ being banned.”

I have only half followed the story , but I don’t think you are necessarily right here about the attendees. I myself am ambivalent, but the men’s issues writer in The Age newspaper here wrote a piece sort of defending the men who would go to the seminars. This is because the seminars were protested and apparently yelled at the attendees and videoed/photographed them (youtube footage at the link)

The defense (excerpted below) sort of went that the men who attend and pay for these seminars are actually probably not likely to be the sort of men who routinely debase or abuse women, but more likely awkward nerdy men or men with disabilities or men of ethnicities that are not preferred by women in the Australian dating scene.

If this is the case they would do better getting normal advice on talking to women, not advice on how to insult and abuse women. So they are lucky to be saved by the government from getting such bad advice. If only the government would do this more often on other forms of bad advice.

It was actually quite interesting that the government intervened this time. Occasionally these sorts of things come to attention here but often the government does not act, like the other year there was the case of Tyler the Creator that women wanted not to be able to come and perform his concerts with songs that are abusive to women. But from memory the government did not intervene but during the tour he abused a woman in the audience and some sort of nasty twitter war happened with Tyler the Creator and his fans and the women who campaigned against him.

“Think for a moment where you’d have to be as a person to pay someone hundreds, often thousands of dollars, to teach you how to talk to members of the opposite sex? These are not evil men, they’re not even creeps – certainly not the types of guy who’ve broken women’s hearts or treated them like crap.
They’re often men who have never had a girlfriend, sometimes never even kissed a woman. Some of the men are from racial backgrounds that are heavily discriminated against in Australia’s overwhelmingly white, Anglo dating scene. Some have stutters, physical or mental disabilities or disfigurements.
Many have had poor male role models in relationships and they’ve reached a point of loneliness, frustration and isolation they’ve swallowed their pride, admitted they need help, then paid for it.
Imagine you turned up at last week’s event with that mindset and had people screaming “creep”, “loser” or “abuser” at you and they were filming it?
These are powerful messages and they are being aimed at a subculture of men who, I’d argue, are some of the least exploitative of women.
These are not footballers who pass women around like toys, bang them in cubicles or pressure them into group sex. They’re not cashed up bankers or bikers who ply chicks with cocaine. They’re not religious nuts who codify the submission and abuse of females of all ages, nor advertising and media executives who aggrandise and profit from sexism. They’re not even the yobbos who catcall from cars and building sites.
They are nerds. They are the guys who rarely get the girl. They are a soft target. It’s hard to imagine they are the most dangerous example of misogyny in this country.”

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/hating-the-search-for-love-20141112-11k5px.html#ixzz3J0hQ4wzB

Helen @81

I had actually heard the story slightly differently: that that poster actually was a literal diagram for domestic violence, ie created by an independent group for social workers somewhere so they could help abused women who might be reticent about getting help to identify patterns and such things. What he did is encountered it and was like ‘Oh, this is my approach in a nutshell – said it better than I do myself!’ and happily posted it on his social media account.

I don’t think we can do much about the leading individuals themselves, (I won’t presume to diagnose them from afar but I am very tempted to), but the steps taken, like in Australia, to prevent them from spreading their message sound like a proper response.

Gianni’s take seems to be the right one: http://www.vocativ.com/culture/society/julien-blanc-youtube/

Not good.

91 — but, ZM, teaching pathetic losers to try to be violent assholes isn’t even good for them, and still doesn’t seem like something the state is required to abet.

I think the crucial third element, so to speak, bridging the gap between ‘nerdy men’ and #chokingasdatingadvice or whatever, is Ressentiment

clew,

“91 — but, ZM, teaching pathetic losers to try to be violent assholes isn’t even good for them, and still doesn’t seem like something the state is required to abet.”

Oh I agree, that is why I said it was good the government saved them from these seminars by deporting the man.

I was just pointing out that Ronan’s idea that the men attendees were already abusive of women so there was no point in the deportation was not necessarily so, at least according to this article where the writer says he has observed various sorts of pick up artist talks.

Whoops, my snark wasn’t needed. Par for the course.

#74 TDA

Courtship dances by various species of birds certainly can’t be mistaken for agressive behavior, IMHO.

Konrad Lorenz wrote a story about some cichlid fish, which I haven’t heard refuted.

He claimed that the males and females looked exactly alike, and mostly behaved alike. He wondered how they could tell their own genders apart. One of his students found out. She observed three kinds of behaviors. They attacked, they ran away, and they started doing sexual behaviors.

…in the male, the motivations of flight and of sexuality cannot be mixed. If the male has even the slightest fear of his partner, his sexuality is completely extinguished. In the female, there is the same relation between aggression and sexuality: if she is so little in awe of her partner that her aggression is not entirely suppressed, she does not react to him sexually at all. She becomes a Brunhilde and attacks him the more ferociously the more potentially ready she is for sexual reactions, that is, the nearer she is to spawning, in respect to her ovarian and hormonal state.”

Conversely, aggression and sexuality are quite compatible in the male; he can treat his partner roughly, chase her all around the tank, and betweenwhiles perform sexual movements and all possible mixed forms of motor patterns. The female can fear the male considerably without suppression of sexually motivated behavior pattern. The bride-to-be may flee before the male and at the same time make use of every breathing space to perform sexually motivated courtship movements.

…. Thus the behavior pattern just described guarantees the pairing of two individuals of opposite sex.

Of course, people are not so simple and do things every which way. And among bird species there’s also tremendous variation.

Clarisse Thorn’sConfessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men has it that there are decent parts of the PUA group of subcultures, but my observation is that the misogynistic ones ate more popular.

#101 ZM

” .. but I still don’t see how, plausibly, the sort of men who would attend one of his lectures are not going to behave in exactly the same way despite his ‘bootcamp’ being banned.”

I have only half followed the story , but I don’t think you are necessarily right here about the attendees. I myself am ambivalent, but the men’s issues writer in The Age newspaper here wrote a piece sort of defending the men who would go to the seminars.

I don’t know any of these guys, so what I say about them will have to be mostly armchair psychologising, based entirely on stereotypical assumptions.

Let’s assume that they are nerds who do not have much contact with women. On the one hand, they are probably not violent against women or they would not feel the need to pay money to listen to a role model tell them to be violent against women. On the other hand, they are probably already leaning that way or they would not pay money to etc.

It’s reasonable to suppose that people who are discriminated against in the most basic way might feel angry about it. Imagine what it would be like to be raised as a despised minority, and be taught all your life that you can only be complete and happy if a member of the group that despises you becomes your personal special friend….

This anger, while perfectly natural, is not useful to anybody. It will mostly not even get these guys laid. If one of them does start raping women, he will probably not get away with it for very long.

Most of these guys will never find a woman who will have sex with just him, because the large majority of women are raised to think of nerds as unsexy pathetic losers unless they are rich or famous. We can tell them to learn to talk to women, but it’s like telling nerdy short guys to learn to play basketball so they will be popular — they can play the game but they’ll always be at a big disadvantage.

It’s a great big social problem that should not exist but does.

My fundamental dating advice for nerds is: Don’t be a nerd. Be yourself.

#112

OK, Maria, agreed.

J Parnell Thomas is the commenter formerly banned under the handle “godoggo”. Please go away. Your comments will be disemvowelled/deleted as appropriate.

ZM @91- I think I’ve pulled this off topic so ill leave it here, but your comments are well taken.(but see below)
Just (and Maria delete this if you think it’s dreailing things) on this idea that these men are ‘discriminated against’ or an ‘oppressed minority’. I mean come on, give me a break. I know that anecdotes dont stand to much, but the one person I knew who bought into this stuff when I was growing up was not ‘oppressed’ in any way, definitely not discriminated against. He wasnt particularly awkward (in general or around women), or a nerd(for whatever definition of nerd) He was just a f***ing ejit, and still is by all accounts, who either felt entitled to sex or became obsessed by the process (I dont know which one) I don’t know why the assumption is that ‘nerdiness’ or awkwardness drives this , rather than a desire to dominate, misogyny, a feeling of entitlement or just stupidity.
Perhaps it really does work like this in the US, but this idea of ‘nerd oppression’ strikes me a little odd. Most of the (what i guess you’d call) ‘nerds’ I knew growing up had personalities that mapped pretty cleanly onto the general population; from quiet and shy to rambunctious to obnoxious. From good in school to constantly drunk. They just had different hobbies. And they were (pretty much all) capable,most of the time,of maintaining relationships (sexual or as friends) with people (women and men) without resorting to nonsense.
I’d accept some men might approach this (unthinkingly) as some sort of self help program, but I dont think people should play down how much of it is just driven by misogyny or entitlement, rather than blowback from the ‘ oppression of a sub culture.’ (Plenty of women also find themselves locked out of the ‘dating scene’ at various times in their lifes, and dont seem to resort to these elaborate schemes and programs to anything approaching the same extent)

Yes, the focus on ‘nerds’ is improper. Plenty of people with otherwise totally unremarkable social mores fall into the category, as do a number of women.

@5, 6, 89, 90 – anecdotal evidence that Feynman was no ordinary pick-up artist:

My mother, a mostly conventional middle-class wife and mother who would have been 87 this year, knew Feynman socially. (My father was a junior worker bee on the Manhattan Project.) Once after my father’s death, we were watching a TV documentary about him. We got to talking, and she told me, “Any woman on earth would have left her husband to run away with that man.”

Other than my father, there were only two men that I ever heard her express any interest in: Feynman and Paul Newman. And Feynman, apparently, was by far the more attractive of the two.

To hearken back to the days of yore (#27), the PUA vs. MRA thing makes a lot of sense in the right context. If you think of it in relation to morality vs. causality, the PUAs are hyper-causal (“because this strategy works to achieve my specific goals, I should use it relentlessly and not be judged by how it negatively affects anyone else”) and the MRAs are hyper-moral (“men who have achieved the status of being a ‘good man’ deserve to have the things they want delivered to them without incremental effort, regardless of how unrelated those things are to the men’s own accomplishments”).

MRAs are hyper-moral (“men who have achieved the status of being a ‘good man’ deserve to have the things they want delivered to them without incremental effort, regardless of how unrelated those things are to the men’s own accomplishments”).

Except the MRA thing doesn’t even really work to achieve status of being a ‘good man’. Its more like “men who have not been conclusively proven to be convicted rapists deserve to have the things they want delivered to them…” Because that whole “you can’t judge me based on other men’s behavior” thing runs big through the whole MRA discourse as well. Women should automatically assume that any guy hitting on them is not a creep, but a purely well intentioned nice guy, and deserving of their attention, and they are oppressing men if they assume this guy hitting on them is as creepy as the hundred other creepy guys who hit on them the same way. Because I deserve to always be treated as an individual, or something…

Our results suggest that assertive courtship strategies are a form of mutual identification of similarly sexist attitudes shared between courtship partners. Women who adopt sexist attitudes are more likely to prefer men who adopt similar attitudes. Not only do sexist men and women prefer partners who are like them, they prefer courtship strategies where men are the aggressors and women are the gatekeepers.

“My fundamental dating advice for nerds is: Don’t be a nerd. Be yourself.”

No. Being a nerd is fine. Just be honestly interested in the person you are talking to, and she might talk back. Otherwise, she’ll run like hell. Or should run like hell.

How I wish I never mentioned that article by the men’s issues writer. I will never mention men’s issues again. I am not a man, I have never met a single person who has said they have gone to a pick up artist talk or would like to. How would I know why men go to nasty idiotic pick up artist talks? I don’t even know why they watch sports or porn or action movies for goodness sake.

Ronan(rf) said that the government needn’t have bothered deporting the pick up artist seminar man because all the attendees would already be violent and abusive to women anyway.

I said I myself was ambivalent about what the attendees would be like but this men’s issues writer says maybe some of the men were not abusive but ….

Blanc is going to be an issue in the UK too. If he actually said the things attributed to him, then it’s incitement to criminal behaviour. He should definitely be persona non grata!

The “sexist vintage ads” displayed at the bottom of the page are interesting. When it comes to adverts for cosmetics, the ad “industry” today is only barely more subtle than the Palmolive ads of yesteryear; and that’s definitely negging too!

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/11/15/julien-blanc-uk-petition_n_6163312.html

@133:

Wow! I could not figure out the Lysol ads! Kept thinking: why are they advertising household cleaner in such an odd way!? Finally had to look it up.

And it has nothing to do with autism, because the developmental disorder may affect how one expresses empathy but it does not make a person nonempathetic.

I don’t know, I’m reasonably confident that autism will be reflected in how you manifest your arseholery. Arseholes-with-autism will have distinctive patterns of behaviour distinguishable from non-autistic-arseholes.

@134

I am having trouble understanding the policy on posting here. You have banned someone (J.Thomas/Godoggo) and you have threatened to ban someone (Dax).

It sounds like the ban is from CT entirely. They seemed to be arguing for a point of view not in line with the OP but they were not being aggressive or hurling abuse.

1) Are there deleted posts in which they are particularly offensive?

2) Or do we just have to be careful not to put forward opinions that CT administrators/posters do not like?

I really hope it is not (2).

Thanks for explaining that, ZM. I was having significant difficulty with the idea that J. Thomas was the same person as godoggo, something which was obviously true for J. Parnell Thomas.

I think what dax was doing was offensive enough to merit Maria’s response. He was challenging her story from a position of laziness, not bothering to read her closely enough to see how implausible his objections were.

“challenging her story from a position of laziness”.

Too right. It’s about time that this was made a capital offence.

Plus, Dax was asked merely to not comment on this particular thread. Only when it appeared that Dax didn’t get the memo did Maria raise the specter of a CT-wide permaban, and that was worded as a consequence of Dax not staying off this thread.

148

I think you make very good points, and mostly I wouldn’t argue with you.

In this particular case though we’re talking about a systematic cultural phenomenon of disrespect for women. So, if a commenter such as dax can’t manage to show a decent level of respect for the woman telling the story then I certainly don’t blame her for telling him to piss off.

IOW, it would probably be possible to probe into Maria’s account in a respectful manner to shine light on the details and satisfy any skepticism there might be. And, basically, this is Maria’s thread, she’s the boss. That’s the way it needs to be.

I’m probably a bit slow on this, but re-reading the post, especially this bit:

“So I said to him ‘wow, that was really quite rude, did you mean to say it?’ And he said something like ‘come on, you liked it. You know I’m in charge’. Or something equally asinine”

– and remembering some incidents from my not too distant past (and reading the parallel ‘Sexual implicature’ thread) made me think – are these guys on about masculine dominance? Is that what it is?

As I say, probably not a brilliant insight, but if they are in a way hankering for some (partly imagined, but partly true) patriarchal male dominant sexuality, that’s interesting I think. It may also explain the apparent explosion of online pornography and possibly the ‘Shades of Grey’ phenomenon (two things about which I have to confess I know almost nothing)? Both men, in practice or attempted practice, and women, mainly in imagination, are getting off on this (hopefully) passing historical epoch?

I think so many of our current social problems – including neoliberalism – can be explained by people’s unease and reactive responses to feminism and the (as I say, hopeful) end of the historical era of patriarchy. Probably I’m influenced in this view by being Australian and having recently observed our recent female Prime Minister being exposed to some pretty weird and misogynistic reactions (and in my opinion, some pretty biased responses from supposedly progressive men on the left).

I think it was more that Dax was asserting that the gendered and sexualised rudeness in the OP was the same as general rudeness. Possibly he is a man and has never been subjected to gendered sexualised rudeness.

Also, as he himself so blatantly mentioned, he proceeded to do this in a rude way.

If another commenter is rude to me as a commenter I can just greatly take offence or be rude back as I do not use my name and have no dignified managing comment thread duties. But Maria uses her name and if she wants to maintain her dignity she probably cannot be especially rude back, and she also might not like to greatly take offense . So telling him not to comment on the thread again is another alternative.

I think the phrase from Dax that struck me particualrly was: ‘the story simply goes from the guy is being rude to Maria’s realisation that the guy is trying to pick her up by a technique which I confess I have never heard of until hitherto.’

Isn’t that the very definition of mansplaining? The man ‘splainer knows nothing about an issue (Dax says he has never heard of it until Maria’s post) which affects women. But he proceeds to set the woman right, and correct her. He presumes to know more than her about her own experience of a common female experience that he has literally never even heard of before.

I sometimes see men (here and elsewhere) hurt and offended by the use of the term mansplaining but – here you go – here it is in the wild.

Maria @157

I see what you mean, but I did get a different impression from the story. It was your patience that was exhausted, it was you who chose the solution, you who positioned the weapon and you who pulled the trigger. The weapon was happy to help, it seems, but was rather passive. Men often see it like that and not necessarily unhappy to be used in this way.

This seems an equally true statement as far as I am concerned.

Plenty of men can’t get laid. They’re “too” fat, “too” thin, the “wrong” color, disabled, “too” old, or not deferential/demure/”charming” enough. But that’s considered to be their fault, which they should address by changing themselves. They aren’t figures of sympathy but of scorn, because they’ve failed in “their role as men.”

Is this not why they are exercising in gyms, desperately trying baldness remedies, having the hair removed from their backs, even taking courses on how to meet women? Is there a figure held more in contempt than the boring middle-aged paunchy white guy with a hairy back and no fashion sense who dares to wear speedos in public?

However, if you can’t walk away, or don’t want to leave the enemy in possession of the field, then you need to protect yourself effectively by any means available.

Oh how much human stupidity flows from this single sentence.

“And also it was a pretty unkind thing to do to this guy, i.e. it was complete overkill. Emotionally satisfying, but not entirely ethical. But there you go.”

In my opinion. you are being WAY too hard on yourself here. The guy deserved what he got.

the fact that I called in an alpha male to deal with the twerp,

Honestly, I did have a negative reaction to that, not that it was unkind, but that it was playing the same game the jerk was playing. It would have made sense for him to walk away thinking not “Trying to dominate women by insulting them is stupid”, but “If I could just project manliness better, like that guy, it’d start working. I’m on the right track!” (assuming, of course, he was an idiot, but he seems to have been). But it didn’t seem worth picking at you about it.

I agree to some extent with Lizard Breath @167. I think it would have been better not to ‘play the game’ at all. The ‘ending’ to the story seems to suggest that it was some sort of contest rather than a meeting with someone unpleasant.

Igor, etc: the problem with trying to `not play the game’ is that the player will interpret just about any avoidance as submission and a number of them will then literally follow you around to collect. Once they’re committed to demonstrating dominance against your will, they’re not listening to standard negotiations.

The `please’ is likely to backfire, IME. *By their design* you have to be ruder to someone playing this game than is socially acceptable in good-faith interactions.

Maybe you should have started negging him back, or negging ‘the king’? Or maybe large-scale social problems can only be properly addressed through organised political action, not individual blogogenic acts of retaliation…

I’ve been trying to think of an approach that wouldn’t reinforce the alpha-male frame

“Who hurt you?”

It sounds to me like just being rude enough wouldn’t have been enough—you’d have to be ruder than the jerk to make the impression you would want to.

But I’m uncomfortable with this line of comments, how Maria might have done better. Most women wonder how they could have done better after dealing with sexist crap, and don’t need the help of other women to second-guess themselves.

If the slant were different, more along the lines of exchanging stories, and what worked and didn’t _for us_ and what might have worked better, I would be happier.

Until this thread, I’d never heard of “negging” or PUA as a movement. You learn something every day.

Maria @157, “the thing that surprised me about this thread was – for the most part – what didn’t become controversial, i.e. the fact that I called in an alpha male to deal with the twerp, rather than sending him off myself.”

Actually that part struck me when I read it immediately, and I wanted to comment the other day but had other things to do. What struck me was that you treated this as a case of you calling in an alpha MALE, while when I read it – while I realised that you were seeking to problematise it in these terms – it seemed to me that you were actually doing something slightly but significantly different: what you were doing was calling in an Alpha, and making the PUA’s behavior public, thus exposing him to public ridicule (well played btw on your part — don’t think you have anything to feel bad about. he got what he was asking for.) . The Alpha’s gender seemed secondary to me in this situation: imagine the alpha had been female, esp. a female alpha both in a professional and a sexual sense (managing director at Goldman with bond girl looks) — would the situation have played out any differently after you “went public” as it were? I suspect not: the chap was being – deservedly – humiliated in front of a power greater than him. The power’s gender seems quite secondary. Indeed, I wonder how important it even was that you were calling in an Alpha, as opposed to just going public: imagine the whole encounter had taken while you were out with a group of people of roughly the same rank (mixed or not), and you “went public” about the chap’s behavior to the group: would things have been different? Again I suspect not, at least if the crucial operating force here is public shaming.

btw, why did J Thomas get banned? He seemed largely perfectly respectful and to be making interesting contributions. Or am I just massively missing something here?

Forgive inelegant language & sentence structures above … putting a huge ppt together one 4 h sleep rather dulls the senses…

I think it would have been better not to ‘play the game’ at all.

It’s not a game, it’s a fight. “Games” need willing participation from both parties, but to get a “fight” you only need one person to want it.

[“who started it” is really, “who wanted it to happen”. And that’s a pretty reasonable question, and the answer isn’t always “the one who threw the first punch”, nor “the one who said the first mean thing”.]

As for calling in the alpha male, well, yeah, sure, the more feminist thing would have been to dispatch him yourself, but you’re human and don’t have to be wonder woman all the time. It’s the difference between reality and fiction: If I had read it in a story, I’d have been disappointed with the heroine, or it would have been a plot point to reveal what her attitude is like, because Everything Happens For A Reason. Live, not so much. It’s messier. I don’t judge a real person as harshly as a fictional one.

As for calling in the alpha male, well, yeah, sure, the more feminist thing would have been to dispatch him yourself, but you’re human and don’t have to be wonder woman all the time.

It’s fun that the alpha was alpha and supplied the response he did, but Maria’s blow was strongest: making it public, there in the moment. People could supply shame at that table simply with presence when Maria spoke up, but fortune supplied a little extra.

My fundamental dating advice for nerds is: Don’t be a nerd. Be yourself.

Huh?

“Don’t be who you are. Be yourself.”

Don’t know whether this has been mentioned here, yet, but Julian Blanc has just been denied a visa to UK:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30119100

“A petition to deny him a visa attracted more than 150,000 signatures ahead of his UK tour, due to start in February.

“Mr Blanc has apologised, saying his intention was “a horrible attempt at humour” taken out of context.

Crime prevention minister Lynne Featherstone said she was “delighted Mr Blanc won’t be coming to our shores”.”