PUA

[DanaC]

There's been a lot of stuff in the news lately about Pick Up Artists - a high profile PUA guru has been asked to leave Australia after a campaign against him (in particular the way some of his videos basically encourage a form of harrassment and assault - wandering around a Japanese city grabbing girls heads and bending them down to touch his cock, whilst yelling Pikachu) and there's currently a petition running to deny him a visa for a UK visit.

I got quite interested in PUA stuff after the Isla Vista murders - given the lad's interest and regular presence in the PUAHate forum. Sp I've been visiting the odd pua site - reading some of their strategies and glossaries of terms - as well as occasionally lurking in a few forums.

Fascinating. And also quite scary.

The attitude to women in these places fucking terrifies me. We are not fully human to the men who write the guides, certainly not in the same way that they are human, anyway. And in some of the forum conversations it seems clear that the men posting are looking at women and seeing things. Things that they desire, but things.

The sense of bruised entitlement is staggering. The codifying of women's internal selves as a set of easily glossed stimuli responses and the flipside of blame and anger at women who do not conform to those stimuli responses is horrible.

These guys are not harmless charlatans. Not only are they fleecing some of the most vulnerable people out there (young men struggling to find their place in the world and connect with women) but they are selling a view of women that is deeply damaging.

This view of women can also be seen in many o fthe Men's Rights sites. Now - not saying that the menz don't have some stuff that really needs addressing (assumptions against them in custody hearings, high rates of male suicide and a real discrepancy in the focus of medical science in some areas) - but a lot of it is just pure vitriol and an absolute belief that women are the real and usurping power in the world (ignoring the fact that women make up a tiny percentage of those in any positions of power, from upper management to politics, to banking and finance) - that they should return to an earlier model of femininity in which they are more passive and compliant.

Though they decry the actions of Elliot Rodgers, they also place the blame for his actions on the shoulders of today's women.

Like this, for instance, from returnofkings.com

Rodger’s manifesto clearly states that his utter failure with women drove him to murder. The problem that he experienced is not unique—many men in Western society graduate from high school or college to realize that they have absolutely no skill or ability to seduce the opposite sex. We live in a society where being shy, normal, or a little awkward is duly punished by entitled American women who have been encouraged to pursue exciting and fun casual sex in their prime with sexy and hot men as a way of “experimentation.” They are enabled by the culture to seek out bad boys while rejecting the nice guy who is “boring.” This behavior continues until they find that they are past their physical prime, whereby the nice guy is plucked from a spartan sexual existence and expected to keep his mouth shut when a trickle flow of informational torture reveals that his bride-to-be has experienced more than a dozen different penises in her vagina, anus, and mouth—the same mouth that is supposed to kiss his future children good night

Nice huh?