PUA

I've been meaning to write about "pick up artists" aka the "seduction community" aka the "got game" guys for a while now. For these guys are not completely crazy. If that sounds like faint praise that is because it is faint praise.

I take it as a given that anyone who reads me will agree that it is wrong to manipulate another human being into giving you sex. But there is a huge difference between "knowing" that it is wrong to manipulate other people into sex and not doing it. We all do things that we know are wrong all the time so right at the outset we need to face the possibility that we are more manipulative than we realize.

There is also a deeply ingrained consequentialism in our culture that makes us all into manipulators whether we mean to be or not. Consequentialism just means a moral system that evaluates the moral choices in terms of their consequences. That can be very complicated but consider a simple example. We've all been advised at some time or another to respond to someone who is behaving badly to us by reaching out more to them. "Try treating little Johnny the way you want to be treated yourself." Or, as they teach people in teacher's college, "Try modelling the behaviour you want from your kids to pick up."

What never seems to occur to the people who say these things is that this is pure manipulation. It's behaving in a certain way on the belief that this will cause others to change their behaviour to something more like we want.

And at some point, that desire becomes an entitlement. Once we've been told often enough that the right moral choices are the ones that produce morally good results, we start thinking that being a good person should be enough to ensure that good things happen to us: "I'm a good person, therefore someone I find desirable will come along and fall in love with me." And once people who believe this are in love, they continue to believe that if they are good, they will also get the kind of marriage they want.

Now we could go all sorts of places with that thought but I just want to stop there. Huge amounts of the moral advice we give and receive amount to the following: "Do X and the other person is more likely to respond the way you want". And that is manipulative. So the most obvious argument we might use against the pick up artist is closed to us. The guy who is "being a nice guy" in the hopes that this will get him sex and love is every bit the manipulative bastard as the guy who uses neuro-linguistic programming techniques to get the girl.