Why we don't like talking about needs

The thing about needs is that they are needs. If I deny your wants, you may get angry about it but you'll survive. If I deny your needs it will make you sick and ultimately may kill you. You only want the things you want you actually need the things you need.

Sex advice columnists may sincerely believe that they are doing women a favour when they tell them to tell their partners about their needs but they are doing anything but. A human being's sexual needs, insofar as we have any, are actually things that make us vulnerable to others. Heck, even our wants, especially our strong wants, make us vulnerable to others. And this is something women have no trouble figuring out without anyone telling them.

What we don't want to learn from pick up artists

If you've ever gone fishing with guys, you will know that a fishing trip satisfies two distinct sets of desires.

• Most obviously, it satisfies the desire to actually go fishing.
• Less obviously, it satisfies a desire men have to be recognized as a competent fisherman by other men.

And the second desire is often much stronger than the first. Pick not just fishing but any sport you like and you will find a significant subset of men in it are motivated more by the desire to successfully demonstrate competency in front of other men than by any love for the sport itself.

And oftentimes, they can and will fulfill this desire by simply talking about it with other men rather than actually doing the sport.

The parallel with sex is, I hope, so obvious I don't need to spell it out. The crucial thing is that an awful lot of sex advice is really some guy trying to establish his competency to other men. Any time you read anything (including anything I write) you want to be asking yourself, "Which of the two desires is really being satisfied here?"

It's always worth remember the anecdote about the honest stock analyst who supposedly said, "If I really knew what the market was going to do I'd be using that knowledge to make millions instead of sitting here talking to you."

What we can learn from pick up artists

I don't, as I've said before, think pick up artists are completely crazy. I think that at the centre of the whole PUA culture is one absolutely correct claim and it's worth knowing. And it's a truth that we officially spend a lot of time trying to deny. You might say that it is like the emperor's new clothes.

What they have noticed is that over and over again the supposed experts on human relationships mislead us. It jumped out at me a while ago when I found myself with an extended period to get through with no one to talk to for large sections of the day, no computer and no television. What I did have was a stack of magazines about two feet high. These included magazines for girls and women ranging from CosmoGirl to RedBook and men's magazines ranging from Men's Health to Esquire. And I noticed something interesting about the sex advice columns. Something so interesting that I got out a notebook and pencil and read them all one after another taking notes this time.

Here is the thing I noticed.

• Any time a woman wrote to say she was unhappy with her sex life she was was told, "You have to make sure he understands your needs.
• Any time a man wrote to say he was unhappy with his sex life he was was told, "You have to understand her needs."

On this model, it is the woman's needs that should drive couples' sex lives. That men might have needs isn't even acknowledged. At most we have wants and these wants are relatively unimportant things that can and should be changed as required. If your partner doesn't like what you want, then your want needs to be sacrificed to her needs.

What the  pick up artists have noticed is that in real life it works exactly the other way around. Men have wants and it is these wants (and not anyone's needs) that drive just about everything about human sexuality.

Now you may not want it to be that way. You may feel very strongly that it would be better and fairer if it were otherwise. But it isn't otherwise. And all you have to do to see this is look around. An anthropologist from Mars would figure it out in about two seconds.

Look at the way women dress. The only way we could describe this as satisfying their needs is if we said that women dress the way they do in order to satisfy the feeling of power they get when they successfully provoke a response in boys. That clearly is something that women pursue for whatever reasons but that pursuit is driven by men's wants.

And everything about human sexuality works this way.

Now you may, as I say, wish it were otherwise. You are in good company if you do. An awful lot of the smartest people in our society wish it were otherwise and will often pretend that it is right down to writing sex advice columns as if it were otherwise. But if you really want to meet women, you are much better off presenting yourself as a strong man with strong wants than you are presenting yourself as a sensitive guy who is willing to subjugate his wants in order to respond to a woman's needs.

Fishing

If you done even a little fishing you've probably seen this interesting reaction. Perhaps you have even done it yourself. I have.

A guy will be fishing and a fish will either approach his offering and refuse it or get hooked but then get away and the guy will respond by getting angry at the fish.

Odd isn't it. But, at the same time, absolutely ordinary. Everybody does it some time. We start to think that the experience we want is already ours because we want it. And it's harmless enough with fish.

A moral question

The thing that got me started on this pick up artist thread was something Dr. Helen wrote. She is positive on the pick up artist thing (a surprising number of women are but that is a subject for another post). I disagree with her about that but I thought she hit on something really important here:

I recently recommended them [books about how to be a pick up artist] to a friend of mine for her son who she said was depressed over his lack of ability to get a date. At first, I started to give the same old tired advice. "Just tell him to be himself and a woman will find that attractive." "Bullshit," I thought to myself. 

She is right that very often the advice given to young men is to "just be yourself" and that it is useless advice (and I'll get into that later too). But the question I have is this: Is it a morally good thing to "just be yourself"?

Turn it around, would you be satisfied with someone else if you knew that she was just trying to be herself?

I've embedded this video before and I'll probably embed it again because it's brilliant:

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.