Talk:Pick-up artist/Archive1

Old comments
Huh really? What is this article about, exactly? 01:46, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Pick up artists? ArchieGoodwin (talk) 01:53, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * WT???? there is a whole "community" on pick up artists?  --[[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]Godot    oi, putain, genial, merci 01:59, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I recall a mention on Freethought blogs a while back, I'll see if I can find it. ArchieGoodwin (talk) 02:00, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * here we go scroll down to the 4th paragragh under "The Homeland of Men" ArchieGoodwin (talk) 02:04, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * XKCD strikes again Sophie  because liberals  11:09, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The big name in PUA. Read it and weep. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 12:24, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Girls have long skinny fingers. "Real men" are short and stubby.  hardly surprising there was a racial overtone as well.--[[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]Godot    oi, putain, genial, merci 13:22, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I know anecdotal evidence is frowned upon here, but a friend of mine actually rooms with a guy who behaves in this manner, and it's just as disturbing as you'd think. One thing he mentions is that the guy constantly refers to women as if they were purposefully trying to foil him and are toying with him, as if he needs some kind of special strategy or weapon to make them do what he wants (ie, give him sex.) Needless to say, this subculture is rooted in deep feelings of inadequacy and anger and most definitely does exist.KnightOfTL;DR (talk) 13:44, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * (EC)Oh yeah, they tend to be racist as well. Note the links to "human bio-diversity" (read: racialism) sites like Steve Sailer, one of VDARE's resident wingnuts. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 13:44, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * @TL;DR: Let me guess, he is a Nice GuyTM? Or an aspiring alpha? Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 13:53, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * @Nebs, it seems he used to be a Nice GuyTM, but then when his total failure to understand other people led to sexual frustration he fashioned himself into a 'master' of women, a pimpin' prodigy that is like the puppetmaster of babes. Sort of like a crappy comic book super villain's origin story: "They said I was a loser but THEY'RE WRONG! I'LL SHOW THEM! I'LL SHOW THEM ALL!" KnightOfTL;DR (talk) 14:04, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Seems like the standard story. I've seen more than one of these guys. They have their own Bible as well. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 14:14, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * What's horrible is that this is actually is evidence of underlying greater social issues: when these guys fail to get a date, they decide not to blame themselves or resolve to find a better match but instead blame women on whole, to absolve themselves of responsibility. It's a response; culture usually blames males who fail to 'perform' to manly status, so not wanting to feel at fault these guys then push the blame to women and make them adversaries. If you can believe it social progress in the direction of not guilting people based on roles (dismissed for being a feminism issue by many) would help these guys more than mastering date-fu.KnightOfTL;DR (talk) 14:40, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Becoming a decent person would also help. GodothasArrived  ( super crazy fun time! ) 14:42, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm so happy this page exists!
I was going to create it otherwise. The seduction community mixes totally banale statements ("Women like well-dressed guys") with complete woo that will supposedly get the girls to drop their pants straight away.--Baloney Detection (talk) 21:34, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Should the Push/Pull technique be mentioned? The smart way to score with a chick, like telling her she's the fourth prettiest girl in the room.  "You’ll leave women no choice but to feel attraction toward you . . . even if they’re repulsed by your physical appearance."  & If that doesn't work on a girl, she's probably just psychologically damaged.  21:56, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Sure, I'm all for adding it. I'm not really up to date on all their concepts and ideas.--Baloney Detection (talk) 13:44, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Fucking hell, there's even a PUA bootcamp. 22:00, 9 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Ye Gods, I assumed the Always Sunny episode The D.E.N.N.I.S System was just Dennis being a big ol' piece of shit as usual. It really worries me that these people exist in the real world... Cow...Hammertime! 22:28, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I understand why desperate men sign up for these programs
I have one friend who is a smart guy, but socially awkward, who has signed up for this. So I use the word desperate here with no negative connotation.

What bothers me is not men who want to have relationships or get laid. That's quite frankly normal. What bothers me is people who prey on these men by charging ridiculous fees (my friend paid $3000 for this) for a boot camp to teach them "techniques" that, quite frankly, are fairly ineffective at cultivating any type of romantic or sexual attraction, and runs the significant risk of indoctrinating these socially vulnerable males that rape and other anti social behavior is okay.

So the real victims here predominantly are the males who are preyed upon by the people selling these programs. And what I believe happens is that these men, after being swindled, wind up being more resentful, not to the people that defrauded them, but towards women in general. That is what makes this program a recipe for disaster.

This is not to say that some of the material taught in these programs does not have some psychological basis. But for the most part, the belief that some sort of mechanical program of seduction is going to improve one's romantic life is baseless. FlamingModerate (talk) 09:09, 14 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I'd be interested to know the date. From what I can tell more of the supposedly secret techniques are now online (FWIW they look an awful lot like a re-branding of the PR techniques used to sell you say washing powder) which I would expect to result in a fall in price. Heh for those that get Scientology references the whole bridge is on the web. I'm also wondering if these “gurus” set their marks up to fail. Looking at the 972mag article one of the exercises is to get “30 phone numbers in one hour” which is higher than what you would get in speed dating with 100% hit rate.Geni (talk) 13:35, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Tucker Max
Would he qualify, possibly his fans, who tended to be love shy nice guys who were desperate and looked to him as some sort of god? Messiah might be more accurate. Vergeltung (talk) 08:19, 16 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Tucker Max is an odd case. He certainly wasn't anyone's guru; I think back in his prime he was just a random douchebag who could tell a good story and was just nice enough to be able to have female friends. (He seems to have grown up since, but that's hearsay.) I kind of doubt he'd approve of outright misogyny; he was all too aware that he was an asshole even then, and knows that it's cost him quite a bit socially. PUAs tend to lack any sort of self-awareness. EVDebs (talk) 04:17, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

The best way to deal with the marketers of these 'skills'
... is to be a 'put-down artist.'

And when will someone write the 'Secrets the pick up artists courses don't tell you (at a fraction of the price)' and make a fortune thereby? 171.33.222.26 (talk) 15:00, 24 June 2013 (UTC)


 * not much money in trying to sell books to a demographic that expects information to be free and on the web.Geni (talk) 01:42, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Written by someone bitter?
Just made some edits (which don't seem to have shown up yet) but the article looked like it was written by someone who had had their girlfriend stolen by a pickup artist.

The reality is not every guy out their gets it, and the pick up community has gravitated towards self-improvement as the overall best way to get a woman (or more than one if you're so inclined.)

Yes, there is some shady shit... and there are some shady people who get into pua and do even shadier shit. Unfortunately whenever you have a large community there will be bad apples. The other end of the spectrum is guys who are just a little shy, who are learning how to talk to women (and people in general) and just be happier.

I edited the article on their (our) behalf. Some of us just didn't get the memo, and we're learning everything now. In the end it's really not that much different than Salespeople reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, or women getting tips on how to make a guy marry them in Cosmo.
 * Cool story, bro. PowderSmokeAndLeather: Say something once, why say it again?.silverbrain.png 05:48, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Funny that a couple people have reverted my edit, even though all I did was change some uncited claims to something more neutral and try to fill in some detail. Onoma (talk) 12:18, 27 October 2013 (UTC)Onoma
 * This wiki isn't neutral. Guys who are just a little shy, who are learning how to talk to women (and people in general) and just be happier are best not getting involved in a macho dick culture that's just going to reinforce their sense of being "beta" while instilling them with an predatory attitude towards women.   13:05, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
 * The fact that you're fixated on women as things that one "gets" tells me all that I need to know about your intentions for this article. PowderSmokeAndLeather: Say something once, why say it again?.silverbrain.png 14:45, 27 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Onoma's got it backwards; the PUA movement itself stems from bitterness. Its entire frame of reference is based around the point of view of the socially awkward male spurned by women.  As a result it doesn't see beyond the immediate urges of an undersexed person in extended adolescence and thus is focused on short sighted and childishly misogynistic  ideas like "getting women."
 * Also, protip: things like How to Win Friends and Influence People and Cosmo relationship advice (which btw, rarely if ever has anything to do with marriage) are almost as much bullshit as PUA nonsense, although perhaps significantly less creepy. --Marlow (talk) 17:28, 27 October 2013 (UTC)


 * @Weasel really? I guess I'm new here but should rational discourse be based on neutrality?  Examining the actual evidence, as it were?


 * @PowderSmokeAndLeather oh brother. It's a pretty common parlance, not even from PUA.


 * @Marlow Odd, How to Win Friends and Influence People is pretty much required reading for salespeople. Frankly, though, that's not the point.  Even if it is just as much BS, there's no call to denigrate something with falsehoods when there's plenty of legitimate reasons to question it.


 * Hell, the feminist wiki actually has a more even-handed article on pickup!
 * Onoma (talk) 04:08, 3 November 2013 (UTC)Onoma


 * Sorry, Onama; as a former pick-up artist myself, I can honestly say that the whole thing is outright pseudoscience.

While yes, it is entirely possible to pick up women using some of the techniques they espouse (I've done it), in all honesty it's likely not for the reasons they claim it works. Much how like certain martial arts claim that Qi is responsible for achieving certain feats that in reality has nothing to do with Qi and everything to do with biomechanics. The rest of the crap falls directly into the world of pseudoscience (NLP), or outright woo (90% of the shit Steve P. endorses; he's the Deepak Chopra of PUA'S). Hell, Neil Strauss buys into so much woo it's not even funny (who do you think made Steve P famous?); in his book 'The Game', he mentions attempting the 'sleep diet' (where you can supposedly attempt to survive by napping for 30 minutes a day or something to that effect). Even a cursory 10-second Google search would have revealed that it wasn't physically possible. Anyone willing to spout off that BS without fact checking is someone you should be leery of....

And finally, THERE'S NO PEER REVIEW FROM THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY!! If they can proof it really works as they say it does, they need to call up James Randi and claim their $1,000,000 prize; somehow I don't see that happening. All there is is anecdotal evidence (which in many cases can be shown to be provably false; I'm talking to YOU, Prophet!!), and testimonies from other 'experts'. Even with the stuff they endorse that DOES get results, they can't provide one scientifically accepted paper on how it works. That should give pause to anyone applying skepticism to the whole concept. TokenSkepticMagician talk 12:29, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * It has nothing to do with science or peer review, & whether it "works" isn't exactly the point. It's a confidence trick approach to sex, & a mentality that basically treats women as objects.  03:49, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Confidence trick regarding tricking women into sex, tricking guys into thinking the techniques work, or both? TokenSkepticMagician talk 4:56 3 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Well if it actualy works there is certianly an element of tricking the woman (are their pickup artists catering to the gay community?). Tricking the men if they hand over money? Probably. Then again at its core the techniques involve spending a lot of time hitting on a lot of women. So if your goal is casual sex then statisicaly almost anything is going to work.Geni (talk) 18:14, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Last-minute resistance
Mystery's method has three phases: attraction (A1: opening; A2: getting attraction; A3: showing interest), comfort-building (C1: building rapport; C2: trust/building emotional and physical connections; C3: intimacy), and lastly seduction (S1: arousal; S2: last-minute resistance; S3: sex). Thus, last-minute resistance happens during the seduction phase (right before sex was going to happen if the guy got his way, hence the term "last-minute"). The article cited here inaccurately makes it sound as though last-minute resistance happens before even the comfort-building stage has started.

At any rate, Mystery's whole strategy was all about playing hard-to-get and acting almost indifferent toward the woman's hotness so as to present an intriguing challenge and seem ultra-desirable (since presumably only the most desirable person would have so many options that he would be indifferent toward some hot chick). His advice for dealing with last-minute resistance was indeed the use of the freeze-out. Those tactics have been criticized as deceptive or manipulative, but probably women are being dishonest too much of the time, e.g. by saying "I don't usually do this" and such. Much of it doesn't even matter, and is just done for the sake of form. It's not much different from how people say "I'm fine" when asked how they're doing; there are just certain social conventions people follow. A Dime Kiwi (talk) 23:26, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
 * So emotional manipulation to get sex is okay as long as it's preceded by a different form of emotional manipulation...right. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 23:32, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Emotional manipulation to get sex has been a common human behaviour pretty much forever. Of course A Dime Kiwi's attempt to justify it through claiming women are doing the same thing (some may be but its statisticaly unlikely they all are) is somewhat worrying. In effect this is the problem you see when people people go from trying pick-up artistry to get a lot of casual sex to addopting it as a wider world view (so called red pills) or using it as a basis for longer term relationships.Geni (talk) 18:04, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Since I haven't read his book I can't comment. Problem with the post by Nebuchadnezzer is that he's showing ignorance of psychology. "Manipulation" is different than positive influence - in order to be manipulation the goal has to be exploitative (such as lying about your career to make a woman like you, or lying to a woman you're dating that you want marriage when you don't). All forms of communication are a type of "influence", but if the goal is positive for both parties it's not "manipulation" (talking to a woman in a way that she finds funny or attractive is not manipulation, if she is a consenting adult and "wants" to give her number or have sex with a man, then she's not being harmed).


 * If something it benefits one at the expense of the other then is when it becomes manipulation. A commercial for an Xbox One game is "manipulation" by his definition since it's an attempt to get someone to "do something" - but if the commercial is honest about the product and the viewer wants to buy it - it's not true manipulation. While a sleazy informetial making false claims on the other hand, is actual manipulation.--206.255.11.166 (talk) 20:18, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Clean up
I went ahead and cleaned up this article and a few related articles - I added additional content and links as well, and replaced snark with more neutral and factually written content. The ratio of "snark to substance" shouldn't be excessive - there are also legitimate dating advice sites which get lumped into the PUA category (and which condemn the content of sites and practices like ReturnOfKings).--206.255.11.166 (talk) 20:00, 21 December 2014 (UTC)
 * You haven't provided examples of legitimate dating advice sites which get lumped into the PUA category, merely asserted it, and you're making edits that change the overall PoV of the article. You should discuss & agree those kind of changes before making them, so please stop reverting.  We don't strive to be neutral.  I've kept in what you added about Julien Blanc & Arden Leigh, but reverted the rest of your edit again as I don't see much else of value.  20:21, 21 December 2014 (UTC)