This is a response to Paul Elam’s recent discussion about Pick Up Artists (PUAs). [1] Paul did a great job of explaining why the sophomoric theories and schemes of PUAs are not appreciated by self-respecting men. Paul also briefly discussed MGTOW, but much more can be said about the societal conditions that led to MGTOW and ultimately to the rise of the PUA.
We can think of MGTOW and PUAs as two different strategies that men have used to survive in a hyper-feminized culture and legal system. I would say that the first two to three decades of feminism led to MGTOW, a situation where men have dropped out of the dating culture, and in some cases they have dropped out of the overall culture all together. But MGTOW is just one domino in a series of events that were triggered when the society became fully feminized. The dating vacuum left behind by MGTOW has created new sociological and psychological problems. Manipulators, opportunists and predators are rewarded for their behavior in this environment. In a normal society, such rejects and undesirables would be weeded out by natural selection. But natural selection fails in the unnatural feminized culture. In other words, feminism has indirectly led to a thriving PUA culture.
Approximately 20 years ago, I was walking down the street in a small American city and as I passed by a small group of twenty-somethings, I overheard one of the women casually, and with a noticeable air of frustration, ask her friend, “How come guys don’t ask girls out anymore?” I only glanced at her (she was quite cute) and I kept walking. That was some time around the year 2000. But at least a few women were aware of this societal problem years earlier than that.
In 1993, a Canadian woman named Alana who had never had a boyfriend, let alone sex, even though she had always wanted to date, started a movement to unite people who wanted a sex life but never succeeded in finding one. Her movement [2], of course, was quickly rebranded by the media as a misogynist movement of angry, sexually frustrated males. But it was actually started by a woman. Alana’s website from 1993, which was taken down years ago, proves that women have known for about 30 years that the dating culture has collapsed.
Because of the ways girls and women are cultured to think, they invent their own convenient explanations for why men never ask them out. Many of these explanations are propagated by the media. We’ve all heard these absurdities many times. Men are afraid of rejection. All men are assholes. Men are intimidated by smart women. Men are intimidated by attractive women. Men were spoiled by their mothers. Men have no balls. [3] Women complain about their dearth of boyfriends, but they never see it as a problem they have the ability, or even the responsibility, to solve.
That brings up a question that has become a joke on many men’s forums: Where are all the good men? Men find humor in that question because the good men never went anywhere. Women are surrounded by good men. They are the guys that women notice in the supermarkets, at a pub enjoying a fine malted beverage, driving in their cars, jogging on trails, lifting weights at the gym, etc. Occasionally, a woman might build up the courage to send one of those men an awkward smile from across a room, or that bewildered female gaze. But the men rarely ask the women out anymore.
The reasons that so few men ask women out have been written about extensively. Legalized abortion empowers women to terminate the life of a man’s child without his consent. Child custody and child support laws empower women to separate children from their fathers, often for no other reason than vindictiveness, and they can even profit from doing it. Divorce and alimony laws encourage women to loot from their own marriages. The MeToo movement essentially legalized false accusations, making any contact with a woman a potential felony. And those are just some of the problems caused by the feminized legal system. The culture itself demonizes men as toxic, misogynist, inept and angry. It doesn’t feel socially acceptable, or even legal, to exist as a male anymore. So the trade-offs for participating in the dating culture are not worth it for most men. The risks outweigh any potential rewards.
Women know all of this, but they don’t organize movements to remove any of those legal weapons from their arsenal. Instead, individual women promise not to use any of the cultural and legal tools at their disposal to destroy a man’s life. Women fail, or refuse, to realize that their promises are worthless in today’s dating culture. Statements made outside of courtrooms are not legally binding, including sexual consent. It seems suspicious that an entire society of women would need laws in place that almost all of them swear they would never use, and most men are not buying it anymore. Until actual laws and the culture change, all those good men will remain on the sidelines, watching and waiting.
Where does this leave women? If women don’t want to start asking men out, which most of them don’t feel comfortable doing anyway, then the men who are still willing to ask women out will be the only men that women have to choose from. Over the last several decades, a large and growing percentage of available men have been PUAs. They are the classic narcissists who fancy themselves to be alpha males (if such a thing even exists in humans) and they use their grandiose self-image as a defense mechanism to suppress their own feelings of inadequacy. In order to prevent the resurfacing of their personal insecurities, they convince themselves that every woman wants them and every man envies them. In his discussion, Paul pointed out that everything a PUA thinks is governed by his dick. I would go one step further than that. PUAs use sex to gauge their own standing in the social hierarchy. In that sense, a PUA becomes the personification of his own penis. Whereas he reduces women to nothing more than ass (not even a whole ass, but just a piece of ass), he also reduces himself to nothing more than a dick. These men make us all look bad, hence women’s false belief that all men are assholes. It isn’t that all men are assholes; it’s just that all (or most) of the men who still ask women out are assholes. The quantity and quality of men available to women are diminishing.
PUAs use the ambiguously defined concept of frame control to educate other men on how they too can reduce themselves to nothing more than a dick, assuming that all men are aspiring PUAs. Frame control is just another term for plain old interpersonal politics. Women play the frame game too, but they do it in more passive and covert ways. These games have escalated into something that seems more like war, with women claiming collective victimhood in order to persuade legislators to arm them with more powerful weapons they can use to destroy men’s lives.
When relations between men and women turn to war, the nicest guys refuse to fight. They walk off the battlefield, deserters, MGTOW. With the nice guys conveniently out of the way, pathological men crawl out from the psychotic underworld to exploit the blighted dating culture. Like pathogens that invade a malnourished body, PUAs are symptoms of a severely diseased and malignant society. These men would never be able to compete in a healthy dating culture. But in a diseased culture, they flourish.
We are several generations into this now. Like Afghanistan, where the last two or three generations of people have never witnessed peace, the last two or three generations of Americans have never witnessed a healthy dating culture. Whereas Afghanistan has been called the Graveyard of Empires, the US could be called the Graveyard of Relationships.
Paul made another significant point in his discussion. Most good men who have gone their own way for the duration of this unhealthy period in our culture’s history do intend, or at least hope, to live long enough to see a dating culture that they might feel comfortable participating in again. MGTOW is a temporary situation for most of them. While the PUAs seem to think that random sex for the sake of sex is a huge leap in human evolution, I’m sure the vast majority of men would prefer deeper relationships with women than just sex, but it would have to be free from legal threats and cultural condescension.
If you want more sex and better sex, you’ll seek a long term relationship with a mature, intelligent and psychologically stable woman, if you can still find one of those in this society. If you combine all of that great sex with real romance, an emotional and intellectual connection and all that comes with it, you’ll have the best of all worlds. You won’t find that by gravitating toward the hookup chicks, the so-called Tinderellas or the women who entice men with exhibitionism. But it will take major changes to our legal system, culture and politics before the American dating culture returns to any semblance of normalcy, and women will need to make an effort if we are to achieve that goal. There are anti-feminist women out there, but there aren’t many counter-feminist women. In other words, plenty of women are willing to denounce feminism for the problems it has caused in their own lives, but not many women are willing to actively fight against it. In order to actually solve these cultural problems, women would have to organize to change the legal and institutional problems that feminism has caused. Only women can change those things; men have been too discredited and marginalized to make a difference anymore. The fact that women are finally admitting that the status quo is not going to be sustainable for them much longer [4] is a step in the right direction. But statements and promises will not be enough. Actions speak louder than words.
References
[2] The Woman Who Accidentally Started The Incel Movement
[3] Why Women Need To Start Asking Men Out…Because Men Have No Balls
