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Develop real self-confidence.
Pickup artists are right that confidence is sexy, but where they mislead is claiming confidence can be gained through simple social tricks. I’m skeptical; hiding your feelings of inadequacy behind tricks probably just reinforces the sense that the real you can’t be good enough.
Instead of wasting time on developing tricks to hide your inadequacies, why not use that time and energy actually feeling less inadequate? I’m not exhorting you to just be self-confident. Real confidence, in my experience, is a combination of having concrete things to be proud of (traits and accomplishments, not possessions) and a focus on the positive over the negative. A side dose of having a sense of humor about your flaws never hurts. Lack of defensiveness is the first step toward actual confidence.
So there’s my entry into the art of non-sexist dating advice, though I maintain a healthy skepticism that it’s not a lack of good dating advice that drives self-styled nice guys into the arms of pickup artists. But I’m always happy to be proved wrong.
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Clarise Thorn: Ethical Pickup Artistry
Amanda Marcotte: The Solution to MRA Problems? More Feminism
—photos by krystian_o/Vee Dub/Flickr
About Amanda Marcotte
Vocalyze
If you’re a woman reading this and you want to understand why men find these articles trivializing, insulting and marginalizing of men – I’ll give you the perfect analogy.
Let’s say you have a business and want to grow it into a MULTI-MILLION-dollar business. And then you read an article (on building a multi-million dollar business) and it says things like
- Think of your customers as human beings, don’t see them as mere cash bags
- Don’t be a dumbtard who sells stuff people don’t want
- Try to sell stuff that’s not rotten, spoiled and try not to sell scams, broken tiems or scam your customers in anyway
Do you get my point? All these points even though doos are so BASIC that its insulting to tell me this. Are you saying that if I’m not a multi-millionaire that I must be selling scams and rotten goods to people? That’s just plain insulting…
And that’s how most dating-advice written by women comes off, especially this Marcotte peace.
—-What makes it further insulting is how untrue it can be—
–> There are guys who GENUINELLY have every single thing on the list but can’t get a date to save their lives
–> There are guys who BREAK EVERY SINGLE thing on this list and are literal rockstars with women.
This is why these articles are so demeaning and insulting to men.
1) The articles first insults the guy with insinuation (oh, you can’t get a date – you must be a smelly, stinky, illiterate, dumb idiot).
2) Then it try to deny you entire reality and what you and every man you know has witnessed your entire life – which is that these “rules” don’t at all apply in the real world and most men who are great with women break most of these rules
3) It leaves out the most important part of man’s challenge. Being pressured into being the one to be the charismatic one. What’s ALWAYS left out is the fact that even in the 21st century most women act as if its the 16th century when it comes to initiation. They don’t approach, ask out and (most) don’t ever initiate the first kiss or sex. All of those pains and hurts and risks are left to men.
And here’s the part everyone leaves out. Even if you claim that women only want an equal (which is desputable), by expecting the man to do all the initiation she’s expecting a SUPERIOR. And the reason a lot of women don’t get this is because they haven’t done enough initiating. Further, women’s criteria for the initiation are a helluva lot higher than for the “man himself”.
In other words, they say they only want a normal ,decent guy… YET they expect the man to have george-clooney like charisma when approaching and asking them out – else they’ll label him creepy.
Trouble is, the advice given isn’t written by a woman, as you claim. It is, as the article clearly states, plucked from PUA advice which is wholly formulated by men. They are the ones talking down to you. You seem to have over-reacted a lot and found a way to generate several paragraphs worth of complaints about women as an undifferentiated group out of a totally false premise. I think I know why the ladies aren’t responding to you. It’s because you’re crazy unreasonably and that’s never attractive.
AlekNovy, you need a blog! I’m going to say it. Yes, Alek is right. If women could give men advice by telling them what they want, do you really think men could give women advice by telling them what they want?
Could you imagine how many guys would say things like:
“Girls if you really want a guy, you need to put out on the first date. Show up with as little clothing as possible. In fact! Show up with no clothing at all! That means your exciting! Then you should buy dinner.”
There’s a lot of crap that the PUA society puts out there for forward marketing and pushing people to buy their product, and geez there is a lot of crap. But, throughout this whole posts, there is nothing provided that could give a dating deprived young man a first step to finding his way to meet the right woman. I’m not saying PUA’s are good or bad, I’m saying that it’s needed. People need the advice, people need to know how to approach women. There are too many men creeping women out and it’s tragic.
But stuff like this, a woman’s christmas list of the most perfect guy, it’s not helping.
I blog about meeting women, but my blog isn’t focused solely on sex. It’s focused on making the best out of all situations because no one wants to spend their time alone.
You hit the nail right on the head! Everything you’ve said here is 100% true in my experience.
I have posted this exact same comment at multiple places, hoping some women actually take the challenge. So here it goes again.
All you girls giving advice, be it the author of this article, women in the comments section, or anywhere else on the internet, there is a very specific term for you in the PU community – it’s called Keyboard Jockey. In simpler words, people who just talk/post on the internet but never take any action.
If you are so confident that your advice works, take on the following challenge. Find a guy in your area/city in his 20s who has very little to zero experience with women (You will be surprised how many of them are out there, who are very normal looking). Take him from that and guide him to becoming a man who feels confident and empowered around women, and is able to find a reasonable girl who he loves, and who loves him back.
Accomplish this task in a reasonable amount of time and without him having to spend an unreasonable amount of money.
If all you girls put together (all over the internet) can achieve this transformation with 10 guys, write about it. Do not cheat and start giving PUA advice to these guys to use ‘negs’/’opinion openers’/’approach x women a day’ or other PUA stuff. Use your own brand of ‘Be yourself’,’Just say hi’,’connect with her’,’don’t dehumanize’,’talk about things which you care about’,’care about what she thinks’,'don’t approach randomly’,'no emotional manipulation’ etc. and see what you can accomplish.
If you are able to achieve this, let me know and I promise to advertise it enough that guys will listen almost exclusively to this brand of advice and not the PUA stuff. But till then, please shut the f*** up
Big Gus – Great post! But I do not see how you expect to receive any cooperation in this from women.
This piece fails to look at differences between men and women. We’re not wired the same. At. All. I feel women fail at recognizing our own attraction triggers, we lump ourselves into the group called the human race rather than looking at our biological differences. Men do have a harder time in dating because they are expected to make the approaches and first moves in general. I’ve often been glad I’m not a guy for this reason alone.
Are there misogynist men on PUA sites? Yep. Are there misandrist women on feminist sites? Yep. There are also many men and women seeking answers for their own struggles. One must sort through the chaff to get to the wheat. Two years spent visiting a PUA site has done more for my dating life (now seriously involved) than years of reading women’s advice. I learned what men really want and I learned my own triggers. The truth shall set you free. Just sayin’.
My advice to women is become self-aware before handing out advice to guys.
Why the big concern about men going to the”self-improvement” websites? You can see the expectations
of the women. What did you expect to happen?
Hmmm
The glance to the art regarding attraction details on five basic tips that will help men and women secure or perhaps improve relationships. That distinguishes between manipulative…Attract and Seduce Women
Marcotte’s advice isn’t necessarily bad advice, but it’s not particularly good advice, either, and definitely not too original. I’ve seen the same kind of advice on a hundred different sites, all cribbed from the same few sources.
Marcotte seems to have gone through the motions just to be able to say that a feminist HAS offered some dating advice to men.
“Free advice is worth the price”.
The entire topic of “Reinventing The Nice Guy” in terms of attracting a woman is what I have been doing since 2003, and what I took to a new level in 2008. After being in several relationships where I was abused by women, I came to the conclusion that it’s not true that women just want a good guy. Even though ever since high school, all I would hear from most women is that “Most guys are jerks, where are all the nice guys??”
So, after finally realizing being nice isn’t enough, I started to try new ideas, and I also later ended up getting heavily into the “pick up” arts. I was the perfect ‘bait’ because I had been so hurt by women, that the message of “you must knock a woman’s self-esteem down otherwise she will abuse you” really felt like it was the absolute TRUTH. The problem though with this kind of advice is that it fails to tell men that any woman that IS abusive is the WRONG woman, and no tactic can change her real personality.
The other problem is that it sews the seeds of mistrust in ALL women, and that means that men will not be able to genuinely LOVE women, which of course means the whole relationship is being built on a very shaky foundation and is destined to be doomed.
Even the most understanding woman on earth is not going to want to live with a man who does not trust her at all, especially when she in fact IS totally trustworthy.
The real answer is to do three things:
1. Find a woman who DOES appreciate you and does not abuse you.
2. Turn yourself into the absolute best version of you possible- not only on the surface but also as a person, including honing communication and listening skills and sense of humor and lifestyle and passions, etc..
3. Learn how to approach women and convey the best elements of yourself quickly- because you only have a few moments to approach a woman who is a total stranger and get her to give you a chance.
I like the idea of approaching women anywhere, because you never know where you might find the woman of your dreams.
So, I took all of this and incorporated it into my teachings at http://www.GetAGreatGirl.com
In fact, a lot of my teachings are responsible for EVOLVING the pick up artist community into something less destructive and hopefully more beneficial for men and women. However, because of the greed of some people who have infiltrated the pick up artist community, they will pander to fuelling more fears of women, or they will pander to gross over-simplifications of how to attract women, all in the name of selling and making more money. This is another reason why I have nothing to do with the community of pick up artists, even though some of these teachers and students indeed are good guys.