Just in time for International Women’s Day, badass feminist and Friend of NSWATM Clarisse Thorn‘s first book, Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, is available on Kindle.
I was lucky enough to be able to read an early copy. Originally, when I got the email, I intended to read the first chapter and then do a few chores. Six hours later, the dishes were undone, the laundry was growing musty in the dryer, and I was doublechecking the last page just in case the book had grown an appendix while I wasn’t looking.
To be fair, I am not sure if there is a target audience targetier than me for Confessions, since it combines many of my favorite things to think about: pick-up artistry, kink, sex-positivity, feminism, Deep Thoughts about how relationships work, and gossip about other people’s sex lives. I am pretty sure the only way it could be more up my alley is if it included an extensive discussion of My Little Pony and Star Wars. So, you know, if you aren’t interested in pick-up artists and feminism and other people’s sex lives, you will probably enjoy this book much less than I did.
Clarisse Thorn is a sex-positive blogger and activist who focuses a lot on masculinity and BDSM; she’s perhaps most famous around the people-who-talk-about-men circles for her post on creep-shaming. She is also impressively well-liked. Seriously, that lady. I have no idea what magic she uses to make MRAs and radical feminists think she’s awesome, but she needs to loan me some. (Maybe she stole all of Hugo Schwyzer’s likeability?)
Confessions focuses on a period in Clarisse’s life in which she became obsessed with PUAs and the lens they offer for modern dating, sexuality, gender norms, and masculinity. (I am currently in the middle of a similar period in my life, and am kicking myself that I didn’t think to write a book about it.) She intersperses theoretical discussions of PUA theory and sex-positive feminist ideas with stories from her romantic life and of her interactions with PUAs.
Confessions of a Pick-Up Artist Chaser features a lot of people you’ll recognize, if you spend a lot of time hanging around the sexy parts of the gendersphere. Holly Pervocracy gets name-checked; Hugh Ristik is extensively quoted; the Heartiste Formerly Known As Roissy has his own section, in which it is pointed out that he is rather a misogynistic asshole and pretty much PUAs: What Not To Do.
(Gah. This post is taking me forever because I keep rereading the book on accident. People, stop writing things I like.)
However, I think it provides some… context, perhaps?… that a lot of the gendersphere discussions don’t. Clarisse’s big strength in Confessions is her empathy. A lot of times people only understand their little corner of the gendersphere and have ideas that are at best strawmen and at worst outright lies about the other corners. But Clarisse understands why men might take up pickup, and how it would help them, and how it can become destructive. She understands the eroticism of power, both in vanilla and kinky sex. She understands actual sex-positivity, not the caricatured version of “we are all SLUTS because it is EMPOWERING” that idiots continually push.
Clarisse Thorn understands that shit is complicated. To pick an example she discusses in the book: a lot of feminists, including me, adopt the “you have to talk about sex, or you have to get used to not having sex until you learn to talk about it” position on sexual communication. However, she points out that a lot of people prefer nonverbal communication, that some people are better at nonverbal communication than verbal, and that people have lots of understandable reasons not to explicitly communicate. In fact, even a lot of sex-positive people are not exactly paragons of explicit verbal communication of everything ourselves. On the other hand, she still gets that explicit verbal communication has many, many advantages (particularly for non-normative sex like BDSM and polyamory) that shouldn’t be ignored.
Another strength of Confessions is the personal nature of it. Although I have a minor degree of PUA obsession myself, it mostly manifests in making all my friends take the Heartiste Formerly Known As Roissy’s Dating Market Value Test. (I’m lesser beta as a guy, greater beta as a girl.) Nevertheless, I can recognize a lot of the thought processes Clarisse goes through– the second-guessing, the trying to read people, the constant wondering if you’re genuine or just playing the game without even knowing it. Not to mention that her personal anecdotes quite often serve to illustrate her theories!
So yeah. Confessions of a Pickup Artist is a very good book. Buy it! Read it! Tell your friends! Also if you are a pickup artist and want to run game on me PLEASE do so, I am endlessly curious about whether it’d work on me.
I bought it as soon as you suggested it but had to delay my reading for working reasons. I am regretting starting it today, just before going to bed; I just don’t want to stop reading it.
@dungone: For things that are not life-threatening but can’t be held off until the age of consent, of course it has to be the parents’ call, but they should also be made aware of what adults who have the same condition think of the treatment, what the child can potentially lose by receiving said treatment, and what other alternatives are available. I think few parents would choose for their children to be blind – even if both parents are themselves blind. Same goes for hypothyroidism, or chronic depression. While some parents would want their children to be deaf or dwarfs… Read more »
@daelyte, for what it’s worth that whole entire hypothetical scenario is a really tough call. Most [rational] people wouldn’t have a problem giving babies a measles vaccine or having them go through open heart surgery to save their little infant lives. If you wait until adulthood to make certain decisions then it’s already too late: you’re dead. With something that is not life-threatening but nevertheless can’t be held off until the age of consent, the dilemma gets muddied. I’m going to just say, at that point it has to be the parents’ call. Because the decision has to be made… Read more »
@pocketjacks: “There are those who attack even the conscientious fat person who wants to lose that 10-15 lb. (because medically speaking, they really should).” Exercise and eating healthy foods is what matters for health, not overall weight. Sumo wrestlers are very healthy, at least until they retire and stop following their strict (and healthy) regimen. “However, I’d argue that asocial or under-social (is that a word?) people are, on average, much less happy and are subtly oppressed in the wider world, so we should try to steer children away from this course as much as we can. ” Most introverts… Read more »
@pocketjacks
Ok, let me clarify. I wrote this in mind with the promises PUA coaches make to sell their products. As a reality check against the claim that some system will turn anyone into an irresistible womanizer. The good thing is you don’t have to be a womanizer to get into a relationship or have casual sex. Most men are not, I’m one of them.
“This is called hyperfocus and, paradoxically, it’s often a sign of ADHD.” Well, I don’t have the hyperactive deal for certain. And as for ADD, I can’t be certain. I did very well in school without even trying. So did one of my brothers, and he got diagnosed with ADD and got meds for a while. When I was a kid, ADD wasn’t diagnosed that way. Neither was aspie. I was in kindergarten in 1987, and only one year unlike almost-newborns spending nearly all their time since birth there. ADD meds wouldn’t have helped me, the way they didn’t help… Read more »
@Schala, Define normal social life? What’s wrong with preferring to be alone? What’s wrong with being asocial (ie avoiding social events as much as possible, even if you do okay while into them)? Nothing. An adult can make this choice for themselves. However, I’d argue that asocial or under-social (is that a word?) people are, on average, much less happy and are subtly oppressed in the wider world, so we should try to steer children away from this course as much as we can. @daelyte, Not to mention, people who are unusually tall may have difficulty passing through doorways, finding… Read more »
@Thomas, The simple truth is if you are not tall, handsome, rich, famous etc. you will never pick up generically hot girls with ease. I’d like to give you time to clarify, because this sounds really bad. Of course not every man can pick up generically hot girls because – for starters – there are far more men (no qualifiers) than there are generically hot girls. Your analogy with the “Health At Every Size” movement suggests that you didn’t mean to say what would be the worst interpretation of what you said. Not everyone can (or even wants to) get… Read more »
(Hmmm… my WordPress login didn’t default to “Doug S.” as I expected it to.)
This is called hyperfocus and, paradoxically, it’s often a sign of ADHD.
You know, in that situation, I would do that, too.
@DaisyDeadhead:
Prosopagnosia, I have a friend who has it. I saw him on a bus once, a few hours after we chatted elsewhere. Out of context, he had no idea who I was until I reminded him.
So are you hypersocial? My dad is like that, and his mother before him. Force of nature.
A lot of aspies end up with a hypersocial friend (or partner). Seems that for those who know everyone and heard all the jokes, aspies never stop being interesting.
Schala and daelyte, autism note. “60 Minutes” is doing a show on “Face blindness”–people who can’t remember faces at all. The opposite is of this is “super-recognizers” –who remember virtually ever face they’ve ever seen. There is a secondary condition associated with that, known as “before they were famous” syndrome, people who can easily recognize very old photos of well-known people. I scored pretty high on this, missed only two. Since I scored so low (high?) on that NT test, I am thinking it is likely that they are connected. I know, causation, correlation, etc etc… but still, it is… Read more »
@DaisyDeadhead: One man’s 4 is another man’s 10, and vice-versa. Just because guys want to pick up hot girls, doesn’t meant they agree on what that actually means. The community in PUA forums seem to understand that not everyone has the same ideal of “hot”, or the even same goals. (casual sex, LTR, family and kids, soul mate, …) For what it’s worth, at least 80% of women I see are physically attractive to me, and I’d probably bed the other 20% if they really wanted to. Unfortunately I can’t tell who’s interested, don’t know when/where/how to approach, and I… Read more »
@schala: “It’s probably considered awful for driving a car however, except maybe for races (in everyday driving it would be a handicap to not be able to divert attention away at will, to say, spot other cars coming from other directions).” Actually, driving is one of the most common situations where even non-autistics report having occasionally experienced hyperfocus. Usually while driving at twice the speed of surrounding traffic, bobbing and weaving between other vehicles, aware of the exact position, direction and speed of every vehicle and pedestrian in a two-block radius… or something like that. Just don’t try to have… Read more »
Thomas: …you will never pick up generically hot girls with ease.
Yes, and as we all know, they MUST be hot.
Just underlining this… you all glide past this little phrase as a given— as if you are not excluding 75% of the women you meet, then wonder why you’re alone.
You have no moral authority to criticize ANY women for wanting a rich or famous man, if you summarily reject all “non-hot” girls.
Same. Same. Same.
“In case of putative mental disorders, a good metric would be, would this person have problems leading a normal social life and a normal professional life, if they were never “outed”?”
Define normal social life? What’s wrong with preferring to be alone? What’s wrong with being asocial (ie avoiding social events as much as possible, even if you do okay while into them)?
What is a normal professional life? A string of dead-end jobs forever until you die counts? One dead-end job at Mom and Pop’s eatery until you die counts?
All the guys on Puahate are cautiously anonymous, so PUAs can dismiss the what is said there. You won’t see a bunch of guys publicly going on TV and saying they have been scammed by PUAs.
@NMMG
“No man will admit he spent $3000 in a boot camp to learn how to hypnotize women. ”
With the advent of anonymous internet I am highly sceptical. At this given moment I can google sites like PUAhate.
“And there are scam campaign who don’t go extinct quickly : scam campaigns about losing weight.”
Most of them amount to the same thing. Eat less, exercise more.
@Dr. Anonymous:
There is a reason most scam campaigns go exticnt quite quickly. People are smart enough to see through them. The very same mechanism would probably work here. If the PUA community was just a bunch of scam artist contributing nothing of value it would go defunct within weeks. It hasn’t so why is this?
No man will admit he spent $3000 in a boot camp to learn how to hypnotize women. And there are scam campaign who don’t go extinct quickly : scam campaigns about losing weight.
@pocketjacks :
Attacking Roissy is not attacking all men.
In his video, Mystery doesn’t talk about mixed signals sent by a woman when she flirt in a bar, he talks about all women – it’s the reason why he talks about shoes and hair. So guys who believe him will try this stuff everywhere on any woman – including at 4 AM in an elevator.
@Thomas
There is a reason most scam campaigns go exticnt quite quickly. People are smart enough to see through them. The very same mechanism would probably work here. If the PUA community was just a bunch of scam artist contributing nothing of value it would go defunct within weeks. It hasn’t so why is this?
@HughRistik Thanks for the detailed response and sorry for my delayed answer. To be honest, I can’t really argue with your points because my insights in the community are minimal. My negative initial reaction to Clarisse’s experiences was a gut reaction. In this spirit, dissecting social interaction in such a highly analytical way just seems weird and wrong-headed to me. My impression is that instead of seeing and accepting the basic things PUAs seem to engage in an awful lot of post-hoc rationalization. The simple truth is if you are not tall, handsome, rich, famous etc. you will never pick… Read more »
@We are anonymous, I think a 28 year old who’s never been kissed will have more success following the PUA script than following scripts from anti-PUAs, advice that mostly consists of ‘don’t do this’. I agree. Or rather, I think he’d do at least as good if not a bit better than following mainstream sources, and significantly better than if he followed most feminist ones. I also think it’s up to him what he does, and would be suspicious of people trying to shield him from his own choices lest he pick the wrong one. They clearly don’t have his… Read more »
@Schala, We have to draw the line somewhere. There are mental afflictions out there where patients want to amputate their own limbs. Is that a lifestyle choice on par with BDSM? Any doctor who knows of such a situation and doesn’t intervene, even against the patient’s will, is abandoning his ethical duty, I feel. I think we can also differentiate between ailments that are debilitating in and of themselves, and those that are detrimental only due to social prejudice against them. In case of putative mental disorders, a good metric would be, would this person have problems leading a normal… Read more »
@daelyte A state of unlimited concentration that generally can’t be interrupted if the interest in the task is high enough? It was very useful for videogame testing. It’s probably considered awful for driving a car however, except maybe for races (in everyday driving it would be a handicap to not be able to divert attention away at will, to say, spot other cars coming from other directions). I’m generally good in Gran Turismo, and have panic mental scenarios about even TRYING to drive in real life, so much that I didn’t give much thought to ever getting a driving license.… Read more »