Rolling 'this is sexist' thread

i'm sorry, i realize that men are victims of patriarchy as well but i am having difficulty summoning much sympathy in this particular instance

I don't think the reaction to this guy's work was unjustified and I see it as a credit to him that, after his shocked denial, he reread what he wrote with a different perspective and recognized what people were reacting to and engaged them to help him fix it. That's the point where I feel like going ham on him now misses the point; he appears to get where he went wrong and is trying to fix it. Meanwhile, people with no interest in this aside from a nebulous attachment to an ill-defined, contradictory definition of "free speech" are bending over backwards to protect the right of people to sell instructions on how to sexually assault someone.

i'm sorry, i realize that men are victims of patriarchy as well but i am having difficulty summoning much sympathy in this particular instance

i don't think it's really a question of sympathy so much as understanding this thing in its proper context. the man isn't "preying" on his fellow nerds: he is coming from the same place as them, which is why his guide struck such a chord, because he and they are similarly thinking of "finding a person who will sleep with you" as a social interaction that can be hacked using this series of weird tips.

huh, maybe elmo's comment was more to treeship than to me.

A response to the Bustillos piece, which she to her credit then shared out:

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/06/okay-to-hate-the-kickstarter-rape-manual.html

“If she says 'STOP,' or 'GET AWAY FROM ME,' or shoves you away, you know she is not interested. It happens.”

Oh, it happens, does it? I'm inclined to dismiss the discussion that follows this quote in the article, because this is significant enough: he's saying it's okay to be the cause of a woman having to forcefully stop you or get you away from her. That is pretty game over to me.

i was p surprised that bustillos came out in defense of this, from following her on twitter etc. she doesn't seem like the kind of person who would. but i can see the free speech angle

in orbit otm

i feel like bustillos has similarly challopsed before, though i can't remember where. it didn't seem super out of place for her.

I actually had the pleasure of meeting Bustillos a few weeks ago at a party in LA, though she and I are both positive we've met each other somewhere else along the line. It could just be my recognizing her name from past Awl pieces. In any event, she struck me as a very sharp, engaging and funny conversationalist. She and her partner, a British fellow, are both a few years older than me and I think both have adult or near-adult kids from previous relationships, which I bring up because a few of the Roiphe comparison comments I've seen around the Net seem to imply she's some young ingenue. Not the case!

in any event i really like the stuff she wrote on DFW and highly encourage everybody itt to seek it out

i think Bustillos has perhaps fallen into the trap of thinking that some nebulous notion of "consent" resolves all these issues of force and coercion--so i suppose it's not terribly surprising that she can justify, at least in her own logic, a PUA manual which pushes "consent" about as far as it can possibly go.

there is something dangerous in the understanding of consent underlying this and other seduction guides, that anything less than a loud, forceful "NO" is license to proceed with aggression; that acquiescence is the same thing as willing participation; that consent is durable and continuous once sexual contact begins

Yeah, I mean obviously there are some elements of romance that begin without express verbal permission (i.e., the first time you kiss a girl you're seeing), but there's always some kind of implied approval via signs in those cases. This guy's manual basically insists to you SHE WANTS IT, EVEN IF SHE ACTS LIKE SHE DOESN'T.

It was weird, but when I was in 8th grade, we had a sexual harassment discussion in our homeroom class, and the teacher warned everybody in the class that if people were making inappropriate, unwanted physical contact with them, they needed to tell them to "Stop!", or else the perpetrator technically didn't have to stop. Which seemed horribly RONG to me at the time that basically the teacher was implying "Everybody is allowed to take advantage of you until you've made it clear that you don't want it", rather than perhaps suggesting that the perpetrators not go around pawing unsuspecting women in the first place. Fortunately, the school's interpretation did not match the teacher's.

that consent is durable and continuous once sexual contact begins

^^^

yeah, this whole episode has brought up some interesting stuff that's far more disconcerting than the fact that PUA dudes exist - unexamined attitudes towards intimacy, entitlement and communicating with a partner, some of those attitudes being pretty horrible amongst peeps who want nothing to do with PUA World

http://jezebel.com/is-there-such-a-thing-as-a-feminist-pick-up-artist-564354894

oh god

i appreciate i may have chosen the wrong DN to explore this

I generally like Maria Bustillos a lot. I don't think she's completely wrong here, but she's a little too forgiving. But I agree that there has been to some extent a kind of hysteria about the book, and a lot of the paraphrasings I keep seeing seem to go a lot further than the language being parahprased. Also I really fucking hate the word "rapey" and people need to stop with that. There's no such thing as "kinda rapey" -- there is a line somewhere between rape and not rape. It's very trivializing to use "rapey" to mean something more like "creepy" or "gross" or "sexually forward in an obnoxious way."

i'm sort of dread-enjoying this whole zone of existence being strip-mined to exhaustion in real time. of course there may be no exhaustion of it.

imo the best relationships or romantic encounters involve shared escalation where one person flirts, the other flirts back, one person brushes against the other, it's returned, etc.

I understand that this isn't necessarily the norm for everyone since there _is_ a culture of expecting men to initiate or be more aggressive than women in hetero relationships but imo supporting any work that concentrates on aggressive male action is failing in a major way. Concentrate on figuring out how to read people, and if someone wants you to be the person escalating things, they will let you know in some way.

to hell with prescriptive gender roles, though.

I'm not a big fan of the word "rapey" but it does connote a spectrum of acts or behaviors that are related to rape, that are similar in important ways, not all of which are popularly thought of as "rape" but which arguably should be, as this current embarrassment shows.

But I agree that there has been to some extent a kind of hysteria about the book

We can't help it, it's all those wombs just wandering around the place.

xp mh, well that's the other, less political issue here is that some people have very few social skills and are unable to read non-verbal cues effectively, and that causes problems not only in romance but in all areas of their lives. and that sucks, i guess. it's almost like a disability. probably, ~40% of the people drawn to PUA manuals take the advice seriously because they are just, for the most part, totally baffled by human social interaction.

i think if you find social communication difficult you shd probly start learning somewhere else than in books about how to treat women as disposable utensils

i'm curious, has anyone here run into one of these dudes irl? i don't go clubbing much but i'm out in public plenty, and i've never seen it. i mean, i'm a dude, but i've never been out with women and had anybody try anything. anybody? have you been sarged? negged?

from the internet, you get the idea that this kind of thinking and acting is getting really common, but i wonder...

I think that what is missing from the main picture here is that there are people who, even by the PUA culture's core beliefs, don't use manuals or coercion or whatever else but yet pick up sex partners or find relationships that they're interested in. The weird thing about PUA culture is that it assumes that it's the only or right way to go about becoming this "ideal."

and yeah, Treeship, reading people is difficult and takes social interaction and practice! There are lots of adults who are still horrible at it, but coming up with a manual to bag a mate so that you don't have to learn how to interact with other humans better in general is kind of a shit way of going at it.

I'm an introvert and generally get anxious at social interaction but really, you use your limitations to your advantage if you're going to figure anything out in life

i get the impression that this stuff mainly happens in bro-ish or more 'mainstream' types of nightlife

I don't go where these ppl are, I think, and I discourage strangers from talking to me anyway so it doesn't get far enough into conversation that I would find out whether they used PUA tactics or not.

i caught a friend negging somebody once, called him on it and he grinned at me.

I have been engaged in conversation at bars or other public places where a guy who is definitely throwing off a PUA vibe, if not actually into the culture, has tried to hijack a conversation I've been in.

I read The Game a few months back and came away feeling like these were the saddest of nerds and none of them would be getting laid, ever.

(he's suggesting) it's okay to be the cause of a woman having to forcefully stop you or get you away from her. That is pretty game over to me.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Stuff like negging and other tactics for lowering self-esteem and social capital etc are just modified abuse techniques, lots of manipulative people use them in lots of situations (unfortch). It's just that it takes a social...movement? phenomenon? like the PUA one to codify them into a set of guidelines and endorse them worldwide.

Yeah, a lot of it struck me as 48 Laws of Power amoral shit, just transferred explicitly onto sex and fear of women.

i think it's possible that what (some of) these guys really want is acceptance but since our culture teaches them to be men an be invulnerable they sublimate this desire, and think instead that is a desire to "get laid."

I think what Bustillos was getting at with that "clarifying the issue" comment though, and this is a touchy area, is that we don't exist in a world in which everyone is entirely consciously 100% sure of what they "want" at every given moment, and I don't see this as something that should be gender-divided. Sometimes having the other person make an advance IS the thing that pushes you from being unsure to sure that you want the other person, or sometimes the other person making a move gives you an excuse to get over your own inhibitions. And sometimes the persistence or the desire itself is an attractive quality. So it's sort of a tricky line to avoid crossing -- teaching a person not to be afraid to assert what they want and at the same time teaching them that they SHOULD be a little afraid to be overly assertive with a person who is acting uncertain about it (forgetting for a moment the no-brainer scenario where a person says "no" or makes their non-consent clear). People who are socially intelligent can hopefully learn to pick up on cues about these things, but as pointed out above, many of the target audience of these books are not very socially intelligent.

I guess to use a PG example from my own life, back when I was extremely shy with girls, I went on a date with a girl, and at the end of the night we were sitting together on a bench, and her body language seemed kind of mixed, and I did something uncharacteristic of myself and pulled her toward me to kiss her. She pulled away and said she wasn't sure about the whole thing. So I didn't push things further and told her (again, very uncharacteristically of me) something along the lines of "I know that I want you, and it's up to you to decide if you want me too." I went home, and she called me later, and we wound up dating. I realize that this isn't really exactly the equivalent of making her grab my dick, but I did act in kind of a forceful and aggressive way at first. And if I hadn't done it, I don't think we would have wound up dating.

I agree with Bustillos that not all PUA material fits the stereotype of objectifying women (I know this because I have watched youtube videos out of pure curiosity -- I haven't been in a position to "pick up" women in 11 years), in fact some of the "artists" emphasize that they used the techniques to meet people that they got into committed relationships with, not for one-night stands.

xp

i don't see the need to jump thru those hoops, i think wanting to get laid is an understandable and common desire, the difference between being an adult and a sociopath is the steps one takes to fulfill said desire

I'd make a horrible PUA because I did put a woman's hand on my clothed groin once and I still feel bad

i've probably talked about this before but PUA stuff is a wide-open gateway into a bunch of other really nasty political and social thinking (it more or less depends on it for coherence). follow the linkages and straight-up white nationalism is not even a degree removed.

Yeah, if they really wanted was acceptance there are about infinity-1 other ways to go about it. xxxp

I don't know any PUA's but I have noticed that some people I knew from college (with whom I don't hang out much anymore) are full of terrible "advice" about women. Also somebody was trying to tell me the other day that women "want to feel intimidated" by men they're interested in. Uh, no, nobody really wants to feel intimidated. I thought that was kind of fucked up.

xp to noodle. i guess so, but with these dudes and these manuals there seems to be a consistent impulse to reify all aspects of social relationships and interactions: like, instead of wanting to make a good impression you need to *be* an alpha, instead of women being people with their own ideas and desires they are objectified as these entities who react in familiar ways to things, instead of wanting validation they want to be a "pick up artist." like, they are trying to simplify everything, in a detached "sociopathic" manner that, i think, might arise due to the fact that life as they know it is just too painful and complicated for them to directly deal with. this isn't meant as an exuse, just like an observation.

i'm curious, has anyone here run into one of these dudes irl?
― goole, Tuesday, June 25, 2013 12:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

totally. usually at the types of places I don't generally like to frequent (clubs). they don't necessarily take it to the length that this guy suggests, but I see it quite a lot.

In fact, one of them tried to steal my g/f once! this guy who was out of a failed engagement moved back to town and started FBing my g/f, innocently saying he wanted to see her. Then he kept calling her, trying to set up a hangout. Over and over. Then he managed to find her at at a local bar she frequented and flat out asked her if she wanted to fuck him. She replied "I'm seeing someone right now" (I'd have just said "No!!"), and he replied "That's not what I asked." He kept flirting with her too, within my vision. One night he asked her 100 feet away from me "are you still dating Neanderthal?" and she laughed and said "YES, YOU ASSHOLE!".

And then there was a dude once who basically walked up behind my b/f, grabbed her ass while I was standing there, and then walked away, winking at her. We were both a bit shocked and wondered if it was mistaken identity, and then he was gone.

xp yeah i am not giving these guys an excuse and this is a really dysfunctional way of thinking, and super socially harmful. maybe it is just too bleak for me to think that there are tons of dudes who like, really think of women this way, and really are this detached and calculating in their thinking.

goole, that's very interesting but on second thought isn't exactly surprising! The basis of PUA stuff is that NO ONE ELSE IS A PERSON, LIKE YOU ARE, or at least if they are, they don't matter. How could that not be built on, and/or reinforce, other superiority-themed structures?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3334/3550798584_6e11d33e13.jpg

Oh, it's bleak all right. You know who it's even bleaker for? The women they target. Or, in some ways, all women, since you don't know who is or could be targeting you.

But I agree that there has been to some extent a kind of hysteria about the book

We can't help it, it's all those wombs just wandering around the place.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, June 25, 2013 12:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Her word!

not to be all "i have seen some shit" but if you take a second to read, say, the twitter feeds of some of these guys you are in the deep hard-right zone instantly. and i don't mean like rush limbaugh republicanism but stuff that is way wilder and darker. derbyshire is a touchstone, if that tells you anything.