The Manosphere Killed PUA
It’s been years and I still can’t draw my attention away from the nutty manosphere. I’ve written articles here, comments elsewhere, posts on discussion forums, questions wherever I could.
I enjoy making fun of manosphere and MRM slash MRA guys partly because I simply don’t understand them. I’ll admit it. I simply don’t understand where all that emotion comes from.
Sure, there are issues that need to be tweaked in society — any society, including ours. And if you get screwed by the system I could see how you’d be bitter. In that case, I’d recommend seeing a professional therapist. For reals.
But it seems that most manosphere guys have never been cheated on, taken to the cleaners in a divorce, been falsely accused of rape, lost a job to some sort of feminist affirmative action, or anything like that.
I just don’t get the bitterness against the system and against women. And lately, it seems, the manosphere has fully embraced the white nationalist segment of its population and become quite racist too. HBD, indeed. You’re looking at a guy who not only read “The Bell Curve” — yes, the entire thing — but also read an entire critique of it. And a critique of the critique.
So is the manosphere just Conservatism applied to male-female relations? Maybe. I’m not sure. But it seems that the vast majority of manosphere bloggers are White, Christian, American or British, and young. Very young men.
I saw a poll showing that something like 80% of the manosphere was age 17-20!? Others said that there was a problem with the poll but, if it’s true, then the manosphere is made up by a bunch of boys who aren’t even old enough to drink alcohol or rent a car (probably a good thing).
Which brings me to PUA. (Or “pickup” as we used to call it back in the ’90s, or “the seduction community” when it was on alt.seduction.fast. As I’ve said before, a PUA was a guy who was really good at PU. PUA was not a thing.)
Anyway, as I’ve also said before, back in the day, “PUA” was about seducing chicks. That’s it. A kid found out about it when his girlfriend dumped him and he wanted to see what went wrong and started searching around the primitve ‘net for it. In “Speed Seduction,” Ross Jeffries used to teach about “eliciting values” from each woman you meet so you could tailor your seduction technique to that particular woman. While there were some general concepts that could be applied to most women, the idea was that everybody is different and had to be treated as such if you wanted to be successful.
These days, when a young kid is dumped by his girlfriend and makes the same internet search that I did back in 1996, he’s not greeted with “seduction techniques” to help him improve his love-life as much as he’s inundated with a massive wave of political diatribes condemning everything from feminism to multiculturalism to socialism and everything in between. Instead of being taught how to address his individual problem, he’s recruited into a swirling morass of radicalized and highly politicized propaganda against, basically, the current state of Western culture itself.
I imagine it’s something along the lines of what happens to young Muslim men. They might have some innocuous question about, say, the hair color of the virgins awaiting them in heaven or something. So they do an internet search and their question immediately leads them to radical Islamic propaganda which — if they breathe too much in — will gradually convert them into vicious tools of that propaganda.
Maybe that’s why the manosphere is so confusing and fascinating to me. Back in the day when I wanted to read about picking up chicks, I didn’t have to wade through a bunch of KKK and pro-rape commentary to do it.
But maybe it’s the new normal. And if that’s the case, then PUA is dead. Because if young men don’t want to change themselves but instead want to sit around writing articles about taking society back to the 19th century when women couldn’t vote… well.. those guys aren’t going to be out in the bars and clubs mackin’ on too many broads.
1990s:
****ty love life –> internet search –> seduction techniques –> meet women –> sex
Today:
****ty love life –> internet search –> MRA propaganda –> write angry blog posts –> ???
Which is not to say that the manosphere doesn’t bring up some good points. For example, the concept of women “hitting the wall” when they reach a certain age. This is true. Although it’s a more gradual decline than a wall. Radical feminists might not want people to believe it, but men are 90% interested in women because of their looks. Sorry, it’s true.
But the enthusiasm and thinly veiled shadenfreude with which the manosphere presents the concept is clearly backed by hatred and viciousness. It’s one thing to say, “Guys, understand that a woman’s looks will usually fade fast.” It’s another thing to write post after post after post about it. We’re not stupid, we got it the first time.
I guess you could say that the manosphere has a collective case of Borderline Personality Disorder (DSM-V be damned). “I hate you, don’t leave me,” the manosphere says to women. “You’re evil, why don’t you like me?”
To carry the analogy further, manosphere bloggers involve themselves in “splitting,” or black-and-white thinking. All women supposedly want the same things and have the same urges. They all lose their looks at precisely the same age. They’re all the same level of emotional and irrational. The opposite of men, of course, who are also all the same as each other. Or at least we should be but for the fact that we’ve all been “feminized.” Etc.
I’ve learned in my lifetime that people who make broad-brush statements about a topic usually have very little experience with the topic of which they speak.
So instead of being presented with stuff like Speed Seduction and even to a lesser extent Mystery Method and RSD — which address individual issues and teach young men to at least kinda see each woman as a unique person worthy of some basic human respect — modern internet “dating advice” instead presents guys with radical, all-or-nothing thinking that demonizes women, blacks, gays, liberals, “sluts,” and most of the entirety of the contemporary Western world.
And the solution that the manosphere apparently proposes for society’s ills is of course utterly impossible: a return to “the patriarchy” of centuries past. Sorry, that just ain’t gonna happen. We’re more likely to return to riding in covered wagons.
So you get a bunch of teenage boys searching for ways to avoid heartbreak and they’re shunted into a weird, dogmatic cyber-world where women and society itself are the enemy and the only solution is so untenable as to be absurd. I can’t imagine the fear and despair that goes through their minds. All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not a teenage boy anymore.
The next question I’m asking is… How did things get to this point?