The Ways the Seduction Community Can Make You Weird

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I post this here without comment. I thought this would inspire some interesting discussion. Thoughts?

Credit: http://www.datinggroundwork.com/community

Warning: This article is really long and detailed, but worth a read in my opinion. There are more than twenty five points, in no particular order. I just had a lot to say and would rather put it into one comprehensive list
I don't really want to write this article. It can't help but be negative and it'll take the wind out a few people's sails. But I think sometimes people need to hear certain things, even if they are a bit hard to swallow at first. Hopefully one day the points below will become irrelevant.

Ah, the Seduction Community. Some of you may not know what this is, but I think a fair percentage of guys who want to do better with women know about it. The summary is that it's a bunch of advice on how to hook up with girls, with a whole subculture of (mostly wannabe) practitioners formed around it. If you'd like some information about it, check out the Wikipedia article. It's a big can of worms though, let me warn you. Also, a good overview can be gained by reading The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss. This book is also good about discussing the pitfalls of this unique subculture. Some of the ideas here are already covered by Strauss' concept of Social Robots. Anyways, the rest of this article will assume you're familiar with the 'Community'. Yeah, it's called the 'Community' for short. I capitalize it 'cause it seems like the thing to do. It's a slightly odd term though, I think.

I don't consider myself part of the Seduction Community. When I was a few years younger and totally hard-up, I knew all about it though. I was your regular eager little newbie trying to apply all the advice he read on the message boards. These days I've been in a relationship for two years and have largely dropped out of the scene. Even before I met her, I was starting to have some reservations about it. Well, except I have this site and the other one, so I naturally try to follow along with it, but I'm hardly out at the bars trying to pick up.

I have a much more ambivalent attitude towards the Community than I used to. On one hand, it can introduce a lot of positive things into the life of really lonely, hopeless guys. But on the other hand, it's just so damned weird and unhealthy at times. Some people get into it and end up becoming a lot more strange than they were going in.

I have nothing against the idea of trying to learn the stuff the Community teaches, I just think you need to extract the benefits and avoid succumbing to the weirdness. Use the individual pieces of advice that help you, but don't go too far into the whole thing and become a totally different, less appealing person. Hopefully this article will help you avoid the common problems.

Here are some of the good aspects of the Community:

It has an overall positive focus on self-help and self-improvement, however misguided these good intentions can be at times.
Some of the advice is really helpful. It helped me.
It helps correct the overly needy, desperate, naive, or romanticized attitudes that some guys have about women.
It helps correct the unhelpful tendencies towards dating some men have, like thinking they must spend a lot of money on a woman to impress her.
It teaches guys that being attractive to women is something you can work on and develop, that it's not a matter of, "You just have it or you don't" or that you must have money or looks or power first.
Through applying advice ultimately designed to help them get women, guys can become more attractive, personable, and confident on the whole.
It provides them with a system in which they can work to improve with women.

Oh, but there's the weird stuff too. Oh, is there ever. Some of it revolves around the advice and ideas, but a lot is based on the Community itself. Many of the guys who are attracted to this stuff can be weird, awkward, and undersocialized, so the cause-and-effect isn't clear. Does the Community make you weird, or is it just that a lot of weird people are drawn to it, or does something about it bring out a new kind of weirdness in a certain type of person?

Anyways, here's an extensive list of things to watch out for in yourself. As someone who used to be into this stuff, I'd be lying if I said none of these things ever happened to me, a lot of them did:

Feeling arrogant and superior just for being in the 'Community'
The Community likes to style itself as possessing knowledge and attitudes about dating that are superior and enlightened compared to the mainstream. Regular males are AFCs (Average Frustrated Chumps) who buy women dinners and drinks in the vain hope of getting lucky, Community guys aren't suckers like that. Even if a guy has never kissed a girl, being in the know about this secret information can give him a feeling of being part of an elite class. Yeah, he's never felt a boob before, but he's not a deluded loser like those teeming AFC masses. He's not a player yet, but that's only a matter of time, and he knows how to be one on paper, which almost feels like the equivalent of being one for real.

Of course, this is pretty silly. Just knowing how to do something and actually doing it are totally different things. That would be like me discovering a bunch of bodybuilding forums then walking around town, looking down at all the pathetic, scrawny people of the world, even though I was still skinny myself. Feeling like this also indicates a naive, Black & White view of mainstream guys. They're not all chumps. Lots of them do just fine with women, despite doing things like going on traditional dates and paying for the meal. They certainly do better than virgins who could only pull a girl in theory.

Having a false feeling of superiority just for knowing about the Community is a poor source of self-esteem. You can come across as extremely deluded to normal people because as much as the Community sees itself as an elite secret society, it's honestly mostly made up of below-average guys trying to catch up to the rest of the world in some very basic areas. For every one true player in the Community, there are hundreds of awkward guys trying to reach milestones that most people experienced as teenagers.

Being an unsolicited advice and opinion giver
I think pretty much every guy who's new to the Community goes through a delusional phase where they think they're some big pimp just for having all this 'How to pick up girls' information floating around in their heads. What usually happens is they start giving unsolicited advice to everyone they know. If a guy at work has just started seeing a new girl, you can bet they'll jump and tell them they should do this, this, and this. That or they'll suddenly feel compelled to start talking about women and society's views on dating all the time. They won't be able to sit through a rerun of Friends without loudly commenting on all the mistakes Ross is making with Rachel, or how he shouldn't supplicate like that, or whatever.

Part of this is just harmless enthusiasm for a new interest. It usually passes for most guys. They'll go to a bar, get shot down a lot, and realize all their book knowledge doesn't amount to much without real world proficiency. Or they'll be giving advice to a guy and get called out on it; "Well if you know so much about girls then why don't you show us?".

It's kind of strange to always be talking about hooking up with women all of the sudden. It can just be poor people skills to constantly talk about the same thing or keep turning the conversation towards the topic when it isn't appropriate. Also, I don't think it's good if you're trying to derive self-esteem from other people seeing you as an expert on gaming girls. That's I why did this sometimes. I wanted people to go, "Wow Chris! You're so cool for knowing this stuff!!!"

Misapplying advice you don't truly 'get'
Of course some of this can be chalked up to the learning curve and the mistakes any beginners make. But some guys in the Community are quite socially and sexually inexperienced. The path they took through life may have caused them to miss out on social knowledge most people take for granted. They may have a lot of mental baggage or negative attitudes towards people. So when they come across certain pieces of advice, they don't really 'get' it and apply their own weird spin to it. A more regular guy could take a particular piece of advice, instantly understand all of its unwritten guidelines and assumptions, and have success with it. A more awkward guy may misuse it and annoy people.

One prominent example where you see this is with the advice telling guys to be an Alpha Male, or be High-Value, or High Status. Many socially clueless guys won't end up acting like how true high status people behave. Instead they'll act how they think Alpha Males act. They'll walk around with cartoonishly exaggerated 'dominant' body language. They'll be arrogant and aloof towards other guys, even their friends. They'll try to put down or one-up other people. They'll take every little joke and rib as an attack. They won't admit to any mistake they make. They don't get it and end up being socially inept and obnoxious as a result.

 

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Another visual example is the idea of 'peacocking' to get attention. Do it right and you're a super cool, unique, intriguing guy. Do it wrong and you're some dweeb wearing weird ass clothes.

A skewed perspective towards other guys
Being in the Community can warp the way you see other males. Instead of them just being another person or a friend to hang out with, you can start to categorizing them according to a different set of priorities:

Clueless mainstream AFCs who you look down on and derive self-esteem from for being better than.
Mainstream guys who are alright with women. Competition. Someone to practice AMOGing concepts on.
Non-Community guys who are naturally good with women (i.e., Naturals). These are living gods whose tricks you must learn for yourself. They are objects to learn from.
Community guys who are good with women, or at least better than you (i.e., Pick Up Artists/PUAs). Also people to idolize, but more importantly, to extract value from for your own gain.
Community guys at your level. Wingmen. Guys who can go out with so you're not at the bar alone. People to learn from. More than we'd like to admit, a way to grease the wheels of your own development. A means to an end.
Friends. People to go out with so you can practice your game once you arrive at the destination. People to give you 'social proof'. People to meet girls through. People to learn social skills from. Another means to an end.

Obviously it's not this extreme for a lot of guys, but getting too into the Community can affect the way you see and value other people. You can start seeing every other person in terms of how they help the growth of your own 'game'.

Idolizing the wrong types of people
I remember first getting into the Community when I was total crap with women. I saw any guy who could get laid a lot as super human. I wanted to be just like them. Any one who was getting lots of action had to be cool.

With lots more life experience I came to see that just because someone can pull women doesn't mean they're perfect in every other way as well. Guys can get laid and still be douchebags in general. Some players are insecure and think sleeping with lots of chicks will make them cool or worthy. Some guys rack up numbers because they'll screw anything. Some guys rack up numbers because they attract truly messed up *****s. Some guys are messed up themselves and sexually compulsive. Some are bona fide creeps and liars. I've met guys who have vague self-destructive feelings and act them out by getting blackout drunk and having skeevy, dirty hook ups. To be fair though, some guys are mentally healthy and just like sleeping around as opposed to being committed to one person.

A sign of hero worship is that you want to be exactly like your hero, and not just duplicate their success in the area for which you admire them for. Are you worshiping the wrong people? There are some pretty flawed PUAs in the community. Yeah, they hook up a lot, but do you really want to be like them as human beings?

Overdoing it with the Community jargon
This is a more minor point. It's one thing to use abbreviations on the internet, but it just sounds weird when you throw around terms like 'Day 2' and 'DHV' in real life. Especially when you do it with non-Community people within listening distance. Also, a lot of Community jargon is redundant. Why say PUA can you can just say player? Why not talk like a regular person?

To get more philosophical, the language you use shapes the way you see the world. If you're always using Community terms to describe everything, it may subtly change the way you see the world for the worse. You'll be that one beat out of synch with the way most people see things, which is part of the essence of being weird.

Focusing on flashy tricks instead of truly being effective with women
A lot of the individual little techniques and lines from the Community have a showy element to them. A girl says something and you come back with a witty line and she goes, "Oh my God!!! I can't believe you said that!!!", then you high five your friends and go, "Dude, did you see that?!!?" Or a girl will ask you to buy her a drink and you'll have some clever comeback action for it. And you'll go to your friends and go, "Hahaha!!! She asked me to buy her a drink and instead I..." There are so many more of these. They revolve around messing with people or pulling off some sort of zany stunt.

Many guys come to see pulling off these tricks as ends in and of themselves. I guess it can make you feel good if you always used to be tongue-tied around women and now you're busting out the crazy lines, but making a girl's friends laugh at her, or embarrassing some guy who was trying to be rude to you isn't the same as actually doing well with women. Getting caught up in pulling off flashy tricks can sidetrack you. Once again, it's also a pseudo-source of self esteem. What's it matter if your mates think you're a mack for being witty to some chick, when you're not really getting anywhere with them?

Trading one set of misguided ideas about women for another
Before they get into the Community, the typical guy has beliefs about women such as:

Women are special, beautiful creatures.
Women need to be saved and protected.
Women need to be loved and nurtured.
You need to make women feel special.
Women need to be wined and dined and romanced.
Women want nice guys.
Women don't like sex.

A little too naive and romantic in other words. Then they get into the Community and before long they've been exposed to ideas like:

Women are flaky and unreliable.
Women are emotional and illogical.
Women only live in the emotion of the moment, do what feels good at the time, and justify their actions to themselves after the fact.
Women are manipulative and use guys for free drinks and dinners.
Women are fickle and have short attention spans.
Women are self-centered and self-interested.
Women primarily go to clubs for attention and validation from men.
Women constantly test men, try to devalue them, and try to make them jump through hoops.
Women try to make men suck up to them and put them on a pedestal.
Women think their pussies are made of gold and sell them to the highest bidder.
Women don't know what they really want.
Women are confused and hypocritical. They'll profess to dislike whorish behavior then blow a guy in a bathroom that night.
Women are programmed to want to get knocked up by an Alpha Male then ensnare an unwitting Beta Male into raising the child for her.
Women will cheat on their partners coldly and unemotionally.
Women are slaves to how their friends and society sees them. They want to sleep around, but have to be discrete about it.
Society's expectations have given women all kinds of weird hang ups up about sex and hooking up. Their minds are full of strange rationalizations and justifications.
Women aren't happy for long in a relationship and you have to constantly keep them on their toes and off-balance to stay with them.
Women are powerless to resist the right type of guy. Even if they're married, they'll get sucked along.
Women are easily manipulated by simple magic tricks and talk of new agey topics.

 

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I'm not saying there's no truth at all in these statements, of course there's some. These statements do describe some women, or the way some women act in certain circumstances. But taken as a whole, you gotta admit this set of beliefs is pretty negative, misogynistic even. Just as all women aren't special creatures that need to be rescued, they aren't all fickle, emotional, and selfish either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and it depends on the girl. Some girls are really normal and cool and easy to talk to.

Interpreting everything you come across through Community concepts
This gets into that saying, "If you give a child a hammer, he'll find that everything needs hammering." The Community's ideas provide a fairly extensive set of advice for socializing with women, and other people as well. But its concepts don't cover everything that can happen in the world. Lots of times things happen that a Seduction Community concept doesn't address.

Guys can run into trouble when they unconsciously shoehorn every social situation they come across into the relatively small catalog of community ideas. As a result, they can often end up reacting to situations in a weird and socially inappropriate manner. Examples: Seeing a girl joking with you as a 'neg' or an attempt to make you lower value. Seeing every request from a girl as a test or a hoop she wants you to jump through. Seeing every joke or disagreement from guys as an attempt from them to 'out-alpha' you.

There are concepts from outside the Community that are useful too. Even mainstream dating or relationship advice has a lot to offer. Just relying on the toolbox the Community provides isn't enough.

Buying too much into the self-hype that the Community is some movement
The first of three points about how the Community can take itself too seriously. Like I mentioned earlier, the Community sometimes likes to style itself as some sort of enlightened underground social movement. Through the Community's values mankind will one day realign the way it approaches interactions with the opposite sex, blah blah blah. People in the Community possess true knowledge about how the world really works, they're on the cutting edge, it's only a matter of time before everyone else catches up.

Yeeaaahhh. I guess this is a source of self-esteem for some guys, to see themselves as in the van gaurd of a movement. But really, these days I just see it as a bunch of dating advice that's a little better than the stuff you'd read in Maxim or on Yahoo! (and assuming it doesn't turn you weird).

Being too into the idea of the Community being secret and underground
Some dudes overdo it with the sneaking around and end up with concerned friends and family members. Okay, I admit, lots of people are still unaccepting of the idea of a guy purposely trying to learn to pick up girls. Still, some guys go too far with being secretive about it. They'll disappear to meetups with other Community guys without saying where they're going. Or they'll have a mysterious second group of 'friends' that everyone only vaguely knows about. Yeah, it's kind of fun sometimes to sneak around like this, but don't be vague and secretive to the point that people start to wonder about you.

Being too against mainstream society
The Community has a tendency to look down on mainstream society's view towards dating and relationships. Its views can take on a conspiratorial tone: Mainstream society brainwashes guys though sappy movies and songs into acting like AFCs. This is turn plays into the hands of women, not the mention the restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and overall consumer culture that profits off the current courtship model.

Sure, many romantic comedies are too sappy and reenacting what you see in them won't get you the girl in real life, but some Community members are too extreme. They'll post in forums talking about how they refuse to listen to popular songs because they don't want AFC memes to corrupt their mindset. Like some song is going to ruin you overnight.

When Community guys refer to regular society, they often use Matrix analogies. They're unplugged, they took the red pill, whatever. Regular people are seen as brainwashed conformists, and in a general sense too, not only in regards to dating beliefs. Community guys think they're on a higher level.

Community members can also exaggerate the extent to which mainstream society fears and misunderstands them (another source of self-esteem; being in an enlightened minority that the masses don't comprehend). There's a point to this, but the world isn't out to get the Seduction Community, and some of its feedback should be taken closer to heart. When someone comments that wannabe PUAs are weird and creepy, they may have a point. When you explain some seduction theory or term to a friend and he snickers, it may be because the idea is dumb, not because he's defensive and can't admit to himself what an AFC he is. The average person often has a commonsense about the Community and its flaws that it doesn't see about itself.

 

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Wanting to be a guru who's looked up to by other guys
Another item in the search for self-esteem. Lots of guys who post in forums or hang out with other Community members want to be looked up to as gurus. They want guys asking them for advice or gushing over their latest post. I mean, most people want to be respected, but the Community seems more guru-centric than most. I dunno, this is just a bit odd on its own to me, especially when guys with no real world game want to be seen as knowledgeable players. Why not worry about how your own life is doing and not care what a bunch of people on the internet think of you?

The naivity and extreme inexperience of so many guys in the Community can also cause very ordinary, unexceptional people to be bestowed with an undeserved high status. In the real world being able to get a date or have regular sex is not a big deal at all. It's the rule, not the exception. It's pretty much seen as mandatory to being a healthy, normal adult. But within the Community, a dude with basic, normal dating skills is far above the average. Even a man who can actually approach women in a bar is in an elite class relative to some of the guys. The bar is not set high at all.

Some guys get such a skewed perspective that they think they're qualified to be dolling out seduction advice to other men (even charging for it) as soon as they sleep with a handful of girls, or even get a phone number. They have no idea what real skills with women look like, believing their wholly average abilities to be much better than they are. And the inexperienced masses don't help the situation, truly seeing a guy who can kiss a girl or get a date as being exceptional and far above them.

Falling into a cult-like atmosphere towards certain personalities or schools of thought
I think things are getting more fragmented now, but on the whole, the Community is organized around particular 'gurus' and their own schools of thought about the best way to pick up women. Some of these gurus are more low key, but others, intentionally or not, end up creating a cult-like atmosphere around themselves and their beliefs. They'll portray themselves as knowing the one true path. They'll over hype their own powers. They'll actively try to acquire followers and attempt to instill in them the idea that anyone who goes along with them is part of a select group, the only ones fortunate enough to be following the true way. They'll try to discredit or limit access to outside ideas. They may fabricate an enemy that's out to get them in order to bond the group together under an 'us vs. them' solidarity.

Getting back to the self-esteem issue again, aligning yourself with one 'guru' can give you a sense of identity and of being in the know. Still, you just want to do better with women, why are you wasting time worrying about this 'guru' vs. that 'guru'? And somehow, that's just got to make you seem a little off to regular folk.

Seeing being good with women as a skill to compete with other guys over for its own sake
I don't think I've met a natural ladies man who cares about having tight game for its own sake. He just sees a girl he likes and says what he has to say to get her. A way to get from point A to point B. But in the Community it's all about who's the best PUA, who could beat who in a PUA challenge, who can achieve some arbitrary game related goal, is this camp of PUAs better than this camp, is such and such PUA as good as he says he is? On a more local level, when guys in the Community hang out together, it's not uncommon for petty little rivalries and jealousies to develop.

Getting too sucked into all the drama and gossip of the scene
This is a very common criticism. The Community can be quite the soap opera at times (most of the time). Betrayal. Friendships falling out. Accusations of theft. Guys leaving one company/message board/local group to start a rival one. Wars of propaganda. Personal attacks across blogs and message boards. Very juicy stuff. The point is obvious: you're wasting your time if you get too caught up in this ****, especially at the expense of living an actual life.

Personally hanging out with too many really weird people
I remember this about myself in high-school, and other people have told me similar stories about their experiences. Sometimes all of a school's unpopular, socially clueless guys will form their own little group. I 'm not referring to somewhat geeky, but mostly normal guys here, more that smaller group of harder cases every school has. If these guys form a group it often isn't very warm and cohesive. They're too distrustful, strange, abrasive, and socially clueless to get along with each other properly. Even a weird, unsociable kid is instinctively put off by another person's weird, unsociable behavior. They may hang out together, but they don't really like each other, and all these little passive-aggressive conflicts occur.

The same thing can happen in the Community on a local level. You get these weird, socially lacking guys together in a 'lair' and they just go at each other. On paper they're comrades, joined together to fulfill a common goal. In reality they're feeling competitive and there's an unspoken 'every man for himself' attitude. They annoy each other. They squabble over petty things. They may model bad habits for each other. If you're not weird already, then getting too caught up in this stuff may make you a little strange. If you already are weird, then you don't need to feed the fire. Better to hang out with some normal folks or more level headed Community types.

Going too far with Self-Improvement
It's a no brainer that improving yourself as a person is a good thing, for you and for the people who interact with you. Lots of Community guys are into the larger process of self-improvement and see learning how to do better with women as one component of that. But I strongly believe you can go too far with Self-Improvement. You can read a few too many self-help books and listen to a few too many motivational CDs and become sort of flakey and unbalanced. It's like anything: go overboard with it and you get a little off. You lose the ability to just watch a dumb movie - that's poor productivity and the time would be better spent learning how to speed read. You can't talk about current events because the only things you've read in the past three months are tomes on time management.

Also, self-help has a not-insignificant new agey aspect to it. Get too into 'energy' and Astral Projection and self-hypnosis and you start seeming really off to people. You get that stereotypical bland smile and vacant look in your eyes. Again, I'm not against looking into this stuff out of curiosity or in moderation, but go too deep I think you go a little funny.

Buying into the weirdness of particular personalities or schools of thought
There are some pretty out there ideas floating around the Community. In general the scene as a whole is moving more towards 'Natural Game', but there's still lots of self-hypnosis, visualization, and NLP-type ideas out there. Then there's all the magic tricks, palm reading, and cold reading games. It's just my opinion, but I think that stuff is all a little weird. What it is with the Community and new agey stuff? Feel free to disagree with me, that's just my gut reaction. Still, I think most people would agree that if you hole up in your room and get really into NeuroLinguistic Programming you're going to get a bit strange in the process.

 

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Aside from that, every school of thought about the best way to get laid has its own little quirks. Some of these quirks are weird and unhealthy to hold. It could be a technique it espouses or an belief about women it holds. It may be an attitude or disposition it wants you to have. The whole system could be rotten.

Next, I think to a degree, every school of thought wants you to act like the 'guru' who came up with it so that you can capture the same success they have. That's cool, but what if you're unintentionally being told to emulate weird or unhealthy aspects of the guru's personality? There are personalities in the Community who are a bit aggressive or unstable. Some are arrogant. Some are sleazy. Some are tacky. Some are socially lacking with other people except for girls they want to sleep with. Some hold odd beliefs. Buy into the idea of being just like them and you'll incorporate their flaws into yourself.

Feeling you have to abandon your past life
I've seen this message board conversation quite a few times over the years:

Poster: "Ever since I got into the community I can't relate to my friends anymore. I want to sarge but they just want to stay in and watch TV like AFCs."

Responders: "If you want to get good at this you have to turn your back on your old life. Your old friends aren't like you anymore."


I just think this attitude is really wrongheaded. It's just a bunch of dating tips, not a lifestyle you have to give up your old self to follow. Some socially awkward people can be negative about others and have a bad habit of looking for excuses to drop their friends. I was one of them. This viewpoint may be rooted in that.

Then there's that common idea that the only way to get good at picking up girls is to drop everything and devote yourself entirely to it for a few years. After all, that's how such and such guru did it. There's probably a more balanced way to go about it though. Why give up your current friends? Why screw up your education or career? There has to be a less obsessive approach to take.

Feeling that getting a girlfriend is a sign of weakness and settling
This 'give up your life' mentality can also lead guys to shun regular relationships for the cause of improving your game. In the Community there's a general belief that if a guy gets a girlfriend, especially before becoming a card carrying PUA, that he's quitting. He's betrayed the scene. He's turning his back on his mates. He can't hack it and is dropping out of the race. If he says it's because the girl makes him feel happy, he's just rationalizing what a loser he is. When well known people in the Community get a girlfriend, there's always this sense of shock and suspicion, like how could he do something so crazy? It's okay to have a harem of **** buddies or be in an open relationship, but just seeing one girl? That's wussy AFC stuff. (As an aside, I find Community advice towards relationships preoccupied with power dynamics and the guy always having the upper hand).

First, I question the underlying assumption that game must be honed purely for its own sake and that everyone who gets into the scene needs to try to become the ultimate mack. Second, there's nothing wrong with having a girlfriend. I don't think everyone has to have one all the time, but on the whole it's a normal, healthy thing to want, not some loser consultation prize. In fact, dating a girl you're really compatible with brings you something no amount of drunken make outs or phone numbers can give you. Do you think natural players fret every time they've been seeing a cool girl for a few weeks because they're worried it's going to mess up their player skills?

To be fair again though, sometimes a guy does just settle for a so-so girl to avoid improving himself, but you can't say this applies by default to everyone who gets into a relationship. Sometimes they meet someone they like, they're ready for that in their lives, and they go with it. Also this advice is sometimes given in the sense of, "The last time you had a girlfriend you were a weak, pathetic wreck. If you just get another one you haven't changed anything. Why not stay single a while longer and improve yourself?" I think that's reasonable, but if I guy is healthy and wants to date someone, there's nothing off about it. He can still grow as a person while he's seeing someone. And if he ever finds himself single again he can choose to pick up where he left off.

Focusing on nothing but getting women and valuing everything in terms of how it helps your game
As the last few points have been harping on, the Community often encourages guys to put learning the game first and foremost. If a guy is hopeless and desperate this isn't unreasonable, and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with throwing your life out of balance temporarily. You write exams and your life is devoted to school for a few weeks. You have a baby and your life is devoted to the newborn for half a year. But you can go too far with this. Some guys unnecessarily put their educations, social lives, or careers on hold.

The problem I really want to talk about is how when you focus on getting better with women too much, you can end up judging everything based on how it helps you improve your game. "Go to an art gallery? Art doesn't help my game. Oh, but maybe there will be girls to hit on there. Oh, maybe learning about art will help me hook up with artsy girls.", or "Hang out with the guys? No, no girls there. That's not a good use of my time. Oh, but maybe I could learn some Alpha behaviors from them, so it may be worth a shot.", or "I like hanging out with Rick because he's good with women. I don't like hanging out with Dan because he's an AFC.", or "Read this pulpy book? No, it won't teach me any Inner Game concepts, so I'll pass.", or "Should I drink? Well on one hand it will reduce my approach anxiety, but on the other, it will hinder my ability to remember my lines." What about judging things according to different criteria, like will you have fun doing something? There's more to life than immersing yourself in learning how to be a player. The cliched thing to say is that it's these extra things that you have going on in your life that are what truly makes you interesting and attractive. If you only focus on game you get odd and one dimensional.

Trying to proselytize and convert your friends
Another common forum thread:

Poster: "I'm trying to get my friends into the game but they're not interested. They're total AFCs but whenever I tell them about the community they don't care. I even tried showing my friend how to approach girls the last time we were out at the bar, but he just got annoyed with me."

Responders: "Oh, don't bother. You can't make anyone change if they don't want to. They're too plugged into the matrix. Getting into the community would mean admitting to themselves that they have a problem, they'd rather preserve their egos, blah blah blah."

 

[tripleplay]

Besides being condescending towards regular guys just because they're not into being a PUA, this 'convert the friends' attitude has some other issues:

Okay, to be fair, sometimes it's just about being enthusiastic or wanting to help your lonely buddies out by sharing something that's helped you.
But a lot of the time it's more about you than them...
You want to be admired for introducing them to this awesome gold mine of knowledge.
You want the rush of getting to be their guide and mentor into this new world.
You want some people to go out with when you try to meet girls.
You want the ego boost of being the wise teacher who brings the clueless chumps towards the light.
Your own progress towards PUA-dom is slow and you think that by being a teacher to your friends you'll give yourself a kick in the ass.
You need other people's approval before you feel comfortable being into the Community yourself.
If they refuse, you get to feel superior to them for being so clueless and deluded.
You want to intentionally put their skills with women under a spotlight and make them look bad, so you can feel good about yourself, all under the pretext of wanting to help.

Being an overconfident loser
A criticism about Community guys I've heard several times is that many of them are arrogant, overconfident geeks. As in, these guys meet several objective criteria for being losers, and they have no rational basis for acting as superior as they are. Such critics are usually relatively normal guys who see Community guys as they really are. Naturally, they're put off and weirded out by such people.

I think there are a few reasons for this behavior. The first is the importance the Community places on being Alpha, and how this advice is frequently misinterpreted. The second reason, which I mentioned right off the bat, is that the Community often instills a false sense of arrogance and proficiency in its members. Third is that it's not uncommon for socially lacking guys to possess a false sense of being better than other people.

Fourth is a Community idea that in order for someone to be cool and high-status they just have to believe they're so. Guys are advised to go to nightclubs and act as if they're the coolest people there. I disagree and think that while coolness and social value is in some ways due to your attitude, a lot of it comes from you meeting outside criteria. A guy who is obviously unkempt, awkward, bitter, anxious, out of touch, and unstylish can't just magically become the coolest guy in the bar because he thinks he is. Other people will look him up and down and instantly realize he can't back up his attitude.

Doing weird, anti-social things to get over your fears
Community guys are collectively obsessed with getting over their fear of women. For many guys this is their biggest problem, not a lack of knowledge about how to get a girl. For some reason many of them get it into their head that the best way to become fearless is to go out in public, act like a weirdo, and purposely expose themselves to embarrassment and negative judgments from other people. Such stunts are accompanied by talk of tearing down preprogrammed social conditioning. The idea is that if you can do something totally ridiculous and extreme, talking to girls (another supposedly societally conditioned fear) will seem easy.

So you read blogs and forum posts from guys about going out in public in a dress or going around saying inappropriate things to people. This is weird. Period. There's no need to do this to get over your fears with women. Guys who do this are not escaping the Matrix or thumbing their nose up at society's brainwashing, they're just being unnecessarily strange.

This gets at a larger issue with the Community, that it's often focused on pulling off wacky stunts. Acting weird in public is a wacky stunt. Saying something outrageous to a girl to impress your friends is a wacky stunt. Trying to AMOG some big guys for no reason is a wacky stunt. I think at the heart of this is the belief that talking to girls is a wacky stunt. Something exciting and extreme to do when you want a thrill. I think it's a natural side effects of your nervousness. Of course the goal is to learn to see talking to girls as no big deal.

Thinking you can reduce all human interactions down to a repeatable formula
This isn't my idea at all. The Social Robots concept from the very beginning of the article gets into this. Other people have pointed it out to. It's the idea that it doesn't matter what you're really like as a person, or what you truly have going for you, if you have the right lines and actions memorized for every situation, you'll be able to hook up with girls. You just spit out the right words, and respond to situations as they come up with the right pre-planned solutions, and the woman becomes interested. Doesn't matter if you can't have a witty, spontaneous conversation to save your life, just repeat the lines that have predeterminded effectiveness.

People usually say this type of thinking goes back to the fact that lots of guys in the Community are supposedly logical computer programmer types, and that they think, in their socially naive manner, that they can turn social interactions into an algorithm. Another popular comparison is of nerdy guys seeing conversing with women as a video game. They think they can beat the system and find an exploit, the same way they can discover how to get their characters up to level 99 before they're supposed to be. Not going to happen. Will make you seem weird. If you want to do better with the opposite sex you legitimately have to improve yourself.

Basing your entire identity around being a 'PUA'
Another criticism I can't take credit for. Guys in the Community are sometimes seen as lame and creepy by regular folk because their whole identities are built upon their being good with women. Some of them style themselves as Miyamoto Musashi-type characters, on a quest to 'master the game'.

Normal guys who get laid a lot see it as something fun to do, but their entire self-concept doesn't revolve around their ability to pick up. Having good game is a means to an end (sex), not an end in itself. At the worst they may brag about their conquests too much, but if you asked them to sum themselves up in one word, they would never say "Pick Up Artist". They don't plan their lives around being the best player possible. They don't try to master the game for its own sake. They don't see themselves as immersed in a unique lifestyle.

Chasing after and glorifying a lifestyle you don't even know you want
Aaaaannnnd finally, lots of sexually inexperienced guys get into the community to hopefully one day become players. This is the pot of gold. If they're anything like how I was, they imagine it to be a lifestyle almost like a real life porn movie - lots of random, disconnected sex with various hot chicks. Guys will tell themselves this is what they want, and it sounds good when you put it like that. They think they're never going to want to settle down and instead remain eternally and happily single, or juggle several girlfriends at once.

More importantly, they think that if they can just become players then their lives will be perfect and all their problems will disappear. Players are gods among men, right? How can they have troubles? How can anything be going wrong if you're scoring with lots of chicks? Or they think that while they may be losers and failures in other aspects of their lives, if they could get that confidence boost of knowing they can sleep with lots of girls, then that won't matter.

So anyways, they start doing a little better with women and they come to realize that sex isn't that big a deal. They have a few one nights stands and find them fun, but strangely unsatisfying after a while. They come to see constantly going out to bars trying to get laid as a pain in the ass. They realize that they'd rather be in a fun, fulfilling relationship with one cool girl than get laid once a month by picking up some random drunk girl they may not even be that into. They stop seeing what the fuss with having a 'high score' for its own sake is all about. It could happen to you, or maybe not...



Damn, that was long. So in conclusion: If you're bad with women then you gotta get this part of your life handled, or you'll never be totally happy. Some aspects of the Seduction Community might be of use to you in that regard. I don't unconditionally hate the Community, just the many things this article pointed out. I wouldn't be with my girlfriend without it, and I've met some great people during my time there. I just think you gotta keep yourself down to earth if you get into this scene. Stay the same person you always were, just be better socially and romantically. Don't lose your life to some weird subculture in the process and end up hurting your cause.

Also, as I say in some other articles on this site, many guys can make more progress towards doing better with women by improving their basic social skills and personality, and overcoming the anxieties that prevent them from trying to meet women. Trying to become a player without this foundation of attractiveness can just sidetrack them, because they're not addressing their core problems.

 

[Microphone Fiend]

Already found its way onto the boards:
http://www.sosuave.net/forum/showthread.php?t=138077

 

[tripleplay]

My big problem with this article is simply that it adds no value. It's just all negativity. He suggests no solution and focuses too much on being "normal." He forgets that it is often the abnormal people in society who makes the biggest changes and push the world forward.

The author just comes across as a guy who has had some bad experiences in the Community, so he writes this 20,000 word tirade full of vitriol. He has the, "If it didn't work for me, how can it work for anyone else wha wha wha!" frame. He's stuck on himself and doesn't realise that a lot of this stuff can actually be BENEFICIAL to other people. Just because it didn't work for him, doesn't mean it can't work for others.

Cheers,

 

[mikeyb]

I can relate to this article. Been there, thought that, done that. As for not offering solutions, I thought the heads up to anyone who might be starting to do the same thing was enough.

 

[j0n024]

This is like the 4th time I see the exact same article....jeez.

 

[AznPlaya]

wtf.... whassup with the long explenation thaz a waste of time errybody knows that this kinda **** can make you wierd if u have common sense and natural instincts...

 

[ready123]

My big problem with this article is simply that it adds no value. It's just all negativity. He suggests no solution and focuses too much on being "normal." He forgets that it is often the abnormal people in society who makes the biggest changes and push the world forward.

The author just comes across as a guy who has had some bad experiences in the Community, so he writes this 20,000 word tirade full of vitriol. He has the, "If it didn't work for me, how can it work for anyone else wha wha wha!" frame. He's stuck on himself and doesn't realise that a lot of this stuff can actually be BENEFICIAL to other people. Just because it didn't work for him, doesn't mean it can't work for others.

Cheers,

This article gets posted here once a month...

But I think the author is spot on. It's a critical article but he's just calling out the things most people don't notice or don't wanna admit - just spitting out reality. That doesn't mean he hates the community. This also applies to fastseduction.com more than it does here, especially all the guru stuff. The KJ-ing and misapplication is more rampant here though

And the solution is implicit - don't do these things. It all amounts to balance - having a reality that's grounded.

"Guys can get laid and still be douchebags in general." <-- best point in the article

 

[The Deacon]

He didn't say that he hated the community. He just pointed out certain things in it that were really stupid, like:

Another visual example is the idea of 'peacocking' to get attention. Do it right and you're a super cool, unique, intriguing guy. Do it wrong and you're some dweeb wearing weird ass clothes.

Mystery can do the peacocking thing very well. However, you don't need to peacock to get attention from the ladies. This one also makes me chuckle a bit:

Sure, many romantic comedies are too sappy and reenacting what you see in them won't get you the girl in real life, but some Community members are too extreme. They'll post in forums talking about how they refuse to listen to popular songs because they don't want AFC memes to corrupt their mindset. Like some song is going to ruin you overnight.

Haha. You guys do know that players can listen to AFC songs and still be players right? You gotta admit some of these beliefs we hold to high esteem here are pretty ridiculous. I joined the community for the positive aspects of it, since it has social ideologies that are much more enlightened than stuff you'd read in other magazines. The dude who wrote this article even said this:

It has an overall positive focus on self-help and self-improvement, however misguided these good intentions can be at times.
Some of the advice is really helpful. It helped me.
It helps correct the overly needy, desperate, naive, or romanticized attitudes that some guys have about women.
It helps correct the unhelpful tendencies towards dating some men have, like thinking they must spend a lot of money on a woman to impress her.
It teaches guys that being attractive to women is something you can work on and develop, that it's not a matter of, "You just have it or you don't" or that you must have money or looks or power first.
Through applying advice ultimately designed to help them get women, guys can become more attractive, personable, and confident on the whole.
It provides them with a system in which they can work to improve with women.

These are all really positive things. As long as you don't adopt the weird misogynistic ideologies in your brain, these things will land you a decent chick. That's what the whole PUA/DJism thing is all about. I don't care that y'all say DJism is about improving yourself, cause the ULTIMATE goal of DJism is to get the girl. Improving yourself (the means) is supposed to lead you to getting chicks (the end).

Definitely the most helpful thing you learn from these communities is how to free yourself from AFCism, much better than anywhere else. You understand that kissing a woman/sexing a woman doesn't necessarily mean that you are in a relationship with a woman. You understand that calling her five times a day is neediness, and the PUA/DJ communities STRONGLY state that neediness is the exact opposite of what a true player does. That is also something so many men could learn from.

On the other hand, this article outlines pretty well the dangers of seduction community ideas. First of all, having a girlfriend is a healthy thing to do, and it does not by any means make you an AFC. Now, some guys with girlfriends are AFCs because they hook up with the girl out of desperation, but there are very healthy LTRs with great couples out there.

Take this article for what it is. It's like, a calling back into objective reality here. I'm getting a little weirded out by the cult-like ideologies that happen on seduction boards over the internet, including this one. Everyone should read this and try to understand what the guy's saying. Again, the seduction communities are not bad, and they do yield results, but they do fvck with your heads if you're not careful.

 

[izza]

Awesome.

 

[Bussey]

Whoever wrote the original article was trying to say this....

'Everything in moderation.'

They just got long winded and frustrated.

Fact is we should all be self moderating. Some of this stuff is great, its really improved my life. But at the same time, realize its not all fact/rules/law. Take things that are of value to you. Ignore the rest.

If you want a girlfriend, that should be your objective. Ignore the literature and posts that say '**** girlfriends, just get laid.'