Building a Bridge
feminism and the seduction community
So I’ve been involved with feminism for long time, and I’ve investigated the pickup artist community pretty thoroughly, and I’ve started to think some kind of dialog, or Third Way, in between the goals of the two movements is necessary and important.
I think there are huge problems with pickup, but I’m starting to see that it exists to address an exigency, and that exigency needs more attention than we’ve been giving it via feminism alone.
That depth is what I’d like to plumb here, with no really strict ideological goals in mind. The fact that these two communities (even the best and most reasonable members of each) have difficulty communicating with one another indicates something crucial, I think, about the state of modern gender relations.
I want to know why pickup artistry exists.
Let’s start with the basics. Why do we think anything MORE than feminism is necessary? Sex positive feminism, even? Why should Pickup Artistry, or Seduction Technique, or whatever (hereafter referred to as PUA) be brought into the discussion at all?
Theoretically, pickup artists just want to have lots of sex. Theoretically, there should be nothing wrong with this, at least according to sex-positive feminism. But the devil, as always, is in the details— a lot of pickup artists employ strategies or attitudes towards mating and dating that feminists and others see as deceptive, offensive, and problematic.
I also think there are ideas in PUA that are excellent and important. You have to dig through some muck to get to them, but they’re there.
So, why? Why should this system of aggressive, problematic communication and behavior have grown up in response to the issue of dating and mating, for males? Where does the problem come from? Why does PUA exist?
Feminism should be able to get you laid on its own. Why isn’t feminism enough for men?
I have a friend. I only really know him through the internet. This friend hasn’t had sex in something like nine years, if I remember correctly, and certainly not a loving relationship, which is what I think he wants. He has an extraordinarily difficult time figuring out how to make this happen for himself.
He has a good job, and he’s quite physically attractive. More than me, in my opinion. He has friends, and he has the opportunity to meet people. Online, he’s quite witty and charming, if a little self-deprecating, and I really enjoy conversing and debating with him. He’s extremely smart.
From what I can tell, all that gets in his way in terms of dating is understanding how to initiate and maintain romantic contact. Specifically. He had a date, recently, and it didn’t go well. He doesn’t ask people out on explicit dates often. He has trouble communicating his desire in a way that will be well-received, and he has, naturally, developed a suspicion that there’s something deeply wrong with him.
There is no model, in feminism, to help this person. That does not exist.
This is why pickup artistry arose.
There’s a connected issue here that I’d like to discuss. Autumn, Olga, and a few other women I’ve talked to recently have been raising awareness about the phenomenon of women having sex that they don’t really want to have.
Now, by a lot of definitions, that’s rape. Generally by mine. But the women I’ve talked to have been careful to explain that they’re talking about a specific thing— they’re talking about cases where they didn’t really want to have sex for a variety of reasons, but just found it easier or more expedient not to object. These women seem unsure as to whether or not to classify what happened as rape, or they outright assert that it wasn’t. They say simply that they’d have preferred not to, but they did it anyway. They didn’t resist, and if they felt pressured they didn’t say anything about it.
This opens up a massive can of worms. There are a whole variety of factors in our culture that make it very difficult for women to speak up about what they want in situations like that— men’s physical power and women’s fear of being physically harmed, social training that makes it unacceptable for women to speak up, the list goes on and on. Feminists would raise their voices and say that the “absence of ‘no’” doesn’t qualify as consent. In my opinion, they would be right. Women, in many of these situations, are held socially hostage.
As an alternative to this clearly problematic dynamic, the sex-positive community has offered the idea of “enthusiastic consent”. The absence of a “no” isn’t enough— what you’re looking for is an enthusiastic “yes!” This is the “yes means yes!” paradigm.
To be clear, this, I also agree with them. I love this paradigm. I’m a huge fan of communication with respect to sex, straightforwardly and enthusiastically. Consideration and empathy are paramount, and those can’t happen without communication.
From here on out is where things get really weird.
I was in a Gender and Communication class in college, and we were discussing the subject of “informed consent”— and though the book provided a lot of examples of situations under which consent COULDN’T be given (one person is underage, under influence of alcohol, coercion is present, etc.), the book effectively did not define the word “consent”. It said what consent WASN’T, but it didn’t say what consent WAS, or how two people get it to happen. There were no instructions.
Partway through this discussion, I turned around and I asked the women in the class (the class was 80% women) “if you’re hetero or bi, and you’re on a date with a man, do you want the man to ask you before he kisses you?”
Most of the women in the class preferred not to be asked. And I said “so basically, according to the legal definition in this textbook, you all want to be sexually assaulted.”
Now, I’ve told this story before. I admit that I was just being provocative— the reality of the situation is much more complicated.
Firstly, plenty of women are fine with being asked before they’re kissed. I’ve discovered this firsthand. I’ve also, discovered that once you get used to getting physically tuned to somebody else, women give very clear indicators that they want to be kissed, or are ready. I’ve never just straight-up leaned in for a kiss and gotten confusion or rejection as a response. The vibe is relatively easy to understand, once you have the hang of it, and it mostly involves body language.
I’d like to use my example, my classroom hyperbole, though, to tease apart a couple issues.
First, this training, this ability to read the vibe, this communication, even the courage I have to ask, were all skills developed through lots of reading, dating, relationships, and interacting with people. They’re not skills that I was born with. I’m a pretty intelligent person, and I’m pretty good at interpersonal communication, and I had to work for years to figure these things out, with help from tons of books, friends, and partners. I was fucking terrible at it through the end of high school, when my first kiss happened, and I didn’t lose my virginity until age 21.
Second, I had to do all this learning and research and trial-and-error because rarely, if ever, has a woman initiated a kiss, a date, or romantic contact with me. Most of the time, that’s my responsibility.
When feminists talk about enthusiastic consent, they talk about enthusiastic CONSENT. They’re consenting to something, in other words, that another party has already suggested. That word doesn’t indicate that they’re doing the proposing. “An enthusiastic yes” indicates that you’re saying yes to something the other party’s proposed.
That’s a fairly disempowered place to be, not least because you don’t get to select your partner. You accept or reject only the people that approach you.
Feminism doesn’t have a framework for helping women learn to approach or initiate either, from what I’ve seen. Nor have I come across a body of work in feminism that encourages women to approach or initiate. I’d like recommendations, if anybody has one.
I think there are a definitely progressive women out there who will make moves and do the initiating. I’ve been asked out and fucked by a couple of these wonderful women. But the vast, vast majority of the dating market still operates on a man-initiates model. This partially explains why my friend, who I mentioned earlier, hasn’t had sex in nine years. There’s plenty he could do about this, if he were more willing to inhabit his socially-assigned male role, but if he were a female of equivalent attractiveness (and he’s quite attractive, as I said), he would be able to rely on the other party to do the part he has trouble with— the approaching and initiating. He could focus on his strengths— being appealing, attractive, pleasant, and fun. These are things he enjoys being, not things he feels pressured to be, I think.
I’ve heard some feminists say that if you’re trying to date a women who wants you to kiss without asking, wants you to make the move, isn’t comfortable offering an enthusiastic “yes!”, then you should just date somebody else. You shouldn’t reward that approach, they say. I think this perspective is a little unrealistic— many men aren’t dating in environments where there are a lot of feminist women. If their romantic options are limited to women comfortable communicating clearly about sex, or to women that are comfortable initiating, or women well versed in the relatively new “enthusiastic consent” framework, their dating options are basically going to be nonexistent. A lot of women are quite comfortable with the old framework, and men sometimes date those women, because they may have many fantastic aspects to their personality besides their lack of contemporary feminist training. Either that, or they’re just shy.
I’m describing a set of dynamics, probably, that everybody reading is relatively familiar with.
But how did I get from here to sexual assault? Or to women having sex that they don’t want to? What’s the connection?
I suspect we’ve created a system that results in women being pressured and cajoled into sex, and I suspect this system is more complicated than the “douchebag” model would suggest.
The “douchebag model” suggests that there are a certain number of men who are just douchebags, and these men have zero consideration for female boundaries. They’re the rapists, or potential rapists, the users and abusers, and they ruin it for everyone else. Other men aren’t like them. Other men are “nice”, or kind, or sane, and are a different order of being altogether.
This is, I think, naive.
Hetero women, from what I can tell, don’t necessarily have a solid bead on the male developmental trajectory. When they meet a potential male partner, they classify him as Attractive or Unattractive, Douchebag or Kind Person, based on a variety of factors, but the idea that it took him work or time to get that way is sort of a secondary consideration. There’s nothing wrong with this— it’s not a woman’s job to consider that, or evaluate a male based in his potential. They’re looking at him right then, which is the responsible thing to do in terms of planning a realistic future. You don’t evaluate a partner based on what they *could* be; that’s a terrible idea.
In terms of acquiring resources, learning social skills, and working to navigate society as a male— women see the end result. Not the process, unless they’ve spent long periods of time with a male friend or a male partner.
It means, though, that a lot of what makes men into these “douchebags” doesn’t get discussed or evaluated. How did they get that way? What happened?
My dating behaviors, as I’ve said, had to be learned. And, given the culture I’ve described so far, it is not shocking to me that many men learn terrible behaviors.
Men are expected to know how to date and mate. The (potentially) best teachers for this, the women they want to date, don’t have the time or the obligation or the desire to instruct them. We don’t have any good educational structures in place for this, either. So men develop their own frameworks for figuring this out. And some of those frameworks are very, very bad.
And I suspect that, among many other reasons, these frameworks are bad because they’re designed to work within a system where a man is always the initiator, always the asker, always the aggressor, until he hears the word “no”. The cycle perpetuates itself. And, as we’ve established, there are also no frameworks in place to tip that balance— to empower women to approach, to initiate, and to have more general social control over the terms of the romantic playing-field.
There’s no real understanding, within these stunted male frameworks, of the female experience— how would there be? There’s just this vague understanding, handed down from male culture, that the male role is “to push” and “to initiate”. To perform, to go hard, to overcome rejection. To make it past the gatekeeper.
I don’t feel like I need to elaborate that much on all the problems this creates. I think you guys get it by now. Problems. Big problems.
So: How do we get rid of this culture, of “aggressors” and “gatekeepers”? This culture where men understand only what they want, and not what women want? What can we do to begin moving away from this model?
Believe it or not, In this respect, I think a lot of pickup artistry is a step forward. At least it’s a set of social and mating strategies that attempt to understand what women actually find attractive. The best versions of PUA, anyway.
The best versions include the injunction that you need to be appealing and exciting, and not just forceful, in order to initiate romantic contact. They always advocate self-improvement, confidence, and— this is key— a refusal to allow your personal worth to be dictated by women, or by your access to sex. In other words, they try to build an inner source of confidence into men, by explaining to men that that inner source of confidence is what women are attracted to in the first place.
It’s a bit of a catch-22, of course. But a lot of men won’t even listen to self-improvement advice if they’re miserable because they’ve never had, or can’t have, sex. Anything you tell them will go in one ear and out the other. So the better versions of PUA use the establishment of a modicum of sexual health and engagement as a stepping-stone to something more.
The worst versions of PUA, of course, are horrifying and damaging. Abusive and misogynistic. Rape-apologist and totally blind to women’s needs, or to the greater social good.
But the entire mass of conflicting ideologies is an attempt to address a question. How does one mate, as a male? (this video has some problematic elements, but if you want an inside look at PUA, it’s worth watching):
In addition, a whole bunch of people in the “seduction space” are starting to understand the limitations of traditional or misogynistic PUA ideology. They’re developing a path that takes into consideration all the criticism they’ve gotten from feminism.
https://www.neilstrauss.com/neil/the-game-bill-of-rights
http://markmanson.net/fuck-yes
And there are even people that have moved from the feminist space, into the seduction/dating space, in order to address the exigency I’m talking about from a feminist, sex-positive angle.
http://charlienox.com/
http://reidaboutsex.com/
This isn’t an effort, from me, to sell PUA or the seduction community, though, or to absolve them of their many sins. That’s not really the point of any of this.
I also don’t meant to suggest that misogyny or rape are solely the result of traditional dating dynamics. But I don’t think those dynamics help. And I think opening a conversation about those dynamics, and about how men can learn to stop perpetuating them, will change a lot of unforeseen things about how we relate to one another. This is my deep suspicion.
I don’t think our problems of pressure, loneliness, unwanted sex, sexual assault, objectification, street harassment— I don’t think they’re isolated issues. I really don’t. I think they’re connected, and they’re connected to a gap in our conversation about how to effectively and compassionately be men in the world.
I don’t think this is a problem, in other words, to be laid at the feet of a few psychopaths. I think this is so widespread, and so pervasive, that it’s a problem we have to lay at the feet of our culture. And we need to try and figure out a way to fix that culture.
I’m open to your ideas.
PS: I’m well aware that this is very hetero-centric, since that’s the place I come from. I don’t feel like I have the knowledge or mastery to explore any of these ideas within the context of LGBT culture. If anybody wants to bring that perspective, it would be massively appreciated.