Joss Whedon, Feminism, and Men With Silly Hats
2006 was a good year. Men with silly hats danced around girls, running “sets,” “negging,” and using “kino” to get laid. Pick Up Artists ran amuck around the clubs, bars, and streets of Los Angeles, New York, Warsaw, or Berlin.
A few months earlier, a writer by the name of Neil Strauss had published a book about his time inside the “secret” society of pickup artistry. So secret was this society, it managed to charge upwards of $1500 a person to teach average chumps the ways to a lady’s nether parts.
Feminists were outraged. Reduced to mindless drones whose programming was so basic, even chump programmers in silly hats could hack it, make them desire sex with them, and thank them afterwards. But were they?
In essence, pick up artistry (PUA) isn’t much different from the tactics used to sell cars. Rather than selling cars to people who don’t want or need one, car salesmen find the ones who are in need or want of a car, and then employ techniques not unlike the PUA Handbook to place themselves as the only valid choice to fill that need.
There is an artificial time constraint (“could be gone tomorrow”), social proof (“I am going to have to talk to my boss, but I think we can do something about that”), negging (“we usually sell to higher class customers, but I really like you”), and kino (“want do do a test drive?”).
So feminists weren’t so much pissed about being shown as drones, but as humans. Just like men, most wanted to get laid, all the time, and just like men, all it took was a good salesman to get the deal. Simple as that. Leave aside the rape-fantasy parts of a Roosh V (“push her head into your crotch”), and PUA might not have been a wet dream for feminists but it definitely was a wet reality for its practitioners.
Starting in 2008 the narrative changed. No longer was there an overarching idea of most men being essentially chumps (and only “dangerous” if they discovered how to sell themselves), now the “patriarchy” reared its ugly head. Lose your job? Patriarchy did it! Get less pay than the guy who works more hours and didn’t take five years maternity leave? Patriarchy did it! The patriarchy reprogrammed the world to believe, that excessive body fat wasn’t healthy or attractive in women (it was always unattractive in men, same body type advocates love to call them by their medical term “creeps”). The patriarchy rapes so consistently, all men have to be educated not to rape. It also makes drunken men rapists and drunken women victims, but not vice versa. The patriarchy is 2017s Zombie Apocalypse, with big Title IX walls around mine and other campus, signs posted: “men will be shot on accusation, no proof of guilt necessary.”
“Safe Spaces” protect the victims from those Zombie Hordes of Dissent and dissenting opinion. Inside my own college, there is a safe space for wymyn, inside that is one for wymyn of color (to protect them from Wypepo), one for lesbian wymyn of color, to protect them from heteronormative aggression, and one for transgender wymyn of color, to protect them from hearing about periods and child rearing.
What’s all this got to do with Joss Whedon?
Enter the new PUA. In a world, in which it is a rather grave sin for men to have opinions or show strength, only the non-threatening get laid. A PUA of Neil Strauss’ “Style” persona might still get lucky in LA’s valley girl traps, but out here, in the world of “sapiosexuality” and “STEM”, only being as bland, acquiescent, and subordinate as possible will do. It’s the perfect pickup. Peacocking at its finest: putting your pronouns, a rainbow ally flag (don’t forget the new additions of brown and black), and a rant against sexism on your OKCupid profile will get you blown. Lots.
A German friend of mine, well employed, an industry icon, good looking, strong, and funny, recently lost his girlfriend to a guy she’d been cheating on him with for months. The new guy? Unemployed for 20+ years, could be her father, chainsmoker, with six other girlfriends. His secret? He has his pronouns on his dating profile, speaks more about the evils of patriarchy than advancing research in combating Parkinson’s.
Lest you think that’s me being facetious… no. He truly only started getting laid by the bushels after changing his profile, he says so himself, and takes pride in this new way of PUA.
Joss Whedon is this new PUA Clique’s Neil Strauss, their Style. By harping on his feminism over and over, not missing one opportunity to put it front and center in his interviews, articles, books, and more, he peacocked the new generation of feminists. Like the PUA of old, he eliminates his competition, this time not by dominance but by becoming the least dominant, least threatening, boychild he could possibly portray. That he was cheating on his wife… well, did Style worry about not really being the crocodile leather suit clad superstallion he played? Nope. And like Style, he’s playing a Game, its goal to bed women, by any means necessary.
Nothing will change.
Whedon will be kicked from the hallowed doorsteps of Femdom for a few weeks, where he had been flagellating himself (and every other man) for a chance at some sexy time. He’ll still get laid, still call himself a feminist, and likely now adopt the message of monogamy being somehow a patriarchal ploy. Old-school PUA are still the enemy, the dirty index finger pointing at our best kept secret: that we’re just as programmable as them, and that we hate it when they do to us, what we do to them.
And in the end? We’ll all still get laid. A little less, a little less happily, but who cares, right?
