Inside the underground pick-up artist community
Elizabeth Kim
It’s 10 pm on a Saturday night, and you’re sitting down with everyone on the couch in your Frat house. Eyes are nervously darting everywhere, wondering if tonight will be the night to finally pick up a chick and bring her back to your dorm. You’ve never had the best luck with girls, but everyone is convincing you that they have finally learnt the tricks that will work. Tonight, you and every guy in the frat will put it to test in the race to pick-up.
If you haven’t heard of the name Neil Strauss, it’s time you do. You’ll need to know who he is and what he does to understand the workings of this underground community and its systems.
In 2005, Strauss’s book ‘The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Underground Pickup Artist’ was published. From his experiences of failure with girls, he formulates methods and psychological tactics to pick up girls. He offers guidelines on the process of seduction in his book, which includes things like falsely creating a ‘’value system’’ which will render you dominant and impressive. Psychological manipulation is key; things like ‘’false time constraints’’ to compel women to emotionally invest themselves into the conversation more is a prominent tactic. The Game is essentially a guide to the underground world of pickup artists, commonly abbreviated as ‘PUAs’.
According to Google’s definition, PUAs generally don’t want a girl to date or to be in a relationship with, but rather they categorise all women as sexual prospects — or let’s even put it as ‘objects’. The fact that each individual girl could be different is completely dismissed, and instead, they take the guidelines from ‘The Game’ for face value, believing that the tactics will all work for they are just ‘girls’ and not ‘individuals’.
Online discussion forums, such as http://www.pick-up-artist-forum.com/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/seduction/,provide a platform for guys to voice their victories, struggles and questions. It’s a rapidly growing community in many Western countries, especially in the United States and Australia.
For more on the context of Strauss, click the link for more → https://people.howstuffworks.com/pickup-artist.htm
When Strauss made his debut on the Jimmy Kimmel show in 2006, people were blown away by the covert and surreptitious ways Strauss had ‘picked up’ Jessica Alba. His tactics went by unnoticed by the general viewer, but the outcome was obvious, demonstrated by the supposed change in Alba’s body language. Alba supposedly tries to invade his space, interrupts him and bites her nail while she looks at him at 6:50.
Was this all real or was it orchestrated to shine fame onto Strauss’s career as a PUA expert? No one will ever know, but what I do know is that it isn’t just Strauss’s ‘’legendary’’ tactics that are going by unnoticed. If you listen closely, there are words that strongly imply misogyny, manipulation and compulsive lying.
Key words and phrases that should not be gone unnoticed:
1. ‘pretend’
2. ‘some guys have it, some don’t’
3. ‘authority over her world’
4. ‘negs’ —playful backhanded insults, a term used in the PUA community
There’s a long list of foreign vernacular used in the PUA community. It isn’t absurd at all when a guy will call up another guy and tell him, ‘’I was in a two set trying to neg our target, but I got IOD (indicator of disinterest), so should I DHV (demonstration of higher value)?’’.
It sounds ridiculous, but what he means is that in his attempt to playfully insult the girl who he wanted to pick up, she shows an indicator of disinterest. As a result, he is contemplating whether he should demonstrate a sense of dominance over them so that he can instead get an indicator of interest from both of them.
The Game virtually teaches tactics to make lies in order to change who you are and how you identify yourself to others. There is no real belief system, and it’s an unsustainable way to spark any sort of connection with a girl.
PUA Terminology:
When I scrolled through the terminology list there were many striking misogynistic terms like the few listed below (sourced from http://www.pualingo.com/pua-terminology-list/)
— UG (Ugly Girl): a very unattractive girl who may be best friends with the HB (Hot Babe). As a PUA, it is important to give the UG attention to your own advantage so that she will not become a cock block and you can DHV by showing others that you are not judgemental about looks.
— DHV (Demonstration of Higher Value): a story or action used to increase the perceived value of a PUA, which results in increased attraction and interest from the opposite sex.
→ these definitions highlight how manipulative the PUA society is as they objectify women as mere ‘targets’, rating them out of 10 based on their looks. They also fabricate false illusions of identity to draw in the attention of women.
Whilst many guys are feeling empowered by this underground and online community, I questioned whether it was the right type of empowerment.
When Jessica Alba says, ‘’PUA is the future of dating,’’ it concerns me to think that the world of dating is really headed to that direction of perversion.
The PUA movement has often at times been voiced as pseudoscience, sexism, misogyny and subterfuge. Renowned activist and author of ‘Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men’, Clarisse Thorn, views the PUA community as barbaric and primal however also perceives that it is important to understand its mechanisms.
‘’PUA tactics are worth understanding because they are not unique to the PUA community, but instead represent society-wide beliefs and patterns and strategies of human sexual behaviour’’ — Clarisse Thorn
The UCLA Center for the Study of Women also believes in the misogynistic tendencies of PUA as it purely exists on a continuum of sexist behaviours and attitudes that at times have included rape and murder.
→ PUA society misleads other men about their own identity, belief and value systems
→ PUA society heavily objectifies women through its facile ratings out of 10
As these men find refuge and comfort in these underground online forums, the ability to express their problems is unfettered. A desperate cry for help turns into hunger and the want for more. Many go to large extents whereby the detriments are forgotten.
The innate desire to win someone and claim them as a prize has extended itself into a large underground community that has taken wide online presence. Although it has connected many insecure and confused men across the world, it has raised many ethical issues in regards to the men themselves and the treatment of women in the dating scene.
