Masculinity, so fragile

[tr0g]

Careful tr0g! Someone may use that in 30 years to prove you're a pedo.

If I am being considered for any sort of federal appointment, the world will be in far worse shape than anyone should care to contemplate. Also, that statement will be so far down the list of objectionable things I've said in public as to barely even be noteworthy.

Much of the red pill/pua stuff snaps into focus when one replaces "women" with "women with lots of cluster B personality traits." When the guys engage in behavior specifically designed to attract those women, what a surprise, every woman they deal with is a borderline or narcissist. I wonder what the correlation could be...

Bingo. Most PUA stuff I've seen only works on somebody with underlying issues. Unfortunately for everyone, there's a lot of people with issues out there.

[Jennifer]

Much of the red pill/pua stuff snaps into focus when one replaces "women" with "women with lots of cluster B personality traits." When the guys engage in behavior specifically designed to attract those women, what a surprise, every woman they deal with is a borderline or narcissist. I wonder what the correlation could be...

Like the old saying goes: If one or two people you know turn out to be assholes, well, that's just bad luck on your part. But if EVERYBODY you know turns out to be an asshole, chances are the asshole is you.

[Jadagul]

The PUA community is an interesting mix of genuinely good and useful insight, genuinely antisocial and destructive insight, bizarre obsessions, and misogyny. I learned a lot useful from reading them for a couple years. But it's important to filter.

[JasonL]

I’ve never heard or read any PUA inflected discussion contain any worthwhile anything. After every claim is a parenthetical “because women aren’t people with minds they are vending machines”.

[Jadagul]

The best explanation of how to make interesting small talk and make the other person feel good about themselves came from Roissy, of all places. Same with the best advice on how to comfort someone who's upset/crying but doesn't want you to do anything particularly substantive.

It's hard to recommend either essay, because they were both liberally peppered with "women are all thoughtless bimbos, so you have to..." and such. But the actual advice was excellent.

[Kolohe]

It's close to "Hitler says that smoking is bad for you".

[Mo]

Jordan Peterson just wants people to be able to speak freely.

[dhex]

He's going Michael Jackson very quickly.

[Dangerman]

It's the cider.

[Dangerman]

[Shem]

The best explanation of how to make interesting small talk and make the other person feel good about themselves came from Roissy, of all places. Same with the best advice on how to comfort someone who's upset/crying but doesn't want you to do anything particularly substantive.

It's hard to recommend either essay, because they were both liberally peppered with "women are all thoughtless bimbos, so you have to..." and such. But the actual advice was excellent.

There's absolutely nothing to be gained from a PUA book that you couldn't get from a self-help book that wasn't written in order to make the world a horrible, blasted hellscape. This, for example, which is what I used to recommend when I was counseling people. It changed 15-year-old me's life. It provides superior insights on how to be a better, more successful person, without having to dig through 18 tons of pig shit. And best of all, by the time you're putting it into practice, you're acting the way you are because you're able to get at the sort of deeper understanding of why people do what they do and it helps you empathize, not because you've deadened your emotions to the point where everyone around you is just an ATM that spits out sensations you can use to sodomize the vast emptiness that used to be your soul.

[Jennifer]

For all the jokes I've seen about wanting to "hate-fuck" somebody, in all seriousness: it must really suck to only be sexually attracted to people for whom you feel nothing but contempt, if not worse emotions. Were they not such reprehensible people, I'd actually feel sorry for them.

[Jennifer]

Oh, this is funny:

I estimate that if a girl has over 500 followers on Instagram, she is so used to attention from throngs of men that the love of one man cannot possibly satisfy her.

We must also throw in the growing “travel blogger” lifestyle where, instead of using only her body to get attention, a girl uses pictures and video from exotic locations to enhance her beauty.... Sadly, men are so desperate for love that many would wife up a former prostitute or porn star, but it’s highly unlikely those women will make for stable families.

But then, just a couple days later:

http://www.rooshv.com/im-going-on-vacation

I’m hitting the road for 2-8 weeks. I may post travel updates on my Instagram [with 2,858 followers]

It's sad to see how modern men have become so corrupted by our decadent society. I estimate that if a man has over 500 followers on Instagram, he is so used to attention from throngs of people that the love of one woman (other than his mother, whose basement saves him from being homeless) cannot possibly satisfy him. Fortunately, no woman is so desperate for love that she would husband up a basement-dwelling e-beggar, since it's highly unlikely such men will make for stable families.

[Jadagul]

The best explanation of how to make interesting small talk and make the other person feel good about themselves came from Roissy, of all places. Same with the best advice on how to comfort someone who's upset/crying but doesn't want you to do anything particularly substantive.

It's hard to recommend either essay, because they were both liberally peppered with "women are all thoughtless bimbos, so you have to..." and such. But the actual advice was excellent.

There's absolutely nothing to be gained from a PUA book that you couldn't get from a self-help book that wasn't written in order to make the world a horrible, blasted hellscape. This, for example, which is what I used to recommend when I was counseling people. It changed 15-year-old me's life. It provides superior insights on how to be a better, more successful person, without having to dig through 18 tons of pig shit. And best of all, by the time you're putting it into practice, you're acting the way you are because you're able to get at the sort of deeper understanding of why people do what they do and it helps you empathize, not because you've deadened your emotions to the point where everyone around you is just an ATM that spits out sensations you can use to sodomize the vast emptiness that used to be your soul.

I'm sure there are lots of other sources for some of this stuff. (I got a lot of the same threads from How to Win Friends and Influence People). But that doesn't mean that the PUA people don't have some genuine insight about some things. (And seriously, the best explanation I've ever read about how to be a generous conversationalist and an attentive listener was from a PUA source).

They're also really good at giving conversational scripts, which are great when you have no idea what you're doing. The problem is that their target audience---socially oblivious guys---are, well, socially oblivious. This means two things. One, they're not great at filtering out the nonsense.

Second, they can't see where the limitations of the ideas and scripts are. (This is why "negging" has such a bad reputation. The idea as originally formulated is pretty decent and reasonable. The idea as implemented by the overwhelming majority of the audience is not).

[Jennifer]

(This is why "negging" has such a bad reputation. The idea as originally formulated is pretty decent and reasonable.

I just don't know what to say to that, Jadagul.

[Jadagul]

(This is why "negging" has such a bad reputation. The idea as originally formulated is pretty decent and reasonable.

I just don't know what to say to that, Jadagul.

I mean, the point is that "negging as understood by popular culture" isn't the same as the original idea. Which as I understand it was basically that, when you're picking a woman up in a singles bar, you shouldn't approach with a boring compliment, or a line she's probably heard five times already that night. Instead, you should say something a bit more complex, that doesn't fit cleanly into any preconceived scripts she has, so she isn't immediately sure how to respond and has to actually pay attention to you and to what you said. Preferably something a bit intriguing, so she wants to continue the conversation and figure out what you meant.

Unfortunately, the typical examples that drove the understanding were sort of ambiguous compliments---things that sound like compliments but then you realize they're a bit more ambiguous and have to think about what they meant. (And also are now in the position of needing to establish that you are interesting, rather than simply sit in judgment of your suitors---it's a bit of a script flip). This is really effective if you can do it well.

(I explained this to one of my friends once, and she sort of jerked upright and said "wait, I negged my boyfriend the night we met!" They had a bunch of mutual friends and she'd heard stories about him, so the first thing she said after meeting him was, "Oh! You're [name]!")

But this is hard to do well without making it sound like you're just insulting people. And most of the people trying to borrow the technique missed about 90% of what I just said, and translated it into "if you walk up to a woman and insult her, then she'll have sex with you."

(And to make things even worse, a big part of the point was to shake the person you were talking to out of established and boring scripts. Once this became a recognized, boring script, it couldn't possibly work as intended any more).

[JasonL]

You like the scripts because you get unscripted responses?

[Shem]

Again, that's like saying "I once found a gold nugget while wading through 16 tons of pig shit, therefore wading through pig shit is not the idiotic pastime people think it is." Nah bro. It's still dumb, pointless, and liable to give you hepatitis. That the weirdest man on Earth derived benefit from doing it once doesn't change that.

[Dangerman]

JAKES LAW! JAKES LAW APPLIES!

Nobody wants to look at your shiny ring if you hold it next to your asshole.

[Shem]

JAKES LAW! JAKES LAW APPLIES!

Nobody wants to look at your shiny ring if you hold it next to your asshole.

QFTMFingT.

[Jake]

JAKES LAW! JAKES LAW APPLIES!

Nobody wants to look at your shiny ring if you hold it next to your asshole.

QFTMFingT.

Someone remembers!

[tr0g]

JAKES LAW! JAKES LAW APPLIES!

Nobody wants to look at your shiny ring if you hold it next to your asshole.

I dunno, my wife rests her hand on me all the time and people still look at her jewelry.

[Pham Nuwen]

JAKES LAW! JAKES LAW APPLIES!

Nobody wants to look at your shiny ring if you hold it next to your asshole.

I dunno, my wife rests her hand on me all the time and people still look at her jewelry.

Well done there, sir.

[Jennifer]

Gaping-asshole-marketing failure: Roosh's "Return of Kings" site is going on "indefinite hiatus" because he's burned out and also not making money at it anymore.

http://www.returnofkings.com/195790/ret ... -on-hiatus

[Dangerman]

JAKES LAW! JAKES LAW APPLIES!

Nobody wants to look at your shiny ring if you hold it next to your asshole.

I dunno, my wife rests her hand on me all the time and people still look at her jewelry.

I think this is a pearls-before-swine scenario TBH.