The world of pickup-artists is one I don't visit very often. There's something sad about it all (immature? lonely? lots of misplaced anger and pain?), but mostly my lack of frequent visits is because even a short dip in those waters makes me yearn for a brisk massage with barbed iron sponges and a few years in a shower of bleach.
Why that feeling? Probably because my sex places me in an odd outsider position there. Imagine a pike reading about how people best fish for pikes, and then you get the idea.
To understand what goes on in that alternate reality, you need to accept several ideas that might sound unfamiliar, even bizarre to you:
Men can be divided into alpha males and beta males, the former being the leaders, heroes, kings and victors, while the latter are doormats or feminist allies or nice guys who never get pu**y.
Alpha males get all the beautiful women. But all men are really entitled to those beautiful women, in terms of getting them to give men sex as often as men want. The PUAs tell all the supposed beta males how to get the beautiful women, in the exact same way that a book about pike fishing would tell fishers how to tire the fish out, where it might be most easily caught, and how to prepare it for eating (fry it in butter and eat it quickly).
All this is about sex as warfare or as a hunt. The beautiful women are the prey, the object is to get them in bed, and the advice the PUAs give is all about that. The scoring is based on how many one-night stands a man can get, preferably with women who weren't that much into him in the first place. And the basic trick is male dominance. You pretend to be a dominant alpha male, and then you get all the pu**y that rightly belongs to you.
I think where my feelings of sadness come in is in the near-total absence of any fondness for women the PUA world exhibits. Women are really the enemy, or objects for reaching sexual climax. When you combine that with the apparent feeling of sexual entitlement that PUAs possess, you get the hunting, trapping or fishing games. There's an underlying anger in it all, also revealed in the frequent argument that no woman ever lacks a willing male partner, that somehow women are "withholding" sex that they should be providing to all the men who worry that they might be betas, and so on.
That world is a firmly heterosexual one, by the way.
What brought these thoughts to the surface of my thought bubbles is a book project at Kickstarter. It's a trapping and hunting guide for guys. Or a seduction guide. The author advocates that men should take charge, be the leaders in sex, be modern alpha males:
Man #3: The Modern Alpha Male
He's not "alpha" in the fist-pumping, type-A, bro-type sense. Nor is he "alpha" for picking fights and putting down others. Yet, Women find him irresistible. He has no problem attracting and keeping women. His life is abundant. He has sex often.
In more cases than not, the only difference in the development of these three men is that man #3 learned to physically escalate from a younger age. Because he embraced his sexual side early, he naturally learned how to be successful with women. He benefited from the confidence and abundance mentality this gave him. Everything else auto-corrected.
Learning and practicing physical escalation with women is one of the final keys in your development. Master this one skill and you will be that much closer to becoming the man you want to be.
The author argues that men are notoriously bad at reading women's body language, so always grab her, pull her on your lap, place your joystick in her hand, tell her where to stick it and so on and so on. He does make a quick nod on taking a REAL no for a no, but given the difficulty men have in understanding women in general, I'm not sure how that message could be clearly differentiated from the types of "nos" that mean you can just plow in!
I get that the traditional dating rules can be tough for men, because of that expectation that they make the approaches. On the other hand, waiting for someone to approach can be equally tough. And if you then get a physical escalation approach from a PUA!
Still, none of this is about dating*, the way the term is usually construed. It's about a pu**y hunt, and that explains why the advice is never about how various women actually might feel or what they might be looking for and so on. Rather, it really is based on how to get that pretty pike swallow your worm.
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*There are lots of dating guides for heterosexual women, so I guess these types of books are dating guides for heterosexual men. Imagine the cultural clashes when the readers of those sex-differentiated guides meet each other! And yes, there have been guides about how to trap men for women. They are not much better, though I don't think they objectify the catch quite as clearly.