Why Feminists Need to Pay Attention to Pick Up Artists

[Trigger warning — if you’ve not read anything PUA before, Tomassi’s collected posts about The Matrix might be both shocking and confusing]

Some admitted they didn’t like the things PUA’s said about women. Some leapt immediately to an ardent defense — what they read completely transformed the responses they received from women in dating. Others went right to indignation: this is the way the world is — deal with it.

These stories present an exercise in cognitive dissonance: these people are my friends, and they are also talking about something I found repugnant. They speak earnestly and with a lot of energy when disclosing their (often controversial) thoughts. The first impulse in this situation can be derision and recoil, so deciding to meet these thoughts with curiosity can be a real challenge. This cognitive dissonance didn’t go away, either — these conversations kept happening.

I did what any rational intellectual would do when perplexed — I decided to do some research and got accepted to grad school. I told the world (a.k.a. Facebook) about the planned study (a Marxian analysis of Pick Up Artist texts) and asked for resources.

That’s when the floodgates opened. The number of people that reached out, from all over the world, was overwhelming.

Responses came from men from diverse professions, age groups, and cultural backgrounds. Responses came from sex positive and feminist men, men who I know from their consistent action over time are allies. Responses came from kind, sensitive men.

Not from Snidely Whiplash types hidden behind their keyboard filling the internet with woman-hating bile, not from archetypal villains.

Responses came from “normal” men.

Theirs were stories of struggle to find a connection — to masculinity, to self, and to others. These stories of lived experience were extraordinarily personal and often painful. Some stories even came from feminist men, sharing memories of the time that they spent involved with Pick Up Artist communities.

This uncomfortable truth is the reason that feminists need to care about and to pay attention to what is going on in PUA communities. The people PUA communities influence aren’t some random other dudes out there that deserve bad things and a bad life. They are people you probably already know and people that you likely love. They are people that you share your life with, and yet who carry their often unspoken experience of gender-related trauma.

They are men that want to connect, and get told that it should just happen, that they should just be themselves, and by some magic of cosmic fate it will all workout fine when it comes to dating, sex, and relationships. They are men that lack the social skill and finesse for things to happen “naturally”. The things many of us take for granted in social interaction and etiquette — to the point that it feels like common sense — are things that are not common sense to many men.

From a feminist perspective, this can seem like, once again, giving special consideration to men. It can feel like saying “men are in pain and now women have to patiently deliver care, no matter which shitty attitudes those men will have developed after PUA”. It can feel like saying we have to just take it with calmness and thoughtfulness, regardless of which offensive things they say.

Women are really good at resourcing each other. Women are adept at holding space for each other, especially for difficult emotions in times of struggle. Men suck at doing this for other men generally, and PUAs are some of the only men filling this void. Where can we refer men in pain? A lot of the available sex positive and ethical resources assume a baseline level of social skill and understanding and may be completely impractical for someone who struggles to make eye contact, let alone understand the nuance of touch.

So, why do feminists need to pay attention to Pick Up Artists?

Pick Up Artists have cornered the market on teaching social skills to socially awkward men. It’s not that other resources don’t exist — they do — but there’s knowledge-based barriers to finding them, whereas PUA is both ubiquitous across the Internet and offers what these men are seeking more than anything else — practical, how-to advice to solve their problems. This makes Pick Up Artistry a force to be reckoned with in shaping the way that humans relate to each other and how men in particular view the way relationships work.

We need to pay attention because Patriarchy harms us all, women, men, and non-binary folk alike, and this battle will be more easily won if we do not alienate a huge swathe of the population in the process.

Men are in pain and few people are addressing it. It’s really facile to dismiss men coming to Pick Up Artistry as assholes that feel entitled to women’s bodies (while recognizing that some certainly are, or become so after exposure to this ethos). There is nothing wrong with men wanting to have sex, and nothing wrong with men wanting information about how to find sex partners or relationship partners. In fact, I’d go as far to argue that the majority of men who would seek out this kind of information in the first place are the kind of men that would be amazing lovers and partners if ethically and factually sound information were provided to them.

If we pay attention, it becomes possible to develop and offer alternatives.

Most men, and I’d argue most people, are concerned with doing the right thing and living a good life. Obviously this is not true of all people — there are men who harm women, commit terrible acts of violence against women, feel entitled to women’s bodies, say wildly hurtful and inappropriate things, and all manner of other ugliness. Many men and women (myself included) have suffered directly at the hands of men. Yet, this binary thinking that a man is either good or is a predator is limiting and destructive.

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