Amanda Marcotte has some thoughts on PUA ideology and Elliot Rodger.
This theory—that ordinary and worthy men are oppressed by women who refuse to have sex with them—was articulated in Rodger’s 141-page manifesto he sent to newspapers.
Women are incapable of having morals or thinking rationally. They are completely controlled by their depraved emotions and vile sexual impulses. Because of this, the men who do get to experience the pleasures of sex and the privilege of breeding are the men who women are sexually attracted to… the stupid, degenerate, obnoxious men. I have observed this all my life. The most beautiful of women choose to mate with the most brutal of men, instead of magnificent gentlemen like myself.
This sort of rhetoric is fairly common on some of the more embittered PUA forums, and the “men’s rights” forums that have quite a bit of overlap with them.
And it is what it is. It’s not all that belief-defying that one very warped guy would take the rage and channel it into violence. It’s surprising that more warped guys don’t. (But many of course do it one at a time, in private, without a manifesto.)
There is an issue buried in here of something that particular to heterosexuality (the more extreme kinds) which is the utter inability to comprehend or relate to what the desired partner sees in one’s own gender*. Most people manage to deal, often excellently. But it’s absolutely striking of the MRA/PUA crowd that they can’t/don’t/won’t . Since that’s the case, they’ve built themselves an idea of what women ought to find attractive based on factors that are often used in status competition between men – cars, money, etc. In Rodger’s case we see this construct, possibly exacerbated by mental health issues.
* I’m not knocking this per se, it’s just a fact of life. I fall into this category myself. I’m utterly unable to perceive what men find attractive about women or why some more than others. It’s just that I don’t try to second guess them based on some invented criteria of my own.
At one time, I was of the opinion that “rage” sites were a good safety valve. They let people fantasize about violence and violent behavior and “get it out of their systems”. Or at least provide a safe place (for everyone) for the venting of rage.
I was wrong.
It’s the same as the right-wing “militia” types. The profile of the right-wing terrorist is a loner guy who has serious job-and-relationship issues, who is triggered to violence by participation right-wing web sites where that kind of revenge fantasy is encouraged and rewarded.
Roger is absolutely no different from the right-wing militia terrorists. Except his rage was focused not on the government, but on women.
No difference. Not one iota’s worth. Except for where the bull’s-eye was drawn.
Actually, what you’re describing here is not in the least bit particular to heterosexuality, extreme or otherwise nor, indeed, is a function of gender.
I’ve got a small but fascinating experimental study knocking around somewhere on one of my backup drives in which researchers interviewed a group of people who were going to attend a speed dating event and asked them what kinds of qualities and characteristics they were going to be looking for in potential date.
After the event, they got the same people indicate which of the people they’d met at the event that they were actually interested in dating and found that when it came to personal characteristics and qualities, status, etc. there was essentially no correlation between what people said they were looking for before the event and the characteristics of the people they actually picked out as potential dates after the event.
Give or take a few distinct preferences for superficial physical characteristics what both men and women say they find attractive when asked in principle appears to bear very little relationship to what they find attractive in practice. We are all pretty much in the dark in terms of consciously understanding what we ourselves find attractive in other people, never mind what other people find attractive, which make the whole status competition thing a complete nonsense.
It’s not really about comprehending or understanding why a particular person you might be attracted to doesn’t reciprocate your interest, it’s more about having the maturity to accept such situations for what they are, just part of life, and move on.
Men being sexually frustrated is really nothing new. I’m not a huge fan of calling this “entitlement.” Sexuality is one of the strongest motivators that exist. It has to be, to be worth the effort. Too many of these articles tend to brand sexual frustration as something to feel guilty about, when in reality it’s a natural human emotion that most people experience at some point or another. The PUA community is a direct result of this frustration, and definitely contains a lot of misogynistic elements, i.e. objectifying women, rambling on about “value” of women being tied to their looks, lots of silly psychobabble about what men and women are, etc.
However, it does contain some good elements, too. The overriding message is that it isn’t a woman’s fault if she isn’t attracted to you – it’s your fault. This is a good message. Being more attractive requires work. This is a good message. I’d like to think there is a middle ground where sexual frustration is embraced as normal (because it is) and efforts to overcome it are embraced as normal (because they are) without all the extra b.s. in the “manosphere.”
There has been a fair bit of research done on this topic and it appears that venting is not very helpful, and possibly even counter-productive as some of these studies have found that those that vent actually have increased anger and aggression after doing so.
Yeah he definitely hated all women just as much as he hated all men, exactly for the same reasons. You can clearly superimpose misandry and mental illness onto this just as much as misogyny.
/sarcasm
@Pen1
Expanding off of that I wonder what it is that might be preventing development of valuable personal characteristics that are just as attractive to people of all sorts. Being a money or property collector is a limited skill set that I doubt maps into the interpersonal realm in the best ways (there are probably some good ones, though).
@Kevin Kehres 2
>”I was wrong. ”
I’m seeing more and more that the idea of suppressing or venting anything is not so useful in a personal or social context.
Suppressing does not make emotional reactions go away and can accidentally lead to those emotions getting connected to other things in perception or mind. A social group suppressing would probably just start connecting that emotion to perceived suppressors real or imagined leading to paranoid conspiracies among allies as the echo chamber gets louder when people come home from the public.
Venting just lets you practice the emotion so you are still just as good at it, you are what you do. Venting leads to channeling (targeted or indiscriminate) as you develop habits in responding to that emotion over time. A social group venting is practicing their feelings, that variation in the activity in the echo chamber. PUA and anti-PUA groups alike vent all sorts of interesting things in their spaces.
If things like CBT on an individual level show us that you have to disengage an emotion from it’s associated object and redirect the object to a healthier reaction, changing behavior like this is necessarily going to involve getting individuals and groups of individuals to see their object of hate in a new light. First by pervasive exposure of a message about why the previous connection makes no sense, and why the new one is healthier for the person and everyone.
Not to get all Buddhist on you, but the three categories of karma – thought, word, deed – all feed into each other. What we think about, we’re more likely to communicate about; what we communicate about, we’re more likely to do.
Violent video games are a far better safety valve:
http://kotaku.com/5814601/violent-video-games-contribute-to-dropping-crime-rate-study-suggests
http://www.soraker.com/category/statistics/ *
Statistics don’t lie.
* True, correlation does not guarantee causation, but it most certainly DOES imply causation! Without correlation, we could never ever discern causation – think about THAT for a moment, XKCD! BOOM!!
@ Edward Gemmer 4
>”Men being sexually frustrated is really nothing new. I’m not a huge fan of calling this “entitlement.””
Men being sexually frustrated is not what is being called entitlement. It’s a set of beliefs and actions they choose to associate with that frustration that is being associated with entitlement. Not all solutions to the problem of how to deal with sexual frustration are being described as entitled.
While this sounds superficially okay, it really gives me an icky slimish creepy feeling. Why not instead teach people to honestly be themselves and to regard future mate(s) as people they are compatible with (like FRIENDS), understanding that it must be reciprocal (preferably equally so) for it to work? Why not inform them that the more they put on a facade to impress, the more dissatisfied the other person will be when they discover the deception – and they always will?
@Edward Gemmer 4
*Sexual* frustration and no way to find a partner leads to masturbation, not to objectifying, manipulating, or even hating half of humanity. The latter set of of attitudes are due to something besides sex. If it was due to the lack of satisfying partnered sex, you’d see a lot more rage and pickup sites authored by women.
@Edward
“The overriding message is that it isn’t a woman’s fault if she isn’t attracted to you – it’s your fault.”
The problem is the ‘solution’ is to study the PUA ‘game book’ and then, when that doesn’t work either 1. you weren’t playing the ‘game’ right or ,after a long enough time 2. the sentiment turns to ‘women be bitches’ since after applying the PUA game book, they still weren’t interested.
@10 quixote
That’s exactly it. The thing I always want to ask these “incel” bozos is if you’re so desperate for sex, and you hate women *so much*, why don’t you guys just fuck each other? But the simple fact is, they’d never willingly subject themselves to the experience they demand of women, the feeling of being violated by a loathsome creep.
The saddest thing about these unfucked fuckers is that sex has been so built up in their minds as this incredible, transformative experience, that I *guarantee* if they actually got any they’d feel strangely dissatisfied, especially when they’re looking to fuck people with whom they have no emotional connection. If Rodger actually managed to trick a woman into fucking him, I think he’d just get increasingly abusive towards her, stroking his own ego in an attempt to fill the hole in his spirit most people fill with the love of others.
This vile puke seems so much like the abusive exes in my female friends’ horror stories; him getting laid *might* have prevented the mass shooting, but he almost certainly would have turned all that narcissistic rage against the poor woman who made the mistake of thinking he was redeemable.
” They are completely controlled by their depraved emotions and vile sexual impulses.”
What an echo of what used to be said about men and women of color.
Kevin, see Carol Tavris’s book Anger for confirmation that “venting” anger doesn’t.
I fell on that book like a starving person on falafel, because it had been my experience from jobs that meetings where people “vent” led to amped-up rage, period.
Unity @3 – I was all excited to hear about your study, but I realized it doesn’t really address the Issue about sexuality I was making. Here’s a way it could work: before a speed-dating event, get the women and the men in separate groups and have them ‘speed date’ each other, e.g. get to know each other a little. Then ask them to rate the other members of their own gender group on how likely each is to get liked as a potential date by the opposite sex. Then do the cross-gender speed-dating and see if their predictions match the actual outcome.
In fact, since I suspect a lot of people are at least a bit bisexual, there may well be a good correlation. Most men and women may indeed be quite good predictors of what the opposite sex finds attractive. But there will certainly be individual variation.
@ Blanche,
Why not instead teach people to honestly be themselves and to regard future mate(s) as people they are compatible with (like FRIENDS), understanding that it must be reciprocal (preferably equally so) for it to work? Why not inform them that the more they put on a facade to impress, the more dissatisfied the other person will be when they discover the deception – and they always will?
Certainly good advice, but not necessarily helpful advice. Feeling comfortable and confident in one’s own skin is certainly and important step in being successful romantically. However, it’s also kind of like telling a depressed person to be happy. Being comfortable and confident is the goal, not the process. The process is doing things that will lead to more confidence, i.e. exercising, reading, learning how to play an instrument, traveling, etc. From what I’ve seen that’s pretty standard advice from the PUA crowd, and I can’t find any good criticism against exercise or education.
@smrnda,
The problem is the ‘solution’ is to study the PUA ‘game book’ and then, when that doesn’t work either 1. you weren’t playing the ‘game’ right or ,after a long enough time 2. the sentiment turns to ‘women be bitches’ since after applying the PUA game book, they still weren’t interested.
I agree – the PUA “handbook” quickly leads to places that are pretty much awful. Frankly, the entire enterprise of being a “pick up artist” is littered with problems. However, there is a vast gulf between “Women exist for me to have sex with” and “I wish I were more successful with women.” IMO, there isn’t a lot of good advice for people in the latter camp, which leads them to the former camp, because even if their advice is often goofy, at least it’s something. No one wants to be met a big guilt trip when expressing their desires.
This. I used to call it “venting.” Now I call it “practice.” Venting anger serves mainly to make anger habitual. And as you get better at it, of course, you’ll do more and more of it…
It takes work to be this obliviously wrong.
It takes work to be this obliviously wrong.
Well I’m a hard working man.
Here I go, feeling queasy again. um…Edward, I’m not sure how successful I’ll be at putting “queasy” into words, but if the whole concept of self-improvement and self-development is undertaken with the explicit understanding that “If you do this, you’ll get that”, that’s a good criticism against it. People should be challenged to expand themselves for the sheer enjoyment of that activity in and of itself, to enhance their lives independent of any other motive, rather than as a means to an end. The fact that there is obsessive craving driving these efforts is not being addressed via PUA; it’s being exploited. THAT is good criticism against exercise and education – if your only purpose in pursuing it is to “get” a woman to have sex with you (I’ll be blunt), then it won’t have any beneficial effect. Rather, after investing all that time/money/effort and STILL no pussy, the individual is going to feel even MORE cheated, betrayed, and enraged – and he’s unlikely to turn that ire against the cult leader(s), because he really, REALLY wants their woo to work for him and he’s convinced that they DO know what they’re talking about. So he turns it outward toward the women who aren’t doing THEIR part. He’s done HIS part, after all – now it’s THEIR turn! That’s how the equation works – physics/math and stuff, people!
Yeah, PUA has many attributes in common with cults.
Case in point: On spring break, I went on a school trip to So. Padre Island. We were all staying in the same hotel complex. One night, a bunch of us were sitting around a bonfire at the beach. This dweeby guy was sitting next to me, talking to me. Being polite, I talked back. He kept inviting me to go for a walk down the beach. In the dark. I kept saying “No thanks, I’m comfortable right here by the fire.” After a little while, I got tired of being badgered about going off into the dark alone with HIM, so I said my goodnights and went back to my room. After I left, he lamented to my friend, “Why wouldn’t Blanche talk to me?” My friend said, “What the hell?? She was talking to you for over a half hour – I saw it myself!” He harrumphed, “Well, she wouldn’t go for a walk with me.”
This guy was *NOT* interested in talking to me. Yet that’s how he phrased his intentions to himself. Why do YOU suppose he kept trying to get me to go off alone with him in the dark after I’d already said “No” a half dozen times??
The solution, naturally, is for people to be socialized with members of the opposite sex from birth and to learn how to be friends with others. Period. This Rodgers guy apparently had no friends of either gender. Theoretically, our public schools should be providing this experience. So why does this model end up producing individuals who are as clueless about how to approach/address the opposite sex as graduates from a (gender segregated) Islamic madrasah, and Western men who display attitudes and behavior toward women that we are more accustomed to seeing in men living in Muslim theocracies?
Starting with the sentence I put in bold, you’re right about the dearth of good advice. Should there be an “It Gets Better” campaign aimed at these social misfits the way there is one aimed at young homosexuals? Should movie stars come out and reveal that they, too, were awkward, unpopular, never had a date, etc.? Should this be something that is spotlighted in our culture for redress the way adolescent homosexuality has been? Of course the fact that a person is sad should never be met with “It’s your own damn fault, loser.”
Should we take advantage of our culture’s natural xenophobia and bigotry and inform these PUA/MRA men that they remind us more and more strongly of fundamentalist Muslim men?
@12 – zibble I can’t imagine you got any detail wrong there. That’s exactly how such things play out.
#4
@Edward Gemmer, I know other people have responded to this and I don’t mean to dogpile you. But you’ve seriously misunderstood what people mean by “entitlement” in this context.
There is a pervasive attitude that men are entitled to sex (and more generally, attention) from women. And not just from women: from desirable women: young, attractive–in a word, “hot.” It would take a while to deconstruct it, but, simplifying, it’s that men have Needs and women are sex dispensers. You’ll find this attitude expressed in “Men’s Rights” and PUA and PUAhate sites–it’s behind the common MRA trope that “women have all the power and men are really the oppressed ones” because pussy. You see it expressed less explicitly in the media, in the constant sexual objectification of women. You can see it in the anger some men express when a woman turns them down. You can see it in Rodger’s manifesto, which was mostly not about sexual frustration. Rodgers hated women as people. He had nothing but scorn for the “ugly” woman his roommate dated. He apparently didn’t make much effort to approach the young women he did find attractive–he assumed they’d reject him. Nevertheless he thought that, by virtue of being rich and having the objects that signify social status, beautiful young blondes should have been throwing themselves at him, and when they didn’t he was furious. Had he managed to actually attract one, she would have been a trophy for him, another accoutrement along with his expensive clothes and his BMW.
No no no a thousand times no – lack of attaction between two individuals is not anybody’s “fault”. Attraction is a complicated phenomenon and sometimes the sympatico is simply never going to be there for certain pairings, no matter what either of them does. Sometimes, when one or the other of the pair changes something about themselves, the attraction might become mutual after all. Sometimes, when unrelated circumstances change for one or the other of the pair, attraction might become mutual after all.
Sometimes, no matter what changes in behaviour or circumstances of the pair might occur, one of them will simply never fancy the other one sexually no matter what. Individual men often pronounce how they simply don’t find certain women attractive because they just don’t and never will, even if many other men they know do find those same certain women attractive (just get a discussion going about hot-or-not celebrities). It is illogical to think that individual women don’t feel exactly the same way about certain men.
Sure, if a man is finding that *no* women are attracted to him, then his behaviours and expectations could well be the root cause and he might need help to learn to change them to some that are more appropriate/realistic. But changing those behaviours so that he now can attract *some* women is no guarantee that his “somebody special” is ever going to reciprocate, because it may well be something totally outside either his or her control which means that the “chemistry” just isn’t ever going to be there.
Learning to accept this (that sometimes you simply will not be chosen) for what it is, for both men and women, is one sign of a certain emotional maturity. Women are generally socialised into this particular aspect of emotional maturity at an early age, men generally much less so. The setting of “romantic” expectations needs to be less gendered throughout society at every age. Adolescence/adulthood is leaving it too late.
FYI, folks. Gemmer has been told these things already. He’s just JAQing off.
Not that I don’t appreciate your eloquent explanations. Just thought you’d like to know, if you didn’t already.
After I read this, and put it together with Gemmer’s statements about PUAs advocating making yourself more attractive and working on yourself to be more desirable, I was suddenly struck my how narrow some people’s view of beauty and attraction are. You put together up a set of features that make a women desirable, and assume those women are going to go after a certain type of person and work yourself into that so that you appeal to them. But attraction does not work that way, plenty of those desirable women are not looking for the guy PUA want to be. I am a round, moustachioed nerdy guy and I know, and have dated, women who were considered very desirable and had many other guys to choose from. But they were not looking for that chiselled guy, that was not generally what they were attracted to. To tell guys that if they “improve” themselves they will meet women is the wrong message. By all means, lose some weight, be healthier, if you want, but I think we all benefit when we stop pushing simple ideas about what is attractive to others.
One of the things that bothers me is the notion that Rodger (for example) is angry at women who “rejected” him. There’s nothing to say that any of his women targets were people who had “rejected” him at all. For all anyone knows, they had never met or spoken, ever.
At the end of a date, if you try to let a guy know there was no attraction but it isn’t his fault by saying “you’re a nice guy, I just didn’t feel a connection,” some men take that as “I don’t like you +because+ you’re a nice guy.” When it’s actually a way to let the guy know he’s a great guy and there’s nothing he did wrong, there is just no chemistry. Guys actually believe that only thing they have to do is be polite and nice on a date, and we must be so grateful for that that we reward them with sex or a relationship. They don’t consider all the complex reasons people have for being attracted to someone. Because the bar is set so low, if a man is just polite and courteous, a woman has to like him and find him attractive and want to be with him, otherwise, the only explanation there can possibly be is that women don’t really want Nice Guys like they say they do, they must prefer guys who are obnoxious jerks.
Edward, I’m not sure how successful I’ll be at putting “queasy” into words, but if the whole concept of self-improvement and self-development is undertaken with the explicit understanding that “If you do this, you’ll get that”, that’s a good criticism against it.
I don’t blame you – it does sound kind of creepy and objectifying. However, there is the saying about making sausage. It’s kind of gross to think about, but in the end people like sausage. Some people are naturally gifted when it comes to romantic success, and others…aren’t. Getting there requires work and practice, just like getting good at anything, really. IMO, the problem is that all the wisdom about this is being dispensed by a misogynist community because no one else is doing it.
IOW, if you were a person extremely frustrated with your lack of sexual success, you would probably go on the internet for help. You find one site that tells you how awful you are for wanting sexual success, and you find one site that tells you how to increase your chances of having sexual success with women. Even if the latter site is creepy, it is at least telling you what you want to know.
This guy was *NOT* interested in talking to me. Yet that’s how he phrased his intentions to himself. Why do YOU suppose he kept trying to get me to go off alone with him in the dark after I’d already said “No” a half dozen times??
Because he was attracted to you. And he was “dweeby” and probably pretty unattractive and annoying. All qualities that make it less likely for him to have any romantic shot with you (and probably many others). What advice would you give to him to be more attractive? That’s what he really wants to know.
Should we take advantage of our culture’s natural xenophobia and bigotry and inform these PUA/MRA men that they remind us more and more strongly of fundamentalist Muslim men?
All good questions. I don’t know. I would agree that the public school system skirts around sexuality in a way that makes the internet (and before that, your buddies) the prime method for learning about sex. People (especially women) are often pressured into being polite in the face of unwanted sexual advances. While there may be sound reasons for this, and it’s probably better than being cruel, there might be a better middle ground of being straightforward and honest.
@TGirrl,
Because the bar is set so low, if a man is just polite and courteous, a woman has to like him and find him attractive and want to be with him, otherwise, the only explanation there can possibly be is that women don’t really want Nice Guys like they say they do, they must prefer guys who are obnoxious jerks.
I agree with your whole post.
I was thinking of a way to say that. Yours had a lot fewer paragraphs.
Don’t badger a woman you don’t know into walking alone with you in an isolated place at night and then complain bitterly to her friends when she doesn’t?
Don’t badger a woman you don’t know into walking alone with you in an isolated place at night and then complain bitterly to her friends when she doesn’t?
This is good advice, but doesn’t help him with his fundamental problem, which is why he may be unlikely to listen to it.
There is no point in trying to be more attractive before one masters being less actively repellent.
As Sally Strange said, you’re trolling, but for the benefit of any lurkers genuinely interested in the answer: the main thing that makes someone attractive to others as good company, from which both friendship and love relationships may grow? It’s to have a variety of interests which make one a happier person, so that others who share those interests enjoy spending time around one.