I decided to look at some PUA blogs recently, out of morbid curiosity, and theunitofcaring was not kidding when she said that...
I decided to look at some PUA blogs recently, out of morbid curiosity, and theunitofcaring was not kidding when she said that that’s where the useful advice for socially awkward men is. Yes, it’s steeped in misogyny, and yes, a lot of what’s presented as advanced…
Yeah, like I’ve said, if you want to give PUA sites shit for something, give them shit for being Cosmo for Men.
(“Confident seductress career girl” Cosmo is really for insecure high school and college students, just like “cool high schooler” Seventeen is for twelve-year olds trying to wash the dork off. For the same reason bridal and interior decoration magazines are for people planning a wedding or remodel, not people who enjoy them. They’re instruction manuals, not enthusiast journals. Which is why they repackage the same material constantly. And why a guy whose identity is wrapped up in being a “veteran” PUA is still creepy, just like a high school Jezebel commenter who’s pushing 30 and only graduated to *making* the gifsets about how Beyoncé Means Nothing Is Ever Your Fault)
It was kind of like when MLP:FiM came out and the first bronies were like “man, I wish I got *these* friendship messages as a kid”, and got shit for that like ha how socially incompetent do you have to be to be impressed by these basics? Well they’d (“we’d”, I’d) figured that by *now* (this was after the first season, later bronies I’ll not be so charitable). But growing up as an only child in a neighborhood with no kids my age, a school with few kids intelligent enough for me to level with or want to do group activities with, parents who were young enough to *have* friends but too old to *make* many, at least in any part of their lives I saw…
well, so I got a lot of my ideas about How To Social from the Official Channels that were actively making a show of Instructing How To Social, and was too naive to see the official line of “Be Yourself, anyone who tries to get you to do things you don’t want to do is Not Your Friend” was *terrible* advice.
(Though maybe in the Just Say No era it made more sense as “bourgie child! give in not to the fleshy temptations of your superficial peers the non-college-bound, lest ye be dragged back into the working class your yuppie parents have defined their lives on forgetting they ever were!”)
And I think I would have been a lot better served by the pony message of “okay, try putting up with it occasionally for your friend’s sake if it’s not too ridiculous, and don’t bitch and moan, but don’t feign enthusiasm lest they think you really like it and try to make it an everyday thing, also maintain other friends you can spend time with when your one friend gets too far gone, and harmlessly complain about her, and accept that if she likes that activity she’ll find friends who *do* like it *through* it, and can do it with them, and if she really liked you before this she still will without it, but if she spends all her time with these new friends you might drift apart so if you really value her as a friend maybe consider going along more than you’d like to for the sake of servicing the relationship”.
and I think how that got through so well was that the world of these neon pastel girlponies was so aesthetically distinct that not only was there no way to confuse it with grimdark “realism” and judge it for adherence to the Trenchcoat M. Gruffstubble ideal self (the M stands for McKatana, it’s a family name), but it was so far out of that universe it couldn’t even be mistaken as an *antonym* to that and read as a volley from the types of people who mock that ideal, and could be judged on its own merits.