The Lie of the Anti-PUA
I was a young engineer many years ago when I learned a lesson that has stuck with me over the years. Unfortunately, nobody was teaching guys about women at the time, but the lesson applies to any industry, including the Pick Up Artistry (PUA) industry nowadays.
As a young engineer, the latest business and management buzzword was Total Quality Management, or TQM. Well, not so much a buzzword, but sound business practices to reduce business costs and improve product quality. I was in the thick of it, and I studied TQM and took the courses. It was a new way of doing business, and if you weren’t at least attempting TQM you were behind the times. Soon everybody was a TQM consultant. I even wrote a mini-paper on the subject and presented it at a symposium. Not long after that, a strange thing happened. Consultants started appearing who were anti-TQM and were willing to help you, for a generous fee of course, get TQM out of your organization and resist the new practices because TQM would “destroy your business”. That’s right. Sound business practices to reduce costs were bad news! That’s when I learned a very important lesson. Whenever a new market becomes saturated, an anti-market will spring up to make money on the exact opposite principle. You can bet your bottom dollar on it.
The same is true in the Pick Up Artistry business area. Teaching men how to pickup women has become a huge industry, bringing in millions upon millions of dollars for the companies who have quality instructional products to sell to men, and even for companies with mediocre and downright shoddy products. The market is saturated, so now the anti-market has sprung up; the anti-PUA instructional products.
Like the anti-TQM market, the anti-PUA market is claiming to help you avoid dangerous practices that could ruin your life and future relationships. The spiel usually goes like this: “PUA is inherently bad, artificial and damaging to your self-esteem and prevents your development as a real man. Our product is not PUA, so therefore our product must be inherently good, no matter what it teaches.” The marketing campaigns are utter nonsense. The bad logic would make a 3rd grader cringe, yet probably more guys fall for the anti-PUA BS than ever did for the PUA products.
The PUA marketers have a set of lies to sell, as I wrote about a while back, but the anti-PUA marketers have their own unique set of lies. The most obvious lie being that PUA is inherently bad. In fact, at its root, PUA is simply a set of social skills to improve a man’s ability to relate to women. Some skills that are taught are rather frivolous, some are borderline moronic, and some are advanced interpersonal relationship skills. The ones that work continue to make money for the companies teaching them. The other companies with trivial and less than useful PUA products tend to die off. Saying that PUA is inherently bad is simply a common marketing technique to “ghost” the competition, that is, criticizing the competition to make them look bad. There is good and bad PUA, but nothing inherently wrong with the subject itself.
The second lie of the anti-PUA is even more blatant. If you’re reading the advertising of the anti-PUA marketer, you’ve read his criticism of his competition, and you have probably avoided the PUA marketing material. What you don’t realize is that the anti-PUA marketer is selling men the exact same product as the PUA industry: social skills to improve a man’s ability to meet and relate to women! It’s the exact same product, with a different brand on it.
If one company teaches conversational styles, awareness of body language and techniques for self-confidence, while a different company teaches conversational techniques, body language control and self-assuredness, there’s little to no way to tell the difference, yet alone to judge one as bad and the other as good.
There is one key difference between the two, and it’s probably the only criteria you need to recognize. The PUA marketers will tell you exactly what they’re selling you. The anti-PUA marketers lie about what they’re selling. Which marketer would you trust to buy from?
