Giving Men Grace
Reconstructing Pickup Artistry, Part 2
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Dating and romance are some of the most hot-button issues on social media. The fact that 86% of men think they suck at flirting shouldn’t surprise you, nor should the rise of Red Pill and pickup artistry as an aborted solution to the problem.1
This has led me to this series of essays on an attempted post-patriarchal deconstruction and reconstruction of pickup artistry. While each essay is written to stand on its own, together they constitute a full picture that is important to see in its entirety. So, if you like this essay, which is the second, then consider starting at the beginning with The Problem of Creepy Men”.
So, we have a majority of men who suck at flirting, but as we discussed in the first essay, an almost complete lack of any real education and honestly, empathy for the situation men face. If you followed my previous sub-series you can see how much this ties in with stereotypes of men being agentic, of being assertive, confident, rational, and competent. We simply assume that men ought to know what to do or there is something wrong with them.
Throughout my own 20s, I tried desperately to get my parents to understand how bad I was socially and how much help I could have gotten from pickup coaches. Now I’m incredibly grateful for my parents, and honestly, I’m kind of glad I never went as deeply into pickup as I could have. However, for as helpful as my parents have been, that’s actually my point. For all the amazing things my parents have done for me, it puts it into stark perspective just how brutally unhelpful they’ve been when it came to my social and dating skills.
That said, literally months before the pandemic closed the world down, they had finally agreed to help me. They were willing to help me out financially so I had more time to go out and socialize more often, and I’m incredibly grateful for them. I don’t want to minimize that at all. And yet, according to them, I had to be smart enough to figure it out on my own.
This is the reality that I think many men who are left behind face. Most don’t even have the privilege of parents willing to help. And despite the financial help my parents were willing to give, they didn’t end up helping, and honestly, they still don’t really get why I needed it in the first place. It wasn’t a matter of having more time to go out and socialize. It was a lack of a mentor who could help me with these issues.
You better believe that these issues have been far worse than any mental health issue I have ever had, but my parents would have fallen over themselves to help me with mental health. Dating? No.
This is the reality that men are condemned to. You should already know how to do it yourself and if you don’t, then you must take the entire burden on your own shoulders and learn how to do it yourself. Again, with nearly any other problem my parents would have helped, and yet for this, perhaps one of the most important – creating love with someone I will spend my entire life with, perhaps even start my own family with – my need for help was completely ignored for years, and then that promised help never actually came.
You might say that maybe my social skills weren’t as bad as I thought and I just needed to put myself out there, be myself, “you’re a good kid, women would love you!”
Like really, actually consider that I didn’t know how to make new friends. I felt crippling anxiety before every social event. At one point I was afraid to hang out with one friend at a time because I was so terrified I’d fuck up. I needed someone else there so I didn’t have to hold the weight of the social interaction alone. I lacked self-trust so much that I could barely get myself to speak because again, I was so terrified of saying the wrong thing and I had plenty of prior evidence. Then, you throw me into the romantic world and expect me to “just figure it out”?
When I did finally work up the courage to ask women out, I would leave a GOOD date and immediately have obsessive, intrusive thoughts berating myself, “oh that thing you said was weird,” “she’s never going to like you,” “you’re such fucking garbage, I fucking hate you.”
I dealt with that shit for over a decade in silence, but at least I’m a good kid, women should love me?
Don’t make the mistake of diminishing the severity of the social and romantic problems that men face, because at some point we have to acknowledge that maybe we should think of it as a mental health problem after all. Or perhaps even a public health problem. As Dr.’s Hirsch and Khan write in regards to sexual assault:2
“Thinking about sexual assault as a public health problem expands the focus from individuals and how they interact, to systems. If we know that people are drinking water that is polluted, one solution is to try and educate every person about how to use that water in safe ways. Another is to go upstream and remove the toxins from the water, reducing the need to change individual behavior one person at a time.”
So many of the issues that women face in their lives in regards to men are often because men feel incompetent in their romantic lives and are forced to resort to guidance from other men, those same men who are causing the problems women face. I mean is it a surprise when the chronically romantically powerless, who are fed stereotypes that they should be the competent, agentic man who always knows exactly how to respond, then go on to seek power over others? Is it any wonder when even those who try to be good, also continue to cause the problems that women face?
I’ll use a personal example to give you a sense of what I mean, but before I continue, if you like this video so far please be sure to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. I also have a Patreon where you can support the channel. You’ll get monthly community calls, early access to videos, and eventually other things like a bookclub, but I’m going to be keeping my content as free as possible. If you think this message is important then please consider a subscription. Thank you so much.
A really good friend of mine said that she was afraid of guys asking her out because she didn’t want to lose them as a friend. She felt like guys would get to know her as friends, then ask her out, she would say no, and then they would just never talk to her again. She felt like men either viewed her as a possible fuck or they didn’t care about her at all. As a man who had done this several times it made me realize how unkind it was, and so I made a point of doing more to be friendly with a woman even after she had rejected me.
With that context in mind, I once asked a woman out and she said no because she’d just gotten out of a long term relationship, but that she just wanted to be friends. A little time passed and I texted her one day to ask about a project she’d been working. We talked a little bit about it, but I could tell something was off about how she was responding.
At that point I made a joke about her rejecting me. It was perhaps a bad attempt to ease any tension that might be there. She immediately lost it and said she didn’t need another guy trying to fuck her. I explained myself saying I was just joking, that I respected her decision not to date me, and that I had simply thought we were still on friendly terms. Either way, I’d leave her alone.
Knowing my side of things, you may think that she was being unfair. Sure, we all know that “let’s just be friends” usually isn’t an honest statement. And yet, my friend told me personally, that she didn’t like when guys assumed that. Different women have different perspectives, obviously, so I want you to try to understand things from this woman’s perspective.
She said explicitly, “I don’t need another guy trying to fuck me.”
However good my intentions may have been, and however much they were motivated by advice I had received from another woman, she will still interpret everything that happens based on her own past experience. She couldn’t possibly have known what my intentions really were.
Understand that in today’s world of social media, women are constantly bombarded with men trying to fuck them, sending them unsolicited dick pictures, constantly sending them messages after rejection, constantly sending them messages even though they ignore them, freaking out at them when they’re rejected, being friendly with them to try to fuck them only to completely ghost them as soon as they’re rejected, etc., etc., the list goes on. Women have a lot of negative experiences with men because of the online world, let alone all that happens outside of it. Does this mean that all men are evil assholes? Of course not, but when you’re constantly exposed to those men who are the assholes, is it any wonder when you misinterpret the good men as doing something bad?
And, ask yourself, honestly, how many of your “platonic” female friends would you sleep with if they said they were interested? Imagine what it must be like for these women to never really know if a guy they like as a friend really likes them for who they are, or because they have a nice collection of body parts he’d like to put his dick inside of. The sad truth is that for as many good men as there are who simply make honest mistakes, there are also many men who treat women like shit.
That woman I talked to may go forward with another example of a man who violated her boundaries. Even though my intention was the exact opposite, her interpretation will continue to influence her future interpretations of the things men do. When she comes across other men who are trying to be good men, she will be more likely to misinterpret them as being manipulative, which again will make the next misinterpretation all the more likely.
A consequence of this is something I’ve noticed where male romantic interest is increasingly pathologized in a wider array of contexts. It’s not okay if men approach in nightclubs, women just want to dance with their friends. It’s not okay if men approach on the subway or in the mall, women are trying to live their lives. We’re told to approach women in hobby groups, but I’ve had a woman complain to me personally about men doing that. It seems like there is no place a man can go to just look for a romantic partner.
Alex of DatePsych has talked about how 50% of men report their fear of social consequences as a reason for why they don’t approach women.3 Can you see now how much weight is placed on a man’s shoulders to not only deal with the anxiety of making the first move, but also of correctly interpreting a woman’s behaviour as interested or not in the first place, and of dealing with the aftermath if a woman interprets their honest mistakes in a bad way? That’s a lot of responsibility for a man to deal with when you don’t give him any education with any of it.
My point in saying all of this is not to paint women or men in a bad light, but to show how difficult dating can be and how easy it can be to misinterpret awkwardness and mistakes in unfair ways. Women have bad experiences with bad men, but this can make them treat good men unfairly, which turns them into bad men who treat women unfairly and, of course, there are plenty of shitty women out there too.
So, for as unkind as my friend thought it was that guys disappeared after a rejection, maybe they did so because they had been treated like I was after they had tried to remain friends with other women. The point is that patriarchy creates experiences and people, of all genders, who go on to reinforce patriarchy itself, however unknowingly and unintentionally.
However, when some pickup artist comes along and says “hey I can help you fuck the hottest girls so no one will ever reject you again,” am I going to listen to him or to the feminist who says patriarchy is the problem and I need to free myself from the original sin of toxic masculinity? This is the choice that many young men are given. Who the fuck do you think they’re going to listen to?
And so again, we come to the point of this sub-series of essays on reconstructing pickup artistry. I hope that triggers red flags for you because that means you understand the depth of the problem inherent to reconstructing an enterprise that is so deeply misogynistic.
In my essay Against Pickup Artists, I went very deeply into the idea of last minute resistance. I’m grateful that I quickly came across coaches talking against that idea. They said that if you get last minute resistance, then there are many things you should do way before the bedroom to make her feel more comfortable. Unfortunately, too many men never hear that, and are deluded into literally assaulting women.
And yet, how are we to really solve this problem of a lack of education without pickup? In the next essay we’ll address the fundamental premise of pickup artistry.
Until then, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
References:
1 – Apostolou, M., O, J., & Esposito, G. (2020). Singles’ Reasons for Being Single: Empirical Evidence From an Evolutionary Perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00746
2 – Hirsch, J. S., & Khan, S. (2020). Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. WW Norton.
3 – Alexander. (2023, July 14). Risk Aversion and Dating—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/risk-aversion-and-dating/
Has a woman or man unfairly misinterpreted your behaviour?