For most people, dating is an organic process that begins with a conversation, a phone number, then coffee, and dinner. Before you know it, you’ve been dating for a few months, met their best friend, and have inside jokes together.
But this isn’t the case for everyone. The objective of some men is to intimidate, manipulate, and coerce. The end game is sex, usually, or sometimes just a phone number. These men are called pick-up artists.
A Carleton student, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes himself as having an “uncomfortably troubling connection” to pick-up artist culture.
Dating or degrading?
“About a year ago I got out of a relationship and . . . I can’t say I was happy but I guess I was looking to fill a void, and I knew about my friend who was working a lot with, he called it date coaching,” the student said.
The lessons on picking up women and getting numbers were exciting, he said, but ultimately didn’t leave him feeling fulfilled.
“When I got wise and realized what I was doing could hurt people, or more so, bothering them, I felt I was ashamed that this kind of culture even existed,” he said.
A pick-up artist, according to him, works on principles of desire and misogyny.
“The philosophy of a pick-up ‘artist,’ or PUA, is a unique combination of explicit male chauvinism and a compulsive need to compensate for loneliness and isolation,” he said. “PUAs believe that every woman they see has a secret desire to sleep with them.”
Take Julien Blanc, a pick-up artist who works for Real Social Dynamics. Blanc’s Australian visa was revoked while he was on a tour there, after a petition saying he perpetuated violence against women garnered thousands of signatures. The Twitter campaign, #KeepJulienBlancOutOfCanada, was a win for grassroots social media activism.
“Any politicians would be proud of the Twitter campaign that got rid of him, because they wish they could get that kind of mobility,” the Carleton student joked.
Blanc has since been banned from Canada and the UK.
The notions found in PUA culture have seen the creation of extreme views against women as well.
The dark side
Elliot Rodger was 22 when he shot six people and injured 13 others in Isla Vista, California in May 2014. In a video posted to YouTube the day before, he proclaimed his frustrations linked solely to women.
“You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it,” Rodger said. “It’s an injustice, a crime, because . . . I don’t know what you don’t see in me.”
Prior to the killing, Rodger took part in an online reddit forum called PUAhate. The forum is littered with derogatory and sexist language, created to debunk the theories of pick-up artists for sexually frustrated men.
Rodger was quickly condemned by the PUA community, but the troubling connections between entitlement, violence, and seduction still exist.
The forum goes under the title of being “red pill,” which alludes to the red pill of truth and the blue pill of ignorance from the movie The Matrix.
A Reddit forum titled “The Red Pill” posted an article from a website called The Futurist. Titled “The Misandry Bubble,” the article begins with: “All of us have been taught how women have supposedly been oppressed throughout human existence, and that this was pervasive, systematic, and endorsed by ordinary men who presumably had it much better than women. In reality, this narrative is entirely fabricated.”
The image of confidence
PUA culture has another side, however, where much of the techniques are seen as dating tips, which aren’t necessarily founded under the same beliefs as those of PUAhate and other red pill communities.
For men who look to “date coaching,” the Carleton student believes insecurity is at the root of the problem.
“Insecurity is part of it, guys trying to prove to each other, ‘Yo, look what I can do,’ kind of thing, and because they are trying to build up their image. They’re doing it at all costs,” he said.
Julien Blanc even acknowledges this. On the website he runs, called pimpmygame.com, a spinoff of Real Social Dynamics, Blanc he describes his transformation.
“Listen, I’ve been there. This shy stuck up guy with horrible social skills with women who would get stifled in every “normal” social situation,” Blanc’s website reads.
The Carleton student said from his perspective, PUA culture is synonymous with misogyny.
“It can lead to, and it’s connotative with a lot of rape culture, the idea that this is just symbolic of male empowerment and I think this is only promoting it,” he said.
