I must say I have a hard time resonating with the new wave of so-called puas. I am proud of being one - or for what it was. But I surely would feel bad being associated with those guys. I may not agree with their overall view on game, but it stretched far beyond that. The vibe, the behaviour, their view on women, and even their game is offputting.
The good news is, nobody thinks of these guys as "pickup artists" or even really uses that term anymore.
In fact, these guys are anti-PUA. When pickup comes up they say stuff like "Everybody knows pickup doesn't work. You can't talk a woman into wanting you." They basically all practice red-light-green-light game ("Either she likes you for you or fuck her!").
The feminists are not entirely wrong referring to them as "Toxic masculinity". i hate to admit it. Some of these new era puas actually do share misogynist views, and I wonder deep inside if they even like women, as in the feminine essence, or if it is all just to get validation or something to "jack off" in.
The irony is when feminism started going in on this "women hate men" thing, the number of men who actually hated women was fairly low. I am reading Susan Brownmiller right now (1975) and she 'mind-reads' basically anything men do as absolutely dripping with hate for women. If a man simply does not agree that everything should be all about rape 24/7, it is because that man views women as "his enemy." She talks about men viewing women as "the enemy" so much in that book it is startling; in her mind, men and women are simply arch-foes.
But since all this "men are the enemy" stuff leaked into the mainstream, so many men started feeling like they were being treated as "the enemy" that they adopted this whole "I guess women really are The Enemy" stance.
It is particularly bad on social media. I have to very carefully word stuff I post on X or else I get a flood of guys coming in calling me simp, blue pill, "you don't understand women", "clearly you have never been burned by a woman", etc.
I actually think social media like TikTok serves as an echo chamber where normal people get silenced or driven off by the most aggrieved people. Like so:
- Poster A posts some rant against [whatever]. A bunch of similarly aggrieved people come in saying, "That's right!" "Hell yeah!" "They're terrible, right?" The voice of reason person shows up and tries saying "I think actually that blah blah [something reasonable]." Then a bunch of aggrieved people pile on and say "You are just [name-calling] [insults]!"
- Poster B posts some levelheaded comment about [whatever]. Poster B's levelheaded followers see this and appreciate it. But then the post catches on, and all the aggrieved people find it, and begin piling in with rants and insults. "You are just [name-calling] [insults]!"
The average normal, ordinary person who does not want to deal with all that negativity quickly just says, "Well fuck all that noise!" and quits going on there or participating.
So you mostly end up with a bunch of negative people circlejerking each other and attacking anyone dumb enough or stubborn enough to wade into that morass with something levelheaded.
(I will say, though, at least on X: it appears to be getting progressively more levelheaded on there, and the miserable idiots are getting progressively quieter. I don't know if that is due to an algorithm update or if the culture is genuinely shifting back to more levelheadedness... hopefully the latter!)
I would also say there is the whole post-MeToo backlash mass hysteria going on, that is also contributing to broad male resentment toward women:
Many men in the 2020s are terrified to approach women. They’re paralyzed with fear a girl might shame or insult them. These fears are a male mass hysteria. Mass hysteria has gripped the minds of millions of Western men as of the mid-2020s. These men are not just hesitant to approach women –...
www.girlschase.com
I’ve been following infields of different PUAs for years now, and I don’t remember any of the older ones showing the faces of the girls in public.
I noticed lately they’ve been posting infield without blurring it and with names. I am surprised people are so dumb as to do that after the whole industry nearly got purged from posting infield even with blurred out faces / identity details.
From what I can tell, there are multiple reasons for this:
- Old school PUAs actually PICKED GIRLS UP. You do not want a girl you picked up and dated/made out with/slept with getting hounded by randoms from the Internet and then blowing up your whole relationship with her. Meanwhile, these new idiots are not getting with many/any of the women they are actually approaching, and never hear from the girl after, so there are no consequences for it there.
- The new "rizz" guys are desperate for views and clout based on "girl hotness." They know they are not going to be impressing anyone with their game. So they are going for "Wow bro, look how hot that girl you approached was. She was totally into you, too!" clout points. TBH old school PUAs did this with "proof pics"... there's an orgy of unblurred "proof pics" in this Joe Ducard article, for instance; Mystery used to have a ton of proof pics of him with girls (faces never blurred)... the difference there is these are mainly shared "within community", or at least on pages or articles people have to dig to find... they are not blasted out all over social media with the guy hoping to "go viral" and have the girl's image spread everywhere.
- The new "rizz" guys have no connection to old school PUAs and were not around for the channel wipe-outs. Yeah, a bunch of PUA channels got wiped out over in-fields, but these rizz guys have zero connection to those guys. They probably aren't even aware of that. So they feel no trepidation over posting girls' faces online.
- The new "rizz" guys are social media natives (as are the girls they're posting vids of). I don't know if it makes it any better, but Gen Z has a much lower expectation of privacy than previous generations had and are much more comfortable having their faces shared all over the Internet. Many of them seem to even like the attention. So the guys just assume it's fine, and the girls seem to care much less.
- The new "rizz" guys are also a lot more 'harmless' from girl perspectives. These guys are basically just going up to girls, calling them hot, then getting rejected. All they're doing for any girl who they post a video of is raising her social value. "Wow, some Internet guy called you hot -- then you rejected him! Girl, you're famous!" Far cry from a PUA approaching a girl with game and picking her up. Girls do not want their actual seductions being broadcast. But them nicely rejecting a guy who calls them hot... there's a lot less anger about men posting that stuff.
Anyway, it's all retarded stuff and is not really helping anyone.
But if you think of social media not as primarily a vehicle for
self-improvement but instead as primarily a vehicle
for entertainment plus as a way to
blow off steam, all this goofy nonsense starts making a lot more sense.
Chase
www.bbc.com
