MANOSPHERE Copyright 2020 Shane Rogers Entertainment Midnight Facts for Insomniacs Podcast Transcript (Note: transcript consists of episode outline)m This topic was suggested by James via email. The Pickup Artist Community and the Manosphere. So this is a weird one for us to tackle, but—for me at least—kind of fascinating. PUA tactics are genuinely toxic, and sadly, they also genuinely work. As long as your goal is just to get laid and also to corrupt your soul. If you’re a guy who has massive self esteem issues and you don’t have the guts to talk to women, these strategies will cure that. And they will cure that by building calluses...for all the talk of “game theory” as some kind of secret code for solving the mystery of women, all it really comes down to is a numbers game: if you hit on zero women you have a zero percent chance of sex; if you hit on 800 women, and even just .001% of them are receptive, you end up having sex with, what, 8/10 of a woman? A stump? I’m terrible at math. You get the idea. So you’ll overcome your fear of rejection and build confidence while becoming emotionally numb and dead inside. Because the seduction community has a cynical view of human relationships. When you view every interaction from the perspective of attack and defense—sex is the target and women’s brains and personalities are basically barriers to sex— women become a problem to solve rather than human h by rings. Life is a transaction. But there IS real psychology behind a lot of these techniques. Evil psychology. It’s mad scientist stuff. So let’s talk about what it is, where it came from, and whether there’s any hope for the human race. There is a long history of men distributing seduction advice and “instructional manuals.” The famous Roman poet Ovid created a three-book-long dating manual Ars Amatoria, or the “Art of Love” in the year 2. It was all about dating in the original aughts. Sex in the Jesus years. It was “sex in the city” except the city was Rome, and women weren’t allowed to have jobs. Anyway his book became super popular, because people realized he knew what he was talking about. He was a ladies man. Those poets were cleaning up back in the day. Nowadays, not so much. Bragging about being a poet is just bragging about being unemployed. But back in antiquity, “poet” was a viable profession. You could poet around all day long, and still make rent. Spend all week poeting and then go on vacation. Like whew, that was a rough week. Rhyming is hard work. I’ve been stuck on Orange for five days. I’m beat. Some of Ovid’s advice: he recommended finding a receptive lady at the theater, or an arena. You should befriend her associates to get into her good graces. Also, according to Ovid, once you’ve earned her affections, be sure to hide your sexual affairs, don’t give her any gifts, and also be nice to her slaves. So take notes, single guys. Wisdom from the ancients. It was a different time. Seriously, romance changes. Advice from today isn’t going to be relevant in 100 years. “Always share her TickTock videos, but don’t duet them. That’s just creepy. Don’t change your Facebook status before the second date“ Pickup artists are staples of literature through the ages, notably the many tales of the fictional womanizer Don Juan, most recognizable from the 17th century Spanish play, and the later Mozart opera Don Giovanni, all of which helped establish the archetype of the aloof, mischievous bad boy. Later in 18th century we get the autobiography of Giacomo Casanova, a Venetian author whose sexual exploits became so legendary that his name is now synonymous with the idea of a desirable and promiscuous man. So even if you weren’t poeting you could still make a living as an author by just bragging about your sex life. And it’s not like anyone could really fact check you back in the day, no one was checking sources and footnotes. The 18th century was a good time to be a liar. The modern art of making money from the art of teaching men the art of getting laid became an established hustle in the 20th century. (it made sense when I wrote that sentence.) In 1931 we had A Gentlemen’s Guide to Scientific Seduction in Eight Easy Lessons by Jack Hanley, and of course who could forget Norton Hughes Jonathan’s Guide Book for the Young Man About Town. These are kind of snooty sounding for hook-up guides. “When you’re a sophisticated gentleman and you want to tap some ass.” But what we think of today as modern pickup artistry was birthed in 1971 from an ad at the back of penthouse magazine by a guy named Eric Weber. To come up with the techniques he interviewed and observed his friends, he interviewed and observed women, he was pretty creepy with all the observing and interviewing, and he ended up with a whole fuckton of misogynistic nonsense which he slapped together in a self published mail-order guide called How to Pick Up Girls! I said it like that because that’s totally how it’s written, with an exclamation point and everything. Here are some choice lines directly from Weber’s girl-picking-up advice : “Whether you know it or not, you already have one great thing going for you when it comes to picking up chicks. And that is, you’re a man. As a man, it’s your right, your privilege to approach a woman any time you want. But women— they’ve got to sit there and wait.” How great are double standards, amiright? Yay misogyny. “Even with Women’s Lib coming into its own, it’s going to be a long time before the average chick can approach a strange man without feeling like a whore.” So we’ve dropped the whole gentleman artifice at this point. “Women are fragile creatures. If they’re not dating they get terribly lonely and depressed. They don’t have exciting jobs and golf and tennis and football to keep them busy all day.” End quote. So look, you’re doing them a favor by hitting on them. What else were they going to do all day? Fending off horny dudes is their only pastime, it gives meaning to their aimless female lives. This is from the introduction, this is Weber explaining why he wrote this book, illustrating that he understands and sympathizes with that feeling we all get when we see a pretty woman: “You’ve just got to see more of her long lean legs. Her fine rounded breasts. Her high, firm behind. For an instant you even consider rape.” Do ya? Maybe if you’re the kind of guy who purchases mail-order sex guides from the back of a porno magazine...touché. He knows his audience. But Weber later did make an attempt to at least pay lip service to basic humanity and restraint. He continued “the most important tenet of a pick up is that it’s mutual … Women are entitled to say ‘no’, plain and simple.” So of course you WANT to rape every woman you see, duh, you’re a man, but like, try not to. Do your best to not commit full-on sexual assault, dial it back to like second degree harassment. There are other little milestones in pickup artistry, but the real inception point, the nuclear bomb that goes off in the nascent incel community, before we even knew that that was a thing, is Neil Strauss’s The Game: penetrating the secret society of pick up artists, published in 2005. It sold 2.5 million copies and introduced the world to a subculture that most of us didn’t know existed: men who had been developing elaborate techniques, terms, principles, an entire pseudoscience of booty- hunting. Strauss was a journalist who was initially assigned to write an article on the pickup community, and got sucked in. He attended pickup “Boot Camps“ taught by one of the celebrities of the pickup subculture, a six-foot-five- inch-tall Canadian who wore a tophat and eyeliner named Mystery, The inventor of the “mystery method“ of seduction. Mystery becomes like Neil Strauss’s muse, his idol, Strauss goes all in on the pickup game, adopting his own obnoxious nickname, “Style.“ everyone has to have a cool pseudonym, it’s like top gun. Maverick, iceman. It has to be something smooth. I’d be “cat guy”...that’s no good. That’s like “cat lady.” It’s like how “cat woman“ is cool (Michelle pfeifer), but cat lady is very uncool. This is where we first learn the PUA terms that would become notorious. Like with all of the Manosphere, from incels to MGTOW—we’ll get into this later— they’ve developed their own creepy little lingo. For instance, here’s the definition of “negging“ from a pick up artist website (link in show notes). “A unique technique developed by Mystery that involves conveying active disinterest in a HB9+ target for the purpose of removing her bitch shield and lowering her value relative to the PUA’s perceived value.“ it’s pretty easy to decode based on context, obviously an HB9+ is a “hot babe” who is a 9+ on the attractiveness scale and a “bitch shield” is a woman’s defensive response to being sexually harassed by douchebags.