PUA lines and systems aren’t worth spit … that said, that doesn’t mean that everything written on those sites is bad. There are definitely useful bits of advice here and there.
**I’ve seen quotes where a PUA guru was essentially telling men to commit sexual assault and coerce women into unwanted sexual contact. OK–here’s the link:
doctornerdlove.com/2013/06/trouble-pick-up-artists/**
“On Wednesday, a Kickstarter project for a self-published book on picking up women entitled “Above The Game” started rocketing across blogs and Twitter. The author, a regular poster on r/seduction, a sub-Reddit dedicated to exchanging tips on meeting and hooking up with women, was looking for $2,000. He ended up getting over $16,000 – mostly from Redditors. Nothing terribly interesting in and of itself. The samples of his advice he was giving…”
**CAFers, you can read the sample at your peril. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
This is well beyond the “look nice, smell nice, have good posture, smile and have good eye contact” advice you can read anywhere.**
One that I mentioned earlier: look to a woman’s actions as far more representative of her true feelings than her words when her word and actions do not align. That was one of the very best and most valuable lessons I ever learned.
**That’s genuinely useful, but you can hear it elsewhere. It is actually a Maya Angelou quote I’ve seen bandied around: ““When someone shows you who they are believe them.”
It’s equally useful for women who forgive anything when accompanied by the right kind of sweet-talking. **
Another one: “just be yourself” as often advocated on Catholic or Christian guides for men (and to be fair, most secular guides as well) is really, really bad advice … if “yourself” behaves like a nice guy who supplicates a lot and operates on covert contracts.
Agreed. I would definitely not say, “Be yourself!” to a guy, not knowing anything about his appearance, personality or general situation.
A third one: Paul truly understood the nature of men and women when he called on men to love their wives and wives to respect their husbands. Why did Paul put the words “love” and “respect” this way? After all, he did not say, men respect your wives. A good discussion right there. But the flip side that is seldom discussed in Catholic or Christian advice for men in a realistic way: what are practical ways for a man to maintain his wife’s respect and why that is so vital to the health of the marriage in a social environment that encourages divorce.
**Not something you’ll find in the PUA community proper, but I agree that Athol Kay is actually pretty good, although the idea of keeping divorce hanging over the other’s head is bound to get a little old.
**
One more: while there is considerable disagreement among secular men’s blogs on what men should say and do around women, there is actually a fair amount of agreement on what behaviors men should avoid because they are almost always unattractive to women. What they’re saying is that not doing X, Y and Z, etc., can go a long way toward avoiding turning a woman off too soon, and a Catholic man would do well to follow this too. Some of those behaviors have been discussed in this thread. Here’s a short, abbreviated list:
- don’t be indecisive.
- don’t slouch. fix your posture.
- don’t dress or groom like a slob.
- don’t let yourself go physically.
- banish verbal place holders like “umm”, “aah”, “ehh” and/or “uhh” from your conversations
- don’t whine, moan or complain in the presence of women you don’t know well or are just beginning to date.
- don’t let a woman’s poor conduct go without a response.
**That’s all very reasonable.
I suspect, that if we were to have an hour or two with some of our CAF no-hopers, it would be easy to discover some quick fixes.
**
