Unsurprisingly, some of the "strategies" that seem ridiculous in male PUAs look pretty silly when MacRae tries them too. She looks like a goofball in her "peacocking" getup, but so does Mystery. Her fake name, Cash, is a little ludicrous, but then, um, so is "Mystery." The getting-ready portion of her experiment doesn't really tell us much about gender differences — it just confirms that pickup artistry works better as theater than as reality.

Then she tries out her "game," which includes the famed practice of "negging," or saying mildly insulting things to people to make them want to fuck you. In the PUA "literature," negging seems to be based on two principles: that women need to have their confidence eroded before they will consent to sex, and that they are turned on by feeling threatened or degraded. Since men are traditionally thought to be turned on by the exact opposite, I was curious whether negging would work on them. It didn't. When MacRae called a man "grabby," he ran for the hills.

But women didn't really like to be negged either. MacRae drove a woman away by saying she had "man hands" — to hear her tell it, her PUA tactics were pretty much a disaster with both sexes. This could be because, as a commenter says,

The Game is designed to work on responses *to males* that are "hard-wired" into women. If women want a game-plan for picking up other women (or men, for that matter), some woman or group of women should do the actual work (hypothesis - experiment - confirm hypothesis- practice) the PUA weirdos did to learn how men should pick up women.

Or it could be because silly stunts are actually a bad way to get people to like/make out with/do you. Obviously MacRae was performing a caricatured version of "game," but the original isn't much less bizarre (cf. Mystery's fucking hat) — and, as the commenter mentions, it takes "work." But unless I'm totally missing the point of human interaction, flirting is supposed to be fun. One reason it's fun is that the other person has some agency — you can't be sure what they're going to say next, whether they like you, or what's going to happen between you at the end of the night. Following a whole bunch of tips to make absolutely certain that you're going to hit your "target" doesn't sound exciting, even if it were possible. Frankly, it sounds desperate, a way to satisfy a lack of self-esteem. Which makes sense, given that PUA maneuvers are all meant to give the appearance of confidence. As MacRae writes,

[E]ventually the eyeliner has to come off, the big hats and feather boas hung up, the prefab conversations retired for the night. And you're still whoever you were before you started trying to convince strangers that you are grand, mythic and studly - the same person with the same hang-ups and human foibles. Just with more silly hats.

MacRae's experience notwithstanding, I believe game could work for some people. I'm just not sure "work" is what you want your sex life to do.

Image via Nerve.

I Did It For Science: Female Pick-up Artist [Nerve]

Savage sums up Sodini's murder spree thus: "It's never pretty when chronic sexual deprivation and a lifetime of romantic rejection slam into a narcissistic personality with sociopathic tendencies who happens to live in a country awash in guns." He then writes,

I'm not suggesting that this tragedy could've been averted if only some selfless woman had "taken one for the team" and married Sodini, an asshole and a sociopath. The women who rejected him obviously saw him for what he was and were right to run in the other direction. But if someone had told Sodini, who hadn't had sex since 1990, to see sex workers-something I advised the guys in my column two weeks ago to consider (among other things)-it might have taken the edge off his anger and kept it from curdling into homicidal rage. Maybe if we, as a society, valued sex workers and sex work, if we legalized and regulated it, and if we viewed "paying for it" as a legitimate option for guys who would otherwise go without for decades, perhaps this tragedy could have been averted.

Is he right? Did George Sodini just need the sexual release that the services of a prostitute could provide? Let's look at those other guys Savage mentions. In his July 30 column, Savage answered a letter from "Sick Of Beatin'," who wrote,

This question comes from a point of real frustration. I'm a 26-year-old straight guy. Due to my being overweight, awkward, and generally unable to attract women I'm actually interested in, I have only been sexually intimate with prostitutes and women of low caliber.

Savage gives him a much-needed talking-to, saying, "Stop sleeping with women unless you're attracted to them on some level, and recognize that holding the women who will sleep with you in contempt is an expression of self-hatred and knock it the fuck off." He also writes,

there are sex workers out there who will not only get you off in exchange for your money, SOB, but will work with you on improving your skills and building up your confidence. You may have slept with one already without realizing it because you so resented having to pay for it that you dismissed her as a cheap whore to protect your ego. Dumb mistake.

A sex worker probably could have helped Sick of Beatin' work on his confidence and his erectile problems, but not until he worked on his disgust for sex workers and other "low caliber" women who would sleep with him. Unfortunately, a common thread between SOB, Sodini, and Sodini's fellow acolytes at the R. Don Steele school for dating younger women, is the belief that women can be plotted along an objective scale of attractiveness, and the only ones worth sleeping with are the top of that scale. Savage acknowledges this:

Sodini felt that he was entitled not just to sex and a romantic relationship, but to sex and a romantic relationship with a much younger woman. And he was following the advice of a love-and-romance guru who encouraged him to cling to that belief.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon sums up the Sodini/Steele attitude nicely:

It's a matter of faith to PUAs that there's a single, objective standard of beauty, so if you find a girl to be X amount attractive, that's exactly how much attention she gets, and therefore exactly how much she'll be "stuck up" because she thinks she can do better.

Or, as Amanda Hess at The Sexist puts it,

It is not enough for the Pick-Up Artist devotee to date someone who is his equal; in order to receive respect in the community, he must date someone who is somehow "better" than him ("hotter"). At the same time, the Pick-Up Artist operates on the assumption that women who don't want to have sex with him-even these "better," hotter women-are conceited bitches.

Sodini, Steele, PUA types in general, and probably SOB, believe that not only that "there's a single, objective standard of beauty," but that only women who conform to it are worth banging. And paying for sex, as much as it might release sexual frustration and even pave the way for a non-paying sexual relationship, doesn't count. Because the problem with men like Sodini isn't just "chronic sexual deprivation" — it's a whole slew of damaging beliefs about women, and about what the women you fuck say about the kind of man you are. Like SOB, Sodini wanted women of "high caliber" — unlike SOB, when he couldn't have them, he went berserk.

Marcotte rightly critiques the view that pickup artistry is just about lonely guys "seeking out help." There are lots of ways lonely guys can get help, from therapy to, yes, sex workers. What PUA promises is a way for lonely guys to rank women, and then swiftly fuck the ones at the top. As Savage, Marcotte, and Hess all both point out, it's a false promise — more about selling books than about helping anybody. It's also a dangerous one.

Image of George Sodini (center) from R. Don Steele promotional video, via CBS.

Gasoline And The Match [Savage Love]
Only The Lonely [Savage Love]
Penny Arcade Update [Pandagon]
"Nice Guy Must Die": Gym Killer's Shocking Date Tape [CBS]
Why Pick-Up Game Hurts Everyone Except the Guy Shilling Books [The Sexist]

Roissy is a proponent of PUA (pickup artistry) or "game," and his raison d'etre is helping hapless men "bang" more chicks while spending less money, thus developing into "alpha males." Since the whole point of his blog is to treat women like prey and men like animals whose worth increases in proportion to their savagery, we're not exactly surprised that his list of "tramp tells" (used to distinguish "wife and mother of your children material" from "stopwatch material. You wonder how fast you can get her from 'Hi' to 'Spread your ass cheeks, I’m going in'") is misogynistic. Still, we thought you "wind-up Jezebel lezbots" would enjoy a few selections:

She suggests kinky sex acts.

Cosmo agrees with this one. Somehow we're not shocked by the similarity.

She *really* seems to know what she’s doing in bed.

All those man-pleasing tips aside, you'd better lie back and think of England lest he assume you're some kind of whore.

She has an impressive collection of vibrators and admits to wacking off to porn.

This means "she’s a high testosterone sex fiend who values sexual novelty more than pair bonding. This type of girl is a creature of her id. High T girls are easy to spot. Check for forearm hair, narrow hips, broad shoulders, a penchant for cursing, a flat ass (adjusted for race), career ambition, and status whoring." Thanks, Roissy, for the handy checklist of qualities that are valued in men and denigrated in women.

And, finally, combining several types of bigotry into one fetid package:

She’s black.

It's Easy To Identify A Slut [Roissy in DC]