Johnny Wolf\'s PUA Blog

I recently found this article, in Brisbane Australia of all places, which is the one place I’ve been telling guys that “The Game” hasn’t reached yet. Two years ago I did a bootcamp in Melbourne and last year one in Sydney, both times I was shocked and surprised that I didn’t spot a single PUA.

Girls had not been picked up, so even the old school lines like “Who Lies More, Men or Women?” Still were fresh there and worked. But I guess pick up and PUA Tactics have sarged out and tainted the world, now no where is safe!

From the Brisbane Times:

You may have heard of the term Pick Up Artist (PUA), which is used to describe guys who are, or try to be, skilled in meeting, attracting and seducing women.

It was popularised by people like Ross Jefferies, David DeAngelo, a guy called Mystery (who’s so mysterious he now has his own website and VH1 TV series) as well as New York Times writer Neil Strauss, who are responsible for the mass of dating literature in the United States.

I’ve read a lot of their stuff and some of it is immensely helpful for guys who are clueless about how to meet and attract women; DeAngelo in particular is quite groundbreaking with some of his theories.

Unfortunately a lot of what he and the others I’ve mentioned first taught has been bastardised by the PUA community and turned into some kind of weirdo science of mantras and lines and techniques making creepy ‘guarantees’ any guy can ‘have’ any woman he wants.

I’ll give you some other names for Pick Up Artist. Dork. Dating nerd …

PUAs teach you techniques that manipulate women, and when all is said and done and the tide of your enthusiasm for this stuff recedes, when the “negs” and the “patterns” and all the other terminology is stripped away, what you’re left with is an empty shell.

That’s why the art of picking up women is called ‘Game’ in the PUA community, because too many of the guys practising its theories are big babies playing at being men.

This is what Strauss, who influenced this culture as much as anybody, had to say about Pick Up Artists in his book The Game: “The community had grown large and reckless; too many competing businesses were teaching the same material. And we had saturated more than just Los Angeles. PUAs in San Diego, Montreal, New York, San Francisco and Toronto had been reporting the same problem lately: They were running out of fresh girls to sarge.”

My colleague Samantha Brett told me she was in New York a couple of Christmases ago and she was hit on by so many guys who tried to run ‘game’ on her.

The problem was she’d heard all the lines before, so she’d flip it around on them and say “Oh, so you’re a Pick Up Artist? Okay. So run your game on me, get my phone number,” and these guys would just crumble because without a script, they were dead.

Rehearsed cues are not what being a man is about, it’s about being able to feel comfortable in your own skin in pretty much any situation you’re put in.

DeAngelo admits as much in one of his newsletters, where he says: “Over the several years that I was learning how to attract women for myself, I tended to focus on ‘techniques’ and ‘tricks’. As I learned more and more about what worked and what didn’t, I began to realize that my ‘Inner Game’ was actually more important than my ‘Outer Game’.”

Inner Game? It’s how you feel about yourself, it’s the little voice that’s going in your head every second of the day. It’s self-esteem, it’s loving yourself and it doesn’t fall out of an e-book or a Fed-Exed package from a dating guru. It’s hard-won but far, far more valuable.

This is not to say that you cannot gain some fascinating insights from people like DeAngelo, and especially his Double Your Dating series.

I would highly recommend it to any man who wants to further his understanding of the way men and women interact. The same goes for much of Erik Von Markovik’s (aka ‘Mystery’) Venusian Arts Handbook.

Both these resources are crammed with compelling information – just be aware that is at times useful and in other instances, needlessly confusing.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve started to see self-proclaimed PUA ‘gurus’ pop up in Australia – dating nerds who spout the same ideas and concepts as DeAngelo and co. – which I have no problem with as long as they’re honest about what they do.

The truth is there is no one idea or concept or ‘line’ that is going to improve your interactions with women.

If you’re serious about transforming that part of your life, yes, educate yourself, but put your own spin on it, make it part of you rather than becoming part of it, otherwise you risk becoming just another robot parroting lines and routines.

Be cautious of claims made by some dating gurus that you can “place beautiful women under your spell”: aside from being a little creepy, I believe statements of this sort just create anxiety in guys looking for solid advice.

Men wonder what they’re doing wrong because they’re not dating Vogue-covermodel-aerobics-instructors-with-law-degrees and it blinkers them to the opportunities that are right in front of them.

Yes, there are fabulously wealthy, ambitious, “perfect ten” women out there in the world who can chat about literature and science and current affairs but they’re more than likely not going to be at your local pub or club or supermarket – and what’s more – most guys couldn’t be blagged being with that sort of woman.

As Strauss says in his book: “They were automatons. The troops would be sent to the Sunset Strip nightly to do battle – armed with my clothes, my stories, my mannerisms – it was time to leave the community behind. Real life beckoned.”

“We were all searching outside ourselves for our missing pieces and we were all looking in the wrong direction. Instead of finding ourselves, we’d lost our sense of self…. Mystery didn’t have the answers. A blonde “10″ didn’t have the answers. The answers were to be found within.”