I Was Able to Kinda-Sorta Get Through This Peter Pan Manifesto

. . . and it was good for a laugh, but not worth rebutting, exactly. Though it does elevate male defensiveness and insecurity to new heights of wordiness.

It’s worth pointing out that:

1) Megan McArdle is a newlywed, so unlikely to be terribly frustrated right now—romantically or sexually.

2) I’ve never had to run after a man, or a bus, because there will always be another one along.

3) I get that there is an analogy to be made between achievement in the world and romantic conquests, but I assure you that someone who’s playing guitar really, really well is not thinking, “wow, I can get lots of guy/girl attention with this,” but rather “this is as good as sex. Maybe better. Maybe not. Dang, but it’s great right now.” That’s how it works in the higher echelons of human achievement. Most of us have pleasure centers that light up when we learn and play and write and pray and do drugs, as much as when we come. That is why we feel sorry for the so-called PUAs; they are missing out on so much real human pleasure. Sex is great, but there’s more in life, even for boys.

4) There is no such thing as a linear scale of what men find attractive in women. Guys like different things. A lot of them don’t like to admit that they like different things, but they do. Likewise:

5) Most intellectual women don’t care what a man’s status is in the world in terms of money or other external signs of achievement. The only coins of the realm are education (not degrees—real education), brains, and a sense of humor. Your alpha male/beta male stuff means nothing to bright women—because we like what we like, and it cannot be predicted ahead of time.

Via Cassandra, who doesn’t suffer fools well.

UPDATE: Previous thought on “the Seduction Community”:
Bill Cosby, Paraphrased
I Used to Know Ross Jeffries: Why PUAs Are Pathetic

UPDATE II: I’ve been reading through the comments on Megan’s second post, and it occurs to me that a lot of men 1) are looking for women in the wrong places [e.g., bars], and 2) may have saddled themselves with a disfiguring label such as “beta male.” When you use that term, and you’re not joking, you will wind up wearing it. And then you have a problem.

Try to stick with terms like “eccentric,” “quirky,” “cerebral,” “thoroughbred,” and “picky.”

UPDATE III:: Also from Megan’s comments. I’ll just quote this verbatim from one of her commenters, “Emmanonymous,” because it reads like a Bible for the socially awkward. Below the fold . . .

I’m now a married woman in my early 30s, but as a teenager, I was just as socially awkward. I was the Nerd Queen of my high school, back when geeks weren’t cool yet, and wasn’t gorgeous enough to override it. (I was/am fairly cute, but it would have taken a supermodel — I was just that bad.) What worked for me was simple enough: find a group of people just as dorky as I was, and learn some social skills in a situation where there wasn’t an overwhelming social inequality to be overcome. Once I got it through my head that there WERE guys in the world who would be really happy to date me, and learned how to interact with them, it was a lot easier to interact with all different types of guys. I also discovered I really liked geek guys, which is why I’m now happily married to someone who once thought he was doomed to permanent bachelorhood. (I met him at a LUG, so I am really, really not kidding about the dork thing.)

I’ve spent close to two decades now watching socially inept men operate around me and other women. I’ve heard a lot of guys say the same things you’ve said, and I’ve noticed that one or more things are invariably true:

— the guy is focusing nearly exclusively on conventionally beautiful girls, and ignoring a lot of girls who are average-to-cute. I think that one of the more destructive aspects of PUAism is the implication that every guy “deserves” totally gorgeous girls, and that it’s impossible to be attracted to girls who aren’t completely perfect. There’s something attractive about pretty much everyone, just like there’s something unattractive about them — it’s a continuum, not a binary thing. There are a lot of factors that can go into being attracted to a woman and an important component is how into YOU they are. Consider how many not-cute women you know are happily married, because I promise you they’re mostly not in soul-crushing loveless marriages of convenience. If you’re desperate for love and human contact, try getting to know women who don’t make you go either “whoa” or “ugh” from across the room — there are a lot more of them, and a lot less competition. Befriend women whom you can’t or won’t date, like married co-workers — you can learn a lot from them about how to get along with women, without getting caught up in the whole friends-vs-relationship dynamic.

— the guy gives off the stench of desperation. A lot of us have taken chances on guys like you before. Sometimes it works out fine and you have a nice relationship, but we’ve all known the guy who decided we were The One by the end of the first date, mainly because we’re the first date he’s had in years. That’s usually a rotten situation to get out of, especially if he’s a guy you already know rather than a random encounter. At best, it involves a lot of mopey guilt-messages on our voicemail, and sighs of woe whenever we run into each other. Sometimes it involves you trying the just-be-friends gambit, with simmering resentment whenever we take you at your word and then move on romantically. Sometimes you’ll trash us to all our mutual friends as “such a shallow bitch”. Occasionally you’ll cross over into stalker behavior, which is really frightening. Most of us have a Desperate Guy in our history somewhere, and if we do, we’re pretty invested in avoiding any guy who shows even the potential to turn into another one.

This is a hard one, because sure, loneliness sucks, but honestly, you have just got to accept that you’re probably going to find someone someday, but that it may take a while. Until you get to the point where you’re OK with that, you’re going to approach every encounter with a woman as if it’s your one shot at female companionship, and we’re going to know it. (This is the one part of PUAism that doesn’t reflexively make me cringe — the idea that there are lots of people out there, and that you shouldn’t hang too much weight on any one encounter.)

— the guy is carrying around a big sense of entitlement. We’re not obligated to go on a second date with you, or put out, or fall in love with you, just because you meet the basic standards of being a decent human being and/or you bought us $50 worth of food and wine. However, we can usually tell whether you think (consciously or unconsciously) that we ought to be, and that’s a signal to Run the Hell Away. Spend some time thinking about how you’d handle rejection at various points of the dating process, not just phone number acquisition. If you find yourself thinking any of them are incredibly unfair, you’ve probably got some Nice Guy tendencies to work on [“Nice Guy” is used herein to mean “manipulator whose niceness is a ploy”–ed.].

— the guy has major psychological issues with women. There’s a really high correlation with PUA and this one, and PUA feeds it in a big way with its depiction of women as hypocritical, irrational, and manipulatable creatures. If you can’t or don’t interact with women you are NOT interested in having sex with, you might do some thinking about why this is so. Do you ever have conversations with friends’ wives in social situations? Do you ever have lunch with mixed groups of co-workers, or have non-business conversations with female colleagues? If you have sisters, do you talk to them much? Do you have any honest-to-god female friends for whom you are not nursing a secret passion? If the answer is no, you might need to do some serious thinking about whether you really think of women as people worthy of loving, or whether you just want an animate blow-up doll.