There is a lot of confusion as to what exactly "PUA," game, pickup, nanpa, etc is. This post hopes to clear up a few misconceptions while making the discussion a bit more complex (in the right way). Let's begin with a few definitions.. These are just my own at the moment, other people are free to come up with their own if they like
PUA - Anglosphere practitioners of "pickup" who apply the systematic studying and testing of behaviors and beliefs on interactions with persons of romantic interest. Fundamentally a
Western practice and ideology.
Pickup - Talking to previously unknown women with the purpose of finding a romantic/sexual partner.
Game - A person's effort towards getting sex or romance with another person.
Gamer - A person who proactively meets potential sexual partners and tries to improve their success
Thus, the casual guy (and every other guy) has "game" and it may be good or bad. However, he doesn't do pickup usually except perhaps at bars or clubs occasionally. A gamer also has game, which might be good or bad, but at least he's trying to improve actively.
Game and Naturals
Every guy ‘has’ game in varying amounts, ranging from “naturals” who, without studying anything, seem to just magnetically attract women to themselves. Everybody has that friend or knows that guy who somehow just seems to end up with women without any real effort on his part. To the natural, pickup seems pretty strange because he doesn’t realize that not everybody has game as good as he does.
Normal Guys
The vast majority of guys, however, don’t really have much ‘game’ at all, and just rely instead on talking to whatever girls are near them in whatever way they can. They try to make small talk, befriend the girls normally, and rely heavily on social circle introductions and women who are near them for their dating pool. They generally don’t really know what to do with an attractive woman when they get her, and thus have difficulty keeping attractive women around them. Occasionally, and often in proportion to how large their social circle is, they will get girlfriends, and sometimes - if those girls don’t have many other good options or if the guy is particularly well put-together (in terms of career, fashion, fitness, etc), those girlfriends will be quite nice. By and large these guys will end up marrying one of the first girlfriends they have, convinced their feelings are the deepest love they can have. Often, these marriages end up in cheating, divorce, or dissatisfaction, which makes sense - the guys didn’t really experiment much with what they like before settling down (remember the average sexual partners is somewhere around 10 for the modern male) and thus can’t really be sure that they married the woman because they truly liked her or because she provided them with something few other women have - sex and a relationship. Scarcity inflates value, etc etc.
Discovering "The Community"
Enough frustration and a bit of courage and entitlement, and a guy might google online how to get a girlfriend or how to talk to girls. He comes from sexual scarcity, which means that he does not have access to as much free sex as he would like. Thus, his first goal is to acquire sex. This can mean either to get a girlfriend, or just to have random casual sex with whoever is near and willing. He stumbles across pickup material, which tells him in varying ways to man up, stop sucking up to women, grow some balls and talk to women he likes proactively, and stop having horrible “small talk” conversations, among other things.
Naturals vs. The First PUAs
This is the “market” or the background forces which made the pickup community. There were a few guys, initially on forums or boards not unlike this one, who had been going out a lot and talking to a LOT of women. These weren’t naturals - because naturals aren’t really aware of their own skill or how to teach it - nor were they “normal guys” who just wanted to have their standard 10 sexual partners then get married to the tenth. They were guys who looked around at the attractive women who were walking around everywhere, and driven by desire, strove to get them.
First-Wave Pickup
The famous initial PUAs - guys like Mystery, Style, Matador, David D, Ross Jeffries, and Tyler - focused initially on “techniques”. They took up the cultural myth of the “pickup line,” the one magical line that would open the gates to the woman’s vagina. They ran with it and expanded it. They were convinced that what separated the naturals from the average guys (AFCs, or Average Frustrated Chumps), was just behavioral - if they could somehow copy the natural’s behaviors, they too would get laid like a boss. This era was the heyday of NLP, “routine stacks,” “negs,” “openers,” “DHVs,” and other similar “moves” which were deployed in certain patterns, almost like pressing buttons on a controller. And these got results, to a certain degree. A hallmark of this era was over-the-shoulder opinion openers with FTC - false time constraints (“I have to get back to my friends soon, but can I get your guys’ opinion on something..”).
The intention behind this was good. The FTC would assure the girl that you wouldn’t be hanging in there far past your welcome. The “over-the-shoulder” body language was meant to be non-threatening, as if the approach was almost an afterthought before you were on your way. The opinion opener was meant to put low pressure on the interaction, and make it so the girl could give some emotional content easily without the confrontational “accept or reject my approach” setup of most pickup lines.
And the result - to seem casual, non-threatening on the open, increase their sexuality and touchiness (“kino”) whereas before these guys were herbacious friendly beta males, terrified of touching a girl, etc etc - was overall a positive one compared to what they were doing before - which was nothing. Guys learned to own their own actions and intentions rather than be afraid of them, to go up to a girl with the “right” things to say to direct the conversation rather than terrified and making lame small talk, and make things sexual and emotional pretty quickly rather than skirt around safe, boring topics like the weather, then were taught to isolate and escalate after building comfort rather than letting the interaction fizzle out.
BUT it was (especially some of the more intense routines) manipulative and dishonest. Routine stacks and compliance ladders, “the cube,” the “Octoberman sequence” “strawberry fields” and other similar elaborate routines were all stuck together as tools in the toolkit, to deploy to shatter ice shields of cocktail waitresses or Abercrombie models, then hook them in to you like little addicts. This was the dark side, the part of pickup that left a nasty taste in the mouths of both women and normal guys on the outside looking in.
There was another huge problem with this “first wave” of pickup. It totally ignored the person - on both sides of the interaction. Namely, it was a cookie-cutter approach that any man could deploy and it would work (to a degree) on any woman. That was its appeal, but also its massive shortcoming. What you were left with was a bunch of same-night lays, and then after the smoke and mirrors clears, you are left with a girl you don’t really know that well and you’ve used up all your routines. Sure, you had sex with her, but was this really you? With no more routines left, you were there, naked and still the same guy as before you learned all this “knowledge,” in all your flaws and mostly unchanged.
Second-Wave Pickup
The “second wave” of pickup was radically different from this. The second wave was based on inner game. The idea here was that you have to master yourself and become an attractive man of value first, then get the girls. Second-wave pickup is a direct criticism of first-wave pickup, and it realized that if you merely use techniques, you are still that same unattractive guy you were before you learned the techniques. In short, the techniques are manipulation and dishonesty - using parlor tricks to seduce a girl who wouldn’t be attracted to the normal you. The focus shifted from learning “facts” and routines to self-development. The idea was everyone should be improving all the time and in all aspects of their life - first become the attractive man, then anything you say or do will be attractive.
“Openers” were exiled from the gospel and replaced with simplicity. Routines were shunned for their role as a “crutch” for weak game. Instead, guys were taught to open with simple things like “Hi” or a self-introduction and trust in themselves. They were taught to fix their wardrobe and hit the gym, meditate to center and clear their minds, eat healthy to feel better and have more energy, read books to increase their knowledge - things which will make any guy more attractive. They were told to make normal friends and pursue meaningful hobbies. And above all, they were told to gain reference experiences and take action. Through action and experience, and through changing your beliefs and improving as a man, you will get better and more high quality women. And it’s not a trick or manipulation - because there are no routines or lies, just your own self. You become naturally attractive first, then merely go up to a woman and start a non-scripted, spontaneous conversation. The amount of women you "get" is a direct result of your ability to 1. Improve yourself, 2. Convey yourself honestly, and 3. Lead the interaction forward
Japan Game/Nampa
Nampa has a long history entirely independent from Western pickup and brings with it its own cultural connotations and practice. Japanese guys have been doing it for decades, and
@Dorian Gray learned pickup from nampa masters and with almost no external influence (meaning - no Western pickup material). These guys have similar but different pickup methods to Western practitioners. However, the game is much different for foreigners in Japan than it is anywhere else.
Attempts to bring first-wave PUA over to Japan failed woefully. However, Japanese nampa proved a powerful combination with second-wave pickup, which is where we now stand. Japan game remains fundamentally separate from Western pickup, and yet the ideas are starting to blend. Japan will always be a bit different from the West because we communicate from different cultural understanding, different language (often), and yet equal socio-economic position... at least when comparing countries most of us are from (a typical Japanese person is roughly the same SES as a typical Westerner). This means that unlike the 80s /90s, Westerners aren't really fetishized and you need more than to just show up to get laid.
Dorian Gray summed up the relation between culture, class, and pickup in his 2013 post “
RSD: Real Social(ist) Dialectics"
Japan game is still quite different from typical Western game, and attempts to apply Western game cut-and-paste to Japan have failed many times before. The novelty factor for foreigners in general and white guys in particular has fallen off dramatically, to the degree where with some demographics and with girls who are more attractive, it can even be a disadvantage. Cultural understanding is necessary to an insane degree here. Thus, Japan game has evolved into quite a unique niche. You definitely do need tight game to succeed in Japan these days, and tight game in Japan comes down to (in no particular order):
1. Cultural awareness (language, media, phrases, customs)
2. Right Action (taking action towards talking to women who excite and interest you)
3. Reflection (being able to reflect and improve from your previous self and interactions)
4. Technical Skill (dealing with AMOGs/friends, logistics, bouncing, texting, etc)
5. Empathy and Genuine Interest (ability to understand the girl in front of you - her values, desires, and choices, being able to tell which girls you have true affinity with and which you don't)
6. Self-improvement (making youself into the best person you can be)
In contrast,
What I think would be "bad advice / techniques" would be anything that ignores the six points above I mentioned. For example (points ignored in parentheses):
-touching the girl on the street (1)
-not understanding (or trying to understand) the girl (1, 5)
-(only) waiting for girls to come to you / not approaching girls you like for any reason (2)
-Relying on any particular technique or verbal routine (3, 6)
-"Be yourself" (3, 6.. this one could be talked about a lot.. it isn't necessarily "bad" advice as much as it is incomplete)
-Wanting or claiming to have a "magic pill" (2, 6)
-Manipulating the girl (5)
-"Every hole is a goal" (2, 5)
-Berating a girl,calling her a slut or a bitch, etc (3, 5, 6)
-Do whatever necessary to have sex (5)
-"Game" isn't necessary / doesn't work (4, 6)
TL;DR, pickup is very diverse and changes depending on the agent, recipient, situation, class, culture, country, age, era, time of day, and probably any other variable you can think of.
