Just Gaming
There is an incentive to “game the system” wherever there is a system that acts as a gatekeeper, evaluating claimants for some reward and screening out those that fail to make the grade. Wherever there is privilege, there is cheating; wherever there is identity, there is performativity.
Consider again the case of the would-be “pick-up artist” (PUA). The assumptions governing his behaviour are as follows. Females act as gatekeepers for sex; they are comparatively choosy about their sexual partners, and select on the basis of a largely unconscious evaluation of “biological fitness”. This “fitness” is in turn signalled by status markers, which indicate a positional value: “alpha” and “beta” refer to a male’s current standing in the continual struggle for dominance among his peers. “Game” is a name for the praxis of male status-projection, which has to contend with opposition in two dimensions: a) “horizontally” from other males, who may try to out-game you (but who can also be useful foils for establishing your own superiority), and b) “vertically” from females, who will attempt to validate the status signals they are receiving, and will employ various countermeasures to detect and discourage bogus signalling.
There are two further assumptions involved. The first is that some males are just “natural” alphas: simply being who they are is “game” enough. The second is that false signalling provides a means for “natural” betas to obtain the rewards of alpha status. But, as in the old showbiz joke about sincerity (“…if you can fake that, you’ve got it made”), the ultimate goal of the PUA is to acquire “inner game”, a self-confidence initially acquired through enjoying the rewards of fakery that will alchemically transform his natural beta-ness into natural (or natural-enough-seeming) alpha-ness. The “natural” turns out to be interchangeable with the naturalised, with acquired interiority.
The hallmark of “inner game” is its immunity to female countermeasures intended to detect fakery: it is incorrigible and unimpeachable; perfectly smooth, offering no hooks for a hermeneutic of suspicion to latch on to. Every trace of the egregious beta-self has been vanquished and erased. This is a kind of sainthood, albeit the kind that happily coincides with lots of schtupping. Few indeed are they that rise to such a pitch of accomplishment.
The PUA’s is an admirably frank project of self-advancement, which provides a particularly lucid template or schema for “personal performativity” under late capitalism. In our society, an uneven distribution of rewards is justified by reference to the natural deservingness of the winners who enjoy the spoils: they, the golden few, are the truly talented, enterprising and industrious. It’s understood that the system works in such a way as to evaluate personal merit (in terms of market value) and reward it appropriately. At the same time, the promise made to the less fortunate many is that by working to achieve the appearance of merit, it is possible to appropriate and interiorise it.
As with the PUA, the seeker after social betterment must contend both with competition from his peers, whom he must out-perform in order to maintain his positional distinction, and with social barriers – spam filters – established to uphold the proper separation between the deserving and the undeserving. In order to pass as deserving he must resort to systematic guile, a cunning matched to the cunning of the system to which it is opposed. It will always be trying to suss him out: he mustn’t slip, or they’ll have him. It’s in this sense that our intuition is correct that the dire warnings on posters threatening the perpetrators of “benefit fraud” with imminent discovery are addressed to all of us, as subjects-supposed-to-fake-it. The biggest fraud of all is the one who has learned how to stop feeling guilty about it.
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:48 am
Let’s turn your analysis on it’s head: By ridiculing and shaming men
who try to escape the traditional and mostly unpleasnt roles that
conventional matriarchy assings to men (either long-term celibacy or
long-term monogamy with provider enforcement, pace divorce payment
statistics), are you not helping to reproduce exactly those misandric
structures that PUAs, in an attempt to live a better, more
self-determined life try to break out of? By stud-shaming, by
critisising men not interested in monogamy or celibarcy, are you not
reproducing the rough deal that men get in matriarchy? By suggesting
that PUAs somehow trick women (rather than study women to act in
ways more in-line with female desires), are you not sneaking in atavistic
ideas about female sexual propriety?
In all your defense of the sexual status quo, you miss a fascinating
aspect of PUA culture: it’s emphasis on sharing knowledge. In the
past, knowledge of how to become better at leading sexually
satisfactory lives was carefully guarded and virtually never
shared. The reason was presumably the greater scarcity of the key
resource “bangable totty”. Now that we have advanced contraceptive
technology, it became possible to let women have a self-determined
sexuality, and not surprisingly, they have also chosen the path of
greater promiscuity. The lead to greater sexual opportunity for men,
meaning men see themselves less as sexual competitors, and instead, as
a cooperating group, who’s cooperation makes them stronger against
their misandric oppression. In other words, you miss the
politicisation of men.
March 2nd, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Richard Thompson has your number.
March 2nd, 2010 at 12:49 pm
But the homosocial dimension of the “secret society” hasn’t escaped me. Men bond, as ever, over and through the bodies of women.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:02 pm
In the game of the PUA, I’m the guy who wonders onto the pitch oblivious to the match or stadium, and when I get the game pointed out to me, laugh and say, ‘the ball’s nice mate but aren’t you taking the game a bit seriously’?
But I can say that cos I is married like.
I wonder if you are ever an alpha male if you think you are? Or at least if you’re trying to be. But if you think you’re a beta male then you probably are.
Of course it’s all a load of bollocks invented by insecure boys innit.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Why else would you feel the need to be a pick up artist?
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Sorry Dominic to keep banging on, sorry commenting.
I get the majority of your post except the last line? What is wrong or fraudulent with not feeling guilt for refusing to accept the legitimacy of a gate, for example the social security system.
Sometime ago i saw scrawled across a poster warning of benefit fraud statistics comparing the money lost through benefit fraud and white collar crime.
Then there’s surplus profit and the recent crisis, it pales into insignificance. The guilt evaporates if there was any.
P.S Just read the Red Light comment, it reminds me of the Web 2.0 utopians, same kind of self-delusion about the lack of exploitation.
That to reminds me of doing a course to train to work in the care industries where we were with no uncertain times told that if we choose this career choice, even if we do not act abusively ourselves we will at some point become abusers by proxy, there was no way out, it is the nature of the industry
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:56 pm
“Matriarchy”. What planet does that guy live on? I want to move there.
It would be pretty silly not to expect people to fools of themselves trying to suss out sexual opportunities. Most people, including women, discuss their strained relationships with the objects of their desires amongst their peer groups.
It’s the PUA community’s reliance on only the most ridiculous and easily discredited evo-psychology, however, that makes them so disgusting (but mostly just pathetic). It’s so the fantasy of college sophomores and virgins that women are really a coherent social group whose every thought and action can be predicted according to an algorithm based on (largely imaginary) primordial cave-relations. And of course, $$$$$$.
I imagine when these guys finally do “fuck close” they imagine it’s because their tactics and strategery worked, and not because some tipsy woman who was having a bad night, decided to let her standards momentarily slip, and he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
March 4th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
The only people worse than PUAs are guys who actually are naturally handsome, successful and charismatic without even trying. Urrggh!