BBC article on "The Seduction Game"

[TheRattleBag]

This is horrific - especially the bit about consent:

"He told us that men can be too preoccupied with consent.

“Sometimes guys are a bit too shy or a bit too scared to keep pushing forward [be]cause they [men] want like… they want so much consent. I mean that they want lots of like… a written permission slip from her like, you know, ‘it’s okay that we go all the way’. ‘Cause it’s a nuance, obviously, you have to… you have to feel out the right moment, and sometimes it is your job to push things forward and lead.”"

The Seduction Game

when no means yes

I read this this morning and was appalled. Read bits of it out to my DH and he was appalled too.

Hopefully I'll be able to catch the programme on catch up.

I just hate this ramping up of men's entitlement. Every which way you turn men are demanding that their sexual needs are met, whether it's AGP or other kink or just hammer hammer hammer at women. I'm so cross.

Governments and society need to start addressing male violence too - the root cause of most of today's problems as far as I can see.

And I'm not a man hater. But I do hate some male behaviour.

I just don't understand why people would ever think it's acceptable to stop a complete stranger on the street and demand their phone number.

So much entitlement and then rage if they don't get their own way. Sickening.

Ghastly.

Thank heavens the predator the article opens with has now been locked up.

What sort of a person thinks this way? (We all know the answer - rapists).

I saw a summary of this on the BBC news at lunchtime, interviewing the journalist, with clips from the programme. I was really annoyed that the tactics got all the publicity, almost like a free advertisement for these type of people. I felt more emphasis should have been given to how this stuff should have been removed from Youtube.

Needed countermeasure: a massive movement for women, by women, about consent, about boundaries, about what healthy relationships and healthy social behaviour looks like, how to expect to be treated with care and respect, and how to deal with abusive and entitled people.

Which is the root of the issue really. Men who do not want to have to change sexist, abusive, entitled behaviour are finding women don't want to have anything to do with them. They're urgently looking for narratives that frame their behaviour as ok, and taking what they want by force is ok.

Right back to basics that most people learned by the age of 5: if you don't play nice, no one will want to play with you. And no you can't call that a phobia or any other excuse. Be responsible for your own behaviour like a real grownup.

Excellent post Michelle.
There needs to be a fundamental rethink of the messages that are being shared with young people - although with so many porn advocates in influential positions these days, I'm not sure that will ever happen.

^

And further education of men to understand that they are not to force their attentions on women.

I'm up for this. If anyone has ideas on how to make it happen then I'm very happy to give time and energy to working with them. The right to say no and to not accept the shit end of the stick via an accident of birth belongs to every female.

And further education of men to understand that they are not to force their attentions on women
Surely these men know this already? The problem is that a) they can get away with it b) that this sort of behaviour is promoted on the internet

I can't face watching the programme

but this article got me thinking about how long PUAs have been around - a long time, because it's been tried on me! - and I thought, how is that more women aren't aware? Should it be included in sex ed at school now - or maybe it already is?

Just starting now

Okay I am watching it

I don't understand the shop approach in particular

In my day(!) as a teen out shopping, a man or boy started talking to you, you told them to fuck off. What happened that teen girls are listening?

I get that if you're alone in the dark, you're scared. But the shops being a good place, I don't get.

I think some of the PUA stuff is just making money out of gullible men. I once read a bit of it (know your enemy kind of thing) and it suggested that men carry a piece of fluff with them, so if they see someone they fancy they can pretend to remove the fluff from their clothing in order to manufacture a conversation. Only sad, desperate losers pay money to be told that kind of crap.

Reading about 'negging' helped me understand why so many men appeared so very charmless in their pickup attempts.

Then there's the RooshV kind of loons whose spectrum runs from internet whiner to the full Elliott Rodger.

Surely these men know this [not to force their attentions on women] already? I think a sizeable chunk of them don't, horrifyingly. Where is it...
www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/22/one-in-seven-young-australians-say-justified-if-women-change-their-mind-study-finds

www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/a-third-of-male-university-students-say-they-would-rape-a-woman-if-there-no-were-no-consequences-9978052.html%3famp

And then there's all those men who punish women with verbal abuse for the crime if rejecting their advances. As a young woman I worked in bars etc and was frequently called things like frigid bitch or cunt if I didn't want to meet with customers after work. Those men thought they were in the right.

Horrible men - utterly vile. That young woman described very well how she kept trying to ignore that creep, breaking eye contact, short responses but didn't want to be rude or make him angry - the fear of what he might do.

I read a book about 12 years ago called The Game about all this PUA stuff. I'd like to re-read it with the benefit of an extra dozen years of maturity.

They're talking about this on Radio 5 Live.

Wasn't there something very similar to this on the BBC on this a couple of years ago?

Women are socialised to be nice, and not to be rude, partly for fear of provoking aggression. About time we said sod that, but it's a hard habit to break. In a public place, it should be easier, but it doesn't feel like that

Surely these men know this already?
Well, if that's the case, they're rapists, aren't they? Coercion.Thousands of them. Fucking thousands.

I became interested in this partly because of a book on the War on Women and partly because two men attempted to pick me up using exactly the same approach. I've done a bit of research this weekend after reading the original post and one of them definitely has studied PUA stuff. And he's a fucking singer, a well-known artist in his field, you'd think he could pull just with a good song.

It is scary, and embarrassing, when men come on to you. As well as the 'he might kill me, I'd better not annoy him' and the 'I mustn't hurt or embarrass him that would be unkind' and the 'Aww, he likes me', perhaps women are always just hoping someone nice will like them. Maybe we really need to boost the self-esteem of younger women and women-children so that this need has less influence on their decisions.

I watched about 30 seconds of the program before virtually combusting with rage.

I had someone who had clearly been on this type of course approach me about a year ago. Middle of the day, was walking to yoga. He was about 20 years younger than me. Just kept asking me questions, telling me how nice I looked, etc. Wouldn't shut up or leave me alone. To be honest, I first I thought he might not be NT, so I didn't instantly tell him to fick off. After a few minutes of him going on and on, touching my arm, etc, I just stopped, looked him straight in the eyes and told him to stop harassing me immediately or I would call the police. He looked terrified, but then, surprise, surprise, started calling me names as he walked off.
It was such an uncomfortable experience - brought back so many memories of being treated like this in my teens and twenties. It's fucking infuriated that there are plenty of men out there who think this is fine.

I think all young teenage girls should be given a mandatory course of krav maga training! That way, they don’t have to tolerate any of this shit out of fear of provoking the bloke to attack them.
The knowledge that you can drop even the biggest bloke to the floor and incapacitate him long enough to make your escape is hugely empowering!
My own DD now rarely even gets approached by these creeps - I’m sure that’s because she gives off such confident vibes of “Don’t fucking mess with me, pal”.
She’s stepped in to help other young women being hassled, and volunteers to provide security at feminist marches and meetings.

My opinion for what it's worth

I believe that anyone who can bear to do so should study these pick up artists and their techniques.

The technique described in the BBC piece is called "escalation" and a youtube search for "pua" and "escalation" will bring up some videos worth reflecting upon

Also it is worth understanding that there are many similar shcools for women, only instead of PUA they are called Goddess schools / academies or schools for seduction and similar names

There is a fairly awful 2004 film called School for Seduction that features exactly this kind of school

trailer here

the entire film can be seen on youtube but in a very poor quality upload

These is an intersting clip from the film here, with Russian language overdub. These kinds of school are all over Russia and Eastern Europe.

By some strange coincidence the writer for School for Seduction, Martin Herron, is also the screenplay writer for the film Irina Palm, a strange film in which an elderly lady regains her self-confidence by working in a sex club masturbating men through a hoole in the wall. She ends up falling in love with the pimp / sex club owner, and he with her due to her amazing masturbation techniques.

Irina Palm trailer here for anyone interested

Of course the difference between the PUA schools and the schools for seduction is that the latter claim to teach women to either marry a millionaire or to secure gifts and money from men.

The schools operated by cults claim to empower women by training them to be goddesses, however the "goddesses" usually end up working as strippers, pole dancers, porn actors, sex cam girls, escorts etc.

Their role can be to earn money for the guru / cult but also to seduce politicians and people in positions of influence and serve as bait for compromat.

Jeffrey Epstein's network operated in a very similar way on a number of levels

Extremely vulnerable young women were groomed via a pseudo-academic process and were taught skills of how to please men sexually.

Young women who were the daughters of extremely inflential people such as politicians were also groomed and abused.

The main difference between the MO and the 2 different groups of females is that while the former were used as bait for obtaining compromat on people of influence (via compromising film and photos), the latter were used to blackmail and compromise their parents. Nobody wants to see their daughter sexually degraded on videos on the internet and powerful, influential people especially don't like it.

These videos are from an extremely dangerous Russian cult that operates goddess schools internationally, highly active in Mexico where these videos were filmed