Interesting as they were, David De Angelo's "Interviews with Dating Gurus" was just the tipping point of a fabulous journey into manhood. Pick up was back then a marvelous item which dated its roots back to the 70's and was kept well underground for most of its existence until the advent of the Internet Era in the 90's. Of course, I speak of the slang "Pick up Artist", also known by its acronym P.U.A., as being popularized back in the 70's, because its subculture can be traced as far back as WW2 in anti-prostitution banners. There were books written on the subject in the 70's, most notably "How to Pick up Girls". You learn lingo such as "the inner game" (roughly the projection of thoughts concerned with yourself, your self-image, you self-worth, etc.), "the outer game" (the projection of such thoughts unto outside aspects of yourself, the way you handle yourself, how you actually present yourself, hence the affix "outer"), A.A. (Approach Anxiety which can be experienced even by well-seasoned and skillful P.U.A. artists), and so on.
Neil Strauss wrote "Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists" and nothing was the same ever since. It caught my eye more than any other book I had read before or thereafter because he was, first, unsuccessful with women; secondly, because he was a well-established writer before he ventured into a circle of P.U.A.'s and his experiences there served as the coming-of-age amphitheater to his book. There's even a P.U.A.'s glossary in the back of the book with the meaning to most of the lingo pertaining Pick-Up artistry. Then there were books to the divine likes of The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida which just took things out of this stratosphere and into a whole new realm. When you see less-in-depth P.U.A. characters denounce and defy his advise, you know some people will never be satisfied: there will always be critics or, as the P.U.A. community may describe them, "cock-blockers", also known as "haters", well, you get the meaning. First off, you can't expect to grasp Deida's apprenticeship by stumbling upon it as you would a precious stone (which, it sure is), just as you wouldn't stumble upon being good at poker by just sitting at a table in Las Vegas and being dealt a hand. It takes approximately two years for a human being to learn how to walk and if you know anything about body language (which you should, if there's the slightest chance you'd hook up with anyone in the near future), many haven't still quite mastered it. So why rush to get to the finish line, when you know that once you get there, the zen master is just gonna take one look at you and tell you to make the line all over again?
It can get tricky to discern among the many false prophets there are lurking in the midst. But I'll clear some things, since it's not my intention to get things more unnecessarily complicated than they already are. First, if we still want to learn the easy way out of a situation, let's just say that there's no easy fix. However, you can get better at anything if you just put your mind to it. If you find yourself baffled by the mere understanding of a word like "Game", I'll simply say this much: in life, every concept and its precepts, all the ideas governing our thoughts, are in many ways a "game." What this means is, you choose your thoughts -whether you do so consciously or subconsciously borrow them from your parents, teachers, friends, culture, books read, movies seen, etc. - just as you choose your clothes. How fancy you want to look, is really up to you. It's a game, and you'd know it by no other name, because if... say you were transported back just a hundred years ago, there was probably little need for such trickery, life was much more simple or at least was more simplified for our grandparents than they are for us today, but not any less hard. The fact is, women did not have as much power as they do today in any historical period of the species, they can have you or not, they have the right to vote, they enter the workforce in droves, they're even more educated and sometimes maybe even smarter than we are. (Read: "The Unquestioned Superiority of Men", one of my earliest dissertations on this blog, for which I still stand for word by word!) It's not an easy era we were chosen to be born on, for eons women were subjugated, treated like second-class citizens, suffered chauvinism at the expense of their men, and now we, modern beasts, have to "pick up" the tab. It's time to move on from this realm and into a more frank and less deceptive dialogue about how we move on from this point forward.
Pick-up was a good start. Let's not stay there. Today seems just about right.
No comments:
Post a Comment