Over on PUA dirtbag Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog, a guest poster calling himself Emmanuel Goldstein (oh, how clever) offers a rather revealing take on the psychology of “players” and pickup artists like himself.
After justifiably mocking “nice guys” for assuming that “girls choose men like people buy houses” – that is, by carefully weighing pros and cons and looking for the best deal – he suggests that
[p]layers … are more like that sweet old lady with saggy arms wearing a hairnet at your local supermarket, handing out free, tasty samples.
Stay with him; it will all make sense, sort of, in a moment.
You’re not even looking at her, and she beckons you over to have a taste. Even though it’s junk food, you can’t resist. You avoid sweets, and here you are eating a tiny cinnabon. And really, she won’t mind if you take just the
tiptaste.Regardless, minutes later, you’re going home with a 96-pack of cinnabons – and you don’t even eat pastries! To be completely honest, the first time it happens, you’re a little jarred and confused about how the whole thing went down so fast. …
Now, imagine that that sweet old lady is actually a funny, strapping young man, and you buying those cinnabons is a woman agreeing to sex with him the night she met him. That confusion you felt after you bought a huge package of junk food? That’s how a girl might feel after her first one-night stand.
Yes, that’s right: Mr. Goldstein is comparing himself and his fellow “players” to supermarket pastry-pushers who cajole people into eating things they know they shouldn’t eat, and that they later regret eating.
And, oh yes, that are really bad for them:
If you remain unconvinced, just remember that our economy is in shambles because tens of millions of people bought homes they cannot afford, and that half of us are comically obese from eating too much junk food. That granny sample lady is looking pretty formidable right now.
Now, there are all sorts of things wrong with Mr. Goldstein’s analogy here. Sex isn’t pastry, for one thing, and for another, women (and everyone else) should be able to indulge in either of these pleasures without having assholes on the internet getting up in their business. (And, yes, PUAs, I’m saying that as a fat fatty.) I’m just trying to point out that by the terms of his own analogy, Mr. Goldstein is saying that sex with him is a shitty thing that’s bad for you.
This isn’t someone attacking PUAs for being miserable, self-centered sexual users who are only able to convince women to have sex with them through manipulation, leaving these women feeling shitty afterwards.
This is a PUA who ASPIRES to be such a miserable, self-centered sexual user he’s only able to convince women to have sex with him through manipulation, leaving these women feeling shitty afterwards.
In other words, PUAs are devoting their lives to making women feel bad about themselves. As a life goal, this seems a bit lacking.
Kitteh’s interrogation has some of that too. To be good at it you have to get inside other people’s heads. To teach it you have to let them into yours.
Good point, Pecunium. Though again, like psychological support work, interrogation isn’t a job that anyone’s going to shrug off as being no different from flipping burgers. It’s the whole “letting someone into your body is so insignificant” subtext that was squicking me out in the Feministe arglebargle, especially when there was a shitstorm at one poster who expressed concern that the normalisation/legalisation of sex work could lead to added pressure on the unemployed (specifically the disabled in zir comments) to undertake it. Whether that fear was realistic or not (I don’t think it was), zie was treated as if zie was TOTES HATING ON SEX WORKERS. It was just ridiculous.
So sex work, therapeutic work, and interrogation.
Somehow I feel like I’m in exalted, if frightening, company!
LOL!
I suppose one could combine them in a really niche domination role, too. 😛
But I’ll refrain from telling my psych he’s in a line of work akin to sex work. I freaked him out enough last time when he came back into the office and there was a cat on my lap.
kitteh’s: I got some of that from the, “Oh, a soldier” comments. As if being a soldier was something which needed no brains.
Gawd. You’d think we were in the days of the press gangs (okay, that’s navy not army, but still). Even then they had lots of skills to learn.
Guess what!
Baby tree kangaroo!
Kitteh: You grow cats? That is AWESOME!
Depending on his perspective he may have a wide variety of responses. I am now tempted to taunt my school chums with our similarities to sex work! Also, around the office we sometimes talk about how we are professional friends who answer loosely to the Federal Government, which is somewhat apt – though it’s a very one sided friendship (and has to be, given our current paradigms).
Personally, despite being for universal draft, I think I’d make a crappy soldier – because I don’t think I have the mad skillz. Psych is really my home; I’m perfect for it.
DON’T
I
JUST
WISH!
She was a neighbour kitty who’s apparently taken over the clinic (it’s a general practice) since they made the mistake of giving her tuna one time. First time I’ve seen her and of course I went SQUEEEEEE. The psych freaked a bit – even though he knows her – because I’d just told him about how my Katie, who passed over four years ago, had spent her anniversary hanging around with me at work.
Good thing Clinic Kitty doesn’t look like Katie! 😀
Now I’m all disappointed… you just lure cats with your catnip and tuna infested lap. 8(
Re non-sexual trafficking: Here in Sweden we’ve had trafficking of blueberry-pickers. Which also proves wrong a claim I’ve seen sometimes, according to which trafficking would disappear if sex work were legal. Blueberry-picking is legal.
Re sex-work compared to other jobs: I’m coming around to the view that it should be legal, but for a LONG time I was put off by the pro-sex-work side, since their main argument seemed to be “it’s totally just a stupid myth that sex would be any different from any other activity, a myth propagated by people who think it’s morally wrong to have sex unless it’s true love”. Like I used to be a real slut, I had tons of sex with people I wasn’t the least bit in love with – but I was picky in the sense that I’d only sleep with people I was sexually attracted to. The thought of sleeping with just anyone (well, who isn’t dangerous and so on, but anyone who seems okay and safe and pays you) makes my skin crawl. And I know for a fact that the “people who think sex work should be illegal think true love is necessary for sex” is a total straw-man.
I started to change my mind when someone pointed out the much better argument that people should be allowed to make the decisions they want to make about sex as long as it’s consensual – including exchanging money.
Deoridhe – ROFL! You’ll love this tale (no pun intended): I told my opthamologist the Cat On Lap story and he told me one about his SiL, who’s scared of cats. They were on holiday in France once, walking out in the countryside somewhere, and passed a rather ramshackle farmhouse. A mob of cats – my doc said nearly twenty but he could be exaggerating – came out and made a beeline for SiL, tails in the air and obviously wanting pats. SiL took off, walking faster and faster, with the cats hurrying after him, and totally unsympathetic family laughing and taking photos.
I told opthamologist his SiL would have to give up on the tuna-scented cologne.
Dvärghundspossen – yes, it’s bollocks that legal sex work eliminates sex trafficking. We have legal, or at least decriminalised, sex work in Australia and that most definitely hasn’t stopped it.
“it’s totally just a stupid myth that sex would be any different from any other activity, a myth propagated by people who think it’s morally wrong to have sex unless it’s true love” – that whole line sounds like someone totally alienated (if I’m using the right word) from themselves. Alienation? Dissociation? I’m not sure but it just reads like sex is something remote, and that doesn’t sound like a particularly happy place to be. Am I coming off as judgemental in saying that? I sure hope not, I don’t want to be mirroring the “what are you making sex to be something so important for?” judgementalism, much less suggesting that someone saying it has psychological problems. I just wonder why anyone would insist on their feelings (or lack of feelings) about it being applicable to everyone, or fail to see that such physical intimacy has all sorts of emotional connotations for a great many people.
Haa haaa! That is hysterical!
Yeah, re: trafficking, a chunk of it is for domestic servants, and that is legal, too. The issue is in not wanting to pay the person to do the work, not in whether the work is legal or not. The problem with criminalization, imo, is that it sets even women doing it against their will up as criminals, not victims, which means it’s harder to help them. Criminalization of sex work just tacitly legalizes anything people do to sex workers (up to and including rape and murder), and that’s why I’m pro-legalization. (It’s also why I’m pro-cops-not-being-ICE; just because someone is in a country illegally doesn’t mean we should set up a situation where they are vulnerable to abuse because they can’t go to the police to report what I would consider “real” crime – abuse, rape, murder, etc…)
Legalization seems to have actually increased trafficking in The Netherlands.
Just to clarify – I am totally not in favour of sex work being illegal. All that does is victimise the sex workers, whether they are doing the work from a genuine free choice or whether they’ve been forced into it (trafficked, pimped, trying to maintain a drug habit, whatever).
I should add though that Sweden has legalised SELLING sex, but not buying it. The idea is that trafficking victims and other vulnerable sex workers should be able to go to the police with no risk of being convicted themselves. So technically, you don’t have to legalise sex work period if you only want to fix the problem that sex workers can’t go to the police and report crimes committed against them.
Wouldn’t legalising the selling but not the buying of sex force prostitutes to do unsafe things to protect the anonymity of their clients?
@Lowquacks: Yeah, that’s an argument against this kind of law; although prostitutes can go to the police and report if they’ve been raped or the like without fearing being charged themselves, the entire business tend to go more “underground” than in countries where it’s legal full stop.
The most common argument voiced though is that this law treats prostitutes as children who’re not responsible for their own actions, while only their clients are treated as responsible adults. Like, either prostitution is fine and we legalise it full stop, or it’s bad and ought to be criminalised full stop, but merely criminalising the buyers makes it seem as if it’s bad BUT only the buyers are responsible for what they do.
It’s also kind of pointless in another way; it’s saying “it’s legal for you to sell product X, but illegal for anyone to buy it” – which means there’s no use being in the business of selling product X. Unless that was the idea, to make sex work disappear that way? I hope not, because we know the likelihood of that happening.
I think the idea was based on how drugs have been decriminalized in certain places, but in reverse to indicate who the lawmakers see as being at fault in this case (ie the buyers, not the sellers).
Wouldn’t legalising the selling but not the buying of sex force prostitutes to do unsafe things to protect the anonymity of their clients?
the buying of sex force prostitutes
sex force prostitutes
SEX FORCE PROSTITUTES
I am totally calling dibs on this for the name of a band, comic book or TV show.
@Kitten: Yeah, that was the idea. Obviously no one was naive enough to think it would completely vanish, but the idea was basically “Sex work is bad, there should be as little of it as possible, therefore it should be illegal – but on the other hand, for all kinds of reasons it’s bad to criminalise sex workers – SO let’s just criminalise the johns!”. That was sort of the idea.
Basically, most people supporting this law tend to think that nobody really likes doing sex work, but it’s something you do to feed your drug habit, or as a self destructive thing because you’re somehow psychologically messed up… So sex workers should be encouraged to seek help for their drug habits or psychological problems or whatever it is that makes them prostitute themselves. But if what they were doing were illegal, it would be much harder for them to seek help. On the other hand, johns are EVIL PEOPLE who are taking advantage of the poor sex workers.
And you know, it’s not like the above is NEVER an accurate picture of things. It wasn’t that long ago that a couple of seventeen-year-old prostitutes, who were pretty clearly self-destructive and psychologically messed-up, came forward to the police, which eventually lead to their johns (bunch of rich middle-aged men who’d been hiring them for big gang-bangs) being imprisoned. It’s not like people invented the above scenario, the messed-up poor sex workers and the evil johns, completely out of the blue. I mean, I do think that sex work should be legalised and one should try to get at the problems that obviously exist within sex work in different ways than criminalisation. But saying, as I’ve seen many legalisation-advocates do, that everyone who opposes a legalisation thinks sex is morally wrong unless it’s true love, is arguing against a complete straw-man, everyone who says sex is NO DIFFERENT from other activities is being a moron, and everyone who suggests that sex work is always some kind of rational choice the sex worker made and NEVER something one does because one his somehow messed up is, well, a moron as well.
“Any kind of sex should be legal as long as it’s consensual” is really a sufficient argument.
@Dvärghundspossen
Someone should tell that to Nevada, the Netherlands, and pretty much everywhere else where prostitution is legal, since that legalization has come with an increase in human trafficking, particularly of children. Sex trafficking happens everywhere, but places with legalized prostitution provide a much more lucrative market.