Women, beware this PUA army of sleazebags, saddos and weirdos

The first time a man used a trick on me that he had learned from a pick-up artist (PUA), I did not do any of the things his guru had promised I would: I was not “intrigued”; I did not feel an urge to “impress” him; and nor did I immediately drop to my knees and start servicing him sexually – which was, no exaggeration, cited as a possible outcome. Instead, I walked away. In PUA parlance, I showed my “bitch shield”.

It was 2010 and I was single in New York, which meant that every time I went to a party a friend would insist on fixing me up with someone who they knew I would definitely love, if only because we worked in the same field. So I turned up to a friend’s party and was thrust in front of a 30-year-old dude who worked at GQ. He asked me what I did for work. I told him, and he laughed. He asked where I lived. I told him, and he made sarcastic comments. By the time he asked me where I grew up, I thought I was prepared for his reaction. I was wrong.

“Ohhhh, I know that part of town,” he smirked. “I used to tutor kids up there, but I couldn’t justify to myself giving an extra leg-up in life to spoilt kids, and dealing with their dumb-dumb parents. So can I have your number?” I told him to get it off my butler, and walked away.

I assumed he was just a weird one-off. Again, I was wrong. There was the 50-year-old news editor (“You work for a British paper? Does your wrist get sore copying stories off the New York Times website all day?”); the 25-year-old from a trendy literary magazine (“Has anyone else ever told you that you have a face like a rabbit?”); the 45-year-old arts critic (“I’m having a party. You probably shouldn’t come – it will be quite highbrow”). Eventually, I mentioned to a girlfriend that the men in this town all seemed to be jerks. She rolled her eyes: “It’s that negging thing. They all do it these days.”

“Negging” is a “negative hit”, or what you and I call an insult. PUAs teach their acolytes that if you insult a woman, she will be intrigued and see the man as a “challenge” , or what you and I call a jerk. The PUA mentality is that women should be psychologically (and sometimes physically) manipulated into having sex.

After stories this week about Dapper Laughs, the character created by comedian Daniel O’Reilly, who was a maybe, maybe-not satire of a PUA, and whose show has not been recommissioned by ITV2 after thousands of complaints, and Julien Blanc, a real pick-up artist who was deported from Australia after protests against his seminars, this feels like an opportune moment to turn our attention away from O’Reilly and Blanc themselves, who are ridiculous (Blanc, in particular, looks like the human definition of “douchebag”) and on to their many fans, who shouldn’t be dismissed quite so easily.

For it is easy to dismiss the men who look to Dapper Laughs for pulling advice, or who pay a shade under $3,000 to attend one of Julien Blanc’s “boot camps”. They’re sci-fi saddos; they’re World of Warcraft weirdos. Of course you think that of men who listen to pick-up advice that ranges from “Tell her: ‘Get out your gash,’” (Dapper Laughs) to “Command her: ‘Get down on your knees, call me master and beg me to kiss you’” (Julien Blanc). (You may have noticed an overlap in attitudes towards women from these two chaps.) Even O’Reilly tried to distance himself from his fans when he appeared on Newsnight in an I’m-taking-this-issue-very-seriously black polo neck:

“That type of humour was really popular with a certain demographic,” he mused, solemnly. “I didn’t think so many people would see it.”

Indeed. One audience member with whom it was so popular was O’Reilly’s own father. He tweeted his son that a female writer who criticised him was “to [sic] ugly … to rape”. Can’t choose your family, right, Daniel?

Like O’Reilly, I imagine quite a few people will be surprised by the popularity of Dapper Laughs and the rest of this stable. They shouldn’t be. I would bet my bitch shield that in any office in this country there will be a handful of men who have at least considered using PUA techniques. These are men who resent women for having the free will to turn them down, and they want to manipulate them accordingly. Yet they look like everyday guys. Of course, there are extreme versions, such as Elliott Roger, the 22-year-old who killed six people earlier this year, whose manifesto was a PUA statement book writ large:

‘You girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you for it,” he wrote , which is not very different to the kind of talk you get from PUAs at their seminars.

But he was the extreme end of that wedge. For the most part, men who pay attention to PUAs are just normal looking guys who have an inner rage against female free will. The popularity of PUAs and Dapper Laughs is a backlash against feminism that rapidly becomes one of the more puerile strains of misogyny.

Happily, despite the $3,000 price tags and promises, these techniques don’t work on the vast majority of women. A woman recently posted a conversation she had with Julien Blanc on Tinder, in which he begged her repeatedly for sex:

“I promise I’m normal.”

“:)”

“Please respond.”

“You should be happy I’m acknowledging your existence you whore … Grow a pear [sic] pffft.”

“Please ignore that :).”

“I’m sorry, I’m just very desperate.”

“Why won’t you sleep with me?”

“Is there something wrong with me?”

And, just like that, he answered his own question.