You’d think PUA types and MRA types would get along just fine. Both have swallowed a red pill to see the true nature of women, male-female relations, and the structures in society that discriminate against men. On the surface, at least, there are grounds for a common cause. However there seem to be two broad types of PUA and two types of MRA:

PUA

1. Young guy with little life experience, gunning it solo in the clubs and streets, up for adventure and a high laycount
2. Older guy coming off some bad experiences, trying to relearn the ropes and lower the age of the girls he dates.

MRA

1. Burned out older guy suffering the consequences of a horrendous divorce raping, finding a community of like-minded sufferers to vent with to ease the pain and disillusionment.
2. Guys who had a near miss with the forces of misandry and has hurriedly educated himself on the bullet he just dodged. He is seeking to rearm himself before going back into life.

Crude, I know. You’d only expect the (2) guys of each camp to get along. PUA (1) doesn’t give a flying fuck for the sociology of Game and hasn’t had any rude awakenings with women. MRA (1) is a totally broken man who is light years from accepting responsibility for his hand in his own broken dreams. I think most of the hostility between PUAs and MRAs is between the type (1)s.

That said, I think there is a genuine bone of contention that can’t be explained away by mere divergent interests and life situations. A common charge by MRAs against Game is that no matter how successful you are with women the very fact you chase them is supplication and the process of chasing them diminishes you as a man. Thus the PUA lifestyle is supporting the pedestalised position of women to the detriment of men, enabling bad female behaviour, saving them from the loneliness such behaviour deserves, and ultimately it is traitorous to the emancipation of men.

It’s a hefty charge. I also think it’s mistaken. Partially. I’ll allow Ayn Rand to offer her thoughts via Atlas Shrugged:

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie – the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on.” Hank Rearden speaking on page 859.

Thank you Ayn Rand for eloquently stating both the fundamental flaw in approaching Game from the Dark Side, and also for why MRAs dislike PUAs. Let’s unpack the statement as it applies to pickup.

MRAs assume PUAs are all dark side and thus Game relies upon changing your identity so you can tailor all your responses to what you think will win the girls approval of you for sex, and that chasing skirt is the main goal in your life. Thus when the PUA lays the girl, the “liar gains a victory over his victim…. one gains the immediate purpose of the lie.” There’s no free lunch. The cost of the lie is in surrendering your identity. You have accepted the target’s frame and allowed yourself to be sucked into her reality. You are not the selector. You know that showing your real identity and intention will lead to a “no” answer and therefore you must create an impression in the girl that you are something you are not, that you are the man who meets her criteria. Thus you fake a reality that is not your own. This is “living a lie” and creates cognitive dissonance which corrodes your identity and self-esteem. The girl’s reality becomes your master.

I think this is what MRAs are trying to articulate when they bash PUAs for being shameless skirt-chasers. They have a point. Few things are more important to a man than his strength of character, his word, and his willingness to impose himself onto an uncompliant world. Surrendering your masculine purpose to get your cock inside a girl cheapens you as a man, and MRAs are very sensitive about their masculinity.

How about the PUA side? Well that’s rather less esoteric. They look at MRAs and see a group of whiny guys not getting laid who are trying hard to rationalise their way out of their sense of inadequacy. Decent PUAs have done their 1,000 Sets Of Hell and are rightly damn proud of that achievement. They don’t take kindly to keyboard jockeys telling them they aren’t masculine when they are going out every weekend and taking rejection after rejection, clawing their way up Pussy Mountain one notch at a time. Being masculine isn’t just about what the MRAs value, it’s also about taking control of your destiny, not relying on somebody else to fix your problems, and getting laid.

My conclusion? If MRAs were to resist holding a 2002 Mystery caricature of Game they’d see that Light Side doesn’t diminish men at all and moreover it returns women to their rightful submissive role – which is where they always longed to be.