Even though the heydays of the PUA community are long over, its spirit still lives on in some corners of the Internet. Nowadays, nobody would claim that “looks don’t matter”, which was the quintessential absurd PUA claim. Instead of addressing those obvious objections, today’s hucksters are much more positive in their messaging and seem to ignore basics altogether. “Just be confident, bro!”, they tell you instead. Of course, at the core of human mating behavior is the preeminence of looks. Men want both their short-term and their long-term sexual partners to be physically attractive whereas women want to get railed by Chad in a bathroom at Starbucks but when it comes to financing her life and kids as she gets older, they are much more interested in how thick their man’s wallet is. Obviously, in the West women can just leech off the guy with the thickets wallet of them all, namely Daddy Government.

PUA dogma was that looks do not matter at all and that other aspects are much more important. They spoke of “glitches in the dating matrix” that allow you to “highjack her brain”. To do all that, you only need to approach her from a 42.5 degree angle, have half a dozen magic tricks memorized, and pretend that you are not sexually interested in her. She’ll never see through this, bro! When PUA dogmas were less and less convincing, the PR changed. The last-ditch effort was to talk about “that one guy” who was short, ugly, and poor who nonetheless banged all the hottest women. Lowly interns at those PUA companies flooded the Internet with messages about this mysterious one guy we all know who gets laid due to PUA techniques. Strangely enough, even though all the PUAs and their interns knew him, no footage of that person ever surfaced.

Let us look at what women communicate in their dating preferences. For a one-night stand they want the hottest guy they can get. Yet, PUAs are telling you that they can completely change a woman’s hard-wired biological preferences that have an evolutionary history of millions of years. Instead of “I want the hottest guy I can find”, Stacy is supposed to believe that in the absence of the hottest guy, the ugliest guy around will do just as well, provided he pulls off a bunch of PUA routines. Also, women love to brag about the guys they had sex with. For one-night-stands they talk about this or that hot dude. Do you think Stacy would sit together with her friends for brunch and boast about this “really ugly guy” she fucked last night? The proposition is so absurd it boggles the mind that anybody could ever fall for it.

For a long-term relationship, women want a guy who is financially stable and, ideally, also good-looking. I supposed the PUA claim is that you can somehow trick women into believing that it is not important for their man to have achieved a modicum of success in life. Women boast about how much money their boyfriend or husband makes. I suppose in the alternative reality of PUAs, women do not boast about the 5-series BMW their husband recently bought, which would make the others chime in about the cars their husbands drive. For PUA teachings to make sense, women would need to be just as happy to one-up each other about how little money their partners have. A passive-aggressive statement like, “Oh, your husband has a new 5-series BMW. How lovely! We also thought about getting one but in the end we decided on a Porsche Panamera.” is supposed to be replaced by competing about who has the shittier car. It is laughable to believe that. Again, just like in the case of the men women want for one-night stands, PUAs promote a complete inversion of reality in the case of female preferences for long-term relationships as well.

Let us now turn to how men view women. We all want our women to be attractive. Do you think any female dating coach could teach women to trick you into finding old, barren women sexually attractive? Probably PUAs would claim that this cannot work on men as they are smarter than women, yet dumb enough to buy the claim that looks do not matter — for women. If you want to get laid with some random slut, you would probably agree that you want the sexually most attractive woman you can get. Yet, applying PUA reasoning to this would mean that men can override their hardwired biology at will and somehow want to go for the ugliest chick they can find. Presumably, she should be as ugly as can be, and the older she is, the better.

When changing the perspective from the woman to the man it should be immediately obvious how utterly absurd the claims of PUAs were. They made no sense at all, yet it took about one decade for that community to die off, so desperate were men for a supposed shortcut to romantic success. Then again, we still have multi-level marketing schemes, pump-and-dump stock fraud, and the engineered boom/bust cycle, so it is not as if humanity has collectively smartened up. Compared to financial scams, the PUA industry was small fries. When I came onto the PUA scene and exposed its lies, there was no end to the hostilities I received. It was obvious to me that the people whose financial livelihood I threatened were pretty upset about my work. However, it took me a while to understand why plenty of regulars got really aggressive as well when you told them that looks really do matter and that dating is pretty straightforwards and not at all like PUAs portray it. The problem was that those men built an identity around PUA ideologies, just like today you have people who have taken four jabs of mystery juice, got Covid nonetheless, and still think that the unvaxxed are the problem. Arguably, the bigger issue here is that less than 10% of people in advanced societies are able to think critically at all. In that regard, we should be glad that the PUA industry was around as a nice little case study of that issue.