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You know what's weak? Or rather, who's weak?

Pick up artists.

If pick up artistry were simply about teaching shy men how to gain the confidence to approach women in bars, I'd have no issue with it. But these guys don't see any value in the woman they're picking up beyond that night. If this stuff was really about emboldening shy men with confidence, then the focus would be learning how to talk to women in order to find out which ones share common interests with him, and therefore which ones might be interested in dating or a relationship.

Rather, PUAs learn how to talk to women with slightly more interesting banter than usually expected from a guy looking for a one-night deal, and the goal is to basically trick the woman into thinking that he's smarter or more interesting than he actually is. The apparent intrigue will then hopefully land him a bedmate for the evening (but just for that evening, because it wouldn't be long after that the woman would figure out that behind his fancy posturing he's actually just a tool, and a pretty boring one at that.)

I usually don't think about them much, but recently the PUA community has been making something of a statement online since the gym murders of women in Pennsylvania. Their position? That George Sodini was just a "nice guy" who "lacked game" and if "women had just been more kind to him" (read: had pity sex with him) then this tragedy wouldn't have happened.

You see what they did there? They took one George Sodini, obviously mentally deranged criminal, and made him the victim of his crime because WOMEN had been harsh to him and thusly deserved to die. This is all an extreme representation of Nice Guy™ syndrome (link HIGHLY encouraged reading), in which women are to blame for the asshole-ization of "nice guys."

I found this article in the Taipei Times discussing this phenomenon succinctly - but there's a lot more reading on the Internet to be had if this subject interests any of you, for whatever reason. I just wanted to throw my two cents on there so that the WWW knows where I stand.

Music time!