Hi everyone!
I've been assigned to write an article about the PUA industry and the various controversies surrounding it. Since there is so much negative media coverage, I'd like to give members of the PUA community a chance to defend the industry.
Make it as personal as you'd like, and if you would like your name published alongside your comment, please sign it at the end. if not, you will be anonymous.


Please include your age!

Some questions to consider:
What are your reasons for engaging in PUA?
Do you believe that the media backlash is justified?
What is your opinion of Julien Blanc, who has been accused of encouraging violence against women?
What do you wish outsiders would understand about the PUA community?
Do you think the current PUA should be more inclusive of female pickup artists?

Thank you in advance to anyone who responds!

I started liking girls at a very young age but I could never figure them out when I was a kid. I had a crush on this classmate when I was still a small boy in grade school and I was sure that it was love. But I didn't know what to do. I asked my mother, "What made you love dad?"

Her answer damned me for years to come, "He told me that I was the only one he loved."

Why did it damn me? It was because my immature mind interpreted that as something along the lines of, "Show her how desperate you are." I became your prototypical "nice guy," a pushover. I scared girls away with my desperation and uninvited displays of emotional affection. This might sound very pathetic, but it drove me into suicidal depression. "Why wouldn't anyone love me the way I loved them?" I asked myself. My brain automatically answered, "It's because you're worthless."

Learned helplessness never fully took grasp of me, though. I was always in search of a way out of my pain. I eventually found it.

I first learned of the "underground seduction community" (this term is interchangeable with "PUA community") back around 2003 or so. They promised the answers that would help me fix the errors of my ways. They taught me that I always got rejected not because I was worthless, but because I simply had the wrong attitude about it all. I wasn't supposed to put women on a pedestal, I was supposed to actually value myself. I wasn't supposed to profess my undying love to every girl I had a crush on, I was supposed to lightly tease her. I wasn't supposed to be a desperate nice guy, I was supposed to be confident.

These concepts may seem like common sense to a lot of people, but they didn't come so naturally to a lot of other people like teen me. And a lot of adult men still don't get it.

Modern day marketing may make the PUA community look like a bunch of manipulative scam artists trying to teach you how to become some sort of super pimp that objectifies women, but I've always seen the core of it to be a much-needed source of remedial education for desperate, lonely men who would otherwise be good people. I've seen both the sincerity and pain in most of the men that I teach this stuff to. It's like seeing a bit of my past self in them.

And to this day I continue to help others who were once in my position because I think it's the right thing to do. My views have constantly evolved from delving deeper and deeper into all this pickup and seduction stuff, and now I find myself in one of the many schools of thought in the PUA community that promotes feminism alongside rampant, unbridled seduction. Why? Because a marriage between the two just makes sense. Man or woman, we all want the same thing: connection. I don't know about "justified," but it's certainly to be expected. There are many schools of thought in the PUA community, and the ones that stick out like a sore thumb and get the most attention are the ones that objectify women and treat intersexual relations as inherently adversarial. The misogynistic ones call themselves part of the "manosphere." Pretty ridiculous.

For some reason, human nature compels us to pay more attention to the negative than the positive, so of course the negative aspects of our community will get the most media attention. And the negative aspects of our community are very problematic, too. Guys that get rejected over and over again are drawn to us, and many of these same guys become bitter and misogynistic. I went through a phase of intense bitterness toward women myself. Fortunately, more enlightened minds from our community helped me past those immature stages in order to end up truly LOVING women. I hope to help more men through these stages as well. Old news, but his actions are fully condemnable and any pickup artist who isn't conscious of women's issues has no business teaching this art. We all need to wake up to the truth that we're all in this together; pickup it isn't about taking back your power from women and asserting your dominance over them in order to appease your fragile ego. It's not about power at all. It's about building a bridge. It's about intimacy. They can think what they wish to think. What matters is that the men trying to get help get the help that they need, not what the general public thinks of what essentially boils down to celebrity gossip. We've always invited women into our community with open arms, but let's face it: most women aren't interested in what we're selling. On the outside, our community promises to get you laid. This successfully draws in the kind of men we're trying to help change. Once they're in, we feed them the holistic kind of long-term improvement they actually need. We're changing who they are rather than just teaching them little tricks to trick women into sleeping with a scumbag; we're changing the scumbag into a genuinely attractive man with an attractive personality. Are most women generally interested in any of this? No. When it comes to dating, most women are generally more concerned with keeping a good man around because they usually don't have too much trouble bedding him in the first place. Most women are generally more concerned with the time constraints of their impermanent youth and how that ties in with their dating lives. Most women are generally more concerned with the social consequences borne from sexual activity that would otherwise not be a problem if it weren't for the unjust double standards imposed upon society by the patriarchy. Our so-called "gurus" don't usually discuss these things. Well, I do, but it's in the context of understanding women rather than overcoming these challenges as women.

In the future, though, I would be very excited to see if there were more room for women in our community. If there is a greater role they can play here, I'd love to help in any way I can. To be honest, I'd jump on any excuse to have more women around me. I love women!

- Michael Chief, author of Attraction Arsenal and creator of the Seductive Introvert program