Penny Arcade Takes On Gender --- But Not How I Wanted

[rax]

So Penny Arcade, which I had talked about not really addressing issues of gender in the past, recently featured a discussion between the two creators about pick-up artistry (PUA) and the "seduction community." You can read the whole exchange here. I'm not going to get into the basic stuff here; you can already go read other bloggers who actually blog on a regular basis talk about those things eloquently. (At least one of those has some genuinely good dating advice in it.) I want to focus on a few specific things I think are interesting about this:

• Gabe's assertion that they were joking and dismissal of people who took him seriously
• Who the assumed reader is (both for their posts and the other posts I'll mention)
• What are the pickup artists saying about this?
• How this ties into the other post I made a while ago

Here's the thing that Gabe said that really bothered me:

I decided to play devil's advocate yesterday with Tycho just because that's something I enjoy doing. I think in reality I fall somewhere in the middle of this argument but that's not as much fun. What I didn't expect was to get flooded with mail from guys thanking me for sticking up for this system because they use it. I also got my share of mail from angry girls but honestly I expected that. I made some pretty ridiculous exaggerations for the sake of a silly argument. Just like any time we exaggerate for the sake of a joke, we end up offending people who don't see the humor in it. We've been doing this for ten years and so the angry mails were no surprise. It was the mails from guys thanking me that really threw me for a loop.

If you go and look at what he'd written up to that point, I don't think you'll find "ridiculous exaggerations" --- I think you'll find things that I see and hear people say all the time. I disagree with them, mind you, but it's not like he said "We should kill all women and replace them with robot orifices" or something that was clearly a ridiculous exaggeration. Maybe I missed some subtlety in there, but if so, I wasn't the only one. I see the humor in exaggerating for the sake of a joke, but I don't think they did a good job here. That in and of itself isn't, you know, a killing offense or anything, it's just failing at being funny to part of your audience. I do this all the time :)

The thing that bothers me is that "Oh I was only joking" is kind of a standard tactic in coming back from saying something offensive. It's hard not to read this as backpedaling, especially with how dismissive of "angry girls" he is. The women (and presumably other people who are not women) who wrote in and said "Hey, that is not cool" are just "angry" and "no surprise," but when men actually agreed with him, they weren't "not seeing the humor in it," they were providing a new and potentially enlightening viewpoint. If he actually exaggerated and said ridiculous things, and people wrote in being on the side of the ridiculous things, shouldn't that be more troubling than people who just didn't get the joke?

Now, he does say some things I actually agree with: "My advice for what it's worth, is that the girls you really want aren't playing a game, and they won't expect you to play one either." "I understand how badly you want to believe that there is a system out there that if you can simply master will resolve your problems. Sadly I don't think that's the case and if there is such a system, it certainly isn't this one." I totally agree with those things. I sort of feel left out of the equation here, though. I mean, their conversation includes the two of them, and one of the people from Love Systems (who blogs about the experience behind this link). Could they perhaps have asked a woman her opinion on the matter, or imagined what she might think or feel? They have wives, it's not like this option was unavailable to them --- and of course women wrote in "angry" as well. Were none of them quotable, summarizable, or otherwise mentionable? If not, why not? I think it could have added a whole lot to the discussion.

The people in the pick-up artist community (which you can find out all about because they have blogs! Wandering into the spaces of people like that is fascinating) at least act like they are actually concerned with what women think about them. Here are a few examples: a Love Systems instructor, who says "some of our most robust critics are usually guys with zero game, whereas all the women that I know who know what we do think its not only awesome, but necessary to make sure guys know how to flirt and hit on them properly!", another instructor going by "tenmagnet," who says "Women, (for example Tyra Banks) tend to understand and appreciate what we do," and the original person who responded to Tycho suggests a few links where women have written about his seminars. One of them seems pretty clearly directed at men; the other less so, though I can see both how it would read to me as "ewwww" and it would read to interesting guys as "Hey, that sounds like maybe I should spend money on this." (I'm also curious if they've ever tried marketing to queer women --- or queer men --- and if so, what happened. Certainly, despite being someone with a theoretical interest in picking women up at bars, I'm pretty certain they are not selling to me.)

They're all pretty on-message about what women think: "Women approve of what we do." But they're not actually asking women to engage them in specific conversation on this, they're positing Tyra Banks and a couple of columnists as an authority for "Women" and moving on. I don't feel engaged in discussion or invited to see what they're all about; I'm just assumed to be on board or of no use to them. They've also figured out that readers of Penny Arcade are going to follow along to their websites and blogs because of this, and in their blog posts, for the most part, try to emphasize the distinction between them and the "bad PUAs": "us and 'PUA's', which I would definately [sic] not class myself or any of the other instructors as," "the seduction community is not the place to go. Most of Love Systems’s competition are second-rate or outright charlatans," "Update: As of this writing, there is now a 30 page thread on the subject of Lovesystems and PUA’s (not the same thing)" (For what it's worth, the forum with that thread has been down for a while, and I've thus not read it. If I'm duplicating work, oops.)

On this issue, they fail miserably at staying on message. "Savoy," who is apparently one of the big names in this cluster, says "Tenmagnet also writes a great blog. I love all PUA blogs, but his is really one of the best." Tenmagnet himself has "pickup" in his tag cloud, and his blog header is "Free Dating and pick up artist advice from Tenmagnet, a Lovesystems/Mystery Method Corp instructor." He also links to "PUA Braddock," another instructor. Future links to "Pickup Artist Tenmagnet," 5.0 uses "PUA" as practically a gendered title like "Mister"... uh, guys, I understand you probably had like four hours to try to take advantage of this huge marketing opportunity (since they charge what, $3000 per attendee to these things?) but.... This is your cake. This is you eating your cake. You can not has.

So other than getting a chance to go and look at how successful these guys are being at marketing themselves, what does this allow us to say about Penny Arcade, and its relationship with issues of gender? Well, sure enough, Automata and Lookouts had no women in them, to the surprise of few. (Automata did have people of color! They play music in a club and get shot at.) I mean, OK, sure, whatever. I get that I'm not part of your audience. And that's just it, I think... I don't feel like they're including me when they address or consider their audience. It's fine that they're guys, I don't have a problem with that. But in situations like this I feel like they are assuming that their readership, or at least the part worth addressing, is male. I think I'm worth addressing, and I think I'm not male, so I feel left out. If their webcomic wasn't funny, I could just go somewhere else, but it's actually pretty funny, and I also don't know where else to go to get the same things. "Gamer girl" things I've seen have mostly seemed to be addressing guys, too.

I'm lucky to have the (incoming shameless plug) Crawl community, which has its share of problems, but there are women on the Dev Team, the playerbase spends its off time discussing gender theory, and calling things "gay" because you don't like them on the IRC channel results in calling out. (In fact, the offtopic discussion group that we joke about calling "##gender-offtopic" started because other people called me out for being sexist. How cool is that?) We're having a tournament at the moment and it's going great. But if I played Halo, I have absolutely no idea what I would do... wait, scratch that. I do know. I'd probably stop playing, and go find something where it felt like the community wanted me there. I think this is also part of why you don't see a lot of women at chess tournaments, &c., but that's another blog post.

I know I wasn't the only person to be bothered by this whole brouhaha --- krinndnz  brought it to my attention and it actually caused me to meet sylvanstargazer . This basically confirms what I already thought: "Penny Arcade isn't great about gender, and it's not likely to change, and I can take it or leave it." Does it change anything for anyone else?

Comments

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Slightly off-topic, as this is more about PUAs than Penny Arcade's response to them in specific, but I was struck by this comment in one of the articles you linked to:

In this society, women hold the power in most romantic interactions. We're the ones who decide if and when sex is going to occur and that gives us the upper hand ... until we actually do the deed. And then all the power shifts to you males. So keep that in mind next time you think a girl is being standoffish for no reason. We're just protecting ourselves.

I know I've heard that this is how it works, and that there's a whole elaborate social system structured around it, but maybe I just don't have enough heteronormative experience-- I always thought of it the situation as either a) mutual agreement or b) rape. The model described above seems to ignore the possibility that the woman might want to have sex with a man who doesn't want to have sex with her. How does that model deal with that situation? Assuming that either the woman is a slut or the guy is queer or otherwise unmanly? < / sexist and heterosexist phrasing > Or what?

It's odd because it's not precisely a lack of female agency-- just a lack of agency-aimed-at-sexual-satisfaction, rather than agency-aimed-at-power-through-manipulation.

Feh.

(Edited to correct my not-really-html-tags)

[kcr.livejournal.com]

I always thought of it the situation as either a) mutual agreement or b) rape.

In the model of the post you quoted, I think in the civilized situation you have a mutual agreement negotiated between parties with unequal bargaining power.

[nathanjw]

Look up the phrase "no-sex class"; it should lead to a great deal of discussion of this model and its problems.

[shahnasa.livejournal.com]

Gaudior, I apologize if what follows is really articulate, and I think this might be what you were saying in your last line anyway, but I know if I don't say it now I won't come back later.

The fact that that model doesn't deal with the situation in which a woman might want to have sex with a man who doesn't want to have sex with her is not an accident. It is, as you say, totally heteronormative, and makes many assumptions that do not play out in real life, such as

1.) Women do not want sex. Or at least the degree to which they want sex is so much less than men so as to be able to be treated as negligible. Sex is simply something women do for men in order to get love/security/attention/etc. Therefore, women do not pursue sex. They pursue the other things, offering sex only when it becomes necessary to continue getting the other things. Thus, women have no agency-aimed-at-sexual-satisfaction, because they do not want, or are incapable of being satisfied by, sex.


2.) All men want sex. The only case in which a man would not want sex with a women is the case in which she is ugly. In which case there's not going to be any "romantic interaction" anyway, because the man doesn't want sex to begin with, and therefore the woman has no power to begin with. See above assumption number 1.), and realize that her power regarding sex is only the power of a gatekeeper, and not the power of an active seeker.

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty accurate summary of my admittedly limited understanding of how the stereotypical heterosexual world works. It's definitely more complicated than that, but I've struggled with it enough to know that it applies quite well to some people and circumstances: the more cis and heterosexual the people you're talking about are and the more heteronormative the social environment (e.g. the hetero bar scene), the more true it becomes.