Casanova's condemnation of the Pick-Up Artist.

A while back I wrote an article for GMP about how men had to change their attitude when dealing with women. I mention how men have to stop treating women like a challenge to be won with scams and lies. And I left it at that. I understood I had stated my mind on the subject and moved on to other aspects of what being a Gentleman.

Till a fellow blogger, @MarieFranklin00, brought to my attention the PUA (Pick-Up Artist) Community and BootCamp training centers.  At first I thought it was a joke, sort of the “Colbert Report” of Romancing. Maybe it was a comedy skit for some late night show or a joke ad brought to us by a Deodorant company. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized just how real this thing is. 

"Over the past ten years, we have systematically developed the most effective methods in the world for attracting and dating beautiful women. As our thousands of students worldwide have learned for themselves, our system is real, and it gets results."

These workshops teach men how to be more confident and assertive when dealing with women, how to read a person’s body language, and understanding the importance of how you project yourself to others. These are all very valuable skills every man should develop. Unfortunately, the way these lessons are taught is by degrading and devaluing women. Saying that these workshops teach men to be more confident and outgoing when dealing with women is like describing the Spanish Inquisition as a “marketing strategy used by the Church to get more members”. They both might work, but not for the right reason. The main concept drilled into the mind of these guys is that women deserved to be “screwed over”.  Ladies are viewed as manipulative gold diggers, so coning them is not only ok, but actually some sort of masculine righteous vengeance. They consider themselves the equivalent of amodern day Casanova.

Guys (cannot call them Gentlemen, or even men), read your history before you hurt yourselves.

Giacomo Casanova, like Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron, loved women, maybe a little too much. All three might have been womanizers and hedonists, but they actually respected women. What made them attractive to women was how they men actually paid attention to the desires of the ladies, liberating them from the chains of a repressive, uptight, misogynist social structure. 

Casanova’s relationships with the ladies went beyond just sex. He would create a fantasy where these women could escape their dreary life. He offered women what every woman who respects herself must demand: all that he had, all that he was, and a world larger and greater than what is regularly given to these women. Casanova himself wrote that the best way to romance a woman is to offer her DIGNITY. He openly disdained alcohol and violence as a means of seduction since mutual consent was crucial. For him attentiveness and small favors opened the path to a woman's heart, but it was a man’s skill with words that would conquer her. "Without speech, the pleasure of love is diminished by at least two-thirds". Interestingly enough, Casanova was a rather plain man in appearance.

He always avoided the easy conquests or the overly complicated situations. He would never go after a novice or inexperienced women, since he considered this as taking advantage of them. Casanova valued a woman’s intelligence over her physical appearance. "After all, a beautiful woman without a mind of her own leaves her lover with no resource after he had physically enjoyed her charms." I am not saying that he promoted women being educated, something that was not permitted in his times.

What I am trying to say here, guys, if you are going to romance women, do it the right way and for the right reason. What PUA’s are teaching you is to dehumanize women just to make yourself feel better about hurting them. We have seen this kind of dehumanizing as a tool to mistreat or to even attack marginalized groups. That’s what the racist does, that’s what the religious fanatic does, and that’s what you are doing. Some countries have actually listed these PUA manuals and blogs as nothing more than Rape Guides and Hate Speech. And you’re paying money to be trained to become the ultimate asshole by these guys?