Keeping score

Recently I found a fantastic Youtube channel called ContraPoints.  It is, as the star says, a scholarly study of online bigotry.  It is also funny as hell, and mixes educational material about racism, sexism, and all the other isms along with dark and dirty humour.  It is definitely not safe for work, and it is not safe for work in ways that I quite enjoy.  The video I watched today is this one about pickup artists who call style themselves 'alpha males'.


The thing I found most interesting in the video was a description of the end goal of pickup artist seduction techniques.  I always found pickup artists loathsome but this gave me some insight into how you get from where I am to where they are.  I like sex, I am a straight man, I am fine with casual sex, and in the periods in my life where I wasn't having sex I was unhappy about that fact.  This might suggest that I would be the sort of person who might employ their tactics.

But no, never.  The reason is that pickup artists aren't actually in it for the sex.  They are in it to try to soothe their intense feelings of inadequacy and self hatred by having as big a score as possible.  If they were just looking for good sex they would figure out how to be in a relationship and find some woman with a massive sex drive and call it a day.  But that doesn't inflate the number of people you have slept with much at all, and that number is the way in which they keep score.

For me sex is the point, score isn't.  The interplay of mutual desire, the ratcheting up of excitement, these are the things I want.  Having sex with new people is fun in general but the really important thing is that the sex be *good*.

Whereas for pickup artists no time is wasted on how to enjoy sex, or how to bring your partner enjoyment.  Once you get your penis inside a vagina your score has ticked up, so the remainder of the encounter is not particularly relevant.

Now I get it.  It wasn't just that pickup artists were gross before, it was that they made no sense at all.  They were clearly evil, but it was an evil without a point, which confused me.  Now that I realize that their goals were entirely different from mine it all falls into place.  Pickup artists aren't pleasure seeking hedonists like me, because wasting time in bars trying to get reluctant people to have shitty sex with you isn't pleasureable.  They just want to win the game, and they are willing to win it in a way that is sad for all people involved.  The game of keeping score in life by the number of one night stands you have had is sad and destructive and I want no part of it.  I am going to keep score by trying to be the person who generates the most fun for me and the people around me instead.