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I don't think so. All of these things existed before. For instance the PUA community has perfect overlap with rockstar or yuppie lifestyle from 1970s and 1980s. And of course the archetype is way older than that such as a dashing American soldier picking up young desperate girls in occupied Germany using chewing gum, can of beans and coffee, or even in 19th century literature where young noble or soldier picks up local village girls doing the deed in haystack, and leaving them with bastard babies. Or you can go even earlier with literature of conquistadors and pirates and sailors having harem of wives and lovers in every port - the OG "passport bros", such as no other than Hernán Cortés who allegedly killed his own Spanish wife for nagging him about his harem of lovers and concubines, and for being too low status as an official wife for his elevated position. Andrew Tate is just a pale image of this Chad. It is all over the literature either as a cautionary tale, but also as a tale of promise for young brave men.
It still is structurally quite different. PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery. This wouldn't have worked historically; Men in a social group generally guarded the women against strangers, and the women themselves were often even more wary of strangers. Inside a social group where everyone knows everyone else already, PUA falls apart as well.
The examples you cite have primarily two mechanisms they used: Actual status, and (the threat of) violence. As a peasant, you couldn't openly dismiss a noble unless he very blatantly broke with established rules, the way you would with a stranger. The social status itself also, of course, made the nobles more alluring for the women, and peasant men that would otherwise guard them also might try to curry favor with the noble instead. Not to mention that more critical literature of these individuals often strongly insinuates that their allegedly awesome powers of seduction was to a large part just plain prostitution. This is proven at least partially true by what frequently followed; A peasant women with an accepted noble bastard child would usually get an alimony that far outstrips any other stream of income usually available to her. But also for sex more generally, if a noble offers a women coin upfront, and the sexual encounter is revealed against their wish & expectation, both parties can save face by claiming that it actually just was a seduction. The women becomes a hapless victim, the men an awesome seductor. Much better than a whore & john.
For the soldiers/conquistadors/pirates etc. taking advantage of their physical power, almost everything above holds true as well, just that the arrangement is usually less voluntary in nature.
I agree on 70/80 rockstar/yuppie life. Male hippies, even if they have a different political connotation, behaved in practice quite similar as well. It's all imo quite evidently downstream of the sexual revolution. PUA simply couldn't exist without it.
Thanks for the reply; I was about to make largely the same points but you were faster.
The explanation is much more mundane, I think. "American soldier picking up young desperate girls in occupied Germany using chewing gum, can of beans and coffee"? Well, yeah. This was happening during a famine. Elaborate pick-up skills weren't exactly needed.
Rockstars? A very tiny minority of the male population. Nothing to conclude about it in particular. There will always be men who stand out of the crowd for whatever reason, and will thus command a disproportionate amount of female attention. Nothing new about it.
The yuppies, as far as I know, were also a strictly GenX phenomenon, by and large. No argument about that on my part.
I'd add two more caveats. PUA as a phenomenon specifically entails men codifying pick-up artistry and teaching it to other men.
Sure. Let me know what you think about OG PUA master named Giacomo Casanova I mentioned in my other reply. Does he fit your criteria of womanizing teacher?
Plus how does picking and fucking desperate girls not fit the disgusting PUA style? I know of a guy who back in oughts created a bot contacting all the women on dating platform with a rude message akin to - hey do you want to fuck - as an experiment. He had maybe 1 in a 1000 response, some of them even from very attractive girls, although I'd wager they were all crazy. Maybe in their manic phase of BPD or some other shit. I know of a guy from the West who rented an expensive car back in early 1990s, and who went on fucking spree in Eastern Europe for pennies, and he even evaded having his teeth kicked in by local village heroes, mostly by copious amount of bribes and rounds paid. But hey, what works works - right?
How does any of this equal paying for sex with canned beans and coffee in a famine?
In the same way inviting some local girl for a drink while flashing you borrowed Omega watches and designer cloths bought on credit works right now in a bar. A promise of stability and bright future of plenty of money/food if only they fuck you, and then discarding them like a dirty rag.
By the way, this whole PUA topic is disgusting to me as I am Christian. But there has to be some reality check.
Stability and bright future of plenty of money/food as opposed to not starving to death. Got it.
These were not whores, just regular girls. A can of beans was not payment for sex for a prostitute, but elaborate ploy in game of affection, accompanied with promises of eternal love and poetry from a married husband, who was set to leave day after tomorrow back to his family in USA to be demobilized. It was a game.
How naive are you? Or maybe even better - how cynical are you in your pretentiousness?
Regular girls will whore themselves out for canned beans and coffee among ruins and during famine, which is a rather understandable and unsurprising state of affairs. If your argument is specifically about GIs making false marriage proposals then I have nothing to comment on, because you’d be hard-pressed to find any PUA guide anywhere that advises you to do such a thing.
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