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I guess that one large difference between us is that I actually had some contact with the people in the PUA scene, as it actually existed, though not enough to call myself a pickup artist (I was at a particular low point of my social university life and tagged along for a short while with some of them, but found their behaviour too unpleasant to really get into it). The great majority of them were literal nobodies, low or middling social status at best, no notable wealth, certainly no possibility of using physical power to get their way. Nothing. Just like me, that was in fact precisely what attracted them to the movement in the first place. They weren't even especially charismatic in a general sense, nor unusually intelligent. They employed a relatively rigid playbook of behaviour that works well on lone, ideally half- or fully drunken girls who already were receptive to liaisons. But that's the important part, it worked. And this is what PUAs were selling, an approach for getting women to sleep with you available to anyone, even the losers, in the span of a single night, or maybe just a few dates. That's the whole point. You don't have to be a loser to use it, but it works even if you're a loser.
And now take a look at Casanova again. He's in an entirely different ballpark. The average loser can't get people to finance their university degree, can't get a wealthy patron to enable them, can't trick people into believing they are medical experts, and especially not for months at a time. It just doesn't work. Casanova used a wide array of social trickery far beyond the small, formalized PUA playbook, and expertly switched it around to whatever was needed for whatever he wanted to do at the moment. This included seducing women, but was not limited to it, and even on this particular topic he generally was more versatile. He's a con artist.
So, in extra clear words on what is PUA, and who is a pickup artist: PUA is a limited playbook of behaviour aimed primarily at seducing receptive lone women over short spans of time that flat-out wouldn't have worked in the past due to social/male guarding. A pickup artist is someone who employs this kind of playbook to sexual success. Someone can also develop such a playbook, or teach other people how to use it, and become rich & famous as a result. This would enable them to seduce women in a different way, using their status & wealth, which was available to people in the past since it's a way to get past social guarding. They can also simply be con artists in addition to pickup artists. But most of them would still regularly employ PUA tactics instead anyway, because they were already used to it and it already worked for them. And in this way, they did stay pickup artists.
Casanova wrote his memoir exactly as PUA masters sell their courses. He "inspired" millions of middling losers with his tidbits of wisdom in his memoir, shit like Be flame not the moth or Praise the beautiful for their intelligence and the intelligent for their beauty. He was the OG pickup artist, not a middling wannabe art dabbler. Anyway, my original point is that this whole culture is nothing new and it exists for centuries and millennia.
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