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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.
What a silly thing to say, as if people in the past were so different from people now. Let me introduce to one of the OG pickup artists, one young Venetian commoner, son of two actors back then when the word actress was a synonym for a whore: Giacomo Casanova. In his memoirs he named 100+ women that he slept with in 18th century, ranging from commoner farm girls or courtesans, nuns, through daughters of merchants and patricians to high nobles such as Madame d’Urfé - who was probably not right in her head as she was obsessed with occult and other weird shit, something like modern liberal Wiccan widow of deceased startup entrepreneur.
He beguiled them all using wide range of PUA strategies, which were then rigorously employed by his fans, while retaining his head on his shoulders from vindicative male relatives and rivals. If anything, he played the PUA game on Nightmare mode and "won" by that metric, living to age 73 in comfort and fame. Many other examples like that.
Now you're talking about someone entirely different than you did before, though. I was talking about the people you yourself mentioned: Aristocrats, soldiers, pirates etc.
Secondly, Casanova is someone with a high enough social standing & wealth that his family could afford to send him to study law at a university, at a time when such education was extremely rare. That tells you a lot more about his background than just saying his parents were "two actors". He also is a classic general-purpose con artist, as evidenced by the wikipedia entry you cite yourself. He not only regularly, successfully impersonated aristocracry, he also directly tricked aristocrats themselves. And he evidently was genuinely rich, even if it was ill-gotten & regularly frivolled away. Obviously, such a person can take advantage of a similar playbook as the actual aristocrats.
He didn't walk into a bar at night negging unaccompanied women until they sleep with him. He publicly displayed his wealth and status to the entire greater circle of people around the women, would woo the men around her as well, often played a long game over months that included ripping off entire social groups for money by claiming access to secret, useful knowledge. It's certainly more similar to PUA than the classic, far more common aristocrat, in that it includes social trickery aimed at women, but yet again structurally very different and far more complicated.
And also I have to mention again we're talking about the personal memoirs of a self-admitted con artist. That's really not something I'd take at face value.
Edit: And to make my own position very clear: Solely beguiling women without also having access to some genuine advantages such as high social standing, wealth or power was near-impossible before the sexual revolution due to guarding behaviour by males in her social circles. You had to successfully trick those men as well to even just get access to the women. Casanova does not disprove this position in any way whatsoever; He had a genuinely high social standing, genuine wealth, genuine education, and then also tricked entire social circles.
After the sexual revolution, women would start to regularly go unattended to parties & festivities, which made (a percentage of) them easy prey for the first generations of tricksters in the hippy movement. Since women aren't stupid, this caused a backlash quite fast and they became more wary again, which necessitated the more elaborate trickery employed by PUA. However since it's a formalized movement it's easy to recognize once you know what you have to look for, so it died in the span of just a few years again. But more generally, there still just aren't as many safeguards nowadays; Obviously, tricking an entire social group, including both men and women, over long spans of time is much, much harder than tricking a (necessarily single-sex) lone individual over short spans of time. So the general style of social trickery as employed by PUA artists is still mostly viable.
What? Casanova was as poor as it gets at least in Venetia. He got his degree thanks to a priest who noticed him at age 9 in poor boarding school while his widowed mother was "acting" somewhere in Russia. He showed enough aptitude for Latin and other subjects to pass for priesthood education at age 12. He received his degree at age 15, not at all anything special - something like degree from some degree mill, such as University of Phoenix today.
Nevertheless I agree with the statement that he was well "educated" by experience for life as a con artist, ranging from his actor parents through talking his way through life hardship in his early teens which translated later to his life. Which is exactly what PUA lifestyle is about, isn't it?
No, he applied wide range of PUA strategies. When he wanted to bang nuns, he applied his meager theological knowledge. When he wanted to bang Madame d’Urfé and get her money, he pretended to be an occult master. He was exactly what you in your original reply mentioned as:
Anyways, the point is that PUA is nothing new. You discarded pirates, conquistatdors, minor nobles and other players as somehow unfairly using status and violence to bang hundreds of women in order to be "true" PUA artists. Now you discard Casanova and his ilk for applying social trickery and beguiling his victims from being the same. So what is PUA artist? Only those who fail in life or in seduction of women using their perceived status, money, power, social wit and any other trick that can get them to score? It does not make any sense.
I added my position in an edit since I didn't expect you to answer so fast, so sorry for that. But I think my position is pretty clear:
Pickup artists are predators. They do not have to go after the most secure and difficult prey. While in the past it may be so that women had in general more protection from their families, they were also more gullible in absence of internet and other channels. There were widows, women with sick parents etc. In addition even if men held dominion over their women, then the path led through those. You could just get into a good grace of dominant men in order to get to women in their care.
Plus again, you have a very self-defeating definition of Pickup Artist. It seems to exclude any man who either starts or during his life gains status, wealth, social trickery or any other resource. What is your stance then? That "true" pickup artists are only losers who never start or end with money and status and who never get laid?
So again - who is PUA artist in your eyes? I just googled for the list of most famous modern Pickup Artists, not that I know any of them:
Julien Blanc
Ross Jeffries
Mark Manson
Erik von Markovik
Neil Strauss
Roosh V
Eric Weber
According to AI, the average net worth of all of those is in range of millions of dollars, often due to their courses etc. Are they by your definition not Pickup Artists - because the can get to fuck women solely based on their fame and wealth?
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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