Why pick-up artists are super-creepy

Most people who have seen 'Magnolia' probably remember the character TJ Mackey, a self-made man whose avowed mission is to help shy, confused men score better with women. In a brilliant portrayal by Tom Cruise, TJ Mackey turns out to be a broken egotist with parent issues and pretty misogynist beliefs. Unfortunately, 'Pick-Up Artists' or PUAs fit that misogynist caricature almost to a T - maybe without the daddy issues, but the misogyny is definitely there. Why?

1. In their quest for sex, women are reduced to mere objects. Now, plenty of people, both male and female, can go out looking for sexual gratification and that's fine. However, PUAs take objectification to an extreme that treats women as complex machines where all you need to do is input the right sequence of actions to gain the desired result.

2. It is insincere. Again, everyone has probably given a compliment they didn't really mean, or exaggerated a trait to make themselves look better in the eyes of someone they desired. For PUAs, everything's a game, literally, including the entire faux-scientific-sounding jargon. If you google the term, you'll come across a wide variety of forums with a mind-bogglingly long list of jargon.

3. It is degrading. By assuming that men need to manipulate women into sex, PUAs believe that a woman doesn't desire sex herself. There's a subset of PUAs who concede that women do desire sex but are socially conditioned not to let it on too much (which is unfortunately true), but that doesn't mean that it's a-okay to aggressively pursue sex solely on your own terms, with a complete disregard for another person's feelings and thoughts. Even worse is that some popular PUA tactics rely on actively destroying a woman's self-esteem to make her comply with what you want, which borders dangerously close on rape.

4. PUA culture has a veneer of helping out socially awkward and shy guys. The problem is that what sound advice it has to offer (be confident, learn to accept rejection, dress yourself well, have something interesting to say, don't be a doormat) can be found elsewhere too, and is completely distorted into some weird form of mimicry of how socially successful people behave.

5. It's interesting to note how PUA culture solely revolves around getting laid. Relationships are discarded because PUAs seem to believe that women are vile creatures who will always seek ways to dominate and destroy men. That's not only another example of glaring misogyny, it's also damaging to how men should view themselves - as sex-crazed automatons incapable of forming an emotional connection with someone else.

Theory of parameters

Can we discuss art? “De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum” is a Latin saying that has survived the ages – it all boils down to whether you, personally, like something or not. Taken to its logical extreme, these sayings would render the entire business of art critique, music and film reviewing and literary criticism irrelevant. On the other hand, people who argue that any form of art can be discussed on its merits in a meaningful way have, whether they like it or not, an underlying idea about what good art is and that that idea is universal.

So, on the one hand, nihilism, on the other hand, Platonism. There is no middle ground, once you think about it – you can’t claim that art is personal and then discuss it, and neither can you claim that your or anyone else’s opinion is worth more without an inherent belief in a fixed sense of aesthetic values.

Move away from dualism

Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed that man, especially in the West, was malformed and twisted by dualism. Even before him, thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Hegel attempted to reconcile dualistic notions into something larger – Aquinas tried to reconcile pragmatic Arestotelianism with Platonism, while Hegel formulated his theory of dialectic materialism, which would become the basis of the work of Karl Marx. However, even their theories still suffered from the grandiose ambition to house even the wildest contradictions under one theoretical roof. It took us until the 20th century, with Wittgenstein, Russell and others, to realise that no one logical system will ever be adequate to explain one phenomenon in its entirety.

Why this derail into the philosophies of dusty, dead white men? Isn’t this thing supposed to be about music?

It is. Through discussions with friends, I developed a theory which I like to call “the theory of the parameters”. It simultaneously explains why and how discussing art is meaningful, and why there are limits to it.

We all have parameters

Even the most uneducated person in the world has a notion of art, even if they don’t define it as such. For example, their criterion for appreciating a painting could be: “Does it feel like an adequate reproduction of reality?” or “Is it beautiful?”. Then most likely, the old Flemish masters and the hyper-realists would be very pleasing to this person, while they would consider Mondriaan to be nothing even approaching art. While a person with only one criterion for appreciating art is likely very rare, it doesn’t make their opinion worthless.

Consider an art critic. They have different sets of criteria. Examples could be: “Does it tell me something about the society the artist lived in?”, “How original is this work?”, “Does it tie in with existing traditions of art?”, “Does it have a sense of irony?”, “Was there any technical skill involved?” or “Does it have a message about art as such?”. One of this critic’s criteria might even be diametrically opposed to the one criterion of the anonymous in the paragraph above: “How far does it deviate from reality as we know it?”

I call these criteria ‘parameters’. In discussing any form of art, these parameters come into play, and someone with a bigger, more varied set of parameters will automatically have the upper hand in a discussion, because (a) they will usually know more about the matter at hand and (b) can argue their point of view from several different points of view at once. So, no, someone who only likes realistic art doesn’t have a worthless opinion, but it is highly irrelevant. Discussing art is not a win-or-lose game, but someone with just a few parameters will run out of steam quickly, and place severe limits on any type of meaningful discussion.

But how does that explain there is no consensus in the art community?

This is not only because they may have different parameters, but also because they weight them differently. I’ll offer two examples, this time from the world of literature.

Ancient Greek and Roman writers usually shared a great deal of parameters, sometimes summed up in the expression “imitatio et aemulatio” (“imitation and improvement”). Their idea of great literature was literature that not only blatantly copied earlier writers, but tended to add its own touch of genius. So, to be taken seriously as a writer by the ancients was to have a deep understanding of all preceding literature and ground yourself in that tradition, then try to add a few touches of your own. The Romantics, however, introduced “creativity” as a new parameter on the art scene (one that hasn’t left the great reservoir of major parameters ever since). They found tradition to be constrictive. So there we probably have two equally skilled groups of artists with a radically diverging set of parameters, although they likely would have had a whole list of them.

A more subtle example takes us to the modern world of movies. A good friend of mine and I share a great deal of tastes. We also both like David Lynch movies. We might even say we share a great deal of parameters. He thinks “Lost Highway” is superior to “Mulholland Dr.” while I think the exact opposite. I understand his points about “Lost Highway” being more original, more radical in its exploration of the soul’s darkest corners and has some cool things going for it, such as a cameo by Marilyn Manson and music from Rammstein, but I think these points are not that important. For me, the superior acting, more sure-footed direction and multi-dimensional script of “Mulholland Dr.” take precedence. So, we assign different priorities to our parameters. This is but one example how you can agree to disagree, and still don’t find discussing art is pointless.

How are new parameters developed?

People’s minds can obviously be changed. The best example is education. An art teacher, for instance, typically guides students through several art genres and styles, and attempts to explain why the artists of that day made the choices they did. I had an art teacher who repeated an experiment every year: at the start of the school year, he would show a slideshow of about fifteen paintings, and asked us all whether we thought this was art or not. He repeated the same slideshow at the end of the year, possibly to gauge his own effectiveness as a teacher, but also as a form of self-reflection on how our opinions had changed.

It doesn’t have to be typical top-down education process only that affects how our parameters develop, multiply or change priorities. In my early adolescence, I thought of Verhoeven’s film “RoboCop” as a pretty good action movie, but too focused on excessive violence to be taken seriously. One of my brothers made me see that “RoboCop” is about much more than just violence, and nowadays I also appreciate the movie for its subtexts and various other elements that escaped me the first time, because I simply did not have those parameters yet. Interestingly, Verhoeven’s status as a “dirty old man” is still a debate among cinephiles.

As a last note, I am not passing judgement on individual parameters or how they are informed. This framework is just a general idea that attempts to make a case for art, music or literature discussion as not pointless at all.

White Whine #3: Multiculturalism has failed

Multiculturalism is a fact. Just like gravity can't suddenly 'fail' to exist on earth (barring quantum fluctuations), so have cultures been living side by side for as long as cities have existed. To paint multiculturalism as a left-wing, happy go-lucky hobby project is completely ridiculous. What the right actually means to attack is the tensions between immigrant communities and their descendants with the communities that were around before their arrival.

By the way, I am going to talk mainly about North African and Turkish immigrants. Whenever a European person says 'multiculturalism has failed', they're not talking about any immigrant group other than Muslims. There have been occasional fears about Polish plumbers, but I'm quite sure that discussion wasn't as deeply mired in mutual prejudice, racism and cultural presuppositions.

No doubt that tensions exist. While I am very wary of making general assumptions about one culture, ethnic group or religion, there's no denying that the cultural distance between, say, a family with roots on the Moroccan countryside and native West-Europeans will be greater than between someone who's moved from Athens to Brussels. It is also true that for far too long, the left has looked the other way when the theme turns to crime among immigrant youth, how girls report feeling unsafe or getting harrassed by them, or how some young Muslims attack openly gay or Jewish people. That is seriously not cool at all and frustrates a lot of people.

The right, again, is also right in pointing out that bad social integration lies at the root of the problem, but it is completely wrong in putting the onus only on the immigrant communities themselves. Research has indicated that Flemings and Walloons are among the most racist people of Europe. Time and again, employers get outed for having a secretive policy of not hiring people who look too brown or are of North African or Turkish descent. This is a big, big problem because it foments frustration.

Traditionally, Mediterranean cultures are patriarchal. Their very overt patriarchy bothers a lot of Europeans (and Americans too, I am sure). To pick a less controversial example, if you've ever been to Southern Europe, you might have seen how from an early age, boys are sometimes treated as princes, and the bad apples among them act like impossible little Mussolinis with a huge entitlement complex. Now put little Mussolini in a context that simultaneously tells him that he's a prince, but the wider society he lives in considers him a backwards savage and oh yeah he's pretty sure he won't be able to find a job and never get to have all the fancy stuff or any sign that says he's made it.

Then, people he sees as 'naturally' inferior to him ascend beyond his social position: rich gay men with nice designer clothes, confident women who go out alone at night, or Jewish people who have always been stereotypically associated with financial success. Top it off with his confrontation with racism on an everyday level that you and I (I am pretty sure 99% of my audience will be white) never have to face, and yeah, you can sort of understand why a young man like that would be an explosive cocktail of anger. So they run back to their safe space: their culture, their traditions, their religion, the place where they meant something. The fact that snooty whites come around and tell them that their culture is backwards only strengthens this belief.

The left has generally remained silent on this issue. That's too bad, because I think that these problems can be successfully tackled from a very real socio-economic angle. Here's a few thoughts:

• Workplaces where there's a healthy mix of sexes and ethnic backgrounds will decrease racism. You realise you're all in this together.
• It is absolutely crucial that employers who are found to be discriminating get named, shamed and hung out to dry.
• Concentration schools and ghettoes need to end.
• Emancipatory initiatives from within immigrant communities should be supported, but the state shouldn't make its own - you can't force people to emancipate.

Other issues that could help advance the position of ethnic minorities more or less fall in line with other initiatives to create a more egalitarian society. I'm specifically not addressing homophobia and sexism within the Muslim community because I have a keen sense that these feelings are not altogether dissimilar of those in native, white underclasses in the West. They're just not as exacerbated by a sense of 'Kulturkampf' or racism.

Getting back to the idea of multiculturalism as a surefire mechanism to doom a society, I would say that this is simply not supported by history. The Roman Empire's might and power grew expansively as it absorbed other cultures and those cultures impacted Rome's. It's funny to note that even then, there were backwards, staunch defenders of Rome's "rural values". Genghis Khan built one of the world's most impressive armies (a questionable feat in itself, obviously) with a meritocratic structure, regardless of ethnic background.

No, rose-tinted glasses are a bad thing and stuff like this doesn't solve itself. But there is no alternative, and any serious solution can't be explained in a political slogan. Except, maybe, this one: we all suffer from various forms of oppression. Instead of snarling and guarding jealously whatever we have think we've got left, we need to make a stand together and solve this mess.

My big fat Greek debt crisis

It's been plastered all over the news for months now, ever since the debt crisis in the Eurozone started: Greece had big problems in maintaining fiscal discipline, and now all of Europe has to pay the price. There have been some protest voices, sure: some say that Greece would do better to opt for an Iceland-style scenario, others rightly doubt the disproportionate influence of rating agencies - which, by the way, are all US-based and have often been wrong - and some on the left sing the familiar tune of a European Union too beholden to neoliberal fundamentalism.

What surprises me about all of this is that people act surprised. Disregarding all valid objections against the straitjacket Athens finds itself in, back when Greece joined the Eurozone, all politicians already knew it was cooking the books and shouldn't have been let into the Euro in the first place. Hell, when it joined the EU, a lot of the reasons for its joining were rooted in cold war ideology that wanted to reward Greece for casting off the chains of military dictatorship without lapsing into communism.

It's worth looking back at the '80s for the root causes of the current crisis of the European Union. When Greece joined the EU in 1981, it had gotten rid of its military junta for barely seven years. By contrast, the first post-Communist Central European countries only joined the Union 15 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, while Spain and Portugal waited over a decade. How did anyone seriously expect that Greece would mature into a perfect democracy with a forward-thinking fiscal policy by mere virtue of entering the Union in its infancy stages of liberal democracy? Secondly, the early '80s were the onset of neoliberal orthodoxy. The crazy caroussel that put countries like Spain, which did not accrue outrageous debts, in such a bad spot was played by institutions and countries that were much better at them than weak, newly democratic governments could hope to be. Compare Iceland and Luxembourg. Luxembourg is an obscenely rich, small country with a population comparable to Iceland's, and has a bloated banking sector. The difference is that it's had that for a very long time and knows better how to game the system. Iceland didn't, overplayed its hand and crashed.

The biggest winners and losers? Why of course, again since the '80s, the biggest winners have been financial elites who do not produce anything of value for anyone, their political lackeys who try to make others believe that poor people are stopping them from becoming as rich as them, and right-wing media who support that message with lurid fearmongering. The losers: everybody else.

For what it's worth, I believe in a common European currency and I believe in the European Union as an idea and a concrete project. How we can do it differently and to the benefit of the peoples of Europe rather than a handful of old white men, I'll address in a later post.

White Whine #2: 'Feminazis'

The common image of the screaming, bra-burning, feminist with a square jaw and copious armpit hair is not only ridiculous and demeaning, it is also untrue. There are a lot of misconceptions about feminism. I'll try to be as brief as possible here, but what men feel selective outrage over (e.g. men being portrayed as stupid doofuses in commercials) is actually a much wider range of topics that hurts both men and women. A few statements:

- Not all women are feminist, and not all women understand feminism.
- If an individual woman happens to be a bad person, it's fundamentally wrong to attribute her bad traits to her being a woman.
- Physical, verbal and sexual violence against women is still an enormous problem.
- Feminism has no need for a 'male perspective' precisely because our entire society is informed by this very same male perspective.
- Feminism by not hostile to men, but it is hostile to patriarchy.

The common shorthand is that "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people". That they get treated fair and square, not written off, insulted, lavished in unwarranted praise, treated with kid gloves or fawned over simply because they happen to women.

If men who felt selective anger at being caricatured, what they need to blame is not feminism but patriarchy in general. In fact, if we would all take a few seconds to think that this sort of minor inconvenience is what women and other minorities face every day, we might begin to understand their plight.

One last thing: it's dumb to portray men as some sort of manchild-neanderthals, but as a man, I must say that no matter how coarse, this is a stereotype that we owe to ourselves. Some men still even pride themselves on it. And really, one joke in bad taste and men are hurt? I guess you've never tried to go in an online multiplayer game as a woman.

White Whine #1: White Entertainment and Straight Pride

"But why is there no White Entertainment Channel or Straight Pride parade?" Because pretty much everything is tailored to white, heterosexual people. History? The deeds and acts of white people, pretty much. Literature? A history of old, dead white men. Most important movie characters? White men. Pretty much every major institution in the West? Geared towards heterosexual people. The reason why 'White Pride' or 'Straight Pride' is absolutely stupid is because the entire West is one big celebration of whiteness and straightness through a mechanism called privilege. Lastly, there is currently no 'White Pride' group that is not at least covertly extremely racist and hateful.

Are progressive movements antiquated?

The most high-profile progressive cause of today is probably the LGBTQ movement. They fight against discrimination based on sexual orientation and push for equal rights to heterosexual couples. While a lot of countries in the West still have miles to go to achieve true equality, the headway these movements are making is undeniable. It is a more quiet but by no means less vocal movement than the American Civil Rights movement of the '60s, the sufragettes of the '20s and beyond, and the first workers' unions of the early 20th century. Unfortunately, all this progress has lulled a lot of self-described progressive and conservative people alike into a false sense of comfort.

Certainly, if we have to believe the uninformed, the West has moved beyond racism and sexism, unions protect workers' rights and all is well. It's true, progress has been made on many fronts since the start of the 20th century, but to say that empowering movements have become obsolete is misguided at best:

- Violence against women is still a jarringly frequent occurrence
- The 1% continuously try to use their political henchmen to make people believe that unions and regulation are their enemy
- Racism, no matter whether it is dressed up as 'ironic' or not, still prevents people from getting hired and gets exploited by opportunist politicians
- Hostility against sexual minorities, verbal or otherwise, is still commonplace outside of large urban centres and sometimes even inside of it
- Women are still a minority in corporate Boards and high-profile political life

The list goes on and on. To make matters worse, there's a number of groups that insiduously claims that it is now, in fact, heterosexual white men who are getting the short end of the stick. The problem with this statement is twofold:

- Most hetereosexual white men are completely blind to their own privilege because they never experienced anything else
- They focus on petty anecdotes or elements of a patriarchal society that harms everyone, not just them

Progressive movements are certainly not antiquated. In fact, more than ever, in the face of environmental collapse, resurging hard right movements, corporate media manipulation and cynical exploitation of fear, a coherent progressive message is more important than ever. The bottom line is, and this will return in this blog a couple of times, that we are all in this together. Only if we attempt to erase mutual prejudice, we can truly make the playfield level and be societies that offer everyone equal opportunities to succeed in life and be happy - not just the 1%, who is happy to make us believe that 'uppity' minorities are our enemy and the cause of our problems. That is simply not true. The real problem is a deeply-entrenched system of privilege over privilege that finally ends with a tiny amount of white old men.