Did pickup artists join the online right? If so, how?

The great flip, as pro-sex people move from the left to the right in the 2010s

There’s an interesting but unsatisfying answer given in “Why pick-up artists joined the Online Right: The manosphere has given up on self-improvement,” but I've wondered about the topic and see the change the writer is talking about... I just don’t think this random guy has the answer. Some guys are still doing pickup apolitically, and they are most interested in developing skills, rather than doing culture war. But “Let’s learn to pick up chicks and f**k more* guys seem to get less traction than culture war guys (the shift from “real-world consequences” to “play fighting online,” might be a more interesting way to phrase the issue). I have a theory about why pickup artists may have shifted right, if they have, with two main parts...

1. The left used to be pro-sex and at least neutral towards masculinity, and it's now openly anti-sex and anti-masculinity. That shift happened in the mid-2010s. That, plus,

2. Something (I don't understand what) about social media makes people want to  pop off about politics in ways they'd never do in real life. Social media as it developed in the 2010s encouraged everyone to have dumb political opinions about everything, all the time, and spout them, all the time, and it's easier to have opinions and play the video game that is Twitter or Facebook than it is to do important things in the real world.

These two points are related... that the left hates men and hates masculinity seems to have intensified with the advent of social media. The left has also institutionalized that hatred with tremendous success in e.g. the college Title IX regimes. If the left actively hates you, there's going to be a tendency to look to wherever you can go for a safe haven. And the right doesn't hate men right now (women used to vote evenly between the parties).

The left used to be the libertine, pro-sex party (from the 1960s or 1970s until the 2010s) and now it isn't. That's made the right more hospitable to what I've seen called “Barstool Conservatives”... guys who like to f**k and don't like the recent puritanism of the left. The libertine and sex people are now mostly on the right... this seemed to flip in the 2010s. Used to be that the left loved sex and the right hated it… see the Bill Clinton impeachment for those White House humdingers for maybe the high-water mark of that, as opposed to the sour Republicans chasing him down for a bit of casual fun. Maybe the abortion issue will change things, but, given the ongoing hostility of the left to men and sexuality, I don't see that happening in the shorter term.

While this has happened, the left has won pretty much every important institution... society has been largely and successfully feminized. We've seen that Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas. I've personally been on the receiving end of this sh*t in Women don’t think that women can make adult decisions and be held accountable for those decisions. The left cheers feminization and the right is at least not for it, which pushes a lot of guys to the right. I personally am neither right nor left wing, cause choosing a "side" is largely stupid and makes people stupider, and I'd love to see less political stupidity, and less stupidity in politics. The dynamism of the private sector relative to the stupidity in politics (including on the right, and especially on the right in the last seven years) is epic.

If a person can invest in the dynamic private sector or the gridlocked, dysfunctional public sector, which makes more sense? Yeah, focus your energies there.

Most guys who are truly interested in pickup want to get laid more and don't care that much about politics. The guys who have deep political commitments are usually filling a void that should be filled by family and other things, but those guys can never see their own void. They can only see what's immediately in front of them, and what they mistake for being important. This goes for the committed lunatic lefty fringe, too. There's a symmetry between the ultra-online political people, which they also rarely see.

The problem with the online right, and the offline right, is however summarized well as “Why Jail is Programmed for All Rightoids” (written by someone with rightoid tendencies, not by someone from the left, in case that matters to you). If you’re attracted by the online right you need to read that.

“The Skewed and the Screwed: When Mating Meets Politics” is also relevant. That author says, echoing the research you have already read about here on Red Quest, "The ratio between men and women in a mating market is the most underrated force shaping mating outcomes. It’s underrated because it’s not directly visible except in extreme cases. But the downstream effects of a skewed ratio are very visible: one of the sexes has more choices, and thus it has a lot more power." People who are very far left or very far right are badly skewing their dating markets. Smart and reasonable people understand that most of their political beliefs don’t really matter,

In the politically-moderate gender-balanced middle, neither men nor women have a dim view of the other sex and neither has the power to dictate terms. Compromise and cooperation lead to the best outcomes, in Congress and in the bedroom. But on the sex-skewed edges, the minority do what they can and the majority suffer what they must while building seething resentment. Political conflict theory turns into gender conflict theory.

It’s better to get laid than to own the libs, in my opinion (IMO) and in my experience (IME). Young chicks, however, can get away with extreme political views, "youth is correlated with wokeness. Even if they’re the majority sex in their political tribe, young Progressive Activist women can play in a favorable dating market in their twenties. But as they get older, things begin to change."

What else is correlated with wokeness?

Rich parents.

Young chicks who have never had to pay their own way live in a different world than the rest of us. Guys who make enough money to pay serious taxes also live in a different world than people who have never made that much money, and the world you live in helps shape your political beliefs.

The hotter chicks are never the wokest, and the wokest chicks are never the hottest. And most women who claim to be woke or far left, if you ignore them when they’re spouting their political beliefs, are just chicks, looking for what most chicks are looking for.

Point two (“Something (I don't understand what, exactly) about social media makes people want to pop off about politics in ways they'd never do in real life”) is about social media and the way it makes people love popping off about random political opinions. I don't need to know what a random whoever from high school, or what Twitter’s EnduringWest07, thinks about presidential politics. Our relationship would be better without them expressing outrage about the latest outrage. Yet social media dynamics encourage people to go nuts over these things.

Finding things to go nuts about is very easy. Too easy. Hop on Twitter, Facebook, etc., and blast out whatever you think you think (that doubling is deliberate, read it again carefully). Tell the other people how wrong they are, because what you feel is right and what they feel is wrong. Yell, scream, beat your chest online. At some point you have to log off and look at the studio apartment you inhabit, the roommates you don't like, the job you have to go back to, the job you don’t have, the way your only accomplishments are in Elden Ring, the student loan debt you never should have taken on... but at least you are RIGHT about the latest outrage, and you can show people how right you are. You never have to approach a girl to be be told by others on your side how righteous you are.

One paper claims that “We  find  that  milder  and  older  communities,  such  as  PickUp  Artists  and  Men’s  Rights  Activists,  are  giving  way  to more  extreme  ones like  Incels  and  Men  Going  Their  OwnWay, with a substantial migration of active users.” Is it true? I don’t know. The methodology is suspect, cause the authors grabbed six kind of random-seeming forums. They also looked at a bunch of sub-reddits, however, and to the authors’s credit and point, a lot of the chatter seems to have migrated to reddit.

The political right, in the meantime, does live-action role play (LARP) of masculinity, and a lot of dumb / insecure guys eat it up. This is “if I buy a pickup truck, I must be a man” demographic. Contemporary country music appeals to this group too. Suckers rarely realize they’re suckers.

Watching pr0n is easy, making it is hard. Which is more meaning? In the GAME OF THRONES books, the warrior culture of the Iron Islands has a rule about jewelry, at least for men... if a man wears a bauble, did he pay the iron price for it (he took it off the corpse of an enemy), or the gold price (he bought it)? For pr0n, a similar principle applies... gold price, or iron price?

The "lost boy" constituency is much larger than the number of guys who want to improve their own lives. Politics appeals more to the former, the lost boys constituency, than the latter. One requires action and struggle, while the other requires mere belief. Which is easier?

People tend to do what's easiest, not what's best. The original author of the piece focuses on many of the worst of the pickup guys, not some of the best, but maybe that's intrinsic to what he is looking at, because the best leave. They f**k hot chicks for a while, post about how they've done it, and eventually they get old or their priorities change or they meet someone at the top of their SMV range and that's it. They leave, usually to have kids. Their blogs wither and their voices are gone. The lunatics, the failures, and the weirdos remain.

Do you want to take the easy path, or the hard path?