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the word PUA, and the PUA community seems to be associated w/ more ideas and concepts besides the completely obvious trio of dress nice, be confident, be interesting. If this is where it ends for you, perhaps PUA isn't a good word to describe yourself. Maybe you guys can coin a new word, (Moral) MPUA.

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I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I suspect that the notion/widespread belief that PUA is "immoral" is based on the fact that the guy is not "himself" when he approaches women, right? That he creates a "facade" (which Cardo "detests") or uses canned, rehearsed material, or flat out deceives or lies to his "target." Amirite?

I think the response to this is that guys are not 100% honest in their interactions with women NOW. Your average guy does not walk up to a girl he wants and say "I really want to have sex with you" or "I really want you to be my girlfriend" or whatever it is he wants.

And why not? Because he knows it doesn't work. Instead, he adopts a "facade" of the nice, friendly, non-threatening non-sexual guy, the bumbling nervous guy who manages to win the girl's heart in the movies by "being himself."

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This is the part where I think PUA-type thinking can be the bumbler, in that it it sometimes assumes that men and women are necessarily some sort of opponents to each other, both in sexual and non-sexual matters, and that all interaction proceeds from that premise. I think in a way this can be self-fulfilling; if you sexualize everything and turn it into a conflict of wills, well, everything will indeed be "revealed" to be sexual and about conflicts and opposite motives. What else could it be, if you insist on making it so?

Actually people of either sex can work toward the same goal, of getting along well and having a good time, quite naturally, and then see where it leads, if anybody's interested or if it comes to that.

Being a nice, friendly, non-threatening guy doesn't have to stand in for some other set of goals or mean something else; it can be genuinely who you are. And women will often like you a lot for it; at least as good, even if they have no interest in you themselves, they'll often pave the way for you with their social crowd, which will of course include lots of other women. Being a relaxed, regular guy doesn't have anything to do with being non-sexual either; it's recognizing that there is a time and place for everything, and that sexualizing every encounter is not necessary, not even for sex.

For sexual purposes, it relies on picking up cues and giving your own, which women pick up on very easily(sometimes when they're not even there, among the conceited types). It really doesn't take very much to pick out who likes who during normal socializing. I think a lot of guys would do better to learn to pay more attention and pick up on women's cues than to try to be the driving force behind every encounter. There's plenty of time for that. I'm pretty sure most men probably overlook women's signals of interest in them regularly and are doing better than they think. And if they learned to relax a bit, they'd do better still. All without any particularly complex strategies or seminars. More just -- paying attention. A huge life skill that probably a lot of guys discount and would do very well to develop.