Reader Jennifer Frances Armstrong says:

I have the impression that a lot of what is at the source of PUA problems is the fact that they (and many men) have been taught to desire something that isn’t sexually healthy. They’re not attracted to real women but to the unreal images that appear in adverts and on movie sets.

Reader llama responds:

Yes this whole sex as a commodity thing is the problem. The idea that it is better if the woman looks like a model is fucked.

What I have to add to this interesting exchange between our brilliant Australian participants is the following. Many people don’t derive any true pleasure from the actual sex act (because of their puritanic upbringing and attached feelings of guilt, for example). Any pleasure they get is subverted by guilt and shame. As a result, they begin to invest sex with other meanings. In order to have any kind of usefulness, sex for them needs to bring prestige or social recognition. Such people are often heavily homosocial. They are oriented towards gaining acceptance within their gender group while heterosexual sex partners are only needed as trophies to be demonstrated to the peer group.

Of course, such unhealthy attitudes to sex make these people very sexually unattractive. This is why they have to come up with convoluted strategies just to get anybody to talk to them.

All of this talk about how one should be patient and understanding with vicious jerks and aim at getting them to like you reminded me of this post I wrote a while ago.

The post had many comments when it was published but then Blogger crashed and ate them all up.

Jonathan writes:

Just reading those history books was a revelation. That’s the exact moment when I became an intellectual. Interesting that this is about (in other words, exactly) the same time I started to question religion. Just getting a larger perspective makes you question the provincial realities of your own time and place.

I know what Jonathan is talking about here. At about the same age, I started to feel too constricted by the  provincial realities of my time and place (what a beautiful, apt expression!). For me, this meant questioning atheism.

Everything is relative, people. When I was at school, the rebellious, anti-establishment thing to do was to protest the teaching of the evolution as the only explanation of how things came about.

As I mentioned before, we are having our offices renovated at work. All of the teaching faculty have been moved out of our offices and new furniture is getting installed gradually.

One of the instructors at our department is the wife of our Dean. Her office faces mine. And what I find to be very surprising is that the Dean’s wife is waiting for her turn to get her office back, just like we all do.

This would have never happened back in my country. There, the offices would have been renovated based on the hierarchy of who is more important. It would have never happened, like it has at my department here, that an adjunct would get her office back faster than the Chair.

Here, however, everybody has to wait for their turn. And that makes it a lot easier to deal with the inconvenience of not having an office. We are all in the same boat, there is no unfairness, nobody gets humiliated, and the resentments among colleagues do not appear.

And I really like that.