Some Core Reasons The Seduction Community Is So Weird

The Seduction Community is full of strange people, ideas, and practices. Not just about how to get women, but also about itself and the people who are its members. Why is it like this? What made it get this way? Not every subculture that forms around an interest is weird, why this one? How does the weirdness sustain itself? Here are my thoughts, sadly drawn from my formerly being a paragon of most of these points myself...

Many of the guys who get into this stuff are weird themselves

Some guys who get into the Community are pretty well-adjusted, cool dudes. Some of them aren't though. They have issues such as:

And importantly, they often don't have a lot of insight into how they come across. They may even have a distorted view of themselves and think they're cool or superior, when most people would say otherwise. I was once one of these people, boy was I ever.

These guys aren't weird in the good 'misunderstood creative, artistic, non-conformist genius' sense of the word either, although they may tell themselves they are. They're just messed up guys who are behind in their social development. This doesn't imply they're bad people though, many of them are still good guys despite their oddness.

Visually you may think these people are all hunched, pale nerds or Comic Book Guys. Actually, a lot of them look like pretty average men. It's not until you start talking to them that you realize their thought processes are a little off.

When these guys get together they often magnify each other's weirdness. They encourage each other. With only other strange people around there are none of the checks and balances on odd behavior that exist in the regular social world. They come up with new wrong-headed ideas to spread around. Their 'weirdness filter' makes them misinterpret existing good ideas. At the very least they're not making each other worse, but hardly have any good social habits to teach each other either.

Basically the ranks of the Community are constantly being replenished by guys who are predisposed to keeping it a weird place. It's a struggle for the forces of normality in the scene, because even if they can chip away at one cohort's problems, there is always a freshly weird one waiting to take their place.

Why are so many of the guys weird in the first place? Well the scene attracts desperate, sexually inexperienced guys. They're more likely than your Average Joe to have core issues in being able to get along with people, including women. Secondly, as a fairly underground, fringe, unregulated scene, the Community can be somewhat of a magnet for eccentric characters.

Many of the guys in the scene don't have the social or life experience to properly evaluate the information they're exposed to

A lot of strange ideas proliferate in the scene because a large proportion of the people who come across them don't know any better. They don't have the experience built up that allows them to look at something and instantly go, "No, no. That's just creepy" or "Sure, this aspect of what he's saying is perfectly reasonable, but this other part is just stupid." They're sometimes lacking in common sense and just take things at face value and follow along without thinking them through. Or they judge ideas according to their own distorted library of life experiences, one that tends to cause them to come to the wrong conclusions.

The Dunning-Kruger effect and Unconscious Incompetence

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where those who are the worst at something have the most false sense of skill and superiority. Unconscious Incompetence is a related concept, where people who suck the most in some area don't realize how bad they are. So basically the Community is full of guys who are weird and not very good with women, but they mistakenly think they know what they're talking about. This is especially true because the glut of information in the scene helps give people a false sense of expertise. Practically this means a lot of strange, misguided ideas, from people who don't know their ideas are weird, are continually being added to the discourse.

Some weirdness and conflict is driven by guy's egos

Guys who desperately want to improve are also sometimes threatened by those who seem better than them, or who are getting the hang of things more quickly than they are. Their thinking is that even if they're not objectively skilled, they can still derive some self worth from being just as bad as everyone else. Seeing a fellow scene member make progress shatters that image. They may be tempted to criticize and tear them down. This is where some of the Community's negativity and hating comes from, insecure guys trying to pull others down to their level.

As guys get better with women, their egos may still influence them. But now you're seeing clashes between gurus or competing companies, and all the bickering, arguments, and allegiances that creates throughout the scene.

A need for self-esteem and a well fed ego can cause Community Guys to feed the overall weirdness by doing all kinds of things to try and attain it. To not be redundant, I talk about some of those things in the following article (link jumps right to the relevant section):

Weird Dynamics That Can Occur Between Seduction Community Members

The first gurus in the Community seeded it with weird ideas

Even though they may get laid a lot, many of the gurus in the Seduction Community are kind of messed up humans otherwise, and teach and believe some unhealthy or out there concepts. You can be weird, or remain weird, even if you get better with girls.

The first big name gurus popularized some odd or only half-right ideas, at a time when there were no better, competing concepts. It took a good few years before people had actually tried them out in real life enough to finally say, "Wait a second. There's a better way than this." The current Community is slowly shaking this legacy off. However, many of these ideas are still fairly prevalent, even if more current thinkers are trying to move beyond them. If the first site a newbie comes across is one of the less helpful ones, he may be set down a path of weirdness without knowing there's better information out there that he's missing out on.

Guys in the community tend to hero worship the gurus

The problem with this is that instead of dispassionately thinking, "This guy has some good ideas. I'll use them. But otherwise he's not someone I want to be like. So I'll take the useful stuff and ignore the rest", they go, "Oh man. He's so cool. He gets laid a lot! I want to be exactly like him!!!" Then they proceed to try and be just like their chosen guru, harmful traits that have nothing to do with meeting girls and all.

An example would be a guru who, when he's out, tends to drink a lot, say obnoxious things to people, and sometimes get into fights. Obviously acting like this isn't an integral part of having success with his advice. But you'll see forum posts from guys boasting about how they talked shit to people then got thrown out of a bar.

It's largely on the internet

Everyone who's spent time on a message board, chat room, or comment thread knows everything is more messed up and annoying online. Of course there's the well-known factor of everyone being less inhibited, filtered, and polite. Some people are annoying across the board, but even guys who are cool in real life can come off as abrasive jerks on the internet. You've got to wonder how much less drama and conflict there'd be in the scene if it wasn't for "internet courage."

In real life if you put a bunch of people in a room together everyone would pretty quickly spot who was eccentric or full of it and promptly disregard them. The anonymity and lack of distance online largely prevents this dynamic. And everyone can make their opinion known, no matter how useless or unhealthy it is. Every hack, weirdo, clueless beginner, or borderline scam artist can get their voice out there. And it's sometimes hard to distinguish them from more together individuals. They can portray themselves in any way they like and the onus is on the reader to figure out if they're the real deal or not. If they can talk a good game they will often be seen as legitimate.

Another given on the internet is that the idiots speak louder and more often. You see this in the Community too. The more normal, healthy members and gurus are invariably more low-key and participate less, while the freaks and the marketers hocking useless magic-bullet products easily fill the available space with their noise.

Many guys in the Community are searching for self-esteem

Sure it's about hooking up with hot chicks. But deeper down lots of guys in this scene are quite unconfident and looking for a way to feel good about themselves. Becoming a player and being able to sleep around is one way they think they can do that. This leads to two things: First, a lot of weird ideas can bypass a guy's critical thinking skills if they appeal to his need to be cool and worthy. Secondly, this longing for self-esteem directly fosters some of the Community's more arrogant, "We're enlightened and superior to all the AFC's"-type beliefs.

A vicious circle keeps the weirdness going by driving away more normal people

When more socially adjusted, level-headed people discover the Community many of them are driven away quite quickly. Some are put off as soon as they read some of the stranger advice. Others are gone when they hit the forums. The next batch survive those obstacles only to beat a hasty retreat upon hanging out with some Community guys in real life. Things are almost to the point where a guy has to be at least a little weird to want to stick around. With the normalizing influence of regular people largely absent, the remaining ones are left over to become even more weird together.

A second vicious circle keeps the weirdness going because the guys who improve often leave

Some guys stay in the Community as they get better with women. Just as many take off though. It's actually widely recommended that you do. A common piece of advice is to take what you need from the Community, get better with women, then get out. The weirder guys are often the ones who struggle the most, so when the guys who 'make it' leave you're again left with a predominance of odd people making up the bulk of the population. You'll see the same weird, non-progressing guys hanging out on forums for three years or more, while the guys who improve move on to different pastimes, like hanging out with their new girlfriends or enjoying their new social lives.

Another selection process working against the weirdness quotient is that if an awkward guy does develop better social skills over the course of his improvement, he'll sometimes to 'wake up' to how weird the Seduction Community is and want to bail

A lot of the weird ideas originate from guys being too nervous to get out there

Approach anxiety is the undoing of many an aspiring pick up artist. All kinds of kooky ideas have risen up to try and combat it. As with medicine, when an illness or condition doesn't seem curable it's not long before the more new agey and alternative treatments come into the picture. In the Community a nervous guy has no shortage of hypnotic and psychic techniques, and other odd fear-reduction assignments and theories to turn to if he so desires.

Nervousness also breeds classic keyboard jockeying. Guys who are too nervous to approach girls usually still want to contribute to forums, but rather than writing something based on the real world, they'll pull some possibly good sounding, but not-quite-connected-to-reality ideas out of their minds.

Sometimes creating weird products is the right move for marketers

For one, there's a market for it, so why not feed and nourish it? Secondly, grounded, simple advice on how to get better with women often isn't sexy or profitable. Now something that seems like it contains exotic, esoteric insights, or secret high-technology of the human mind may move some units. It has that magic bullet appeal to it. It seems fresh and like something a guy hasn't come across before. Who cares if it's actually going to make many of its customers more interpersonally inept than they were already? Third, sometimes the marketers are just loony themselves and creating new agey e-books comes naturally to them.

Guys are often so enthusiastic about discovering the Community they don't properly screen what they come across

I remember first discovering the Seduction Community while in the depths of my own desperation and hopelessness. The first few pieces of advice I was exposed to were so earth shattering to my romantically clueless mind, and its promises of effortless pussy so appealing, that my attitude quickly became, "Holy crap! The Seduction Community is awesome!!! Everything it has to say is amazing!!! I've finally found my salvation!!!" This is another way my normally reliable critical thinking skills took a break. Too bad some of the subsequent information I came across wasn't as good as the first stuff I read, and my mind wasn't awake enough to filter it out.

Some guys are so grateful to finally be a part of something they don't properly screen the Community's weird concepts

This point is saying the same thing as the last one. Besides from potentially being a savior from a life of virginity, the Community sometimes appeals to lonely guys by giving them at long last a, well, community to be a part of. They're not sitting around at home anymore, feeling like they can't relate to anyone. They're a member of this whole special underground culture now.

And it's one more thing that turns their judgment down a notch; believing the Community's ideas makes them part of the chosen group. They don't consider how it might be having a detrimental effect on them. They may even align themselves with a certain school of thought as part of their new identity and preach and defend its tenants.


Other Articles On The Seduction Community
Main Article Index
www.succeedsocially.com - My other site on people skills