it’s disturbing how well PUA concepts apply to business and sales negotiations where you typically have two entitled assholes employing peacocking, negs, shittests, last minute resistance, the whole nine yards.
Yeah, I’ve talked about this before elsewhere – IMO this is actually the central insight of PUA: it’s an attempt to apply salesmanship techniques to courtship and flirting. People often dislike that definition because they want to emphasize how “rapey” PUA is and how it treats other people’s boundaries and wishes as desires to be overcome, but, like, that’s exactly how sales and negotiations work. The fact that we consider it unacceptable when it comes to sex is a rare example of us actually having a high degree of scruples about the matter.
In the context of a business deal, though, there’s rarely an underlying threat that the other party is going to beat, forcibly rape, or even kill you if you don’t comply with what they want. Also I do in fact dislike pushy attempts to get me to buy shit, it’s just not socially acceptable to be rude to salespeople in the way that one might be rude to catcallers.
This is definitely a subtext underlying a lot of sexualized interactions, but I don’t think it explains the attitudes toward PUA specifically, because they really don’t seem to be about this. PUA “game” is about sales tricks, not force, and I get the sense that even a totally misogynistic pick-up artist would disdain relying on the threat of force to achieve success, if only because it demonstrates a lack of skill.
What criticism I’ve seen mostly seems to emphasize that hard-sell techniques and emotional manipulation undermine the legitimacy of consent, violate boundaries, and push people into agreeing to things they might regret later. Those are completely legitimate objections, but they do apply to sales generally.
Most sales decisions are reversable in a way that sex isn’t.
Also, its less tied to people’s particular identities. The quality of a product and the needs of a customer are separate from the person, so people are not as emotionally invested.
Also we have pretty strong norms about where and how it is appropriate to sell things, you can do a hard sale technique at a car dealership or in finance, but you couldn’t o it in a lot of industries, and you certainly can’t do it to random friends and family. (Indeed the stereotype of MLM scams is people selling in inappropriate situations )
This is true, but a lot of the mitigating factors in sales were put there by the government against the wishes of the people doing the selling, and in many cases they’ll go to considerable lengths to prevent people from reversing their decisions. Moreover, I’d say it’s probably easier to wreck your life by buying the wrong thing in the wrong way than it is by fucking the wrong person in the wrong way – unquestionably that’s the case if you discount STD’s. Destroying people’s lives, intentionally violating their boundaries, and otherwise harming and parasitizing the vulnerable in the pursuit of profit is a core component of sales as a field, even though any given sales job may not involve it. This bothers people less than I think it probably should.
With small-scale sales that happen in a designated selling place, I’m much less troubled by it, but there are a lot of sectors of sales where making a bad decision could ruin a person’s life and everything is optimized to make sure that as many people as possible do so. The industries where it’s most acceptable to be predatory are also the ones where it’s most destructive to the mark – car sales and finance are big ones, as you note in your examples. And while things like door-to-door and street sales are stigmatized, they’re certainly not stigmatized anywhere near as much as the equivalent style of flirting. So I think it’s fair to say that there is an actual double standard here, particularly in light of the fact that most PUA stuff seems to happen at places where flirting is considered appropriate.
I don’t exactly know where I’m going with all of this, admittedly. I wouldn’t say salespeople should be viewed as negatively as pick-up artists, or that both are benign. But I will say this much: I think that viewing consent and coercion as topics predominantly related to sexuality and the politics of sex – or of having a completely different standard when applied to those fields – warps our ability to think and talk about them.
