Compliance & PUA
Goal
My goal with this article is to introduce a PUA concept — compliance — and then to offer some of my thoughts about PUA in general. More broadly, I wish to use this article among possibly-future others to become a more credible voice on the topic of PUA/game.
Compliance
Disclaimer: I am presenting the following information with a neutral scholarly interest.
A fundamental feature of game is compliance. Compliance is about a man getting control over/getting submission from/dominating a woman, with the woman letting him do so and doing what he wants. Many aspects of game can be traced back down to compliance.
The idea is that the man must:
- convince the woman to submit to his authority; then
- boldly exercise that authority and bend the woman to his will.
Example
For example, let’s say that the man is in the club. He looks tall, handsome, confident and well-dressed. He finds a woman with his gaze and starts approaching her. The woman watches the man as he approaches and obviously recognises that he’s a prize. She sips her drink in that way. The man notices this in turn, and when he reaches the woman, he immediately leads her, willingly, by the small of her back out of the crowd so that they can talk.
Breakdown
To start with, the man demonstrates a high-value appearance and attitude, signalling: this is a man who gets what he wants. This makes the woman receptive, ready to bite — as per step 1, the woman is convinced that she should submit to the guy’s authority some. She signals this in the way she sips her drink. The man senses her receptiveness — and as per step 2, he exercises his authority. He assumes compliance and physically leads the girl away. He could have asked the woman if she would follow him, or demanded that she should. But instead he was bold. He boldly exercised his authority. He didn’t say anything and knew that the understanding was already in place. The man was in some sense maximally exercising his authority, making the biggest acceptable move for compliance. (If he didn’t do so, the woman might be put off. It would seem like the man is failing to seize an opportunity.)
Sex
Game is about compliance, and compliance is about sex, in the sense that the final act of compliance is supposed to be sex (or some imitation). That is the ‘full submission’, the endpoint. It's the key thing that makes compliance so important. It should get to a point where the girl wants to fuck because the man wants to fuck, and the girl wants to do what the man wants.
But sex is rarely first compliance act. It’s rarely the first time where the man is taking the lead. Typically, a sequence of successful acts of compliance are used as prelude to gradually escalate to sex. Compliance requires some element of focus basically throughout all stages of the game.
Building up lots of initial compliance in this way is effective and/or necessary due to a few things:
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Reputation. Even if the woman is DTF from the first, she likely considers it on her reputation to maintain a standard of you winning her over in several intermediate steps.
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Arousal. Small acts of compliance are sexually attractive to the woman, because they mirror and anticipate compliance in the sexual act — they play the role of gradually getting the woman more so in the mood.
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Conditioning. More compliance establishes a habit in the woman of doing what the man says, so that she becomes psychologically more likely to accept whatever’s asked of her next; and from the man’s POV that’s a win.
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Investment. This is also effective from the man’s POV because, by complying, the woman invests her trust in the man and becomes more committed to their relationship/interaction. She has given away a part of herself. That means that she would have a less graceful exit from the interaction, with more of a burden of explanation — avoiding that burden makes it more likely that she’ll continue to play along.
General thoughts about PUA
PUA is generally worth learning, even if you’re not interested in picking up girls. It breaks down the dream-barrier1, behind which lurks an array of unconscious social rules, reasons for emotions, habits, and thinking patterns. It reveals to the critical eye of consciousness things which had been left to unconsciousness by often long-forgotten means. Learning PUA, you become far better able to understand yourself and the world around you.
I respect PUAers. There are some bad apples and there is a lot of crappy or dark advice out there. For example, some of what I just said about why compliance is effective is sketchy and manipulative, and can definitely be abused. But in general, the idea of men coming to more deliberately consider their purposes, to be more calculated, to know what they are trying to accomplish with women, is a good thing — a realistic, incremental step towards them bettering themselves. It’s good to have men who are not just puppets of their unconscious ideas, watching on passively, deeply afraid to confront themselves and to take up the reins and to control their mind.
Conclusion
I have gained some credibility. Now I have a one-article-level track record of speaking coherently about PUA. There are definitely omissions which would feature in a higher effort version of the article. I acknowledge those omissions, such as:
- examples of emergent concepts in game that can be reduced to compliance
- more compliance examples and breakdowns
- an example of an escalating sequence of compliance
- data, in-field experiments which consolidate a point
Feedback
Contribution towards those higher-effort features would be appreciated. I can introduce them in an edit (with attribution) below this section.
Otherwise, I’m not a complete PUA expert, so they’re might be some inaccuracies in the compliance summary, and I’d be interested to hear of any of those.