RooshV = admitted to being a fraud on several occasions
Mystery = spent more time in psychiatric asylums than picking up women
Matt Forney = only managed to get laid in the Philippines
Neil Strauss = perhaps the only legit one
Second-wave PUAs (post 2005) = mostly a scam industry. Thousands of ugly shy nerds scammed out of 10,000 euro for "workshops". Youtube videos shown to employ paid actors.
2005 was the year of "The Game," right, that book? Jesus christ. I got that book at the time (it actually had a nice design -- as if it was a bible) and started visiting a certain 4 chan-esque forum (was it called "Fast Seduction" or something?) where supposedly all the big PUA names gathered and politically incorrect discussions regarding women were had. Two points I want to make, one concerning me and one concerning the history of PUA and its effect on the modern era:
Point 1. At the time I was convinced to try the book's techniques. I was 20 years old. Obviously as you understand the main appeal of PUA is it promises the subscriber that, through will power, he can make his sexual dreams true. I started talking to a lot of women and clearly received indications that were evident they weren't into me, and ran into awkward situations under the mentality of "approach as fast as you spot them" as PUA gurus instruct you to do.
I remember attending a community college and seriously trying that shit on a small Latina from Peru or some such central-American nation. She was cute. I recall now how I was eager to face her when I was talking to her (as in eager to maintain eye contact) and how she was insistent on facing away from me, as if I had halitosis. I went through this shit repeatedly with multiple women and eventually did land a "girlfriend," a landwhale 4. She had just moved across the country and had no friends/allies in this new region, and was evidently eager to team up with someone to not be friendless in this new place. I took her out on a date and made out with her/felt her up etc.
She dumped me two weeks later when a guy from Brazil at our workplace hit on her and she monkey-branched hard. I faced numerous humiliations to get to that point -- you think I was going to repeat that shit again? I realized that normal dudes weren't going through this same shit and something was wrong. But I still maintained hope until about 2012 or so that things would change.
Point 2: Those old PUA forums at Fast Seduction, when the internet was still at this 1.0 stage, were the precursor to r/theredpill, and therefore a precursor to the whole manosphere. Event though PUAs were for the most part frauds, they did start the "explicit red-pill thinking" trend, of which the blackpill is the culmination. So, in a way, without the PUA craze of 2005 (Neil Strauss became famous and a LOT of people read "The Game") we may not be here or we may still be at the r/theredpill stage.
Also, I find the intellectual development of the manosphere in the last thirteen years to be really interesting.
I distinctly recall in 2007 reading a passage in liberal journalist Robert Wright's book "The Moral Animal" that struck me as being of special significance. He explicitly said that serial monogamy is a form of polygyny (i.e what we usually mean when we say "polygamy" -- one man/many wome) which makes sense if you think about it. If you realize that serial monogamy is the norm these days -- and realize that serial monogamy is a form of polygny -- you have arrived at a "blackpill" realization about the rigged nature of the modern sexual marketplace. Of course this is only a "macro" analysis and isn't necessarily important in my context, but the blackpill was born of many men of a cerebral bent making these not too sophisticated connections at the same time, and the spark that lit these types of ruminations was, I'm sorry to say, the PUA scene.
