The card table paradigm.

Since the PUA post seems to be stirring discussion, I want to talk about just one small part of the whole wacky mindset: card tables.

There seems to be this idea that meat markets consist of women setting up card tables, which men then line up at and submit applications to receive sexual favors. The men make formal approaches, and the women then make the decision whether to accept or reject each man. Any woman present in a social situation without a male secort has her card table out, and any woman not rejecting a man's social overtures is at least considering accepting him as a sexual partner.

There is no, absolutely no, such thing as a "friend," or people who go to bars or parties to "enjoy themselves."



I'm not going to make a point-by-point rebuttal just now. Instead I'm just going to list how I met some of my partners.

-Long-term friends since high school, we turned out to have had long-term crushes on each other.
-We were assigned adjacent rooms in the dorm, and my roommate was horrible, so I took refuge in her room.
-He was an actor in one of my student films, and after the project was over we kept hanging out together.
-On OkCupid, he was my very highest ranked "match," so I sent him a message inviting him out for Phad Thai.
-We were members of the same online BDSM community, and started trading private messages that became increasingly more intimate.
-After talking to each other at a BDSM munch, we kept talking outside the venue after it closed, then decided to go home together.

If this just sounds like a big random pile of coincidences--good. It was. And yet they were deliberately encountered coincidences in a sense, because I made friends, met my dorm neighbors, worked on films, joined online and real communities, and so forth. In the course of living a full life, I happened to meet people, and in the course of meeting people I happened to discover sexual chemistry with quite a few of them.



Oh, and when I go out to a bar with a group of female friends, it's usually because I wanted to spend some time with those friends. FYI.