Did you know that The Weekly Standard has female writers?  I know, weird, right?  Anyway, one of them, Charlotte Allen, has just written an interesting, if belated, essay on the recent phenomenon of Pick-Up Artists viz the bigger question of what the (mostly heterosexual part of ) the dating/sex/love/relationship landscape looks like in 2010 America.  Preview: not so great.  Allen makes an extremely sensible point most feminist critics of people/phenomena like Tucker Max, Neil Strauss, and roissy in dc are loathe to bring up: these guys might be assholes, but goddamn are they popular with young men AND a lot of young women.  Something big and not necessarily pleasant is happening to American sexual culture, and just writing off these guys and their fellow travelers won’t explain or contest or stop anything.

In sum, while the piece is occasionally reductive, and I sometimes can’t tell whether the author is celebrating or bemoaning the present state of things (or both), it’s still punchy and entertaining and, for TWS, surprisingly reluctant to blame left-wing ideologies for everything.  A recommended read.

-TGR