What we have here, or at least appear to have, is a bizarre cult of cynical, exploitative and manipulative, coercive behaviour.

Men have behaved like this since, like forever, the only difference is that a kind of ‘critical mass’ had been reached by way of reference to online communications media.

I know from when I was growing up - a long time ago - that a toxic, repellent culture of maleness pervaded, but I think that the art of deception (that is what this PUA movement seems to be), has been refined and inverted, so that man who want to “get ahead”, in the narrowly-defined, instrumentalist conception that they have of it, are better off publicly distancing themselves from all the precedents of this very Incel-adjacent sub-culture.

I’d heard of PUA since, i think, around 2015, but I found the whole concept to be utterly repulsive, even without attempting or bothering to look into it too much.

I was not typical of my then-type growing up, and yes that made a difference to how I viewed things.

It is within living memory that certain salient strands of PUA subculture were deemed to be ‘the norm’. I’m not sure how much things have really changed, because I see a lot of it going on around me. One difference is that them men involved in these manipulations have become ever-craftier and concealing their true motives and intentions.

I hope you’re right insofar as the poisonous well of outright misogyny has collapsed in on itself, though i do think this is perhaps a somewhat optimistic prognosis.

I used the term ‘strutting social peackock’ on certain kinds of men not as an endorsement or celebration of their shallow, puerile mentalities, but rather as a deliberate disparagement.