Similarly, the pickup extremists wish to hold their judgments up as the only acceptable rulings on who is or is not an “alpha male.” Accordingly, they ground those judgments in abstractions and self-fulfilling prophecy: you are an “alpha” if, and only if, you behave this way and think of women that way, because we say so. If they based their alpha rulings on external criteria, they might end up being proven wrong.
The number of women a man has slept with, or the frequency with which he sleeps with them, would seem to be a no-brainer as far as alpha criteria go, but you’ll note the conspicuous absence of hard numbers to this effect in the pickup world. If they actually came right out and said “You are an alpha if you have slept with X number of women,” they would be leaving open the possibility for men to come forward who have slept with that number of women without following any of their advice, acting in any of the ways they say to act, or believing any of the things they say to believe.
Indeed, the one time I did see a pickup site put an official number on the requisite lifetime conquests for alphahood, I found to my amused surprise that I had slept with that many women by the age of 22, despite always having acted pretty much the opposite of how PUAs claim one has to act.
If I pointed this out to the site’s operators, of course,
they would be armed and ready with a litany of reasons why my numbers “don’t count”—the girls were all sluts, not high-value, too old, into nerds because of meds they’re on, probably cheating on me, etc. What kind of girls do “count?” The kind of girls who sleep with men who act the way these guys say to act, of course. (God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible is right because God exists.)