Livre d'Or

Yes, that's a very good point, even if men are being exploited, if they hurt women and behave like misogynists they are still culpable. It's absolutely true that some PUA stuff is making a lot of money; people pay money for bad solutions partly because they have a serious problem to which there aren't any good solutions.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the big fancy outfits were hiring shills to pretend to respond to the marks' advances. But I also wouldn't be surprised if approaching dozens of women, using a pre-defined script, gets you at least some positive responses, certainly more than either being too scared to ask anyone in the first place or losing your nerve and being either tongue-tied or crude. Also some of the PUA stuff is basically high pressure sales technique, if your metric is "getting" a number or a kiss, then putting women into a position where it's extremely socially awkward to say no does in fact "work" at least some of the time.

It's classic measurement fallacy: if you believe that being a worthy man means that women will want to date / have sex with you, but you don't know how to go about being a worthy man, you find ways to manipulate women into giving you the signs of sexual interest you're using as a metric for success. Never mind that they aren't actually interested in you, let alone that you're not in fact the kind of person who's attractive, you just have a higher score in the thing that's easy to measure.