TALLINNA ÜLIKOOLI
EESTI HUMANITAARINSTITUUT
KULTUURITEADUS
Tõnis Jürgens
Pickup Artistry as a Sociocultural Formation
Bakalaureusetöö
Juhendaja: Triinu Mets
Tallinn 2012
Abstract
The “seduction community” is a collective of men connected mainly via the internet, and
in their common ambition – bettering themselves at the seduction of women. There are
dozens of official “schools” or “companies” that teach various seduction methods for
money; each represented by a self-affirmed guru, whose adherants include any number of
the tens of thousands of seduction artists that mingle in the Community.
While outside opinion of this sociocultural phenomenon is prone to disbelief and reproach,
those within the Community share the ideology that their practices aren't simply about
bedding women, but about personal development, about becoming a “better person”.
Not all members of this virtual fraternity associate their practices with pickup artistry;
some deal, instead, with neuro linguistic programming, or speed hypnosis, while others
claim to teach their clientele holistic lifestyle development. Still, the majority of the
seduction community adheres to “pickup”, which, as an element of the seduction
discourse, can also entail the aforementioned practices. In this study, I will analyze, and
give an overview of “structured game” – a method of pickup artistry made globally famous
by Neil Strauss' autobiographical book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of
Pickup Artists (2005). To this end, I will utilize the theoretical concepts of “compulsive
heterosexuality”, “performative gender practices”, “the heterosexual matrix”, “the
hegemony of men”, and “erotic capital”.
I argue that pickup artistry, as a sociocultural formation, was effected by the integration of
the excessively commercialized and politicized ethos of sexual liberalism, and the
expansion of the self-help market, concurrent with the growth of the American middleclass.
To relate pickup artistry to concrete aspects of the modern courting culture in America, I
will compare practices of pickup artistry to those of “the hookup culture”, as depicted by
Michael Kimmel in Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (2008).
Table of Contents
Abstract..................................................................................................................................2
An autoethnographic introduction..........................................................................................4
1. Methodology......................................................................................................................8
1.1 Hypothesis...................................................................................................................9
1.2 Compulsive heterosexuality, gender performativity, and the heterosexual matrix....10
1.3 Hegemonic masculinity, and the hegemony of men..................................................13
1.4 Erotic capital..............................................................................................................16
1.5 Structured game – applying the methods..................................................................18
2. The seduction community................................................................................................22
2.1 The propagation of Sex..............................................................................................22
2.2 The expansion of the self-help industry.....................................................................26
2.3 The internet-based Community.................................................................................28
2.4 Media attention..........................................................................................................30
2.5 Inner-community homosociality................................................................................34
3. Average frustrated chumps...............................................................................................38
3.1 “Hookup” and “pickup”: a comparative analysis of modern courting practices.......40
Summary..............................................................................................................................49
Elukutseliste võrgutajate praktikad kui kultuurisüsteem – kokkuvõte.................................51
Bibliography.........................................................................................................................53
2
An autoethnographic introduction
“This should be illegal! 3 questions that... TURN HER ON! Find out how:
click here” – web banner for Pandora's Box, a “one minute mind reading”
technique
Clicking the banner led me to a webpage1 where I was assured that the system wasn't in
any way a hoax or a gimmick: “It's cutting-edge psychology combined with real-world
application,” claimed the anonymous author of the text. “I was sick and tired of seeing rich
or good looking guys get all the girls... and nothing I tried or found online ever worked. I
learned 'the hard way' why most 'systems' for meeting and attracting women don't work!”
An introductory video to Pandora's Box began playing. The voice-over of a younger man –
a student of this method who later introduces himself as Benjamin Kennedy Jr. – stated that
he was not good-looking, rich, powerful or naturally good with women, but used a certain
psychological method developed by a professional seducer with the assumed name of Vin
DiCarlo. This system, Benjamin claimed, now allowed him to successfully approach
women without the fear of being rejected, and it could be taught to anybody interested.
This was my first contact with the online seduction community.
I was sceptical. It seemed like pseudo-psychology, like another dubious product one can
stuble across on the internet. The marketing effort put into it – the emphasis on the fact that
it “actually works!”, the claim that a Harvard graduate recommended it, or that scientists in
general had something to do with it – was enough to initially make me extremely sceptical,
and then, however, borderline curious. I was intrigued as to how this “Vin DiCarlo” could
convince me that his method had any other function besides angling money from
unsuspecting loners.
So I downloaded and read the introductory “strategy guide”, A Man's Guide to the Female
Mind (DiCarlo 2011), which explained the basic theory of Pandora's Box method. The
system categorizes women into eight types depending on her thoughts about sexual
1 “Open her box” – one of the internet marketing outlets of Pandora's Box: http://openherbox.com/xb/?
hop=evevera
3
behavior, relationships and self-management. The approaching man, having in mind three
more or less implicitly asked questions, tries to find out a particular woman's “type” and by
knowing it, the aspiring seducer can then make subtle changes to his approach to have the
“best results” with the woman he's interested in.
With these three questions2 in mind, I thought about women in my social circle, friends and
acquaintances, and tried to apply this method of stratification to see if it actually made any
sense. It's an uncomfortable and difficult errand, as placing people in these sorts of rigid
categories of identification tends to be. Pandora's Box is basically a simplified
demystification of normative gender behaviour expected of Western women – at least these
were my thoughts at the time, albeit much less clearly defined – but some of it also seemed
to make sense; or, at least, to kindle further curiosity.
I confessed to a friend, another young man, about this strange discovery of mine and he
told me he'd heard about something like this before; a book recommendation from a friend
of his, who had a reputation for being quite a “ladies' man”. Although I was reluctant to
admit it, I felt the initial burning scepticism I had for any kind of self-help literature and
the likes, slightly fade. If somebody like that – somebody who, in my mind, knew how to
socialize with women much better than I did – had taken an interest in these things as well,
I figured I was on to something. Had he actually studied one, or more, of these seduction
systems? Were they truly of any help? How did they work?
I figured that whatever results this personal research would eventually yield, I'd still come
out the winner: were I to disprove the effectiveness of these seduction systems, I'd simply
prove it valid to have severe doubts in suspicious self-help methods, but were they to
actually turn out useful, I'd be richer in knowledge. Even though I understood that
Benjamin Kennedy's monologue on being an average, romantically unsuccessful guy was a
marketing trick, an effort to have me relate to this anonymous voice in cyberspace, the idea
of an intelligibly outlined routine to decypher the mystified workings of Woman's mind –
as I'd thus far come to think of it – was appealing.
2 The questions are following: 1) is she a Tester or an Investor? – does she date several men searching for
the right one, or does she invest her time in trying to change one man to be perfect?; 2) is she a Denier or
a Justifier? – does she suppress her ideas about sex, thus making it for men to approach her sexually, or
does she see sex as less significant, and often justifies it?; 3) is she a Realist or an Idealist? – is she
realistic in her need to be self-sufficient and career focused, or does she maintain an ideal image of her
future husband and children, and hopes to achieve this goal in a more passive manner?
4
As such, interested to find out more about these methods, and about the men who claimed
to apply them without embarrassment and, indeed, with success, and about this odd subgenre of self-help in general, I searched the internet for information about this book my
friend's friend recommended:
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005) is Neil Strauss'
autobiographical field study on the world of pickup artists, a book that's spawned harsh
criticisms, and what could be considered a cult following (Lin 2012). Strauss begins
researching pickup artistry not only out of journalistic interest, but personal need, and in
time becomes, under the tutelage of Erik James Horvat-Markovic – better known by his
stage name “Mystery” – a renowned master pickup artist himself: “Style”.
Before all this, however; before creating his “lady killer” alter-ego, Strauss starts off from
humble beginnings like the majority of the seduction community; as Benjamin Kennedy Jr.
said he had: not good-looking, rich or famous. Strauss describes himself as an averagelooking man living in Los Angeles who feels intimidated by women, and inadequate in
comparison with men who don't. To exemplify these men, he writes about a friend of a
friend, Dustin, who, with his natural3 charm and “animal instinct”, seems to work fluently
at seduction. Strauss' feeling of inadequacy inhibits his personal evolution, but unable to
learn from Dustin, and overcome his difficulties at socializing with women, Strauss simply
accepts his failures and Dustin's successes as an expression of an inevitable difference in
personalities. That is, until he comes across something that he considers to be lifechanging:
“What I discovered was an entire community filled with Dustins – men who
claimed to have found the combination to unlock a woman's heart and legs –
along with thousands of other like myself, trying to learn these secrets. The
difference was that these men had broken down their methods to a specific
set of rules that anybody could apply. And each self-proclaimed pickup
artist had his own set of rules.” (Strauss 2005: 11)
Strauss' following story is easy to relate to. It evokes empathy through which seems to be
an honest depiction of an unconfident and self-conscious man half-sceptically grasping at a
chance to improve himself. The Game, albeit clearly written foremost to sell books and
entertain people, appears to give a fairly comprehensive overview of this sociocultural
3 Among pickup artists, a “natural” is considered to be a man who is naturally good with women, without
prior knowledge of the workings of the Community.
5
phenomenon. In the current thesis, I aim to I relate my own, Strauss', the friend of a
friend's – who recommended the book – and presumably many other men's discovery of
the seduction community, and get acquainted with its workings.
6
1. Methodology
In studying pickup artistry as a sociocultural formation, I will try to answer the following
questions: how and why has the seduction community come into existence? Who are its
members? What do their various practices entail? How do they relate to the normative
practices of modern courtship in America?
At this point, it serves to briefly distinguish the somewhat ambiguous difference between
the terms “seduction community” and “pickup artistry”: the seduction community is a
sociocultural formation of men, who're connected globally via the internet, and in their
common ambition – learning, with varying interests and approaches, the seduction of
women. There are dozens of “schools” or “companies” that teach different seduction
methods for money, and tens of thousands of aspiring seduction artists; many of whom
share the ideology that their practices are not simply about bedding women, but about
personal development, about becoming “a better person”.
“Pickup”, as a term, has a longer history: at the beginning of the twentieth century, a
“pickup” was, for a white middle-class male of higher college status, a (working-class) girl
turned sexual object, with whom, after having wooed her (with his status), the man pushed
“as far as he could” (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988: 263). While this overtly seems to be the
goal of the majority of the seduction community's members, there are yet some who make
a distinction between themselves and “pickup artists” (see chapter 2.5). In this study,
“pickup artistry” will define a collection of practices shared by a certain (majority) group
of men within the seduction community, who mainly utilize the methods of “structured
game”4 in approaching women; as made globally famous by Neil Strauss' The Game
(2005), and the reality show The Pickup Artist (VH1 2007-2008), hosted by Mystery.
I argue that the seduction community, and pickup artistry as a subsidiary technique, were
begot in the integration of two concurring processes of the twentieth century: 1) the ethos
of twentieth century sexual liberalism (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988), as affected by
developments in the discourse on sexuality during the nineteenth century (Foucault 1990);
4 Focusing on the teaching process, routines, and techniques of seduction, “structured game” is an elaborate
system of (more or less) verbose, and intelligible social manouvers. Mystery is its prime advocate.
7
2) the booming of the self-help industry during the 1970s (McGee 2005), influenced by the
ever-expanding market for (auto)biographical self-improvement guidebooks (Sassoon
2008). My claim is that the ethos of sexual liberalism effected, in many heterosexual
American men, a feeling of masculine inadequacy. In attempting to alleviate their
frustration, these men turned to the seduction community, seeking aid in an according form
of self-development – pickup artistry.
In trying to give an overview of the Community, this study will mainly use as source
materials Neil Strauss' autobiographical book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of
Pickup Artists (2005), the reality show The Pickup Artist (VH1 2007-2008), the webpage
PUA Lingo5 (2012), and various other internet sources. More specifically, I will focus on
aspects of seduction guru Mystery's techniques to exemplify the common practices of
pickup artists who utilize “structured game” as their method of seduction.
In addition to giving a brief historic-analytic overview of the seduction community, and
how pickup artistry as a sociocultural phenomenon has formed, I will analyze the latter
with the theoretical concepts of “compulsive heterosexuality” (Pascoe 2007), “the
heterosexual matrix” (Butler 1990), “performative gender practices” (ibid.), “hegemonic
masculinity” (Connell 1987, 1995; Connell, Messerschmidt 2005; Demetriou 2001;
Donaldson 1993), “the hegemony of men” (Hearn 2004), “erotic-”, or “sexual capital”
(Green 2008; Gonzales, Rolinson 2005; Hakim 2010; Martin, George 2006), and Kimmel's
(2008) reports of “the hookup culture”.
1.1 Hypothesis
As a result of various sexual liberation movements of the twentieth century, the
economically, politically, and symbolically charged value of one's sexuality, and that of
sex, ascended. Because of this, it would seem, a failure at realizing one's potential for this
newfound sexual freedom – a deficiency in succeeding at the modern courting practices of
the “hookup culture” (Kimmel 2008) – created in many men a feeling of masculine
inadequacy. The seduction community terms these men as “average frustrated chumps”, or
AFCs (Strauss 2005: 10); and to PUAs, (abbreviation of Pick-Up Artist) they represent the
5 The pickup artists' online encyclopedia, PUA Lingo: http://www.pualingo.com/, maintained mostly by
Vince Lin, a.k.a. AlphaWolf, and by “Casual”. I'll be citing Lin as the author.
8
majority of typical modern males with socially conditioned ideas of the workings of the
attraction process (Lin 2012). With the help of the seduction community, professional
pickup artists claim to have evolved beyond these obsolete courting practices, no longer
feel as victimized by the latter, and are able to pass their knowledge on to those desperate
enough and willing to pay.
My claim is that behind this ideology of helping their former AFC counterparts, pickup
artists do, in fact, understand the workings of today's courting rituals, but instead of
attempting to rectify this somewhat flawed machinery of sociocultural practices, many of
them simply use it, instead, to earn profit in the context of helping others at selfdevelopment. There are, indeed, men who, after their encounter with practices of pickup
artistry, go on to live as more confident persons, with increased “erotic capital”, and able to
make themselves and their future romantic partners happy (Strauss 2005: 168-169, 430432); but a great many stay on to teach others, as self-affirmed seduction gurus in a field of
competition for the accumulation of not only economic capital (as exchanged for erotic
capital; see chapter 1.4), but, in a sense, for the approval of their peers. As such, pickup
artists – especially those that one could consider “social robots” (Lin 2012; Rifkind;
Spencer; Strauss 2005) – are perpetuating patterns of compulsive heterosexuality (chapter
1.2), enforcing the heterosexual matrix (ibid.), and propagating practices of the hegemony
of men (chapter 1.3).
Before giving an overview of the origins and history of the seduction community, as
influenced by the past century's politicization and commercialization of sexuality, and then
applying the above-mentioned theoretical concepts to the analysis of this overview to
provide a more concrete case study of the practices of pickup artistry, it serves to briefly
elaborate on these theoretical concepts, and why I'm using them.
1.2 Compulsive heterosexuality, gender performativity, and the
heterosexual matrix
In her book Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, C.J. Pascoe
(2007) writes about eighteen months of fieldwork conducted among the students of
Columbia River High School, as she studied their practices of sexuality and gender
9
identity. While overhearing the locker-room talk of adolescent boys, Pascoe noticed a
mirror image of the public face of masculinity, as the boys' “sex talk” was similar to that of
their “celluloid representatives” (85). However, Pascoe claims that their discourse on
heterosexuality reveals less about their sexual desire and orientation than it does about the
centrality of their ability to exercise literal or figurative dominance over girls' bodies,
which is not only a means for the deflection of insults such as being called a homosexual, a
“fag”, but also for the affirmation of one's masculine image (86).
The boys who can't amount to proper sex talk are emasculated, but those who prove their
worth by advocating and engaging in public practices of heterosexuality are considered
masculine. Pascoe names this collection of sexualized practices, discourses and
interactions as “compulsive heterosexuality” (ibid.); drawing on Adrienne Rich's (1986)
concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” and Michael Kimmel's (1987) argument that
masculinity in itself must be constantly expressed and proven in practices of what the latter
calls “compulsive masculinity” (Pascoe 2007: 86, 197).
“Chad sneered at boys who, unlike him, couldn’t 'get girls,'” writes Pascoe (92), depicting
a typical example of practicing compulsive heterosexuality in a high school setting. This
kind of mentality and behaviour later transfers into the post-adolescent years of many men
(Kimmel 2008). Those who can't engage in the “game of getting girls” weaken their
masculine image, and are seen as portraying inadequate masculinity, while those who can
“get girls” are, e.g. in Neil Strauss' terms considered the “Dustins” of the lot (2005: 10-11)
– the “naturals” that AFCs stand in awe of.
In Pascoe's (86) view, the concept of compulsive heterosexuality exemplifies Judith
Butler's (1990) idea of “gender performativity”. To Butler both one's (social) gender and
(biological) sex are constructed, and continually perpetuated via performative gender
practices. These practices are not to be confused with the idea of the performance of one's
gender, however. While the performance of gender practices – exemplified, in an extreme
manner, by drag (ibid., 137) – is, of course, an essential aspect in the affirmation of one's
gender, the term itself seems to hint that there exists an ungendered subject, who can freely
choose which gender to perform in a given instance. Performativity, to Butler, is an
authoritative utterance, that serves not only as an acknowledgement of one's gender, but as
a continually repeated assertive action, which begins with one's birth – when a person is
10
deemed a “he” or a “she”. (Annus, Laanes 2008: 854-855)
These performative practices – including compulsive heterosexuality – are normative
within the bounds of what Butler calls “the heterosexual matrix”; the grid through which
bodies, genders and desires are naturalized. The heterosexual matrix is:
“...a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that
assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex
expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine
expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through
the compulsory practice of heterosexuality” (Butler 1990: 151)
According to Butler, categories of male and female, woman and man, are produced within
the binary frame of the heterosexual matrix, which presupposes that men desire women
and vice versa (22-23). In the West, this desire was greatly intensified with the sexual
liberation movements, and concurrent propagation of Sex during the twentieth century (see
chapter 2.1).
A masculine identity can be formed, and maintained by adherence to compulsive
heterosexuality, as exemplified by some modern courting practices; e.g. trying to “get
girls”, and expecting the latter to comply. This is a means to affirm one's masculinity, as
demanded of modern men by the heterosexual matrix.
As pickup artistry certainly entails attempting to “get girls”, and thus the according explicit
displays of one's heterosexuality, and an according variant of masculinity, the theoretical
concepts of compulsive heterosexuality, gender performativity, and the heterosexual matrix
seem to apply well in the analysis of pickup artistry as a sociocultural formation.
Based on Pascoe's abovementioned claim that the assertion of one's literal and figurative
power over women's bodies is a means for the affirmation of one's masculine gender, and
Kimmel's (2008) observation that “hooking up” with girls – a concept that will later be put
in comparison with “pickup” (in chapter 3.1) – is not only performed in striving for sexual
pleasure, but as a young man's effort to prove something to his peers (Kimmel 2008: 205206), I move to argue that pickup artistry is largely a collection of homosocial practices,
and, in a sense, its cause is more about attaining hegemony, than it is about giving and
receiving heterosexual pleasure.
11
1.3 Hegemonic masculinity, and the hegemony of men
Hegemonic masculinity, as a theoretical concept, was first proposed by Kessler (1982), in
reports from a field study of social inequality in Australian high schools, which provided
empirical evidence of hierarchized masculinities, in terms of gender as well as class. The
concept was then further developed by Connell as a critique to the “male sex role” theories.
In Gender and Power (1987), Connell proposed “hegemonic masculinity” as model of
multiple masculinities and power relations, and integrated it into a systematic sociological
theory of gender. (Connell, Messerschmidt 2005: 830-831)
Derived from Gramsci's (1971) concept of hegemony – the process through which the
ruling class, in an effort to assert its domination, establishes and maintains its ethos as a
societal norm (allegedly) beneficial for the subordinate classes – “hegemonic masculinity”
proposes that most societies perpetuate gender practices through which men are
encouraged to affirm a dominant masculinity via hegemony. While practiced only by a
minority of men, distinct from those of subordinated masculinities, hegemonic masculinity
is certainly, in essence, normative, as it embodies the currently most honored way of being
a man, requires all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and legitimates,
ideologically, the global subordination of women to men. (Connell, Messerschmidt 2005:
832)
As such, explicit heterosexuality and homophobia are established as the bedrocks of
hegemonic masculinity; the fundamental element of hegemonic masculinity is sexualizing
women as potential partners while negating other men as such. Women, as well as
competition with other men for them, provide hegemonic men with sexual validation.
(Donaldson 1993: 645)
This certainly concurs with the concept of compulsive heterosexuality, whose practices
entail, as mentioned above, overt demonstrations of one's heterosexuality in trying to “get
girls”, thus also avoiding the prospect of showing a complicit masculinity, and that of
emasculating insults such as being deemed a homosexual (Pascoe 2007: 86). As Connell
and Messerschmidt (2005) state, the power of hegemonic masculinity is in its most explicit
form in relation to men of subordinant masculinites – those who receive the benefits of
patriarchy without enacting a strong version of masculine dominance are regarded as
12
showing a complicit masculinity – and in the compliance of heterosexual women to the
hegemony of a certain minority of men. (ibid., 832)
There is pertinence, also, between the concepts of hegemonic masculinity and the
heterosexual matrix, as both constructions are maintained via practices of compulsive
heterosexuality. The self-preservation of patriarchy is assured by strictly maintaining
heterosexual desire as the standard, and people that adhere to deviations from the norm –
homosexuality, or forms of sexual perversion that were dreaded during Victorian times –
are regarded as showing complicit masculinity, as being subordinant to hegemonic
masculinity, and can be categorized as “the Other”.
Butler (1990), drawing on psychoanalysis and Gayle Rubin's (1975) readings of LéviStrauss, Lacan, and Freud, depicts “the Other” as preceding the compulsory
heterosexuality established by patriarchal exogamy. As all cultures innately seek to
reproduce themselves, exogamy was established as an expression and assertion of the
incest taboo. Since this exogamy was inherently heterosexual, homosexuality was made
taboo along with incest. Thus, “the Other” helps in the establishment of the heterosexual
institution; while the one deemed homosexual or pervert is a means for the normative
heterosexual to distinguish himself, the former remains outside the bounds of the
heterosexual matrix. (Butler 1990: 72-74)
Similarly, hegemonic masculinity maintains itself by subordinating homosexual
masculinities, and differentiating itself from them. The concept of hegemonic masculinity
is built on the idea of a hierarchy of masculinities, deriving from homosexual men’s
experience with violence and prejudice from straight men, as accounted by social scientists
in the 1970s and '80s (Connell, Messerschmidt 2005: 831-832). However, later
developments of the concept of hegemonic masculinity have shown that while
homosexuality is generally thought of as in direct opposition to hegemonic masculinity,
because it undermines the heterosexual institution that's of primary importance to the
reproduction of patriarchy (Demetriou 2001: 344), hegemonic masculinity, as a
sociocultural collection of practices, is actually not constructed in total opposition to gay
masculinites, since it often takes elements from the latter to create “a hybrid hegemonic
bloc whose heterogeneity is able to render the patriarchal dividend invisible and legitimate
patriarchal domination.” (354)
13
Connell and Messerschmidt, in their response, agree that Demetriou's conceptualization of
dialectical pragmatism in “internal hegemony” is useful, and that Demetriou makes a
convincing case that certain representations of masculinity, and some heterosexual men’s
everyday gender practices have appropriated aspects of gay masculinities. But they aren't
convinced that this hybridization is hegemonic, at least not on a regional or global level,
where the estrangement of homosexuals remains (Connell, Messerschmidt 2005: 845).
It's clearly important to distinguish hegemonic masculinity from the masculinities that are
subordinant to it, such as homosexual masculinites. However, the constant back and forth
debates over the distinction of masculinities makes the utilization of hegemonic
masculinity, as a concept, a somewhat unprogressive development.
Jeff Hearn (2004) makes a point of distinguishing the concept of hegemonic masculinity
from “the hegemony of men”, the latter defined as a collection of the various everyday
practices that affirm the hegemony of a particular group of men. While hegemonic
masculinity, as a theoretical concept, often tends to involve itself with the distinction of
various kinds of masculinities, the hegemony of men suggests “a greater attention to the
social construction of the systems of differentiations of men and men’s practices rather
than the social construction of particular ‘forms’ of men, as masculinities.” (60)
Hearn claims, that it isn't a particular form of masculinity that's hegemonic, but various
ideas and practices instead (60-61). As such, his concept of the hegemony of men dodges
some of the main problems concerning “hegemonic masculinity”: the problems of
ambiguity and overlap (Connell, Messerschmidt 2005: 838-839), as well as the perils of
reifying opposite groups of men instead of looking at masculinities as fluid configurations
of practice (Aboim 2010: 70).
“The hegemony of men” coincides with the previously mentioned theoretical concepts of
chapter 1.2, and also with Judith Butler's (1990) notion of performative gender practices. In
order for one to remain within the normative bounds of one's gender, Western society, as a
patriarchal formation, endorses various practices of hegemony by men – the domination of
women, and the dialectic of the alienation of “unnatural”6 sexual practices along with the
hybridization of some, useful gay practices – and, in women, the consent to some of these
6 “Paradoxically, homosexuality is almost always considered within the homophobic signifying ecenomy as
both uncivilized and unnatural.” – Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990: 132)
14
practices of men in order to uphold patriarchy.
Pickup artists support practices that affirm the hegemony of men by endorsing compulsive
heterosexuality – a collection of practices, and a mentality, that dictates the expression of
one's desire for women, in order to avoid being classified as “the Other” – and,
accordingly, aspiring for complete or symbolic dominance over women's bodies and
minds. In their efforts, they often study, and mimic, behavioral patterns of people in the
context of courting, and of those naturally good with women; striving, eventually, to
exceed the latter in terms of seduction.
By competing for, and gaining sexual control over women, pickup artists not only acquire
sexual validation, but affirm patriarchy, and the hegemony of men, and assert their stable
masculine gender identities, as demanded of them by the heterosexual matrix.
1.4 Erotic capital
Hakim (2010) presents the concept of erotic capital as a fourth primary personal asset next
to the concepts of economic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). Erotic capital,
Hakim argues, is multi-faceted, and consists of six (or seven) elements: while agreeing to
the inherent importance of physical beauty and sexual attractiveness in consisting erotic
capital, Hakim also points out the value of social grace, liveliness (a mixture of physical
fitness, social energy and good humour), social presentation and style, explicit sexual
competence, and, in some cultures, a woman's fertility. (2010: 500-501)
Since most of the abovementioned elements of erotic capital are readily acquirable by
learning, the concept is closely intertwined with Bourdieu's “cultural capital” (1986: 1721). Indeed, erotic capital gains greater value when linked to one's high levels of economic,
cultural, and social capital (Hakim 2010: 503), but it is imperative to note that while erotic
capital is closely interrelated with other capitals, it isn't reducible to them (Green 2008:
29). As a term depicting, accordingly, a collection of the elements – aligned to represent a
quality and quantity of attributes that an individual possesses, which serve to elicit an
erotic response in another – “erotic capital” stands on its own. As such, it is convertible to
other forms of capital, and vice versa. Nowadays it's possible to exchange economic capital
for (potential) erotic capital e.g. by investing in plastic surgery and augmenting one's
15
physical elements. (ibid.)
While pickup artists don't generally invest in plastic surgery, they do study, as mentioned
above, the behavioral patterns of people in the context of courting practices, and later
utilize this knowledge in the social performance of “getting girls”, or pickup artistry. As
most pickup artists tell their clientele (fittingly, as a marketing scheme), they too were once
“average frustrated chumps” – socially awkward, intimidated by women, and uninformed
in matters of modern courting. Coming across the Community; discussing, in online
newsgroups, with men of a similar disposition – in a form of “sex talk” – the topic of
attracting women; studying under the tutolage, and paid services, of one or more seduction
gurus; going out in “the field”7 to put their theories to practice; and then, again, debating
with other PUAs on the internet; all of this provided these men, once AFCs, with the
knowledge and skills necessary for becoming pickup artists. In this sense, the qualities that
PUAs acquire in their “training” can easily be associated with most of the elements of
“erotic capital”, as defined by Hakim (2010). Bettering oneself at pickup artistry involves –
often with the help of other forms of capital – increasing one's self-confidence, social
skills, sex appeal, liveliness, personal presentation, etc.
The accumulation of erotic capital, as such, is central to all the various operational schools
of seduction in the Community. Average, non-professional pickup artists utilize their erotic
capital in an effort to gain sexual validation, and the affirmation of other men; the latter by
pertaining to practices that endorse the hegemony of men and perpetuate the heterosexual
matrix, as discussed in previous chapters (1.2 and 1.3). Professional seduction gurus, on
the other hand, convert their erotic capital not only into masculine capital8, but into
economic as well, by selling their knowledge in the form of seduction workshops,
seminars, personal coaching, (e-)books and guides, DVDs, CDs, etc.; all this in an
ideology of helping “average frustrated chumps” realize their sexual potential. These
processes appear to have a market-like character, but they aren't, however, entirely
reducible to market analysis, as “bodies do not carry prices in sexual sociality, so the
abstract principles of market exchange hold limited analytic value” (Green 2008: 28;
7
8
“
The real world, as opposed to idle fantasies and online pickup forums.” – Vince Lin (2012)
Masculine capital”, in singular form, implies an essentialized, universal masculinity, that all men adhere
to. In this context, I mean a form of masculinity that is associable with the domination of women, and the
subordination of other men; masculine capital that is acquirable via practices that endorse of the
hegemony of men, not e.g. homosexual masculinites.
“
16
Martin, George 2006: 114).
In analyzing pickup artistry as a cultural system, I will use the concept of erotic capital in
two ways: 1) to define an assemblage of personal qualities, made proficient through
practice and intended, when utilized by pickup artists on certain women9, to induce erotic
attraction; 2) knowledge on which particular personal qualities one ought to develop, and
how to develop them, to succesfully seduce women; marketed by PUAs as acquirable in
learning, and improvable by honing. The second aspect is similar to that of “cultural
capital”, but in this context strictly marks courting-related developments.
In addition to being associable with practices that maintain the upkeep of a patriarchal
society, the concept of erotic capital also relates to the notion of the performance, and
performativity of one's gender (Hakim 2010: 503-504).
1.5 Structured game – applying the methods
To illustrate the application of my methodology, and how the theoretical concepts
mentioned in chapters 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 are actually usable in an analysis of pickup artistry,
I will approach some of the distinct elements of the “structured game” of Erik James
Horvat-Markovic, alias Mystery, as depicted in The Game (Strauss 2005), The Pickup
Artist (VH1 2007-2008), and on www.pualingo.com (Lin 2012).
Mystery was one of the foremost pioneers of a structured approach in the seduction
community, using an elaborate system of (more or less) intelligible social manouvers, as
developed over a decade of practice and “field testing”10 (Strauss 2005: 20). A lion's share
of the lingo that pickup artists use – as seen in the glossary of The Game (439-448), or on
the webpage pualingo.com – is begot of Mystery. By creating a system of verbose
seduction techniques, which came to by known as the Mystery Method, he augmented not
only the jargon and techniques of pickup, but also advanced ways of teaching it to others
(ibid., Lin 2012). The teaching of “structured game” in a seduction workshop, as such,
depicts the process where a seduction guru exchanges embodied erotic capital – his
knowledge of pickup – for the economic capital of the attending students.
9 HB – the abbreviation of “hot babe”, “a term used by members of the seduction community to refer to
attractive women. When discussing a specific woman, it is often followed by either a numerical ranking
of her beauty – such as HB10 – or by a nickname, such as HBRedhead” (Strauss 2005: 442).
10 Testing theoretical concepts of seduction in the real world.
17
Mystery sees the process of seduction as linear: “'The basic format is FMAC – find, meet,
attract, close.'” (Strauss 2005: 20). For this purpose, the pickup artist utilizes an array of
techniques. In this brief analysis, I will approach three: “avatar-building”, “demonstrating
higher value” (DHV), and “negging the target”. These techniques serve to improve a
pickup artist's erotic capital, and his chances of eliciting a sexual response in women he
approaches.
“Avatar-building”, as demonstrated in the reality show The Pickup Artist, is an external
make-over: the aspiring pickup artist gets a haircut, a tan, has his teeth fixed, finds more
suitable clothing, etc. However, the PUA's “avatar” should also, along with the aspiring
pickup artist's new (more sexual) self-representation, eventually internalize his concurring
newfound ethos of pickup artistry, thus serving as a performative gender expression. This
ethos entails advocating practices that maintain the heterosexual matrix – a stable
masculine gender is expected to express desire for the opposite sex in activities of
compulsive heterosexuality – and the hegemony of men – via the consensual domination of
women, and the subordination of the representatives of complicit masculinites.
“Being picked up by a pickup artist, when done properly, is a privilege,” claims Mystery
on the second season of The Pickup Artist (2008). This signifies several elements of the
PUA ethos: 1) pickup artists succeed at more practices of seduction, and the hegemony of
men, than their AFC counterparts; 2) pickup artists often exceed even “naturals” at the
“game” of seduction; 3) because of the previous two points, pickup artists make better
mates for women.
The first element creates a dichotomy of masculinites, where PUAs hold the hegemony
over AFCs. The second, however, puts AFCs and PUAs both in a subordinant position to a
group of men, whose practices inherently maintain, and influence, the hegemony of men;
pickup artists subordinate themselves by accepting the hegemony of men as normative, and
by studying and mimicking the according practices to achieve concurring, or better results
with women.
As for the third aspect: by claiming to improve the seduction experience for women,
pickup artists distinguish their courting practices as more beneficial to women than those
of other suitors. As such, they're implicitly utilizing their hegemony over their
18
subordinates, and gaining sexual validation via women, and the competition for them with
other men.
For now, the PUA ethos of holding hegemony over others brings me to the concept of a
demonstration of higher value (DHV): “A story or action used to increase the perceived
value of a PUA within a setting, which results in increased attraction and interest from the
opposite sex” (Lin 2012). DHV relates closely to pickup artists' studying and mimicing of
“naturals”, who're thought to convey their higher value inherently. Elements that serve to
demonstrate a pickup artist's higher value are: alpha-maledom, social intelligence, correct
emotional filters, sense of humor, a willingness to walk away – “you want her, but you
don't need her” (ibid.), a good body build, a sense of style, perceived material wealth, etc.
Thus DHV, it would seem, is in many ways the Community's own term for “erotic capital”;
as a practice, it entails showing the same elements as a demonstration of one's erotic capital
would (Hakim 2010: 500-501).
“Negging” involves making ambiguous statements, backhand compliments, or accidental,
but humorous insults to lower a woman's self esteem, and to actively demonstrate the
pickup artist's disinterest in his “target” – the girl he is actually trying to woo – while he
concurrently displays his erotic capital amongst her friends (Strauss 2005: 20-21). Negging
serves to distinguish the pickup artist from other suitors, who “make the mistake” of
lavishing a beautiful woman with compliments (Lin 2012). Thus, negging, as a technique,
implies hegemony over subordinant groups of men (AFCs), and, since pickup artists expect
the woman to comply to the desired outcome of negging – to show active (sexual) interest
in the PUA – this technique also maintains a mentality of hold over (compliant) women.
I chose these three particular elements of structured game, because they exemplify three
primal facets of pickup artistry: 1) avatar-building is related to self-affirmation: the
externalization of one's newfound ethos as a pickup artist entails showing explicit desire
for women (propagating compulsive heterosexuality, and the heterosexual matrix), seeking
heterosexual validation, and the subordination of other masculinites (practices of the
hegemony of men), such as “naturals”, whom PUAs originally study enviously; later, one's
avatar is internalized through repeated practices of pickup artistry (performative gender
practices); 2) demonstrating higher value is basically the same as demonstrating one's
erotic capital, and it is also associable to performative gender practices, as well as further
19
enforcing of notions of hegemony; 3) the negging of “HBs”, as a technique, distinguishes
PUAs from men who are, in terms of courting, less informed – subordinating the latter –
and is meant to call forth compliance in women; thus asserting hegemonic dominance over
them, and exemplifying a womanizer's mindset.
While this brief analysis of a few technical elements of “structured game”, as pioneered by
Mystery, seems to prove the usefulness of the particular theoretical concepts chosen for
this study, it does not bring me closer to answering the questions I posed earlier. For more
elaborate examination of pickup artistry as a sociocultural formation, it serves to give an
overview of certain historical developments in America, and to depict the seduction
community's relation to them, as well as compare practices of pickup artistry to those of
modern courting rituals.
20
2. The seduction community
“Pickup isn't just about finding women in your life. It's about being a better
person.” – Simeon Moses, winner of the second season of The Pickup Artist
(VH1 2008)
This chapter will deal with a more historical overview of the seduction community, and
will attempt to depict how, and why it has, as a sociocultural system, developed.
I quoted Simeon above, because his claim affirms, in a way, that the formation of the
Community, and practices of pickup artistry are historically related to two developments of
the past two centuries: 1) the process in which the Western middle-class charged its
discourse on sexuality with great political, economic, and symbolic value, as described by
Foucault (1990), and D'Emilio and Freedman (1988) – which is why pickup is about
finding women; 2) the concurrent expansion of the self-help market, along with that of the
middle-class, especially in the United States (McGee 2005; Sassoon 2008) – which is why
it's also about being a “better person”.
As a third aspect in the seduction community's history, I will dwell on its more recent,
internet-present history, and its coming into the media's attention due to Strauss'
autobiographical title The Game. Also, I will give a brief overview of inner-Community
homosocial relations among pickup artists.
2.1 The propagation of Sex
In the nineteenth century, according to Michel Foucault (1990), the Medieval tradition of
the confession was merged with the scientific discourse to create a modern concept of
sexuality – the Western scientia sexualis. This was an effort to produce true discourses
concerning sex; dealing, on the one hand, with the secret ills of the human subject as
related to confession, and on the other hand with knowledge and truth that science is
associated with; and operating on the notion that through sex, it is possible to discover
truth about human behaviour. (ibid. 67-69)
21
Having control over a given population's sexuality by medicalizing and intellectualizing it,
by taking active interest at uncovering the seemingly inherent secrets of one's own sex, was
an expression of a new justification of power – the biological preservation of life, or “biopower”, as Foucault names it. (117-121)
Foucault claims that the prudishness of the nineteenth century middle-classes was actually
an effort to ensure the purity of one's family line; as such, the bourgeoisie were vigilant at
regarding their sexuality. Later came the repression of the working classes, but not, as is
often mistakenly believed, as a means for the “ruling classes” to assert their dominance,
and to limit the pleasures of those exploited. The primary concern was the health,
longevity, and descent of one class, not the enslavement of another. (122-123)
“Broadly speaking,” writes Foucault, “at the juncture of the 'body' and the 'population', sex
became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the
menace of death.” (147). In the assertion of this new concept of “bio-power” – achieved by
controlling the sex and health of the “class body” with the advancement of education and
science, and the deployment of sexuality11 – the dominant middle-class of Western society
responded to the antiquated concepts of passing on power via bloodlines. If sovereignty
represents the idea of power through blood, then modern society is the society of sex, or
rather a society “with a sexuality” (ibid.).
Foucault finds that “sex” is actually an imaginary element of the discourse of sexuality; by
creating it, the deployment of sexuality also created the modern desire for sex:
“...the desire to have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to
articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth. It constituted 'sex' itself as
something desirable. And it is this desirability of sex that attaches each one
of us to the injunction to know it, to reveal its law and its power; it is this
desirability that makes us think we are affirming the rights of our sex
against all power, when in fact we are fastened to the deployment of
sexuality that has lifted up from deep within us a sort of mirage in which we
think we see ourselves reflected – the dark shimmer of sex.” (156-157)
In America, this desire found its outlet during the twentieth century, in various movements
11 As a theoretical augmentation to the “deployment of alliance” – a system of kinship ties that consists of a
number of more or less implicit rules that concern marriage, family ties, ancestry, etc. – the “deployment
of sexuality” doesn't so much work to maintain the stable structure of society, as provide an everchanging structure that allows for the interpreting of a range of phenomena in their relation to sex and
pleasure. (Foucault 1990)
22
for sexual liberation, which, as Foucault would argue, were actually born of the very same
“repressive” power that they were aimed at, and attacked.
The American sexual liberalism, claim D'Emilio and Freedman (1988) in Intimate
Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, intially began in the 1920s, and owes much to
sex educator, nurse, and birth control activist Margaret Sanger's fight for the complete
legalization, approval, and supply of contraceptive devices. The “contraceptive revolution”
resulted in the booming of the condom industry in the 1930s, the invention and approval of
“the pill” in the 1960s, and – due to pro-choice movements of the New Left – the
nationwide legalization of abortion in 1973 (as a landmark decision of the United States
Supreme Court in the Roe v. Wade case). While the use of condoms and other
contraceptives could be justified for the prevention of disease, which would be in
accordance to the middle-class' striving for “bio-power”, the newfound prevention of the
dangers of unwanted pregnancy turned sexual pleasure into more of a value in itself, and
not just a side-effect of procreation. (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988: 243-245, 250-251)
While, as a result of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the “commercialized amusements
that gave play to sexual adventure temporarily withered” (242), the forces behind the
advancement of sexual liberalism still developed apace. Access to birth control, higher
standards of wealth, the growing independence of women, the mobility provided by the
automobile, the circulation of eroticized imagery in advertising, movies, literature, etc. –
all of this resulted in ampler experimentation in premarital sex from the 1920s to the '60s;
sex was steadily moving beyond the confines of marriage (264-266, 278-280).
In the 1960s, like never before, the sexual liberalism of the young white middle-class
climaxed. Additionally to former forces of liberation, this was powered by the
development of a singles culture in America, which rooted its ethos into views akin to
Hugh Hefner's and Helen Gurley Brown's propagation (via Playboy and Sex and the Single
Girl, accordingly) of enjoying the pleasures of sex without the pressures of marriage,
without regarding sexuality and the eroticization of women's bodies as something dirty.
Both Hefner's and Brown's manifestos, however, were based more on the ethics of success,
prosperity, and consumption, than on sexual liberalism as an ideal. The singles culture was
23
quickly invaded by enterprising businessmen, who sought to market the hedonistic
approach to life as moral, and provide singles bars, dating services, courting guidebooks,
etc. to the sexually adventurous young American. (302-305)
Secondly, the non-materialistic “free love” hippie movements of the late 1960s sowed
ideals of free physical love in defiance of those with still moralistic middle-class
sensibilities (307-308). Meanwhile, the women's liberation movement of the New Left,
attacking the eroticization of women's bodies and the oppressive character of the
institution of marriage, further shook traditional values, and, in many ways, initiated a
reshaping of the nation's understanding of sexuality (309-314).
Thus, both the consumer culture and the counterculture were breaking the old tenets of
stable, marriage-centered sexual relationships, paving way for the birth of the multi-billion
dollar “sex industry” in the 1970s. Not only did pornography move into the light of day –
with the development of VHS, cable television, and eventually, of course, the internet – but
with movies, television, advertisements, music, books, etc., sexual imagery became
thoroughly incorporated into the mainstream of American life (328-329). Sexuality had,
for almost two centuries, been moving into the marketplace; gradually becoming from the
marginal market of urban underworld prostitution into a province of big-time
entrepreneurs. (353, 358)
In addition to serving as a vast market for profit, sexuality was also used as a means for the
controlling of racial and sexual minorities: in the America of the 1950s and '60s, federal,
state, and local governments mobilized their resources against the underground sexual
world of homosexuals. A fear of homosexuality, of getting the taint of the Homosexual –
who'd now replaced the patron of the red-light district as the marker that divided good men
from bad – enforced further practices of traditional heterosexuality. (288-295)
The gay community argued, in it's responding critique of America's sexual mores, that the
oppression of homosexuals “stemmed from a rigidly enforced system of heterosexual
supremacy, that supported the primacy of the nuclear family and the dichotomous sex roles
within it. Sex was just one more vehicle used to enforce subordination and keep the system
functioning.” (321)
The oppression of homosexuals, and the gay community's resistance, as discussed in
24
chapter 1.3, later effected the development of a theory on hegemonic masculinity (Connell,
Messerschmidt 2005; Donaldson 1993). While the sexual revolution celebrated the erotic,
it also attempted:
“...to keep it within a heterosexual framework of long-term, monogamous
relationships. Sex need not be confined to marriage, but it was expected to
lead in that direction. Homosexual men and women, and young black
mothers who failed to marry, violated that requirement, as did the rapist and
the prostitute. Thus they received public censure and served as deviants
whose behavior helped identify acceptable norms.” (D'Emilio, Freedman
1988: 300)
D'Emilio and Freedman agree with Foucault's (1990) ideas, claiming that sex, as a means
for wealth and power, is the invention of the white heterosexual middle-class of America,
and often serves to assert the latter's hegemony by more or less implicitly subordinating its
sexual and racial minorities. This is also demonstrated in a later study by Gonzales and
Rolinson (2005), who allege that white heterosexual males (especially those of a higher
class) in the United States are sexually more adventurous, and find greater pleasure in it
than black men, black women, and white women.
In this light, the “average frustrated chumps” – the targets of the seduction industry – are
(mostly) white heterosexuals, who feel inadequate as they fail to realize their potential as
participants in the economically, politically, and symbolically charged discourse on
sexuality; who are unable to fulfill the “duty” of expressing their heterosexuality, which
they feel to be demanded of them by the society they dwell in; by the heterosexual matrix,
and the hegemony of men.
Surrounded by the constant propagation of sex, and the erotic, the AFCs – as viewed not
only by the seduction community, but, as they seem to believe, by society as a whole – are
deficient practicioners of modern courting practices. In search of means, or a basis for selfdevelopment, more and more of them come across the seduction community.
2.2 The expansion of the self-help industry
I argue that the seduction community is an offspring of the interweaving of the
commercialization of sex – resulting in, eventually, in the development of the sex industry
– and the booming of the self-help market in the 1970s.
25
The roots of the latter reach the beginning of the 19th century, when the market for books
related to self-improvement was expanding along with the Western middle-classes.
Sassoon (2008) notes a prevalent inferiority complex of the bourgeoisie in relation to the
aristocracy, which lead to the publishing of various how-to books, which verbalized proper
behaviour and conduct. Acquiring cultural capital became important to the bourgeoisie;
shelves filled with various encyclopaedia, lexicons, and works of certain renowned authors
such as Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe or Dante served as material vindication for one's
social status. (394)
Biographies and autobiographies became another important source of income for many
publishers; the prospect of reading about the lives of great people and taking note, Sassoon
proposes, must've appealed to the masses (395-396).
Samuel Smiles' extremely popular Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct,
which was translated into 53 languages, was a collection of various stories from the lives
of personage that were meant to praise the individual's own efforts at succeeding in life
(399). Westward, in the economically more developed United States at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the broader bourgeoisie and wealthier working-class audiences with
inherent dreams of making it in the Land of Opportunity provided self-improvement books
with an even wider market. This lead to the success of such self-help titles as Dale
Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), which has sold over 50
million copies to date, and Napoleon Hill's The Law of Success (1928) and Think and
Grow Rich (1937) in an array of corresponding literature: Dorothea Brande's Becoming a
Writer (1934) and Wake up and Live! (1936); Walter B. Pitkin's Life Begins at Forty (1932)
and More Power to You (1933), etc. (McGee 2005: 11; Sassoon 2008: 734)
When Smiles' Self-Help depicted the lives of great people as something to adhere to, then
this new wave of American personal development aid hailed the myth of the “average joe”
as someone who can, with enough effort, achieve something great – a fad for one's
individual progress in society. The importance of improving one's public image became
essential and is, as such, to date. A market for literature to help find out what other people
were doing and thinking was developing rapidly. It is the promise of combining both
material success and inner trancendence, that now makes self-help a multi-billion dollar
industry in the United States. (ibid.)
26
In the 1970s, the sex industry got a toehold in the concurrently booming self-development
market, with marital advice books rapidly losing their audience to popular sex manuals.
Many of them – e.g. David Reuben's Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex
(1969), Joan Garrity's The Sensuous Woman (1969) and The Sensuous Man (1971), and
Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex (1972) – became runaway best-sellers (D'Emilio, Freedman
1988: 330).
In 1970, Eric Weber's How to Pick Up Girls was first published, which marks the meeting
of the propagation of sex, and the expansion of the self-help market; and introduces, also,
the pickup artist to the ever complex discourse on sexuality in modern America. Weber's
book “helped start a trend” (Strauss 2005: 124) that culminated in a movie with Robert
Downey Jr. and Molly Ringwald: The Pick-up Artist (1987), a romantic comedy about a
womanizer who falls in love with the daughter of a mobster, a member of an organized
crime syndicate. The movie was not a success, but How to Pick Up Girls sold over a
million copies in the 1980s, and went on to being published in several revised editions,
proving that there was a market for guidebooks of the sort.
2.3 The internet-based Community
While Weber's How to Pick Up Girls gave rise to pickup artistry as a self-help method, it
did not form the modern seduction community as it is today. As Strauss (2005) points out,
the latter is mostly the famous Ross Jeffries' doing (124-125), one of the original seduction
gurus.
The internet presence of the Community can be traced back to the newsgroup
alt.seduction.fast12, an online discussion board, founded in 1994 by computer hacker and
aspiring seduction artist Louis DePayne, who, in turn, was a student of Jeffries. The latter
was, at the time, looking for a way to market his secrets of Speed Seduction. (ibid.)
Jeffries' method of seduction was based on the theory of Neuro Linguistic Programming
(NLP), with which he came in contact via Frogs into Princes, the 1979 self-help book by
Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Their theory was, in turn, influenced by Maxell Maltz'
Psycho-Cybernetics (1960), which reinvigorated the concept of mind-power in self-help
12 Current site of former newsgroup alt.seduction.fast:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.seduction.fast/topics?pli=1
27
literature with a new scientific, cybernetic legitimacy. NLP proposes that desired behaviors
and feelings can be “installed”; that patterns of human behaviour, of oneself and of others,
can be programmed like computer software by using specific words, suggestions, and
physical gestures designed to influence the subconscious. (McGee 2005: 60-61; Strauss
2005: 38, 124)
Jeffries took the idea of marketing Speed Seduction on the internet from the legendary selfhelp guru Anthony Robbins, who also adapted NLP in his theories, and whose success was
based entirely in his effective use of distribution techniques; in addition to distributing his
teachings on CDs and audio cassettes, Robbins pioneered the use of the internet for selfimprovement culture (McGee 2005: 62).
Though the newsgroup alt.seduction.fast was initially created as a way for Jeffries to
market Speed Seduction, it is also where many of the original pickup gurus, who later
founded their own separate schools, first came into contact. Another launcher of lucrative
careers is said to have been www.cliffslist.com, a non-profit website where pickup artists
congregated, and where one could freely subscribe to a private e-mail seduction letter
(Gravenor 2005).
The next important marketing innovator in the Community is considered to have been
David DeAngelo (Lin 2012; Strauss 2005); former student of Jeffries, who, after a quarrel
with his mentor (125), began marketing his own e-book Double Your Dating (2004) as a
mainstream self-help product, and as a rival business of Speed Seduction. Rather than NLP
and hypnosis, DeAngelo's method explored the concept of attraction, and how to generate
it in women by abandoning approval-seeking practices of “nice guys” and behaving more
like a “bad boy”. This is done by appropriating an attitude of “cocky and funny”; mixing
an appearance of conceited self-assurance with humour to balance it out. (Lin 2012)
While DeAngelo's Double Your Dating was a detraction to Jeffries' Speed Seduction, a
further diversion from hypnosis and NLP in the advancement of seduction techniques was
taken by Erik James Horvat-Markovic, whose method I briefly discussed above. He was a
magician prior to becoming a pickup artist, and initially had used the pseudonym
“Mystery” as a stage name for his magic shows. Mystery was a major contributor to the
interactive seduction discourse on the original alt.seduction.fast forum and other following
28
online forums, discussion- and newsgroups. As I've already mentioned, he was a pioneer of
“structured game”, a mentor and friend of Neil Strauss', and came into the media's
spotlight due to the Strauss' successful The Game.
2.4 Media attention
The modern, internet-based seduction community, and the term “pickup artist” were made
globally famous by the award-winning journalist Neil Strauss' (2004) pickup-related article
in The New York Times, and his aforementioned book The Game: Penetrating the Secret
Society of Pickup Artists (2005), an autobiographical account of two years spent with and
within the seduction community. During that time and initially from a journalistic interest,
Strauss studied from various masters of seduction – many of whom were mentioned
previously, especially Mystery – to become, from a lonesome journalist, a renowned
womanizer himself, master pickup artist “Style”.
The Game became a best-seller, garnering both widespread media attention and what could
almost be considered a cult following; the book is cited by many following pickup artists
to have been their threshold to the seduction community (Levitt 2008; Lin 2012).
Additional mainstream interest in the Community was kindled by the reality show The
Pickup Artist13 (2007-2008), hosted by Mystery, who, by then, had written The Mystery
Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed (2007). The Pickup Artist originally ran for
two seasons on VH1. The show revolves around a group of romantically unsuccessful men
– “average frustrated chumps” – who've come under the tutolage of Mystery and his
“wingmen” Matador and J-Dog (later replaced by Tara) to learn how to become successful
seducers of women.
According to Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter, in January 2012, actor James Franco
was reported to be in negotiations to star in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's adaptation of Strauss'
book. If The Game was to be made into a major motion picture, it would surely draw more
massive attention to the Community.
In various articles related to The Game, and the pickup culture, the attention of journalists
range from amused disbelief to scrutinous criticism. In The Guardian, Rafael Behr (2005)
13 VH1's The Pickup Artist second season “supertrailer“: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pM77Xt4rVk
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claims the methods described in The Game to be sinister and pathetic, and pickup artists
themselves to be “alienated and dysfunctional people, some profoundly damaged by
childhood neglect or abuse”. Similar points of criticism are shared by Steven Poole (2005),
who sees the pickup artists' inner-community competition for the attention of women as a
homoerotic tribute to Top Gun (1986) – the movie that inspired many of Mystery's PUA
(acronym for Pick-Up Artist) jargon – and pickup artistry as something that would only
appeal to a reductionist-misogynist mindset, which presupposes that all social situations
with the opposite sex can be defined as manipulable patterns. The aforementioned
homoerotic undertones are also noted by Liese Spencer in The Scotsman:
“Living in all-male communes, watching each other stalk women in public,
then rating and describing their conquests in code, PUAs seem to represent a
depressing social atomisation. The rivalries and crushes they have on one
another sometimes seem stronger than any putative relationship they might
have with a member of the opposite sex.” (Spencer 2005)
Living in Project Hollywood, a rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills turned pickup artist
headquarters, Strauss himself notes that while the initial point of studying pickup artistry
was women, the result turned out to be men:
“Instead of models in bikinis lounging by the Project Hollywood pool all
day, we had pimply teenagers, bespectacled businessmen, tubby students,
lonely millionaires, struggling actors, frustrated taxi drivers, and computer
programmers – lots of computer programmers. They walked in our door
AFCs; they came out players.” (Strauss 2005: 289)
Megan McCradle (2010) writes in The Atlantic that she finds pickup artists to be “the
girliest of men”, especially like girls in the 14-17 age group; spending all their time
thinking about the opposite sex, trying to be attractive, talking about it with their friends,
developing increasingly elaborate stratagems for getting attraction, evolving these
stratagems into rituals “as mechanical as playing the opening levels of an old-style video
game”, etc.
In the first PUA workshop that Strauss attends, Mystery advises him and his other students
to reduce their approach anxiety by thinking of pickup as a video game, as not real (Strauss
2005: 19). Aimee Levitt (2008), in the Riverfront Times, comments on this idea, claiming
that thinking of pickup as a video game makes some pickup artists lose sight of what
should be their ultimate goal – finding a soul mate, or at least a girlfriend – and instead get
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caught up in mastering the skill of pickup itself and in trying to beat their previous scores.
Hugo Rifkind (2005) of The Sunday Times attended a two-night workshop conducted by
Style to find out whether the seduction community was truly real, and if their methods
actually worked on women. After failing in his attempts to generate attraction once or
twice, and explained as to why by Style, Rifkind approached a girl and, after “running
game” on her, recollects:
“By the time I’ve finished, she is – quite honestly – looking at me like I’m
the most fascinating person she’s ever met. As a human being and, perhaps
more crucially, as somebody with a girlfriend, I feel like absolute scum.”
(Rifkind 2005)
Rifkind points out that while pickup artistry does provide any desperate but willing man
with the ability to approach women more effectively than even the “naturals”14 they've
come to admire through their lives, the other side of it all is that pickup artists “risk losing
their soul” (ibid.).
Strauss, however, as interviewed by Spencer (2005), states that while “playing the game”
for too long tends to turn some men into “social robots”, relying not on their own
personality but on various patterns and routines that are known to work, and gurus of their
personal choice for guidance, pickup artistry in itself isn't about learning how to be fake or
phoney, but how to be confident, allowing shy men “to be their best selves”.
Jaimal Yogis (2006), of the San Francisco Magazine, attended a PickUp 10115 workshop,
and talked with the women working there; they saw teaching seduction as a good thing:
“'Guys need it,' says Luanne Hernandez, a bubbly 22-year-old who has
worked at two other PickUp 101 workshops. 'Women get good advice from
Cosmo and their friends, but guys don’t have anything.' Hearing from these
two makes the whole thing seem less scandalous, and the more I ask women
what they think, the better I feel about it all. 'I think it’s necessary and called
for,' says Natalie Mock, a 28-year-old from Berkeley who says guys try to
pick up on her all the time at her restaurant job. 'Most guys just go off their
instincts, which is generally a bad idea. If these classes are done in a way
that’s thoughtful to the woman, then I support it.'”
Catherine Townsend (2006), in The Independent, writes about a quite negative experience
14 A man who is naturally good with women, without prior knowledge of the workings of the Community.
15 A San Francisco pickup company started by Lance Mason, now part of the Art of Attraction company:
http://www.artofattraction.com/
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– being “negged” by a man who was actually trying to charm her:
“'You have really freaky, wide-spaced eyes,' a guest at a black-tie dinner told
me, right before blowing smoke in my face. 'Can you see in opposite
directions, like a horse?'”
The next day, she writes, she eventually abided to the man's invitation for drinks after an
explanation and a polite apology, to find out whether these were techniques as well.
In the Houston Press, Craig Malisow (2005) writes about an evening spent with pickup
artists. After witnessing a botched attempt at seduction by a pickup artist called Bashev,
Malisow follows his “set” – a group of two girls – to ask their opinion on the matter; one
of them says she is getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry and finds fast-seduction, as she's read
about it, laughable, while her friend claims that it might work, provided it is done “to the
right kind of girl”.
A voice in cyberspace that calls himself Khiem (2009) claims, in his blog Kiss N' Tale
(“making sense of the PUA community”), that most (structured) pickup methods are
specifically designed to work in loud, high energy environments like clubs or bars, and, as
such, with an according audience. Khiem claims to have spent a lot of time with pickup
artists, and says that while he likes to talk to “intelligent, caring, independent, emotionally
stable and overall confident or self-made women”, the practices of pickup artists mostly
attract a different kind of woman. Could Khiem mean what PUAs refer to as an “HB”, the
standard target for practicing seduction techniques? While beauty and intelligence certainly
aren't mutually exclusive qualities, the former is still the pickup artist's basis for choosing
his target.
Another voice, “John” (2010), in his blog Lifestyle Journey for Men, writes about the
sexual preferences of Mystery and other PUAs who utilize a structured method, claiming
that:
“...the whole notion of 'HB10' and 'beautiful woman' is biased because in
Mystery's and his followers' view, only dolled up 18-25 year olds are
classified as beautiful or 'perfect 10s', and since the PUA techniques play on
these women's insecurities (very common for girls in this age range) they
are lauded as superior; i.e. they get the 'best women'. And if the techniques
don't work, and they won't on older more intelligent women, it is said that
these women are not the best anyway.”
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Both these bloggers claim to have dwelled amongst pickup artists, and found their
practices to be flawed, double-standardized, and often unnecessary.
These examples of (mostly) outside opinions of the seduction community illustrate how the
public generally perceives, or is made to perceive by the media, the sociocultural
phenomenon of the Community. While public opinion of pickup artistry, and other
seduction discourses in the Community is commonly prone to disbelief, pickup artists
themselves (as far as I've witnessed) always advocate their practices as life-changing, and
-bettering. Inner-community homosocial relations are, however, inclined to paradigmatic
shifts, and in time, the popularity of certain methods of seduction increases or decreases.
2.5 Inner-community homosociality
As I shortly depicted in chapter 2.3, the popularity of various “schools” of seduction is
prone to change: Ross Jeffries' community-founding Speed Seduction (Strauss 2005: 124125) was contended by David DeAngelo's non-hypnosis-based “cocky/funny”
methodology (ibid.), which, in turn, was outweighed by the popularity of Mystery's and
Style's “structured game”, after the release of Strauss' article in The New York Times (2004)
and The Game (2005), and the broadcasting of the The Pickup Artist on VH1 (2007-2008).
As newer schools of the seduction community market their methodology as a better way to
acquire erotic capital than previous approaches, inner-community competition, not
heterosexual pleasure, becomes a goal in itself. This is especially exemplified in the
practices of “social robots” – pickup artists, who often get great results when utilizing their
techniques of seduction in real life, but who never seem to have actual girlfriends, a life
outside the Community, or a personality (Lin 2012; Strauss 2005: 300). Social robots, as
defined by Strauss, generally see most women as potential conquests, most men as
competition, rely only on pre-developed methods of pickup, and socialize only by using
rules and theories they've learned via the seduction community (ibid., 300-301). As such,
social robots spend more time mimicking pickup artists, than they do “naturals”. While
commonly pickup artists strive, through this mimicry, to eventually internalize the way a
naturally “successful” womanizer behaves (see chapter 1.5), social robots only rely on the
pre-developed social routines of PUAs, and thus have limited hopes of true self-affirmation
and personal development. As such, they illustrate how structured game can be taken to an
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extreme, and how the initial cause of – and aliby for – pickup artistry changes from selfhelp to (video-)gamely competition.
In The Game, Strauss describes the rise of Real Social Dynamics, founded by pickup artists
Tyler Durden and Papa – a company that, for Strauss, exemplifies, and perpetuates, the
methodology and mindset of social robots. Initially founded in the shadow of Mystery's
and Style's successes, and completely mimicking their way of doing things, Real Social
Dynamics eventually sought to compete with them; and through manipulation and sinister
tactics, succeeded at that. (Strauss 2005: 238-239, 288-289, 292, 300-303, 391, 426-429)
In response to the structured approaches made popular by Mystery and Style, and the
sinister ways of the Community's “social robots” (Rifkind 2005), a new movement of
pickup artistry has lately reared its head. This is a method that has grown more popular in
the past few years – “natural game”, which entails a more free-flowing, improvisational
approach to seduction (Lin 2012). While “natural game” focuses more on “developing
fundamental skills such as connecting with women on an emotional level, communicating
authentically, and building a solid 'inner game'16” (ibid.), it still utilizes some pre-tested
routines, depending on the specifics of the situation and the pickup artist. It is important to
note that “natural game” is not about using one's inherent natural charm, at least not before
developing it; it is about imitating, and surpassing, the “naturals”, and is still something
that is taught to those who feel inadequate enough to pay for it.
As natural game is based more on individual development, a recent trend in the
Community has been moving away from teaching various routines and “openers” for
approaching a woman, to teaching “more holistic lifestyle development” (Lin 2012),
emphasizing, again, the self-help aspects of pickup artistry. Some of the major seduction
companies that deal with this are PUA Training, The Art of Charm and David Wygant
Coaching. Many of “natural game's” adherents don't actually define their practices as
pickup artistry, but simply as tending to their clientele's desire to make a change in their
lives.
16 “Inner game” is the area of pickup artistry which deals with a PUAs “personal development, inner beliefs,
core values and life goals” (Lin 2012) as opposed to “outer game”, which is entirely technique and
practice based. These two are co-dependent; developing a good inner game is done by polishing one's
outer game and vice versa.
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While, as I've pointed out, the ethics and credibility of pickup artists and their practices are
constantly put under scrutiny by both mainstream media and the various contending
schools within the seduction community itself, the prevalent belief amongst all AFCs
turned PUAs is that in the process of learning how to seduce women, they've also become
more confident, sociable, attractive, etc. – the belief that they've become better persons in
general.
Malisow (2005) interviews PUA Formhandle, the creator of a major pickup-related
website, www.fastseduction.com. The latter justifies the site, and pickup artistry, claiming
it's a way for men all over the world to “improve their attitude, social skills and
confidence. It's a way for them to get over their insecurities and become the kind of guy a
woman would like to get to know.” Formhandle sees pickup artistry as no more deceptive
than make-up, push-up bras, high heels or working out in a gym; as such, he claims, pickup
artistry's not “just a game of words and seduction, it's an overall life improvement.”
In the reality show The Pickup Artist, the first season winner Alvaro Orlando (2007) claims
his victory to be:
“...the proudest moment of my life. I never thought in my whole entire life
that I would be able to figure out women and to approach women. The way
I talk, the way I'm wearing my clothes, the way I feel inside about myself,
everything about me, my soul, I know who I am. I want all the women to
know out there that I'm not a player, I'm not a pimp, I'm not a jerk. I'm a
pickup artist and there's a huge difference. […] My whole life, man, people
were always telling me, 'Kosmo you're not good enough, you can't do it,
you're too short, you can't talk right, you're latino, you're poor.' I just feel
like I'm not a loser anymore, you know, I feel like I have accomplished
something, you know. I feel like the underdog made it.”
Alvaro now goes by the pseudonym “Kosmo”, and is an active pickup artist. It is important
to note that Kosmo is a latino, thus affirming to the presense of other races along a white
majority in the seduction community.
His feelings on pickup artistry, however, exemplify those of all PUAs I've come across in
my research. The idea of helping other men become confident and skilled socializers – and,
often, womanizers – is central in the Community.
Strauss (2005), after claiming to have retired from “the game” (436-437), admits to
reporter Deborah Netburn (2005) of the Los Angeles Times, that he still likes helping out
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desperate men: “If I can boost someone's self-esteem, help him get a girlfriend for the first
time in his life and keep him from opening fire in a supermarket because of his
frustrations, then I'm doing something good in the world,” he says.
This was confirmed in 2007, when the book elaborating on Strauss' own approach to
pickup was first published; it's titled as Rules of the Game. Strauss also wrote the foreword
to Mystery's latest book, The Pickup Artist (Markovik 2010); a title that's becoming more
annoying as it is reoccurring.
More recent pickup-related releases include e-books called The Journal: Man's Quest for
the Perfect Match (Miller, Wolfe 2011), and The Tao of Badass (Pellicer 2011), and pickup
guru Richard La Ruina's (2012) both electronically and physically published book The
Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want.
With more and more books, DVDs, CDs, seminars, workshops, etc. available for sale to
whomever interested, and with the continuous growth of the seduction community, it
seems as if the market for various seduction-related self-improvement products is yet to be
bled dry by the gurus. On this note, it seems appropriate to approach the “average
frustrated chumps” that represent this market; to try and answer as to where their
insecurity is derived from, and whether pickup artistry is actually the means to resolve it.
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3. Average frustrated chumps
“Being a master pick up artist is much more than just being able to attract
beautiful women into your life. It's also being able to systematically convey
that information in your head to someone else. [...] The tables have turned
and the students become the teachers.“ – Mystery, The Pickup Artist (2007)
Teaching other men how to perform pickup is an important part of the cultural system of
pickup artistry. “Until you can teach the game to another guy, you won't be considered a
master pick-up artist,” claims Mystery, hosting his reality show.
This is how the seduction industry, as developed in the multi-billion dollar self-help
industry (McGee 2005), remains afloat – by supporting an ideology of helping other
sexually frustrated men. Becoming an instructor is not, in itself, obligatory. But for the
more devoted seduction artists, it is an easy means to earn money. In teaching their
newfound skills to AFCs, many pickup artists either adhere to a certain company of
seduction or begin independently teaching their own method, conducting seminars and
workshops, and marketing (e-)books, DVDs and CDs.
Most seduction gurus – the “unnaturals” – market their method by claiming, like the
aforementioned Benjamin Kennedy Jr. of DiCarlo's Coaching, to have once been regular
“average frustrated chumps”. As the opposite of the seduction artist, the AFC is relatively
“clueless when it comes to attracting women” (Lin 2012), even though they might've had a
few successes with the opposite sex. Ross Jeffries, the cornerstone of the internet-based
seduction community, for example, was a failed stand-up comedian and screenwriter; an
angry, lonely, frustrated man, who, according to Strauss (2005: 38), managed to end a fiveyear streak of sexlessness in 1988 by using neuro linguistic programming; utilizing a
method that soon came to be marketed as Speed Seduction, to help frustrated men like
Jeffries himself once was (ibid., 124).
David DeAngelo – another example: though a former student of Jeffries, he claims to have
finally had a breakthrough in figuring out how attraction works by studying those naturally
37
good with women; another AFC turned PUA, though DeAngelo himself claims not to teach
seduction – which implies trickery, enticement, and dishonesty – but attraction (DeAngelo
2012; Strauss 2005: 130-131).
“I was a scared kid, I had no purpose. So I decided to do something about it,“ claims
Mystery (2008), the host of The Pickup Artist. Feelings of inadequacy were once central to
most self-affirmed pickup artists:
Mystery's “wingman” on the first season of the show, PUA J-Dog (2012), was formerly a
“lonely engineer”, but is now offering a “VIP Coaching Package” for a “Summer Special
price of only $647 per month” on askjdog.com, his pickup artist webpage.
Joshua Pellicer, author The Tao of Badass (2011), didn't want to feel like a “victim” for the
rest of his life, or “a guy who got walked all over and overlooked” (Pellicer 2012).
Richard La Ruina a.k.a. Gambler, like so many others, was an introvert, socially awkward,
had low self-esteem and an array of embarrasing encounters with women before
discovering The Game and developing his own method of seduction (La Ruina 2007).
Neil Strauss stood in envy of a friend of a friend – Dustin, who, with his natural charm and
“animal instinct” possessed the quality of attracting women – until disovering “an entire
community filled with Dustins” (2005: 11). Under the tutolage of these men, Strauss
eventually evolved into master pickup artist Style, and even founded his own school –
StyleLife Academy.
While there are also those seduction instructors in the Community, who claim to be
“naturals”, to have inherent skills of seduction – like the Croatian pickup artist Badboy,
whose “charisma, inner strength and leadership skills were apparent at a very early age”
(Badboy 2012), and his team at the BadBoy LifeStyle company – the marketing machine of
pickup artistry is still aimed at the “average frustrated chumps” of society; the typical
modern males with socially conditioned ideas of the workings of the attraction process that
most pickup artists claim to have evolved beyond (Lin 2012).
For those deemed as lacking erotic capacity, and feeling lost within the discourse on
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modern sexual practices, as developed during the past century, the seduction community
claims to be a beacon of hope – a means for the modern heterosexual man to acquire
enough erotic capital to realize the potential for sex he's constantly been sold by his
surroundings.
3.1 “Hookup” and “pickup”: a comparative analysis of modern
courting practices
In his book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, based on nearly 400
interviews with young men in the United States, Michael Kimmel (2008) writes about the
sexual practices of modern post-/adolescents and the development of what could be called
the “hookup culture”. In the face of antiquated campus courting rituals, hooking up
represents a new, more convenient collection of sexual practices, mainly followed by the
white majority. (Kimmel 2008: 203-204) The meaning of the term, it would seem, is
deliberately vague, just as the practices involved:
“As a verb, 'to hook up' means to engage in any type of sexual activity with
someone you are not in a relationship with. As a noun, a 'hookup' can either
refer to the sexual encounter or to the person with whom you hook up.
Hooking up is used to describe casual sexual encounters on a continuum
from 'one-night stands' (a hookup that takes place once and once only with
someone who may or may not be a stranger) to 'sex buddies' (acquaintances
who meet regularly for sex but rarely if ever associate otherwise), to 'friends
with benefits' (friends who do not care to become romantic partners, but
may include sex among the activities they enjoy together).” (ibid., 195)
The deliberate vagueness of “hooking up” can serve men and women in different ways:
“When a guy says he 'hooked up' with someone,” writes Kimmel, “he may or may not have
had sex with her, but he is certainly hoping that his friends think he has. A woman, on the
other hand, is more likely to hope they think she hasn’t.”(197)
Thus, hooking up retains certain features of older dating patterns: male domination, female
compliance, and double standards. As in the beginning of the sexual liberation of the
twentieth century, women who are more apt to “giving it up” have more (though shorterlived) popularity amongst young men on campus, but are often frowned upon by
traditionalists. As such, hookups are mostly initiated by men, and raise their social standing
while lowering that of the women; a continuation of the courting rituals of the twentieth
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century, as remarked by D'Emilio and Freedman (1988): “Boys pushed, while girls set the
limit […] Behind this cat-and-mouse game lay the continuation of gender-based
dichotomies over the significance and purpose of sexual expression.” (ibid. 262-263;
Kimmel 2008: 197)
While hooking up enforces this old double standard, the term's vagueness accordingly
protects or improves the reputation of both participants. This vagueness of hooking up is,
in actuality, expressed in three elements: 1) a planned and performed illusion of
spontaneity in hooking up, which is enacted in an effort to appear less interested in one's
sexual habits; 2) the almost-obligatory presence of alcohol, which lubricates the effort of
performing the illusion of spontaneity, and helps to further remove responsibility from the
whole ordeal – a convenient excuse in case of sexual disasters as well as a method to keep
one's reputation of level-headedness intact; 3) the absence of pressure to develop longstanding relationships – enforced by the previous two elements – fitting for young men
who feel too immature to enter monogamous adult relationships, but also for women of a
similar disposition. (Kimmel 2008: 196-203)
The hookup culture, claims Kimmel, while also attracting the opposition of antipromiscuity movements, has come to be the normative form of courtship amongst the
(white) post-/adolescents of America (213). The 1970s and '80s showed an increase of
women students engaging in coitus, often in relationships that held no expectation of
marriage (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988: 334). As formal dating evinced a sharp decline, and
changes in the patterns of sexual behaviour led to men and women of varying educational
levels engaging in more casual relationships, the hookup culture, in its modern form, as it
were, was becoming a preferred method of courting (335). As such, for the young women
who are, however, in search of more stable relationships, the hookup culture appears to be
virtually the only place where to look for them (Kimmel 2008: 203-205, 210-211).
Of course it's not truthful to say that all the young women are hooking up in hopes of
developing long-term relationships, nor are all the young men making strenuous efforts to
avoid the prospect of such commitments. But the vagueness of hookup certainly retains the
support of on-campus promiscuity, and the behavioral patterns of compulsive
heterosexuality. In this sense, it would appear that the AFCs are men who fail at
successfully utilizing the elements of the hookup culture – unable to approach women even
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in the hookup performance of drunken spontaneity – and who fail, also, at more
conventional dating practices; e.g. showering a girl with gifts and flowers to try and make
her feel “like a princess”:
“'So the whole thing about putting her on a pedestal – that's not going to get
you anywhere?' I ask Strauss. He's quick to respond with a question that's
really an answer. 'What's happened within your experience when you've
done that?'” (Malisow 2005)
For the “average frustrated chumps”, who are, by their account, victimized by the
normative dating practices of modern American society, pickup artistry markets itself as an
augmentation of these practices; it claims to yield desperate men, who're willing enough to
pay, means to both enforce endless womanizing, or to find during these nights of
“sarging”17, a soulmate, a wife, a girlfriend, should it be one's fancy.
The pickup culture claims to augment the central trio of elements that comprise the hookup
culture as follows: 1) while drawing on the illusory spontaneity of hooking up, pickup
artistry spotlights the male's performance in the ritual of courting; practices like “avatarbuilding”, “demonstrations of higher value”, “creating an emotional connection”18, even
“negging”, etc., serve to prove the pickup artist's worth over other suitors, and to create
“legitimate” attraction in the woman, to swipe her off her feet, as it were, so there'd be no
need for 2) alcohol, the social lubricant; the pickup artist ought to be able to charm his
“target” to such a degree that there'd be no need for the reduction of responsibility and
level-headedness that alcohol provides, along with relieving the inherent pressure to 3)
develop long-standing relationships; pickup artists mostly are, as Mystery claims,
“polyamorous” (Strauss 2005: 414), and the young women who don't accept this are
simply relinquished, while the skills of the pickup artist ought to provide consolation in his
next target.
In actuality, pickup artists take the entire pressure of the performance of modern courting
rituals onto themselves, but seem to be forgetting the woman's part in the whole ordeal.
Indeed, the term “pickup” itself seems to picture women as inanimate objects that can be,
with minimal effort, picked up from somewhere, from a preferred venue (Poole 2005). The
17 “The act of going out in field, usually with other PUAs, with the explicit intention of picking up girls,”
the term “to sarge” is said to have been named in honour of Ross Jeffries' cat, Sargy (Lin 2012)
18 While an emotional connection is a combination of “strong inner game, vulnerability, and trust” (Lin
2012), it can be faked or induced in a target via certain routines, or with enough practice.
41
term's history can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century; a “pickup” was
a working-class girl – a sexual object with whom, after having wooed her with a higher
college status, the middle-class white male pushed “as far as he could” (D'Emilio,
Freedman 1988: 263). “Pickup” exemplifies a practice of the hegemony of men, as it
presumes a woman's inherent compliance to the suitor's self-justified approach.
The fact that the women who visit the loud, high-energy locales – clubs, bars, etc. – are
quite probably out there looking to be swept off their feet, or picked up, as it were, is in no
way implicit in the teaching process of seduction instructors; on the contrary, this is
something that the instructors frequently tell their AFC clientele in an effort to alleviate
their approach anxiety. However, as the first successful attempt at seduction makes way to
others, the woman's part – her culturally enforced enaction of spontaneity, and compliance
– is somehow forgotten in a haze of self-assurance in the PUA's ability to attract. Thus, the
perpetuation of pickup effects a conflicted state of mind.
On the one end, pickup artists claim to devote their practices into bettering the courting
experience for women: “Being picked up by a pickup artist, when done properly, is a
privilege,” claims Mystery on the second season of The Pickup Artist (2008). In The Game,
as an effort to justify pickup artistry to Dustin – the “natural”, now turned religious, who
inspired Strauss' womanizing ways – Neil Strauss (2005) claims that since pickup artistry
entails self-improvement, it implicitly serves to better the world:
“Think about it, […] if a guy wants to improve his odds of meeting women,
he's going to have to make some changes to himself. And it just so happens
that all the qualities women look for in guys are good things. I mean, I've
become more confident. I started working out and eating healthier. I'm
getting in touch with my emotions and learning more about spirituality. I've
become a more fun, positive person.” (ibid., 166)
Indeed, the world of pickup artistry claims to revolve around women, as noted by Khiem
(2009), and bettering oneself in striving to get to them; however, in their efforts to please
women by taking them off the pedestal of mainstream society's courting standards, as they
appear to do, the pickup artists put women on another pedestal instead. This constitutes
that it's the PUA's job to figure out how to get the correct response from women – who,
according to most structured schools of pickup artistry, all act in accordance to the same
inherent value system, based on which they make their choice of mate – and if the seducer
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fails at this, it's either his fault, or the woman's ability to judge character is considered
crooked (John 2010), and nonresponsive to the norms of the heterosexual matrix.
Thus, the pickup culture transfers the responsibility of meeting women entirely to men,
who, in the improvement of their seduction skills, and in ignoring women who don't value
these skills, eventually come to forget that their successes are solely derived from the fact
that they're operating in venues where women usually come to seek potential sexual
partners. The fact that “structured game” is specifically designed to work on “HB10s” is
omitted, as pickup artists fulfill their self-administered responsibility by successfully
deploying their hard-(l)earned skills of seduction, and prove their adequacy by
demonstrating control over women's bodies and minds.
While on the one end, PUAs claim to augment the practices of the hookup culture and give
women a better experience of being approached, the other end of the conflicted state of
mind induced by pickup artistry accounts women as means for men to assert their
masculine identities. In actuality, while the pickup culture works to remove the vagueness
of hooking up by giving men the means and confidence to approach women, the
performance of spontaneity is still enacted by both parties, as men and women gather to
traditional venues of hooking up, knowing what they're after, but pretending not to care
(Kimmel 2008: 198-199). The alleviation of the responsibility to develop long-term
relationships is also retained, in the excuse of being “polyamorous”, and dismissing
women who don't accept it.19 Thus, the relationship-phobia central in the hookup culture is
also perpetuated by the pickup culture. However, it again serves to note that not all the
male participants of either courting cultures are out there avoiding all prospects of finding
a stable girlfriend; most of them just want to find her later, in their thirties or so (ibid.,
205). The process of sexualization during the twentieth century had, in some ways, pushed
the logic of sexual liberalism to an extreme: “once sex had been identified as a critical
aspect of happiness, how could one justify containing it in marriage?” (D'Emilio,
Freedman 1988: 343)
Thus, the apparent relationship-phobia of post-adolescent men is largely based on their
19 In The Game, Mystery repeatedly states that as a pickup artist, his goal is to seduce two loving bisexual
girlfriends, who'd also serve as his sex slaves, and as assistants in his magic shows as he travels the world
as an illusionist (Strauss 2005: 168, 171, 193, 324). However, due to trying too hard at making his fantasy
come true, as claimed by Strauss, Mystery botches one chance for a stable relationship after another. This
is an extreme example of what the concept of being polyamorous can amount to.
43
wants for only all the sexual benefits of an adult relationship, and for none of the other
aspects, which demand more emotional input, more “work”. Yet, as Kimmel notes, it's
about more than just the desire for sensual pleasure on the part of the young men – if sex
were the goal, a guy would have a much better chance of having more (and better) sex with
a steady girlfriend; hooking up, and pickup, seems to be performed in an effort to prove
something to other guys or, as Kimmel puts it: “The actual experience of sex pales in
comparison to the experience of talking about sex.” (205-206)
Kimmel's claim that the pleasure of knowledge about sex can often outweigh the sensual
pleasure of the act itself is certainly admittable to argument, but in the case of the more
“socially robotic” groups of the pickup culture, sex does, indeed, seem to be less about the
sex and more about the talk (Lin 2012; Strauss 2005). “Sex talk”, as a practice of the
hookup culture, and also the pickup culture, is a means to affirm one's heterosexuality, but
hides beneath it a sense of insecurity amongst sexually inexperienced post-/adolescents
(Kimmel 2008: 207). Its roots are in the beginning of the sexual liberalism of the twentieth
century. As the boundaries of approved sexual behaviour fluctuated, sex became justifiable
for its own sake, and for many young male students, not just an expression of love, but
instead, a symbol of conquest, or a “badge of prestige to be sported among one's fellows”
(D'Emilio, Freedman 1988: 263). As the latter discussed sex amongst themselves, an
incessant interest in the proper methods and techniques for making sexual approaches to
women reared its head (ibid., 262).
In this context, it is again perpetuated, just like in high school (Pascoe 2007), that control
over women's bodies serves as a means to acquire masculine capital20. “Scoring” with
women also means keeping score on one's male friends. The insecurity that underlies these
practices can be traced to most young men's actual sexual inexperience; with very few or
no sexual partners and a poor education on the matter – “Sex education in schools is often
restricted to a quasi-religious preaching of abstinence,” says Kimmel (2008: 207). This
notion is also observed by D'Emilio and Freedman:
“A survey of high school youth in the early 1980s found that almost half had
learned nothing about sex from their parents. Nor were schools rushing to
fill the gap. [...] A California school district provided sex instruction in
conjunction with drivers education, indicating how marginal it was to the
20 See note 8, p. 17
44
academic curriculum.” (1988: 341-342)
As such, knowledge about sex is mostly acquired from one's peers and, more importantly,
the rather illusory discourse of pornography. (Kimmel 2008: 207)
Operating within this field of vague sexual practices, with little means to know what
exactly is going on in the sex-lives of all their counterparts, the hookup culture is
maintained as an effort to keep up with the men who seem to represent the idealized
hegemonic practices – the men that are suspected of having much more of (much better)
sex than the “average guy”. If, for the past three centuries, the West has been actively
developing its scientia sexualis (Foucault 1990), then, seen in this light, it appears that the
average frustrated Western post-/adolescent chump certainly hasn't had any real access to
it.
In search for a stable gender identity and masculine adequacy as demanded of him
accordingly by the heterosexual matrix and patriarchal practices of hegemonic masculinity,
the AFC seeks to fulfill a duty he sees as expected of him by modern patriarchal society.
As he has little or no knowledge of proper sexual conduct – the sex education provided by
society is partial, and asking about it from his elders is too awkward – he often turns to the
seemingly spontaneous practices of “hooking up”. The latter inherently unburdens him of
the various responsibilities that come with adult sexual relationships; the “work” that's
involved in forming long-standing relationships, the adherance to monogamy, the
performance of giving sensual pleasure itself. It also serves as a means to affirm his
masculinity by sporadically asserting dominance over women's bodies to which the latter
are, within the hookup culture, and in contect of the hegemony of men, expected to
consent.
With its inherent alleviation of responsibility, this new normative form of courting rituals
provides its participants with little knowledge to go on in their postgraduate and adult
lives. While in these latter stages of their lives, many young men are reported to turn back
to more “traditional dating patterns” (214-215), the negative influence of the hookup
culture still latently enforces masculine insecurity, and thus justifies using women to
remedy this feeling of inadequacy.
What passes on for sex in hookup culture isn't the kind of sex that adults – those with
45
considerably more experience in this arena – would think of as healthy. It seems to be
something that doesn’t build a relationship, but rather is intended to be a temporary standin for one, claims Kimmel. The real skills necessary for young people to take on adult
relationships later in their lives are mostly absent in the hookup culture, and modern adults
don't really seem to participate in developing their children's romantic endeavors. (215216)
While pickup artistry claims to augment the abovementioned aspects of the hookup
culture, and provide its clientele with the knowledge necessary for the successful handling
of their future lives' sexual endeavors, structured game, as demonstrated above, shows
deficiencies in actual use. The sex talk of those that adhere to structured game often
amounts to nothing more than the (video-)gamely competition of “social robots”; PUAs,
who commonly happen across the Community at a young age, and whose personal
development halts, as they begin to rely only on pre-developed social routines in realworld interactions (Lin 2012).
Sex, argues Foucault, in its current form, was invented by the middle-classes of the
nineteenth century, and is constantly used as a means to gain wealth and power (1990:
148). Since then, the sexuality of the middle-classes has not been repressed, but, in
actuality, aroused (ibid.). The propagation of sex created a desire for it. Sexual liberalism
seemed to promise freedom from the “Establishment”, but was used, instead, by many
entrepeneurs to market their products (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988). While the hookup
culture exemplifies a somewhat ambivalent outcome of sexual liberalism, the seduction
community – a logical offspring conceived in the meeting of the ethos of sexual liberalism,
and the booming self-help industry – promises to help those perplexed, emasculated, and
frustrated by the vague practices of modern courting rituals, by giving them means to tap
into their sexuality, charged with great economic, political, and symbolic value, and
marketed as such for the past century or more.
However, in many ways this results in the overt sexualization of women, the enforcing of
heterosexual supremacy, and the assertion of the hegemony of men. As the accumulation
of erotic capital becomes a goal in itself, along with using it to compete with one's PUA
counterparts, pickup artistry, for some, becomes a means for engaging in homosocial
46
relations, rather than heterosexual pleasure – this especially applies for “social robots”,
whose practices emphasize inner-community competition, rather than an individual's
personal development.
While the now increasingly prolific (Lin 2012) method of “natural game” puts the focus,
once more, on the self-help aspects of pickup artistry – as historically and originally
intended – it remains to be seen how useful the practices of “natural game” are in actual
self-improvement, and in aspiring to evolve beyond being an “average frustrated chump”.
47
Summary
After happening across a web banner that advertised Pandora's Box, a certain method to
improving one's skills at attracting women, I began investigating various aspects of the
seduction community – a sociocultultural assemblage of certain men, who're connected,
globally, via the internet, and in their common aspirations: womanizing, and concurrent
self-development.
In this resulting study of pickup artistry – a subsidiary technique in the discourse on
seduction – as a sociocultural formation, I initially sought to answer the following
questions: how, and why had the seduction community come into existence? Who were its
members? What did their various practices entail? How did they relate to the normative
practices of modern courtship in America?
In the first chapter of this study, “Methodology”, I presented a general hypothesis, and the
theoretical concepts I would be utilizing to support it. These concepts were: “compulsive
heterosexuality” (Pascoe 2007), “the heterosexual matrix” (Butler 1990), “performative
gender practices” (ibid.), “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1987, 1995; Connell,
Messerschmidt 2005; Demetriou 2001; Donaldson 1993), “the hegemony of men” (Hearn
2004), and “erotic-”, or “sexual capital” (Green 2008; Gonzales, Rolinson 2005; Hakim
2010; Martin, George 2006). I then applied the concepts in a brief exemplary analysis of
“structured game” – a method of approach in the discourse on seduction, as pioneered by
PUA Mystery, and given global fame by Neil Strauss, a.k.a. PUA Style.
While this short analysis served to prove the usefulness of the abovementioned theoretical
concepts, it did not, however, bring me closer to answering the questions I initially posited.
To this end, in the second chapter of my thesis, I gave an historic-analytic overview of the
formation of the seduction community. My claim was that this formation was influenced
by two concurrent processes of the twentieth century: 1) the evolution of the ethos of
twentieth century sexual liberalism (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988), as affected by
developments in the discourse on sexuality during the nineteenth century (Foucault 1990),
and 2) the booming of the self-help industry during the 1970s (McGee 2005), influenced
48
by the ever-expanding market for (auto)biographical self-improvement guidebooks
(Sassoon 2008).
As the American middle-class, on whom this study mainly focused, charged its discourse
on sexuality with great political, economic, and symbolic value, a feeling of masculine
inadequacy was effected in certain men. These men were unable to realize the heterosexual
potential that the commercialized discourse on sexuality had perpetually marketed to them.
In the 1970s, the concurrent expansions of the sex industry and the self-help industry, and
the fear of displaying a complicit masculinity – as represented by a certain group of men –
resulted in an overlapping – a hotbed for the developing of the seduction community.
I moved on to give a brief overview of some of the major schools of thought within the
Community, its coming into the media's spotlight due to the publishing of Neil Strauss'
autobiographical field study The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
(2005), and the controversy regarding it. I also gave an overview of the inner-Community
homosocial relations of seduction artists, and defined “social robots” as exemplifying an
extreme variant of adherants to “structured game”.
In the third, and final chapter, “Average frustrated chumps”, I presented a comparative
analysis of two developments in America's modern courting practices: “the hookup
culture”, as researched by Kimmel (2008), and “the pickup culture”, which claims to
augment the former.
In actuality, pickup artistry maintains the fundamental flaws of the hookup culture: the
propagation of the practices of compulsive heterosexuality, the adherance to stable binary
gender roles, as defined by the heterosexual matrix, and the upkeep of the hegemony of
men, whose ultimate cause could be defined as the global domination of (compliant)
women and the subordination of those men who demonstrate complicit masculinites.
49
Elukutseliste võrgutajate praktikad kui kultuurisüsteem
– kokkuvõte
Käesolevas bakalaureusetöös, „Elukutseliste võrgutajate praktikad kui kultuurisüsteem“,
uurin globaalset interneti-põhist fenomeni: Võrgutuskogukonda (seduction community).
Tegemist on kümneid tuhandeid mehi paelunud sotsiokultuurse moodustisega, mille
liikmeid ühendab kollektiivne eesmärk – enesearendus naiste võrgutamises. Kogukonnas
on kümneid ametlikult tegevaid ettevõtteid, mis õpetavad asjast huvitatutele suurte
summade eest erinevaid tehnikaid, mille abil naistele meeldida. Iga ettevõttet esindab
reeglina isehakanud võrgutus-guru, kellel on vastavalt ka oma spetsiifiline
“seelikuküttimise” metodoloogia.
Meedia arvamus Võrgutuskogukonnast on reeglina pigem umbusklik ja tauniv, kuid
Kogukonna liikmed järgivad ideaali, et nende praktikad ei seisne üksnes naiste
magatamises, vaid ka isiklikus arengus, “paremaks inimeseks” saamises.
Valdav enamus Kogukonna liikmeid, kuigi kindlasti mitte kõik, määratlevad endid termini
pickup artist abil, mida on keeruline emakeelestada; hea vaste võikski olla “elukutseline
seeliku-/naistekütt”. Käitumispraktikate mõttes hõlmab taolise elukutselise naisteküti
tegevus endas vastava metoodika abil vastassoo võrgutamist, ning selle metoodika teistele
meestele teatava tasu eest edasiõpetamist.
Oma bakalaureusetöös annan ülevaate spetsiifilisest struktureeritud võrgutusmetoodikast –
structured game – millele tõi ülemaailmse tähelepanu Neil Strauss'i autobiograafiline
uurimus Võrgutuskogukonnast: “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup
Artists” (2005). Oma uurimistöös lähtusin järgnevatest küsimustest: Kuidas ja miks
Võrgutuskogukond tekkis? Kes on selle liikmed? Mida kätkeb nende tegevus? Kuidas
suhestuvad nende praktikad kaasaegse Ameerika normatiivsete kurameerimispraktikatega?
Väidan, et Võrgutuskogukonna kui sotsiokultuurse moodustise kujunemisele pani aluse
kahe 20. sajandil toimunud protsessi integratsioon: 1) Ameerika seksuaalse liberaalsuse
kommertslik ja politiseeritud ideoloogia (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988; Foucault 1990), ning
50
2) eneseabitööstuse turu laienemine Ameerika keskklassi näol.
Lisaks võrdlen Võrgutuskogukonna käitumispraktikad Ameerika kaasaegse hookup
kultuuri (Kimmel 2008) käitumispraktikatega. Seks otstarbeks kasutan järgnevaid
teoreetlisi kontseptsioone: “kompulsivne heteroseksuaalsus” (Pascoe 2007),
“performatiivne soolisustamine” (Butler 1990), “heteroseksuaalne maatriks” (ibid.),
“hegemoonne maskuliinsus” (Connell 1987, 1995; Connell, Messerschmidt 2005;
Demetriou 2001; Donaldson 1993), “meeste hegemoonia” (Hearn 2004), ning “erootiline-”
või “seksuaalne kapital” (Green 2008; Gonzales, Rolinson 2005; Hakim 2010; Martin,
George 2006).
51
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