UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE School of Communication, Media and Theatre Successful Masculinity In Search of the Alpha Within Dermot Lyons Pro Gradu – Master’s Thesis June 2015 UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE School of Communication, Media and Theatre LYONS, DERMOT: Successful Masculinity: In Search of the Alpha Within Pro Gradu – Master’s Thesis, 133 pages. Journalism and Communication / Media Culture June 2015 Abstract Pickup artists and the seduction community have gone from being an underground network of workshop and internet based teachers and students, to, following the publication of Neil Strauss’ book ‘The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists’, a movement entering the wider public consciousness, a subculture of (primarily) men who wish to get better at meeting, sleeping with, and dating women. They try to make the transformation from men who are not successful socially or with women, termed ‘AFC’s or ‘Average Frustrated Chumps’ in the seduction community, to PUAs, or PickUp Artists. There are now seduction companies, TV shows, radio shows, podcasts, blogs, books, forums, websites, chat rooms, and community groups for major cities all across the world. This material is not always practiced or preached in a mainstream-safe way, but rather is done by breaking through groupthink, going against perceived norms, not being politically correct, and using the findings of evolutionary psychology and life coaching. The thinking behind this is: Everything can be taught, so why not how to get girls? Game is (supposed to be) a fun, pleasurable way to improve your overall self: diet, exercise, hygiene, education, career, living circumstance, behavior, sociability – all are looked at towards bettering an overall enhanced version of yourself, almost quantifiable, to be the most optimal self you can be, where you are having a good life, and women are a part of that life, who may join you on your own individual journey as a man. An alpha. The present thesis focuses on Strauss’ book ‘The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists’, highlights themes and issues which are pertinent for social and inter-relational reasons. Masculinity in postmodern hypercapitalist neoliberal western society is examined, through the prism of the text. The seduction community and its pickup techniques have not been examined adequately so far in academia, there is little research on the validity of the apparently successful routines and social dynamic structural mechanisms which pickup artists use to attract women. Findings include the similarities in the ways that Game overlaps in some instances with social theories, better understandings of male-female interactions, and a more comprehensive picture of masculine dating and attraction rituals. Keywords game, pickup artistry, seduction community, attraction, hegemonic masculinity, dating, social dynamics, alpha, power, success, homosocialization, self-improvement Index Abstract 1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 1 1.1 Background and Material………………………………………………………….. 1 1.2 Some Aspects of Game……………………………………………………………. 3 1.3 Autoethnographic Statement………………………………………………………. 5 2 Goals and Research Question…………………………………………………………. 7 2.1 Research question………………………………………………………………….. 7 2.2 Auxilliary Questions and Sub-Auxiliary Questions……………………………….. 7 2.3 Prior research………………………………………………………………………. 8 3 Theoretical Framework………………………………………………………………... 13 3.1 Rights………………………………………………………………………………. 13 3.2 Gender……………………………………………………………………………… 15 3.3 Masculine Success and Objectification…………………………………………….. 18 3.3.1 The Female Gaze……………………………………………………………….... 18 3.4 Friendship and Homosociality……………………………………………………… 23 3.5 Power, Equality and Truth………………………………………………………….. 26 3.6 Identity……………………………………………………………………………… 29 3.7 Men’s Perceptions…………………………………………………………………... 32 3.8 Male Sexuality………………………………………………………………………. 34 3.9 Initiation Rituals, Rites of Passage and Liminality…………………………………. 36 3.10 Sex and Love………………………………………………………………………. 38 3.11 Constructing Masculinity………………………………………………………….. 44 3.12 The World of the Masculine……………………………………………………….. 54 3.13 Liquid Life…………………………………………………………………………. 57 3.14 New Contexts for Writing: Literacy and Multimodality…………………………… 58 3.15 Social Dynamics……………………………………………………………………. 63 3.16 Self-Identity………………………………………………………………………… 65 3.17 Media……………………………………………………………………………….. 68 3.18 The Social Self……………………………………………………………………… 69 4 Methodology……………………………………………………………………………. 72 4.1 Notes on Methodology………………………………………………………………. 72 4.2 Qualitative Research…………………………………………………………………. 73 4.3 Narrative Analysis…………………………………………………………………… 74 5 The Material…………………………………………………………………………….. 76 5.1 Brief Overview of Game as a Concept……………………………………………… 76 5.2 Brief History of Game and the Seduction Community……………………………… 77 5.3 Summary of the Story……………………………………………………………….. 79 6 Analysis…………………………………………………………………………………. 82 6.1 Application of Method to the Material Analysis…………………………………….. 83 6.2 The Author’s and Narrative’s Journey Within the Text of ‘The Game’…………….. 85 6.3 A Close Reading and Narrative Analysis of the First Half of ‘The Game’…………. 87 6.4 A Macro Multiperspectival Reading and Narrative Analysis of the Second Half of ‘The Game’ 104 7 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………… 117 7.1 Summary of Themes/Positioning Game……………………………………………………………. 117 7.2 Summary of Analysis………………………………………………………………………………. 118 7.3 Suggestions for Further Research…………………………………………………………………… 124 7.4 Additional Questions Concerning ‘The Game’……………………………………………………... 125 7.5 Concluding Remarks………………………………………………………………………………… 125 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………… 127 1. Introduction In this chapter, I outline the material and background for the present research. I give a broad history of Game, of the author Neil Strauss, the material to be analyzed and its context. Then I explain some of the aspects comprising Game. Following this, I give an account of my interest in the material and motivations for writing on this topic. In this dissertation, I look at the socio-phenomenon of Game, using, primarily, Neil Strauss’ book ‘The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists’. Other sources are used, when necessary, to provide context and explanation. To tackle the themes and issues that the text raises, I look through the prisms of various theorists, using, among others, the works of Bauman, Giddens, Kimmel and Kress. My analysis of the text is done using narrative analysis. 1.1 Background and Material The seduction community is a group of men whose aim is to get better at meeting and seducing women. These pickup artists use a variety of tactics and gambits that are designed to increase the likelihood of a woman being attracted to them and sleeping with them. There are many ‘schools’ and companies who have differing approaches and styles in this arena. The community started in the late 1980s with Ross Jeffries, who used some techniques designed by the US military to coerce prisoners of war to reveal secrets, and repurposed these techniques in order to lightly hypnotize women and get them attracted to him. These techniques use a form of hypnosis and ‘brain programming’, termed NLP, or Neuro- Linguistic Programming. ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine did an article on Jeffries, he is considered one of the originators of modern pickup. Pickup coaches charge thousands of dollars for students to attend ‘bootcamps’ and seminars, where typically students will meet for a two or three day period, studying methods of seduction, theory, and then putting those to practice in ‘the field’, that is, any location where girls might be found, such as in shops, the street, libraries, college campuses, and mainly, in coffee shops, bars and nightclubs. Mystery (aka Erik Von Markovik, aka Erik James Horvat-Markovic) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, discovered, created and implemented a systematized way to attract and seduce women, through countless nights and days of approaching them in his hometown of Toronto, Canada, seeing how interactions went, noticing underlying patterns emerging in interactions and social dynamics, and logically determining, over the course of a few years, what is effective and what is not, in maneuvers designed to make a woman attracted to a man. He, through trial and error, and observation of social behaviors, cues, seduction and attraction, categorized, decoded and implemented the techniques that work to make women attracted and seduced by men. This was groundbreaking, as it means you do not necessarily have to be famous, or good looking or rich to be successful, if you have the techniques learned and internalized. He went on online forums on the internet, where a secret group of underground pickup artists shared their field reports, experiences, new routines and theories in getting better at attracting women. He created much, if not most, of the terminology that the seduction community uses as shorthand, and to covertly discuss pickup tactics in social settings. Apart from Ross Jeffries, Mystery can be credited with being among the first of the pickup gurus to conceptualize and monetize pickup as an area that can be taught and learned, combining economic and erotic capital. Ultimately, the goal is to improve one’s life quality and circumstances, and with women, to be as good as a ‘natural’ or an ‘alpha’ male. The seduction community also includes proponents who teach about other methods, which can be under the umbrella of seduction, or self-improvement, or life coaching in