MASTER THESIS
Not MeToo: the seduction community’s nice guys, bad apples, false allegations and anxiety
Mihaela Crăciun 11786884
Cultural Sociology Track
Supervisors: dhr. dr. K. (Kobe) De Keere dr. M.A. (Marguerite) van den Berg
Amsterdam, 08-07-2018
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Table of contents
Abstract...... 4
Chapter 1: Introduction...... 5
Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework...... 10
2.1. Emotional landscapes and cultural incoherence ...... 10
2. 2 Men’s rights movement and hybrid masculinities...... 11
2.3 Neoliberal logic and hegemonic masculinity in the SC...... 14
2.4 Sexual scripts and essentialism...... 15
2.5 Seduction and anxiety ...... 17
Chapter 3: Methodological Approach...... 20
3.1 Desk Research...... 20
3.2 Participants...... 21
3.3 Interviews Overview...... 22
3.4 Interpretive approach and positionality...... 24
3.5 Data analysis...... 25
Chapter 4: Findings...... 25
4.1 Concepts and lingo...... 26
4.2 Neoliberal, self-entrepreneurial framework...... 32
4.3 The “poor nice guy”: navigating anxiety and rejection...... 41
4.4 Not MeToo - it’s just the bad apples...... 48
4.5 MeToo: false allegations and anxiety...... 53
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Chapter 5: Conclusion...... 58
Bibliography...... 62
Appendix...... 69
Word count: 23,925
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Abstract
This paper explores the worldviews of the Dutch “seduction community” in an effort to understand how their inter-subjective frameworks relate to wider instances of inequality (Lamont et al, 2014). The seduction community is a transnational, self-help community aiming at empowering men who are “deficient” at social skills and particularly at successfully “picking up” women. The embodiment of masculinity is central to this rule- based, essentialist framing of sexuality and attraction in which men aim at instrumentally influencing sexual interactions in a quest to regain control and felt lost power over intimate relations (Schuurmans, 2017). Sexual success becomes a token of manhood that not only helps “socially awkward heterosexual men” (Denes 2011:414; Almog et al, 2015) climb up the social ladder of masculinities but also one that promises soothing of anxieties and mastering of emotions. Based on a desk research of “pickup” concepts and on qualitative interviews of the local seduction community’s members, this paper examines how members of the SC frame their involvement with pickup as well as broader issues of inequality such as sexual violence and the anti sexual harassment activism represented by MeToo. The paper argues that the community resorts to an intertwining of two complementary frameworks: hegemonic masculinity versus victim power, emphasizing what scholars have called hybrid masculinity (Connell et al, 2005).
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Chapter 1: Introduction
The issue of sexual harassment and assault has made its way into the public sphere for a few years now in light of feminist activism (Gotell & Dutton, 2016). Yet it is the recent MeToo movement that has showcased the extent to which sexual harassment is a pervasive social matter. The name “Silence Breakers” (Zacharek et al, 2017) was given to the main figures associated to the MeToo movement, so as to imply the broken taboo around sexual harassment that up until recently was mainly kept a private matter. Issues such as low reporting rate of sexual assault, low conviction rates (Tempkin & Krahe, 2008), widespread sexual violence against women and a culture of victim blaming and stigmatization in which women are the “gatekeepers” of sexuality and thus responsible for transgressions have long been documented (Gottel & Dutton, 2016). The movement has gained considerable support and the amplitude of the stories comes to show the extent to which feminist legitimacy was gained. Contestation and backlash to the movement has not nevertheless failed to come. The MeToo hashtag was quickly followed by #NotAllMen (Emery, 2017), as reactionary to a perceived overly inflated critique to manhood. Initiatives such as “La lettre des cent femmes” have come to critique MeToo for Puritanism, for “hatred of men and of sexuality” (Nous defendons, 2018). Postfeminist claims framing patriarchal structures and gender inequality as a thing of the past (McRobbie, 2008) are not new and have been a matter of interest for many sociologists. Postfeminism has been related to processes of reconfiguration and negotiation of intimacy (Gill 2009) and even with the rise of antifeminist attitudes and of the men’s rights movement (Ging, 2017; O’Neill, 2015; Gottel & Dutton, 2016; Menzies, 2007). Researching on MeToo and anti-harassment feminism proves therefore to be of high relevance in terms of better grasping the movement’s advance as well as the backlash that feminism still has to navigate its way through. The widespread endorsement of the “real rape” myth (Temkin & Krahe, 2009:349) still carries important consequences that ultimately minimalize the seriousness of sexual assault and thus implicitly enables a system of sexual violence. While MeToo is not be taken as ultimate victory on otherwise structural matters of inequality and sexual violence (Davis &Zarkov, 2018), it does bring to the forefront a necessary debate on sexuality and sexual harassment issues.
Of particular relevance to reshaping of cultural norms of sexuality and consent as brought forward by the MeToo movement is the pick-up artist community, hereby called pickup community or seduction community – SC (O’Neill, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017). The
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SC’s main aim is to increase sexual choice and control for heterosexual men through specific knowledge acquisition, skill training and seduction practice – self proclaimed as “artistry” or “game” (O’Neill, 2015; Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015). While main figures and popular “gurus” of the SC have oriented themselves towards more marketable identities such as “dating experts” or “lifestyle coaches” (O’Neill, 2015:8), thus diversifying the spectrum of memberships, for concision purposes we will refer to the entirety of materials, practices and followers identifying with this corpus under the sole name of SC or pickup community.
The SC professes self-help goals in helping men increase their erotic game, their heterosexual competences and sexual success with women, all within a re-enactment of hegemonic masculinity markers such as dominance and control (Almog et al, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017). The community targets men with low social skills (Denes, 2011; Almog et al, 2015) by putting forth a rule-based schemata of ideas, skills and seduction practices that would grant them success with women. Meticulous practice or “ascetic labor” (Schuurmans, 2017:69) is emphasized as only way to achieve success, in a paradoxical mixture of hedonistic goals and ascetic means (Hendricks, 2012). Originating from the US, this community has quickly spread into a global phenomenon that transcends its cyber dimension (Schuurmans, 2017). From online classes, blogs, forums where members exchange personal experiences with game, to offline seduction workshops, bootcamps or “in field” practice trainings, PU has gained many followers around the world. While its origins are traced back to the 70s and to figures such as Erik Weber’s “How to Pickup Girls” (Almog et al, 2015) , the SC has truly gained worldwide recognition after the bestselling success of the book “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists” (Strauss, 2005), in which Strauss describes the catchy story of his evolving from an AFC (average frustrated chump) into a PUA (master pickup artist).
While commercial in nature, this transnational community is considered part of the wider men’s rights movement (MRA), aligned with the central MRA philosophy: the popular Red Pill Philosophy1 aiming at liberating men from misandry and from the “feminist delusion” (Ging, 2017:1). The men’s rights movement or men’s rights activism (MRA) developed in the 1970s as an anti-feminist faction of the men’s liberation movement (Coston
1 The Red Pill Philosophy originates from the /r/TheRedPill subreddit concentrated on antifeminism and rape culture defense issues. Now central to the MRA movement, it claims to enlighten men over feminism’s misandry and brainwashing (Ging, 2017) by resorting to a cultural analogy to the famous movie The Matrix.
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& Kimmel, 2013; Messner, 1998), touching upon issues such as father’s rights, domestic violence and recently, sexual violence as main topic (Gotell & Dutton, 2016). Also called “masculinism” or “masculinist movement” this antifeminist movement claims that men are hurt by the “feminization of society” (Blais & Dupuis-Deri, 2012:21). Feminism and its feminist agenda becomes the enemy harming men’s wellbeing and masculinity must be restored as main marker of self identity (Allan, 2016; Coston & Kimmel, 2013; Messner, 1998; Gotell & Dutton, 2016).
In alignment with the MRA rhetoric, the SC strongly resorts to evolutionary psychology theories and biological determinism ideas (Ging, 2017; Denes, 2011). The overall PUA community aligns itself with wider misogynist, anti feminist frameworks employed by the men’s rights movement. Among the main ideas building the MRA worldview we find: gender roles are inscribed in our biology and women are thus naturally irrational and submissive (Ging, 2017:12); rape culture is a feminist created “moral panic” supported by widespread false allegations and non scientific claims and statistics (Gotell & Dutton, 2016:65); rapists and ordinary men must be clearly distinguished and sexual violence must be addressed as gender neutral (Gotell, Dutton, 2016:66). At its turn, the MRA is also impacted by the SC. Originating from PUA, a uniquely misogynist and heterosexist lingo has spread throughout the entire MRA (Ging, 2017:12), with popular terms such as friendzoning, negging, shit testing, last minute resistance, going caveman, the bitch shield and many others.
With men’s movements playing an important role in the growing backlash against feminist anti-harassment movements (Gotell & Dutton, 2016), researching into how they frame the feminist anti-harassment movement and how they positions their self membership becomes therefore relevant both towards the social issue itself as well as towards the wider sociological field of inequality; particularly so as the SC is explicitly concerned with seduction and sexual interactions. As stated by Blais and Dupuis-Deri (2012:29), antifeminist backlash intensifies with a perceived increased loss, contestation or threat to male privilege. The men’s rights movement’s rhetoric therefore provides valuable insights into feminism’s advance and status (Menzies, 2007: 66). The MRA’s intensified discursive backlash on the topic of sexual violence stands as proof of social norms being reshaped by feminist activism; which with the rise of the MeToo movement becomes ever more salient. Yet such backlash needs not be merely disregarded as “extreme”. As previous research has theorized, the men’s rights movement rhetoric legitimizes its claims along the lines of a wider normative
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neoliberal, postfeminist discourse and thus has the potential of broadening its support (Menzies, 2007:71; O’Neill, 2015; Ging, 2017).
The PUA transnational industry is no novelty for the public sphere – its commercial success speaks for itself. Be it through its defining, bestseller book “The Game” (Strauss, 2005) sold in more than 2.5 million copies or the up to 3500 euros tickets for a bootcamp in Amsterdam with a worldwide renowned dating “guru”2, proof of PUA’s commercial success and appeal is widespread. This strong commercial dimension makes the PUA subculture try to claim its own “entirety”, to set itself apart from other MRA factions or even align with more sophisticated names for marketing purposes – such as dating coach, lifestyle experts etc (Ging, 2017; O’Neill 2015). While controversies over sexual assault issues have recently put PUA back into the spotlight the seduction scene seems to be as appealing as ever. Among such controversies was that of the famous PUA instructor Julien Blanc who was banned from entering the UK and Australia (“Julien Blanc..”, 2014). Blanc is a famous controversial PU instructor behind the Real Social Dynamics (RSD) company who got banned from entering several countries in 2014 after his famous series of videos named #ChokingGirlsAroundtheWorld. His inciting to violence and sexual harassment is far from being subtle, with famous posts such as:“At least in Tokyo, if you're a white male, you can do what you want. I'm just romping through the streets, just grabbing girls' heads, just like, head, pfft on the dick. Head on the dick, yelling, 'pikachu’”(Li, 2014). Blanc has nevertheless “risen” from his own ashes by capitalizing on the controversy and using it as opportunity to become a spiritual teacher (alongside a dating coach). The Blanc controversy reached the Netherlands as well as Dutch right wing politician Thierry Baudet publicly took Blanc’s side (Terugkijken, 2014).
Recent literature on the SC has focused strongly on a content analysis of the PUA rhetorics (Ging, 2017; Denes, 2011; Almog et al, 2015); or on an ethnographic approach into members’ lived experiences with pickup, with its practices and its promoted ideals (O’Neill, 2015; Schuurmans & Monaghan 2015; Schuurmans, 2017), approach that nevertheless has not fully addressed how cultural accounts are related to inequality. This paper aims at enriching current research on the SC by looking into the local seduction community’s members’ moral position taking in terms of their own alignment with PU and of wider issues of inequality such as sexual harassment. While the online dimension of the SC is one of the
2 More info to be found at https://www.askmystery.co.uk/events; http://rsdbootcamp.com/schedule/
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main contributors to its widespread, transnational commercial success, we argue that the actual lived experiences and personal perspectives of its members is one that demands deeper investigation as it gives clearer insight into how the PU ideas and theories are translated into people’s worldviews and how they might ultimately relate to wider instances of inequality.
A qualitative methodological approach, enriched by a desk research into the community’s lingo, has enabled us to get a grasp of SC members’ frameworks, perspectives and emotional landscapes. Qualitative, in-depth interviews allowed us to “excavate” into different layers of cultural meanings and cultural incoherence which provide valuable insights into their “emotional landscape that brings a broader, social dimension to individual motivation” (Pugh, 2013:43). Scholars have long noted the emotional impact on heterosexual men as related to changing social norms around gender and sexuality (Allen 2003, 2007; Bridges 2014; Bridges et al, 2014; Montemurro et al, 2018; Cook 2006; Lamont 2015; Schuurmans et al, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017). In their research on the SC in California and Hong Kong, Schuurmans & Monaghan (2015:2) and Schuurmans (2017) emphasized how the quest to embody the Casanova myth within the SC is a double-edged one: it produces the same anxiety it claims to help alleviate. Becoming an Alpha is not without emotional turbulence within this standardized, rule-based vision of sexuality as something to be mastered, influenced and controlled by men through a process of impression management (Goffman, 1959) and dramaturgic performativity of hegemonic masculinity traits (Almog et al, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017). Building upon the work of O’Neill’s (2015), Almog & Kaplan (2015), Schuurmans & Monaghan (2015), Schuurmans (2017), we try to extend current research on the SC by addressing how members’ frameworks and emotional landscapes on sexuality relate to wider instances of inequality. My main research question is therefore:
How do members of the Dutch seduction community frame, understand and justify their own involvement within the community?
This main research question will be addressed by looking into the following subquestions: How do members of the Dutch seduction community rely on neoliberal arguments to frame their membership? How do they employ emotional frameworks to position their experience with pickup? And lastly, How do members of the SC frame and position themselves on the recent MeToo movement?
The MeToo movement will be defined and operationalized as known societal debate on shifting sexual norms that would enable us to tap into our respondents’ moral positioning
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on matters of sexual violence and ultimately, inequality. In this sense, we argue that these inter-subjective frameworks, scripts and narratives contribute to wider cultural processes and to the reproduction of inequality (Lamont et al, 2014).
Chapter 2: Theoretical framework
2.1 Emotional landscapes and cultural incoherence
Cultural sociology has long been preoccupied with the role culture plays in motivating action. Culture as a “toolkit”, as a repertoire (Swidler, 2000) refers to culture being used to make sense of one’s action rather than as a causal, motivating factor. Actors are here portrayed to be hyper rational in their quest to justify and organize their lines of action and thus discursive, cultural incoherence is merely the result of an instrumental, non-internalized culture. In a quest to re-introduce internal, moral motivation, Vaisey (2008) proposes a “dual process” theory that would allow for both internal and external, conscious and unconscious levels of cognition. Specifically, culture holds both a motivational and a justificatory discursive dimension to it, all according to its level of internalization. Tapping into either can therefore be made through different methodological approaches aiming at mobilizing either the fast, powerful, unconscious, culturally causal “elephant” or the reflexive, discursive “rider”.
A departure from the influential cognitive culturalism of Vaisey is brought by Pugh (2013), whose theory underlies and supports our current research endeavour. Building up on Vaisey’s theory of a bifurcated consciousness, Pugh (2013) argues that cultural incoherence needs not be solved but rather integrated. If Vaisey claims that it is only through forced- choice surveys that one can tap into the “snap” judgements of people, into their deeper seated, moral motivations, Pugh argues that the “visceral” and the “honourable” levels of consciousness coexist and pierce through a person’s “contradictory cultural accounts” (Pugh, 2013:42). Honourable selves are here understood similarly to an impression management concept (Goffman, 1959) or to the effort to maintain an ethical persona (Hanna, 2014), while visceral selves speak of a deeper, individual moral and motivational dimension (Pugh, 2013).
In this sense, Pugh pleads for the value of in-depth, interpretive interviewing in accessing the visceral and the honourable self; the deep seated, emotional, moral motivation
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as well as the honourable, discursive justifications. In this study we will integrate Pugh’s theoretical and methodological approach that enabled us to tap into these cultural layers reflective of our respondents’ emotional landscapes. In this sense, “contradictions and paradoxes are powerful tools for highlighting the emotionally charged – what is emotionally difficult to claim, where anxiety lies, and what sort of cultural problems people face for which they need to reach for such contradictory explanations” (Pugh, 2013: 48). This paper will therefore rely on Pugh’s “emotional landscape” as encompassing term that underlies cultural incoherence, connects the different levels of consciousness and allows the understanding of “a broader, social dimension to individual motivation” (Pugh, 2013:43).
2.2 Men’s rights movement and hybrid masculinities
A first introduction to the PUA community refers to it having been theorized as part of the wider men’s rights movement. Increased technological affordances have enabled the rise of the men’s rights movement as a powerful transnational, online presence. The self- proclaimed “manosphere”3 represents the central cyber dimension for the men’s rights movement (Gotell & Dutton, 2016; Ging, 2017). According to Messner (2016:12) the emergence of the manosphere was related to the increase of the postfeminist discourse and to an overall rhetorical “decline of males” – but also to wider socio-economical processes such as neoliberalism and consumerist orientation (Ging, 2017; O’Neill, 2015). As Menzies puts it, the manosphere showcases “a truly remarkable gallery of antifeminist content” (Menzies 2007: 65). Here, feminism is portrayed as a mere tool to reinforce political correctness (Gotell & Dutton, 2016: 68), having therefore “‘gone too far’ and harmed men in profound and fundamental ways’’ (Maddison 1999: 40). Restoring such harm made and bringing men back in touch with their masculinity becomes a must.
The overall discourse of the MRA has mostly revolved around defensive, “reactive politics” to feminism (Allan, 2016:25). A previous longstanding focus on issues such as father’s rights or domestic violence (Gotell & Dutton, 2016; Dragiewicz, 2008), has morphed into a new field of interest: sexual violence issues. It is this recent focus on sexual violence, called the “anti‐anti‐rape backlash” (Bevaqua in Gottel & Dutton, 2016:68), that comes to mark a new territory of antifeminist backlash.
3 The term “manosphere” was mostly popularized by Ian Ironwood, author of “The Manosphere: A New Hope for Masculinity” (2013)
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The MRA’s discursive shifts concern both content but also its discursive tone, now strongly tilted towards the realm of emotion. The manosphere’s rhetoric shifts therefore from a predominantly political dimension into a space of cultural, “affectively charged” narratives (Papacharissi, 2014:2) or “affective utterances” (Allan, 2016:22). Gotell and Dutton (2016) have theorized that the movement’s previous engagement with tackling and influencing public policy, on issues such as father’s rights or domestic violence (Dragiewicz, 2008), has now softened into a more individual, emotional level playing up on “victim power” (Allan, 2016): men are also harmed, but this time by feminism. Messner (1998) demonstrates how men’s rights movement’s speech originates from an earlier men’s liberation focus on sex role theories. He shows how sex role discourse was progressively divorced from a critical acknowledgement of institutionalized inequality, with an increasingly conservative emphasis on male individualist hurt and symmetrical language (e.g, men are equally if not more harmed by sex roles). This has enabled the rise of the MRA’s new discursive strategy as a “beta uprising” (Ging 2017:3) of “aggrieved masculinities” (Kimmel, 2015), where the manosphere works as a collector and promoter of individual stories of misandristic hurt. As reaction to a stronger anti-rape feminism, the contemporary MRA movement showcases an increased focus on sexual violence issues, delivered in a discursive, “victim power” mode (Gotell &Dutton, 2016). In their analysis of the MRA’s discourse on rape, Gotell and Dutton define the movement’s new and increased focus on sexual violence as intent of “using the issue of rape to mobilize young men and to exploit their anxieties about shifting consent standards and changing gender norms.”(Gotell & Dutton, 2016:65).
This discursive shift only comes to reiterate the importance of recent debates on hegemonic masculinity and of its necessary conceptual reformulation, debate which will stand at the core of this paper’s theoretical framework and research aim. The main reformulation of the concept is proposed by Connell and Messerschmidt’s thesis (2005) through which they aim at complicating previous narrow understandings of hegemonic masculinity. According to them, hegemonic masculinity can no longer be addressed as a mere cultural schema composed of stereotypical patterns of domination and masculinity. In short, hegemonic masculinity no longer simply reinforces hegemonic behaviours. Instead, masculinity should be understood as a way through which men position themselves alongside a spectrum of multiple meanings (Wetherell & Edley, 1999), as a strategic alignment with whatever discursive practices might ultimately grant external hegemony (Demetriou, 2001; Ging, 2017; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). The traditional hegemonic masculinity morphs
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from a fix set of characteristics into more fluid, strategically chosen practices, showcasing an ambivalence and even at times contradiction between alpha or beta masculinities – ambivalence visible within the men’s rights movement subfactions and their alternate uses of beta vs alpha identities (Ging, 2017). The “beta uprising” of young white males (Coston & Kimmel 2013, Kimmel 2015) and Connell & Messerschmidt’s (2005) hybrid masculinity comes to profoundly complicate the long line of research on hegemonic masculinity. It is within such “dialectical pragmatism” (Demetriou 2001:345) that masculinities are hybrid, constantly reconfiguring in an intricate, “interwoven pattern” striving for external hegemony and “work[ing] to conceal systems of power and inequality in historically new ways” (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014: 246).
MRA’s main legitimizing theoretical corpus of cherry-picked evolutionary psychology arguments and biological determinism (Ging, 2017; Messner, 1998) do not only inscribe traditional hegemonic masculinity as nature. The resort to such theories extends to emotionally arguing against the feminist agenda, to reinstating a “victim power” discourse legitimized through biology. The focus is on men’s personal stories of misandristic hurt that come as result of feminism’s distortion of natural laws. The discrediting of feminist empirical research and statistics (Gotell & Dutton, 2016) pinpoints to MRA’s effort at naturalizing structural instances of inequality by bringing the conversation unto the undeniable realm of affect (Allan, 2016). The main threat consists of feminism’s constructed “moral panic” over “distorted” topics such as sexual violence or rape (Gottel & Dutton, 2016). Within the MRA discourse, gender differences are inscribed in our nature and the higher “order of things” (Bourdieu, 2001:8) needs to be reimposed and preserved against feminist efforts. We are reminded of Bourdieu’s symbolic violence (2001) as main mechanism of male domination. But if Bourdieu (2001) pleads for a de-essentialization of the congealed dynamics of gender inequality, his habitus theory can elude the potential of an actual strategic use of displays of affect and resort to undeniability of feelings (Papacharissi, 2014; Allan, 2016) as mean to ultimately grant hegemony. In Feminism’s Flip Side: A Cultural History of the Pickup Artist, Andrew King (2018) argues that the evolution of the PUA scene is related to feminism’s gender relativism and to the erasure within public debates of biology as factor of attraction. In stressing out how the media attention on PUA revolves mainly around controversial, extreme figures, while ignoring the complexities behind PU and behind heterosexual, biologically driven attraction, King speaks of a “moral panic” that the
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feminist agenda is trying to reinforce, thus legitimizing the MRA’s emotionally charged discourse.
2.3 Neoliberal logic and hegemonic masculinity in the SC
Recent ethnographic research on the seduction community highlights a “highly rationalised form of eroticism” (O’Neill, 2015:8). Through ethnographic fieldwork, O’Neill attempts at complicating the narrative reifying the PUA figure as a deviant one by arguing that “the underpinning logics of the seduction community are consistent with broader reconfigurations of intimacy and subjectivity taking place within late capitalism” (O’Neill 2015:2). In line with a neoliberal logic of entrepreneurship and within a wider postfeminist social context, the SC’s rhetoric reproduces, according to O’Neill (2015), a stereotypical take on sex as something safeguarded by women and to which men must gain access to and control through strategic, “ascetic” labour (Schuurmans, 2017:69). Not only is sex here to be obtained from women as gatekeepers in what was called a “sex as conquest discourse” (Seal & Ehrhardt, 2003:296), but also won over other intensively competitive men (O’Neill, 2015:9). Scholars have theorized pickup to be a collective practice organized along the lines of both vertical and horizontal hierarchies (Schuurmans, 2017; O’Neill, 2015; Almog et al, 2015). The SC represents a “homosocial space of cooperation and competition” (Almog et al, 2015:15), in which men are both seen as “wingmen” – members collaborating during pickup, and competitors – the outsiders, the “naturals” at seducing women. Pickup is here comparable to competitive, hard labour sports practice and the sexual pursuit of women undergoes intense professionalization (Schuurmans, 2017; O’Neill, 2015). The means to achieve sexual success are encompassed within the embodiment of the ideal, dominating Alpha male figure.
If Ging (2017) identifies the “affectively charged” narratives as main standing point for the reconfiguration of hegemonic masculinities within the men’s rights movement subfactions, O’Neill (2015) comes to rather emphasize the neoliberal cultural logics of entrepreneurship that underlie the PUA scene and its marketing based endeavours. The seduction scene seems to be channelling a much more popular discourse of self-governance and entrepreneurship of intimacy and sexuality, where one must only work hard so as to achieve desired results (O’Neill, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017). Furthermore, the “general commodification of sex” (Gilbert in O’Neil, 2015:7) as scripted within neoliberal culture is showcased through the PUA community’s commodification of intimacy and access to
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women’s bodies as not only marking status but providing actual exchange value (O’Neill, 2015:7). Trainers gain recognition by not only shareable knowledge but by proven, recorded success in their sexual encounters with women – sexual success with women being the main marker of not only “real” masculinity (Schuurmans, 2017; Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015) but also of the community’s professional skills and market value. Filming and later screening of sexual encounters is often done by such trainers to showcase and establish legitimacy over self proclaimed knowledge. Women are not only objectified but become actual “object lessons” (O’Neill, 2015:8) with no say over issues of consent in being filmed or in later screening/publishing of such materials. Expertise and professional recognition is given to those PU instructors who not only prove extensive, accelerated game skills but also an impressive number of sexual conquests and sexual success with women holding high erotic capital (Schuurmans, 2017:79). In this sense, the community reasserts a gendered framework of sexuality in which men are naturally designed to be sexual predators and women are the “gatekeepers” responsible for hyper-vigilance and proscribed to passivity (Gotell & Dutton, 2016; Denes, 2011; Schuurmans, 2017; Almog et al, 2015).
2.4 Sexual scripts and essentialism
The SC defines sexuality upon essentialist grounds by resorting to evolutionary psychology theories and biological determinism (Ging, 2017; Denes, 2011; Almog et al, 2015). Essentialism here is to be understood as an immutable system that grounds gender and sexuality in the natural order of things; in short, “biology is sexual destiny” (Philaretou & Allen, 2001:302). Attraction can therefore be traced down to rules that are forged in by nature – men are naturally sexually driven and drawn to physically attractive women, while women look for social status markers that would showcase ability to provide for offsprings. In short, “alpha fux beta bux” (Ging, 2017): women look for alpha males for sex, inscribing hegemonic masculinity markers as biological and desirable. According to O’Neill (2015), Denes (2011), Almog et al (2015) seduction training promotes an understanding of intimacy and sexuality as procedural, rule-based schemata that can be produced on will by men and which ultimately eludes the dimension of mutuality and of female agency.
In an effort to understand the SC’s framework of sexuality, we introduce the concept of sexual scripts as prescribed guidelines for specific situations, operating on different levels: a wider, cultural scenario one as well as an interpersonal and intrapsychic level (Simon &
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Gagnon, 1984). Montemurro and Murphy’s research (2018) showcases that the traditional sexual script of male sexual assertion has been morphed into a rather hybrid masculinity (Bridges & Pascoe, 2014; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005): younger men no longer subscribe to it as much. Sexual initiation is purposefully morphed into “waiting”, in an effort to avoid emasculation over possible rejection. This demonstrates important transitions in sexual scripts, as reflective of wider social change around gender and sexual norms (Montemurro & Murphy, 2018). According to Schuurmans (2017), the gains of second wave feminism in terms of lifting restrictions on female sexuality is one that paradoxically also brought along new challenges for men “who can no longer hide behind the adage that women are sexually unavailable (Schuurmans, 2017:67). Sexual success with women is thus reinforced within the SC as marker of hegemonic masculinity, as “means to do gender, to signal a successful masculine identity” (Schuurmans, 2017:82). Sexual assertiveness, dominance and initiating skills are here extensions of traditional norms of masculinity (Reid et al, 2011; Sakaluk et al. 2014). In this sexual script, women are the sexual gatekeepers, in charge of enabling sexual encounters as well as responsible for handling transgressions (Seal and Ehrhardt 2003; Masters, 2010; Reid et al, 2011; Sakaluk et al. 2014;).
According to Seal & Erhardt (2003), shifting sexual scripts can be a source of conflict and anxiety as men and women are faced with the challenge to create new sexual scripts while potentially sharing different expectations and different interpersonal and intrapsychic scripts. The complexities as well as the resistance to these social changes is revealed by the fact that the traditional sexual script of male sexual assertion is revived by and remains deeply inscribed within the PU community (Denes, 2011; Ging, 2017; Almog et al, 2015; Schuurmans et al, 2015). This extension of an otherwise traditional sexual script arguably plays and capitalizes upon the anxiety men might feel as result of such wider social changes. Within such ambivalence and anxiety, these sexual scripts come as relief, as providers of “ways of knowing how to behave in sexually defined situations” (Ryan, 1988: 238). Yet this same reinforcement of manhood and of traditional sexual scripts represents, according to Schuurmans, an ambivalent source of both aspiration and anxiety for members of the SC (Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017).
Biology as consent was problematized by Denes’ (2011) content analysis on the SC’s sexual scripts for seducing women. According to Denes, the essentialist approach to sexuality, central to seduction teachings and preached in one of PUA’s main text, The Mystery Method: How To Get Beautiful Women Into Bed (Mystery, 2007), privileges
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biological markers and reactions as truth (Denes, 2011:1). Women’s bodies are positioned against themselves as any other reaction than bodily ones is to be disconsidered. Essentially, the guide to a woman’s consent lies within her body and not within her verbal communication. A woman’s resistance to sexual interactions is commonly framed as token resistance, or in PUA lingo as “anti-slut defense” (Denes, 2011:416): women want to have sex but are scared of the stigma carried by sexual double standards. Essentialist scripts are meshed with restricted acknowledgements of cultural factors – the one cultural factor that is widely recognized by the SC yet specifically instrumentalized for own purposes concerns the restrictions of female sexuality. Pickup mastery becomes here the antidote to the crippling anxiety women have of being judged or seen as “sluts”. Female resistance to sexual interaction is framed as part of a common sexual script in which women are either “shit testing” (testing for Alpha traits in their male partner) or as “last minute resistance”, here a token of women’s fear of the double standard stigma (Schuurmans, 2017). In this essentialist framework, female sexuality is something uniform, predictable and controllable – by men; while female agency is removed (Denes, 2011:418).
While the community’s lack of acknowledgement of female agency raises important criticism of objectification, Hendricks (2012:9) complicates this critique by saying that “members of the Seduction Community not only objectify women, but also other men – and [..] themselves”. By learning to look at both women and themselves as “biological machines” (Hendricks, 2012:9), Hendricks argues that members of the SC end up ultra rationalizing social interactions, feeling lonely and disconnected from the social world outside of the SC. Essentialist scripting of gender and sexuality not only creates an “unrealistically high standard of male sexual performance” (Philaretou & Allen, 2001:303) but also generates along intense sexual anxiety for men pursuing this standard. This being said, recognizing how the essentialist script of sexual initiation extends the issue of sexual violence by “naturalizing” gender roles of “push” versus “resist” while strongly dismissing subjectivities and female agency remains critical, as Masters( 2010) argued.
2.5 Seduction and anxiety
With many scholars researching changing social norms and sexual scripts and their provoking of ambiguity and anxiety for heterosexual men (Montemurro & Murphy, 2018; Seal & Ehrhardt, 2003; Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015), the emotional landscape of
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members of the SC becomes an important topic to address. Schuurmans & Monaghan (2015), Schuurmans (2017) come to extend O’Neill’s take on the SC’s neoliberal logic by emphasizing the emotionally stirring dimension it implies. According to Schuurmans, social changes such as decreased restrictions on female sexuality (Schuurmans, 2017:9) have brought about an important impact on intimate interactions. The rise of a hookup culture has concomitantly fuelled fantasies of sexual abundance, or the “myth of the pickup” (Grazian, 2007:226), yet Schuurmans’ findings reveal sexual adventurism and abundance as rather exceptional and resource-consuming (Schuurmans, 2017:9). In this sense, social changes have brought about specific challenges to young heterosexual men who now “can no longer hide behind the adage that women are sexually unavailable” (Schuurmans, 2017:67); all the while masculinity is strongly reinforced within the SC through sexual success markers, hence the emotional turmoil of the SC’s members. Playing up on this anxiety, the SC comes to promise relief from the emotional discomfort of not living up to the ideal male sexuality, while also setting “an overly rationalised performative standard” in which learning manhood becomes key for success (Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015:2). This creates a paradoxical twist: the SC reinforces the same anxieties it claims to alleviate. Aspiring towards greater sexual success as inspired by the glorified Casanova myth is not without emotional costs for those working on their “game”. Schuurmans’ studies (Schuurmans, 2017; Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015:2) provide a valuable insight into the emotional landscapes of the SC and into the relevance of the anxiety inducing, “double-edged sword” of the Alpha male embodiment.
Nevertheless, the relevance of such emotional frameworks and how they relate to wider systems of inequality is left mostly unaddressed. As Coston & Kimmel (2013) theorized about the MRA and their emotional policies of victimhood and reverse discrimination, such aggrieved feelings are real and extensive research showcases increased anxiety over changing social norms around sexuality – particularly so for heterosexual men (Montemurro & Murphy, 2018; Seal & Ehrhardt, 2003; Allen 2003, 2007; Bridges 2014; Bridges & Pascoe 2014; Cook 2006; Lamont, 2015; Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015). But while such emotions are highly relevant and real, nevertheless, “real, here, is not to be confused with true. These men do feel a lot, but their analysis of the cause of those feelings is decidedly off.” (Coston & Kimmel 2013:373).
It is here that we aim at extending current research on the SC by addressing how these frameworks and emotional landscapes possibly relate and contribute to wider cultural
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processes and to the reproduction of inequality (Lamont et al, 2014). If Connell and Messerschmidt’s claim that “challenges to hegemony are common, and so are adjustments in the face of these challenges” (2005:835), which might “stabilize patriarchal power or reconstitute it in new conditions”(Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005: 853), then how is the SC reacting to the implicit challenging of their practices that the recent MeToo movement brought into the public sphere? It is under such contestation of practices as under the sexualized, essentialist system of meaning constructing gender that the SC members’ moral positioning will be understood. More specifically, feminist contestation of sexuality meanings and practices not only threatens to destabilize men’s felt entitlement over women’s bodies but also actual identity markers of masculinity within which you are less of a man if sexual success and prowess is taken away or contested. The affective turn of the MRA is considered to be a strategic manufacturing of male victimhood (Allan, 2016:37) as response to increased anti-harassment activism (Gotell & Dutton, 2016). Nevertheless, we reiterate that we should not oversee the real potential of anxiety inflicting that such contestation of sexual norms and practices brings and which requires therefore careful scientific consideration. As Heath claims, feminism “makes things unsafe for men, unsettles assumed positions [and] undoes given identities”(Heath in Bryson, 1999).
Following Demetriou’s (2001) dialectical pragmatism and Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) hybrid masculinity theories within which hegemonic masculinities appropriate whatever strategies seem best suited for continued (external) domination, we will look into how members of the local PU community position their membership and also frame wider feminist efforts of contestation of their practices (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005: 853), such as the MeToo movement. If the seduction community has been portrayed by O’Neill (2015) as a site of mediated intimacy that is driven by neoliberal, self entrepreneurship logics of hard labour then how do its members react to feminist claims of redefining cultural norms on sexuality and consent? Is a resort to male victimization in issues of sexual violence and consent (Gotell & Dutton, 2016; Ging, 2017) a strategic counterbalance to this neoliberal, self entrepreneurial alpha masculinity logic that underlies the seduction scene – all in order to justify membership, motivate controversial sexual practices and maintain an external hegemony (Demetriou, 2001; Ging, 2017)? This is not to say that these emotional landscapes are merely justificatory or “unreal”. We align our research endeavour with previous findings on the SC members’ struggle with anxiety (Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017) and we will therefore consider and
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address this emotional landscape as motivational, reality defining as well as discursive, while at the same time considering how it relates and contributes to issues of inequality.
Chapter 3: Methodological approach
Our research goals as well as the community’s extensive online presence and usage of a specific set of knowledge and skills have guided us towards a triangulation of methods. This has consisted of a desk research of the SC’s main concepts and ideas as well as of qualitative, in-depth interviews with members of the Dutch SC. Complementing the qualitative interviews with a careful desk research into the community’s set of professed knowledge and skills proved to be essential to a clearer, more in-depth understanding of our respondents’ personal perspectives - both during the actual field research as well as in the later process of data analysis.
Addressing how members of the SC frame their involvement in pickup and how they position themselves on issues of gender inequality revealed the importance of undertaking a qualitative methodological approach. Qualitative, in-depth interviews enabled us to “excavate” into rich, different layers of cultural meanings and cultural incoherence that come to provide valuable insights into the “emotional landscape” they inhabit (Pugh, 2013:43). Also, the qualitative interviews were relevant to filling in the missing blanks in current qualitative research on the SC; specifically on how SC’s members’ intersubjective frameworks and emotional landscape extend to wider issues of inequality.
3.1 Desk research
The desk research has comprised mainly of watching youtube videos, reading blogs, Facebook pages, forums, most of which were international but also a few Dutch ones. The main criteria for selecting sources consisted of online materials on some of the most referenced, globally famous dating companies and PU coaches (Hendricks, 2012): the Mystery Method belonging to the famous Erik van Markovich but also the more controversial figures of Julien Blanc and Owen Cook behind the Real Social Dynamics company. These two “schools” of pickup were strongly referenced in most forums and blogs but also in other instructors’ materials as representing the most important “foundations” for their teachings. Also, several Dutch based sources, publicly available and mostly written in English, were
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included, as they provided an important insight into the local scene of seduction and how globally famous PU references and ideologies were translated locally. The desk research has also included watching the popular VH1 reality show “The Pick Up Artist”, featuring the famous coach Mystery and his team. The show ran during two seasons between 2007 and 2008. Despite schools and main PU figures claiming self-entirety and unique approaches to gaming, an overall strong consistency was found that referenced a commonly shared basis of knowledge, concepts and practices. This shared basis of ideas was what we aimed at understanding through this desk research as it proved highly important for our immersion into our respondents’ worldviews and frameworks. This basis will be detailed in the findings section Concepts and lingo.
3.2 Participants
We conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 12 members of the Dutch seduction community, all in order to explore their perceptions of the MeToo movement. Participants were aged between 21 to 39 years old, with one participant non-white. Most of them had started pickup training or practice during highschool or immediately after, with only two participants having started after 25 years old. Involvement in the community consisted of an average of 5-6 years old involvement for 7 of our respondents, with overall involvement ranging from 3 to 9 years.
Recruitment of participants was done by snowballing through gatekeepers (Palmer & Thompson, 2010), through members willing to participate and to also further recommend other participants among their community friends. Recruitment through snowballing has enabled us to reach into a national network of pickup art members, with most respondents from Amsterdam (5), but also from Den Bosch (2), Tilburg (1), Groningen (1) and Eindhoven (3). Many of our respondents maintained an otherwise tight connection with each other, regardless of their living location, in a quest to better their pickup skills within a “homosocial space of cooperation and competition” (Almog et al, 2015:15)
The considerable ambivalence and controversy around terms such as “pick-up artist” or “PUAs” (Ging, 2017), as well as the high standards members associate to the label “pick- up artist”, leads to men not always self-identifying themselves as such while still being an active part of the PUA community. Recent media controversies have also pushed towards the rebranding of the commercial term “pick-up artist” towards more marketable terms such as “dating experts” or “lifestyle coaches” (O’Neill, 2015:8). Therefore the main sampling
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criteria of participants has been self-identification with “pick-up” or “game” as ideology and/or practices of seduction (Hambling-Jones & Merrison, 2012) – whether self-taught through online or offline sources, as “practicians” of PUA techniques and praxis or as active members in a local/national PU community. Specifically, snowballing implied asking Dutch students, young workers or members of the SC for friends who “are into pickup art”.
3.3 Interviews overview
In-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews of approximately 75 minutes on average were carried within the timeframe of 20th of March – 30th of May. While the community thrives on an online basis of promotion, recruitment and ideological subscription to wider MRA philosophy, its offline dimension of personal motivations, of praxis and of interaction as well as of sense-making of such practices is one that is best to be discursively tapped into through in-depth qualitative interviews. Interviews enabled us to have a closer look at the inter-subjective frameworks and emotional landscapes that the participants might use to position themselves and to frame topics such as MeToo.
The semi-structured interviews have been overall guided by a topic list (see Appendix 2). Introductory questions touched upon the participant’s involvement and experience within the PUA community, both online and offline. Respondents were then inquired into assessing their experience with pickup in terms of motivations, felt benefits or downfalls, which enabled us to elicit participants’ stories, to encourage a fluid sharing of personal experiences and to tap into more emotional realms (Pugh, 2013). In order to grasp participants’ “affective utterances” (Allan, 2016) on MeToo and to tap into their “emotional landscapes” according to Pugh’s theory (2013), questions were purposely framed so as to elicit narratives touching on our research topic. Since participants have early on single-handedly provided references to the community’s having acquired a “bad rap” in the past years, addressing how did they feel about the recent controversies on PUA as well as how such controversial image impacts their life enabled us to tap into a more emotional dimension and served as transitional questions towards the MeToo topic. Additional questions included at times their openness to share their experience with pickup with other people or with sexual partners. These questions allowed us to better grasp their emotional landscapes and enabled us to further inquire into how they perceive the anti sexual-harassment movement. Here, MeToo was defined and introduced as a well known and visible public debate on sexuality and shifting sexual norms. Main general questions revolved around how do they feel about the MeToo movement and the conversation
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on changing cultural norms of sexuality as well as how do they feel this movement impacts his dating life and his pickup experiences.
Fully aware of situational risks (Palmer & Thompson, 2010) brought about by my being a female researcher interviewing men on matters of sexuality and seduction, the interviews were designed so as to ensure a smooth, unbiased field research. The locations for the interviews were purposively chosen to be quiet, neutral and secure, such as public coffee places. Most respondents from outside Amsterdam were interviewed through Skype. Following Sturges & Hanrahan (2004), the two interview modes - face to face and telephone interviews - offered little differences in the quality of interview data, in the themes emerged and in the depth of content. According to Sturges & Hanrahan (2004), the suitability of telephone interviews (here, Skype) is to be considered according to the specific research endeavour. The topic we looked into proved to be an appropriate topic to be addressed through both Skype and face to face interviews. Its sensitive nature enabled respondents to feel a sense of anonymity and disclosure via Skype (Sturges & Hanrahan, 2004; Fenig et al, 1993) and to help us navigate what might be a reluctance to participate due to the nature of the interview. Last but not least, researching into what can be considered deviant or socially disapproved behaviours (Sturges & Hanrahan, 2004:109) can pose safety concerns and situational risks (Palmer, Thompson, 2010) that can deter researchers from addressing particular topics – which at times made Skype interviews a more suitable, research effective choice. Sampling and approaching potential participants as well as overall interaction during interviews was strictly made on a basis of an approachable yet formal and neutral language that emphasized the confidentiality of the research. Building and maintaining rapport as foundation for a good qualitative interview has been a major concern both prior and during the interview itself, as well as eliciting information and probing (Spradley, 1979). Interviews were recorded and transcribed. After transcription, all recordings were destroyed in order to protect participants’ anonymity. One of the respondents has sent us a follow-up text in a manner of few hours after our interview, which has also been included in our analysis. Furthermore, all details that could have given away our respondents’ identity, such as their name, job, occupation, have also been fully removed or pseudonymized.
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3.4 Interpretive approach and positionality
My “being-in-the-world” (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012:172) as a woman and a researcher, particularly within this specific research endeavour, has demanded cognisance of its potential impact upon the research. A researcher’s positionality requires a careful consideration of her/his gendered, racialized eyes as well as of her/his developed theoretical lenses through which they filter and “grasp” the world around them. While particular attention was given to building and maintaining rapport, some respondents did at times reference my “womanhood” as contrast to their identity, to their experiences and struggles, thus inescapably bringing it to the forefront of our interaction. Reflexivity on my being a flesh-and-bones woman and a researcher did at times emphasize how researching unto such topics can be challenging as they can at times be “hard to digest and capable of evoking all manner of visceral reactions.” (Menzies 2007:87). Nevertheless, this can only reify the importance of researching and broadening the conversation on such otherwise rich and complex subjects (Palmer & Thompson, 2010).
While challenging, we argue that it is this same positionality that also holds the potential of providing richness of insight and can enable the collecting of valuable, rich data. My presence as a woman interviewer, as figure reflecting participants’ ambivalent take on femininity as both object of desire and source of anxiety, has enabled tapping into their honourable / visceral selves. Following Pugh’s theory on contradictory cultural accounts (2013), incoherence is something to be expected and embraced rather than solved as it provides a window of understanding into its cultural context of meaning. Emotions are here considered the link behind cultural incoherence (Pugh, 2013). As Pugh (2013:48) states, “Contradictions and paradoxes are powerful tools for highlighting the emotionally charged – what is emotionally difficult to claim, where anxiety lies, and what sort of cultural problems people face for which they need to reach for such contradictory explanations”. Interpretive interviews allow excavating into these different layers of cultural meanings so as to better grasp the emotional landscape that people inhabit and ultimately the wider social dimension of their motivations (Pugh, 2013:43).
In this sense, an emphasis was made during the in-depth interviews (Weiss, 1994; Pugh, 2013) on eliciting respondents’ stories, encouraging them to narrate rather than just give factual answers. Also, in order to tap into these rich layers given by the sensitive topic, careful consideration was given to neutral probing and encouragement, as well as to generally
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keeping questions open. Participants were encouraged to emphasize the subjects they felt were important thus allowing topics to come up on their “own”, as mean to enable stronger validity; also, choices of phrasing, of additional questions as well as timing of questions were overall adjusted to the respondents’ input. These aspects enabled an interpretive approach to both interviewing and later analysis. (Pugh, 2013).
3.5 Data analysis
In an effort to achieve “a situational fit between observed facts and rules” (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012:171) we balanced an inductive-deductive methodological approach. Drawing upon existing theories and research on masculinities and on the seduction community, we immersed into a repeated cycle of reading of notes and transcripts, data coding, memo writing, generating and reviewing/merging themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and constant revisiting of data as mean to clarify and deepen insights (Kilpinen, 2009). Interpretive analysis also implied a fine attunement to the discursive choices of participants and to their usage of rich language such as metaphors, logical contradictions, non-verbal cues or emotional references (Pugh, 2013). Prior as well as during the data collecting, a thorough desk research was done so as to deepen our understanding of the PUA lingo and concepts as available within the community’s online dimension that stands as important “medium for examining social constructions of reality” (Hanna, 2014). Data analysis was done through the use of the qualitative data analysis program ATLAS.ti.
Chapter 4: Findings
This following section will take us through the main findings of our interviews, as comprised within several topics. First, an introductory, desk research section will first lay the grounds of basic concepts and lingo within pickup. We considered these necessary for an in- depth understanding of our findings and of how they relate to our respondents’ worldviews. The following two subchapters will emphasize the two main frameworks used by our participants to position themselves, their experiences and membership within the SC, as corresponding to our two first research subquestions: a neoliberal, hegemonic masculinity framework versus an emotional, “victim power” framework. Their resort to these two main moral frameworks will help us further explore and understand the final two subchapters
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addressing the respondents’ positioning on the MeToo movement: self-distancing versus false allegations anxiety.
4.1 Concepts and lingo
We will here address the main concepts behind the community’s sexual scripts and procedural schemata of seduction, as derived from our desk research of the SC’s main referenced materials as well as of the local Dutch SC’s online sources. While some of these concepts have not been explicitly included in the findings section or directly referenced by our respondents, they together construct an important body of interrelated ideas that helps ground the worldviews of our respondents and are thus essential for an in-depth understanding.
Beliefs deriving from popular evolutionary psychology theories and biological determinism claims are widely preached within pickup art’s rhetoric and embodied within its set of knowledge and practices (Ging, 2017; Denes, 2011). One of the two important concepts underlying the pickup logic is the popular, essentialist “alpha fux beta bux”: specifically, women look for and are attracted to Alpha males for sex. This popular PU script is infused in all motivational marketing messages that promote a “quick fix” for a hedonistic pursuit of sexual success by learning how to embody the Alpha figure and “lead” her towards seduction. But as Hendricks (2012) argues, the promised fix is a rather laborious, ascetic one thus building up to both anxiety and motivation, as Schuurmans (2017) proves. Also, the “If I don’t, we won’t” sexual script (Montemurro & Murphy, 2018) positing male sexual initiation skills as evolutionary imposed defines the SC’s motivational worldview and thus grounds the inescapability of learning pickup as only mean to achieve sexual success.
Here, a very common belief concerns the “currency” system of sexuality (Schuurmans, 2017), in which women’s role as sexual “gatekeepers” leads to an overly inflated sexual competition between men and to an implicit imbalance of power working in women’s favour. As described on the Dutch page Masterflirt (Gorny, n.d. a), attraction is evolutionary gendered: for men it’s an “on/off switch”, while for women it’s a “dimmer” – hence the hard work and the initiation responsibility that biologically falls on men’s shoulder. Men are biologically attracted to female beauty, while women are attracted to Alpha male characteristics – here ranging from social status markers to simple re-enactments of domineering Alpha behaviour. According to Gorny (n.d., b), an Alpha man is assertive, direct and in control of his emotions, perseverant and risk-taking, confident, and mostly, a leader of
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the group, oriented towards value giving to himself while keeping in mind the group’s best interest; he is also the leader of a relationship, and achieving the Alpha state of mind is done by channelling a “growth mindset” – Alpha is something you become and learn to embody and display. In this sense, a “social proof” theory, as popularized by the famous Mystery (2007), dictates that men have to display such masculinity markers in what is called a DHV (demonstration of high value).
If not referencing biological and evolutionary destiny, then seduction is at times explained as constrained by the socially imposed restrictions on female sexuality and its double standard: women might not initiate or continue sexual interactions because they are afraid to be considered “sluts”. Having to “play hard to get” is therefore a woman’s biologically and socially imposed curse and can manifest in her not initiating or in her “resisting” the sexual interaction (Johnson, n.d.). References are also at times made to women having to navigate many “creeps” on a daily basis: “a girl rolling her eyes, not giving you anything to work with is just a filter to get out all the creep, weird, drunk criminals and this is nothing that you need to take personally”.(RSDMax, 2017a) In this sense, perseverance of approach is recommended while the limit consists of a woman’s “clear NO” (Johnson, n.d.) or her walking away: “it’s your responsibility as a guy to hang in there, because as long as she’s there, you’re good [..] she can leave at anytime, but as long as she’s with you, you definitely have a chance, and then it’s in your responsibility to warm her up” (Tomic, 2017).
Concepts such as “shit testing” or “the aggressive version of a girl being interested in you, [..] Some girls just like, ‘I don’t like to be passive, I like to just throw shit at the guy, right off the bat, so I can sift out all the losers beta males from the cool alpha males’” (RSDMax, 2017b), reinforce the necessity for persistence and for display of an Alpha identity and confidence while at the same time portraying women as “confrontational”, “bitchy” or “ice princesses” – reflecting MRA’s construction of femininity (Ging, 2017; Gottel & Dutton, 2016). “Shit testing” as well as “last minute resistance” to sexual intimacy (LMR) - reveals an underlying belief in women’s verbal inconsistency to which men must gain “reading” skills. “Resistance” as test of masculinity rather than true disinterest is commonly referenced, and thus again, perseverance is key (Johnson, n.d.). Ways to overcome LMR while already in a “sex location” is by keeping a woman’s “emotional bank account” full, in a quest to make her feel emotionally comfortable to engage in sexual interaction. Also, “framing” her mind through strategic, sex positive story telling is advised. Specifically, “her preframe should always be sex is something natural, sex is something wonderful, and I’m not going to judge
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you” (RSDMax, 2015). According to Max from RSD, this encourages the woman to subconsciously see sex as a way to express and confirm her own identity to herself as “empowered”.
Women are constructed as incongruent in their verbal expressing of their true desires: specifically, that women verbalize their appreciation of a “nice guy” while in fact being attracted to and responding to the “bad guy”, Alpha male figure. Bodily reactions represent thus the ultimate indicators of a woman’s interest. In sharing his seduction method to a group of women, Mystery states that: “what a woman says and how they respond are two entirely different things. There are specific hardwired signals that you are evolutionary calibrated to demonstrate when there is a man of high value in proximity to you” (Mystery, 2014). Attraction is, according to him, “not a choice” – in short, primary urges overrule rationality. A particular system of indicators of interest (IOI) is put in place so as to read a woman’s true “signs” as inscribed in her body (Denes, 2011) and so to enable a rule-based, methodical approach to seducing women. Among such physical signs or IOIs are: if she touches her hair while approached; smiling and giggling – even if she seems to disagree; crossing her legs; not leaving etc (Mystery, 2014). While Mystery’s approach can be considered somewhat more methodical (Hendricks, 2012) than the approach of the RSD seduction company (Real Social Dynamics), the focus on the body as ultimate indicator remains supreme in both. In the series “The Pickup Artist” (Ney et al, 2007-2008), Mystery advices participants to pay attention to these signs as valuable clues into a further escalating of physical intimacy. Analyzing his student’s “target” body language while being “picked up”, he enthusiastically says: “Boom! She touched her hair. They have no clue they’re doing it!”4.
With more than 700k views, a popular video of the famous Real Social Dynamics seduction company touches upon the issue of IOIs as well. In this in-field hidden footage lesson (RSDMax, 2017b), IOIs are explained and visually demonstrated as being found “in the subtleties”, as a woman’s primary drive is emotions, while man’s is logic. Women as profoundly emotional while men as strongly rational is a current idea. Interestingly in this same video, the instructor constantly calls men “retarded”, in an endearing way - suggesting the unknowing innocence of men over this women’s complex irrationality. Physicality is the central IOI: from simple indicators such as women “showing off her goods”, flicking their hair, laughing to poor jokes, sitting/moving next to you, to acceptance/non reactivity to
4 Episode 7 of the first series of the VH1 reality show “The Pickup Artist”
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physical escalation itself as the major IOI. In short, the best way to navigate through women’s different characters (e.g., shy versus talkative) is through initiating and escalating physicality, “little by little”, based on a one sole indicator of interest – she is still there. In the same video, Max advices to use physical touch as sharpest mean to determine a woman’s interest and concludes by saying: “Don’t be distracted by the verbal things that girls are giving you. Use physicality as a ping” (RSDMax, 2017b).
Here is where “calibration” - advanced reading of social cues and behavioural adjustement, plays in as “deeper level” of mastering pickup. The famous and contested Owen Cook (pseudonym: Tyler Durden) claims he is “The nerd” - as he never had social intelligence growing up which lead to his severe social anxiety, revealing the “nerd” identity behind the SC as theorized by Almog et al (2015). Cook underlies the main paradox of pickup as torn between the imperative of dominance and the necessity to not fall into the “sociopath” pile: “Picking up girls is a combination of fucking going for it but also being very aware of how the girl’s feeling” (Rsdfreetour, 2014). The sweet spot lies, according to him, in the combination between aggressiveness and tenderness; between the “freedom from outcome” and the “killer instinct” (RSDMax, 2014); between wanting it and not needing it. In describing himself as having been too empathic to what women think, which was something he had to counteract with more dominance, he claims that “paradoxically, by being so concerned about not pissing a girl off you turn her off, cause you’re not a man.” (Rsdfreetour, 2014). While preaching for “social calibration”, nevertheless, Cook (as his fellow RSD colleague, Julien Blanc) was also caught in controversy over his teachings – such as in his video “Tyler’s Most Gangster Exercise For Entitlement” (RSDTyler, 2011). Here, he advices men to get over their approach anxiety or, as he calls it, their “entitlement block”, by first practicing grabbing an unattractive woman and later translating the same felt confidence unto this time grabbing an attractive woman (the obvious, real “target”).
Succesful, quick “escalation” as well as “pulling the trigger” and the achievement of the “deal closing” goal were the most rewarded skills that the participants of the VH1 series could show (Ney et al, 2007-2008) and are considered to be one of the markers of pickup mastery (Schuurmans, 2017). “Kino escalation” relates to a gradual intensification of physical touch and the ability to produce the necessary psychological as well as logistical conditions for its accomplishment. The main belief behind kino escalation is, again, that one can seduce any woman by simply awakening physical desire in her through a series of increasingly physical interactions and “emotionally comforting” behaviours (Vrouwen
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Verleiden, n.d.). Getting physical from the beginning is a general advice, as is a gradual built up of touching as means to increase “trust” and emotional comfort of their partner (Mystery, 2005:143). In short, sexual touch creates sexual tension.
Similarly, “isolating the target” – or successfully taking an attractive woman into a more isolated venue, while keeping it a mysterious, preferably surprising move for the woman was an important incentive and goal to obtain during the night game tests of the series “The Pickup Artist” (Ney et al, 2007-2008). As Schuurmans(2017) argues, “isolation” or “pulling” operates on the belief that outside of scrutinizing eyes, women are less inhibited to be sexual. If this can be related to public sexual activity not being the norm in the “urban erotic contact zones” of Hong Kong, (Schuurmans, 2017: 112), it is arguable whether the same still applies to the American based club in which they filmed the show. Risks associated with “breaking the norm” were arguably not what Mystery was concerned about when instructing the participants on “isolating their target”. Instead, he argues for an effective management of the woman’s group of friends, the “set”, and moving unto a more convenient logistics for a further increase of physical intimacy where the woman’s attention can’t be deflected by her friends or other obstacles.
Strategies to regain control over their sexual life and over their game skills are built therefore around the ideal of the dominating, Alpha male that women are theorized to be naturally attracted to. In this sense, the embodiment or at least, the performativity of the Alpha ideal becomes primary. Also, compensatory measures are prescribed in an effort to balance out perceived gender power imbalances within which women are the sexual “gatekeepers” (and thus power holders) and are “blessed” with the effortless high currency of female beauty. Here, several concepts portray this idea. “Negging”, or the insertion of a backhanded compliment, is prescribed as technique to disarm a woman’s greatest power – her physical attractiveness (King, 2017). The purpose of such technique is to actively discredit oneself as potential suitor but also to decrease a woman’s sense of sexual power by confusing her with unexpected male reactions; women, or particularly attractive women are used to being given attention and flattery and have developed a sense of pleasure in “toying” men with such received attention. A “push-pull” dynamic is the overall principle to a successful pickup: the more attractive a woman is, the more she should be made to “work” for your attention, in a twisted dynamic to what she expects to receive from men. Similarly, the push pull dynamic serves also to overcome LMR and break the “bitch shield” - or the woman’s
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defensive mechanism against slut shaming, by retreating as mean to make her react and push for the interaction herself.
While men’s role is that of a sexual initiator, women are strongly reduced to physicality. A rating system for women supports the biological argument that men are naturally drawn mostly towards physically attractive women. “Erotic prestige” (Grazian, 2007) for young heterosexual men increases therefore not only with having a high “number” of conquests but also proportionally with the perceived erotic capital of their partner. A 1 to 10 scale rates mainly female beauty but also specific character traits brought by their “socialization”. According to Rick Dutch, the co-founder of the School of Seduction based in Den Hague5, a 10 is a super model, the perfect mixture of both physical attractiveness and attitude and a 9 is for women hired for their beauty – reminding of what the famous self proclaimed PUA Mystery calls “hired guns” (Ney et al, 2007-2008), or the highest challenge to be “conquered” by the participants in his show The Pickup Artist. Physical attributes as “tits” or “fine ass” are also graded by Rick Dutch, who strongly follows Mystery’s method, and warnings are given to never go below a 5. Scoring a 10 is a naturalized, strong incentive to reaffirm masculinity. Female beauty and objectification of women is also defining for the show “The Pick Up Artist”, where Mystery and his team also introduce a woman PUA (Ney et al, 2007-2008). While in the second series she does actually become part of the two “wings” of the main coach and series leader, Mystery, in the first series she only appears episodically. Alongside a few other women included as non “targets”, whether taking the roles of instructors, “practice material” for the participants’ making out skills, “wing women” for the in-field tests or “sexy nurses” testing participants’ ability to control their physical arousal, women were overall strongly resumed to a passive, objectifying stance in which they were the prizes to be gazed at. “Wing women” serve again as mean to display increased erotic prestige and social proof by showcasing “preselection” by high erotic prestige women, but also to keep participants “inspired” and motivated in their goal to get a 10.
5 Info retrieved from his official Rick Dutch facebook page, posted on March 11th 2018 https://www.facebook.com/pg/RickDutchDatingCoach/posts/
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4.2 Neoliberal, self-entrepreneurial framework
Hard labour and self growth
In line with the neoliberal, self entrepreneurship logic of pickup (O’Neill, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017), the SC adheres to traditional hegemonic masculinity ideas. Manhood is defined by several important markers such as quantity and erotic prestige of sexual partners, dominance, persistence, directness and control (Grazian, 2007; Martin, 1996; Schuurmans, 2017; Reid, Elliot, and Webber 2011; Sakaluk et al. 2014). Nevertheless, direct identification of our respondents with a Casanova figure was somewhat low, in alignment with Schuurmans & Monaghan’s (2015) results. Our respondents’ main motivations for this time and resource consuming PU journey were: gaining more ease at interacting with women, overcoming a seemingly debilitating approaching anxiety, bettering social skills, getting a girlfriend or simply “meeting more interesting women”. Overall, pursuing PU mastery was framed by them as a matter of self-growth rather than a quest for “sexual success”. Success with women was a salient motivation for our participants who nevertheless frame their efforts as ones for “self growth”, for “becoming a better self”.
Most of our respondents have framed their PU journey as an overwhelmingly positive one, by using a language of self help and self growth to contrast with the emotional struggles they had and have to handle in this intense game. Overall, PU is mostly defined as a positive, life-changing experience that empowers men to regain self confidence, to build social skills and to regain control over their sexual life. Matthias shares how PU helped him change for the better:
“back in the days I was not so social, I was very into myself, I was not brave enough to talk with any girls. So when I see this and I get this and I try it so hard, I get a little bit cocky of course, but that is good, because you have to be a little bit cocky and I get, I don’t know how to say it in English....I am now..zelfverzekerd (self confident)..”
For Piet, who always struggled socially as well as with mental health issues, PU has been “one of the best decisions of my life actually.” Similarly, for Jan, starting his PU journey “was a really tough decision but it’s probably one of the best I ever made in my life”. He was first inspired to pursue this after a dramatic loss in his life. In this sense, he describes PU to have been a decision to change his life around, to meet more interesting women but
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also “to learn, like the ancient Greek said, (to) know thyself”. Jan also mentions how PU lead him also to get in contact with his spirituality. He continues to say that:
“It’s a very controversial community in a way, especially in the US, but I think also really helps a lot of people, a lot of men get out of shyness, experience some type of love for the first time, and of course, the negatives come in the news (laughs).. but when you see that hundreds, even thousands of men have got their life on track because of learning a few basic skills and apply it to other areas of their life as well, I think it’s a beautiful thing to learn.”
For Guus, PU is not only a valuable tool for the respondents and their growth, but a key to everyone else’s wellbeing:
“This entire pickup thing is a process through which you grow as a person, especially in interacting with women, so as you can get the ability and the knowledge to talk to them, to obtain sex, to obtain a relationship, in a way that everyone is ultimately happy[..] I think that those who get to a certain level are better, for themselves and for those around them. The way they talk, they behave, the way they give people space”.
Nevertheless, warnings are given by Guus that if taken too far, this newfound power of PU skills “can make you drunk and you can, if [..] you have a lot of confidence and you blow it, it can turn bad”.
Framing their pickup journey as a self-growth one, as a path towards conquering insecurities and even towards becoming a better man, is what all respondents seem to have in common, despite different levels of experience, of involvement or motivations. For two participants, the journey takes them beyond self growth: pickup is framed as their gateway to having discovered spirituality. For Roel, this is one of the biggest benefits he feels he got out of PU:
“It really helped me get into meditation and more of the spiritual side, because yeah the main thing that I started meditation was because I read a lot on different forums that the thoughts improve your dating skills to be more calm [..] the whole dating dynamic has been a real motivator for me to work on myself”.
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One of the PU figures he mentions to have inspired him into spirituality and whose spirituality course he bought is Julien Blanc. Blanc is the famous controversial PU instructor who after being banned from the UK and Australia on grounds of sexism and inciting to sexual harassment (Li, 2014), rebranded his services as spiritual self-help within an impressive one year timeframe. His most famous product is the spirituality course Transformation Mastery, in which he capitalizes on the life changing, spiritually transforming experience of having become “the most hated man in the world”6 by aligning with the widespread appeal of the self-help culture.
Regardless of self declared motivations and goals, all participants did seem to concur on the supreme value of practice as key, reflecting O’Neil’s (2015) argument of a neoliberal, self entrepreneurial construct of achieving sexual success through hard labour. Practice becomes therefore, regardless of level of involvement with PU teachings or practices, the key for them to overcoming their emotional hardship and of achieving the much longed for confidence and success with women. This “ascetic labour” (Schuurmans, 2017:69; Hendricks, 2012) directly relates the framework of self growth with the methodical, uniformized, essentialist process of sexual attraction that the SC promotes in a quest to appeal to men’s felt lack of control over their intimate relations. While hedonistic in its promoted goals of adventurous sexual success, the SC needs to emphasize its “ascetic” means and processes (Hendricks, 2012) for what might be considered a maximization of its commercial success: the strongly longed for sexual success with women requires hard, methodical, consistent work.
Practice and ascetic labour is also the dimension that defines the true “essence” of a pickup artist. In being asked about the downsides of his experience in PU, Alvin shares that he didn’t feel totally represented by the entirety of the PU community members. By introducing the binary “nice guys” versus “douchebags”, Alvin sets the lines of what a true PUA is about: hard work, not bragging about sexual success. For him, it is the douchebags the ones that ruin the reputation of the community – to the disadvantage of the rest of the nice guys. He goes on to say that:
“If you never practice it’s never gonna happen. Cause you’re still gonna be shy, you’re still gonna be awkward, you’re still gonna be all those things that you practicing not to. So if you wanna be good at the game, yeah you have to get rejected
6 For more about this http://julienhimself.com/self-help/
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a million times - unless you’re something called a natural. That’s people who don’t need the game, that kind of guy, because they’re very good looking, you know, they have their ways around social dynamics, it comes natural to them. I always envy those guys. I’m not one at all.”
Alvin’s account speaks of practice and hard labour yet a more visceral self pierces through by his referencing to the pain of rejection and of not being a natural at seduction. Alvin introduces an honourable “stoicism” as integral part of this performativity of masculinity in which “alpha creates an unshakable upbeat emotional state” (Schuurmans, 2017:100): emotions need to be conquered. Yet by emphasizing that practice implies going through “a million” rejections and by admitting to his envy of the “naturals” at seduction, we step into a more visceral, emotional self. His account reveals an inner contradiction between practice as imperative virtue backing pickup mastery and practice as key to a stigmatizing, less honourable figure of a “womanizer”, the one whose main interest is increasing his “number”. As Martin (1996:14) claimed, having sex “reinforces masculine and adult status”, particularly for young heterosexual men. Yet the quest for such status - status otherwise strongly preached by the SC and its professional legitimacy claimed on the grounds of intense sexual success with women - is not one without emotional struggle and ambiguity. Alvin’s distanciation from the “douchebag” bragging over his sexual conquests number seems to contradict his preaching of practice as key. Getting a “number”, reaching the masculinity marker of high number of sexual conquests, becomes justifiable if seen as a process you have to go through, as a “statistical” part of the game, of the practice needed to master seduction skills. Alvin further speaks of practice in a more honourable way: “I didn’t really get much better, except for the fact that I’d be comfortable talking to people and getting rejected. That’s all that it is, it’s a numbers game”. This allows maintenance of distance from the image of a less honourable Casanova (Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015).
On a similar note, Roger goes on to explain his vision on “getting a number”: “I think that when you just start this, it is good to practice with as many as possible, with the more structured method...the more you practice, the better you get, just the more data your brain has to process this”. Practice, hard labour and a neoliberal, self entrepreneurial approach become central to this systemized, procedural approach to regaining control over sexual interactions as well as over the emotional hardships of rejection that this process might entail.
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Roger explains the tight connection between rejection or “approach anxiety” and practice: “in the beginning you feel afraid of approaching because you fear being rejected, but what they say is just practice and the fear will go away. And that’s true, cause you’ll have the experience and you know that rejection is part of this seduction process.”
Many respondents, among which Sven, emphasized that PU has lend them towards a path of self growth, path that even though was filled with hardships, was well worth it: “So like I said, the personal development stuff, the getting better at it, [..] I have put a lot a lot of work in it and I went through a lot, a lot of struggle and hardship shit to get to this point..but in the end, it literally makes you a better person”. The “hard labour” of practice becomes therefore an honourable dimension in which self-growth takes centre stage and empowerment arises out of achieving stoicism (Schuurmans, 2017). Pickup becomes an imperative for regaining self-confidence and control:
“Finding about it, I was like, if I don’t learn about it, I’m fucked. You can have a great lifestyle like all these guys are having because they put in the work and the hours, or I can still, because I’m not naturally talented at all with it, it was really or I stay the same, or I go for the awesome road. It was like getting the work done is going to be a lot of pain, it’s not going to be easy, but it always beats like staying in this position, so I was like I just have to learn it.”(Sven)
Hegemonic masculinity
Seduction training and ideology reinforces traditional gender norms positing sexual virility and prowess as important expression and certification of masculinity (Seal & Ehrhardt 2003; Reid, Elliot, and Webber 2011; Sakaluk et al. 2014; Schuurmans, 2017). The dominant sexual script within the seduction community claims that any man can achieve greater sexual success and control through the laborious, systematic acquisition of specific seduction skills aiming at the embodiment of the Alpha male. This reinforces a neoliberal, self entrepreneurship ideology that reproduces traditional norms of masculinity (O’Neill, 2015; Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015). Hegemonic sexual and gender scripts posit men as initiators and women as sexual gatekeepers, responsible for hyper-vigilance and for enabling sexual encounters through signs (Gotell & Dutton, 2016; Denes, 2011; Seal & Ehrhardt 2003). It is all up to men to take matters into their own hands and make it happen, reproducing a stereotypical take on sex as something safeguarded by women and to which men must gain access to and control through strategic labour.
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Derek, one of the few claiming to rarely currently practicing PU and one of the only two respondents in a monogamous committed relationship, expresses his belief in pickup as important skills that fathers should teach their sons. He says so by framing the sexual initiation script as an undesirable given:
“yes, guys have to make the first move, I have no idea why. It’s either from society it’s either from biology [...] in general, in biology, in almost every species you see male pursuing the women instead of the opposite. But I really wish it wasn’t.”
Essentialist views of sexuality were often backed by our respondents through references to evolutionary psychology and biological determinism (Denes, 2011; Almog et al, 2015), reflecting an overall alignment with a wider MRA rhetoric (Ging, 2017; Messner, 1998). In this sense, most respondents explicitly aligned themselves with the intrapsychic script “If I don’t, we won’t” (Montemurro & Riehman-Murphy, 2018), positing the necessity to initiate sexual interactions themselves or otherwise nothing would happen. This imperative mastering of “initiator” skills serves as both sense-making and motivating force for their pickup quest.
Not only are men the ones in charge with initiating sexual encounters but they also must subscribe and embody Alpha male characteristics to which women are “naturally” drawn to – in short, dominance, assertiveness, persistance and control within interactions (Schuurmans, 2017; Almog et al, 2015). Matthias explains that not only did PU help him become more self confident in his general social skills as well as specifically with women, but that he also learned that a certain doses of “cockiness” is imperative to an effective, methodical influencing of sexual interactions:
“you have a conversation and it’s like if you’re with this girl, you are good asking the right questions, so when you are a little bit cocky or in the middle, you can ask typical questions that lead to typical situations or to a different kind of conversation or movement in her body..so you can go to the next step. Because if you don’t do that, then it’s not gonna happen.”
Here, many participants expressed how the benefits of having learned PU and having gained confidence extended beyond their dating life, as it helped them gain more professional confidence by gaining persuasive, sales skills or negotiating abilities – arguably all reflective of domineering, influencing skills.
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Beyond being the one in charge of taking matters into their own hands and learning how to make interaction happen, men also feel bound to understand the signals women give so as to more effectively react towards achieving desired outcome. Roger, who’s 26 years old, explains that PU is about:
“taking the initiative, and approach a woman and take the lead in the ways of seduction. Cause that’s what society is about, the man should take initiative, show themselves and then women will give signs to men when to take the next step, so it’s just for guys to just reading that, reading to those signs and take the lead in that.”
While the recipe for gaining such “sign” literacy seems to be a mere matter of technical knowledge and PU practice, confusion and implied feelings of rejection are bound to happen. Jan reinforces this evolutionary take on gender differences, by saying that:
“for girls it’s totally different, they have their own issues, worries, problems of course..but they can go out, stand there, dance, and they get approached. When a guy doesn’t do anything, he doesn’t get anywhere! He has to take action himself. Because, well, girls give signals, that a lot of guys don’t know how to read it, so PU learns that as well. Girls communicate in a different way.”
Guus claims that women seem to have it “easy” when it comes to matters of sexuality in which compared to a man’s hard labour, they “only” have to be attractive:
“generally in courtship [..], the woman decorates herself, puts some garnishing on, make-up and makes herself beautiful, goes to a club and she exists. A woman just has to exist. And the guy has to pull out all the stops, to please her, to get her attraction, so as to, well, get something romantic or sexual out of it.[.]. if you’re a woman and want to get laid, you just have to go to a club and exist. And not be super ugly. If you’re a guy, you have to make a triple twist, transform yourself in Prince Charming”.
In this approach, men are disadvantaged within sexual interactions as these are controlled by women, the “gatekeepers”, whose advantage is seemingly given by their effortless physical appearance. The labour of making seduction happen falls on men’s shoulder. References to such physical beauty “advantage” were given by a few respondents, with no critical references to how reinforcing beauty as a marker and norm of femininity might contribute to women’s objectification.
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Similarly, the popular, essentialist PU theory of the push-pull dynamic (Almog et al, 2015; Schuurmans, 2017) is emphasized in several instances in an effort to simplify and hyperstandardize sexual dynamics so as to make sense of optimal steps to take in the pursuit of sexual conquests. Sven explains that:
“if you look at our ancestors, I really think we’re evolutionary programmed to go after stuff that runs away from us. So if you’re hunting, the deer is running away from you, the rabbit is running away from you and you’re going as fast as you can after it, so you start chasing that, so you start chasing the things that run away from you that you wanna have..and viceversa [...] So if you push a girl away from you, like you go talk to her, then you’re running away from her and her natural response is, oh no, I actually wanna talk to you, you know?”.
Reminiscent of the PU concept of “last minute resistance”, this evolutionary based push-pull dynamic paves the way for men in knowing how to cope with a woman’s “sudden” change of heart in an effort to get her back on “track”. Female desire and self expression as incongruent dimensions of femininity, cementing consent as biological rather than expressed (Denes, 2011) is also reinforced within this essentialist sexual script:
”This is a thing of balance, if you treat the woman as you would treat any other human, you won’t be able to get anything out of it. If you treat the woman as a friend, as a buddy or as a neighbour, or if you care too much about her ideas, you won’t get anything from her. [...] For her to sleep with you, to fall in love with you, you have to have a certain attitude, [..] to have confidence, generally be a bit more dominant [..] if you do this too much, you dehumanize the woman a bit. So you kind of have to get what the proper balance is [..] The problem is, that what women say they want and what they really want doesn’t really match a lot of the times. If the woman says I want a sensitive guy but then she goes and sleep with a guy who’s not, [..] so her saying she wants a nice guy it’s unreliable. Because that’s not what she reacts to.”
Here again, in Guus’s perception, women are attracted to markers of dominance, reinforcing the “alpha fux beta bux” concept behind the binary “nice guys” versus “bad guys”. Women might say they want the “nice guys”, but somehow fall “prey” to the charms of the domineering “bad guys”. The idea of women’s real desire being incongruent with what they express is emphasized, thus the necessity for men to perform dominance. This
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potentially lays the ground for dismissing women’s verbal expressions and agency (Denes, 2011; Almog et al, 2015).
According to Alvin, this push-pull dynamic is even more so handy when you are trying to approach an attractive woman, who’s accustomed to receiving attention and compliments. This requires men to counteract their expectations in order to successfully make women “chase” them:
“your target is gonna be the most pretty girl or the girl you’re most attracted to [..] cause we’re simple creatures, right? So you give a lot of attention to her and your target is hotter, she’ll probably be ok for a little while longer but at some point, cause she is so used to getting validation from guys all the time, she’s gonna start working for your validation. That is the next phase. You don’t just give it to her, she kind of has to be subsconsciously accustomed to the feeling of working for your attention.”
If physical beauty is seen as granting women an effortless, superior “currency” advantage over men in heterosexual interactions, women falling outside of the “physical beauty” spectrum are deemed irrelevant to their seduction practices or interests. As Schuurmans (2017) and Almog et al (2015) stated, manhood needs to be constantly proven through markers such as high number of sexual partners, a high perceived erotic prestige of partners as well as adventurous, intense sexual activities and quick sexual escalation skills. Female beauty plays therefore a big part in granting game practitioners validation of their skills and of their manhood; the bigger the role it plays though, the more anxiety provoking over its perceived power. Attraction is naturally gendered - men are attracted by beauty, women by character – and thus the high investment pursuit of men hunting “female beauty” is rationalized as a given:
“men generally choose their women, at least for sex, visually. If you’re pretty, beautiful and with an interesting body language and you move nicely, good for you. Women, generally, don’t choose men visually or at least to a lesser percentage. I know some guys super ugly but very talkative and funny and interesting as character and they have a tons of success and I know quite some handsome guys, well dressed and well mannered, who don’t have that much success and are in very abusive relationships”
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Within this perceived imbalance of power, a woman’s physical appearance seems to signify a major advantage as it grants them easy access to men – as compared to a man’s struggle of having to work his way through. When explaining about the laborious push-pull dynamic necessary to pickup attractive women, Alvin adds: “young women they usually do pretty well with the guys. You probably have experience with that, it’s not really hard probably.”
4.3 The “poor nice guy” – navigating anxiety and rejection
Becoming the Alpha male participants felt compelled to reproduce and to get skilled at does not leave them unaffected, as previous research on the seduction community has already shown (Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015). Nevertheless, our respondents’ overall alignment to the Alpha male ideal and to an essentialist sexual script brings these to the forefront as undeniable reality that needs to be reproduced, eluding any personal subjectivity. As argued by Philaretou & Allen (2001:304), essentialist sexual scripting creates unrealistic demands of “masculine ethos” which fuels anxiety and inadequacy. As we saw, the SC proposes negative emotion solving by working hard at embodying manhood – thus reinforcing the same unrealistic demands that might be causing it.
Most men reported different levels of anxiety, inadequacy or even feelings of injustice over the “natural” obstacles that they have to overcome in this essentialist view of sexuality and gender that they subscribe to through pickup. In sharing their personal journey with pickup or “game”, participants bring forth a common story of hurt, insecurities and for a few, a mental health history, in what could be called “affectively charged” narratives (Papacharissi, 2014:17) or “affective utterances” (Allan, 2016). Beyond a mere language of hard labour, emphasis was at often times put on the emotional hardship of coping with their lack of success with women, as well as on the later, ongoing hardship of the pickup journey itself. Handling anxiety and rejection is a recurrent theme of struggle that most participants subscribe to, whether declaring to having bettered at it or not.
All stories of our participants recall a pre PU self that was ridden with anxiety, “approach anxiety”, insecurity and lack of self confidence. Alvin explains how he felt moved to get into PU, by identifying himself as the “nice guy” who’s always left behind, underlying the injustice behind the alpha fux beta bux principle:
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“I felt like I needed it. You know, it’s gonna be a sad substory, but I was very shy boy, and I was always duded into a friendzone[..]i’d be a best friend, but never the guy that you’d like. In the mean time, girls I like would be dating with my friends..I was fed up with that. So when it came to this, I felt like, this can bring change, I can only win here.”
“Friendzoned” comes to mark here what seems to be the ultimate, sad fate of the “nice guys” trapped in the “alpha fux beta bux” script: being stuck in a non-sexual dimension with women whose urges keep them charmed by the Alpha figures. Many instances are framed as “sad stories”, whether their personal ones or of their PU friends - similar to Sven’s account:
“I had one friend who also read the book The Game, but that’s like a really sad story, cause he was [..] even when we started way more off than me, and [..] he ended up institutionalized. Yeah exactly, cause he was suffering from social anxiety for real, and exposing himself to that much social pressure he literally became suicidal from it, it’s no joke! So it’s not always fun, there’s like also bad stuff about it.”.
We find here a strong resonance to the rhetoric of the famous book The Game (Strauss, 2005) and how it capitalized by appealing to young, insecure men longing for Strauss’ transformation from an AFC (average frustrated chump) to a PUA. Mentioning mental health and issues surrounding depression over lack of success with women is a recurrent theme for our respondents’ looking back at their emotionally charged PU journey. PU becomes a life-changing motive to give men their sense of power back, of confidence, of control over their life and over their emotions. This shared theme of struggle is a revolving point for our respondents around which all other dimensions are to be explained or understood. By anchoring themselves in an essentialist, immutable framing of sexuality, the theme of overcoming the hardships of sexual nature becomes a very emotionally filled narrative that pinpoints at both motivation of action and justification of membership within the SC. With women being solely attracted to the Alpha figure that they weren’t naturally skilled at, their only hope out of this hurtful reality was to better their seduction skills. The language of self-growth comes in to accentuate their emotional struggle and to deepen the meaning of their involvement within the community. Alvin emphasizes this struggle:
“it’s really a community that aims at helping people grow. Cause the thing is there’s a lot of people that have a bad rap because I can imagine guys just learning how to pick up chicks it’s kinda weird..but then again the people, most people [..] in this
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community, they were guys like me. Sweet ass guys, but just too sweet, they always just missed the boat. You know, they’d always be on the sideline and though they know in their hearts and the girls know it too, you’re best friends, he’s the guy for you. But then again, a girl is more attracted to a bad boy or at least in that part in your life. I was that guy and I feel like a lot of those guys is them so I would say it’s a good thing. They get to grow, they get like me, you know, to get out of their shell, mature a little bit, give less fucks. Whether they sleep with the girl or not is irrelevant, you know, it’s a process of growth [..] And that’s why I’m grateful that I got to do all this”
While most respondents do seem to believe PU is of great help in overcoming insecurities, some seem to be painfully aware of the “double-edged sword” of it: producing the same anxiety they promise to ameliorate (Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015:2). Joris doesn’t refrain himself from admitting to such anxiety and to how some of the more intensively “marketing” oriented messages no longer appeal to him. If most participants aligned with the sexual initiator script, Joris explicitly showed emotional distress towards the SC’s marketing strategy pressuring to embody masculinity. This caused him to distance himself from an instructor he admires, Tim Veninga, the figure behind the Dutch company VersierCoach. He describes the promotional email he received the days before our interview and on which he reflected before our interview:
“there’s 2 types of men, one type goes after the woman he wants to meet, to date, to have sex with, whatever, and the other just don’t and that kind of men deserves to DIE (emphasizes). That kind of men deserves to have his genes pulled out for/from extinction cause like, then you’re weak, and actually that’s how evolution works, the weak ones are left behind. So if you don’t want to buy this, if you don’t want to be with us, well then it’s your problem, you know what kind of men you are...And I thought, that’s so wrong!”
Nevertheless, most respondents aligned with the hegemonic sexual script and rather took any sense of failure upon them. Piet declares to be disappointed over how hard his PU journey was compared to his expectations. His preference to being sexually dominated has caused him a lot of ache in finding a girlfriend, since he feels women are looking for a much more dominating figure. He feels hopeless about this and also ostracized from the otherwise tight friends he has within the community as they would not understand his struggle: “if
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there’s no way to get it out of my system, I think that I’m just screwed. I will never find a stable relationship.” He does later mention he’s considering getting psychological help but his emotional distress and overall feelings of hopelessness remain vivid.
Feelings of hurt or anxiety over approaching women were also related to the perceived imbalance of power in the dating scene. In this sense, women were portrayed as having it “easy”: they only have to look pretty and go out. But more than that, women are portrayed as being deceitful, playing with men and purposefully taking advantage of this high “currency” they own, especially against the “nice guys”. Matthias, 24, thinks that dating today in the Netherlands is not as easy as it was for previous generations, as men find it harder and harder to approach women:
“I think, it’s not easy these days, because there’s girls (who) make fun and say I have a boyfriend when you talk to them, and then it’s not true..so, you have to be confident, you have to catch skills..I think how you look is not important, but you have to get the skills, and what I said, confidence, just get it in, and just have a fun evening, man.”
Similarly, Sven emphasizes the hardship of the PU journey filled with the pain of rejection and of being “played” by women, which is why, he considers, many men might ultimately even give up on learning PU:
“The daily grind of going out and approaching is really harsh. Like you get rejected, you know? [..] most girls are going to reject you and even though they, if you ask about it, they’re yeah, ’I’m super nice’, they’re whole acting like angels and fairytales, and, you know, when you go like in real life into a bar, and you start approaching, guys are gonna mess with you, girls are literally, if they think they can walk over you and mess with you, they are going to do it [..] so the daily, literally the actual stuff of approaching and trying to get laid, that is such a harsh process. Cause people are not gonna be nice.. more people are not gonna be nice to you especially when you start out [..] you’re gonna be this weird creepy freaky guy that’s bumped out of anywhere and wants to have a conversation with you and they’re not gonna be into it and they’re gonna bitch you. Like, in a nice or an unpolite way. And so girls are not gonna respond to your text messages, they’re not gonna show up for dates...they play with you, ‘but yeah but i’m not gonna kiss you’, or like you walk home with her, and (they) say ‘well it’s really nice you set me off here, but I really have to work tomorrow so you know, you cannot come in here’, like literally spend 2
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hours talking with her and then she..cause she knows (emphasizes), like, what you want, and....and then it’s ‘yeah you know, but now I also, you can go your way, bieee!! See yaaa nice to meet you!!’”.
The emotional landscape of rejection, as related to perceived unjust responses from the women they interact with is here vivid, reinforcing the idea of women’s manipulative (“bitchy”) pleasure in playing men around. This manipulative dimension is also implied within the idea of women’s incongruence between what they misleadingly say they want – nice guys, and what they actually naturally want – the Alpha figure.
Asked about how he handles rejection, Piet shares what is a poignant emotional struggle in following coach Tim Veninga’s advice: “his idea is if you want a relationship so bad, then you’re not ready for it. You should develop your own taste, you should work on yourself and you will see you will get less desperate. I’ve been getting a little less desperate, but it’s still not enough.” Pickup becomes the route to working your emotions towards better control over feelings, particularly so the negative feelings such as rejection. Stoicism becomes central to the embodiment of manhood (Schuurmans, 2017), yet the compulsive, laborious preoccupation to embodying masculinity is not to happen without emotional hurdles.
Asked if he feels affected by the recent controversy around the media visibility of PU, Matthias’ account also speaks of the pain of rejection over his approaching practices being misperceived:
“A little bit. Because when somebody gets banned from a station, like a train station, you have to be careful, because when I walk in the train station and I see a really nice girl, maybe I walk up to her, but because somebody is banned from the station, you have to be careful, because they’re looking, the guards they’re maybe looking because of that guy. Because some girl, she doesn’t like it because when some guy walks to her, so you have to be careful because sometimes there are guards in the area. When I see that, maybe they think you gonna ask a really rude question but that is not true, because most of the guys are really nice and just want to have a conversation or just wanna ask you something or just wanna have a drink with you.”
Perceiving one’s actions of approaching women as innocent, nice, polite and wrongly understood by women who reject them was a narrative shared by a few respondents.
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Misperception of a “nice guy” is accompanied by feelings of hurt and frustration. Sven shares a similar story:
“So if you’re treating me unfair, unrespectful whatever, you’re out, you know? I was nice and polite and I approached you in a good way, and if you’re gonna ignore me or reject me or in any type of ways, that’s fine, then I don’t want to talk to you anymore..no harsh feelings but like, you’re out.”
While his phrasing seems to reference to a more honourable self choosing to be cool, “stoic” and utilitarian about relationships as based on mutual interest in each other, his choice of words such as “you’re out” as well as the contrasting, emphasized dimensions between being treated “unfair, unrespectful” versus him having been “nice and polite” showcases a rather visceral self with deeper feelings of hurt over being rejected and misinterpreted. He maintains an ambiguous stand on how he handles rejection by emphasizing a hands-on, honourable approach in which rejections should be taken the cool way: rejections are valuable lessons and a natural part of the game in which mastery comes through practice. An essentialist view of attraction is also emphasized in his story, as rejection can be “traced” down to mechanical facts that ruined the “methodological”, rule-based seduction, while no place is given to subjectivities and female agency:
“I’m not crying about it, omg, I didn’t get laid..but I’m literally analyzing what happened, how did it happen, why did it happen, and then it’s like I said, it’s all for the learning. At a certain point you get off that one specific girl, cause as I said, if you go out a lot, you approach a lot, you know. It sounds really harsh, but it kind of becomes a number game[..] I stop thinking about the girl as she was but I start (to) reanalyze my approach like, what did I do? You know, so it’s, oh, she, obviously she probably rejected me because I was coming from behind, or I was not smiling or you know?”
The more women you approach, the better your skills get and the more you learn how to cope with rejection and to no longer take it that personally. Ultimately, also, better pickup skills will grant PU students a greater spectrum of choice, for which, in a self help lingo, an “abundance thinking” is advised – scarcity thinking is here what pushes men into desperation and clinging unto specific women, which drifts men apart from the compulsory “stoicism” that also marks successful manhood (Schuurmans, 2017). Emotions become therefore deeply embedded within the PU rationale: PU and its extensive practice advisory is what grant men
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the ability to work their negative emotions. Negative emotions of hurt over rejection and lack of success with women must be counteracted with extensive PU practice and through an “abundance” mentality. Abundance nevertheless implies again the reinforcement of masculinity markers such as sexual prowess, leaving the many falling behind unrealistic Alpha standards with an anxiety conundrum: how does one solve negative emotions while striving for unrealistic, anxiety producing standards?
With seduction being seen as a “traceable” path, a mechanism produced on will, feelings of hurt over rejection become difficult to be made sense of and dealt with. Some respondents emphasize that rejections should not be taken personally. Derek says that:
“I don’t understand guys who are like yeah, our date is still on, all fun and nice and everything and the girl goes ‘no sorry, I changed my mind’ and then they go ‘well fuck you too bitch’. And I’m wow, what the fuck... really, I see a lot of those on reddit, I find it also very funny but I also find it so terrible. Poor women, you know, holy shit [..] I’m like, dude, give her a break. If she doesn’t want to be with you, she doesn’t. Get over it, move on, and go on.[..]For me, it’s easy, you treat someone with respect unless they treat you shit, then they can go fuck themselves.”
Willem shares how he felt he was way behind other regular teenagers and how difficult this journey has been for him in the past couple of years:
“I still feel more confident with a bit of alcohol. I still do it...who doesn’t? Anyhow, I’m not a scared shitless ass I was to make the first step...but still in my experience concerning rejection [..] I experienced gorilla punches in my face[..] painful rejections, at first they come, like what I just described.. Afterwards they come like..they still come like a hard punch, from a human being, not from a gorilla. Which still means hard, but by far not as hard as it was.”
His metaphorical choice of the “gorilla punches” speaks of a vivid emotional landscape in which rejection is a visceral struggle for him. Assessing felt downsides from his experience with PU, Willem shares a strong emotional struggle with containing his anger over perceived unfair rejections or male competition:
“Yeah, because I, because I tried to date more girls, the more I tried to date, the more I got into fights[..]with the guys. And there was another thing, if I tried to date.[..]
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after I was nice and first made a good approach, I.. - and she rejects me in a very shitty way, I always became very verbally aggressive towards her.”
4.4 Not MeToo – it’s just the bad apples
After having outlined the two main frameworks members of the SC used to position and frame their membership - a neoliberal, self-entrepreneurship one based on an Alpha male ideal and an emotionally filled framework constructed on the “poor nice guy” dimension - we will now address our findings concerning our last subquestion: How do SC members frame and position themselves on the recent MeToo movement?
During the interviews, the topic was introduced through a direct question hinting at MeToo and the debate it stirred on shifting sexual norms (How do you feel about the recent MeToo movement and its public debate on shifting sexual norms?) but only after first exploring how recent controversies surrounding the SC have affected them as members of the community. Here, specifically, these controversies have mostly revolved around some of the community’s famous instructors being criticised for promoting practices or messages inciting at sexual harassment. Among such, the famous Julien Blanc controversy, who was banned from entering the UK and Australia, as was his partner, Jeffy, both instructors for the widely popular company RSD. Understanding firstly how they felt about and perceive these controversies mainly speaking of sexual harassment enabled us to further explore the topic of MeToo as a more specific, very visible public debate on sexual harassment and sexual practices.
Building up on the binary, emotionally filled metaphor of the nice versus the bad guy, most respondents have safeguarded a safe distance from the image of a possible perpetrator and from the MeToo discussion. This emphasizes the stigma of their membership to what seems to be an already controversial community and identity and the efforts that must be taken to distinguish themselves from it and to maintain an honourable self. In this sense, as theorized by Gotell and Dutton in their research on men’s rights movement’s discourse on sexual assault (2016), this narrative claims and builds to the belief that rapists and ordinary men must be clearly distinguished and sexual violence must be addressed as exceptional/ extreme or even gender neutral. Self expressed support for the cause, while rarely expressed by our respondents, was reduced by them also expressing a complementary, ambivalent
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distancing of self from any connection to the topic of sexual harassment, or by inversely, expressing fear of being wrongly accused of sexual harassment.
For Alvin, it is sad to know PU got a bad rap due to the several public scandals over a few famous pickup instructors’ incitements to sexual harassment. He mainly feels really bad for the members of the community because of how this stigma can affect them:
“they were always the sweetest guys, they were always the underdog, right? And it’s just, I find it mainly sad for them because they’re the real community and the community’s not comprised of douchebags. But it’s the douchebags that draw the attention. It’s like terror and Islam, there’s a couple terrorists and as such there’s a lot of lunatics that blame all Muslims for all that shit which is absolutely wrong and it’s the same thing for this”.
Not only does he resort to the binary nice versus bad guy, but he also reinforces it by referencing an otherwise popular, emotionally triggering, political metaphor of the Muslim stigma. Alvin goes on to frame the MeToo debate by both claiming support and referencing his own struggles with harassment: “I love MeToo. I think it’s a great campaign. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been violated myself. Gays are always on that bootie! It’s not just a female thing, man. I can’t go out to a club and not get a spank on my ass or squeeze. It’s usuall males, sometimes it’s girls.” Portraying sexual harassment as somehow gender neutral is followed by framing MeToo as strictly about men in positions of power, abusing it and not really about pickup. But he does later goes to add:
“on a second thought, some of these pickup gurus do have a lot of power. Cause they have a lot of guys sticking up to them. So if they incite to sexual assault and their things to say leaves things open to interpretation, right? It’s kinda like the passage in the Coran that says you can blow people up and get 37 virgins in heaven, you know? It’s a matter of interpretation because it doesn’t literally say that. So maybe they do hold power. And I find that’s scary”
Power and potential harmful impact would therefore lay in these famous instructors’ choice of phrasing their messages and in leaving room for misinterpretation, rather than in the meaning itself.
A distanciation from what Seal and Ehrhardt(2003:296) would call a “sex as conquest discourse” is visible through the respondents’ claims of not aligning with the Casanova Myth
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(Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015) and its damaging stigma. Matthias explains the downside of being in PU - having to keep it a secret so as to avoid the “player” stigma:
“sometimes, it’s like, they ask a little bit about PU, so I say a little bit, but I don’t give the whole thing, because then they think ah, a professional womanizer or something like that. But that’s not true. You keep it low, because if they say you do PU to a girl, then you are fucked because the girl, they say, aw you are player.”
Asked if MeToo impacts his personal and dating life, Klaus, who is 24 years old, says: “I don’t know how much it’s influenced that, because I do take note and inform myself about things, but I don’t actively try to pursue to be this Casanova so, yeah, I don’t know.” Not only is he distancing himself from what is portrayed here to be a more likely perpetrator figure – the “womanizer”, but also the entire Netherlands from the MeToo debate: “I think it’s just a hobby of mm, white left America, no not necessarily white but left America, [..] it doesn’t really apply to the Netherlands, where we can normally interact with each other.” At the same time, in an ambivalent take, Klaus also frames the MeToo movement as representative of a punitive system, a reductionist policing of otherwise complex social interaction; this reminds us of Gotell & Dutton’s (2016:69) “carceral feminism”, of which we’ll talk in the next subchapter.
Similarly, the Casanova Myth is softened by emphasizing how there’s so much more to pick-up than just picking up women. Alvin says that believing PU is just about getting sex is “a big misconception. It’s really not about sex. It’s a part of it but it’s not about sex. If you get sex out of it, then fine, because we all enjoy sex right? I think the true core of the community does not do this in pursuit of sex, it’s more a, it’s a means for them to grow.” Self growth as narrative becomes a way to make sense of their ambivalence by aligning themselves to something grander that enables escapism from the simple, superficial “womanizer” stigma.
Sven goes on also to say that MeToo is much rather about business settings than bar encounters: “the whole MeToo thing is [..] more with the business world, you know”. Ambivalence marks his shy support for the cause by restraining MeToo’s relevance to the work field and stating it has no effect on him:
“I personally have 0 experience with the Metoo stuff, for me it’s literally business as usual. Did not feel any difference, or...like the only time I heard about MeToo is when
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other people started talking about it [..]...me myself I know nothing about it. And in general, I think [..] it’s a good thing for women to get up for themselves, and not let them be used and that kind of stuff and it’s especially when it’s in the...when there’s a power position from like work relationships that is misused in a wrong way”.
Whether called “bad apples”, “douchebags”, “pricks” or “assholes”, most respondents have emphasized a strong disagreement with the distorted figures that seem to have lost control to or are instrumentalizing PU knowledge or power wrongly; some disagreed with the more specific controversial PUA figures – such as Julien Blanc, while also mentioning that they are not representative for the community mostly comprised of nice guys. It is therefore the “bad apples”, the exceptions, the bad pickup artists those who can be included in the sexual harassment debate. Klaus, who shares an ambivalent framing on MeToo as a punitive, reductionist movement that is not related to him, also describes the controversial PU instructors:
“Those are kind of people who I refer to as bad PUA, probably. People who advocate to be almost sexually harassing to women [..] Those are the people you hear about in the news, but those are a small fraction of the people, who are bad apples in the basket.”
He goes on to say that PU instructors promoting these messages can negatively influence young, inexperienced men and goes on to share he doesn’t believe “being really like aggressive towards girls is a positive way to get them in a productive way. In a healthy way”. Several respondents did speak of the concept of “value giving” as emphasized by some PU instructors: in short, both partners need to benefit from the interaction.
While some outwardly criticized such figures for their controversial public incitements to harassment and mostly for the impact upon the entire community, most of them explained it as being a simple marketing quest for publicity or poor phrasing choices that leave things to misinterpretation. Poor, catchy language used for marketing purposes is not representative for what they truly teach. According to Roger,
“The media attention that I saw back in the days, is that the feminists were against it because guys who practice this, they got results and they got a number, and they were just acting more like assholes. Because arrogant pricks, because they could sleep with
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women. That’s the media attention that I saw. [..] But also, I think that’s why this, the marketing was especially focused on this.”
In contrast to the “arrogant pricks”, Roger brings the self growth dimension, where pursuing PU goes beyond just building a “number”, being what separates most members from the stigmatizing “bad apples”:
“you can see the seduction methods as just picking up a lot of women or as just being personal growth. I used it for that [..]. Cause I started noticing more who I want to be, and how do people look at you and what do you want to be as a person.”
Referencing the Julien Blanc controversy over his sexist comments about Asian women, Joris also speaks of the marketing techniques of the famous gurus:
“that’s just pure, the guy trying to be macho, but here in the Netherlands I think there’s more...because I know those guys, like the kind of guys they are [..] and it’s just like, they wanna help people, but they use hard marketing tools to get them do that.”
Matthias shares his belief in practice and Alpha embodiment as key to achieving dating success yet also warns, in several instances, that while “cockiness” is a requisite for a successful pickup, too much of it can get you in trouble; specifically, it can get you reprimanded for sexual harassment:
“What I would do is just go hard with it, because if you put a lot of time in it you get really good..when you go out like 3 times a week, you get very very good. What I would not do is, I think, get too crazy with it, because you have also your normal life beside it and you have to do that part, and then you can do the other part of your life. Because if you lose yourself in it, I think you go too crazy like when you get slapped in the face at the (train) station or something.”
Going “hard” with it but not going crazy with it makes for a somewhat illogical, if not at least challenging train of thought; is dedicating oneself extensively to something that easily detachable from losing oneself in it? The hardship of maintaining a balance between an Alpha based assertiveness and not falling into the “creep” pile is thus emphasized, as seen in the desk research section. Matthias further positions himself on MeToo in a rather particular,
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“deviant” way by claiming downright lack of interest in such a debate – PU is for him, not for someone else; he doesn’t:
“care about the people that are negative about it, because there are always two sides, you have the negative and the positive side of it. So I don’t see the negative side and I always see the positive side, and all of those people they have their reason about it, but I don’t care about it because it’s for me pickup, and it’s not for you. I don’t have to help you but I have only to help me. Only.”
4.5 MeToo – false allegations and anxiety
In line with men’s rights movements take on rape culture as a feminist created “moral panic” that is supported by widespread false allegations and non scientific claims and statistics (Gotell & Dutton, 2016), a strong concern was expressed over the threat of false allegations and of the power that women have in destroying a “good man’s” reputation. This narrative builds up to the myth of false allegations and constructs the anti-harassment movement as a “carceral feminism” (Gottel & Dutton, 2016:69), aiming at consolidating punitive, disproportionate politics. Yet again, this narrative builds on the previous distanciation from MeToo and its inherent nice guy – bad guy binary by this time inserting outwardly expressed feelings of concern and fear, accentuating the perception of the movement’s hunt for the innocent ones.
Anxiety and fear over such threat was expressed outwardly by half of the participants. Piet, self declared member of an important PU group, is concerned that an innocent misreading of a woman’s “signs” can quickly escalate into a false allegation. He outwardly expresses fear over the exaggerated power given to women by MeToo:
“I don’t know, I have to admit that I don’t know all the details about MeToo and all the stories of course and I tend to be kind of a smart ass so I should try to be careful about how I say this...But I think it’s a shame that the whole story about MeToo, that there’s a lot, when you say MeToo and just post a guy’s name, immediately they think the most horrible shit, and probably it’s true in some cases. But let’s say you’re at a bar and you try to kiss a girl, and the girl doesn’t really like it, but you don’t see it immediately, you’re a bit slow and you don’t see the signs, and you push through, and that could be a very, a very bad situation for everyone, very fucked up, but it’s just a
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mistake. And she would post a thing like that and MeToo and your name behind it, or even falsely, just lie, that could happen as well, and the whole world just believes it immediately. And I think that gives a lot of power to women. Because, you can destroy anybody’s life if you want, if you want you can make up a bunch of lies and just post a bunch of stuff and maybe have a group of friends to join you, because if it’s a couple of girls to want to ruin your life, it’s your word against those three..it’s kind of..you know?? It’s...kind of scary.”
His fear over false allegations started several years ago, when after a highschool party, a girl accused him of having touched her breasts:
“I was drunk, so I’m not entirely sure if it happened or it didn’t happen, but a couple of days later, some friends of mine said that I grabbed her tits, which she didn’t really have, because she was flat chested. So I was like why would do that, she has nothing to grab (laughs).”
The girl being “flat chested” is hardly an argument to serve as defence, pinpointing to an inconsistency reflective of victim blaming – is harassment “justifiable” if the woman is deemed attractive? The incident nevertheless was solved to his benefit, as his friends cut contact with her, despite his initial fears of him being excluded from the group due to her having a much higher popularity.
Another ambivalent, yet emotionally filled framing of MeToo is that of Joris. While claiming the entire debate has no impact on him personally, here serving as an honourable portrayal of self, a visceral self pierces through with him calling the movement a “witch hunt”:
“MeToo it’s not for me, on a personal level, that I feel like I should watch my steps, because I don’t think..I know I don’t judge people if they don’t like it, that kind of stuff. I know when I see, when I go too far. Sometimes I go too far and I usually notice it and if people would call out on me like “I don’t like what you just said”, then I’m like, I’m sorry, that’s how I am. [..]Of course it’s bad that they, those guys abused the power they had in their Hollywood structures and that kind of stuff, but I think that for me and this doesn’t have to do with pickup and dating anymore actually...it just really saddens me that a lot of people have the power to break down one of the world’s
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greatest actors within days and they like to do that. And not just him, but countless others, it’s just like a witch hunt”.
The “witch hunt” metaphor here is a strong case of emotional language and a window into Joris’s emotional landscape. The metaphor emphasizes the extent of the abuse that is being done against the innocent ones and the strong emotions that such abuse entails, building up to the image of a “carceral feminism” with a clear agenda of hurting men. (Gottel & Dutton, 2016:69).
The fear over the perceived power that feminism is lending to women is obvious. Roel, who is currently in a monogamous, committed relationship with the woman he hopes to stay with for the rest of his life, only currently “winging” for close community friends, says that:
“one of the things that I really, strongly react to internally in movies is false accusations. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Silver Linings Playbook [..]the guy wants to talk to [..] Jennifer Lawrence and she didn’t want to talk and then she started screaming at the street like ‘he’s harassing me!!’ and stuff like that. [...]that’s like, [...] a little child who wants to get his way and then says ‘if you don’t give me what I want, I say you touched me’ or something like that. In that kind of sense, I’m personally a bit scared by the whole MeToo thing, yeah, just one person has to just interpret something you did wrongly and...accuse you and it becomes a very, very big thing.”
His cultural metaphor and his comparison of women to children throwing tantrums says not only that women are being given power, but that they are likely to manipulate it in an irrational, entitled way. The portraying of women as irrational, hysterical or overwhelmed by their emotions was a long used mean to naturalize gender inequality and posit women as biologically inferior to men and to their reasoning abilities (Lutz, 1998; Hochschild, 1983). This doesn’t fall short from the community’s main references to masculinity as highly rational, technical and methodological, as qualities that can influence a woman’s predominantly emotional functioning.
Ambivalent attitudes showcased both expressed support for the cause and feeling fear over the perceived conflated power of the MeToo hashtag. Piet, while also strongly elaborating on the myth of false allegations, considers the topic to be a “quite difficult
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subject. On the one hand, I kind of feel attacked as a man by hearing those stories, at the same time it’s obviously horrible if you get raped or (harassed)”.
Derek expressed the strongest support for MeToo yet had nevertheless also expressed strong feelings of fear of ever being falsely accused, the more so as he works with young people and teenagers. He initially declares feeling “hopeless” over the unfair short sentence given in a recent sexual abuse case (Alvarez, 2018) which brought about intense protests in support of the victim and in call of a rape sentence for the abusers. Nevertheless, he brings in the conversation the symbolism of the “good” man, referencing back to the wider narrative of the poor nice guy and his being misinterpreted:
“I, also I have to say that, for us, good men, it’s also very difficult. Because then, if we touch a girl, we don’t do it with those intentions. In the sense, of you know what i mean? But they can very quickly regard it as that [..]because, if a man who gets charged for molesting a woman, even if he didn’t do it, that’s still something that can harm him for the rest of his life. Because there are police records.”
His ambivalence showcases again a visceral self in which his subscription to the “nice guy” metaphor emphasizes the emotionally-filled perceived injustice behind anti-sexual harassment movements. Constructing MeToo as a policing, punitive system on a “hunt” for innocents inserts at its core the popular narrative of miscommunication. According to Ehrlich (1998:149), this “deficiency model of miscommunication” is a discursive practice successfully enabling defendants with sexual assault charges to represent and defend themselves as innocent.
Klaus expressed a more reserved opinion by saying MeToo is much rather of an American issue but also an overall distorted, misperceived one: “I don’t know if it’s that big of a problem in the way it’s presented. I mean, there’s, there sure are things that could be better, but I’m not sure is this big”. Klaus believes that “MeToo gets a lot of things wrong, because all this PU and harassing is being thrown in one heap”; he constructs the movement as a rather reductionist, policing one, that cannot fully grasp the complexities of human interaction and he believes that “it isn’t hard for people to grasp but it’s really stupid to set, like define bounda (ries), rules to apply to all situations. I think 99% of people are smart enough to know when something is broken.”
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Three respondents have not only emphasized MeToo misinterprets PU as harassment, but even directly framed PU as a great tool against harassment. Other respondents have also indirectly expressed how pickup is the way to better sexual interactions, by gaining reaction skills as well as “signs reading” skills. For Klaus, PU represents “the whole game of like reacting to how someone’s reacting to you and try to calibrate to that and not exceed someone’s comfort zone”. Jan, a dedicated student of pickup as well as an informal teacher of other members, clarifies how while PU can be perceived as harassive, it’s actually the opposite:
“There are two creepy things: a lot of people say it’s creepy to learn PU, ah? Because of this negative thing ‘yeah you manipulate women’. But he (PU instructor Owen Cook) says there’s one thing that’s even creepier than learning PU and that is NOT learning PU!”
He goes on to say that MeToo:
“it’s a good thing, that abuse and offense.. that it’s called out. But I think... a lot of things which you learn through PU, it should be mandatory in schools, and then a lot of MeToo things won’t happen. Because people then actually learn how to interact and read each other’s signs and all that stuff.”
He maintains a strongly ambivalent position, as he also mentions the overinflated power women have and some even enjoy: “some women use it as a tool to get attention. So how fucked up is that huh?! That they destroy reputations and careers or...family lives of people, just to get some attention.”
Guus also emphasizes how mastering pickup is the key to overall lower levels of sexual harassment as it also decreases frustration and increases rates of sexual success:
“I think if more guys would understand how women truly work and how relationships men-women truly work and how to make women want sex in a relationship and the interaction they want, the world would be a better place. Women would be harassed less...if you’re not sexually frustrated then you don’t need to harass women. If you can pickup every woman, if you have big chances to pickup the women you want, generally, you don’t fixate on a specific woman or a specific relationship and you can accept rejection”.
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Handling rejection becomes a main turning point that manhood needs to learn to conquer – here, with the proper tools and guidance of pickup. Both Jan and Guus make references to the Incel movement as representative of sexual frustration improperly managed (i.e., men who don’t learn pickup) and thus becomes an overpowering menace to them and those around. The “impetus to go out and fuck” (RSDJeffy, 2017) is here inscribed as overruling, inescapable natural drive that demands an adequate outlet: success with women. These accounts reflect the reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity as nature. Not only is anxiety and rejection hardship a source of misery for men and potentially for women around but its relief is defined as conditional on obtaining sexual success as main token of masculinity; all while the resource consuming push towards the achievement of highly performative standards of manhood sets many members up for anxiety and ambivalence (Schuurmans, 2017; Schuurmans & Monaghan, 2015).
Chapter 5: Conclusion
The findings reflect an ambivalent use of both a neoliberal, self-entrepreneurial framework to position their involvement in pickup, as well as of an emotionally stirring, “victim power” one, all in a quest to navigate PU membership internal contradictions and incoherence (Pugh, 2013). This comes to show the contradictions on alpha versus beta masculinity withheld within the SC - despite its compulsive focus on alpha embodiment, in congruence with the wider MRA rhetoric (Ging, 2017; Coston & Kimmel, 2013). This demonstrates Connell and Messerschmidt’s theory of hybrid masculinity (2005). This hybridity, the self positioning as potential victims of women’s perceived disproportionate power, of feminism and of political correctness enables members of the SC to strategically distance themselves from hegemonic masculinity, while nevertheless reinforcing traditional gender norms and existing structures of inequality and power (Bridges & Pascoe 2014); this “both repudiates and reifies elements of hegemonic masculinity” (Massanari, 2015:332).
The intertwining of these two frameworks is relevant to their ambivalent positioning on MeToo as well. Most respondents have kept a safe distance from MeToo by stating it to be a matter of concern only for the few those who actually abuse, building therefore to the myth of the grotesque, the extreme figure of the rapist in a polarity of “goodness” versus “badness”. Half of them have expressed strong feelings of fear over the threat of sexual
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allegations and perceived overinflated power MeToo grants women. Support for the cause against sexual harassment was rather modest or ambiguous and personal accountability in terms of the MeToo conversation having inspired them to reflect on potential personal contributions to the issue was not referenced. Overall, men’s framings of issues of sexuality and of Metoo reflected a wider anti feminist rhetoric being employed by the men’s rights movement, in which sexual harassers and ordinary men must be clearly distinguished and sexual violence must be addressed as gender neutral (Gotell & Dutton, 2016); rape culture is a feminist created “moral panic” supported by widespread false allegations and distorted claims and statistics (Gotell & Dutton, 2016:66). The perception of MeToo as a constructed, conflated, feminist “moral panic” that gives women disproportionate punitive power towards the innocent ones is for our respondents just an addition to the wider, already existing anxiety and pressure over performing and embodying the hegemonic take of masculinity, as researched by Schuurmans (2017). While respondents have mostly framed the MeToo movement in an ambivalent way, the overall emotional language and references used pinpoints to the cultural incoherence that inhabit the SC and to its members’ quest to solve such incoherence (Pugh, 2013). This ambivalence is reflected in them alternating between a self-entrepreneurial, self-composed, domineering logic and an emotionally stirring, anxiety infused framework.
This complicates and extends previous research on the SC. While we agree with O’Neill’s (2015) neoliberal framing of the SC, the study doesn’t address the emotional dimensions of their experience. Schuurmans’s (2017) study puts forward important findings on the emotional anguish and anxiety that PU members have to navigate through, while upheld to the pressure to perform an (inescapable) hegemonic Casanova ideal. Our findings did reflect Schuurman &Monaghan’s (2015), Schuurmans’ (2017) argument and the overall emotionally filled cultural incoherence that members of the SC inhabit but also extended this previous research by relating their emotional landscapes to a wider, structural inequality as brought forward by the MeToo dimension. We emphasized therefore the necessity of an effort to understanding how PUA members frame and position themselves on the emotionally triggering sexual harassment issue, as inter-subjective frameworks are routinary contributors to cultural processes of inequality (Lamont et al, 2014).
The resort to male victimization in issues of sexuality and sexual violence (Gotell, Dutton, 2016; Ging, 2017) as well as the overall charged emotional narratives come therefore as counterbalance to the strong self-entrepreneurship logic with its essentialist hegemonic
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masculinity that our respondents used to “filter” both the world around (specifically, women) and within them (their emotions) - all in order to potentially justify controversial sexual practices, to safeguard membership identity and their ethical personas (Hanna, 2014) and to maintain an external hegemony (Demetriou, 2001; Ging, 2017). We argue nevertheless that it is the very nature of their alignment with PU, as both motivation and sense-making frame that raises the imperative to solve negative emotions externally all the while personal accountability is set aside. The closed, methodological design of the SC’s essentialist script leaves no room for subjectivities (Denes, 2011; Almog et al, 2015) while concomitantly fuelling anxieties over the imposed “unrealistically high standard of male sexual performance” (Philaretou & Allen, 2001:303). This procedural schemata of seduction doesn’t only elude female agency (Denes, 2011; Almog et al, 2015) but also effective means for emotional management, as negative emotions (e.g., rejection) are to be solved with the very means that seem to fuel it. Sexual success with women is reinforced as marker of hegemonic masculinity, as “means to do gender, to signal a successful masculine identity” (Schuurmans, 2017:82); the self growth narrative enables alignment to something grander and escapism from the controversial “womanizer” stigma as well as from the cultural incoherence behind their resource consuming involvement in PU. Practice and “ascetic labour” (Schuurmans, 2017; Hendricks, 2012) as key to the embodiment of the Alpha ideal but also key to solving rejection hurts brings an anxiety conundrum in which failure to rise up to the promised sexual success leaves members to have to deal with and make sense of negative emotions in other ways. It is within this stirring, emotional landscape where the imperative of the SC’s essentialism comes to reinforce inequality (Philaretou & Allen, 301).
Several points are important to be made as to the limitations of our research and its implications for further research on the topic. While qualitative, in-depth interviews speak of a higher internal validity, several limitations on validity still need to be considered. Here, specifically, the cultural, gender differences and different personal backgrounds of the interviewer/interviewee have impacted the interaction and the power dynamics during the interviews and thus possibly the information collected (Tang, 2002). Firstly, a communication barrier was given by the imposed fluency in English, as I am not Dutch speaking. Participants having to be fluent in English brought numeric restrictions to our sampling as well as possibly contributed to our respondents having at times to consciously “reach” for their words during our interviews, thus potentially impacting validity and the nature of the collected information. Secondly, the interviewee-interviewer interaction was
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marked by the salience of our different genders but also by the salience of my being a “stranger” to pickup and to their inner worldview of seduction: in this sense, while some expressed eagerness to share their story to a stranger, some were more reluctant and not sure how to perceive and relate to my “otherness”.
Further limitations were given by the snowball sampling which while it has enabled us to navigate a sensitive, time restricted access to the field and an easier rapport with the participants, it has also possibly gave us access to a particular “profile” of respondents, thus influencing the nature of the information we accessed and ultimately its generalisability. The sensitive nature of the interviews on very personal experiences and on an already controversial topic could have moved respondents into participating or recommending friends on the criteria of being “fit” or open to such sensitive subjects; or even interested in the rather salient experience of being interviewed by a young female researcher. Also, the sensitive topic and the rather emotionally charged personal experiences of the respondents have conditioned and restricted the “spectrum” of phrasing choices in addressing sensitive questions; specifically, sensitive topics related to controversy or to MeToo had to be addressed in rather few questions or references so as to avoid producing emotional discomfort, which possibly left thoughts or ideas unspoken.
In this sense, a more generous timeframe for future research could provide better access to the field and to a wider, more representative sample of participants. Furthermore, stronger consideration for the sensitive topic would translate into investing more time into building rapport as key aspect for tapping into these very personal issues and for richness of insight – for example, via ethnographic research accompanying participants in their seduction quests. As this research aimed at understanding how our participants’ emotional landscapes and cultural incoherence speak of wider structural issues of inequality, a future broadening of this study could concern researching into actual pickup praxis and its real life negotiation of sexuality within members’ interactions with the women they try to seduce. Last but certainly not least, a necessary extension of the research of the SC must include women’s perspective: gender biases could be solved by researching women’s positioning and experiences with pickup, as practitioners themselves or as indirectly involved in pickup specific negotiations of sexuality with male practitioners.
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Appendix
Appendix 1
Figure 1: Not all men are like that
@watchesfriends, 4th June 2017, Twitter, Retrieved from https://twitter.com/watchesfriends/status/871414407003287552
Appendix 2: Topic List Semi-structured Interviews
1. Descriptive experience with pickup:
How did you get involved with PU?
When did you start? Why?
How were/are you involved with PU right now? Offline, online?
Do you go out and practice the skills you learn?
Do you interact with other men from the community? How?
2. Assessment of their experience with pickup:
If you would look back at your experience with PU, how would you feel about it?
What benefits did you get out of your entire experience with PU?
What did you learn?
How did it help you accomplish your goals?
What downfalls did you experience with PU?
What negative outcomes came out of your experience?
What felt like it didn’t work well for you? What didn’t you like out of PU?
3. Media controversies:
How do you feel about the recent media controversies on PUA?
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How do these controversies impact your life as a member of the PU community?
Are you open about sharing your involvement with pickup with others – friends, sexual/romantic partners etc?
4. MeToo as public debate on shifting sexual norms:
How do you feel about the MeToo movement and the conversation it brought about sexuality and changing norms of sexuality?
How do you feel this movement impacts your life, your sexuality and your dating life?
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