Pickup Artistry as a Sociocultural Formation

57 Pages·2012·0.4 MB·English

by  Tõnis Jürgens

TALLINNA ÜLIKOOLI
EESTI HUMANITAARINSTITUUT
KULTUURITEADUS
Tõnis Jürgens
Pickup Artistry as a Sociocultural Formation
Bakalaureusetöö
Juhendaja: Triinu Mets
Tallinn 2012
Abstract
The “seduction community” is a collective of men connected mainly via the internet, and
in their common ambition – bettering themselves at the seduction of women. There are
dozens of official “schools” or “companies” that teach various seduction methods for
money; each represented by a self-affirmed guru, whose adherants include any number of
the tens of thousands of seduction artists that mingle in the Community.
While outside opinion of this sociocultural phenomenon is prone to disbelief and reproach,
those within the Community share the ideology that their practices aren't simply about
bedding women, but about personal development, about becoming a “better person”.
Not all members of this virtual fraternity associate their practices with pickup artistry;
some deal, instead, with neuro linguistic programming, or speed hypnosis, while others
claim to teach their clientele holistic lifestyle development. Still, the majority of the
seduction community adheres to “pickup”, which, as an element of the seduction
discourse, can also entail the aforementioned practices. In this study, I will analyze, and
give an overview of “structured game” – a method of pickup artistry made globally famous
by Neil Strauss' autobiographical book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of
Pickup Artists (2005). To this end, I will utilize the theoretical concepts of “compulsive
heterosexuality”, “performative gender practices”, “the heterosexual matrix”, “the
hegemony of men”, and “erotic capital”.
I argue that pickup artistry, as a sociocultural formation, was effected by the integration of
the excessively commercialized and politicized ethos of sexual liberalism, and the
expansion of the self-help market, concurrent with the growth of the American middle-
class.
To relate pickup artistry to concrete aspects of the modern courting culture in America, I
will compare practices of pickup artistry to those of “the hookup culture”, as depicted by
Michael Kimmel in Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (2008).
Table of Contents
Abstract..................................................................................................................................2
An autoethnographic introduction..........................................................................................4
1. Methodology......................................................................................................................8
1.1 Hypothesis...................................................................................................................9
1.2 Compulsive heterosexuality, gender performativity, and the heterosexual matrix....10
1.3 Hegemonic masculinity, and the hegemony of men..................................................13
1.4 Erotic capital..............................................................................................................16
1.5 Structured game – applying the methods..................................................................18
2. The seduction community................................................................................................22
2.1 The propagation of Sex..............................................................................................22
2.2 The expansion of the self-help industry.....................................................................26
2.3 The internet-based Community.................................................................................28
2.4 Media attention..........................................................................................................30
2.5 Inner-community homosociality................................................................................34
3. Average frustrated chumps...............................................................................................38
3.1 “Hookup” and “pickup”: a comparative analysis of modern courting practices.......40
Summary..............................................................................................................................49
Elukutseliste võrgutajate praktikad kui kultuurisüsteem – kokkuvõte.................................51
Bibliography.........................................................................................................................53
2
An autoethnographic introduction
“This should be illegal! 3 questions that... TURN HER ON! Find out how:
click here” – web banner for Pandora's Box, a “one minute mind reading”
technique
Clicking the banner led me to a webpage1 where I was assured that the system wasn't in
any way a hoax or a gimmick: “It's cutting-edge psychology combined with real-world
application,” claimed the anonymous author of the text. “I was sick and tired of seeing rich
or good looking guys get all the girls... and nothing I tried or found online ever worked. I
learned 'the hard way' why most 'systems' for meeting and attracting women don't work!”
An introductory video to Pandora's Box began playing. The voice-over of a younger man –
a student of this method who later introduces himself as Benjamin Kennedy Jr. – stated that
he was not good-looking, rich, powerful or naturally good with women, but used a certain
psychological method developed by a professional seducer with the assumed name of Vin
DiCarlo. This system, Benjamin claimed, now allowed him to successfully approach
women without the fear of being rejected, and it could be taught to anybody interested.
This was my first contact with the online seduction community.
I was sceptical. It seemed like pseudo-psychology, like another dubious product one can
stuble across on the internet. The marketing effort put into it – the emphasis on the fact that
it “actually works!”, the claim that a Harvard graduate recommended it, or that scientists in
general had something to do with it – was enough to initially make me extremely sceptical,
and then, however, borderline curious. I was intrigued as to how this “Vin DiCarlo” could
convince me that his method had any other function besides angling money from
unsuspecting loners.
So I downloaded and read the introductory “strategy guide”, A Man's Guide to the Female
Mind (DiCarlo 2011), which explained the basic theory of Pandora's Box method. The
system categorizes women into eight types depending on her thoughts about sexual
1 “Open her box” – one of the internet marketing outlets of Pandora's Box: http://openherbox.com/xb/?
hop=evevera
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behavior, relationships and self-management. The approaching man, having in mind three
more or less implicitly asked questions, tries to find out a particular woman's “type” and by
knowing it, the aspiring seducer can then make subtle changes to his approach to have the
“best results” with the woman he's interested in.
With these three questions2 in mind, I thought about women in my social circle, friends and
acquaintances, and tried to apply this method of stratification to see if it actually made any
sense. It's an uncomfortable and difficult errand, as placing people in these sorts of rigid
categories of identification tends to be. Pandora's Box is basically a simplified
demystification of normative gender behaviour expected of Western women – at least these
were my thoughts at the time, albeit much less clearly defined – but some of it also seemed
to make sense; or, at least, to kindle further curiosity.
I confessed to a friend, another young man, about this strange discovery of mine and he
told me he'd heard about something like this before; a book recommendation from a friend
of his, who had a reputation for being quite a “ladies' man”. Although I was reluctant to
admit it, I felt the initial burning scepticism I had for any kind of self-help literature and
the likes, slightly fade. If somebody like that – somebody who, in my mind, knew how to
socialize with women much better than I did – had taken an interest in these things as well,
I figured I was on to something. Had he actually studied one, or more, of these seduction
systems? Were they truly of any help? How did they work?
I figured that whatever results this personal research would eventually yield, I'd still come
out the winner: were I to disprove the effectiveness of these seduction systems, I'd simply
prove it valid to have severe doubts in suspicious self-help methods, but were they to
actually turn out useful, I'd be richer in knowledge. Even though I understood that
Benjamin Kennedy's monologue on being an average, romantically unsuccessful guy was a
marketing trick, an effort to have me relate to this anonymous voice in cyberspace, the idea
of an intelligibly outlined routine to decypher the mystified workings of Woman's mind –
as I'd thus far come to think of it – was appealing.
2 The questions are following: 1) is she a Tester or an Investor? – does she date several men searching for
the right one, or does she invest her time in trying to change one man to be perfect?; 2) is she a Denier or
a Justifier? – does she suppress her ideas about sex, thus making it for men to approach her sexually, or
does she see sex as less significant, and often justifies it?; 3) is she a Realist or an Idealist? – is she
realistic in her need to be self-sufficient and career focused, or does she maintain an ideal image of her
future husband and children, and hopes to achieve this goal in a more passive manner?
4
As such, interested to find out more about these methods, and about the men who claimed
to apply them without embarrassment and, indeed, with success, and about this odd sub-
genre of self-help in general, I searched the internet for information about this book my
friend's friend recommended:
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005) is Neil Strauss'
autobiographical field study on the world of pickup artists, a book that's spawned harsh
criticisms, and what could be considered a cult following (Lin 2012). Strauss begins
researching pickup artistry not only out of journalistic interest, but personal need, and in
time becomes, under the tutelage of Erik James Horvat-Markovic – better known by his
stage name “Mystery” – a renowned master pickup artist himself: “Style”.
Before all this, however; before creating his “lady killer” alter-ego, Strauss starts off from
humble beginnings like the majority of the seduction community; as Benjamin Kennedy Jr.
said he had: not good-looking, rich or famous. Strauss describes himself as an average-
looking man living in Los Angeles who feels intimidated by women, and inadequate in
comparison with men who don't. To exemplify these men, he writes about a friend of a
friend, Dustin, who, with his natural3 charm and “animal instinct”, seems to work fluently
at seduction. Strauss' feeling of inadequacy inhibits his personal evolution, but unable to
learn from Dustin, and overcome his difficulties at socializing with women, Strauss simply
accepts his failures and Dustin's successes as an expression of an inevitable difference in
personalities. That is, until he comes across something that he considers to be life-
changing:
“What I discovered was an entire community filled with Dustins – men who
claimed to have found the combination to unlock a woman's heart and legs –
along with thousands of other like myself, trying to learn these secrets. The
difference was that these men had broken down their methods to a specific
set of rules that anybody could apply. And each self-proclaimed pickup
artist had his own set of rules.” (Strauss 2005: 11)
Strauss' following story is easy to relate to. It evokes empathy through which seems to be
an honest depiction of an unconfident and self-conscious man half-sceptically grasping at a
chance to improve himself. The Game, albeit clearly written foremost to sell books and
entertain people, appears to give a fairly comprehensive overview of this sociocultural
3 Among pickup artists, a “natural” is considered to be a man who is naturally good with women, without
prior knowledge of the workings of the Community.
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phenomenon. In the current thesis, I aim to I relate my own, Strauss', the friend of a
friend's – who recommended the book – and presumably many other men's discovery of
the seduction community, and get acquainted with its workings.
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1. Methodology
In studying pickup artistry as a sociocultural formation, I will try to answer the following
questions: how and why has the seduction community come into existence? Who are its
members? What do their various practices entail? How do they relate to the normative
practices of modern courtship in America?
At this point, it serves to briefly distinguish the somewhat ambiguous difference between
the terms “seduction community” and “pickup artistry”: the seduction community is a
sociocultural formation of men, who're connected globally via the internet, and in their
common ambition – learning, with varying interests and approaches, the seduction of
women. There are dozens of “schools” or “companies” that teach different seduction
methods for money, and tens of thousands of aspiring seduction artists; many of whom
share the ideology that their practices are not simply about bedding women, but about
personal development, about becoming “a better person”.
“Pickup”, as a term, has a longer history: at the beginning of the twentieth century, a
“pickup” was, for a white middle-class male of higher college status, a (working-class) girl
turned sexual object, with whom, after having wooed her (with his status), the man pushed
“as far as he could” (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988: 263). While this overtly seems to be the
goal of the majority of the seduction community's members, there are yet some who make
a distinction between themselves and “pickup artists” (see chapter 2.5). In this study,
“pickup artistry” will define a collection of practices shared by a certain (majority) group
of men within the seduction community, who mainly utilize the methods of “structured
game”4 in approaching women; as made globally famous by Neil Strauss' The Game
(2005), and the reality show The Pickup Artist (VH1 2007-2008), hosted by Mystery.
I argue that the seduction community, and pickup artistry as a subsidiary technique, were
begot in the integration of two concurring processes of the twentieth century: 1) the ethos
of twentieth century sexual liberalism (D'Emilio, Freedman 1988), as affected by
developments in the discourse on sexuality during the nineteenth century (Foucault 1990);
4 Focusing on the teaching process, routines, and techniques of seduction, “structured game” is an elaborate
system of (more or less) verbose, and intelligible social manouvers. Mystery is its prime advocate.
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2) the booming of the self-help industry during the 1970s (McGee 2005), influenced by the
ever-expanding market for (auto)biographical self-improvement guidebooks (Sassoon
2008). My claim is that the ethos of sexual liberalism effected, in many heterosexual
American men, a feeling of masculine inadequacy. In attempting to alleviate their
frustration, these men turned to the seduction community, seeking aid in an according form
of self-development – pickup artistry.
In trying to give an overview of the Community, this study will mainly use as source
materials Neil Strauss' autobiographical book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of
Pickup Artists (2005), the reality show The Pickup Artist (VH1 2007-2008), the webpage
PUA Lingo5 (2012), and various other internet sources. More specifically, I will focus on
aspects of seduction guru Mystery's techniques to exemplify the common practices of
pickup artists who utilize “structured game” as their method of seduction.
In addition to giving a brief historic-analytic overview of the seduction community, and
how pickup artistry as a sociocultural phenomenon has formed, I will analyze the latter
with the theoretical concepts of “compulsive heterosexuality” (Pascoe 2007), “the
heterosexual matrix” (Butler 1990), “performative gender practices” (ibid.), “hegemonic
masculinity” (Connell 1987, 1995; Connell, Messerschmidt 2005; Demetriou 2001;
Donaldson 1993), “the hegemony of men” (Hearn 2004), “erotic-”, or “sexual capital”
(Green 2008; Gonzales, Rolinson 2005; Hakim 2010; Martin, George 2006), and Kimmel's
(2008) reports of “the hookup culture”.
1.1 Hypothesis
As a result of various sexual liberation movements of the twentieth century, the
economically, politically, and symbolically charged value of one's sexuality, and that of
sex, ascended. Because of this, it would seem, a failure at realizing one's potential for this
newfound sexual freedom – a deficiency in succeeding at the modern courting practices of
the “hookup culture” (Kimmel 2008) – created in many men a feeling of masculine
inadequacy. The seduction community terms these men as “average frustrated chumps”, or
AFCs (Strauss 2005: 10); and to PUAs, (abbreviation of Pick-Up Artist) they represent the
5 The pickup artists' online encyclopedia, PUA Lingo: http://www.pualingo.com/, maintained mostly by
Vince Lin, a.k.a. AlphaWolf, and by “Casual”. I'll be citing Lin as the author.
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majority of typical modern males with socially conditioned ideas of the workings of the
attraction process (Lin 2012). With the help of the seduction community, professional
pickup artists claim to have evolved beyond these obsolete courting practices, no longer
feel as victimized by the latter, and are able to pass their knowledge on to those desperate
enough and willing to pay.
My claim is that behind this ideology of helping their former AFC counterparts, pickup
artists do, in fact, understand the workings of today's courting rituals, but instead of
attempting to rectify this somewhat flawed machinery of sociocultural practices, many of
them simply use it, instead, to earn profit in the context of helping others at self-
development. There are, indeed, men who, after their encounter with practices of pickup
artistry, go on to live as more confident persons, with increased “erotic capital”, and able to
make themselves and their future romantic partners happy (Strauss 2005: 168-169, 430-
432); but a great many stay on to teach others, as self-affirmed seduction gurus in a field of
competition for the accumulation of not only economic capital (as exchanged for erotic
capital; see chapter 1.4), but, in a sense, for the approval of their peers. As such, pickup
artists – especially those that one could consider “social robots” (Lin 2012; Rifkind;
Spencer; Strauss 2005) – are perpetuating patterns of compulsive heterosexuality (chapter
1.2), enforcing the heterosexual matrix (ibid.), and propagating practices of the hegemony
of men (chapter 1.3).
Before giving an overview of the origins and history of the seduction community, as
influenced by the past century's politicization and commercialization of sexuality, and then
applying the above-mentioned theoretical concepts to the analysis of this overview to
provide a more concrete case study of the practices of pickup artistry, it serves to briefly
elaborate on these theoretical concepts, and why I'm using them.
1.2 Compulsive heterosexuality, gender performativity, and the
heterosexual matrix
In her book Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, C.J. Pascoe
(2007) writes about eighteen months of fieldwork conducted among the students of
Columbia River High School, as she studied their practices of sexuality and gender
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