Lost Boys E-Book

James Bloodworth

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 365

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

**You've seen the hit Netflix drama, Adolescence. Now read the book that explains it.** 'So compelling' Financial Times 'Remarkable' Sunday Times 'Grimly fascinating' Pandora Sykes 'Sobering' Guardian 'Brave, clear and necessary' Observer 'The one book that everyone should read this summer' Prospect An astonishing undercover investigation into the paranoid and misogynistic subcultures of the manosphere, by the Orwell Prize-longlisted author of Hired. Rarely has there seemed a more confusing time to be a man. This uncertainty has spawned an array of bizarre and harmful underground subcultures, collectively known as the 'manosphere', as men search for new forms of belonging. In Lost Boys, acclaimed journalist James Bloodworth delves into these worlds and asks: what does their emergence say about Western society? Why are so many men susceptible to the sinister beliefs these groups promote? And what can we do about their pernicious encroachment upon our social and political spheres? Along the way, he enlists in a bootcamp for 'alpha males', dissects cultural figures including Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and accompanies modern day Hugh Hefners as they broadcast their jet-set lifestyles to millions of followers. Combining compulsive memoir with powerful reporting, Lost Boys is an essential guide to the contradictions in contemporary masculinity.

Leseprobe

James Bloodworth’s work has appeared in The Times, New York Review of Books, Guardian, Prospect and elsewhere. He is also the author of The Myth of Meritocracy and Hired: Six Months in Low-Wage Britain.

Some names and identifying details have been changed in order to protect the privacy of those profiled in the book.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © James Bloodworth, 2025

The moral right of James Bloodworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. Th e publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 979 0

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 980 6

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For Grandma (1929–2022)

The Manosphere [man–uh–sfeer]: a loosely affiliatednetwork of masculinist websites, blogs and online forums.1

‘Only by being terrible do they avoid being comic.’C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

CONTENTS

Part One: The Blue Pill

1 Body Count

2 Return of the Brute

3 Angry Men on the Internet

4 The 10 Commandments of Game

Part Two: The Red Pill

5 Origins of the Red Pill

6 Make Men Great Again

7 ‘War is Coming’: The Story of Lyndon McLeod

8 Waiting for Caesar

9 Interlude

Part Three: The Black Pill

10 Men of Action

11 Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks

12 Surplus Men

13 Top G

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

PART 1

The Blue Pill

‘As social life becomes more and more warlike and barbaric, personal relations, which ostensibly provide relief from these conditions, take on the character of combat.’

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 1979

1

BODY COUNT

Leicester Square, London, March 2006

‘What’s your body count?’

‘Two,’ replies a diminutive man who has recently introduced himself as Dan. He has a gaunt and ghoulish look and his bony shoulders sag down and inwards as if he wants to shield his solar plexus from the outside world. His voice is barely audible above the hum and clatter of the coffee shop.

‘Louder,’ says the instructor with an imperious gesture of the hand. There are four of us sitting round the coffee-stained table. The two men either side of me are wide-eyed and alert. My own hands feel hot and clammy. There is a sense of trepidation among our little group as the instructor takes turns barking the question at each of us. When he reaches me his eyes narrow; he is looking for signs of low status, categorising me based on the thousands of clients who have come before. And then the question:

‘What’s your body count?’

‘One,’ I reply before surreptitiously scanning the faces of the other men for signs of laughter – a self-conscious tick I’ve internalised over the years.

This is the first time I’ve been asked for my ‘body count’. I briefly wonder if I have inadvertently walked into a serial killers’ meet-up. And yet this is the agreed rendezvous point: Starbucks, Leicester Square, 7 p.m.

The men sitting next to me don’t look like serial killers, if there is a ‘look’. Adam is in his mid-twenties and has high cheekbones, an expensive-looking tan and a carefully coiffured chestnut bouffant that bounces when he talks. He has on a light-blue, button-up shirt and his cloying aftershave mixes incongruously with the smell of cappuccino. He has a job in finance, which is precisely where you’d place him if you were to take a guess.

Sitting next to Adam is Bruce, a stocky white South African with brown curls cropped neatly into a short back and sides. Bruce is also in his mid-twenties and is smartly dressed in a sleeveless puffer jacket and stone-coloured chinos. Though a little on the short side, Bruce is conventionally good-looking. He works in sales and peppers stories of his dating exploits with industry patter. A woman’s phone number is ‘put through the funnel’ before he ‘handles her objections’. If things go well he ‘closes the deal’. He says he hopes this weekend will be a ‘game changer’ for his dating life.

Adam and Bruce boast of double figure ‘body counts’. Dan and I look on deferentially as they reel off a succession of seedy anecdotes. Both men have always been good with ‘girls’.1 But as far as they see it you can always get better.

According to the seduction community’s template of the world, a woman’s most important trait is her physical beauty, which can be rated on a scale from one to ten. When ‘Tux’ asks Adam and Bruce what their dating goals are, both say they want to meet ‘the genuine nines and tens’.

I decide early on that I’m going to stick closely to a third student, whose social deficiencies make me feel less self-conscious about my own. Dan is twenty-two years old and ghostly pale. He struggles to hold eye contact and has jittery body movements. He is a man of few words, though this is a by-product of social paralysis rather than enigmatic mystery. When he does speak there is a nasal voice that resembles the sound of a leaky gas pipe. He possesses an energy that sucks the air out of the room.

Dan and I feel an immediate kinship. Tux on the other hand has identified Dan as the runt of the litter – i.e. as the lowliest member of our little group. ‘What makes you think some little hottie in the club is gonna want to choose you?’ he asks Dan pointedly. Dan gives a hangdog look, writhes in his chair and looks at the floor in ponderous silence. Adam and Bruce’s downfall comes when they open their mouths. Mine and Dan’s comes when we don’t. Instead we look on in awkward silence, our nervous laughter ringing out pathetically as the other men banter.

Each of us has spent nearly £2,000 to be here. This is how much it costs in 2006 to learn how to be a pickup artist. We’ll be spending the weekend with Tux, one of the best in the business. Tux is short for tuxedo, which is purely metaphorical: he has on a black dress shirt that sits snugly under a charcoal grey blazer, and black jeans. The moniker is a pseudonym intended to communicate an aura of debonair sophistication. Tux’s skills with women are legendary in the community. His fans say he combines the smoothness of James Bond with the wit of Oscar Wilde. And he does exude a certain narcissistic blasé, rumoured to be the afterglow of hundreds of successful conquests: the seducer’s aura.

For the next three days and nights, Tux will be our guru and guide. We will do as he says, however ridiculous or terrifying this initially sounds. The instructors are reprogramming us with a new belief system and it is incumbent on us to suspend any lingering scepticism for the duration of the weekend. It’s apparently for our own good.

Tux is a conspiracy theorist. He believes in the existence of a secret society that 52 per cent of the population are part of. Of that 52 per cent, 50 per cent are women and 2 per cent are men. Of that 2 per cent, 1 per cent are gay and the other 1 per cent are sexually attractive ‘alpha males’. This is the real world according to Tux’s employer Real Social Dynamics, a company that makes its money teaching the hapless 48 per cent how to mimic the traits of the sexual elite of ‘alphas’ and ‘naturals’. Boot camps like this one are supposed to begin the process of rewiring our neural pathways through repetition until the performance becomes natural. Tux is a member of the 1 per cent and he’s going to elevate us to his level.

The pickup forums2 encouraged men to steer clear of the mainstream media – to avoid, say, the radio lest it brainwash you with its steady diet of gooey love songs. It was important not to let your newly discovered faith be shaken. According to Tux, everything we have been told about male–female dynamics up to now – by family and friends, by films and soap operas, by popular music – has been a lie. We’ve been brainwashed by a society that wants us only to conform and consume. The soppy advice to buy women flowers and being a nice guy? Propaganda to keep us soft and passive. Tux brings a fist crashing down on the table as his speech reaches its rhetorical climax. Other Starbucks patrons look over quizzically as they file past clutching their mochaccinos and flat whites. Tux’s speech has stirred something in us. Ready to break away from their world, we stare back at their blank and complacent faces with feelings of supercilious contempt.

*

It’s 8 o’clock and we’ve been sitting in Starbucks for nearly an hour. Through gaps in the condensation on the windows we see partygoers stagger across damp cobbles. They mingle effortlessly as if guided by a social instinct that is unfamiliar to at least two of us on this side of the glass. I look on with a tightening feeling in my stomach. Several times on the walk over to Starbucks I nearly went back to my hotel off Trafalgar Square. My head swam with rationalisations as to why it would be no great shame to retreat, order room service and accept my fate. And yet bravely I have soldiered on. An hour later and the warmth of the coffee shop has become congenial. It’s the prospect of mingling with the crowds that scares me.

Suddenly Tux receives a message on his Nokia 3310 and pivots hurriedly towards us. He clasps his hands together, wraps his arms around us and ushers us towards the exit. ‘We’re here to get girls, guys. It’s time to step up,’ he bawls in an Australian drawl. He gets a chant going with Adam and Bruce as he ushers us out of the coffee shop. ‘RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW... RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW... RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.’

Dan and I join in, reluctantly at first but with more gusto until we’re bellowing the words into the night air. A group of Chinese tourists cautiously files past. They glare at us and we try to look menacing. ‘RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW,’ we chant as they hurry through the doors to join their tour party. I laugh with the other students and feel vaguely powerful as I do.

It’s bitterly cold out on Leicester Square, a clear and crisp night lit up by a moon that’s flaring in the sky like a white-hot coin. We’ve been told to do warm-up approaches while we wait for the other instructors to arrive. At first we look around gravely, each of us waiting for someone else to take the initiative. I look at Dan whose countenance is wearing the most desolate expression I have ever seen.

All of a sudden, Bruce has darted off in the direction of three women in their early twenties; this is what the pickup artists call a ‘three set’. The women are wearing stiletto heels, miniskirts and tight-fitting jackets pulled over even smaller crop tops. Bruce moves towards them, loops round and comes back again to position himself so he’s approaching the group diagonally from the front. He stops momentarily and bounces from foot to foot, exhaling deeply as he gets ready to go in. The vapour on his breath is visible as he starts the preamble for his opener. ‘Ex... cuse me...’, ‘Ex... cuse me,’ Bruce says while tapping one of the women gingerly on the shoulder as if touching something scalding hot. Straight away, a mass of blonde hair swivels round and two eyes scan Bruce up and down. The woman’s upper lip begins to curl and retract, exposing a set of luminous white teeth. The blonde turns back towards her two friends and eye-codes them before the group starts to slowly edge away from Bruce. The entire scene unfolds in a matter of seconds. Even after the brush-off, Bruce continues to unload a fusillade of scripted one-liners at the women. He seems oblivious to the fact that it isn’t working, like a fly stupidly bashing itself against a windowpane. When the group is nearly out of sight, Bruce turns around and trundles back towards us pursing his lips. ‘Did you open them?’ asks Adam. ‘Negative,’ says Bruce. ‘I didn’t talk loud enough.’ Bruce is shaking his head. ‘Fuck, I messed up man. Fuck!’

We awkwardly slap Bruce on the back and tell him ‘great job’. We tell him that rejection doesn’t matter – that it’s just a game like Tux said in Starbucks. And yet I feel profoundly disconcerted by the scene I’ve just witnessed. The camaraderie of the coffee shop has been replaced by a grim and solemn atmosphere. Bruce wears a horrifying grimace on a stricken face that appears to have collapsed in on itself. He reaches for a cigarette with a hand that’s visibly shaking. First blood of the night has been drawn. I try to put the episode to the back of my mind.

Bruce has performed what the pickup artists call a ‘cold approach’ (this contrasts with a warm approach, which is when a woman has given some indication that she wants to be approached). The cold approach requires a single-minded willingness to potentially embarrass yourself in the hope that if you repeat the process enough times, proficiency will be attained. It’s called the ‘game’ because viewing the process like a video game is supposed to make it easier and take the sting out of rejection.

Pressure is now on the rest of us to start approaching. Since leaving Starbucks I’ve been floundering. I pretend not to see women passing right beside me. I notice imaginary boyfriends or AMOGs (alpha male other guys) who I tell myself will unleash violence on me if I talk to their girl. I dismiss almost every woman I see as not my type – as too old, too young, too fat (‘she’s just a five, bro’); as wearing too much make-up; as probably not able to understand English anyway – as if someone in my position can afford to be choosy.

I resolve to do my first approach before Tux comes back and catches sight of me standing around shivering. That’s when I spot a potential ‘target’: a woman in a white dress with a black and gold sash draped over her shoulder. She’s trailed by a small group of slightly inebriated women, all wearing different outfits but each with the same black and gold sash flopping diagonally across the body. I hesitate for a moment and then I hear Tux’s admonition ringing in my head – ‘RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW’.

I’ve rehearsed this moment dozens of times in the mirror at home. Yet despite knowing what to do on a theoretical level, my feet remain planted to the spot. My brain is pulling me in two different directions. On the one hand I want to break through the anxiety and stop feeling like such a coward. At the same time I want to run away. Amid this indecision, I begin to question whether the circumstances that brought me to Leicester Square this Friday night are as bad as I’ve been making them out to be. Maybe fate will take care of my dating life if I give it its proper due? That’s when it hits me like a bucket of ice-cold water: I’ve paid nearly £2,000 to be here. In Starbucks, Tux had talked about how our ancestors had killed giant mammals with their bare hands and fought in bloody wars. Why then was I petrified of women? The answer wasn’t easily forthcoming – though my body seemed determined to remind me of its verity: despite the sub-zero temperatures I can feel droplets of perspiration running down the back of my neck. After a minute or so of mental torment, I decide that the women in the hen party are not good enough for me. They’re too prettified and bimboish; we wouldn’t have anything in common. I feel superior to them in some ill-defined way – yet still I want them. I bounce from one foot to the other, my skin clammy and grey. A sense of resignation washes over me. I catch the eye of an Alsatian dog standing on the cobblestones next to its owner; it glances over mournfully at me and we briefly lock eyes; then it too turns its head away in disgust.

*

In 2006, pickup artistry is a multi-million-dollar industry. Whether you want to add more notches to your bedpost or find a girlfriend and fall in love, the industry’s gurus claim to have the secret formula that can induce any woman to fall under your spell. All it takes is a willingness to hand over your money, memorise some canned material and head out to the bars and clubs to practise on unsuspecting women.

I blame the American writer Neil Strauss. Pickup artists went mainstream the previous year largely thanks to Strauss’s book, The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. An overnight bestseller, The Game would go on to sell two and a half million copies. Strauss, a journalist for Rolling Stone and the New York Times, had immersed himself in Los Angeles’s seduction community. The resulting book has piqued the interest of libidinous men the world over. Thanks to The Game, seduction boot camps are in high demand in cities across the world.3 Ask a pickup student how they first discovered the subculture and the reply inevitably comes: ‘I read The Game.’ Not only have the students on this boot camp read it but they have studied it, scrutinised it and imbibed every piece of dubious wisdom contained within its pages. Published in a sleek black imitation leather cover with gold typeface, their copies are defiled with thumbprints and scribbled notes. The contents of the book are treated with a reverence usually accorded to the words of kings or prophets. The Game is a holy book and this boot camp, I suppose, is our pilgrimage.

Though ostensibly an investigation into an unusual subculture, the book doubled up as a scintillating male fantasy told through the concupiscent antics of Strauss’s alter ego, Style. Strauss hadn’t simply investigated the community – he’d ‘gone native’, becoming a venerated pickup artist in the process. The book produced by the experience was a rags-to-riches story transposed on to the world of sex. It was also a vade mecum for the aspiring pickup artist: an instruction manual through which the reader could learn the revelatory techniques that Strauss had uncovered during his two-year stint in the community. The chapters of The Game were even arranged in the chronological order in which a seduction was supposed to go down, from Step 1: ‘Select a Target’, to Step 5: ‘Isolate the Target’, to the most horrifying of all, Step 10: ‘Blast Last-Minute Resistance’.

The Game had added a carnal twist to the traditional hero’s arc. Strauss had gone on an adventure, learned a lesson, won a victory, and then returned to his old life with his newfound knowledge. Throughout the book, Strauss leans heavily on his purported ordinariness prior to discovering the pickup scene. He describes himself in the opening chapters as a short, balding and malnourished-looking man with beady eyes and a nose too big for his face. Yet by rehearsing the scripts and techniques imparted to him by Mystery – a charismatic pickup artist from Toronto who claimed to have distilled seduction into a step-by-step formula – Strauss is able to overcome these physical shortcomings and date a spectacular array of beautiful women. Eventually the student manages to surpass the master and Strauss’s new friends vote him the world’s number one pickup artist.

For a book that would inspire thousands of would-be Casanovas, The Game’s opening sequence is less than hopeful. The story begins with Strauss checking Mystery into a Hollywood psychiatric facility. His mentor is suicidal following a break-up with his latest girlfriend. Meanwhile, Project Hollywood, the mansion that Strauss and the other pickup artists had hoped to turn into something akin to the notorious Playboy mansion, has degenerated into ‘a madhouse’. Doors are smashed off hinges and used condoms float around in a filthy pool. Moreover, the men who live there have come to hate each other.

The scene is presented by Strauss as a dark portent of things to come. Having immersed himself in the pickup community for two years, Strauss reaches the belated realisation that building your life around the pursuit of one-night stands is hollow and soul-destroying. The pickup artists may have been able to make a drunken woman giggle at a nightclub, but when the scripted material ran out, their contrived personas imploded. Women rarely stuck around once they realised they were dealing with losers. Strauss’s final love interest in the book drives the point home by giving him an ultimatum: retire his pickup alter ego or lose her. ‘I want you to just be Neil: balding, nerdy, glasses and all,’ she tells the writer.

Had Strauss not spent the intervening four hundred pages mesmerising male readers with a puerile account of sexual conquest, these hints at a deeper self-awareness might have felt genuine. Yet as with the quotes from celebrated feminists that Strauss decided to place at the beginning of each chapter, such well-timed nods to remorse and contrition felt like an attempt by the author to have it both ways: to retain his journalistic credibility and – should the book be poorly received – leave enough space to wriggle out of any unfortunate associations.

Whether or not The Game really had started life as a journalistic endeavour – Strauss insisted that it had – its author had decided to go all-in on the techniques he had purportedly set out to expose. Once the commercial success of The Game was assured, Strauss quickly released his own three-volume guide to picking up women. The book consisted of autobiographical stories, scripted routines and a thirty-day instructional programme. Strauss had claimed in the closing chapters of The Game that ‘to win the game was to leave it’. Yet he would spend the next few years flying around the world teaching the very material he claimed to have outgrown. As for the rest of us, we wanted to know what it was that Style – Strauss’s irresistible alter ego – possessed that we didn’t.

*

Tux saunters out of Starbucks carrying a flat white. As he does so he makes a sidelong glance at two brunettes walking by. When he returns his attention to us, the remnants of a strange leer are plastered across his face. ‘How you getting on, boys?’ he asks. We mumble various noises in the affirmative.

Tux informs us that the club of choice tonight will be Tiger Tiger, a venue in Piccadilly spanning two floors. It’s a popular nightclub with tourists and Tux assures us it’ll be target-rich. Most pickup artists I’ve spoken to don’t enjoy nightclubs. Underneath the smooth patter they are nerds who would rather be at home playing Xbox or watching the Discovery Channel. But nightclubs are where many of the most beautiful women hang out. They are also a discomfiting environment in which to talk to people, which means they are good places to practise the game. In a club, you are competing with alcohol, loud music and bright lights. You are competing with people who are cooler than you, more attractive than you. If you can nail the art of the approach in a nightclub you can do it anywhere. You’re also less likely to ruin your reputation there. Chatting somebody up in the club isn’t frowned upon like it is elsewhere.4 Moreover, the nightclub has no memory. However badly it goes, there’s a good chance you’ll be quickly forgotten. The nightclub is therefore the perfect place for us to make utter fools of ourselves.

As we approach the venue, Tux makes us split into pairs. Dan and I hang back as the others march ahead. The big clubs aren’t keen on groups of men rolling up because of the heady mix of alcohol and testosterone.

The queue for Tiger Tiger is enormous. It’s so long in fact that I have ample time to run through every possible failure scenario in my head. Worse, when we do finally reach the front, the arm of a bouncer – a granite monolith of a man – shoots out mechanically, halting my forward momentum. Affronted by the crumpled T-shirt I have on underneath my blazer, he makes a grunting sound and fixes me with a grim and serious stare. Fortunately, Tux intervenes, informing the gum-chewing beefcake that my name is on the guest list.

It’s mayhem once we get inside. Women with heavily painted faces and tiny dresses yell and raise their glasses high in the air as the DJ plays a track by Shakira. Men in collared shirts teeter past sloshing jars of lager. Lights pulsate and the music makes the floor vibrate. I cower a little. The gears in my brain start grinding away. I don’t belong here. Everyone is smiling and laughing at some joke I’m not privy to. It’s only a matter of time until I’m exposed as an interloper. I feel acutely aware of my limbs: the jerky movements of my legs and my arms hanging awkwardly by my sides. The club is like a panopticon, ready to enact its unforgiving judgement on my ungainly bearing.

Seeking sanctuary, I find the bathroom and dive into a toilet cubicle. I then proceed to linger around the sinks for a bit before elbowing my way back through the crowds to the bar. I stop off to buy a beer which I quickly drain. I then catch sight of the one person I am trying to forestall my introduction to: my instructor. I see him by the dance floor, head bobbing and foot tapping to the music. He also sees me. ‘Hey, man,’ he says enthusiastically through a toothy grin. He sticks out a hand and introduces himself as Ox. He seems friendly. He’s from Cuba originally and has flown in from Barcelona where he lives in exile from the dictatorship that rules over his homeland. He’s thirty-seven, has chin-length brown hair and is wearing a tight-fitting white T-shirt with ‘De Puta Madre’ across the front in striking yellow typeface. His accent is strong but endearing. Ox is highly respected in the community for his skill on the dance floor and what he calls ‘getting physical’. He tells me to ‘treat every girl as if she is a child or your little sister’. Before I have time to ask any questions about this instruction, Ox puts his hands on my shoulders and spins me vertiginously in the direction of two brunettes standing by the bar. They look deep in conversation but Ox says this is just my brain looking for excuses not to go over. ‘Look down, look what you have... your organ is a spear,’ Ox shouts into my ear. ‘Be the prize,’ he rasps, before gently shoving me towards the bar. His breath smells strongly of aniseed. I make eye contact with Dan as I set off in the direction of the two women. We look at each other with a stricken lucidity.

*

I mainly encountered two types of men in the community. I will call them The Manipulator and The Dabbler. The Manipulator tended to view all social interactions as a means to an end. He was more or less indifferent to most ethical considerations that might arise during an interaction. Women were viewed as inanimate objects who responded in predictable ways to scripted stimuli. The Manipulator probably represented about a quarter of the men I encountered in the pickup scene, though possibly less (a disproportionately high number of instructors fitted this mould). Taking to heart the advice of certain self-help gurus, The Manipulator clinically audited those around him, expelling from his life anybody (friend, relative or partner) thought to be holding him back. Those who crossed paths with The Manipulator were unfailingly assessed on the basis of how much ‘value’ they were bringing to the table.

The Dabbler occupied a more ambiguous place, morally speaking, than The Manipulator. He might become a Manipulator with time (over a period of months or years perhaps) but he didn’t usually start off that way. Most men in the community were dilettantes. They found the pickup material and briefly experimented with it before forgetting about the community once they had found a woman who liked them. The one thing pickup did have going for it was its insistence that men had to put themselves out there. A lot. They had to go out to ‘target-rich’ environments four nights a week and approach x number of women. Over and over again. Statistically speaking, this alone hugely improved the chances of meeting someone. And then, later on, when they were quietly getting on with their lives, The Dabblers probably realised that it was them – and not the pickup lines – that had got the girl. And then they forgot all about it again.

As for me, I was a Dabbler, but then most of The Manipulators probably said that. All I knew was that flirting was a foreign language to me. In 2006 I was almost certainly sexist by today’s standards. But then, to depict the pickup community as uniquely sexist might be to let wider society off the hook. The 1990s and 2000s were the era of publications such as Loaded, Maxim, FHM, Nuts and Zoo. Women were typically presented as either sexual gratification or as ‘ladettes’: parodies of men without the economic power. The tabloids of the day even featured surreptitious paparazzi ‘upskirt’ shots of female celebrities.

And yet it was also true that the pickup community could take the leering masculinity of the day and turn it into something worse.

*

Nobody is entitled to sex; however, it is not unusual to wonder why some men have it while others don’t. This felt like an especially pertinent question when I was in my early twenties. Aged twenty-three, it had become clear to me that an urgent change of course was necessary. The alternative – of rotting away at home until I finally expired in a mouldy armchair – was too horrifying to contemplate. This was probably me catastrophising a bit. But still, I shuddered at the prospect of going through life having to deal with scorn or pity for want of a girlfriend.

In societies conforming to traditional dominant male stereotypes, sex and romance were usually seen as the domain of women. Moreover, as a man, there was a tawdriness about asking for help. It is true that both men and women are judged on how much sex they have, albeit rather differently and on an unequal footing (women have it significantly worse). Whereas it can be socially lethal for a woman to be having lots of it, the sexless man by contrast is usually treated as an object of mirth. Indeed, the ‘forty-year-old virgin’ is a stock comedic character whose lack of potency is thought to betray some Darwinian inadequacy. Complaining only risks compounding this unenviable social position. Better instead to resign oneself to the fact that some have it – whatever it is – and others do not.

Even the relationship advice given to me by well-meaning friends was questionable. People told me to be myself when what they really meant was ‘be attractive’. Things would ‘work themselves out in the end’, they reassured me – but why would they? Confidence was said to be attractive but what was that when you broke it down into its component parts? It was a sort of faith that things would go well because they had gone well before. But what if they hadn’t gone well before? From where was this magical property supposed to spring? In truth, the pickup artist adage – that if we kept doing what we were doing we would keep getting the same results (or lack of) – sounded more realistic to me than the soothing bromides I was constantly hearing from the people who loved me.

Of course, women are not interchangeable robots with predictable psychologies. They are not algorithms or pieces of computer coding. A man cannot simply roll up, say certain things and expect to elicit responses on repeat. But pickup was designed to appeal to someone like me: a 23-year-old mouldering in a prolonged dry spell who is willing to overlook this elementary point. Indeed, we – for I became one of them – were happy enough to deploy our scrupulously rehearsed, prefabricated routines on unsuspecting women if we thought it might result in sex. It was so bad that even Neil Strauss would eventually come to denounce the industry. ‘The techniques, let’s face it, are so objectifying and horrifying,’ Strauss told The Atlantic in 2015:

Why did I really stop writing for the New York Times, hang out with all these kids running around, you know, the Sunset Strip like a maniac in stupid clothing? I see those photos and I vomit in my mouth a little bit. Even when I wrote it, I didn’t think it would be a guide. I thought it would be a book about male insecurity. I even knew then that it was about low self-esteem.5

*

And yet there was a tantalisingly meritocratic appeal to pickup. Mainstream society tended to put people in fixed categories. You were an introvert or an extrovert, shy or outgoing, the life of the party or a social hermit. By contrast, the pickup industry presented itself as the start of a proactive journey of self-improvement. It instilled in us the belief that we too could transcend our unflattering former identities and rise agreeably up the social pecking order. Those outside the community might laugh at the scripted lines but these were a temporary gambit; they were like the stabilisers we once relied on when we were learning to ride a bike. Eventually it would become effortless. We just had to put in the work. The process would be long, arduous and frequently nerve-wracking. The instructors were clear about that. We should be under no illusions: most guys weren’t cut out for the opportunity that we had been given. We had uncovered the hidden code and, through its dutiful study and application, even men like us could go ‘from loser to lothario’. Even. Men. Like. Us. Reading those words for the very first time gave me goosebumps.

It certainly recommended itself to me more than some of the tried and tested alternatives – buying the latest designer aftershave or resigning myself to the vicissitudes of ‘fate’. The community had given me a sense of hope about the future. This was yet to translate into worldly results to be sure; but I felt like I was on the right track. For a long time I had been grappling with this most embarrassing and vexing of issues. And now, here I was with all the answers at my fingertips.

It wasn’t that I had abandoned all of my moral scruples. It was more that I’d rationalised my misgivings away. I wanted to learn some basic conversational scaffolding and escape the knot of tangled emotions: outgrowths from a fractured childhood. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Did men outside of the community not also have their own social routines? (‘Hey’; ‘What’s up?’; ‘Can I buy you a drink?’). By the time I found pickup I had grown tired of hearing that I should ‘be myself’. What I wanted was an honest (i.e. unvarnished) appraisal of where I was going wrong. The pickup community found me at a point in my life where I was ready to pay good money to be told that my haircut was shit, my mannerisms weird and my air of desperation incredibly off-putting.

I was a pickup marketeer’s dream. The industry preyed on men like me – men who believed that in order to be successful with women we needed to efface our personalities. I’d briefly had a girlfriend when I was sixteen. I hadn’t exactly been the protagonist in that one: she’d taken an interest in me and I’d more or less gone along with it. She was more experienced than I was and made all the moves. We eventually had sex. It didn’t last long – the sex or the relationship – and for the next six years the only action my bedroom saw was dusting and hoovering.

My social skills steadily atrophied after that. I had left school and was living in the countryside with my grandmother. I had a dial-up internet connection and a cannabis dealer on speed dial. I worked in a petrol station two days a week but besides that I barely even needed to leave the house. I gradually became more isolated. A few drunken kisses occurred at the dwindling number of parties I was still invited to, but that was about it. On the rare occasions that I did go on a date I always blew it by failing to move things forward. At the crucial moment I would clam up and shut down out of some lingering fear of being rejected. Even outside of a romantic context I was afraid of raising my voice or taking up space in the world. Men hadn’t played a particularly impressive role in my life and I was, on some level at least, ashamed of my masculinity.

Attending a pickup artist boot camp was hardly my proudest moment. And yet at the time, feelings of frustration, rejection and thwarted romantic ambition were weighing more heavily on my shoulders than any ethical considerations. What was the harm in going to a nightclub and trying out some scripted lines? After all, I was what the pickup artists called an ‘average frustrated chump’, or AFC for short, and since I’d learned that I had gradually allowed them to convince me that I needed their help.

*

Every weekend, Real Social Dynamics, or RSD for short, takes men like me – anxiety-ridden, gauche and socially awkward – into ‘the field’, a term pickup artists use for the bars and nightclubs they frequent.

The pickup artists cribbed most of their theories from evolutionary psychology. According to Mystery, the most famous of the 2000s pickup artists, we were ‘biological machines’ whose sole purpose was to survive and replicate.6 Every pickup artist has a talismanic alter ego. There is Tux, Playboy, Juggler, Badboy, Adonis, Matador, to name but a few. They are a psychological device to free men from social conventions and a way to avoid exposure while documenting their salubrious exploits on the community’s sprawling forums and newsgroups. Following a date or a night out at the club, members of the community will sit at their computers and record every gesture, comment and brush-off for their peers to dissect. Naturally they don’t want their family, colleagues and friends – nor the women they are writing about – to know about any of this.

In 2006, the biggest online pickup forum has thousands of members. Many of the men who use it are able to draw on an encyclopaedic knowledge of seduction theory. They write long detailed posts about how to behave around women, about what the perfect opener is, about who history’s greatest seducers were. Women are viewed as machine-like and programmable by a subculture that is made up disproportionately of engineers and computer programmers. Say this and she will do that; do this and she will respond in this way; follow these steps and she will have sex with you. There is a preponderance of men in the community who struggle to communicate with people (and women especially) outside of a problem-solving context.

They spend most of their time on the sprawling forums engaging in one-upmanship, pointless flame wars and throwing themselves into hair-splitting dissections of pickup theory. It is Warhammer for the sexually frustrated. So-called keyboard jockeys (KJs) are treated with contempt by Tux and the other instructors. ‘The game is played in the field,’ Tux says during his introductory preamble in Starbucks. He warns us that if we get caught trying to slope off at any point during the night, we’ll be made to approach the most intimidating sets (i.e. groups of women). I feel a tightening sensation in my stomach as I listen to the instructors say that by the end of the weekend, each of us will have learned how to take an interaction with any woman ‘from open to close’. Cowering behind our computer screens is no longer an option.

*

On the short walk over to the two women that Ox has sent me hurtling towards, I scramble to locate a piece of paper. I have placed it inside my trouser pocket earlier in the evening; written on it are two opinion openers I’ve cribbed from the internet. One is the classic ‘Who lies more, men or women?’ The other is another conversation starter that goes something like, ‘Hey, did you guys see that fight outside?’ It’s not exactly Oscar Wilde but hopefully enough to get my foot in the door.

Yet when I manage to locate the slip of paper, I’m so nervous the words look like hieroglyphics.

My pulse quickens; I’m now almost over the shoulder of one of the brunettes. I’ve been told not to approach from directly behind because it’s creepy. Getting here wasn’t as difficult as I expected it to be, mainly because I had somebody literally pushing me into the conversation. The fact that Ox sent me here is psychologically reassuring somehow, perhaps because I can blame him when I have Martinis thrown in my face and my eyes gouged out with little paper umbrellas.

I linger for a moment and a strong whiff of perfume passes my nostrils. This must be the closest I’ve been in months to a woman who isn’t a direct relative. I take one last surreptitious look at the brunette standing closest to me. She has her hair tied back; the ringlets tumble endearingly down each side of her face. My heart stirs with the gold of her laughter. Perhaps she’s ‘The One’ and we just don’t know it yet. I look at her and then I remember who I am; the prospect of our union seems unlikely. Then, coming out of my dream, I realise that I’m almost directly in front of them. Faithful to the teachings, I place my body at an angle so it looks as if I’m ready to leave at any moment. I lurch forward and emit a shaky ‘Hi’. Then I wait. The word hangs limply in the air for what feels like a very long time. Meanwhile the brunettes have continued talking, oblivious to my hovering presence. I feel like a piece of furniture, awkwardly fixed to the spot like one of the bar stools. I need to take action before my momentary burst of courage deserts me. According to the pickup artists, you have to approach within three seconds of seeing a target to stop your brain from chickening out. It has the added bonus that you won’t be seen as another lurker, the bane of women in nightclubs and a phenomenon to which their social radar is highly attuned.