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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Within the so-called seduction community, the ability to meet and attract women is understood as a skill which heterosexual men can cultivate through practical training and personal development. Though it has been an object of media speculation - and frequent sensationalism - for over a decade, this cultural formation remains poorly understood. In the first book-length study of the industry, Rachel O'Neill takes us into the world of seduction seminars, training events, instructional guidebooks and video tutorials. Pushing past established understandings of 'pickup artists' as pathetic, pathological or perverse, she examines what makes seduction so compelling for those drawn to participate in this sphere. Seduction vividly portrays how the twin rationalities of neoliberalism and postfeminism are reorganising contemporary intimate life, as labour-intensive and profit-orientated modes of sociality consume other forms of being and relating. It is essential reading for students and scholars of gender, sexuality, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wants to understand the seduction industry's overarching logics and internal workings.
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Seitenzahl: 511
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The spectacle of seduction
Researching the seduction industry in London
Seduction as mediated intimacy
Notes
1 The Work of Seduction
Cultivating a sexual work ethic
Anxious attachments
Desire and discontent
Intimate ambitions
Aspirational bodies
Intimate enterprise
Branding the sexual self
Professional imperatives
Notes
2 Pedagogy and Profit
Men, sex, silence
Styling masculinity
Making men
Masculinising spaces
The seductions of community
‘Professional friendship’
Notes
3 Manufacturing Consent
Systematising sex
Sex in the social factory
‘Last-minute resistance’
Buying in
Masculinist sex
Claiming truth
Notes
4 Seduction and Sexual Politics
Articulating aggrievement
‘It’s just evolution of the species’: evolutionary imperatives
‘Your whole masculinity gets lost’: masculinity undone
‘You can’t have it both ways’: intimate inequality
After the aftermath, into the wreck
Notes
Conclusion: Against Seduction
What gets between
Patching the system
Going forward
Notes
Postscript: Power and Politics in Feminist Fieldwork
Negotiating femininity
Injurious intimacies
On being complicit
(En)countering others
Notes
Appendices
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Seduction
Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy
RACHEL O’NEILL
polity
Copyright © Rachel O’Neill 2018
The right of Rachel O’Neill to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, 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 the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2159-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O’Neill, Rachel, author.Title: Seduction : men, masculinity, and mediated intimacy / Rachel O’Neill.Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2017050360 (print) | LCCN 2017061782 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509521593 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509521555 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509521562 (paperback)Subjects: LCSH: Sex. | Flirting. | Masculinity. | Feminism. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies.Classification: LCC HQ21 (ebook) | LCC HQ21 .O58 2018 (print) | DDC 306.73--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050360
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Thanks first and foremost to Rosalind Gill, who has supported the project from its earliest stages. Her dedication as an advisor is nothing short of extraordinary, and I am privileged to benefit from her intellectual generosity and scholarly acumen. As well as being a trusted mentor, she is a dear friend.
Funding for this research was provided by the King’s College London Graduate School. Sara De Benedictis and Simidele Dosekun were steadfast companions in the protracted endeavour that is completing a PhD. I have discussed many of the ideas elaborated in this book with them at length, and both have read and commented on individual chapters at various stages of development. The wider community of gender and cultural studies scholars at King’s sustained and enhanced my work. Thanks to Ana Sofia Elias, Bridget Conor, Christina Scharff, Hannah Hamad, Laura Harvey, Laura Speers, Natalie Wreyford and Toby Bennett.
Diane Negra and Andrea Cornwall were generous examiners, providing insightful commentary on the arguments presented in my thesis and stoking my ambitions for this book with their praise. Diane has an uncanny ability to recommend readings that give definite shape to ideas I am merely grasping at.
Living in London for the past decade has afforded many pleasures, not least of which has been the opportunity to participate in a variety of feminist collectivities. Jo Littler is owed thanks for organising more than her fair share of events, providing a space for discussion and debate that is always illuminating. Meg-John Barker deserves special mention for their work with the Critical Sexology network, a crucial forum for examining contemporary currents in sexual culture and imagining ways to relate otherwise. Pam Alldred, Róisín Ryan-Flood and Sumi Madhok each invited me to discuss my research with their students, whose insightful questions and perceptive observations have sharpened my thinking.
Alison Winch and Jamie Hakim have become valued interlocutors on all things mediated intimacy. I am particularly grateful to Jamie for gamely agreeing to spend three days together in the south of France. The conversations we had while walking around the city and meandering through galleries fortified my resolve as I began drafting the conclusion to this book. Long-distance as well as face-to-face discussions with Frank Karioris, Gareth Terry, Michael Flood and Sam de Boise have renewed my faith in the intellectual and political project of men and masculinity studies.
The Department of Sociology at the University of York has proved an exceptional environment in which to complete this book and also begin a new project. Nik Brown, who I imagine doesn’t much like to think of himself as a line manager, has performed the role with aplomb. Dave Beer has championed my work at every opportunity, offering encouragement as well as intellectual sustenance through his sheer love of ideas. Kasia Narkowicz welcomed me immediately and became a fast friend. Xiaodong Lin has often gone out of his way to brighten my day. Joanna Latimer, Maggie O’Neill, Sarah Nettleton and Victoria Robinson all model the kind of feminist collegiality I aspire to, producing brilliant scholarship while conducting themselves with grace, candour and no small amount of humour. Clare Bielby has made the commute altogether more enjoyable.
The team at Polity have been an absolute pleasure to work with – my thanks to Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, Emma Longstaff, Mary Savigar and Rachel Moore. Thanks also to Caroline Richmond for her meticulous copy-editing.
My mother Janet is a continual inspiration to me, both for her immense personal fortitude and unwavering commitment to fighting injustice on many fronts. I am deeply appreciative of the close relationship we share. My father Michael has contributed to my intellectual development and academic career in innumerable ways, making profound sacrifices so that I would be free of the constraints that patterned his own life. The knowledge that he would support and be proud of me no matter what route I took ensured I could carve my own path. Each of my siblings, in their own way, inspires and motivates my work. I am especially grateful to my eldest sister Kate for the innumerable hours we have spent discussing the vagaries of gender, intimacy and sexuality.
London friends – Anne, Eric, Jon, Isaac, Natasha, Melissa, Sam – have provided welcome respite from work with food, drink, dancing and games. I relish the fact that, while some of you are also academics, this is largely incidental to our relationships. The absence of Farah – who died too young, when she was filled with life – is the cause of unbearable sadness. Occasionally her image flashes up before me, appearing momentarily in the gestures and expressions of a stranger who bears some passing resemblance to her, and my heart bursts for all that was and all that would have been.
It seems impossible to adequately express the love and gratitude I feel for my partner Chris, friend, lover, comrade. The scrawling notes he provided on each and every draft of each and every chapter of this book and the thesis that went before it were both entertaining and insightful, challenging me to nuance my thinking while at the same time affirming my most deeply held convictions. For this, and much more, I am so very grateful to you.
I am forever indebted to all those who participated in this project. I can only hope that this book does justice to the complex realities of your lives and experiences.
This book draws from and expands on material previously published in the following places: ‘The work of seduction: intimacy and subjectivity in the London “seduction community”’, Sociological Research Online 20/4 (2015); ‘The aesthetics of sexual discontent: notes from the London “seduction community”’, in Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism, ed. Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, London: Palgrave Macmillan (2016), pp. 333–49; and ‘Homosociality and heterosex: patterns of intimacy and relationality among men in the London “seduction community”’, in Masculinities under Neoliberalism, ed. Andrea Cornwall, Frank G. Karioris and Nancy Lindisfarne, London: Zed Books (2016), pp 261–76.
Introduction
Standing at the front of a nondescript conference room in a hotel in central London, one of the lead trainers welcomes everyone to the event. After passing out some complementary notepads and pens, he introduces himself and describes how he became involved in the seduction industry. Aged twenty-one, he found himself single for the first time in his adult life, having been in a relationship with the same woman since he was a teenager. He was working long hours in an office job and becoming increasingly frustrated with the monotony of his daily routine. On top of this, most of his friends from home were now at university, so he had no one to go out with at the weekends. In short, he explained: ‘I found myself in a situation where I didn’t really know what to do.’ It was then that, quite by chance, he saw a documentary about pickup on TV. He spent the next morning looking for information online and by lunchtime had signed up for a bootcamp the following weekend. Recalling the experience while pointing to a chair in the front row, he says: ‘I sat right there. I didn’t know anything about pickup, I didn’t know the terminology, I didn’t know who was teaching − I just wanted to learn to get women.’
A few hours later we set out for the first in-field session. It’s a particularly busy weekend and the streets are crowded, despite the heavy rain. On the pavement outside the hotel each trainer is assigned two students. We peel off into groups and walk towards Covent Garden. Once we reach the market, the trainer I’m shadowing waves his hand around vaguely and says: ‘If you see something, please go.’ He is distracted, looking at his phone continually, and after twenty minutes spent walking around aimlessly the students begin to look doubtful. Eventually the trainer puts his phone away and leads his students down to the market’s sunken courtyard, where he tells them to approach two women sitting outside a café. After a few minutes of stilted conversation, the women begin gathering their things. Seeing this, the trainer walks towards the group – smiling widely, his arms outstretched – as though rejoining friends. Soon the women are laughing and chatting amiably with the trainer. He leaves a few minutes later – evidently trying to give the students another chance – but the women depart shortly after he does. Nevertheless, the two men bound back towards us and flank the trainer on either side as we cross the courtyard, marvelling at his easy demeanour and cool confidence.
Later that afternoon, a different trainer sets up a flip chart at the front of the room for a session on conversation skills. Commenting on the downpour we’ve just escaped from, he jokes that Fifty Shades of Grey is responsible for ‘the wettest summer on record’. Almost as an afterthought, he turns and asks if anyone has read the book. Faced with a sea of blank expressions, he says: ‘Right. Write this down. Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s an erotic novel. It’s what girls will be talking about, and it also allows you to introduce sexual themes very quickly.’ The trainer begins writing on the flip chart, assuring students as he does so that developing conversation skills is not about memorising routines: ‘I’m not going to tell you what to say. I’m going to tell you topics you can talk about and a way you can talk about them. Your own content should be exactly that – your own content.’ The students scribble in their notepads as the lesson gets under way, attempting to commit to paper the diagrams the trainer somewhat haphazardly produces as visual aids. A key takeaway is the importance of listening, with the trainer explaining that women’s most common complaint about men is that they don’t listen. This, he says, is a missed opportunity: ‘Girls will tell you everything you need to seduce them.’
After a quick meal in a dimly lit Mexican restaurant, the bootcamp cohort arrives en masse at a club near Regent Street for the night-game session. The trainer in charge stations himself near the doorway of the club: from here, he can commandeer trainers as they shepherd students between the pulsing environs of the dance floor and the cool reprieve of the smoking area. I join him there, and for the next two hours we maintain this post, receiving occasional updates on milestones achieved. When this trainer leaves to make a phone call – one of the trainers scheduled to teach tomorrow has cancelled, and now a replacement has to be found – another sidles towards me. Earlier that evening, over dinner, he had been loudly complaining about how tired he was. With an exaggerated yawn, he leans toward me now and says: ‘I didn’t get any sleep last night.’ Still I refuse to take the bait. He leans closer again, and I can feel his breath on my face as he grins lasciviously and says: ‘The energy of eighteen-year-olds is just incredible.’
The next morning, back in the conference room, I sit towards the back and look over my notes. There’s a jocular atmosphere as the students arrive, exchanging stories about the night before. The session begins with a trainer asking everyone how they’re feeling now that they’ve completed the first half of the course. One student jumps to his feet, eager to respond. He explains that, while he was initially sceptical – to the point of suspecting the course might even be a scam, a remark that earns him a sarcastic ‘Thanks!’ from the trainer – it had already exceeded his expectations: ‘I didn’t think any of this would work. But by the end of the day, I was like, fuck, this works. This really works. I was just amazed. It’s just like, my God, this is the Holy Grail.’ A whoop goes up from the audience and soon everyone is cheering and clapping. As we go around the room so that each student can share his experience, I notice that a few are missing. They turn up later in the afternoon, looking rumpled and sleepless. One tells me he was out until 3 a.m. with a trainer who took him to the VIP lounge of a high-end nightclub. ‘It was crazy,’ he says. ‘He was just picking out the girls.’
The above notes recall scenes from the first seduction ‘bootcamp’ I attended. During the year-long ethnographic study on which this book is based, I went to many more training events like this one, spending weekends moving between conference rooms and nightclubs, going to seminars held on university campuses and in pub basements, observing one-to-one coaching sessions that traversed parks, cafés, shopping centres, train stations. I interviewed many of the people I met during my fieldwork, ranging from those who were new to the practice through to others who had spent years honing their skills and teaching them to other men. I undertook extensive media analysis, examining the mass of autobiographical books and blogs as well as instructional videos that promise to guide men through their interactions with women. Throughout this process, my central concern has been to understand what makes seduction so compelling for those drawn to participate in this sphere. What leads men to seek out this particular form of expertise? What motivates them to read up on the topic, join forums and take courses, often at considerable expense? What is it that they hope to realise or achieve?
While seduction has a long and variegated history, within the cultural formation known as the ‘seduction community’ it refers to a very particular set of knowledge-practices organised around the belief that the ability to meet and attract women is a skill heterosexual men can cultivate through practical training and personal development. Though many of its key tenets are informed by or drawn from fields such as business management and evolutionary psychology, those who establish themselves as experts in this sphere lay claim to a distinct form of expertise variously denoted as ‘seduction’, ‘pickup’ or ‘game’. Having originally taken shape in the 1990s in the United States, this cultural formation now manifests in urban centres across the world, from Stockholm to Mumbai, from Sydney to Shanghai, from Houston to Tel Aviv. Though the language of ‘community’ persists, it is a decidedly commercial enterprise, a kind of community-industry hybrid. Likewise, while those involved in this sphere often refer to themselves and are elsewhere referred to as ‘pickup artists’, or ‘PUAs’, there is a good deal of ambivalence around these terms – for reasons that will become clear below – such that many seek, at least nominally, to distance themselves from them.
The spectacle of seduction
The seduction community has been an object of media fascination for over a decade. When it first came to public attention in the anglophone world in the mid-2000s, many news publications deployed intrepid male journalists to discover this clandestine world by attending seduction seminars and other events, on which they duly reported in mildly disapproving yet begrudgingly admiring tones. An array of documentaries soon followed: Channel 4’s The Rules of Seduction (2007) tapped into cultural anxieties about masculinity in ‘crisis’ and explored issues of social isolation among men, while more recently Amazon’s Attract Any Woman Anywhere (2017) invoked a familiar ‘battle of the sexes’ narrative, emphasising the manipulative tactics deployed by both women and men in contemporary dating culture. Long before these features, the documentarian Louis Theroux interviewed the self-proclaimed ‘godfather of the seduction community’ Ross Jeffries as part of his Weird Weekends series (2000), which set out ‘to discover the genuinely odd in the most ordinary setting’.
The figure of the serial seducer has been subject to numerous portrayals on the silver screen, some of which acknowledge the existence of a wider community-industry, while others obscure this by focusing on individual womanisers. In an early forerunner, Robert Downey Junior plays Casanova to Molly Ringwald in brat-pack rom-com The Pick-Up Artist (1987), using a tightly scripted deck of lines and routines. Later, the ensemble film Magnolia (1999) sees Tom Cruise as the maniacal Frank T. J. Mackey preaching his particularly noxious brand of seduction – ‘Respect the cock, tame the cunt’ – to large audiences in packed-out convention centres. Subsequent Hollywood incarnations offered more sympathetic readings, framing seduction coaching as an almost benevolent enterprise whereby certified studs help ‘nerds’ and ‘losers’ meet women. In Hitch (2005), the eponymous ‘date doctor’ – played by the famously congenial Will Smith – coaches a select group of eminently well-intentioned clients while refusing to work with those who seek to prey on women. In the boxoffice smash Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), the newly minted male feminist icon Ryan Gosling plays charming Jacob, who helps the hapless Cal (Steve Carrell) sleep with a bevy of women after Cal’s wife leaves him. Jacob’s motivation is not financial – no money appears to change hands and he is not shown teaching other men. Rather, he takes pity on Cal, who reminds him of his own once similarly emasculated and now sadly deceased father.
Staked as it is around the promise of personal transformation, the system of expertise elaborated within the seduction industry proved readily adaptable to the dramatic conventions of reality television. Leading the trend, Vh1’s The Pickup Artist (2007–8), saw a predictably ‘geeky’ cohort of participants placed under the tutelage of skilled seducers and put through a series of increasingly outlandish challenges. The format introduced large audiences to a colourful cast of real-life industry personalities, some of whom became minor celebrities and were subsequently wheeled out for tabloid talk shows such as Dr Phil (2008) and Tyra Banks (2009). Elsewhere, the journalist turned seduction guru Neil Strauss attempted to seduce the actress Jessica Alba on Jimmy Kimmel Live! (2005). The nomenclature of seduction has seeped into other popular entertainment forums, with stock characters in shows such as How I Met Your Mother (2005–14) and The Big Bang Theory (2007–) dabbling in seduction theory in order to parlay their friendships with women into sexual encounters. Seduction logics are also more subtly manifest in shows such as Aziz Ansari’s Master of None (2015–), where Dev employs a highly formulaic approach to online dating and uses the same open-ended message to start conversations with every woman in whom he is interested.
In a darker turn, the ‘White Christmas’ (2014) episode of the speculative fiction series Black Mirror sees Jon Hamm – famed for his portrayal of the advertising executive Don Draper in the acclaimed series Mad Men (2007–15) – as a once highly skilled seduction coach now consigned to a remote outpost. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Hamm’s character, Matt, used to teach other men how to meet and sleep with women using the augmented reality device ‘Z-Eye’, which allowed him to see through their eyes while providing verbal instruction via a two-way voice communication system. One night, hunched over a laptop in his home office, Matt remotely guides a student named Harry as he gatecrashes a Christmas office party, eventually going home with a woman he meets there – much to the excitement of the group of men following the proceedings via a live-streaming ‘watcher’s club’. However, Harry’s would-be conquest has misunderstood why he appears to be talking to himself. Believing that, like her, he wants to kill himself, she poisons them both in a gruesome murder-suicide. Seeing this, Matt immediately disconnects and attempts to destroy the evidence of what he has been doing, only to wake his sleeping wife, who uses the Z-Eye to ‘block’ him from her life entirely. By the end of the episode, Matt has been registered as a sex offender and ‘blocked’ by all, meaning that he will never again be able to communicate with anyone.
Promising men ‘mastery’ with women, the seduction industry has unsurprisingly attracted a good deal of feminist commentary and criticism, much of it stemming from the transnational but US-dominated feminist blogosphere. The American feminist news and lifestyle site Jezebel has long reported on the seduction industry: it has examined the underlying assumptions and possible implications of the techniques promoted here and catalogued the exploits of key figures within the industry. Other hightraffic feminist websites such as xoJane and Feministing, as well as aggregator sites such as Buzzfeed, routinely feature articles on seduction; many of these are highly critical, with titles such as ‘Do pickup artist techniques lead to sexual assault?’ (North 2012) and ‘Are pickup artists contributing to rape culture?’ (Smith 2012). Elsewhere, the writer David Futrelle (2017) maintains a website dedicated to tracking what he terms ‘the new misogyny’ elaborated online via the ‘manosphere’, a conglomeration within which he includes PUAs alongside MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) and MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way). Some feminists have taken a more equivocal stance towards seduction, with the blogger Clarisse Thorn exploring the industry and incorporating some of the advice administered here into her own ‘sex-positive’ feminism in Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser (2012). Elsewhere, the pro-feminist site The Good Men Project has run articles criticising some of the more obviously egregious elements of seduction while seeking to retain many of its core themes under the auspices of ‘ethical pickup’ (O’Malley 2014).
Public debate over and attention to the seduction industry reached new heights in November 2014, when a series of campaigns were launched to ban the seduction instructor Julien Blanc – an employee of the American company Real Social Dynamics (RSD) – from countries including Brazil, Canada, Germany, Japan and Singapore, where he had been scheduled to lead training events as part of a world tour. Blanc drew particular criticism for the sexist and racist content of his teachings, which appeared to endorse sexual violence as a seduction tactic and to advocate a kind of sexual neo-imperialism. In a video on his YouTube channel – entitled ‘White male fucks Asian women in Tokyo (and the beautiful methods to it)’ – Blanc boasted about roaming the city streets and grabbing women in order to force their heads towards his groin. On Twitter, he posted an image of the ‘Power and Control Wheel’ commonly used in domestic violence intervention programmes to help women identify abusive behaviours, captioning this with the statement ‘May as well be a checklist … #HowToMakeHerStay’.
What began with a Twitter hashtag started by an Asian-American woman named Jennifer Li, #TakeDownJulienBlanc, quickly developed into a loosely coordinated global initiative. In the UK, a petition calling on the then home secretary, Theresa May, to deny Blanc a visa quickly attracted widespread public support and extraordinary levels of media attention. Politicians from across the political spectrum lined up to denounce Blanc publicly and lobby May to exercise ‘sensible border control’ (quoted in Watt and Mason 2014). Articles and opinion pieces discussing the controversy appeared in the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Independent, and the New Statesman. On Saturday 15 November, the story made the front page of The Guardian, which printed a large image of Blanc accompanied by the headline ‘The pickup artist. Should he be banned from Britain?’. A few days later, it was announced that Blanc’s visa application had been rejected by the Home Office. As multiple news outlets reported at the time, it was the first known instance of a person being denied entry to the UK on the grounds of sexism. Within a matter of weeks, Blanc had become a figure of international opprobrium, encapsulated in the Time magazine headline ‘Is this the most hated man in the world?’ (Gibson 2014).
Though the media event that engulfed Blanc was unprecedented in terms of the level of scrutiny he attracted, it continued a well-established pattern whereby the deviance of pickup artists was affirmed and reified. In doing so, this cultural figure – temporarily embodied by Blanc – became knowable as an individuated problem that could be safely contained through recourse to state intervention. Blanc himself was subject to a variety of armchair diagnoses which saw him branded as a narcissist and sociopath. Commentary about the kinds of men who attend his and other seduction events also proliferated, much of it simultaneously derisive and dismissive. Hadley Freeman, a prominent feminist voice in the UK, penned an article detailing her encounters with men employing seduction tactics and counselling: ‘Women, beware this PUA army of sleazebags, saddos, and weirdos’ (2014).
This book complicates the narrative through which those who participate in the seduction community have become sedimented in the public imaginary as by turns pathetic, pathological or perverse. It does so by locating this community-industry firmly within the broader cultural moment of which it is part and interrogating the economic, social and political arrangements that animate this moment. It is a specifically feminist analysis, one that is critical of the seduction industry but which resists the temptation to isolate this formation from wider cultural currents. Rather than pointing the finger and apportioning blame, or resorting to mockery and ridicule, I want to move towards a more difficult conversation which recognises the seduction industry not as a deviation or departure from current social conventions but as an extension and acceleration of existing cultural norms. This, then, is a study that refuses to partake in spectacle and insists instead on taking the seduction community seriously – without assuming that this means accepting it on its own terms. It charts one among the myriad ways in which the twin rationalities of neoliberalism and postfeminism are remaking every aspect of contemporary life, including its most intimate dimensions.
Researching the seduction industry in London
London represents a major hub within the transnational seduction industry and a popular destination for seduction training in Europe. The industry has had a presence in Britain for at least ten years, with the first UK-based training company, PUA Training, established in 2007 by Richard La Ruina. Today, a panoply of private companies as well as independent trainers offer fee-based seduction training services that include one-to-one coaching, weekend ‘bootcamp’ courses and live-in ‘residential’ programmes, the cost of which ranges from several hundred to thousands of pounds. Blogs and online forums provide spaces for men to document their activities, discuss techniques and give advice to one another. Those with established profiles as trainers often host channels on social media sites such as YouTube, where their videos can garner hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. The industry has developed its own dedicated lexicon, comprising a range of jargon terms and acronyms which serve to designate various conceptual premises and technical manoeuvres. Where these words appear in this book, they are placed in inverted commas to designate their origins within the industry. Though in many cases their meaning is readily apparent, explanations are provided where necessary.
Aside from the small number of company headquarters registered to private apartments in the city centre – where trainers often live together and host clients – the seduction industry is spatially and temporally discontinuous. Adhering in no fixed place, it instead continually consolidates and disaggregates in the capital’s streets, cafés, bars and nightclubs. Nevertheless, its urban geography is well known to those who participate in this sphere, running down Tottenham Court Road via Oxford Street and Bond Street, taking in Soho, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Covent Garden. The Strand and the South Bank are also popular haunts on account of the many public spaces and tourist attractions in these areas, while Knightsbridge and Kensington represent more upmarket destinations. Seduction seminars regularly take place on London university premises, their central locations making these venues practical while additionally lending the industry academic gravitas.
Participating in the seduction industry can be a costly undertaking, with a weekend ‘bootcamp’ at an established company currently retailing for anywhere between £500 and £900. Week-long live-in ‘residential’ programmes can cost £3,000 to £5,000. Instructors working with private clients on a one-to-one basis generally charge upwards of £100 per hour, with some commanding considerably more than this. Commercially, it is a highly competitive industry, with low barriers to entry and minimal overheads. While the tabloid press occasionally run articles exclaiming over the vast sums of money made by coaches (Spencer 2016) and estimates elsewhere suggest it is a $100 million industry (Samra 2017), many of those I spoke to presented seduction training as a precarious enterprise. One trainer explained: ‘It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. These companies might look big, even things like Venusian Arts, RSD, Daygame, PUA Training – but I know all of those guys, and they’re all kind of run in people’s bedrooms.’ Publicly available financial records seem to corroborate this, with many UK-based seduction training companies operating at a relatively low turnover, at least on declared earnings.
Because of the costs involved, participation at live events in London is concentrated among middle-class men with professional occupations such as teaching, engineering, business and finance. The majority are in their twenties and thirties, though some are considerably older. While most of those involved in the industry are white, typically comprising between half and three-quarters of participants at events I attended, this is generally considered unremarkable and goes unremarked upon. By contrast, it is the relative overrepresentation of British Asian men vis-à-vis the general population that most often draws commentary, a discourse informed by the positioning of South Asian British men as either effeminate or hypermasculine (Kalra 2009) alongside the coding of British Muslim men as sexually predacious (Tufall 2015). Meanwhile, white seduction trainers routinely appropriate aspects of rap and hip-hop culture to bolster their own masculine repertoire, variously fashioning themselves as ‘hustlers’, ‘players’ and ‘pimps’ in displays of what Nancy Leong (2013) terms ‘racial capitalism’.1
Gaining access to the seduction industry in London as a researcher proved difficult. Many established companies as well as freelance trainers ignored or refused my requests for meetings. Some of those I met with vetted me extensively, asking about my research questions, intended methods and publication plans. Some offered conditional access on terms to which I could not agree, such as the trainer who said he would allow me to observe his teaching only if he could use any recordings I produced for commercial purposes. The difficulties involved in researching the seduction industry stem, in part, from its taciturn character. Those with a commercial stake in the industry are often wary of receiving negative publicity but know also that publicity of any kind is likely to bring them new students and increase revenue. The difficulties I faced were also partially related to my positioning as a woman, which marked me out not simply as an outsider but also as a potential target. As one trainer put it to me: ‘They’re trying to get you. So they can’t let you see what they’re going to get you with, you know?’ At the same time, it was often suggested that, as a woman, I could use myself as a kind of bait to source participants, as when the same trainer later said: ‘You just need to go to Tiger Tiger [a nightclub] on a Saturday night and they’ll come and talk to you.’ I discuss how such dynamics shaped my experience of researching the seduction community at length in the Postscript: Power and Politics in Feminist Fieldwork.
In the end, the bulk of my fieldwork was enabled by a small number of individuals whose approval not only granted me access to the spaces they administered but also provided inroads to those overseen by their friends, colleagues and business associates. I attended a number of bootcamp programmes, where teams of trainers teach groups of students how to choreograph their interactions with women through a combination of seminar presentations, live demonstrations and practical exercises. I also sat in on individual training sessions and attended a variety of talks, meet-ups and promotional events. Observing these proceedings proved crucial to understanding the discursive patternings, relational dynamics and affective rhythms that animate the seduction industry. In some cases, I was additionally provided with access to company training materials and student profiles, information which further enhanced my understanding of the industry’s pedagogic remit and client base. While undertaking fieldwork I was very often able to make detailed notes in situ, my own jottings rendered inconspicuous by virtue of the fact that many of those around me were also writing. Where this was not possible, I recorded key words and phrases, later using these to write up more extensive reports. By the end of my fieldwork, I had filled four 200-page diaries with hand-written notes, extracts of which appear throughout this book.
Through my fieldwork I recruited a total of thirty-two interview participants, the majority of whom I met with individually in the identikit environs of the coffee-shop chains that populate central London. Where, in a small number of cases, distances involved did not allow us to meet in person, interviews were held over the phone or by Skype. In almost all instances, I had already met and spent time with participants and was able to talk to them about events we had both attended, the people we had met there, and so forth. When recruiting participants I sought to include a broad cross-section of those involved in the London seduction community, from bootcamp students and private coaching clients, freelance trainers and company employees, event managers and CEOs. Though the majority of these participants were men – reflecting the overwhelmingly gendered composition of the industry – I also interviewed a small number of women who work in the industry, whose gendered exceptionality is continually highlighted by themselves and others via their designation as ‘female trainers’ and ‘wing girls’. Short biographical notes for all participants, each of whom has been given a pseudonym, are in the Appendices. Collated demographic information – encompassing age, education, occupation, ‘race’ and ethnicity, disability and mental health – is also included. On average, interviews lasted two hours, though some went as long as four or five. Some participants were, at their own request, interviewed on a second occasion. Others kept in touch via email, periodically sending me updates about their activities as well as links to or copies of materials they felt would be relevant to the research. Once compiled for analysis, transcripts totalled almost 600,000 words, or just over seven times the length of this book.
Long before beginning my fieldwork I kept tabs on the huge array of media produced by this industry, and I have continued to do so since completing it. For the past eight years I have subscribed to the mailing lists of a number of British and American seduction training companies and have received an average of fifteen to twenty promotional emails per week, the continual flow of which has allowed me to stay apace of new products and decipher industry trends. I have amassed a virtual library of seduction texts, read innumerable blog posts and forum discussions, and watched countless hours of video content, all of which provide insight into what it is the industry markets to men. I have given special attention to autobiographical books and blogs where trainers document their own personal transformation, gesturing to a past in which they were lonely and unpopular while showcasing a present in which they enjoy near constant access to beautiful women as part of a more generally enviable lifestyle of world travel, financial independence and male camaraderie. Examining these texts provides insight not only into the working lives of these men but also into the psychic investments of those who look to them as masculine exemplars, and for whom these texts function variously as blueprints for living, fantastic escapism, sexualised entertainment and erotic kindling. I have followed English-language reporting on the seduction industry the world over and compiled what now amounts to hundreds of news articles from countries including the UK, the US, Australia, China, France, Germany, India and Israel.
Instructional videos posted on sites such as YouTube represent an especially important media source, as many participants cited these videos as their primary mode of engagement with seduction expertise. To this end, I have followed the YouTube channels of a number of key figures within the industry over the duration of the project, watching the videos they produce and reading the discussion threads these generate. By far the most popular genre is the ‘in-field’ video, whereby trainers covertly film their interactions with women and later add ‘how-to’ commentary via voice-overs or explanatory subtitles. Indeed, in recent years in-field footage has become such an important marker of expertise that now any trainer who does not offer this kind of content is liable to find their legitimacy called into question. Richard La Ruina, for example, one of the few British seduction trainers without a public playbook or commercial catalogue of in-field videos, routinely faces demands for evidence of his expertise in below-the-line comments on his YouTube channel.2
In analysing the various materials this research produced, my process was both inductive and recursive, with lines of enquiry developed by reading across interview transcripts to examine common patterns and then putting these into dialogue with fieldwork observations and media analyses. Consistent with feminist poststructuralist approaches, analysis was orientated towards ‘understanding the cultural conditions of possibility for being in the world’ (Gavey 2011: 186). Thus, in addressing the question of why involvement in the seduction industry is compelling to many men, I train attention not only towards psychological processes and interpersonal dynamics but to the relationship between culture and subjectivity at a more fundamental level. To this end, it is important to state that, while I am interested in how claims to expertise are made – a theme taken up at greatest length in chapter 3 – this book does not attempt to address the commonly asked question of whether or not seduction techniques actually ‘work’. Research of this kind, utilising surveys and psychological measures, is available elsewhere (Hall and Canterberry 2011). Neither do I attempt to inventory the full range of seduction methods available or provide an organisational history of the industry. Instead, the focus throughout is on how this cultural formation variously reflects, reproduces and reanimates broader social patterns.
In the dedicated Postscript at the end of this book, I discuss my experiences undertaking this research at some length. However, it is worth flagging two interrelated methodological issues regarding my research practice from the outset. First, in researching the seduction community I did not take up the knowledge-practices elaborated in this sphere by approaching strangers and attempting to convert these encounters into further meetings or relationships. Elsewhere, the British artist Alex Brew has done precisely this, spending a week meeting men using techniques outlined in a popular seduction handbook for a project entitled ‘femme-takingliberties’ (2011). Of this experience, she writes:
Attempting to perform the ways of interacting described in the book was depressing in some ways and led to incredibly surprising and human interactions in others. For a start, I was originally going to follow the suggestion of 100 approaches in a day but it was too much. That’s gruelling. You can’t be human at all approaching that many people in a day. You’re bringing the capitalist productivity model into your personal life. Maybe I’ll try it some time but it’s a horrible prospect. Then there’s the problem that you can’t really just be open to a person. You have to stay in control of your game. Everything is about your performance, your pick-up … I felt a bit of a dishonest shit at times. (Brew 2011)
Yet, while I did not apply myself to the hard graft of seduction, over time I nevertheless took on aspects of the seduction mindset. Even without realising what I was doing, while observing training sessions I found myself scanning crowds in much the way trainers do, observing interactions with the same appraising eye, calculating odds on eventual outcomes. However, I also maintained a different perspective from trainers and students, one more closely attuned to the variety of repertoires women use to negotiate unwanted advances in public settings.
Second, in researching this community-industry I have been unable to address directly women’s experiences of being ‘seduced’. While to do so would clearly throw up a host of ethical as well as practical questions, the decision not to seek out women’s voices has been a continual source of concern for me as a feminist researcher. After all, women have long been positioned as the proper ‘object’ of feminist study, such that projects without women at their centre are liable to have their feminist credentials called into question (Wiegman 2001). And yet, while creating knowledge about women’s lives and experiences is undoubtedly an important goal of feminist research, ‘if our concern is to understand women’s oppression we need to target our attention on the ways it is structured and reproduced … Studying women’s lives as a feminist means that male dominance, masculinity and men are always part of the research’ (Kelly et al. 1994: 33). Women’s experiences of seduction have, however, been examined elsewhere in the work of the American artist Angela Washko. After reading a series of seduction handbooks produced by the infamous US-based pickup artist Roosh V – whose titles include Bang ([2007] 2010), Bang Ukraine (2012) and Don’t Bang Denmark (2011) – Washko decided to curate an online project called Banged. She posted a series of calls asking women who had slept with Roosh V to be interviewed, stating: ‘If you have been with this man, he has made a very public assessment of you but hasn’t given you a voice … I can promise you anonymity, respect, and an opportunity to critique the experience. There is plenty out there online about this guy’s sexual conquests … but nothing about [women’s] experiences’ (Washko 2015). The project later expanded to include women who have had encounters with any man using seduction techniques, the result of which is an archive of stories by turns comical, exasperating, unnerving, enraging and devastating.
Seduction as mediated intimacy
This book approaches the seduction community as a site of ‘mediated intimacy’, a concept originating in the work of the social and cultural theorist Rosalind Gill. In a study of women’s magazines (2009), Gill examines how the sex and relationship advice these texts provide frames intimate subjectivity as a site of labour. Her analysis identifies a series of representational patterns or discursive repertoires. The first of these is ‘intimate entrepreneurship’, whereby sex and relationships are to be meticulously planned for, continually evaluated and actively managed. Second, these texts elaborate a kind of ‘men-ology’, explaining what men are like and giving women detailed instruction in how to please and appease them. Third is what Gill terms ‘transforming the self ’, as women are called upon to remodel how they think and feel about their bodies, desires, sexual practices and relationships. Taken together, these repertoires exhort women to work on their sexual selves and invest in an intimate skill set: ‘to self-monitor and monitor others, to work on and transform the intimate self, to regulate every aspect of their conduct, and to present every action – however constrained or normatively demanded – as the outcome of individual choice and a deliberative personal biography’ (Gill 2009: 366).
More recent work undertaken by Gill in collaboration with Meg-John Barker and Laura Harvey argues that intimate life is shaped by a large variety of media, far beyond texts that are explicitly advice-orientated: ‘we live in a world suffused and saturated with representations of intimate relationships; our understandings about love and sex are not bounded by advice that announces itself with “how-to” guides’ (Barker et al. 2018: 24). Thus even media that are not of an obviously instructive character set out certain expectations, producing collective – though contested – conventions about what is normal and desirable in sexual and intimate relationships. Moreover, advisory discourses originating in the self-help genre percolate through a range of other media, such that each informs and inflects the other. To give but one example of this, the book (Behrendt and Tuccillo 2004) and, later, the film (2009) He’s Just Not That into You – which, as the title suggests, purports to decipher men’s otherwise unfathomable romantic cues for women liable to read them in an overly positive light – was inspired by an episode of Sex and the City (2003), where Carrie’s new boyfriend gives Miranda insight into what is presented as a universal and immutable male psychology.
To talk about intimacy as mediated, then, is to talk about how intimate life is patterned by media representations which churn all around us and cycle through our lives. Narrating and aestheticising the interpersonal dynamics of attraction and desire, sex and romance, lust and love, media provide unspoken guidelines for the organisation of feeling. And, while intimacy is always mediated in some sense – most obviously through language but also through affect, bodies, technologies (Attwood et al. 2017) – media have become a key source of knowledge and information about sex and relationships, not least as the influence of religious dictum and other traditional forms of authority wane (Plummer 1995). Directed by commercial imperatives, the most widely consumed forms of media exploit readily recognisable and easily consumable tropes, thereby reproducing highly conventional ideas about what relationships should look and feel like. Popular media distils and dramatises the ‘regulatory fictions’ (Butler [1990] 2011) of gender and sexuality, providing ‘supplied states of being’ (Lorde 1984) which we are encouraged to align ourselves with and measure ourselves against. Even if, as individuals, we were never to read a sex advice column or consult a relationship self-help book, the ideas promoted here nevertheless seep into our lives and shape everyday forms of being and relating. Media provide the backdrop against which we understand and articulate our desires. Ideas borrowed from the media inform how we feel about a one-night stand or marriage proposal. Their iconography enters into the very moment at which a relationship is consolidated or breaks down. Idealised imagery sets a yardstick against which actually existing relationships are evaluated. While the social arrangements produced as a result of these continual interchanges are certainly not determined by media representations, our intimate lives are nevertheless indelibly impressed by and patterned with their influences.
Through its emphasis on the dynamic interplay between culture and subjectivity, the concept of mediated intimacy directs attention towards the shaping of intimate life by wider cultural rationalities, most especially those of neoliberalism and postfeminism. While as an economic system neoliberalism is centred around minimising welfare provision, privatising public assets and maximising corporate profits (Harvey 2005), it necessarily gives rise to particular modes of sociality and subjectivity (Gilbert 2013; Hall 2011). As a mode of governance, neoliberalism ‘normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life’ (Brown 2005: 42). While foregrounding the market, it is ‘not only or even primarily focussed on the economy’ but, rather, involves ‘extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player’ (ibid.: 39–40). Closely related to neoliberalism, postfeminism describes a social landscape or cultural sensibility wherein feminism is both ‘taken into account’ and ‘undone’ (McRobbie 2009). Elements of feminism are incorporated into social and political life, such that the wide variety of movements coalescing under this banner are deemed unnecessary. Postfeminism ‘positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality has been achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force’ (ibid.: 12). By co-opting the language of feminism, postfeminism converts ‘empowerment’ and ‘choice’ into consumer activities that substitute for political engagement and collective action. Where women are constructed as the ‘beneficiaries’ of social change, any remaining inequality can be understood only through a grammar of individualism. Thus ‘postfeminism proclaims for gender what neoliberalism advocates in a broader sense: both assert that the individual bears ultimate responsibility for their social status’ (Negra and Tasker 2013: 348).
In approaching the seduction community as a site of mediated intimacy, I want to push against interpretations offered elsewhere, which characterise this formation as either a subculture (Baker 2013) or a self-help movement (Hendriks 2012). Though it has some of the trappings of a subculture – the jargon, the secrecy – it is nowhere near as bounded or alternative as this framework implies. Similarly, while it is suffused with logics of self-betterment and individual uplift, to label the seduction industry as a self-help movement fails to address the specifically genderedand sexual character of the system of expertise enumerated here, the result of which is that issues of power and inequality are downplayed or disregarded altogether. In addition, both these framings overlook the financial interests at play in this so-called community, the very language of which lends it a sense of authenticity and inclusivity that is commercially beneficial.
In the main, however, recognising the seduction community as a site of mediated intimacy means attending to the ways in which the form of expertise elaborated here is not distinct from but, rather, continuous with much sex and relationship advice administered elsewhere. To this end, it is worth noting that those who work in the seduction industry routinely contribute columns to, write features for, and are profiled by major magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health. Many additionally dispense advice to large audiences via popular online sites such as AskMen, where they rebrand themselves as ‘dating experts’ and ‘lifestyle coaches’. The industry borrows from and is informed by many of the same knowledge formations that undergird heterosexual sex and relationship advice more generally, most particularly that of evolutionary psychology, a major purveyor of the ‘two sexes, two cultures’ paradigm (Potts 1998) and one that has come to enjoy outsized authority amid a more general ‘psychologisation’ of everyday life (Rose 1998). Principles and techniques elaborated in the seduction community frequently manifest elsewhere, such that ‘negging’ – a much discussed seduction tactic that involves making negative statements about someone so as to undermine their confidence – has been inaugurated by journalists as a ‘dating trend’ (Bradshaw 2012; Woolf 2012). Because the seduction community is so widely dispersed and disaggregated, its logics find many ways of entering into heterosexual intimacies.
In pursuing an analysis of the seduction community as a site of mediated intimacy, I also hope to extend the concept’s theoretical purchase in three ways. First, through ethnographic research I seek to go beyond a concern with textual representations in order to examine how mediated intimacy is lived and experienced. To this end, I examine how men take up and try on the advice elaborated in this setting, adopting certain seduction axioms while bypassing others. At the same time, and recognising the ways in which media technologies have entered into the relational fabric of intimate life, I consider how men in this setting use media to work on their sexual selves. The arguments developed in this book thus work with the notion of ‘mediated’ while de-centring ‘media’.
Relatedly, and this is my second theoretical concern, in utilising the language of mediated intimacy I want to think about how that which goesbetween gets between. This line of enquiry is born of a recognition that sex and relationship advice frequently corrals us to inhabit categories to which we have been assigned rather than chosen, and to follow scripts we have inherited rather than authored. We are told, in a whole variety of ways, that by occupying these categories and taking up these scripts we are aligning ourselves with happiness (Ahmed 2010b). And yet this is not to say that happiness is what we will get by adhering to prevailing wisdom or newfangled expertise. Thus, while in general usage ‘mediate’ refers to the process whereby things are brought together – in the sense of arbitrate, liaise, conciliate – one of the ambitions of this book is to use the term to think about interceptions and impediments. Indeed, the Latin root ‘mediatus’ – which means ‘placed in the middle’ – directs us to explore precisely this predicament, whereby that which promises to enable intimacy may actually serve to occlude it.
Third, and most substantially, this book centres questions of men and masculinity. While the majority of sex and relationship advice is implicitly or explicitly directed towards heterosexual women – a trend reflected in existing analyses – the system of expertise enumerated in the seduction industry is overwhelmingly produced by and for heterosexual men. Recognising it as a site of mediated intimacy prompts a consideration of how neoliberalism shapes the intimate subjectivities of men, while also demanding attention be paid to the ways in which men navigate the terrain of postfeminism in the context of their intimate relationships. These issues have been largely overlooked in existing scholarship within feminist cultural studies and sociological masculinity studies.
To begin with, where masculinities scholars attend to the workings of neoliberalism, it is generally with an understanding of neoliberalism as an economic programme rather than a cultural rationality. As a result, we have a good deal of research on what might be thought of as the henchmen of neoliberalism – corporate managers and finance executives (Connell and Wood 2005; Griffin 2013) – but rather less on those who may be called upon to model themselves on the version of masculinity these men propagate. Indeed, scholarship that engages this kind of analysis is often more likely to be found beyond the conventional purview of masculinity studies, in areas such as anthropology (Cornwall et al. 2016) and cultural analysis (Gilroy 2013), both of which I engage with.3 Informed by the interventions by poststructuralist scholars in masculinity studies (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994; Frosh et al. 2001; Wetherell and Edley 1999), and deliberately bypassing entrenched debates about hegemonic masculinity (Beasley 2008; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Messerschmidt 2012), I am concerned to examine how neoliberal rationalities centred on management and entrepreneurship shape the intimate subjectivities of heterosexual men. In doing so, I am interested less in arguing that neoliberal capitalism is fashioning a new hegemonic variant of masculinity than in examining how the logics of neoliberalism get under men’s skin.
In relation to postfeminism, scholarship in this area overwhelmingly privileges subjects that are middle class (Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008), white (Butler 2013) and Western (Dosekun 2015), all of whom are almost invariably women
