Seduction

Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy

Rachel O'Neill

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509521593
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Media Studies

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.

1
The Work of Seduction

I arrive at Oxford Circus a little before the appointed 12 p.m. meeting time. By ten past, all the students and trainers are there, and together we set off to a nearby café for a briefing session. I fall into step with the lead instructor, who jokes that, by the end of the weekend, I’ll have learned enough about seduction not to fall prey to it myself. He goes on to muse that perhaps all women should attend a course like this ‘for their own self-defence’. When we arrive at the café, he is greeted by two men sitting at a corner table. He walks over to where they are sitting, shakes each of them by the hand, and asks what they’re doing here. Having themselves taken the bootcamp just a few months previously, the pair have come to London for the day to hone their skills and have arranged a double date that night with women they met on their last excursion. Wishing them good luck, the lead instructor rejoins the present bootcamp cohort where they have gathered, coffees in hand, at another table towards the back of the café.

After each student has introduced himself, the lead instructor goes over the schedule for the weekend and asks if everyone has studied the online course to which they have been given access ahead of the bootcamp. He spends a few minutes summarising the key principles and core techniques students will be learning, reminding them to ‘give girls that movie moment’. Satisfied that they have a basic understanding of the central tenets they will spend the rest of the weekend refining, another trainer pulls out a backpack and spills its contents on the table. A tangle of wires lie in front of us, and he explains that each student will wear a small hidden microphone throughout the weekend so that their interactions with women can be more closely evaluated. Once everyone has been fitted out, we leave the café, the instructor saying: ‘Try to do five before lunch.’

Later that afternoon, I stand with two trainers outside the flagship Topshop store at Oxford Circus while waiting for the bootcamp collective to assemble again. One points towards the enormous billboard that towers over us and tells the other that he had approached the model on the street a few days previously. I look up at the image. The woman is white, young and slim. She leans against a worn-out dresser, her long blonde hair falling over her shoulders, the scarlet dress she is wearing slit to the thigh. She is everything advertising tells women to be – and has the billboard in central London to prove it. The other trainer scarcely glances up before pronouncing: ‘She’s not that hot.’ The first trainer seems taken aback by this response, but only for a moment. Quickly recovering his composure, he nods in agreement and says: ‘She’s not great and definitely not as good in real life.’

In Undoing the Demos, the political theorist Wendy Brown (2015) examines how the relentless economisation of social life taking place over the past four decades in the US has fundamentally undermined the country’s social institutions. Brown is clear in arguing that, while it involves the market, economisation is not the same as or reducible to commercialisation or commodification. Rather, ‘neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities – even where money is not at issue – and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus’ (Brown 2015: 31). While Brown is concerned primarily with institutions such as government and education, she makes some suggestive comments about how neoliberal rationalities might enter into and repattern intimate relationships, for example noting that, within neoliberal contexts, ‘one might approach one’s dating life in the mode of an entrepreneur or investor’, attempting to maximise ‘return on investment of affect, not only time and money’ (ibid.).

This chapter examines how logics of management and enterprise organise the intimate subjectivities of men who participate in the seduction community. I discuss how those involved in this sphere attempt to ‘sort out’ their intimate lives by approaching their relationships with women in much the same way as they do other endeavours such as work or study. I examine how men spoke about their past relationships and attempt to make sense of the pervasive dissatisfaction which patterned these narratives. I also look at how an aspirational ethos shapes the embodied impulses of desire, as female beauty is held up as an index of masculine worth. I argue that the entrepreneurial logic that characterises men’s engagements with seduction generally is literalised among professional seducers or career pickup artists – those who make a living in the seduction industry – for whom the accumulation of sexual experience functions as a means not only to acquire masculine status but to generate economic capital. I conclude by examining practices of sexual self-branding – whereby trainers document their intimate lives and open these out for public consumption – demonstrating that, within the seduction community, already tenuous distinctions between life and work under neoliberalism are decidedly collapsed.

Cultivating a sexual work ethic

In 2012 the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey (James 2012) created a transnational phenomenon, with 70 million copies sold worldwide. The book centres on the relationship between a young woman graduate and a powerful male business magnate – the eponymous Grey – and was considered notable for its BDSM themes and imagery. Accounting for the book’s tremendous popularity, Eva Illouz (2014) argues that though conventionally viewed as a romantic fantasy, Fifty Shades is better understood as a kind of self-help text. She describes the threefold movement charted by the book’s main narrative, which ‘encodes the aporias of heterosexual relationships, offers a fantasy for overcoming these aporias, and functions as a self-help sexual manual’ (ibid.: 30). Outlining the broader cultural trajectory of which Fifty Shades is part, Illouz cites the best-sellers Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (Gray 1992) and The Rules (Fein and Schneider 1995) as forerunners. For Illouz, each of these texts has achieved wide cultural resonance because it taps into collective anxieties and shared preoccupations about sex and relationships, while framing these in an explanatory way by providing instruction in the successful management of intimate life (Illouz 2014: 23).

Published in the interim between these titles is Neil Strauss’s The Game (2005), an autobiographical self-help guide in which the author chronicles his engagements with the then burgeoning seduction community in the United States and his eventual transformation into a full-fledged pickup artist. Strauss introduces himself by cataloguing his physical shortcomings and underlining his undesirability:

I am far from attractive. My nose is too large for my face and, while not hooked, has a bump in the ridge. Though I am not bald, to say that my hair is thinning would be an understatement … I am shorter than I’d like and so skinny that I look malnourished to most people, no matter how much I eat. When I look down at my pale, slouched body, I wonder why any woman would want to embrace it. So, for me, meeting girls takes work. (2005: 4)

Over the course of 500 pages, Strauss details his rise within the seduction community and regales readers with a seemingly countless number of sexual exploits. The book predictably culminates, two years later, with Strauss becoming involved in a relationship with a woman who does not easily submit to his cultivated charms, but who eventually comes to love him for who he really is. After this, he supposedly leaves seduction behind, claiming: ‘To win the game is to leave it’ (2005: 473).¹

The Game topped the New York Times best-seller list for two months in 2005, and it remains a best-seller across a range of categories on sites such as Amazon more than a decade after its initial publication. Yet where the relational programmatics proscribed by books such as Mars and Venus, The Rules and Fifty Shades of Grey are more or less explicitly addressed to heterosexual women, the advice elaborated in The Game is unambiguously directed towards heterosexual men. Within the seduction community, The Game functions as a kind of Urtext. Virtually everyone I spoke to had read or was at least familiar with the book, and many men referenced the text as a means to explain or make sense of their own engagement with the industry. Describing why he had first begun attending seduction training events some months previously, Ali said:

Well, I guess it’s an area of my life that I’ve never felt like I really … handled that well. I feel like I did well academically and creatively, and I’ve always been fine socially, but when it comes to the relationship side of things I feel like I’m never – I guess, similar to what Neil Strauss says in The Game, he felt like – I think he says he felt like that was an area of his life that he never really felt he had any control over. And I feel like … I feel the same. I never had much control. I was always waiting for something to happen, or stuff was acting upon me. And this kind of seems like a way to gain control in that area of my life.

As a popular best-seller that has amassed a large general readership – the UK paperback edition boasting endorsements from GQ, The Guardian and Elle magazine – The Game provides a form of social recognition for heterosexual men who feel they lack control and agency in their intimate lives. At the same time, it serves to legitimate discursively and reproduce performatively the perception that men should exercise control in their relationships with women and premises that this can be achieved by utilising the knowledge-practices elaborated therein. In this way, The Game follows the same threefold movement as Fifty Shades and other best-selling sexual self-help guides: it stages the aporias of heterosexual relations by demonstrating the author’s inability to attract women, provides a symbolic resolution to this by showcasing his transformation into a successful seducer, and offers readers a compendium of practical resources with which to manage their own intimate lives as Strauss exhaustively details the tactics and techniques he employed over hundreds of sexual encounters.

For many of the men I spoke with and interviewed, discovering seduction as a distinct system of expertise – often through reading The Game, but also through encounters with the wide range of seduction guides, TV programmes, DVD series and online materials that have since become available – was accompanied by profound feelings of relief and reassurance. When we met, Moe was attending his second seduction bootcamp, having flown to the UK from Sweden to take the two-day course with a London-based company. He described the sense of optimism that taking these courses had inspired in him: ‘It actually gave me a feeling that there is hope, I can do something about this. I can change, really. It’s not only for those who … it’s nothing you’re born with – you can learn it, you can change.’ Similarly, Ali explained how he felt after attending a seduction seminar:

Probably more a sense of … I think calmness almost. I feel like I’m working towards something, so things … I will get better. And there’s like a peace that I know as long as I keep doing this I will have this area of my life sorted. It just feels better, in a way, knowing that you can do something. And there’s … it’s like another skill.

Statements such as these readily illustrate the strong affective dynamics that engagement with this community-industry can generate among men who feel they lack control in their intimate lives. The particular form of expertise on offer here contravenes the pervasive assumption that success with women and dating is a matter of inheritance or good fortune. Instead, sexual and intimate relationality is understood as a skill or competency that can be cultivated through practical training and personal development. Seduction thus enjoins heterosexual men to cultivate a ‘sexual work ethic’, whereupon ‘the domain of intimate relationships is treated as analogous to the domain of employment’ (Rogers 2005: 186).

Where an equivalency is drawn between the world of work and the world of sex, the competencies required to run a successful business can be deemed analogous to those necessary to become successful with women. When I asked Ryan, whom I had met at a weekend seduction training programme, how he had decided to take the course, he described having shopped around online comparing various options. He decided to enrol on this particular course after being impressed by the sales technique of the trainer featured in the company’s promotional video: ‘I thought, well, this guy can definitely sell. So if he can sell me the product, I think he is good with girls also. And I thought, I can learn from him. Because of the way he talked, very confident. If he can convince me, then he probably can convince girls.’ Competency in negotiating sexual relationships is thus assumed to be synonymous with business prowess, as Ryan reasons that, if a trainer can convince him to pay £700 for a weekend course, he can probably also convince women to sleep with him. At the same time, Ryan implicitly positions himself as more discerning in his consumer choices than women are in their sexual choices, supposing that it is likely to be easier for the trainer to entice women into bed than it is for him to entice men such as Ryan onto a costly seduction training programme. Notably, heterosexual sex is understood as a matter of inducement: just as the salesman persuades customers to buy his products, so the seducer convinces women to sleep with him.

The framing of intimate relationality as a skill that can be honed and developed draws on and redeploys the logic of meritocracy, which in its current iteration works to marketise the idea of equality by combining an essentialised notion of talent with a belief in social mobility (Littler 2013). Adam, a trainer who has worked in the seduction industry for a number of years, explained: ‘I think what game does, it kind of gives power back to those who are not the biggest, strongest, most athletic. It’s a set of skills that can actually be learnt by different people, which makes it quite accessible to all.’ Through an appeal to equal opportunities – the contention that these skills are available to everyone – it is premised that any man can achieve greater control in his relationships with women, provided he is willing to make the necessary effort to do so. As a configuration of sexual practice, seduction channels the meritocratic feeling of neoliberal culture at large by facilitating an ethos of competitive individualism within the domain of intimate relationships. There is, however, a kind of compulsion embedded within this promise of control, as those who take up these knowledge-practices become wholly responsible for the relative success or failure of their sexual relationships. This sense of responsibility functioned as a constant exhortation to work more and try harder; as Antonio related: ‘If you don’t do anything, nothing happens. As with everything in life, if you don’t work, if you don’t … yo...

Índice

• Cover
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Work of Seduction
• 2 Pedagogy and Profit
• 3 Manufacturing Consent
• 4 Seduction and Sexual Politics
• Conclusion: Against Seduction
• Postscript: Power and Politics in Feminist Fieldwork
• Appendices
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement