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 âsort outâ 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 menâs engagements with seduction generally is literalised among professional seducers or career pickup artists â those who make a living in the seduction industry â 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 â whereby trainers document their intimate lives and open these out for public consumption â 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 â the eponymous Grey â and was considered notable for its BDSM themes and imagery. Accounting for the bookâs 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 bookâs main narrative, which âencodes the aporias of heterosexual relationships, offers a fantasy for overcoming these aporias, and functions as a self-help sexual manualâ (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 Straussâs 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 Iâd 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: âTo win the game is to leave itâ (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 itâs an area of my life that Iâve never felt like I really ⊠handled that well. I feel like I did well academically and creatively, and Iâve always been fine socially, but when it comes to the relationship side of things I feel like Iâm never â I guess, similar to what Neil Strauss says in The Game, he felt like â 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 â the UK paperback edition boasting endorsements from GQ, The Guardian and Elle magazine â 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 authorâs 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 â 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 â 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: âIt actually gave me a feeling that there is hope, I can do something about this. I can change, really. Itâs not only for those who ⊠itâs nothing youâre born with â you can learn it, you can change.â Similarly, Ali explained how he felt after attending a seduction seminar:
Probably more a sense of ⊠I think calmness almost. I feel like Iâm working towards something, so things ⊠I will get better. And thereâs 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 thereâs ⊠itâs 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 âsexual work ethicâ, whereupon âthe domain of intimate relationships is treated as analogous to the domain of employmentâ (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 companyâs promotional video: âI 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.â 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 ÂŁ700 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: âI think what game does, it kind of gives power back to those who are not the biggest, strongest, most athletic. Itâs a set of skills that can actually be learnt by different people, which makes it quite accessible to all.â Through an appeal to equal opportunities â the contention that these skills are available to everyone â 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: âIf you donât do anything, nothing happens. As with everything in life, if you donât work, if you donât ⊠yo...