Auditing and Crafting Self-Presentation
Henry: “Sure. So, within the firm of ABCD, we [coaches] each have our silos of expertise, areas of expertise. Because, like I said, if you are one person, you only have your experiences to talk about [theme of personal experience/embodiment as key in the manufacture of expertise in dating skills.] And, you can’t be an expert in all fields, it’s not possible. So by creating a firm—a think-tank, if you will—the sum is greater than the parts, because we all get to learn from each other, and help our own teaching as well. I focus on the daytime. So night-time is [at a] bar, a party, or a social events. Daytime is work, walking up on the street, the subway—where you spend most of your life. So I’ll meet with a client five times, or seven times. He’ll meet twice with a night-time coach, once with a flirting coach, twice with a female coach—he’ll meet me the vast majority of the time. So we sit down, every session, it’s one hour long. We meet at a coffee shop, we call it being out in the field. Because, you can’t learn baseball sitting in a room. So we talk for part of the time, and then we’ll go out into the field and actually practice what we just talked about. And there’s a curriculum; there’s [subjects, like] ‘this is what I talk about on the first session, this is what I talk about on the second session.’ However, the further they go on, the more open it becomes, and we can focus on things that they might need more help on. Or, I might do the fifth session [as the] third, and the third session fifth, because I think they need more focus on these particular things. And then, when I take them out, first of all I have to show them how to do it—to show them that everything that I’m telling you can be done, and easily. That it’s not brain-surgery, things like that.”
Me: “Can you give me an example of that flow—you said from day 1 to day 5, the sequence of topics?”
H: “Sure. So day 1, basically, is a little bit about destroying everything they thought they knew. A little bit like the military, we break them down to build them back up again. [Theme of the process of transformation, liminal, like a conversion-narrative.] I’ll take you through it quickly. So, one thing I always do is [that] I bring a journal. Psychologically, if you write things down, it makes them feel more valued, because you’re wasting a resource—even something as small as this [paper]… Because if you just sit and talk at someone… And I always tell them to bring one too, because if you write something down, it’s in your brain in three places: where you heard it, the actual physical writing of it, and then the reading from the writing. So it brings it in. For instance, the first session… [flips through his journal] And this [process] is for men, women are different. [HERE I WOULD LOVE TO ASK HIM, HOW ARE WOMEN DIFFERENT? HOW DO YOU COACH DIFFERENTLY AROUND WOMEN?] So, what do guys look for in a woman first?”
Me: “Looks.”
H: “Right. So that’s when I start talking about the biology. Where the symmetry of faces is [represents the] genes and chromosomes, and hormonal flow is good nice hair, and waist-to-hip ratio… Just because it’s a simple word [‘looks’] doesn’t mean it’s not complex in its origin. Now, there are four things that women look for in a guy. What do you think they are? Then I have them [clients] list it. Because now, I’m hearing, psychologically—whatever they say is what they think they should be giving. If they think women like money, then they’ll be like [answer], ‘my beamer, my apartment, things like that’.”
Me: “You see what kind of issue they’re creating for themselves [around women]…”
H: “Yep. So, this guy [in the journal] said ‘looks, manners, age, and positive energy.’ Let’s see what some other people have said. ‘Sense of style, success and money, looks, and frankness.’ Let’s see…”
Me: “That’s interesting. I haven’t heard ‘connection’ yet…”
H: “[another person says] ‘Social, stable, humor, not boring.’ So these are all the things that people… So you hear what they’re [thinking]. You can’t say ‘connection’, because, ‘what makes that connection?’ Because a lot of dating is nebulous. So getting them to really concretely be able to define things is difficult, but it’s much easier once you have a word for an idea—a concrete idea for it. [This quote also makes sense in the context of explaining the application of ‘techniques’ in seduction. Inventing ‘attraction techniques’ (PUA) simultaneously enables commodification and monetization, while also acting pragmatically to name, to label, and thus to familiarize men with these ‘nebulous states’ that, before being named, were that much more existentially foreign and angst-producing. Here, you could think of Derrida On The Name.] So once they say what their four things are, then I go through them and attack them, basically. Like ‘okay, it’s not not-boring, because there’s people like Bill Gates—you ever heard him talk? He’s kinda boring. He’s got money. He’s boring, but he still gets girls. Obviously it’s not not-boring.’ Sense of humor? ‘Okay, you hear a lot of girls say ‘I like a guy’s sense of humor.’ Do most stand-up comedians have a flock of women trying to hook up with them? No. In fact it’s rarely offered.’ So obviously, that’s not something that’s gonna do it. Money and stable? Then I tell them [clients] about when I was an actor and unemployed; and I had women buying drinks for me, buying dinner for me, taking me out, buying me clothes… it’s fun to have a sugar mama for a little bit, but you feel lesser as a person when people are buying things for you. [I mean] you’re a man. But it opened my eyes, because it doesn’t mean—I had nothing—and women were paying me to be out with them. So obviously there’s something more at play. ‘Social’. Well, there are a lot of introverts who are book-type people, and they’re going to get girls. So it’s not that. And it’s like, ‘wow, okay, so what is it?’ Then we go into what it is: confidence, leadership, image, and power. So I go through each one of these. So first one, confidence. And I have them define confidence, and this is getting them to find what it actually means. Because they’ve heard people say ‘yeah, confidence’. But if they don’t know what it means, then they can’t be it. So then we talk about leadership, and physical leadership versus emotional leadership. And then, it’s not [about] looks—it’s image. [Interesting—this, ‘image’, is where personality meets brand in the craft of the dating ‘makeover’ that coaches give their clients. It would be interesting to do a semiotic study of ‘image’ that dating coaches create for their male clients. It relates to glamour, to branding, and to masculinity. Conceptually, ‘Image’ also integrates the power of affect—not just how one looks but how one is ‘being’, the ‘beingness’ as Brian Begin would put it.] So most everyone has seen a pretty girl with a guy, and you look at him and you say, ‘how the hell did he get her?’ So there’s obviously more than looks to it, so we talk about image. And then power. So now it’s like ‘alright, so that’s what women look for, so how do we go about doing [creating] that?’ And I say, what’s been difficult for guys, is the rom-com—the romantic comedy. Because who gets the girl in these movies?”
Me: “Nice guys.”
H: “[Yes] And this never happens in real life. So we are as affected by media as women are, just in different ways. [Here H blames the ‘culture industries’ for the propagation of ‘nice guy syndrome’.] So then I ask them, ‘give me the personality traits of the nice guy.’ Well first I ask them, ‘have you ever been accused of being a ‘nice guy’?’ They might say ‘oh, yeah!’ [I say] ‘Tell me about it, what was it like?’ [My method is that] I make them connect to what you’re [I’m] talking about. Make them see themselves in what you’re talking about. And they go ‘Oohhhhhh [realization]’, we call it the ‘aha moment.’ They’re like ‘Oh! Right, yeah…”
Me: “In terms of the behaviors they understand that they were conveying…”
H: “Exactly. So we say, ‘ok, so when you were being a nice guy, what were you doing—gimme some traits of the nice guy’. And they say, ‘caring, understanding, selfless, givers, flexible, punctual…’ I might lead towards some of the ones [definitions] that I need. And I say, ‘ok, now, this is where it gets confusing.’ Because if you ask a woman, ‘what are you looking for in a guy?’ You’ll hear a lot of this and a lot of this—[they’ll say] ‘oh, someone who’s sweet and kind, and gentle, and caring, and loving’—so the guy strives to become that. And then a guy on a Harley-Davidson pulls up, and what happens?”
Me: “She’s gone…”
H: “She’s gone! This is where it gets confusing for guys. Because—[they think] ‘did you lie to me? You bitch! Do you not know what you want?!’ The problem is, when you ask a woman that, they answered you completely truthfully. The problem is, they answered you with…”
Me: “Logic.”
H: “Logic! What are women driven buy?”
Me: “Emotion.”
H: “Eeeemotions. Exactly. And I get them [clients] to write this down, underline it, star it, because we’re going to keep coming back to this over and over again. So, let’s call these motorcycle guys ‘jerks’. [I tell clients] ‘Give me some traits of the jerks’. ‘They’re dirty, rude, don’t care, selfish, on their own time, they’re takers’. Right. Now, no woman wants to date a jerk. Women may end up with jerks, but if you ask women, ‘would you like to be with a jerk?’ What are they going to say?”
Me: “No, no.”
H: “Right. But do jerks get girls? Yes! And you can see them [clients, thinking], going ‘okay…’ There’s a disconnect here. So what is it they’re [jerks are] doing? So [I ask clients], ‘if you are flexible, is that predictable, or unpredictable?’
Me: “Predictable.”
H: “Right. If you are punctual, is that predictable or unpredictable?”
Me: “That’s predictable.”
H: “If you are selfless…”
Me: “Yeah, predictable.”
H: “Right. So I lead them through that. So predictable, in a relationship, equals boring. Boring equals the death of romance."
In my research, I am exploring ways to blend ethnography and digital research as an exploratory means to ask new questions about my topic, and to seek to better understand how the actual experiences of these men are configured in relation to virtual modes of socializing with each other online. Through the use of digital ethnography—specifically, natural language processing and data visualizations using the Python programming language—I want to argue that examining norms of cooperation, competition, social hierarchies, and discursive practices in these communities calls into question the charismatic masculine embodiment these men strive to achieve. My wager is that topical correlations in discourse will appear differently by taking a big-data view of the statistical correlations of concepts across very large corpuses of texts.
In the digital ethnography I've conducted, the primary data set that I have been working with for this project consists of chat-logs from FastSeduction.net, an online forum for dating advice that was established in 1995 and that was active until a few years ago. I’m treating this corpus as both an archive and a social network around the topic of seduction—unpublished records created by participants as they live and understand themselves in terms of their ability to seduce women. The archive of these text files numbers around 1,500 documents, and there are 76 different authors represented in these files, and the writings in the forum span 13 years from 1995 to 2008.
The following slide shows the output of words per year on the forum of keywords relating to technique. As much as these men value ways of embodying identity and lifestyle of the pickup artist, equally many of them place high value on the experience of achieving what Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi would call a “flow” state in their interactions, not just with women, but also with other men. Action in a flow-state seems effortless and automatic, and involves a lowering of inhibitions. Confirming Czikszentmihalyi’s supposition, these words suggest a degree of ambiguity between the objectification of seduction as a skill-set, and the changing self-identity of men who claim to practice such techniques. In my interviews, many men who experience “flow” while practicing seduction techniques report that their psychosomatic relation to their own bodies is transformed. This visualization is a stock-heap of the distribution of words associated with mastery of a skill-set in dating, the same terms for which we saw the earlier word-cloud visualization. You can see the blue zone at the bottom of the slide, this is the keyword density for the word “game” in every particular year in which the forum was active. You can see that the density of the word “game” peaks right in the year 2005, which is the year in which Neil Strauss’ book “The Game” was first published. Compare this with 1996, when there is an interesting—and strikingly different—emphasis on “laws” (the purple zone in the heap graph). “Flow” as a concept is usually associated with literature on performance, consulting, and workplace management. For Czikszentmihalyi, in a flow state people are completely absorbed in an activity, especially an activity that involves their creative abilities. During this “optimal experience”, in his words, they feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.” For flow to happen, it must be prepared for and cultivated by each person, by setting challenges that are neither too demanding nor too simple for one’s abilities.
I want to argue that seduction—as a particular form of affective labor—highlights a family of meanings that straddle the domain between feeling and cognition, and in which the individual subject is affectively beside-themselves. Such states include ecstasy, hypnosis, fascination, and also inhibition and stupor to name a few, and they problematize some foundational cultural concepts in Western societies, including freedom, autonomy, consent, and personhood itself. The naming of sexual behavior as seduction—an activity that constantly recalls the subject to a position of self-mastery in order to overcome what Erving Goffman calls “social infelicities”—has a performative effect on identity and agency for these men. To believe in a transactional relationship between inner and outer self, the game of seduction enables a whole series of self-projects and personalities for pickup artists, by engaging them in what German scholar Erik Hendriks calls “ascetic hedonism.” At the same time, I would like to propose that by making masculinity redundant and almost camp, training in seduction may undermine the masculinity it claims to achieve. For his students, the pickup artist acts not only as role model and sometime friend, but also as part trickster and part con-man. Creating triangles of desire between men and women, pickup artists act to instantiate a structure of friendships, mentorships, entitlements, and rivalries that depend on the changing meaning of maleness in reconfiguring class relationships. To quote Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “we are in the presence of male heterosexual desire, in the form of a desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females” (38).
