Dating Experts, Abject Masculinity, and the Immaterial Labors of Seduction Training

From Berlin to Beijing, heterosexual men question the values and meanings of masculinity and intimacy by joining communities that teach dating skills. With the rise of Web 2.0, what was previously an online subculture has emerged to become a globalized industry in dating training that teaches communication styles, norms of gendered embodiment, and modes of self-help that bear an ambivalent relation to what critics term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 2005). Representing an unaccredited and increasingly commodified field of self-fashioning, this project explores the social practices of seduction and norms of masculinity men seek to embody. What masculine identities are produced in communities that teach dating skills as immaterial labor in self-fashioning? What alternative possibilities may exist for masculine self-fashioning and ethical conduct in heterosexual intimacies? My hypothesis is that training in the arts of seduction to achieve the effect of gender naturalness both challenges and reproduces male domination. 

This website enables a critical dialogue on the production of inhibitions, dependencies, and inequalities in the lives of men who are trained in seduction techniques. The website is an interactive and multi-sensory museum built using the content management system Scalar. It allows users different access points to exploring, creating mobile connections among, and discovering emergent relations among ethnographic data (text, video, or photography) that are annotated, tagged, and deposited onto the website. More broadly, the site is designed to make accessible a critical dialogue on the social production of inhibitions, dependencies, and inequalities in the lives of men who are trained in interpersonal practices of seduction and masculine self-fashioning. This project has three goals. First, as a public-facing portal, the website establishes relations in real-time between my ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical insights on changing cultural values of masculinity in the U.S. and globally. Second, by allowing users to create divergent pathways through the archived materials, interact with and comment on pages, as well as to connect and dialogue with other users, it creates an online safe space for community building around progressive and inclusive gender identities. Third, by fostering a dialogue that bridges academic and public spheres, the website is intended to offer new modes of access, participation, and critique on the production of knowledge in the social sciences.