Nerds and the 'New Man'
By belaboring the problem of ‘communication’ in intimacy, this paper suggests that practices of self-help in men’s seduction training signal a calling to reconcile contradictory ideologies of expressive and entrepreneurial masculinity, figured as a contradiction between instrumental techniques of persuasion and the desire for transcendence in autonomy and expressing one’s ‘authentic self’. Through the ambivalent commodification of expertise in dating coaching, I will argue that failure in dating and the intractable alterity of the other is figured as a form of ‘material resistance’ that positions users of these communities as hackers who play with and remake the meanings of masculinity.
I will start this talk by discussing some elements of dating coaching workshops, and how male participants use their ritual forms to manage stigma and embody desirable masculine identities. I will then move to discuss a different example of somatic practices that men use to remedy some of the failures of dating workshops, and pick out some elements of a shared affective style that links these two communities in producing a new sort of masculinity.
It was a Thursday night in November, and I was seated with two men and their dating coach in the booth of a grill on the Lower East Side of New York. It was the start of a weekend-long training course in seduction skills, called a “bootcamp.” The dating coach had just introduced himself, and outlined his goals for the weekend. He said, quote, “Tell me one fantasy you want to achieve. If I do nothing else, this weekend I want to help you get there.” He then gave these men their first assignment. Quote, “Before we get to the bar, I want each of you to approach three women in the street and just get their attention. It doesn’t matter what you say.” His student-trainees—including an undergrad at NYU, and a Harvard-educated doctor—glanced nervously around the table. This practice of what the coach called “throwing words” is drawn from methods of improvisational (or improv) stage acting, and is designed to push the men out of their comfort zone and lower their inhibitions. This program would culminate two days later with hypnosis by a sex therapist; and Saturday night, in particular, where the men would be taught skills to express their sexuality around women through physical gestures: touching, hand-holding, seemingly accidental strokes of the arm, and so-called “hand-flirting.” The female trainer who assisted the coach was an actress from Montana; the previous trainer, a Brazilian fitness enthusiast, had resigned her position on the program because she had actually started dating the dating coach himself.
Seduction techniques that are taught in these communities include interactional skills in flirting; initiating conversations; conducting playful banter and teasing; demonstrating status through storytelling; as well as approving of a woman or challenging her in order to polarize the affective roles of male and female participants in the interaction, and thereby to avoid appearing to be a submissive or unattractive male. These attempts to strategize social suggestibility hedge against the risk of what Erving Goffman calls “losing face”[i] by attempting to rationalize, manage, and short-circuit what Goffman calls “infelicities” in interactions. They suggest that these men’s self-fashioning reflects attributes of what critics call ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Relying on many of the discursive practices used by twelve-step and addiction-recovery programs (Summerson-Carr), these groups seek to help men recover from what they call ‘nice guy syndrome’ in their relations with women by cultivating appetites for risk-taking (Zaloom), independence, and the rejection of perceived victimization and dependency. But this form of social training also invite us to ask more centrally about the place of the subject, and the conditions of embodiment and agency they experience. What self is called into being through seduction communities? An emancipated self, or an enthralled self—a man who seduces others, or a man who is himself seduced, and for whom the phenomenology of daily life exists only against the background of self as an assemblage of ever-more optimizable, and hence always-already incomplete, parts of body and mind?
The affective labor of seduction interrogates a family of meanings that straddle the domain between feeling and cognition, states of embodiment in which the subject is affectively beside-themselves—including ecstasy, hypnosis, fascination, and also inhibition and stupor to name a few—that problematize some foundational cultural concepts in the West, including freedom, autonomy, consent, and personhood itself. For dating coaches and their clients, rationalizing marginal and ephemeral qualities in social interaction creates the illusion of control. Yet cognition has an ethical limit for these men, where a process of intentional labor is believed to distill an ontological orientation that accrues as a certain embodied ability or capital. In other words, these men believe that their performed playfulness—using gestural estrangement-effects such as “throwing words”—will become automatic, habitual, and unthinking action, conditioning them to embody new identities as charismatic men. Like the individualizing ‘medical model’ of disability, seduction training thus involves what Micki McGee calls an “active form of forgetting, of denying the dependence, vulnerability, and contingency of the purportedly autonomous self” (McGee 173). Stress, fatigue, and depression come to the surface as men struggle and fail to account for human realities of interdependency and corporeal vulnerability they experience in striving to embody these identities.
[i] To use a metaphor developed extensively by Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Boston: Anchor. 1959.
As much as they value the identity and lifestyle of the dating coach, equally many men who practice such interactional techniques 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—a lowering of inhibitions. In the process of practicing seduction techniques, men report that their psychosomatic relation to their own bodies is transformed, and can induce a state of trance. They recall feeling high, or altered states of consciousness. One informant, we’ll call him Jake, described this state as “being in the zone”: a felt attunement, cognitive absorption, or “flow,” where space and interpersonal alterity seem to recede. As Jake described it to me, quote: “There’s a flow to it. Pickup puts you into a zone. It’s all about body language… That sense of time distortion, that sense of ease when all your other troubles go away because you’re focused; and that sense of self-mastery that comes with knowledge and confidence in your skill set… it frees up a lot of mental space on your hard-drive.” But he also confides that performing these social routines can become addictive. As Jake continued, “It gets addicting. You can take it too far. You can get to the point where flow becomes the only sort of experience you can tolerate, and you can’t handle mundane experience anymore, and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘oh my god, I have to quit my job.’” Seduction is here revealed as a form of failure, marked by the stigma of insufficiency and dependency that is felt as emasculating—a metaphorical castration, an existential failure—as Tom fears that flow will lead to the loss of his basic livelihood. Yet in the irony of his tone in speaking of quote-unquote ‘mundane experience,’ Jake also implies that the labor of seduction has a revelatory quality, within which he may realize that his ‘job’ wasn’t fulfilling to him anyway.
What Eva Illouz calls 'emotional capitalism' (Illouz 2007).
Jake also implies an unintended effect of the psychosomatic attunement or ‘flow’ that dating skills provides: that is, a lack of intimacy that inhibits his ability to connect and bond with women with whom he has sexual relations. Many men come to experience this work of self-fashioning as a debilitating condition, one which requires them to invest their time and energy in expressive and feeling-based modes of intimate and somatic-based labor with women. At a workshop for men affiliated with a lifestyle company called TwoTastes, I milled around in a yoga studio with male attendees of the workshop: men in their 30s and 40s, seeking an experience to help them access their feeling and emotional intuition with women by giving up desires for reasoning, self-control, and mastery that characterize ‘hegemonic masculinity’. TwoTastes teaches a New Age philosophy of heterosexual relationships built around a basic core competency, which is a ritualized and dyadic practice between a man and a woman called ‘orgasmic meditation’: in this practice, the woman removes her underwear and lies down on a yoga mat, and the man kneels over her and strokes her clitoris within a timed window of 15 minutes. Our instructor—let’s call him Ted—was a charismatic expert in his early 30s, had previously worked as a technician for Apple’s ‘Genius Bar,’ a place where people come to fix their Apple-branded electronic devices.
While TwoTastes promises sexual liberation by foregrounding the importance of “feel over formula,” like dating workshops it has tacitly absorbed a therapeutic ethos which proliferates pathological forms of intimate relationship in need of expert treatment: symptoms like ‘love addiction,’ ‘love avoidance,’ ‘codependency’, and the so-called ‘Nice Guy Syndrome’. Learning the skill of orgasmic meditation is presented as a subtractive process of self-transformation: by becoming masterful in this practice, men seek to embody an identity that is empowered, connected, and yet flexible like Teflon: simultaneously able to navigate the accelerated possibilities of connection and disconnection in late capitalist megacities, as much as to handle the fickle vagaries of sexual moods and subjective desires. As Ted told his own story, quote “I did this work, and I uncrossed these wires [conditioning] of mine, and I did this work to do what in my opinion was the pinnacle thing—the most amazing identity. Not in a fake way. In a way that the man I became was a man that women could actually find their way into my sex.” Over the course of the day, “doing the work” consisted of a series of social experiments, or what Ted called ‘containers’. These experiments included dyadic, paired exercises with other men. In paired exercises with a male partner, men reflect on and express present and past inhibitions almost in the form of a ritual exorcism, asking each other over and over again, ‘What do you want?’, ‘What didn’t you say?’, or ‘Why can’t you do it?’. The aim of these exercises was to air out our unspoken desires and excuses to a point of physiologically exhausting or depleting various false personas. The container, in turn, allows for particular affects to circulate and become embodied through a series of material-semiotic practices. As Ted explained, “Containers allows us to drop in and allow some part of ourselves to have some air, which might normally not have some air. If we didn’t have a container, things would spill out. The container is there so we can have more and more experiences that directly contradict our conditioning.”
In an interview with a co-founder of TwoTastes, he discussed his personal history and the genesis of his community:
Me: “Can you tell me more about how you got into the Wellcome Consensus, your experience there, and then how you grew that into becoming TwoTastes?”
Raymond: “Yeah. So I’ll pull the lens back a little further back. I was born in the 70s, I was educated in today’s society of who I was supposed to be as a man, and the rules I’ve followed. And it was the 70s and 80s, you know, kind of the John Cusack era of guys—you know, Say Anything was sort of a good bible for how I thought I was supposed to be in this world. And I turned out to be a very nice guy, you know, in terms of what nice was..."
Raymond: "...And I got married to a woman when I was 26. And, you know, I was successful in business, I worked in corporate America, and provided a house, and a good stable income. The main thing I realized was that life was good. And there were definitely pieces about my life that were missing, but I didn’t think they were important. Those pieces really was (sic) a rich sex life and a deep connection to this woman I married. I had basically accepted the fact that most marriages… that most sex lives are hot in the beginning, and they degrade to nothing, like a bad penny-stock—that you just have this really hot moment, and then it kind of goes down to nil; every once in awhile, [it gets] a bump up from something—maybe some alcohol—but that’s just the way I thought it was. So I had accepted that. And my wife Carol didn’t accept that. She was really the motivator for me working, changing my life, and changing my viewpoints. Because she wasn’t satisfied in our marriage. And so, the first thing she did was she took me to Burning Man in 1998. And I was pretty much against it—I didn’t want to go. I thought it was kind of, like, for other people—the doulas, and the yogis, and the burners… like, I didn’t think I was one of those people. And then, as soon as I got there, I realized, actually, I was one of those people. And it was one of those life-changing moments, where I was like ‘oh, maybe the rules handed to me—the John Cusack rules—weren’t the only rules I could follow’. And it really opened up a lot of possibility for me. I did psychedelics, I did mushrooms for the first time in my life on that trip. And I was scared to death of them, but I actually really liked them. And it just opened up—to use the hackneyed [phrase]—the doors of my perception of what was possible. And in that trip, at Burning Man, I had the first honest conversation about sex with a woman in my life, where Carol and I took a walk, and basically just revealed to each other what was really going on in our minds about our sex life, than what we were really having. And there was so much we weren’t telling each other, and so much desire… and so we just went out and searched for what was possible to enrich our sex lives. And that led to going to a swing club in January of 1999, which was absolutely horrible. We ended up taking a course with More[house] in July of 1999, which was a little bit better. In March of 1999 we actually took a class on sex with a guy named Hamid Dimar, who is another men’s teacher in San Francisco, he’s been doing it for a long time, for 15 or 16 years, with his wife Sam. So basically, in that class, I ended up in a circle doing an introduction, and to make a long story short I really embarrassed myself. I did my introduction, and I was so misogynistic and arrogant that my wife, who was sitting right here next to me, started to cry in the middle of the introduction, and I didn’t even know it. I didn’t even notice that she was crying. And so that was the first flash of, like, ‘oh my god, there’s so much more I need to learn, there’s so much more possible.’ And that led me to really throwing myself into what was possible in man-woman relating."
