The Language of Pick-Up Artists

Online Discourses of the Seduction Industry

Daria Dayter, Sofia Rüdiger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032206295
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000541366
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book adopts a corpus-based discourse analysis approach to the study of the communicative practices of pick-up artists, offering a systematic exploration of distinct language use in an online community that uses speed-seduction practices for short-term dating and sex. Drawing on a multi-million-word corpus comprising data from online forums, social media, informational websites, and YouTube videos, the volume explores the verbal practices and narrative framing techniques that pick-up artists (PUAs) draw upon in their interactions with women and the terminology-heavy language used in teaching pick-up to foster perceptions of scientific validity. The book also unpacks videos and reports of live interactions to study naturally occurring PUA discourse from different perspectives but also to more closely examine conceptual metaphors of competition and violence and critically reflect on the ethical considerations of working with such communities. This book will appeal to students and scholars in such disciplines as discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, computer-mediated communication, and language and media, as well as those interested in the study of language use online.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003041313-1

1.1 Introduction

We begin the book with three examples to give the reader short ‘teasers’ of the linguistic features to be discussed and the special pick-up artist stance towards romantic encounters. In this first chapter, we explain who pick-up artists (PUAs) are and introduce our theoretical and analytical frameworks. We also outline the basics of the methodological approach we took in this project: corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Section 1.5 lays out why the choice is made in favour of the pragmatics dimension of discourse analysis, in the tradition of Locher (2006), Jucker et al. (2009), Andersen and Aijmer (2011), and Taavitsainen et al. (2014). We situate the upcoming analysis at the interface between the content and purpose of the language being used and explain how corpus-based and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, in the vein of work by Baker (2005, 2006), is suitable for investigating this interface. We also discuss the intended contribution of the book to the field and demonstrate the value of applying corpus techniques to higher level linguistic investigations, and how the synergy between corpus linguistics and discourse analysis yields novel results. On a more theoretical level, the study adds to our understanding of complex on/offline communities and the role technological affordances play in the changing landscape of human interaction in such a sensitive field as romantic encounters.

1.2 Pick-Up Artists: Who Are They?

Here is a short excerpt from one of our datasets. A PUA posted this story to a forum to share his experience with like-minded online friends. It constitutes the beginning of a narrative reconstruction of an encounter with a woman (in pick-up artists’ terms, a field report):

(1) Not to be confused on scoring with a chick but I scored a chick’s number but this is NOT your traditional N-Close. For those who know my mad skills at pulling VIP table girls away from their friends, N-closing dime pieces you now know I am not just a one trick pony. I N-closed a HB from work. I won’t rate this chick cuz I really like her and some girls are off scale. I no longer get Oneitis but I think what is happening here is this girl is GF¹ material and acting like she wants to be my girlfriend.

1 GF is an acronym for girlfriend.

(FRR_puacom005)²

Having read this without much of an introduction or explanation of what is going on (except that this is the beginning of a story about meeting a woman), an uninitiated reader might ask him/herself: What is an n-close, an HB, and oneitis? The writer also mentions the practice of rating women on a scale, although in this particular case he could not give a rating (as this woman is “off scale”).

2 All examples in this book are given in their original spelling (italics and bold formatting are our emphasis). FRR indicates that the example stems from the Field Reports + Replies Corpus (see Chapter 3); PUA-How-To refers to our corpus of PUA how-to videos on YouTube (see Chapter 6).

To unpack those points first, n-close stands for number-close and means that the writer managed to get the phone number of the woman. HB, the acronym of ‘hot babe’, refers to women and is usually used together with a number (up to 10) to indicate the woman’s attractiveness (e.g., HB8); this is also the ‘scale’ that the writer alludes to when he mentions not rating her. Last but not least, oneitis is the condition – pathological in the PUAs’ world – of being attracted to only one woman (formed by combining the numeral one with the suffix – itis).³

3 The suffix ‘-itis’ is used as “the regular name for affections of particular parts, and spec. […] of inflammatory disease or inflammation of a part. […] In irregular trivial use applied to a state of mind or tendency fancifully regarded as a disease” (OED n.d. a, n.p.).

While this explanation clarifies the words in (1), it also raises new questions: Why is being interested in one woman presented as a disease? Why are women in the post referred to by anything but the word woman/women (i.e., chick, girl/s, dime pieces, HB)? And why does the writer very openly brag about his “mad skills at pulling VIP table girls away from their friends”?

Before we answer these questions, let us give a brief definition of who pick-up artists are: men who practice speed seduction of women, strongly influenced by the belief that the application of specific routines and scripted techniques are key to being successful in this endeavour. According to the community itself, and here we draw on a definition from a popular PUA website, a “pick up artist is a man (or less commonly, a woman FPUA) who is dedicated to improving his skills with the opposite sex through the methods found in the pickup community – a community of guys who study how to seduce and sleep with women” (PUA Lingo 2008a, n.p.).⁴ In view of these two definitions of pick-up artists, the framing of love as a sickness and the objectifying (dime pieces, HB) and belittling references to women (chicks, girls) in (1) are less surprising as they merely reflect a typical pick-up mindset. Part of this mindset is the explicit self-praise as a communicative norm; both successful interactions with women as well as the mere use of PUA techniques are considered braggables.

4 Female pick-up artists exist and we sometimes find women holding a position as an ‘insider’ coach in seduction businesses; in this book, we focus on the prototypical PUA community (i.e., heterosexual men).

Example (2) comes from another field report post, but this time the excerpt is taken from the middle of the text and the writer describes the actual interaction between himself and two women.

(2) Due to the loud music and our physical positioning I wasn’t able to engage the obstacle as much as the target. I was standing beside my target and did a few smaller attraction routines (Cold Reads and Teases) on her, while making little side comments to the obstacle. After I few minutes the girls made excuses and told me they have ‘to go the the bathroom’, but they will be back in a few minutes. We all know what that usually means and I wasn’t expecting them to come back. So I opened the next set which popped up next to me and even gamed a guy for the next minutes (Short setting, it was a target rich environment = good training ground).

(FRR_venus032)

As in example (1), we find the writer employing a number of specialised terms (i.e. set, to game).⁵ In addition, we can identify an explicit reference to the aforementioned PUA techniques, here instantiated in the form of “attraction routines”, and more specifically “cold reads and teases”. Cold reads/cold reading refers to an ostensibly rapport-building technique in which the pick-up artist makes guesses about his newly met interlocutor (refining his subsequent statements based on the woman’s reactions). As example (2) stems from a part of the field report which describes how the post author interacted with women, we can observe a particular dis-cursive strategy which is quite common to all kinds of PUA discourse: that is, re-framing the interaction in terms of sports and/or the military. Accordingly, in (2) the woman who the man is interested in is labelled “target”, whereas her friend is considered an “obstacle”, which stands in the way of the PUA’s success with the woman he desires. The field report writer explicitly categorises the setting of his night out as a “target rich environment”, which served him as “good training ground”. Engaging with women is consequently recast as an athletic endeavour, which can be trained, and where technicalities, like the “physical positioning” of interactants, are of consequence.

5 A set refers to a group of people (usually only women) and to game means to engage in pick-up activities.

Our last example in this section is not taken from a field report but represents another genre: YouTube how-to videos by self-proclaimed seduction experts. (3) is taken from the transcript of “The 2 Biggest Mistakes Guys Make on Dates (And How to Avoid Them!)”, an 8-minute long video by John Anthony. In this video, Anthony stresses the importance of accumulating dates for being successful in ‘the game’ (“Dates are probably one of the most important tools that you have for getting results in the dating game in the pickup game seduction game”, PUA-How-To_Anthony4) and advises his viewers to avoid the “two biggest mistakes” men make when dating (i.e., not “sexualising” enough and not framing the date properly towards the goal of having sex). In (3), Anthony evokes an important principle in pick-up, ‘the numbers game’, even though he does not mention it explicitly (note that examples from spoken language are marked by a different font throughout this manuscript).

(3) setting mass setting dates and then getting good at running your dates is going to be the key to getting a lot of results okay and you have to be able to acquire enough leads and then text properly in order to get the dates set up but then you have to be able to run the dates properly okay someone that has a whole bunch of dates that is poor at running their dates is gonna have a bottleneck and that part of the funnel is not gonna get very many results because it’s gonna be closing up from them consistently messing up their dates

(PUA-How-To_Anthony4)

The main tenet of the numbers game is that it only takes frequent enough attempts at seduction before one is inevitably successful. This also references the common adage ‘practice makes perfect’, and thus alludes again to the sports frame which we mentioned previously.

In this book, we will delve into all of the characteristics of PUA discourse which we just mentioned (and more): the specialised vocabulary, self-praise as a community norm, the re-framing of interactions with women into other activity types, and the obsession with numbers and quantification. Most of our data stems from communication between PUAs (see the preceding forum posts) or between established community members and (prospective) newcomers or ‘beginners’, but we were also able to include data from interactions between pick-up artists and women (as recorded by PUAs themselves and subsequently posted on video sharing platforms). Due to the commercialisation of pick-up, pickup artists can be considered part of a ‘seduction industry’, dealing in commodified dating advice and dating-related services (e.g., coaching, bootcamps, books, paid access to websites, forums, etc.). Throughout this book we will therefore refer to the participants at the heart of this study both as pick-up artists or members of the seduction industry. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we want to discuss our reasons for studying this particular community of the manosphere (see next section), and introduce our methodological and analytical frameworks.

1.3 Why Study Pick-Up Artists?

Pick-up artists are one instantiation of what is known as the manosphere, “a sprawl of blogs, forums, and websites devoted to discussing masculinity” (Marwick and Lewis 2017, 13). Other groups associated with the manosphere are men’s rights activists, male separatists (Men Going Their Own Way; MGTOW), incels (involuntary celibates), fathers’ rights activists, etc. (Marwick and Caplan 2018; Bratich and Banet-Weiser 2019; Krendel et al. forthcoming; for incels specifically see Jaki et al. 2019; Heritage and Koller 2020). While the focus and approach to the subject matter (i.e., masculinity) in each group are different, they are united by their opposition to feminism and open hostility towards women (cf. also the notion of ‘toxic masculinity’ which is often associated with these groups; see, e.g., Ford 2019; Grant and MacDonald 2020).⁶ A common trope and unifying key concept in these communities is the ‘red pill’, borrowed from the 1999 science fiction movie The Matrix, where the main character is given the choice between taking a blue pill (which will allow him to continue his life in content delusion) and a red pill (which will awaken him to the dark reality of the movie world). Drawing on this as an analogy, manosphere communities encourage their followers to swallow the red pill in order to “to awaken men to feminism’s misandry and brainwashing” (Ging 2019, 640).

6 Note that the term ‘toxic masculinity’ has also been criticised for its limited usefulness as an analytical concept (see Harrington 2021).

The manosphere also intersects with the alt-right, embracing white nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Islamism (Marwick and Caplan 2018, 555). It is thus not surprising that for “young men immersed in internet culture, the Men’s Rights Movement is often a stepping stone to white supremacist beliefs” (Marwick and Caplan 2018, 555; based on Futrelle 2017 and Michael 2017; see also Mamié et al. 2021 on a ‘pipeline’ between the manosphere and the alt right). Approaching this from the opposite side, political scholars have observed a “shift toward hardline woman-hating” in the alternative right which can be related to the development of links to the manosphere (Lyons 2017, n.p.). While this is not an ‘easy relationship’, the portrayal of male victimhood (i.e., the false belief that men are being oppressed by society) seems to have struck a chord with alt-rightists, and their similarly false belief in reverse racism (i.e., white people being oppressed by society) (Lyons 2017, n.p.). Patriarchal politics (Lyons 2017) has gained increasing traction in the alt right and white nationalism movements and offers a dangerous coalition between (extremist) right wing politics and misogynistic worldviews.

While some of the manosphere communities seem more extreme than others, this can be fallacious, as “[t]he extremist, and the mundane ‘versions’ of various ideologies are in fact the same ideology – the same assumptions underpin both the mainstream and the fringe” (Lilly 2016, 5). Regardless of its concrete community instantiation, the manosphere has been connected to networked online harassment (Marwick and Caplan 2018) and generally spreads misogynistic content (Jane 2018). Pick-up artists, which in their commodified form can be considered a ‘seduction industry’, might not be representing the most extreme ideologies of the manosphere, but the underlying ideologies and attitudes towards women are largely the same as in the rest of the manosphere universe: women are universally portrayed as inferior to men an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Pick-Up Artists and the Seduction Industry
• 3 Lexical Aspects of Pick-Up Artist Discourse
• 4 The Pragmatics of Pick-Up Artist Interactions
• 5 Conversations in the Field
• 6 Teaching and Selling Seduction
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix A: Transcription Conventions
• Appendix B: Lists of Videos Included in PUA-Lecture and PUA-How-To
• Glossary of Pick-Up Artist Terms
• References
• Index