By means of seduction: pickup-artists and the cultural history of erotic persuasion

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article is about the cultural heritage of a men’s movement, called PickUp, which gained momentum in the United States during the 1990s. It finds that the seduction techniques they use can be traced back to historical seducers. The discourse of seduction is reconstructed by identifying four stages in seduction culture from early modernity to the present. Thus contextualized, the article interpretatively examines three cases of three famous seducers: Don Juan, Giacomo Casanova, and Søren Kierkegaard, while highlighting their changing masculinities as connected to class position and affectual control. Providing insights into particular social constellations and emotional dynamics of seduction, the study finds a number of ‘social tropes’ that play a pivotal role in all the scenes portrayed. Moreover, they have strong structural equivalencies within the actively applied means of seduction that the PickUp-Artist’s methodology prescribes, which is outlined in several advice books that are part of the contemporary self-help discourse. The conclusion comes back to seduction’s complicated history, the theory of social tropes, and problematizes the changing faces of masculinity within them.