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ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on analysis of one component of a larger study exploring men’s online sex advice. The parent project examines the use of casual sex with multiple women as a mandatory obligation in accumulating social status and esteem in men’s online Pick-Up Artist (PUA) advice outlets. While earlier analysis focused on the adoption of militaristic language and the sexual use of women’s bodies to defend male privilege among PUA members, the present analysis attends to the reliance on essentialised, embodied constructions of a homogeneous authentic masculinity. Adopting a feminist poststructuralist framework and discourse analysis, we describe an interpretive repertoire – uncovering the natural – that comprises two themes: embodying work, wherein core masculinity is located within the male body and requires ritualistic practice to harness more proficient manhood, and mental mastery, wherein the path to success extends beyond bodily work and outward performance, necessitating subjective transformation to ‘authentically become’ a new kind of man. Masculinity in PUA texts is framed simultaneously as being in crisis and as an essentialised role ascribed to men as directors of (hetero)sex, with PUA authors frequently adopting an adversarial tone in relation to the preservation of masculinity.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by both the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship awarded to the first author.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
