Communication games: dating coaches, masculinity, and working at play in Seduction Communities

ABSTRACT

This article examines the work of affective labor in remediating experiences of inhibition and insecurity among heterosexual men in ‘seduction communities’: communities of men who train each other in embodying seductive masculinity to pick up women. Considering how men in seduction communities construct and enact symbolic boundaries in their performances of seduction, this paper will seek to answer the following question: what do seduction communities reveal about the vulnerabilities and frailties of masculinity in the US today? Based on original ethnographic fieldwork carried out in New York City, I examine the ways in which men experience states of cognitive absorption, affective license, and also of disability and abjection in fashioning themselves as objects of female desire through rituals of shared affective labor among men. I argue that men experience culturally based ambivalences around norms of self-help – including ideas of freedom, dependency, and addiction – in ways that complicate heteronormative masculine identities. I furthermore assert that self-fashioning through seduction training invokes ideas of work and play in order to differentiate contradictory ethics of persuasion and self-expression, and that these ideas in turn instantiate different technologies of embodiment that reproduce inequalities between men along lines of race and class.

KEYWORDS:

• Masculinity
• affect
• labor
• intimacy
• queer theory
• self-help

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank advisor Dr Michael Blim, as well as Drs Jonathan Shannon, Jillian Cavanaugh, Vincent Crapanzano and Vandana Chaudhry for their invaluable guidance and mentorship in conceptualizing and carrying out the research project. In addition, he would like to thank Antonia Santangelo, Mark Drury, Madhuri Karak, Christopher Baum, Claire Panetta and Dr Julie Skurski for their insightful advice and feedback in crafting this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anders Wallace is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Based on his research on gender, language, performance and digital media, his dissertation focuses on the ethnographic study of masculinity and identity in self-help communities that train men in dating skills. He was raised in Rome, Italy, and speaks five languages.

Notes

1 Flirting was historically socially unmarked due to the greater social function given to etiquette, courtship, and ‘calling’ in creating social unions where social hierarchies were more firmly established (Arditi, 1998; Weigel, 2016). Through their ritualization and formalization, etiquette and courtship provided a grammar of social interactions that secured and perpetuated ethnic, class, and caste divisions, while lessening the operative role of flirting in establishing interpersonal ties.

2 As mythologized, for example, in the figure of the rake Don Juan.

3 Affective labor, as a concept, refers to work that is aimed to produce or modify emotional responses in people. Seduction is thus a germane concept with which to interrogate the current social potentialities through which this work of influencing is carried out.

4 Most prominently publicized by Csikszentmihalyi (1996), flow involves a mental state of operation in which a person is fully focused, cognitively engaged, and enjoying the process of interactively engaging with his or her work.

5 The Collins English Dictionary defines self-help as ‘The act or state of providing the means to help oneself without relying on the assistance of others … government, authorities, or other official organizations.’ Such work often consists of cognitive and embodied labor – including modalities of visualization, fantasy, and behavioral self-discipline – which may or may not be practiced in self-help groups with like-minded people.

6 All names of informants and research participants have been anonymized to ensure confidentiality. All consent procedures for the protection of subjects have been followed according to IRB (Institutional Research Board) standards.

7 According to the Collins English Dictionary, ‘soft skills’ is defined as ‘desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude.’

8 Popularized by Dr Glover (2003), ‘nice guy syndrome’ refers to an adult male who presents themselves as gentle, compassionate, sensitive, or vulnerable. Illouz (2008) has also dubbed this model of masculinity the ‘New Man’.

9 Borrowing from the language of evolutionary psychology, the concept of ‘alpha masculinity’ (Von Markovik, 2005) codes inequality as leadership in asserting that men should escalate dates with women in an explicitly sexual direction.

10 Deleuze (2001), a seminal critical theorist of affect, borrows from Spinoza the notion that affects are a lived transition between ideas, but are not ideas themselves.

11 This semiotic slippage has been critically examined primarily in cases of gay male subcultures, for instance, in Payne’s (2007) analysis of ‘straight-acting’ gay men on the gay male dating app Gaydar.

12 ‘Flow’ is a concept of optimal performance and human functioning that comes from psychological literature, and it is commonly applied in workplace and business management.

13 In the post-fordist transformations of capitalism, emphasis is placed on creativity as value-producing labor: including soft skills such as reputation, visibility, and networking, which are capitalized and valued as essential assets to secure and maintain jobs. This work has been termed variously as ‘free’ (Terranova, 2000), ‘reputational’ (Zafirau, 2008), ‘relational’ (Baym, 2015).

14 These metaphors include expressions like ‘damaged goods’, ‘shop around’, ‘selling yourself short’, ‘sealing the deal’, ‘trade-offs’, and ‘investing in a relationship’ (as discussed in Weigel, 2016).

15 This process has been given different names according to various schools of social theory. These concept names include ‘knowledge economy’ (Drucker, 1969), the ‘attention economy’ (Lanham, 2006), ‘immaterial labor’ (Lazzarato, 2006), ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Moulier-Boutang, 2012), and the ‘network society’ (Castells, 2009).

16 If soft skills are intended as a way to ‘create warm social relations in the context of alienating post-industrial work, they also repackage a compromised sense of masculinity through the reintroduction of ‘soft’ heteronormativity’ (McGuire, 2015). Moreover, Puar (2007, p. 22) writes, ‘the capitalist reproductive economy (in conjunction with technology: in vitro, sperm banks, cloning, sex selection, genetic testing) no longer exclusively demands heteronormativity as an absolute; its simulation may do.’

17 In Grow Rich! With Peace of Mind, the self-help author Hill (1996, p. 80) wrote that we can ‘use transmuted sex energy to add value to everything’ people do. In other words, ‘it's an energy that can be directed into many channels. Anything you do can be electrifying and positive and profitable when it is infused with sex emotion.’

18 Neoliberal governance has been critiqued for its effects on fraying communities and the decline of possibilities for support and recognition in urban spaces marked by economic demands to privatization, self-sufficiency, and the decline of welfare states.

19 Cruel optimism, as defined by Berlant, refers to material and emotional interdependencies by which people create emotional and psychological attachment, investing objects and ideas as ‘clusters of promises’ even as these same relations inhibit their possibilities for human flourishing.

20 ‘Inner game’ is a form of ascetic self-discipline. ‘Inner game’ reveals seduction training as a modality of self-help. It acts as an inward-looking labor on the self that works through language, visualizations, as well as imaginative and physical exercises to instill beliefs and cognitions that instill confidence and heighten men's self-concept as masculine beings.

21 That, in the words of Ahmed (2004, p. 125) evoking Frantz Fanon, ‘Fear responds to that which is approaching rather than already here. It is the futurity of fear, which makes it possible that the object of fear, rather than arriving, might pass us by. But the passing by of the object of fear does not mean the overcoming of fear … When the object of fear threatens to pass by, then fear can no longer be contained by the object.’

Additional information

Funding

Research for this work was supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research [grant number 9111]. Writing and analysis were supported by a Dissertation Writing Grant from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center.