You’re wandering around the Eaton Centre, probably craving a pretzel, when a stranger approaches you, and begins to regale you with random compliments and ask where you’re going.
All you want is a pretzel, so you try to extricate yourself from the situation, only to run into another total rando 10 minutes later. What’s going on?
In December 2013, Toronto women found themselves in this situation after Toronto pick-up artists planned a massive meet-up at the Eaton Centre.
The call to arms on meet-up.com encouraged men to “Set your doubts aside for a session filled with fast paced adrenaline pumping approach action!”
The message also described the process of “‘beasting’ (A.K.A entering BEAST MODE). Defined along the lines of approaching continuously and consistently—targeting every approachable set in the vicinity.”
Eventually women took to Reddit and Twitter to discuss their experiences, and mall security stepped in to deal with the onslaught of attempted seduction.
“He was way too curious and hard to get rid of,” wrote the user “honeythyme,” who started the Reddit thread. “I got a little spooked and went home.”
The Game
The popular culture origins of the pick-up artistry that men were attempting in the Eaton Centre are often associated with The Game, a 2005 book by journalist Neil Strauss who embedded himself in, and eventually became, a part of pick-up artist culture.
He described different pick-up artist methods such as “sarging,” to describe talking to women; “peacocking,” to describe demonstrating one’s attractiveness; and “negging,” to describe the practice of alternating insults and compliments.
Today, there are pick-up artist “lairs” in most major Canadian cities. In Toronto, the Pickup Strategy offers boot camps and seminars for men hoping to learn this method.
According to its website, Toronto is a better training ground for prospective pick-up artists than any city in the United States.
The coaches guarantee success, but at a price. Boot Camps with Pickup Strategy cost $500 a session.
Pick-up culture also spread quickly to online forums, discussion boards, and YouTube channels.
Comedian and video blogger Eliot Chang gave his own pick-up advice on his YouTube channel, in which he emphasized confidence.
“Human beings crave and hope for good social interactions,” he tells his viewers in a July 2014 video titled “How to Overcome Shyness.”
He also emphasized exuding positive energy, being sincerely interested in what other people are saying, and learning how to “not be creepy.”
Chang also used evolutionary language to describe human interactions.
“Women are genetically wired to find a strong mate,” he said in a June 2014 video called “How to Talk to Pushy Girls.”
It’s a popular sentiment in the pick-up community, which celebrates competition and dominant masculinity.
On his website, Strauss encourages men to educate themselves in evolutionary theory with books like Richard Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene.”
As evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller noted in an article for Wired, “The seduction community has become a vanguard of applied Darwinism.”
Whispers from the past
Evolutionary theory plays a smaller role than pick-up artists may think when it comes to relationship initiation, according to Cheryl Harasymchuk, an assistant professor of psychology at Carleton.
“It’s giving evolutionary theory a bad name,” she laughed.
According to Harasymchuk, the evolutionary language and pack mentality many pick-up artists espouse is a misuse of the theory.
“It’s not meant to explain everything. It’s just meant to explain some of these oddities we have that just don’t seem to fit in with current thinking in the year 2015. Why are we doing these types of things?” she said.
She said evolutionary theory helps explain “whispers or remnants of our past behaviour.”
Alexis Shotwell, a Carleton professor of sociology and anthropology, agreed.
“I think that evolutionary theory gets used for a lot of things that it’s not actually suited for,” she said.
“Anyone who goes back to an evolutionary narrative about how the world used to be, we can say are definitely fictionalizing—we don’t have any record of all of the things that pick-up artist sites and narratives go back to,” she explained.
“We have traces of history in the form of bones, but we don’t know how those societies were socially organized.”
If she was going the pick-up artist route in trying to attract as many mates as possible, Harasymchuk said she wouldn’t focus on evolutionary theory because that’s “just a small piece of the puzzle.”
According to her, the key factors to facilitating intimate relationships include proximity, physical attractiveness, reciprocal liking, and common interests.
“Although people say that opposites attract, there is more evidence for the adage that birds of a feather flock together,” she said.
Harasymchuk said she thinks any success pick-up artists experience is not necessarily from confidence or dominance but from “facilitating intimacy in a really fast way.”
By relentlessly asking personal questions, intimacy between people can be created rapidly, she said. Psychologists have studied this concept by bringing strangers into a lab and encouraging them to answer a series of increasingly personal questions, she explained. They call this the “fast-friends paradigm.”
“[Pick-up artists] are doing something like that. They’re moving fast through it and if it works, the potential mate is going to feel a sense of closeness with that person,” Harasymchuk said.
“But the thing is, it’s probably for the most part not working out,” she added. “This is a game, it’s a high-risk game. It’s working some of the time and most of the time it isn’t working.”
She said she thinks the methods taught by pick-up coaches work as a placebo for shy and insecure men.
Whether or not they successfully apply the strategies, “it’s a numbers game,” and when they eventually achieve success they will credit it to their “training.”
Whether they work or not, Harasymchuk said she notes a strong undercurrent of misogyny in pick-up artist methods.
Heterosexual sadness
Shotwell said she sees pick-up artist culture as devolution “back into this conception of women as fundamentally vulnerable and men as fundamentally violent.”
“Pick-up culture is so interesting . . . The pick-up artist as something that men try to shape themselves into is fascinating because it so deeply replicates all the things that are saddest about heterosexuality,” she added.
Shotwell said she thinks pick-up artist ideology is based upon lying and manipulation.
“One sort of basic question about that from a feminist point of view is what does it mean that people feel like they want to be having sex with people that they’ve tricked?” she asked.
At the root of this all is insecurity, a “wounded or pathetic masculinity,” Shotwell said.
She said she thinks the entire seminar business, while claiming to empower men, builds off of their insecurities and fears of being “fundamentally not lovable, not desirable.”
She said the online forums and all-male boot camps point to a need for a different kind of unspoken bond between men.
The point is to go after women “but their main site of interaction is other men,” Shotwell noted.
Shotwell said there’s an opportunity for a great deal of homosocial eroticism in any gender-segregated situation where people are policing each other’s sexual preferences.
She said she thinks it’s sad that one of the only places men are able to celebrate each other’s sexuality is on the pick-up artist training ground.
Forums encourage members to narrate successful pick-ups in great detail, Shotwell said.
“I just feel like there’s not a way for us to read the invitation to ‘like, share with me the hot sex you had’ that isn’t in part enjoying the kind of experience of masculine sexuality. Which of course is great,” she said.
“People should enjoy and appreciate masculine sexuality. It’s totally fine. It’s just, why do we need to pair it with this kind of pathetic manipulative approach?”
