Pickup Artists, Alpha Males, and the Male Supremacist ‘Self Help’ Industry

Overview

PUAs are a community of men who use certain seduction techniques referred to as “game” to pursue sexual relationships with women. PUAs define their masculinity and social value around their sexual successes, which creates a toxic sense of entitlement to women. Their strategies attempt to gamify social interaction to the extent that the emotional needs of both the PUA and the women they are targeting are removed.

PUAs believe they are the victims of an oppressive feminist system. While many other male supremacist ideologies diagnose the problem at the societal level, PUAs view their problems as individual. Through PUA techniques, they believe they can overcome these obstacles and achieve their goal of having sexual and romantic relationships with women. To PUAs, women are the dehumanized objects of the game who need to be tricked into sex with mind games. They invest all their efforts in pursuing sex with women, while simultaneously hating and shaming women for being promiscuous. Women are treated like prey that need to be outmaneuvered or as pets that need to be punished and trained.

While there has long been a genre of self-help books purporting to teach men how to attract women, by the early 2000s PUAs had generated an entire industry targeting and profiting off men’s desire to attract (and, in many cases, control) women. So-called master pickup artists, gurus and coaches promise to teach students the secret formula that will allow them to succeed with women, but often for a high price. Without any real credentials, these purported experts sell books, individual coaching sessions, seminars, boot camps, online courses and a range of other resources and content. In recent years, the traditional PUA community has declined in size and popularity. Because of a range of cultural factors and shifts, including the #MeToo movement, the PUA identity has lost much of its appeal. However, the PUA ideology – with its male supremacist view of women, coercive and predatory tactics, and related industry promising to hold the solutions – continues to flourish online in the TikTok-centric alpha male community. A broad swath of online influencers, including such men as Andrew Tate, social media influencer and a self-described misogynist, command millions of followers across social media, especially platforms used by young people.

In their own words

“Why do women deserve less? Because simps, the government and society as a whole pedastalizes [sic] women for having a vagina. Give them less so they respect you and give you more. Everyone else gives them more so you don’t have to.”

– “Fresh & Fit Podcast” on Twitter, Jan. 27, 2023

“You need to be a little bit misogynistic. If you realize that most women are stupid and have nothing in their brains and they’re programmed by some man, a lot of them are ran through, then you’re not going to be all autistic when you talk … because you don’t need their validation … that anxiety level drops … once you start being misogynistic you realize this is just a girl with a little tight dress on...Make men misogynistic again.”

– Nico Kenn De Balinthazy, known online as Sneako, in a clip that was shared by a fan account on TikTok in July 2022

“If you put yourself in the position to be raped, you must bare [sic] some responsibility.”

– Andrew Tate on Twitter, Oct. 18, 2017

“Make rape legal if done on private property. I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds. … If rape becomes legal under my proposal, a girl will protect her body in the same manner that she protects her purse and smartphone. ... After several months of advertising this law throughout the land, rape would be virtually eliminated on the first day it is applied.”

– Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh in an article posted on Return of Kings titled “How to Stop Rape,” February 2015

“ASD - noun [anti-slut defense]: the maneuvers some women make to avoid taking responsibility for initiating or agreeing to sex; or in order to avoid appearing slutty to the man she is with, to her friends, to society, or to herself. This can occur before or after sex, or it can prevent sex from occurring.”

– Appears on a list of terms and acronyms on a popular PUA forum, April 10, 2007

“The problem with being a pickup artist is that there are concepts like sincerity, genuineness, trust, and connection that are important to women. And all the techniques that are so effective in beginning a relationship violate every principle necessary to maintaining one.”

Neil Strauss in his book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, September 2005

“As anyone who regularly reads newspapers or true-crime books knows, a significant percentage of violent crime, from kidnappings to shooting sprees, is the result of the frustrated sexual impulses and desires of males. By socializing guys like Sasha, Mystery and I were making the world a safer place.”

– Neil Strauss in his book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, September 2005

Background

As Laura Bates outlines in her book Men Who Hate Women, the modern pickup industry emerged in the 1980s largely because of the work of Paul Ross, aka Ross Jeffries. Jeffries started out teaching pickup workshops and published his advice in his 1992 book, How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed. He promised to teach men to hypnotize women through a pseudoscientific technique he called “speed seduction.” In one guide, he promised to teach men how to “manipulate and control all of your women” and “create a state of ‘obedience in women’” for just $19.95. As he grew in prominence, he reached mainstream audiences through appearances on “The Dr. Phil Show” and “The Daily Show,” and he began charging $3,000 for his popular seduction seminars.

However, it wasn’t until 2005 with the release of Neil Strauss’ The Game that pickup artistry received widespread attention. With its black leather cover, red satin bookmark, and gold-edged pages, the book was deliberately marketed to resemble the Bible. His book became an international bestseller, remaining on the New York Times Best Sellers list for two months after its release and selling over 5 million copies. Today the pickup artist how-to guide is still popular, selling an estimated 100 copies each month on Amazon alone.

Strauss was an investigative reporter, and with the subtitle, Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, he promoted his book as an exposé. In reality, the book is an autobiographical account of his journey to becoming one of the community’s most prominent pickup artists. Rather than offering any kind of undercover reporting, The Game acts more as a how-to guide for pickup artistry, promising its readers the secret blueprint for interacting with women and successfully seducing them.

Strauss refers to women as “targets” and, in one passage, refers to a woman as “all holes: ears to listen to me, a mouth to talk to me and a vagina to squeeze orgasms out of me.” The techniques offered in The Game range from bizarre to dangerous. These include “peacocking” (intentionally wearing something unusual and noticeable to attract interest), “negging” (insulting a woman to undermine her confidence and make her more vulnerable to advances), and “caveman-ing” (defined in the book’s glossary as “to directly and aggressively escalate physical contact”).

Readers are taught to ignore a woman’s social and verbal signals that she is uninterested. “You just fucking push, push, push, and it can’t not work,” Tyler Durden, a pseudonymous PUA, is quoted saying as he describes his efforts to overcome women’s resistance to his advances. “I’ll pummel their asses down.” According to the PUA ideology and its affiliated seduction tactics, women are sexual objects to be manipulated and whose protests should be ignored.

Following the popularity of Strauss’ book, the cable network VH1 launched a game show called The Pickup Artist. The show was hosted by the notorious Canadian PUA Erik von Markovic, who went by the name Mystery. The show followed contestants as they competed to learn PUA tactics and implement them in various scenarios. While the show ran for just two seasons, it helped further push this male supremacist ideology into mainstream culture.

Pickup artists have a transactional view of relationships, and much of their worldview is framed in economic terms. The tactics of business negotiations are often transferred into dating, where sex is viewed as a commodity. One example of this rhetoric is the PUA belief in a “sexual marketplace.” This belief is foundational to PUA ideology and posits that every person has a “sexual market value” (SMV) that is determined based on several characteristics including attractiveness, fitness, age, confidence and wealth. According to this worldview, we live in a feminist society that grants women more power in choosing partners. PUAs believe women are hypergamous, meaning they seek men who have a higher SMV than themselves or their current partner. PUAs insist men can raise their SMV and thus attract more women by learning specific PUA seduction techniques known as “game.”

While some PUA techniques – such as putting lint on a woman’s clothing and picking it off to initiate conversation – may seem humorous, even these less dangerous tactics assume women have no right to their own space. Other techniques are far more menacing and encourage sexual coercion, assault and abuse. One popular PUA organization appropriated a domestic violence prevention group’s guide to help women identify abuse and rebranded the diagram as a guide for controlling women. A common topic across PUA boot camps and forums is how to overcome a woman’s refusal to have sex, known within the community as “LMR” or “last-minute resistance.” The PUA community believes that everyone in such a situation is simply playing a role based on gendered social expectations: Women are expected to refuse sex, while it is a man’s job to overcome her refusal. Framing sexual encounters in this way nullifies a woman’s objections and erases her autonomy.

Though the pickup artist industry has receded in prominence in recent years, coaches and gurus continue to charge hefty prices for their services. One PUA based in London, for example, charges £750 ($951) for a 12-hour workshop. Another sells a $1,997 video training course, Tricking Girls into Having Sex Without Revealing Your Personal Information, that boasts it will protect men from “girls wrongfully trying to ruin their reputation and wrongfully accuse them of rape.” Online, another PUA sells an $8 PDF that guarantees to help men overcome women’s allegedly manipulative nature and successfully seduce them, as well as $98 individualized coaching sessions. In these 60-minute sessions, the PUA promises: “I will be able to fix your problems relating to … Issues with women … Depression/anxiety … [and] Becoming a high value man.” Any credentials or qualifications indicating the author’s ability to address serious mental health issues are noticeably missing from the promotional page.

Sexual violence

Strauss eventually went on to reject the pickup artist ideology and culture. In 2015, a decade after his first book, he published The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, where he described the pickup artist techniques he elevated in The Game as “objectifying and horrifying.” In an interview with The Guardian, he acknowledged the impact of his book: “It was really a book about scared men who were afraid of women. But then it became a part of the culture. And it became a reason for women to be afraid of guys.”

George Sodini was one of these men. He attended PUA seminars, bought the purported how-to books and practiced seduction strategies. Yet he was still unsuccessful. Sodini documented his romantic failures and growing rage towards women in an online diary, where he claimed to have been rejected by 30 million women. In 2009, he opened fire in a Pennsylvania gym, killing three women and injuring nine others before killing himself.

Many men embraced more overtly misogynistic and violent rhetoric when PUA techniques failed to fulfill their promises. A few months after Sodini’s deadly attack, PUHate.com launched as an online community that advertised itself as dedicated to “revealing the scams, deception, and misleading marketing techniques used by dating gurus and the seduction community.” This site attracted and helped radicalize misogynist incels, or “involuntary celibates,” who still subscribed to many of the misogynist principles of pickup artistry, but now believed the game was rigged against them. As feminist author Jude Doyle highlighted, “The incel movement grew directly out of the PUA fad, a storm cloud of disillusioned students who were ready to try more violent means of accessing female bodies.” This included Elliot Rodger, who was radicalized on PUHate.com before he conducted the first incel terrorist attack in 2014.

Unlike misogynist incels who blame society for their problems, pickup artists believe the cause of their problems lies with each individual. As a result, while misogynist incels will target society through mass violence, the violent consequences of PUAs are more likely to manifest at the interpersonal level through sexual violence.

Many of the key figures of the PUA movement promoted and defended sexual violence to their supporters. In 2014, the once-notorious PUA Julien Blanc posted a video of himself bragging about and encouraging the men attending his seminar to assault women. “In Tokyo, if you’re a white male, you can do what you want,” Blanc declared. He described how he grabs women’s heads and forces them to his crotch and then showed footage of himself doing just that. At the time, Blanc was charging attendees $2,000 for these seminars. In response to the video and a series of protests and petitions, Blanc was deported from Australia and denied entry to the United Kingdom, Singapore and Brazil.

Similarly, once the most prominent pickup artist, Roosh Valizadeh, or Roosh V., frequently advocated for predatory and forceful sexual behavior on his popular website, Return of Kings, founded in October 2012. A website festering with misogyny and incitements to rape, Return of King headlines included “When Her No Means Yes,” “The Intellectual Inferiority of Women,” “Why Women Shouldn’t Work” and “Don’t Let Your Girlfriends Have Homosexual Friends.” Roosh also organized a “fat-shaming week” to coerce women into losing weight. Roosh called for the legalization of rape on private property, repeatedly encouraged his supporters to stalk women, defended misogynist incel mass violence, and, in a book series, repeatedly boasted of raping women. In 2016, author S. Jane Gari interviewed an Icelandic woman who accused Valizadeh of raping her several years ago after he followed her home from a bar.

In 2013, PUA John Mulvehill, then employed by the popular PUA company Real Social Dynamics, was arrested in Las Vegas after he allegedly locked a woman in his car and prevented her from leaving as he masturbated and attempted to grope and kiss her. Mulvehill went on to found his own PUA company, Efficient Pickup, and three years later, two coaches associated with Efficient Pickup and their student were convicted of rape. In his court testimony, Jason Berlin, the 28-year-old student, said that his coaches, Alex Smith and Jonas Dick, taught him to separate a woman from her friends as well as how to “plow” through resistance to his advances. Berlin initially paid $300 a night for this type of training but eventually paid $2,000 a month for an apartment where the men would bring women home, including their rape victims. During the trial, the judge noted that “anyone with a connection” to the company may be liable for conspiracy charges.

After San Diego Police failed to investigate her rape, the woman was able to track down her rapists after finding their profiles on several PUA forums where they boasted about her assault in a blog post and a “field report.” Once charges were brought against these men, Dick was also charged in the rape of an underage girl, and his DNA matched a rape kit for a third victim.

In her victim impact statement, the woman identified the PUA ideology that motivated her assault: “This is not friendly dating advice or motivational speaking. This is promoting the thinking that women are only objects and men are entitled to their mind and bodies for their entertainment and satisfaction.” She expressed her hope to shine a light on PUAs, noting her rape “was strategically planned by these men, who not only manipulated and raped women regularly, but blogged and profited from it, from their fans and followers.”

Rebranding

In recent years, pickup artists have taken steps to adapt to shifts in society and reinvent themselves. Throughout the 2000s, PUAs were seen as edgy and interesting, living a life that seemed aspirational to some, thanks in part to their largely positive portrayals in popular TV shows and movies, such as How I Met Your Mother and Crazy Stupid Love. In contrast, now the term seems antiquated, associated with obnoxious, fedora-wearing losers who, following their heyday in the 2000s, became the subject of public mockery and ridicule.

Also, in the 2010s, many key figures saw their influence diminished and left the movement altogether. In addition to Strauss rejecting the movement, Roosh, Julien Blanc and Jeff Allen all faced travel restrictions from several countries in response to their predatory and misogynistic teachings. Valizadeh also turned away from the PUA community, citing that a religious awakening led him to condemn sex outside of marriage, aligning him with a different faction of the hard right.

As the traditional PUA community weakened in popularity and influence, new communities and figures built on the same ideology emerged to replace it. The alpha male movement on TikTok and other social media platforms is one example of this phenomenon. Influencers such as Andrew Tate promote the same toxic masculinity repackaged as self-improvement and sell their gamified life hacks that promise to improve one’s masculine status.

Andrew Tate went viral for his toxic misogyny in summer 2022 after he directed thousands of his supporters to inundate social media with his most controversial clips. “Females are barely sentient,” Tate explained in one viral clip. “Females don’t have independent thought. They don’t come up with anything. They’re just empty vessels, waiting for someone to install the programming.” In late 2022, Andrew Tate and his brother were arrested for human trafficking, rape and organized crime. The men were accused of profiting off coercing women into “forced labor ... and pornographic acts.”

The influence of the PUA era on Andrew Tate is obvious in both his rhetoric and money-making schemes. On a podcast in 2022, Tate declared, “The reason 18- and 19-year-olds are more attractive than 25-year-olds is because they’ve been through less dick.” Compare this with a quote from a blog post Roosh V. wrote several years earlier: “By the time a girl hits 25 years old, any man who meets her will have to deal with a walk-in closet of emotional issues and hang-ups from being pumped and dumped as much as a 1930s brothel whore.” Similarly, both men stress that women are solely responsible for preventing their own rape, removing responsibility from men who might commit acts of sexual violence.

Unfortunately, Tate is not the only one promoting this rebranded ideology to his millions of followers. “Fresh & Fit,” a podcast hosted by Walter Weekes, a “dating and lifestyle coach,” and Myron Gaines, the author of Why Women Deserve Less, is another example of how PUA principles are being repackaged. According to the hosts, their podcast covers “females, fitness, and finances,” and the advice they give men for building relationships with women is misogynist at best and dangerous at worst. In one viral clip, Gaines directed followers to “immediately punish” a woman’s “undesirable behavior.” Similarly, in a podcast episode featuring Andrew Tate and his close friend Justin Waller, Waller explained, “Fear equals respect equals love,” when discussing relationships with women.

Another example of this phenomenon is Nico Kenn De Balinthazy. known online as Sneako. De Balinthazy, whom the media has described as “a cheap imitation of Tate,” is another alpha male content creator with millions of followers. In one viral video, De Balinthazy rejects the idea that “no means no” and explains that women say no when they really mean “convince me” because they don’t want to be responsible for their actions or viewed as a “slut.”

Tate, Gaines, De Balinthazy and others tell their followers - if you purchase their advice- that manipulating women is both necessary and easy. In an interview with Metro.co.uk, Lisa Sugiura, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth U.K. whose research focuses on cybercrime and gender, recognized the male supremacy promoted by these men is nothing new: “To me, it’s the continuation of the pick-up artistry movement of the early 2000s, where men would prey on and manipulate women into sleeping with them. Alpha males are just the next logical step of all these pre-existing groups.”

This latest generation of male supremacists is influenced not only by PUA ideology and rhetoric, but also by their profit model that sells expensive shortcuts to life to insecure men and boys. Alpha male influencers capitalize off social media’s predatory algorithms to go viral for their male supremacy and other hateful or controversial views. They subsequently sell expensive tools and strategies to their audience of predominantly young men and boys, promising to show them how to achieve their aspirational alpha male lifestyle. Many of these influencers create content centered around finance, get-rich-quick schemes and cryptocurrency. They promote “this idea that there is a cheat code to life. That there is a cheat code that is going to get you rich, there is a cheat code that is going to get you fit, there is a cheat code that is going to get you to be loved by women, sexual prowess, like social power, you can just gamify it and if you have not figured that out, you just don’t have the right cheat code,” feminist activist Bridget Todd noted on her podcast, “There are No Girls on the Internet.”

Most alarming are the misogynist “cheat codes” to help men manipulate and dominate women. In 2018, Tate launched a $450 online course called the “Pimping hoes Degree” (PhD) program, where he promised to teach men how to attract women. Rolling Stone reported that in these videos, Tate instructed his students to manipulate their partners into doing sex work. Today, Tate sells supplements and other merchandise, and for nearly $8,000, his supporters can purchase access to Tate’s “War Room,” a global network and Telegram channel where Tate and his affiliates offer their advice about masculinity, business and sex.

Similarly, Stirling Cooper, a men’s sex coach affiliated with Tate’s War Room, sells a $799 video course that promises to transform viewers into “DOMINANT Chad[s].” In his promotional text for the course, Cooper uses PUA and misogynist incel talking points and terminology, such as the “80/20 rule,” which posits the top 20% of men have sex with 80% of women, and “alpha fucks, beta bucks,” which refers to the perceived sexual marketplace where alpha males have easy access to sex with desirable women while beta males only achieve these relationships if they are a source of financial support for these women. Cooper also sells a $97 manual titled How I Grew My Penis and Other Porn Industry Secrets.

While many people in the community no longer market themselves as PUAs, they still subscribe to the same PUA ideological framework that views relationships as transactional and women as dehumanized targets who can be manipulated into sex with the right methods.