See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/377375186

'The Language of Pick-Up Artists: Online Discourses of the Seduction

Article in Gender and Language · January 2024

CITATIONS READS

0 113

1 author:

Laura Filardo Llamas

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Laura Filardo Llamas on 01 February 2024.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Review

The Language of Pick-Up Artists: Online Discourses of the

Reviewed by Laura Filardo-Llamas

Recent years have seen a wide interest on the social and discursive configu-
ration of what is known at the manosphere – that is, a variety of media sites
where masculinity is discussed (Marwick and Caplan, 2018; Ging 2019).
Dayter and Rüdiger’s monograph is one of these studies. Its focus is on
analysing the characteristics of the discourse used by one of the groups tra-
ditionally identified as part of the manosphere: the pick-up artists (PUA),
or men who try to seduce women at a high speed by applying a number of
routines and techniques that have been ‘marketed’ within the community
as a path to success. The notion of discourse is key to understanding the
scope of the book: in the words of the authors, this is not ‘primarily a book
about gender. This is a book about language’ (2022:185). Still, this book
does shed light on how members of this ‘community of practice’ (hence-
forth CofP; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992) approach their relation-
ship with women, which is frequently based on male occupying a power
position, on objectifying women and on using several manipulative tech-
niques in both their online and offline communication. As shown by the
authors, all these aspects contribute to spreading misogynistic beliefs and
behaviours, not only online but also in offline interactions.

Affiliation
Laura Filardo-Llamas
she/her
Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
Email: [email protected]

g&l vol 17.4 2023 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.27558

Dayter and Rüdiger set out, as the objective of their study, to inspect
PUA discourse using a multifaceted approach, which involves examining
different genres (e.g. social media, forums, in-field conversations or guru
lectures) and applying a wide variety of methodological tools – for example,
traditional corpus linguistics, corpus-assisted discourse studies (through
investigating functional patterns in different types of interactions) and
conversation analysis, completed with qualitative analysis of specific lex-
ical and syntactic cues. The book begins with a description of pick-up art-
ists and an overview of how they have been represented in news outlets,
which provides the reader with a very detailed contextual description of
the group and public perceptions about them. The authors present pick-up
artists as members of a specific CofP because, in interacting with PUA,
they share a lexical repertoire and they have a joint enterprise: to seduce
women. However, as the authors successfully demonstrate throughout
the book, this is not only a community, but also an industry: it involves
the marketisation of different techniques by PUA gurus – or ‘coaches’, as
they refer to themselves – who use a variety of strategies to keep hiring
fellow male clients who wish to be trained in the seduction process. This
dual nature of PUAs as a community (of practice) and an industry is also
reflected in discursive patterns and in the type of power relations that are
built. How they interact with one another may reflect not only their need to
self-praise – also to be considered a member of the community – but also
their attempts at persuading others to become part of the community by
joining in the same enterprise.
As members of a community (and one of practice), PUAs interact
through a variety of online and offline channels. This explains the detailed
overview of PUA genres provided in Chapter 2, which includes a descrip-
tion of in-fields (offline), guru lectures (offline), how-to videos (online),
social media (online), field reports in forums (online) and a variety of web-
sites and YouTube channels (online). This attempt to provide a ‘genre ecol-
ogy’ (Heyd 2009) of the community is novel in multiple ways. On the one
hand, Dayter and Rüdiger successfully adapt Hymes’ (1974) SPEAKING
model of ethnographic description to account for the increasingly rele-
vant digital context, hence proving the validity and need of using a digi-
tal ethnographic approach. On the other hand, the description of genres
provided in Chapter 2 is used as the basis for the organisation of the ana-
lytical chapters in the book. Because the authors have built a separate cor-
pus for each genre, different data are studied in each of the chapters and
methodological tools are selected to suit the specificities of each of the
genres under analysis. In Chapter 3, corpus linguistics is used to identify
keywords used by PUAs in in-field reports and replies to them in forums.
In Chapter 4, framing choices in such in-field reports are studied so that it
 THE LANGUAGE OF PICK-UP ARTISTS 3

can be explained how they contribute to PUA’s self-praise. These two ana-
lytic chapters contribute to explaining how PUAs relate to their peer mem-
bers in the community. In Chapter 5, conversational patterns in the offline
counterpart of the reports – that is, in fields – are analysed so as to show
how power relations are built and maintained in conversation between a
male PUA and (one or several) women. Finally, in Chapter 6, lectures by
PUA gurus and how-to-videos uploaded to YouTube are investigated with
the aim of identifying how so-called experts substantiate their role in the
community while generating further revenue for themselves.
The empirical analysis carried out Dayter and Rüdiger concludes with
the identification of four main features that characterise PUA discourse.
First, members of the PUA community of practice share a lexical repertoire
that not only marks them as part of the group, but also shows their misog-
ynistic view of the world. Similarities in the strategies used here can be
found with other discriminatory discourses, such as discourses on immi-
gration (e.g. Hart 2010). Among these, we can highlight the use of military,
engineering and marketing metaphors together with examples of semantic
shift, which have a mystifying effect as they discursively deploy women of
any agency. Second, while PUA discourse has been identified as persuasive,
the aim is not so much to persuade women but rather to acquire potential
new clients, hence their need to present themselves as experts in the field
with strategies similar to those found, for example, in health-related dis-
courses (Gülich 2003). These two findings show the dual nature of PUAs:
as a community and as a (seduction) industry. Third, in interactions, PUAs
do not intend to be liked by the women they approach – as in traditional
romantic encounters – but rather to maintain engagement with those
women; they do so by exploiting conversational strategies related to social
expectations about how women should behave. Finally, there is a mismatch
between what PUA gurus promise their ‘clients’ could achieve by using
their proposed seduction techniques and what PUAs attain in real inter-
actions. To counteract this, PUAs tend to rely on a confidence-building
strategy. This also aligns with a pervasive framing of narratives as ‘success’,
which is also identified by the authors as characteristic of PUA discourse.
Dayter and Rüdiger’s study of PUA discourse has proved to be an inter-
esting read, which sheds light on the complexity of online/offline commu-
nities that form part of the manosphere. Yet its novelty and importance
do not just lie in that aspect: the authors also succeed in their attempt at
showing how widening the scope of data to be analysed and adopting mul-
tiple methodological tools can help in triangulating findings (Baker and
Egbert 2016:3).
 4 LAURA FILARDO-LLAMAS

References
Baker, Paul and Egbert, Jesse (2016) Introduction. In Paul Baker and Jesse Egbert
(eds) Triangulating Methodological Approaches in Corpus Linguistic Research
1–19. London: Routledge.
Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1992) Think practically and look
locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of
Anthropology 21: 461–490. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155996. https://doi.
org/10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002333
Ging, Debbie (2019) Alphas, betas, and incels: theorizing the masculinities of the
manosphere. Men and Masculinities 22(4): 638–657. https://doi.org/10.1177/
1097184X17706401
Gülich, Elisabeth (2003) Conversational techniques used in transferring knowl-
edge between medical experts and non-experts. Discourse Studies 5(2): 235–
263. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445603005002005
Hart, Christopher (2010) Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New
Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heyd, Theresa (2009) A model for describing ‘new’ and ‘old’ properties of CMC
genres: The case of digital folklore. In Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein (eds)
Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre 239–262. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Hymes, Dell (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Marwick, Alice E. and Caplan, Robyn (2018) Drinking male tears: Language, the
manosphere, and networked harassment. Feminist Media Studies 18(4): 543–
559. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1450568

View publication stats