đź”’ How Geeks Ate the World: The Masculinity Medicine Show
Pickup Artistry and its roots in quack psychotherapy, pop philosophy, and marketing.
How Geeks Ate the World is the working title of a book that I’m writing, exploring the development of reactionary movements in geek culture (media, tech, and hobbies) since the internet era, and how these movements have come to dominate real world politics in pretty horrifying ways.
I will be publishing chapters and essays related to this project for paying subscribers around once a month. Unlike my regular newsletter, these essays will remain paywalled.
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Episode 1 - How Geeks Ate the World
Episode 2 - Demons of Suspicion
Episode 3 - Backward Male
Episode 4 - The Californian Ideology
Episode 5 - Something Old, Something New, Something Rotten, & Something Awful
Episode 6: The Bomb that Japan Dropped on America
👉Episode 7: The Masculinity Medicine Show
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia, a dark stage lights up to the tune of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. Frank T. J. Mackie, played by Tom Cruise in a muscle shirt and leather vest, emerges backlit from the shadows to riotous applause. When the cheers die down, Mackie gestures triumphantly toward his crotch.
“Respect the cock,” he tells the audience, and after a pause, “And tame the cunt!”
From the framing, Anderson gives us the impression that Mackie is performing before a packed stadium or concert hall. But when we reverse shot to the audience, we see that we’re in a hired conference room with around two dozen doughy, middle-aged men.
Magnolia was released in 1999, but Anderson pre-empted by around five years the mainstream breakout of a subculture known as “Pickup Artistry.”
PUA, as it is known in shorthand, has probably been the most widely recognized subset of the manosphere for the longest time. But although it developed contemporaneously with the Men’s Rights Activism of Warren Farrell and Paul Elam, the two movements have little in common superficially and neither appears to have been greatly influenced by the other. MRA is a theoretical movement that developed as a response to feminism, whereas PUA is an applied pseudoscience with roots, often dubious, in psychology.
The concept, despite the presence of the word “artistry,” is that attracting women for the purpose of casual sex is a science more than an art, and any science can be taught. Given this, PUA is the only branch of the manosphere that is explicitly selling something. Though MRA may be accused of a kind of passive grift, kept afloat via donations and club memberships, PUA is an industry based on buying books and attending seminars, masterclasses, and “boot camps” much like what is depicted in Anderson’s film. It has mentors and gurus, very similar to the world of investment capital, and carries the same scammy ambience as a Tai Lopez seminar.
Techniques that treat attracting women as a kind of skill or an algorithm that can be learned and mastered have long been marketed to men who express difficulty with dating, and these techniques are particularly compelling to those with “nerdy” attitudes who might be very welcome to the existence of an instruction manual or a schematic.
When I was a teenager, I took a couple of professional classes on how to play pool. That was over two decades ago, and I’ve forgotten everything I learned, but it’s a pretty good analogy for how PUA is at least purported to work. Pool is not a “solved game”—nobody can tell you exactly how to win in the way that they can tell you how to solve a puzzle or a maze. But it is a game of physics, balls bouncing around a table in determinable cause-and-effect patterns, so it’s possible to get good at pool by developing a better sense of where to strike the ball.
PUA might try to present itself as sociological, but its view of the world never approaches the complexity of sociology. Sociological interactions are interactions between people. In the mindset of PUA, the problem is physics. Men are the players, and women are the balls on the table.
There’s no coincidence in the fact that the set of skills that PUAs teach is collectively referred to as “Game.”
But like the fable of the stone soup, in which a traveler teaches a village to make a delicious and hearty soup by boiling a simple large stone with a bunch of additional active ingredients, most PUA guides tend to consist of genuine common sense social advice like good personal hygiene (the active ingredients), slipped in alongside the “magic” ingredients, which are the signature tactics of Game practitioners that may have little, none, or even negative effect on the student’s efficacy in dating. This is the stone in the soup.
For example, “Mystery,” the Pickup pseudonym of Erik von Markovik, is a proponent of “peacocking,” a technique that involves going to clubs wearing a gigantic fluffy hat, a pirate shirt, and a feather boa, among other eccentricities. His theory is that “You demonstrate higher value when people perceive that you’re accustomed to this social pressure and otherwise unaffected by it. Even though you’re wearing nonconformist clothing, you can still survive in this world! Women will think, Wow, despite all that “tail” he’s still here; he’s still alive! They will perceive this as social dominance.”1
As silly as elements of it may seem when viewed from the outside—in many cases contradictory to the widely held tenets of Western masculinity, featuring strange costumes, facial makeup, and ostentatiousness more befitting Liberace than Dwayne Johnson—the mainstream exposure to PUA at the beginning of the 21st century was a significant causal factor in the rightward political turn of geek culture in the following years. It’s a story of how the social grievances of young male geeks came to be exploited in the early years of the internet by a marketing industry emboldened by new technological possibilities.
It's easy to assume that the types of people who teach and study PUA are predatory jocks, but in actual fact it is another chapter in the history of geeks trying to emulate jocks. In the fratire era of internet comedy, this emulation was ironic, but here it is sincere.
Contrast it with Tucker Max—he plays a tangential role in the history of PUA, as we will learn soon, but he is not, himself, considered a “pickup artist.” This is despite the fact that he is (or was, given his newfound monogamy, but probably would still be) extremely talented in picking up women. The difference is that Max is a true jock. There are things that he could teach young men about how to seduce women, but they are not marketable. They are things like: Wash your hair, clean your clothes, actually speak to women. They are the uninteresting vegetables in the typical PUA stone soup.
The rest, unfortunately, involves a lot of externalities that aren’t necessarily within your control. Tucker Max is just a physically attractive, witty, and charismatic man. His soup doesn’t have a stone at its heart and is therefore the boring truth: While most men will find somebody, seduction is largely a game of chance, not skill, and certainly not physics.
PUA, however, survives and thrives by instilling the opposite, geekier, and more optimistic idea that attracting women is more like putting together an IKEA cabinet—some people can wing it, but for others, there’s no shame in reading the manual. And there are many, many manuals, most of them self-published, and they all read very similarly. Take this introductory passage from Richard La Ruina’s book The Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want:
London, England; Friday Night, 2:15 A.M.
Hundreds of women crowd the dimly lit nightclub—each dressed more provocatively than the next, each looking to let loose. Ava, a five-foot-ten Estonian fashion model I met just minutes earlier, lays her head on my shoulder.
“It feels like I’ve known you my whole life,” she confides.
I smile and give her a reassuring hug. We’ve now reached what I call the point of no return. She’s mine and I know it. Just a few short years ago, I’d never have been in a situation like this. I would have been at home with my mom, playing Street Fighter, eating ice cream sandwiches on a Friday night. But now, life is different. Very different.
Five nights a week I go out. Five nights a week I have the opportunity to go home with a beautiful woman. What’s changed? The short answer: everything. The slightly lengthier answer: I became a pickup artist… a very, very good one. And now I’m going to make you one too.2
The Sam Spade cringe and the video game references make it clear from the outset that La Ruina both comes from a background, and is appealing to an audience, of geek culture. Like most PUA manuals, The Natural is written as part noir mythology and part nature documentary, studying not just women but also other men with pseudoscientific fascination:
Guys who own a model agency, work in a strip club, or manage a restaurant with hot waitresses all have something in common—they get laid. One of the major reasons is that they’re desensitized to interacting with beautiful women and are therefore comfortable around them. Someone who has worked for a model agency for two years won’t be shaking, sweating, breaking eye contact, or looking generally nervous or uncomfortable if he meets a beautiful woman. She will recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that her beauty doesn’t faze him, and this will mean he isn’t viewed as a lower life-form, unlike the other guys who are obviously very affected by her looks.2
I read another book titled The Manual: What Women Want and How to Give It to Them, by somebody named W. Anton, but it could easily be by the same guy. It drips with multi-level marketing aesthetic, and beyond the introduction, Anton rarely uses the terms “man” and “woman” again – he calls them “males” and “females” as though it’s a report on rhesus macaques for the Discovery Channel.
My intention with this book is to turn your world upside down, to wake you up, and to open your eyes. After you’ve read it, I sincerely believe that nothing will seem the same to you. Most of what you now believe you know about women will change. Everything that previously made no sense will simply fall into place. You may very well see all your past experiences, your current situation, and everything that happens from this day forward in a completely new light. Issues that once concerned you and problems that still concern others will vanish.3
You may feel that this reads as pop marketing pitch, and you would be right. In fact, marketing, coaching, and PUA spring very much from the same well.
The question of whether or not PUA “works” is rather complicated. According to one been-there-done-that by Nathan Thompson, an ex-PUA dabbler on Vice, “In my experience, PUA tactics don’t work. They don’t produce Bond-esque rogues but grotesque social robots whose jabbering mouths spout programming written by borderline sociopaths. It’s insulting to a woman’s intelligence to think that a sartorial spruce up and reciting some lines will win her affection.”4
Considering its underground nature, it’s unlikely that a true establishment figure in modern PUA—with its pseudonyms, mentorships, and boot camps—can be pinned down, and likelier still that it came about through a slow evolution. But references to the practice can be found from the early 20th Century, before the modern nomenclature was associated with it.
“Pickup,” as a term for a one-night-stand, dates back to Second World War advice urging US military members to avoid sexual contact with overseas civilians or sex workers due to the risk of venereal disease. Propaganda posters aimed at soldiers being deployed abroad warned of one night stands with women they referred to as “pickups” and “good time girls,” saying “You can’t beat the Axis if you get VD.”5
It’s uncertain whether the term “pickup” emerged from, or was being used by, seduction community circles at that time, but this subculture definitely existed by World War II. Even Richard Feynman, the 1965 Nobel Prize winning physicist and all-round nerd superhero, dedicated an entire chapter in his 1985 autobiography Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! to his brief foray into what had yet to be known as PUA.
He doesn’t date his anecdote, but notes it was early in his time at Cornell shortly after “working on the bomb.” For most of the Manhattan Project, Feynman was married to Arline Greenbaum, with whom there is no evidence that he was ever unfaithful, but she died in 1945, leaving him a widower, so the story almost certainly takes place either that year or the next. He writes about how he used to visit nightclubs in Albuquerque and muses about the time he accidentally purchased a round of drinks due to a misunderstanding: The waiter informed him that the bottle of champagne he ordered was an astonishing $16 (this was the 1940s economy), to which he responded “never mind,” but the waiter unfortunately misinterpreted this to mean “never mind the price.” He decided to use the mistake to his advantage.
Feynman had hoped, it would seem, to earn a sexual encounter from purchasing an expensive round of drinks, but when this doesn’t happen, he consults an apparent guru who he refers to as “the master,” who tells him:
The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.
Therefore, under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything—not even a package of cigarettes—until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.6
Feynman goes on:
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a god-damn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.6
It can be jarring to read a Nobel laureate physicist ranting on about “bitches” and “whores,” but Feynman was known for his irreverence toward the stuffy and respectful norms that were more becoming for a contemporary of Oppenheimer and Bohr. The admiration that his overwhelmingly male acolytes have toward him is based largely on the view that these attributes made Feynman a uniquely charismatic and relatable figure, a “fun professor,” thus a positive role model for scientists. He is idolized by the characters on The Big Bang Theory, which, for its harsh “nerd blackface” reputation in geek culture, at least attempts to exalt that culture.
But, in lionizing Feynman for his bombastic personality, his fans downplay, twist, or ignore components of his legacy that come off as chauvinist, misogynistic, and even abusive. Popular science media uses neutral-to-positive terms like “nonconformist” to describe a man who held professional and educational meetings at strip clubs, sketched naked pictures of his female students, and, from his behavior after the fact with undergraduate girls, clearly never truly gave up on his “pickup game” as much as he claimed to have.7
Feynman, in his memoir, further lays out the teachings of his anonymous “master.” His aptitude with these lessons was tested when he took a woman for a walk and, believing that he’d locked in a sexual encounter, agreed to pay for coffee and sandwiches to take back to her place. It wasn’t until he paid and noticed that three sandwiches had been ordered that he realized that her proposal involved a third person—another male friend, as it turned out.
He doesn’t hold back in describing his response:
I think to myself, “See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn’t asked her anything, and now I know I’m gonna get nothing! I have to recover, if only for the pride of my teacher.”
I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You … are worse than a WHORE!”
“Whaddya mean?”
“You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”
“Well, you cheapskate!” she says. “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll pay you back for the sandwiches!”
I called her bluff: “Pay me back, then.”
She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and coffee and went off.6
Putting aside the fact that paying a woman who then doesn’t have sex with you is kind of the opposite of a whore, Feynman appealed once again to his master for advice, who reassured him that the girl would return later in the night and he would get his sex. For what it’s worth, according to Feynman, that did happen:
Just as we’re coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, “Come on, let’s go over to my place.”
The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!6
Richard Feynman has regularly been touted as one of the most successful figures in modern history when it comes to driving young people into the sciences. His horny misadventures and conquests surely make him a relatable and even aspirational figure to young, awkward, nerdy men, even if the details of his legacy need to be massaged to make it so. What kind of motivation, though, does his legacy give to young women?
The physicist Lawrence Krauss, who admires Feynman powerfully, wrote a 2011 biography Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, which reviewers noted was much heavier on the science aspect than the life.8 It is understandable in a sense that a writer of popular science might struggle with the human interest angle that drives most biographies, but it may also reflect how difficult much of Feynman’s behavior is to launder. Krauss excuses much of Feynman's womanizing as “lashing out at convention” in response to his “inner turmoil” and “newfound nihilism,” after the death of his first wife and the horrors of the nuclear bomb.9
It's certainly important to put Feynman’s behavior in its context. Arline Greenbaum was Feynman’s high school sweetheart, and by all accounts, the love of his life. It’s easy to see how her young and pointless death very well might break a man in all kinds of ways, and having had no experience or need for attracting women during his formative years may have driven him toward these strange alternatives. But it is important to hold people, on some level, responsible for their actions, the driving realities of their trauma notwithstanding. The hole in his heart should not be used to perpetually excuse an ongoing pattern of sexual exploitation through false pretenses, and certainly not, as his second wife would allege, physical assault.10
But Krauss’ lack of focus on Feynman’s sexual misconduct may have less to do with rehabilitating his legacy or covering for embarrassing facts than simply regarding all this to be inconsequential, frivolous, or even a side-effect or symptom of his genius. In justifying Feynman’s “lashing out” in these ways, Krauss ventures “Perhaps it took a man who was willing to break all of the rules to fully tame a theory like quantum mechanics that breaks all the rules.”
Krauss describes with wistful prose how, when Feynman lived in Brazil, he experienced a “cultural awakening and a sexual feast,” during which he learned to play the bongo drums (one of his most oft-cited eccentricities) and engaged in orgies (less frequently cited). He details Feynman’s growing proficiency in what still would yet to be popularly known as PUA, but which Krauss instead characterizes, with no small note of idolatry, as “outsmarting the local women he met in bars.”
It was during his time in Rio that Feynman proposed via mail to his on-again, off-again, girlfriend Mary Louise Bell, whom Krauss sexualizes as “A platinum blonde with a penchant for high heels and tight clothes,” and who pursued Feynman relentlessly in a way he stops short of regarding predatory. Of their very short and ill-fated marriage, Krauss presents their divorce as amicable and initiated by his feeling that he had made a mistake. Of their divorce proceedings, Krauss cites passages from her testimony that reaffirm his legendary mythology and make her sound like an obstacle to it—that he was so obsessed with advancing science that he was doing calculus in his head every waking hour.9 He does not detail the passages that allege how, when she would accidentally interrupt him, he would throw furniture at her and smash things.10
It’s relevant to mention at this point that Lawrence Krauss, in a spectacular 2018 investigative piece by BuzzFeed News, was revealed to have been the subject of scores of sexual assault and misconduct allegations that stretched back past a decade.11 I’m leaving this fact right here for the moment without further elaboration, but we will revisit it in a later chapter.
This is a preview. Continued after the paywall: Pickup Artistry’s strange roots in such disparate sources as pop philosophy, psychoanalysis, business coaching, marketing, and parlor magic, and how the internet transformed it into something much more insidious.
