In Defense of the Pickup Artist

Incel this, manosphere that—let's keep the lost art of actually trying.

Photography by Joseph Szabo via Trunk Archives

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Before incels, looksmaxxing, and body count became household terms, there once was a type of guy known as a pickup artist. The year was 2005: YouTube had just launched, Martha Stewart was released from prison, and a writer named Neil Strauss published a book called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. In this book, Strauss spent two years embedded with a group of guys who belonged to the “seduction community.” They called themselves pickup artists and shared their strategies for getting women they met out in the real world to eventually sleep with them. As that concept faded into obscurity, so did the pickup artist. But for a time, he played a role in our sexual culture. There was even a VH1 reality show about it.

The pickup artist liked women—that’s the first thing to know. The pickup artist wanted to be around women, to talk to them, to flirt with them and make them laugh. And then there’s the obvious: The pickup artist wanted all of this in an effort to have sex with women.

Many men today do not like women, if our social media feeds are any indication. They do not like women to the point that they also do not want to have sex with them. Do women want to have sex with men? I don’t know. That’s not really the point. That wasn’t something the pickup artist worried much about. Whether a woman consciously wanted to have sex with a man was irrelevant. What mattered was that she could maybe be convinced.

This is not a popular line of thinking, and for good reason. “Convinced” is not an appropriate term to use within our adult consensual sexual lexicon. But at the same time it’s like, I don’t consciously want to order a side of fries with my dinner. I don’t want to take a shot of tequila on a Tuesday night. I don’t want to go to the gym tomorrow, either… But I could probably be convinced.

Attraction, by social psychologists’ definitions, is typically described as an individual’s positive evaluation of another person and the desire to initiate contact or establish physical intimacy with them. At the foundation of the pickup artist ethos is the belief that attraction can be cultivated. Those who practiced the art utilized two primary initial methods: direct, which essentially entails going up to a woman, telling her that you find her attractive and you’d like to speak with her, and the indirect, which can be anything from asking a woman to settle a debate to doing a magic trick. Now you’ve got her interest. Now you’re building trust. You found a quarter behind her ear and she’s starting to feel a bit more comfortable. Here the pickup artist would pivot to kino, or kinesthetic touch—those ineffable moments of spark in a look that lasts just a moment too long, the way you lean in to hear the words of someone you’d like to hear even more words from, the grazing of an arm as you reach for a drink.

Now the pickup artist would move into the seduction phase. You might hear the term pickup artist and think these are men who would buy a woman a single drink and expect to take her home, but that is a bit of a mischaracterization. The pickup artist community adhered to what was called “the seven-hour rule,” meaning that they encouraged spending a minimum of seven hours with a woman in order to build an emotional and mental bond before initiating sex.

Now imagine a young man who listens to podcasters who tell him that women are repellent and that Nazi salutes are funny, or a young man who has been indoctrinated into thinking he will never find love because he’s shorter than six feet tall, or even a young man whose intentions are good who has nevertheless done little socializing beyond a Discord server. Imagine him being capable of holding eye contact with a woman. Imagine him wanting to spend at least seven hours with one. Imagine him having at least enough baseline respect for women that he’d be interested in entertaining a conversation with them. Imagine him asking them, “Is this your card?” It’s easy to imagine women wanting to sleep with him.

It is, really, that simple: In order to meet women—or even to “pick them up,” if you want to use that term—you have to actually try. Now I’m not saying you should start donning an oversize faux fur hat and negging them, or delivering backhanded compliments in an effort to undercut their confidence. But I am saying that perhaps there are a few concepts to glean from the “wisdom” of pickup artists like Erik “Mystery” von Markovik and the words of Strauss. While some might argue that pickup artistry faded due to its misogynistic attitudes, the reality is that the manosphere it grew from is more misogynistic than ever. Trying to get laid has been traded for a culture of hustle and grift that views women as a waste of time. At the very least, the pickup artist didn’t think so.

Seduction does require some push-and-pull. It requires the confidence in oneself to approach a woman in the first place, and the ability to hold a conversation to maintain her interest. A codified set of techniques is not going to present you with some foolproof method of hooking up, nor should it be viewed through such a rigid lens. The point, instead, is that charisma can be built, and that it ought to be viewed as a practice to be cultivated. You might fail at times, but you will have opportunities to try again. It is an art form, after all. And art takes practice.