Introduction
Have you ever had a conversation where each sentence felt forced and unnatural, like you’re wading through mud? How about the opposite, where the conversation flowed and time flew by?
Meeting strangers is a challenge everyone on planet earth faces with different degrees of frequency. We might meet be looking for new friends, meeting coworkers at a new job, or meeting someone for a first date. For the most part, we’d like these conversations to go well. Whether we consider ourselves extroverted or introverted, we all learned how to talk to strangers at some point in our lives. You were probably a child, before the emotional turmoil of puberty, when you started to get the hang of it.
None of us had it easy the first time, but we learned how to deal with the inherent awkwardness of unfamiliarity with different strategies that became easier, even commonplace, with practice. For many of us, dating is one area where we feel more tentative than usual. It’s in dating, intimacy, and sex where the heady mysteries of chemistry, affinity, and desire strike at our deeper insecurities.
Don Juan clearly didn’t need any training in flirting skills, but many American men feel they need help. In nearly every major city of North America exists a seduction community: a community of men who train each-other to pick up women. These men are trained by a dating or seduction coach, and participate in rituals to overcome their inhibitions, optimize their seduction practices, and transform their personality.
The point of this is not just to learn how to attract women but also, for these men, about how to embody empowered masculine identities. Along with digital means for meeting strangers, these communities have emerged over the past 10 years from a subculture to become a globalized industry in seduction spanning from Brooklyn to Beijing. Hundreds of thousands of men participate in these groups at different levels of engagement—from online forums and subscription-based clubs to week-long intensive training courses known as bootcamps—and at a personal cost of hundreds, often thousands, of dollars.
How To Use This Site
This digital book presents you with a second-person journey into the life of men's seduction coaching. You follow the course of a trainee as he navigates myriad environments and situations - sometimes touching, comical, sometimes outrageous - in the process of becoming a seductive man. Your experiences are a composite drawn from many people I met, interviewed, and spent time with during my ethnographic research over the course of 12 months in real-life seduction communities in New York City.
In the style of game-books like Choose Your Own Adventure, you will be asked to make choices and engage with events in ways that alter the experiences you have along your journey. This can sometimes feel like being lost in a maze, running through twists and turns only to find switchbacks, disappointments, dead ends, and unexpected discoveries. Facing down uncertainty, and choosing how you want to play the game, brings you into the perspective of seducers. This may be uncomfortable.
Along the way, you will also find places to explore the social, cultural and historical dimensions that inform key events that happen or predicaments you will face. These pages will lead you to a critical discussion of these phenomena (sample pages cover things like online dating, hookup culture, and the so-called "manosphere") that are informed by academic research. You can read these sections; avoid them; return immediately to the main narrative; or, if you need a break, skip along to the next research page (just remember, you'll be skipping important sections in the plot if you do!)
To flip to the next page, or to make a decision, press a button that looks like this:
To access a research page, press a button that looks like this:
If at any point you want to return here, to the homepage, simply click the compass icon in the top-left corner of your screen. Once you're back here, you can use the top menu bar to find out more about the creator of this site and contact him with any comments, questions, or feedback.
In research pages - and even on a few story pages - you will find citations to books and articles that provide critical discussion of the topic they're paired with. To find any of these sources, click the compass icon. Then, from this page, access "Bibliography" from the top menu bar. This takes you to a complete list of all works cited in this website, without which this site would never have been possible.
The pages that follow contain multimedia elements like photographs, video, and audio clips. You can interact with these freely as you go along. In fact, turn on your volume now if you would like to hear sound - many sound and dialogue effects provide context for specific pages, and will play automatically when a page loads.
Finally, a trigger warning. While this book doesn’t directly talk about sexual intercourse, with one or two exceptions, it deals with everything that happens around it from the perspectives of a large demographic of American men: flirting, swearing, bragging, horniness, offensive speech and behaviors, sexual harassment, general obnoxiousness, and sexual assault. These materials can be upsetting. Some of my informants freight their stories with a palpable sense of fear, depression, anger, sexism, racism, and even trauma. Some of these stories may make you remember things that happened to you. This might be scary, uncomfortable, or distressing. If you feel that reading these stories and anecdotes may cause you distress, then consider, with all due care for yourself, whether it’s worth reading onward.