The Discursive Behavior of Pick-up Artists

Joint project with A/Prof Daria Dayter from Tampere University.

See also this blog post on sci five: Seducing with Words

Who Are PUAs?

The ‘pick up artists’ (PUA) community unites men who learn and practice speed-seduction for short-term mating. The main means of contact for this community are online platforms that incorporate forums where members exchange tips, strategies and reports of their exploits. The PUA movement is highly commercialized: the so-called “gurus”, the experienced members of the community who are successful in the game, go on seminar tours around the world and are well-represented on TV and in the self-help sections of bookshops.

The essence of PUA method is building confidence in the adept. This is achieved through a number of techniques, for example, providing scripts for flirting to help those who are shy and tongue-tied, or more generally, casting the whole encounter within a “training frame”. As such, the encounter is perceived as successful whether or not the woman reacted favourably: as in an athletic training session, the emphasis is placed on the process rather than the result (Dayter & Rüdiger 2016).

The Study

Because confidence is the key element of “The Game” (the pick-up artists’ seduction process), the discourse of PUAs is ideally placed for the study of self-praise. Positive self-presentation happens on two levels: on the one hand, the man constructs a desirable identity within every encounter with a woman; on the other hand, PUA community members strive for the status of gurus in their reports addressed to other members. Since the former type of data is very difficult to obtain, our research focuses on the self-presentation practices within PUA online forums.

We first lay a foundation for the analysis of PUA discourse by focussing on the marked lexis that constitutes a cornerstone of the PUA paradigm. The mastery of a complex technical vocabulary of terms and abbreviations (‘HB scale’ - hot babe scale; ‘negging’ - teasing the woman with minor insults to pique her interest; ‘quality of girl’; ‘woman management’) is inherent to ‘The Game’. These microlinguistic elements are employed by PUA community members to construct their game as successful in the “field reports” (a type of forum post in which members give detailed accounts of their activities).

In follow-up studies, we conduct qualitative analyses of a corpus of field reports representative of the genre and the replies to these reports. We particularly focus on the role of narrative framing in the reporting of events and investigate how the verbalisation of narrative guides the reader towards the intended understanding by establishing the shared knowledge schema in the community of practice.

The Ethics Conundrum

Unavoidably, sampling the language in an environment where risky topics are constantly discussed presents ethical dilemmas. We consider how conducting research in a hostile community may influence traditional methodological decisions. Through the example of the PUA community, we discuss the vulnerability of subjects and potential harm in linguistic research, and whether anything gives the researcher the freedom to forego informed consent, especially when dealing with publicly available data in an open forum. We also address the myth of the unbiased researcher that is prevalent in contemporary social science.

(project description by Dr. Daria Dayter)

List of publications related to The Discursive Behavior of Pick-up Artists:

• Dayter, Daria and Sofia Rüdiger. 2022. The Language of Pick-Up Artists: Online Discourses of the Seduction Industry. London/New York: Routledge.

• Dayter, Daria and Sofia Rüdiger. 2020. "Talking about Women: Elicitation, Manual Tagging, and Semantic Tagging in a Study of Pick-up Artists' Referential Strategies." In: Rüdiger, Sofia and Daria Dayter, eds. Corpus Approaches to Social Media. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 63-86.

• Rüdiger, Sofia and Daria Dayter. 2020. "Manbragging Online: Self-Praise on Pick-up Artists’ Forums." Journal of Pragmatics 161: 16-27.

• Dayter, Daria and Sofia Rüdiger. 2019. "In Other Words: ‘The Language of Attraction’ Used by Pick-up Artists." English Today 35(2): 13-19.

• Rüdiger, Sofia and Daria Dayter. 2017. "The Ethics of Researching Unlikeable Subjects: Language in an Online Community." Applied Linguistics Review 8(2/3): 251-269.

• Dayter, Daria and Sofia Rüdiger. 2016. "Reporting from the Field: The Narrative Reconstruction of Experience in Pick-up Artist Online Communities." Open Linguistics 2(1): 337-351. Open Access