Confessions of a Pickup Artist pt. 4: The Paradise Lost

The online communities of the 2000s were a paradise of self-improvement, lost due to social media.

The Confessions of a Pickup Artist series:

• Pt. 1: The Good Stuff

• Pt. 2: The Mystery Machine

• Pt. 3: The Bad Stuff

• Pt 4: The Paradise Lost

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In previous parts of this series, I covered both good and bad ideas of the seduction community. While sorting out the good ideas from the bad ones was critical to succeed as a pickup artist, I believe that a key factor that helped me and many other men get better with women was the support received from the seduction community.

In this part, I describe how the seduction community worked at it’s peak, common features and differences from other similar online communities from that period, and the reasons of it’s eventual demise.

Online community of men - by Stable Diffusion

Note: I was an active member of the community in 2009-2010 in Poland. Polish society is slightly more conservative than most Western countries and typically lags a couple years behind the cultural trends that originate in the West. Yet, I believe that seduction communities in US and elsewhere worked pretty much the same (feel free to prove me wrong in the comments).

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Just Another Online Community

It seems to me like the public most often considers the seduction community a subculture of seduction gurus/coaches and their students. However, this is not what I saw when I joined it in 2009.

While the early pre-2005 seduction communities may have indeed been based on coaches and students, everything changed after Neil Strauss’ The Game hit mainstream.

What happened can be explained in free market terms: When a sudden spike in demand for services (seduction coaching) occurs, with limited supply and no easy way to quickly ramp up, the prices of services go up rapidly. Many potential customers in need of the services become unable to afford them and, eventually, they need to find a way to manage on their own.

As I joined the community, I saw that most of it was neither coaches or students - just a bunch of guys in early 20s seeking and giving advice for free.

In many ways, the seduction community was no different from many other online communities dedicated to hobbies such as music or sports that sprang up in the 2000s. These were often centered around an internet forum, or message board, used for both online discussion and finding people in your local area that would like to meet and discuss or do their thing together in real life.

These communities were often what Henrik Karlsson described as “scenes”:¹

What is a scene? It is a group of people who are producing work in public but aimed at each other. (…) They challenged and supported each other to be bolder, more ambitious, better. A scene, to borrow a phrase from Visakan Veerasamy, “is a group of people who unblock each other at an accelerating rate”.

Almost invariably, when you notice someone doing bold original work, there is a scene behind them. Renaissance Florence was a scene for scholars and painters, flowering in Leonardo DaVinci. The coffeehouses of Elizabethan London were a scene for playwrights, flowering in Shakespeare.

Their members would most often were high agency men - those, who decided to commit to doing something most other people don’t do - playing a particular musical instrument or a role playing game, doing a niche sport or picking up girls. Unable to find anyone who shared their interests among their normie friends, they congregated online and made new real life connections with people who were into their kind of stuff.

Nat Eliasson notes how the ability to do hard things is critical for success in life:

The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume. 

Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be.

The self-improvement communities were organized around learning hard things. The “doing hard things” ability allowed those who already possessed it to get a head start. For others, the support they got from the community allowed them to eventually prove that they can do hard things too.

Sometimes, local groups formed, typically around a leader who supported his team for free and sometimes also provided paid coaching and training services to others. In skill-based communities, coaches were a vital part of the ecosystem. Trying to build up their status and credibility and funnel the community members into their coaching, training and paid content offerings, they operated in freemium mode, sharing valuable content and responding to threads, with hints that their ebooks and training programs are where you can learn more.

A critical feature of both seduction community and other similar online communities was the status system they were based on.

At first glance, it seemed like the status was corresponding to the level of competence in the skill/activity the community was organized around. However, their status system actually worked like this:

• For beginners: their rate of progress in skill development or self-improvement.

• For experts: the support they provided to less experienced community members.

• For intermediates: both rate of progress AND support for less experienced, proportionally to their own level (lower-intermediate - more about progress, upper-intermediate - more about support).

Bragging about achievements and high level of competence did not provide status, unless presented in a way that was either supportive for someone else, or indicated progress over time.

The status system reflected the familiar archetypes from the Hero’s Journey: the young hero answering the call to adventure, venturing into the unknown, enduring trials, facing his shadow self and returning with special knowledge, and the old, wise mentor assisting him on his journey.

For many, the self-improvement they eventually managed to achieve as members of these communities became their own personal Hero’s Journeys.

In Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery Scott Young explains principles of effective learning, such as learning by copying others (instead of figuring everything on your own) and learning from successes rather than mistakes (for positive feedback and motivation). He also notes how experts are not always the best teachers for beginners - with their high level of unconscious competence and long years of experience, they sometimes forget how was it like to be a beginner.

The way the seduction community and other similar communities worked was aligned with the above principles. As the distribution of competence in skill-based communities is exponential, the intermediate level members were critical for providing the much needed support for a large group of beginners.

All of the above created a virtuous cycle of self-improvement: finding the community, getting started with its support, meeting new people interested in the same stuff and doing it together, learning new things, sharing your progress online, getting status and validation from the community, supporting others and getting more and more involved over time. I believe that this mechanism was the key factor driving the effectiveness of the seduction community and other online self-improvement communities.

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We Are Anonymous

The main difference between the seduction community and other similar ones was anonymity.

The pseudonymous nicknames used for online forum posting were often also used in real life meetings. This allowed pickup artists to develop a secret identity, an alter ego. As a consequence, the seduction community became the much sought-after place where men could openly talk about their emotions, vulnerabilities and insecurities in ways not possible with their normie friends or any other discussion under their own name. This space also allowed talking about male sexuality - stuff considered too ugly, disgusting and pornographic to be discussed anywhere else.

Most other online communities allowed sharing media depicting and confirming the outputs and results achieved by their members. But in the seduction community, the anonymity principle meant that it was strictly forbidden to share any pictures or personal details of the women the pickup artists approached and seduced².

Therefore, real life meetings served an important purpose of cross-validating the online activity: credibility was achieved by other credible peers witnessing and confirming that what you are doing is for real. Conversely, without validation from peers in real life, one could eventually get accused of being a Keyboard Jockey, or KJ - someone who exaggerates or entirely makes up his seduction exploits.

The community also included a caste of mysterious anonymous seduction gurus: guys no one ever met or seen in person. Without the possibility of real life validation, their words had to speak for themselves, as their credibility was solely based on how compelling, congruent and helpful their written advice turned out to be. And it really was - the anonymous gurus produced some of the best seduction writing I’ve ever read. Unlike coaches, the anonymous gurus had no reason to paywall their content, so they just gave it all out for free, just to help all the other guys and, quite possibly, also to enjoy some status themselves.

The final consequence of anonymity was that the discourse in the online seduction community occurred almost entirely in written form - no photos, videos or audio. Many forum threads were basically long form essays, their length and depth closely matching what you currently see here on Substack.

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The Dark Side

The seduction community would sometimes be joined by so-called naturals: men who managed to become attractive and get a lot of experience with women without the help from the community and it’s resources, looking to share their experience or level up their game.

Sometimes, the naturals would would offer a fresh, unbiased view on the seduction process and offer truly original and helpful pieces of advice. However, their advice was sometimes biased in one or both ways described below:

First, some naturals have always operated on the level of unconscious competence and were oblivious to how their seduction process really worked. Similar to normies, they were prone to overemphasizing the impact of outer game (words/behavior) and not noticing the impact of inner game (mental state) and physical attractiveness. Usually, they were also unable to self-analyze the way pickup artists most often did.

Second, some naturals became successful with women because of being high on Dark Triad traits (narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy). Here’s a passage from a Rob Henderson’s post describing naturals:

The vast majority of young males find asking someone out to be intimidating, even in an online context. There’s a small percentage of men who are unperturbed by the possibility of rejection. Men who are confident, relatively uninhibited, and unafraid to approach, tend to be higher on Dark Triad personality traits. These guys (high Dark Triad/preference for casual sex) are unlikely to be looking for the same type of relationships as many of the women they are approaching. This may give rise to a situation where many women think most men have certain traits (narcissistic, promiscuous, etc.) when in fact these are merely the 10-20% of men who are willing to approach them.  

For a pickup artist, cultivating the Dark Triad personality traits is as an equivalent of the Dark Side of the Force: it’s a shortcut that can produce short-term gains in terms of experience and bodycount, but eventually, it corrupts the psyche and makes one incapable of building truly valuable and long lasting relationships.

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The Downfall

I write about the seduction community as of a thing in the past. This is because after the seduction community probably peaked around 2010, it went into a slow but steady decline and today remains just a shadow of its former self. There were many factors that contributed to its decline:

Attrition

The mainstream popularity of Neil Strauss’ book The Game and related media featuring Strauss and Mystery resulted in flocks of young men joining the community in 2005 and following years.

However, no one remains a pickup artist forever. Most pickup artists either quickly fail and quit, or manage to self-improve, get more experience and eventually settle down with a long term partner. Very few manage to keep on going for years and rack up triple digit bodycounts, only to end up in some sort of nihilistic existential crisis.

The guys who joined the community after The Game eventually left it after a couple of years. However, at this point The Game, Strauss and Mystery were already old news, and since then, there hasn’t been any similar mainstream cultural event that could reignite the public interest in pickup artistry and result in next generations of men joining the community to replace the large amounts leaving it in the 2010s.

Bad publicity

Despite the faded popularity of The Game and related media and the subsequent decline of the seduction community, the mainstream media continued to criticize pickup artists for years.

The public image of pickup artists was seriously hurt by the media coverage of the horrible things done by some seduction coaches. Julien Blanc was barred from entering UK after a video from one of his bootcamps showing aggressive touch escalation techniques beyond the threshold of sexual assault leaked online. Roosh V, sex tourist and seduction guide author, made headlines after proposing to legalize rape on private property. Often, collective responsibility was invoked to blame the entire seduction community for the bad things these types of people did.

In the #MeToo era, the media made sure the seduction community is also hit by collateral damage. Pickup artists became scapegoats, blamed for all the bad things men do to women worldwide. Eventually, “pickup artist” has become a derogatory term for a man that objectifies or abuses women, and has since been used to describe people like Trump, Weinstein, Epstein and Andrew Tate.

There was no one to stand up for the pickup artists in the public discourse. Even those with highest status in the community - the gurus and coaches - did little to counter the bad publicity.

In hindsight, it seems that as the community reached its peak around 2010, the coaches relied on it for promotion and finding new customers. But once modern online ad services and social media came into play, the seduction coaches were happy to check out of the community (which, at this point, was nothing but a free alternative for their services) and watch it crash and burn from afar. None of the seduction coaching websites I’ve seen refer to “seduction community” or “pickup artist” trademarks - they typically present the coach as the best (or only) available source of seduction knowledge out there.

Social Media

In 2010’s, social media have replaced forums and message boards as dominant platforms for socializing on the internet. Gradually, users became used to consuming photo, video or audio content over text. Those still consuming text preferred short form (post on wall/tweet) over long form (blog/forum post).

The overall deterioration of culture, media and attention spans has been widely discussed, and especially well described in Ted Gioia’s iconic State Of The Culture essay:

That shift only exacerbated the seduction community’s natural attrition process - most young men preferred social media over reading long posts and spending hours on debates on legacy forum/message board platforms.

Redpill

The gradual downfall of the seduction community created a void, which was filled by the Redpill ideology and culture. Redpill is said to be based on the seduction community body of knowledge, but it also differs significantly in aspects related related to the transition from online community to social media:

• Pickup artists formed a true online & offline community - bidirectional ties between many members talking online and meeting offline.
  Redpill is based on the social media influencer/follower paradigm - unidirectional ties from followers to influencers, with no ties between the followers and no offline meetings or communities.

• The seduction community was, by definition, a niche community created to solve problems of young single men - a small fraction of men present online.
  In order to reach a broad audience of male social media users, the scope of Redpill ideology was expanded to also cover other, much larger groups of troubled men - divorced or living in unhappy marriages and relationships, with emphasis on transactional relationship approach, standing up for themselves, maintaining a right “frame” and getting ready to leave toxic relationships.

• Relatedly, the seduction community was biased towards agency in both self-improvement and getting more experience with women.
  Since the pickup part was not relevant for most men targeted by the Redpill ideology, it does not emphasize going out and meeting women, only the self-improvement part (i.e. hitting the gym). Hence, trying to get better with women based solely on Redpill advice is sort of a cargo cult - “build, and they will come”.

• True pickup artists loved women. They also considered them victims of the social programming enforcing the slut shaming and Madonna-whore complex social norms and wanted to “help” by bringing them sexual liberation. They treated problems faced by young men in a pragmatic way - focusing on solutions, rather than finding someone to blame.
  Redpillers are a more misogynist faction of the manosphere. They don’t hate women they way incels do - they rather have a sort of ambivalent love-hate attitude of Al Bundy-esque³ boomer dads, like “Women… can't live with them, can't live without them”. They blame feminists and women in general for the social circumstances making life harder for young men today.

• Pickup artist content was typically published pseudonymously in long text form (forum thread, blog post, ebook).
  Most popular Redpill content exist in the form of videos, showing either the faces of Redpill influencers or “Alpha male” memes or AI generated imagery.

• Pickup artistry was, by definition, a niche community with no political ambitions, as mass adoption of it would be unsustainable for the society.
  Redpill, as a mass online movement included somewhat of a political dimension. As the Left and Right flipped it’s views on sex-posititivity in the 2010s, the seduction coaches-turned-Redpill influencers joined the Online Right.

The Mainstreaming of Loserdom

The viral essay from Tell The Bees linked above describes how a lifestyle of loneliness and playing video games, binge watching Netflix or scrolling social media is no longer considered loserdom, but slowly becomes a normal lifestyle for Gen Z.

Relatedly, Red Quest hypothesizes how most young guys don’t care much about getting laid: young people nowadays are having less sex, and the moral panic about constatnly falling age of sexual initiation is over, as the trends have reversed.

When inceldom is no longer socially stigmatized, even less young men are interested in learning about pickup and seduction.

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Paradise Lost

After writing for years with the goal of reigniting the public interest in pickup and seduction, Red Quest decided to wave the white flag.

It seems like the big online & offline seduction community as seen in 2010 is dead, but its spirit lives on: in some parts of the Redpill thought, in micro-communities of seduction coaches and their students, in the visions of the Secret Society (Rian Stone, Stripper) and the non-monogamy culture (Aella, Red Quest), describing the adventures of the promiscuous 20%, and in the right wing & evo psych Substack space (Walt Bismarck, Rob Henderson, Richard Hanania and, of course, me).

The online & offline self-improvement community was a brilliant social & technological invention of the 2000s that seems to have been lost, superseded by social media.

Preserving the seduction community of body of knowledge is not enough to successfully allow future generations of young men to get better with women at scale - for that, the 2000s online & offline community model would have to be reinstated somehow. Unfortunately, with social media still dominating the online landscape, this seems very unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.

1. Credit for comparing the seduction community with the “scene”, as described by Henrik Karlsson, goes to Red Quest.

2. For comparison, it seems that on incel forums it’s ok to post pics of girls that the user had sex with on a trip to Thailand - the seduction community was definitely more moral than incels in that regard.

3. Al Bundy can be considered a fictional spiritual founder of the manosphere and/or Redpill, having founded an anti-feminist organization NO MA'AM (National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood) in the early 90’s.