Studying Austin Powers at work in The Spy Who Shagged Me could do more for your sex life than a pick-up artist, says Ally Fogg. But what has worked for you? Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
I blame Transformers. Many of my fellow heterosexual men appear to approach potential romantic partners as if they were those complicated robotic toys with a special hidden feature. All you need to do is turn her head just enough, raise her eyebrows, utter the secret password and woop woop woop: a siren sounds, her nipples start flashing and she instantly transforms into your own personal sex machine – Bonktamus Prime.
Having met one or two real, actual women in my time, I'm not sure they operate like that. They're rather complicated creatures, with all sorts of varied and conflicting character traits, moods, tastes, preferences, senses of humour and sexualities. It's almost like they are human beings or something.
Nonetheless an astonishingly large industry has built up online over the past decade, promising to help lonely men find the elusive sex button. It's not surprising that self-styled pick-up artists (PUAs) have found a market. They offer perfect psychosexual snake-oil, cashing in on the gullibility of the desperate. Their potions are dressed up in a frilly blanket of pseudoscience, snippets of social and evolutionary psychology, stage mentalism, neurolinguistic programming and self-referential received wisdom. It is mostly marketed through far-fetched personal testimony and miraculous anecdote. Most importantly, there are so many different models offered, so many conflicting "treatments" for low sex appeal, that unsatisfied customers can drift endlessly from one treatment to the next in search of the magic sex switch.
Nonetheless, PUAs have a few PR issues to deal with. Last week a Kickstarter appeal to fund a new PUA book came to widespread attention when it was noticed that the proposed content of the book – the collected wisdom of the Reddit community called r/seduction and in particular the contributions of a certain Mr TofuTofu – were peppered with the most gruesomely misogynistic advice. Alex Hern at the New Statesman outlined the worst of it. Kickstarter has now removed the post and apologised, saying "the project has no place on our site".
The proposed book was horrible, but even the more mundane threads on PUA forums are peppered with nastiness. The phrase "last-minute resistance" is used in discussions of how not to take no for an answer. The PUAs insist that their advice is always framed with discussion of consent and respecting a woman's right to refuse, and it is true. However that often seems to boil down to "back off until she stops screaming and then try again". The PUA typically describes consent as a final inconvenient hurdle rather than the starting blocks of any sexual event.
PUA techniques are certainly manipulative, but that in itself isn't the greatest sin. A lot of the advice is a gender-mirrored reflection of the dating advice columns that have filled women's magazines and self-help books for decades. However there is an important difference. PUAs often advocate intrusive, oppressive and sexually intimidating techniques for approaching women, on the promise that it will work on perhaps one woman in 10. Even if that were true, it would mean that nine out of 10 women are being subjected to approaches they may feel are discomfiting, harassing or downright frightening. Where is the concern about the impacts of this behaviour on the other women? Nowhere.
To be fair, there are PUAs who recognise at least some of these problems, and attempt to incorporate some basic human sensitivity. It should also be noted that there may be constructive sides to the PUA experience. Feminist writer Clarisse Thorn has documented the scene with compassion and sympathy, and notes that the community often acts as a kind of self-help and personal development network for socially awkward, shy and unhappy men – something Neil Strauss, author of The Game and original PUA guru has always advocated.
The social support networks may be a major reason why so many men claim PUA tricks have worked for them – just as many homeopathy patients insist on their own positive experiences. A parable featuring the greatest of all PUAs illustrates this well.
As I'm sure you'll recall from your classics lectures, in The Spy Who Shagged Me, the great philosopher, spy and international man of venery, Austin Powers was cast into sexual inconsequence when the evil Fat Bastard stole his mojo during an encounter with Ivana Humpalot. Ninety minutes and several dance routines later, he learned the valuable lesson that it wasn't his mojo that he was missing, but his confidence.
So my advice, for what it's worth ($49.99 to my Paypal account, as it happens) is to abandon the PUA gurus and study the master Powers at work. Things will soon be utterly shagtastic for you, baby. What advice would you share? Whether you are male or female, what has worked for you, or worked on you? Let's see if the seductive hive mind of Comment is free can put the commercial PUAs out of business once and for all.
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'What have you got in that handbag?' … Rod Stewart's pickup line. Photograph: Mike Coppola