In the coaching narrative then, “negative” events that antagonize power relations, such as strikes, boycotts, or protests, should be not evaluated from the standpoint of a possible social improvement but from whether they serve or not our individual happiness and self-fulfillment. References on class are stunningly absent from this discourse, or better they are present insofar as coaches want to highlight that class and social position eventually do not matter. In this sense, the curatorial imperative contributes to further canonizing atomization as the fundamental unit of social reality in which personal interest and the maximization of one’s pleasure should always come first instead of, say, sacrificing oneself for a larger cause. In the next section, I explore how this atomized narrative plays out in the training of heterosexual men on how to form relations with women, a sphere that is particularly apt for reproducing narratives of success and self-realization.
6.5 Curating Masculinities in Sexuality and Intimacy Coaching
Similar narratives are then palpable in the men’s coaching, and more particularly, in the courses, guidelines, seminars, and prescriptions focusing on dating and romantic relations, which attempt to outline the proper ways of curating men’s sexuality and intimacy. This section explores men’s coaching as part of the curatorial tropes that received widespread popularity in platform society.
The areas of sexuality and intimacy, similar to other areas, as we saw, are dramatically impacted by the curatorial imperatives of self-presentation, authenticity, and personal vision that digital technologies have brought about. In this section, I especially look at how sexuality and intimacy are instrumentalized in heterosexual men’s coaching cultures for dramatizing male identities of empowerment among shifting socio-economic realities and conceptions of gender. Sexuality refers to the ways that (gendered) people perform (or not) sexual desires around other (gendered) people and bodies; intimacy in turn refers to the warm and tender feelings or gestures, not necessarily sexual, that people experience around particular individuals. While these afects often overlap, when it comes to male coaching in particular, sexuality becomes primarily the subject of so-called dating coaches while intimacy that of so-called relationship coaches. In men’s coaching and wider popular culture discourse, sexuality and intimacy are considered to be core parts of one’s identity. By understanding and enabling one’s sexuality, for instance, one can have more possibilities to find the ideal partner and achieve happiness (Cabanas and Illouz, 2019). $\mathrm { O r } ,$ by mastering intimacy, one has more chances to succeed in other significant areas of life, such as professional growth, personal development, and family, or to elevate emotional states linked to personal well-being, including feeling protected and cared for. Sexuality and intimacy (maybe along with career) are, in the coaching narrative, the most important areas of one’s identity, to which one should invest time and resources. To go back to the premise of the last section, then, discovering and eventually efectively performing one’s sexuality is part and parcel of unearthing a real self in coaching cultures.
Curating Mindsets, Micro-Celebrities, and Intimacies
145