I have followed coaches addressing heterosexual men who specialize in both sexuality and intimacy across social networks in order to familiarize myself with the tropes of the male coaching romantic discourse.13 As a systematic analysis of male coaches is not the aim of this section, I include some selective examples of dating and relationship coaches which I regard paradigmatic of the curatorial strategies and micro-techniques employed for mentoring their audiences. Indicatively, I discuss Corey Wayne, who is a popular sexuality and intimacy coaching celebrity with 500,000 subscribers on YouTube and 100,000 followers on Instagram as well as the writer of bestseller books, such as How to be a 3% Man. I also include insights and material from other male coaches who perform diverse masculinities: from more fragile, including Reese Stockhausen in a website called “Practical Intimacy”,14 to hardcore and uncompromising alpha, who can be fully misogynistic (an infamous example being Andrew Tate). Despite the diferences in style and nuance, all male coaches address a neoliberal hegemonic masculinity that should be dominant, assertive, and entrepreneurial as opposed to uncurated masculinities of disorientation and servility. In this context, sexuality and intimacy are areas that should be curated toward a winner-takesit-all vision of successful manhood, a vision that can be adapted to diferent constructions of male types from the adventurous and risk-taking “player” to the responsible “family person”.
Dating platforms and apps, according to Chris Haywood’s account on masculinities and online dating, “impel us to reveal ourselves (or particular edited aspects of us)” and more explicitly to valorize the self, making it “more explicit and accessible” (2020: 6). They thus create new anxieties not only for discovering one’s sexuality but also performing one’s unique sexual identity, desires, and romantic aspirations. In a non-binary gender landscape, the notion of masculinity is constantly being made in diferent contexts of interaction that mark the self in diferent ways. Coaches addressing heterosexual men commonly resort to the idea that there is an impending “crisis of masculinity”, according to which men have become weak, disoriented, and incapable of fulfilling their traditional roles. They attribute this “crisis” to the feminist undoing of traditional gender roles, the disappearance of the muscled breadwinner in light of the deindustrialization of the West, and expressions of multiple genders and sexualities that do not conform to traditional binary notions.
By operationalizing flirting, dating, and relationships with women, men’s coaching inhabits a place both in the so-called manosphere, an online movement that avows men’s rights in opposition to feminism (Ging, 2019), and the so-called seduction industry, which is itself a fragment of the manosphere, and aims to train men to seduce, and generally managing relations with, women (O’ Neil, 2018). The manosphere community claims sexist mythologies, such as the Red Pill philosophy, taken from the film
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism