If choice, as the main modality of subjectivity, is nominally limitless, then the issue at stake is how to reach a condition of abundance that would allow men to keep as many choices as possible open: “Busy, successful men communicate abundance. They come from a place of abundance. If things don’t work out with one girl, it’s no big deal. There is another bus every 15 minutes”, as the coach Corey Wayne proclaims (2013: 68). Here, the implicit idea is that once a certain saturation point of desirability is achieved, this will trigger a self-generating condition of more desirability and a self-fulfilling cycle of abundance. Knowing that there is choice elsewhere, men can be more relaxed, cool, and chilled when pursuing a woman. In turn, this efortless coolness will make them more desirable for the women they pursue and, as in a self-generating loop, this will create even greater choice when pursuing the next woman. Women are thus perceived as a sort of currency whose accumulation can lead to an abundance of choice and thus freedom from scarcity.
The men’s dating coaching culture inhabits a rationale that treats women as learnable machines with similar features, at least when they have not been “infected” by feminism, which according to the manosphere discourse, is something that decisively alters their behavior. By treating romantic exchange as knowable, the woman becomes a category that displays observable characteristics over time. In the seduction industry, the eventual conquering of this knowledge is paramount for learning how to conquer women in the context of “the game”, a concept that refers to the mastering of seduction play and that was first introduced in the blockbuster book The Game by the now “recovered” pick-up artist Neil Strauss (Gilsinan, 2015).18 Dating coaches hope to curate the archaic “predator” instincts of modern men by teaching them to know and recognize their prey’s reactions and thus adjust their behavior accordingly. Examples thus drawn from evolutionary biology, or the natural world abound and serve to, one way or another, “naturalize” the behavior of men and women. The injunction that alpha men should be “leading their pack” like wolves is one of the most popular ones but one can encounter plenty of them in the coaching discourse. For instance, coach Corey Wayne in a 2022 video titled “Why She Will BE Back After Backing Away” compares women’s behavior with that of cats: “chase a cat and it will run away; leave it alone and eventually it will come back sit in your lap and start purring; like cats, men must let women come to them at their own pace” (Wayne, 2022).19 Or, as he claims in the section of his book titled Women Are Like Cats, Men Are Like Dogs: “Women are like cats. They come and go as they please… and… YOU MUST LET THEM!!! If you don’t, you will destroy their level of safety and comfort with you” (2013: 79). Here, women react in predictable ways, like domestic animals whose reactions are natural and easy to understand following specific instructions while by doing so men exercise their agency and cunningness to reverse the presumably detrimental social developments against them (e.g., feminism).20
The curatorial imperative in men’s coaching brings to the fore an intense preoccupation with manhood that has to be regained and repurposed amidst disorientation and changing gender roles. The underlying assumption is that the uncurated man is constantly confused and thus not be able to evolve in this new reality. In contrast, the curated man can read gender and generally social relations through a series of “do’s and don’ts”, which, if practiced correctly, can bring success and fulfil the (currently compromised) mission of men to lead and be dominant.
Curating Mindsets, Micro-Celebrities, and Intimacies
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