In The New Republic, Alexandra Starr has found a worrisome trend taking place in Japan, a monstrous activity formerly seen only in particularly disturbed fiction:
I personally suspected something wasamiss after Cruise's pitch-perfect performance as a sexist self-helpguru in the 1999 movie Magnolia. Cruise's character conductsseminars instructing men in the niceties of manipulating women; hebegins his lecture with, "Respect the cock." The entire film dabbles inthe absurd, but, when I was in Japan last winter, I discovered theconcept of a seduction school isn't pure fiction.
She didn't have to go all the way to Japan. Resting at #23 on the New York Times bestseller list is Neil Strauss's The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists. The book is all about, you guessed it, guys who teach seminars full of men how to effectively pick up and seduce women, among them Ross Jeffries, a sort of seduction-oriented hypnotist who Tom Cruise's character was based on. And neither is it hidden or little-read: it's been reviewed in most of the nation's major newspapers, merited time on The View and Nightline, and hit with surprising cultural impact upon release.
What Starr found in Japan is similar to what I took from the book -- insecure guys who need help talking to women go and get trained in how to do it. While there's something objectionable about it on the surface, I've not been able to construct any sort of convincing argument for why shy guys should be consigned to perpetual lonesomeness. There's a cultural belief that connection and progression should happen organically, by kismat, but that really just marginalizes the guys unlucky enough to lack a charismatic father, confident brother, or socially adept friend to learn from.
As Starr found, these seminars don't attract predators, they're more a magnet for the harmless -- the most helpless of "the nice guys" (in the book, Strauss reveals the subculture's name for these dudes: AFC's, or average frustrated chumps, a verdict that was well-echoed in the blogosphere's conversation on them a few months back). But unlike in her article, this isn't some isolated phenomena restricted to meek Asian men, it's here, too, and my guess is you'll in fact find it wherever men are sold. Biologically and culturally, nothing receives more emphasis than love (or at least sex). The idea that there should be classes for astrophysics but not for romance is, I think, a bit wrongheaded.
