Abstract
Rachel O’Neill’s Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy explores the seduction community wherein seduction does not rest on good looks or good fortune but is instead marketed as a skill men can cultivate. The seduction industry offers heterosexual men a free market solution to dissatisfaction with sexual and intimate lives. Surface critique of the seduction industry might position pickup artists or the men who purchase their services as deviant. But O’Neill refutes the notion that these men are outliers, insisting that cultural norms relating to heterosexual men’s ideas about women, relationships, and intimacy are informed by the same cultural undercurrents that structure heterosexual men’s knowledge outside this community.
The brilliance of O’Neill’s book is how she looks past the “spectacle of seduction” to uncover knowledge practices and logics embedded in seduction communities as ordinary or an amplified example of issues and attitudes beyond the community. O’Neill considers how men in seduction communities use media to work on their sexual relationships with women, but also conducted interviews and observations of seduction trainings and conferences to understand how mediated intimacy in the seduction community is lived and experienced. O’Neill found that men work hard to maximize returns on their investments. Even when men did find girlfriends, some did not want to end “the game” or lose their seduction skills by settling down.
Heterosexual masculinity in the seduction community is constructed homosocially. These men come to understand and value what other men in this community have designated as successful seduction techniques while gaining desired social interactions with other men. The community constructs a space where men can talk with other men about emotions in ways that may be more widely available noncommercially to women. O’Neill argues that men’s sexuality and masculinity are socially validated by other men under the pretense of camaraderie and perceived authentic friendship. Men bond over deception of the women they target. O’Neill’s book captures seduction’s appeal, offering men a way to act as sexual consumers without paying for sex itself. Furthermore, success with women was seen as a skill that was framed as easily translating into success in the business world as well.
Yet the type of masculinity elevated in seduction trainings is not available to all men. Whiteness orients men’s success in the field. Not all men can afford the exorbitant costs of training seminars and sessions. Despite this, O’Neill argues that the seduction industry promises to “level the playing field” among men, failing to address or account for existing hierarchies among men. And when training did not yield desired results, men in O’Neill’s study overwhelmingly attributed failure to personal responsibility.
O’Neill is not concerned with whether or not seduction tactics work, but how the seduction community as a site of mediated intimacy unearths cultural norms about deception, coercion, and violence that shape women’s intimate lives. In “Manufacturing Consent,” O’Neill describes training tactics men learn to handle “last-minute resistance.” Women are positioned as objects to be overcome, and consent as an obstacle to sexual entitlement. The idea that all women secretly desire to be overpowered and resistance tackled is dangerous and sexually coercive. Trainers refuse to acknowledge harm in their trainings or potential for assault and violence that may take place as seduction technique. Sexism and difference are legitimized, and men’s dominance over women is understood as natural.
In the final chapter on sexual politics, O’Neill discusses how men talked about feminism, suggesting that women’s liberation has had negative effects on heterosexual men. O’Neill’s book details how the seduction industry promises to restore masculinity “lost” in response to wrongdoings by feminism. Men are framed as at the mercy of biological drives. The seduction industry establishes organized access to women’s bodies promoting sets of administrable rules that promise to mitigate the uncertainty inherent in intimate life.
By studying men and masculinity in seduction communities, O’Neill’s book provides a lens for understanding how cultural norms about sexuality get (re)produced and how heterosexuality structures inequality. O’Neill argues, “Seduction is based in the denial of all that is unpredictable and inexact about human experience for something that has a set of easily administrable rules by which sex and relationships can be managed or achieved” (p. 154). Within the community, men’s sexual entitlement is naturalized and ordained in an industry that takes advantage of men’s distress and frustration. O’Neill proposes interventions like better sex education and suggests a model that creates space for reciprocity and human connectedness in intimate lives. This is a useful book and fascinating site of mediated intimacy for those examining gender, masculinities, heterosexuality, and intimacy.