Received: 12 June 2018 Revised: 5 September 2018 Accepted: 18 September 2018

DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12310

BOOK REVIEW

SEDUCTION: MEN, MASCULINITY AND

Cambridge: Polity, 2018. pp. 256, Hardback £55.00 €62.19, 978‐1‐509‐52155‐5; Paperback £16.99 €19.21, 978‐1‐509‐52156‐2;
Open eBook £16.99 €19.21, 978‐1‐509‐52159‐3. ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐5095‐2155‐5 and ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐5095‐2156‐2

One only has to read a page or two into Rachel O′Neill's Seduction to realize why it was featured as a Times
Higher Education Book of the Week. It makes fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in gender and sexuality,
or ethnographic research, or simply in a well‐crafted account of the complexities and contradictions that characterize
contemporary social relations.
O'Neill is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of York whose research focuses on gender, feminist
theory and sexuality, and in particular, the commercialization of intimacy. The ‘seduction community’ she examines
in this book is a commercial, pedagogic network designed to cultivate heterosexual men's skills in meeting and
attracting women through taught courses that combine classroom teaching and practical ‘in the field’ training. The
latter involves seduction trainers accompanying trainees on expeditions outside of the classroom, onto local streets,
and into nearby bars and clubs. ‘In the field’, trainees are encouraged to put the techniques they have learnt in the
classroom into practice, and to attempt to seduce women, while trainers observe them and provide developmental
feedback. Members of the seduction community refer to this practical deployment of seduction techniques as
‘gaming’, emphasizing the competitive, faux fraternal nature of the phenomenon. Seduction is the result of a year‐long
ethnographic study of this community, involving observational research focusing on classroom teaching and ‘in the
field’ training, and a series of interviews with trainers and trainees.
The opening chapter, ‘The Work of Seduction’, considers the cultivation of a sexual work ethic, and the
commercial exploitation of desire and discontent through what O'Neill calls ‘intimate enterprise’. The following
chapter examines the relationship between pedagogy and profit, considering how a neoliberal masculinity is stylized
within the seduction community as a hegemonically masculine space. Here O'Neill explores both the predatory
orientation of the men involved as well as their vulnerabilities, emphasizing the extent to which they are caught
up in a commercial appropriation of their anxieties and aspirations. Showing how this is operationalized, Chapter 3,
‘Manufacturing Consent’, focuses on the seduction community as a ‘social factory’ that systematizes intimacy. This
leads into the discussion, in the penultimate chapter, of the power relations and politics in which commercial seduc-
tion is embedded and within which ‘last minute resistance’ from the women who are targeted is understood as part of
the game. The Conclusion, ‘Against Seduction’, develops a critique of the exploitation and appropriation that O'Neill
sees as permeating the seduction community, and the Postscript provides a reflexive account of the methodology
and fieldwork on which the book is based that in itself, would be an insightful reference point for other ethnographic
researchers.
The basic premise of Seduction is that the twin rationalities of neoliberalism and postfeminism increasingly
shape every aspect of contemporary life, including its most intimate dimensions. The seduction industry offers a
pseudo‐rational response to the extent to which romance and sexuality have become central to who we are in a
secular, consumer‐oriented world, at the same time as the current configuration of social and economic life makes

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genuine intimacy all the more difficult to cultivate and sustain. In O′Neill's words, ‘seduction is one among many
available patches for a system that at its heart is deeply flawed’ (p. 156).
One of the book's many strengths is its contribution to an established and ongoing critique of the management
of everyday life (see Hancock & Tyler, 2009), the commercialization of intimacy and wider patterns of ‘gaming’, the
latter framing life as virtual play. A belief in the idea that, if correctly managed, life can offer the possibility of a per-
petual ‘reboot’ seems to come across in the men's views of themselves, of women and of intimate relationships.
Indeed, one of the course participants, Elijah, breaks off his relationship with his long‐term girlfriend in order ‘to keep
his game’ (O'Neill, p. 30), seemingly driven by an intensely, instrumentally aspirational orientation. Another partici-
pant, James, hints at the latter when he uses a ‘Kellogg's variety box’ analogy to convey the accumulation imperative
underpinning his approach to intimacy, referring specifically to his desire to sleep with women of as many different
cultural backgrounds as possible. The seduction community as it is described here is illustrative of wider and well‐
established cultural formations rather than being presented as a deviation or departure from them; it is ‘an extension
and acceleration’ (O'Neill, p. 7), an intensification of the cultural logic of intimate life, one that takes the complexity of
human relationships and identities and repackages them as a problem to be controlled through an accumulation of
the right skills and techniques, and following the correct rules and formula.
Context is central — O'Neill brings neoliberalism and postfeminism to bear on her analysis, updating Gramsci's
(1988) earlier concerns with the dehumanizing effects of Fordist sexuality and Jackson and Scott's (1997) more
recent feminist critique of the ‘Taylorization of sex’ showing what happens to intimacy in the hands of the branded
self as a performative project. If Frankenstein is the modern Prometheus, perhaps the Pick‐up Artist is his postfem-
inist, neoliberal counterpart, literally playing out before our eyes the horror of what we have created. We are engaged
with the detail of how this happens, and why; where it takes place is also important and intriguing, namely, intensely
urban, consumer‐oriented settings with long‐standing associations with commercial sex. Situating seduction is impor-
tant, not just socially but materially. The training providers hire university settings to deliver their courses in order to
lend an aura of epistemic credibility to an entirely unregulated and predatory industry. The city centre locations of
the practical ‘field’ sessions on the streets and in the clubs outside are intended to intensify the professed metropol-
itan sophistication of the men involved at the same time as increasing the potential pool of women to seduce.
It would be easy to ridicule, pity or laugh; the strongest urge is to recoil in horror at the layers of exploitation
described here. But O′Neill's reflexive, immersive ethnographic imagination understands this world on its own terms,
yet never from the ‘inside’. O'Neill herself is not seduced, on the contrary. The Postscript is particularly important in
understanding this, speaking to how difficult it was to research the topic and to be immersed in the commercial
seduction community as a feminist (O'Neill negotiated access to observing training courses and practice sessions,
and to interviewing men who deliver the training as well as course participants). How this simultaneous ethnographic
immersion and critical, feminist distance was achieved and sustained is an important question, one worthy of critical,
reflexive consideration as O′Neill's positioning as a woman marked her out as both an outsider and a potential target.
We might also add ‘precarity’ to the ‘power and politics’ referred to in the Postscript's sub‐title. Her methodological
approach meant that O'Neill was unable to understand seduction from the perspective of the women who were sub-
ject to it (she did not assume a participant role, in this sense), or from the perspective of ‘other’ men who could/did
not take part, or indeed, similar commercial communities in other spheres (e.g., couples courses, classes for women to
seduce men, courses aimed at the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) market). O'Neill herself raises the
question: ‘How … can feminist scholars … explore the emergence of newly emboldened and technologically enhanced
forms of sexism and misogyny?’ (p. 149). She draws from Adrienne Rich's (1973) metaphor of the ‘wreck’, arguing that
we need to dive in, rather than critique from a distance, engaging with ‘the thing itself and not the myth’. Yet this was
clearly a significant and ongoing challenge, as illustrated by the instance when a course participant who, in her view
should not have been taking part and who seemed to be experiencing mental health problems, shouted ‘fuck you,
bitch!’ at her (O'Neill, p. 161). As a feminist and as a researcher, O'Neill seems to treat the men, and the seduction
community, with much greater respect than is accorded to her. How did she perceive and experience this? How
did she sustain her critical distance, at the same time as understanding the seduction community on its own terms?
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Seduction provides fascinating insights into these important issues, showing how (and why) questions such as
these were constant methodological reference points throughout the whole study. For this reason alone, the book
provides compelling insight into the complexities of the critical ethnographic research process and would be an ideal
starting point for anyone considering a similar kind of approach to studying a community that might be difficult to
access and research.
Throughout the discussion, seduction training is presented as a stark reminder of the fate of eroticism once it
becomes subject to imperatives of efficiency and effectiveness, to intense quantification and performance evaluation.
O′Neill's sustained critique comes in the form of her reflections on the seduction industry as the antithesis of a
feminist ethos premised upon openness to the other; commercial seduction is a poignant example of the conse-
quences of arrested inter‐subjectivity. Seduction training proffers control and the promise of community (a discourse
that suggests connection and authenticity), it rationalizes and exploits the vulnerability that the desire for recognition
engenders — profiteering at its worst. This is poignantly illustrated by the trainer who laughingly refers to the man
who was abused by his father as a child as ‘the worst student ever’ (O'Neill, p. 160). But as O'Neill is at pains to
emphasize, this tells us something important about the world around us; Seduction is not an ethnographer's glimpse
into an underground enclave. It adds to our understanding of the contemporary sex industry, of the power relations
within which heteronormative masculinity is performatively enacted and of social relations more widely. In the many
extracts from interviews with seduction trainers and course participants, we see masculinity at its most potent and
fragile. Hints at a queer reading emphasize this — that in the ‘doing’ of seduction, the men described are also ‘undone’
(Butler, 2004), as are the women who are objectified by them.
Within the discourse of the seduction industry, women are framed as possessing a sexual power over men
(as gatekeepers to their bodies), hence the elaborate skills base that men need to negotiate sexual access to women;
but this desire, and their right to eventually secure this access, is never questioned by them. The course offers no
scope for engaging with the multiple ways in which it might be possible to be a man, reifying a hyper‐
heteronormative obsession with conquest as the only viable form, or ‘template’ (O'Neill, p. 61), of masculinity. The
logic of seduction attaches itself firmly to an intensive biological essentialism and a gendered universalism. As O'Neill
succinctly puts it, ‘the sexual politics of seduction centre around the reassertion of sexual difference’ (p. 147). Against
the wider backdrop of Me Too1 the commercial seduction community's discursive incitement if not to sexual violence,
then at least to a predatory, aggressive sexuality, is chilling.
Capitalism by its very nature creates simultaneous needs and shortages. Seduction shows us how this is literally
played out through managed intimacy. The latter is performative in a much broader sense than the hegemonic
masculinity it reifies; as Butler and Athanasiou (2013) have argued, the existential precarity induced by the desire
for recognition becomes an imposed precarity once it is entwined with social forces and cultural formations
such as neoliberalism and postfeminism. Our need for recognition makes us vulnerable and therefore open to
exploitation. Seduction training proffers a dehumanizing solution to this. That it is a self‐espoused ‘community’, or
rather what O'Neill calls a ‘community‐industry hybrid’ (p. 3), makes this all the more disheartening.
Rather than sliding this under a microscope, the book frames commercial seduction as a mirror that O'Neill holds
up to the rest of us, asking: What can be done? This latter question she leaves fairly open, but generously so. In the
final part of the book where O'Neill considers this question, she reflects on what seduction suggests to us about the
extent to which sociality has been replaced by a transactional relationality, one that frames intimacy as conquest,
connection as quantification and community as commerce. She reminds us that seduction is but another, albeit
intense, instance of the way in which a market logic permeates social relations, even (perhaps especially) in social
exchanges in which money does not change hands.
It is her discussion in the Conclusion, ‘Against Seduction’, that is perhaps the most illuminating. Here she notes
that those involved in the seduction community ‘who take up the knowledge‐practices on offer here, are looking
for something’ (p. 151; emphasis added). This brings a recognition‐based critique to the discussion and picks up on ear-
lier threads in her argument; the foray into commercial seduction is born ‘of a desire for connection’ (p. 151).
Commercial seduction both creates this problem and proffers an entrepreneurial solution to it. For O'Neill, to
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be against seduction is ultimately to be opposed to forms of intimacy that enhance or affirm a Self over and
at the expense of Others. The question Seduction leaves us with in this sense, is ‘What if anything, is to be done?’
(p. 161; emphasis added). At its heart, this is a question of how we cultivate counter ways of being and relating, pre-
mised upon more ethical modes of intimate engagement, through a radical commitment to equality and relationality.
Against the backdrop of an increasingly technologically intensive, instrumental orientation towards ‘mediated inti-
macy’, what scope is there? O'Neill cites schools (and presumably universities), communities, social networks, and
wider social, political and economic arrangements as being important, noting how, ultimately, it is the twin rational-
ities of neoliberalism and postfeminism that demand our most sustained critique and intervention. This means finding
space (and time) for recognizing mutual vulnerability and for reciprocity. She gives the last word (thankfully) not to
the trainers or the course participants, but to feminist writer and poet Audre Lorde (1984), in her invocation to us
to find ways to live ‘from within outward’. In the preceding pages, O'Neill has warned us of the consequences
of the reverse; that is, of embodying a distilled, un‐reflexive instrumental orientation towards oneself and others,
and to paying money to be told that ‘Hollow Men’ are not just the only, but the ideal way to respond to the reified
circumstances in which we find ourselves. For these reasons and many more, this book makes for disturbing but
important reading.

Melissa Tyler
Essex Business School, University of Essex

ENDNOTE
1
The Me Too movement is a global social movement (with many local and regional variations) against sexual harassment,
exploitation and assault. It began as a social media hashtag in October 2017 in the wake of the allegations against film
producer Harvey Weinstein in an attempt to raise awareness of the widespread prevalence of sexual violence, particularly
in the workplace, and has since become a focus for recognition and solidarity.

ORCID
Melissa Tyler http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4481-3543

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Rich, A. (1973). Diving into the wreck: Poems 1971–72. London, UK: W. W. Norton.