This article examines the work of affective labor in remediating experiences of inhibition and insecurity among heterosexual men in 'seduction communities': communities of men who train each other in embodying seductive masculinity to pick up women. Considering how men in seduction communities construct and enact symbolic boundaries in their performances of seduction, this paper will seek to answer the following question: what do seduction communities reveal about the vulnerabilities and frailties of masculinity in the US today? Based on original ethnographic fieldwork carried out in New York City, I examine the ways in which men experience states of cognitive absorption, affective license, and also of disability and abjection in fashioning themselves as objects of female desire through rituals of shared affective labor among men. I argue that men experience culturally based ambivalences around norms of self-help -including ideas of freedom, dependency, and addiction -in ways that complicate heteronormative masculine identities. I furthermore assert that self-fashioning through seduction training invokes ideas of work and play in order to differentiate contradictory ethics of persuasion and self-expression, and that these ideas in turn instantiate different technologies of embodiment that reproduce inequalities between men along lines of race and class. ARTICLE HISTORY

Close relationships between men and women have been theorized from feminist, psychoanalytic, and political economic perspectives. In seduction communities, dating coaches and pickup artists act as expert mediums in scripting norms of heterosexual courtship between men and women. Based on an ethnographic analysis of intimate labor between coaches and male clients in seduction communities based in New York City, this article suggests three things. First, that apprenticing in techniques of heterosexual seduction is about masculine self-fashioning; second, that men experience culturally-based ambivalences around norms of self-help—including ideas of freedom, dependency, and addiction—in ways that fashion their bodies, speech acts, and identities as objects of desire for women; and third, that practices of seduction complicate heteronormative masculine identities by creating intimate spheres of dependency and self-disclosure among men. This article follows men’s trajectories of learning seduction skills, and finds that men rely on competing rhetorics of authentic expression and technical self-presentation that seek to manage (in ways that also reproduce) a range of social, economic, and gender-based inequalities.