'Pick-up artists' and PUA cultures and communities are hotbeds of misogyny. Pick-up artist culture has been subject to various criticisms:
- A women-hating, virulently anti-feminist culture.
- Focuses on coercive strategies: manipulate women, ignore what women say, push past ‘No’, etc.
- A commodity model of sex. Premised on male entitlement
- Takes away women’s humanity
- Treats human interactions as a formula
- Offers a combative view of gender relations
- Spreads highly traditional, violence-supportive views of men and masculinity
- Overlaps with other anti-feminist men’s rights groups and websites
Here are some accessible feminist critiques of PUA ideology and practice.
- Baker, Katie J. M. (2013). Cockblocked by Redistribution - A Pick-up Artist in Denmark. Dissent Magazine, Fall.
- Barnes, Seduction for sale (review of O'Neill's book Seduction), Oct. 2018;
- Dr NerdLove, The Trouble With Pick-Up Artists, June 21 2013;
- Dr Nerdlove, Can You Be An Ethical Pickup Artist, Aug 17 2014;
- Fogg, Why I have no truck with the art of the pick-up, June 24 2013;
- Geek Feminism Wiki, Pick Up Artists;
- Kale, 50 years of pickup artists why is the toxic skill still so in demand. The Guardian, Nov 5 2019
- Klee, How a Pair of Pickup Artists Turned Into Far-Right Extremists, Jan. 22 2021
- McKay, 7 Tips on Gender Relations, According to Men's Rights Activists and the "Manosphere". Mic, September 30 2015.
- Marcotte, How 'Pick-Up Artist' Philosophy and Its More Misogynist Backlash Shaped Mind of Alleged Killer Elliot Rodger, Alternet, May 25, 2014;
- O'Neill, Seduction Inc., 2018;
- Pennacchia, How Purity and Pick-Up Culture Exacerbated Toxic Masculinity, 2019
- Reist, Banishing the Beasts: The Slick Misogyny of U.S. Pick-up Artists Not Welcome Here (2016);
- Steadman, The sexist pseudoscience of pick-up artists, New Statesman, June 4 2014;
- Walton, 'Pickup artists' and rape culture, Citizen Times, Oct 7 2015.
- WeHuntedTheMammoth (2016). What you need to know about Roosh V, the pickup artist holding meetups in 43 countries this Saturday. February 3.
There is a small academic literature on pick-up artists and communities, as follows:
- Almog, R., & Kaplan, D. (2017). The nerd and his discontent: The seduction community and the logic of the game as a geeky solution to the challenges of young masculinity. Men and Masculinities, 20(1), 27-48.
- Bratich, J., & Banet-Weiser, S. (2019). From pick-up artists to incels: con (fidence) games, networked misogyny, and the failure of neoliberalism. International Journal of Communication, 13, 25.
- Clift, Elana J. (2007). Picking Up and Acting Out: Politics of Masculinity in the Seduction Community. PhD thesis, Department of American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, May.
- Guo, C., & Yin, H. (2021). Localized PUA culture and gender politics in contemporary China. Journal of Gender Studies, 1-12. doi:10.1080/09589236.2021.1929093
- Hambling-Jones, O., & Merrison, A. J. (2012). Inequity in the pursuit of intimacy: An analysis of British pick-up artist interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(9), 1115-1127.
- Kray, T. R. (2018). By means of seduction: pickup-artists and the cultural history of erotic persuasion. NORMA, 13(1), 41-58.
- O’Neill, R. (2015) The Work of Seduction: Intimacy and Subjectivity in the London ‘Seduction Community’. Sociological Research Online, 20(4): 5.
- O’Neill, Rachel. (2018). Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy. Polity.
- Pérez Ripossio, R. N. (2020). Becoming the “Alpha Male”: Heterosexual Seduction Performances at a Coaching School in Buenos Aires. Revista interdisciplinaria de estudios de género de El Colegio de México, 6.
- Ribeiro, M. H., Blackburn, J., Bradlyn, B., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., Long, S., . . . Zannettou, S. (2020). From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: A Data-Driven Sketch of the Manosphere. arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.07600.
- Whitley, R., & Zhou, J. (2020). Clueless: An ethnographic study of young men who participate in the seduction community with a focus on their psychosocial well-being and mental health. Plos one, 15(2), e0229719.