CHAPTER SEVEN

SEDUCTION REMAINS

Among the first wave of refugees following Hitler’s rise to power was a German-Jewish philosopher with a compelling explanation as to how Europe had succumbed to fascism. Herbert Marcuse had been born to a prosperous Berlin family in 1898. A bookish young man, he had been conscripted in 1916 but was spared frontline service due to his poor eyesight. He was in Berlin in 1918 when the Hohenzollern regime and the German war effort collapsed amid mutiny, revolution, and incipient civil war. Already a committed Marxist, Marcuse manned the barricades as fighting broke out between right-wing paramilitary groups and communist insurgents. The nascent revolution was crushed, right-wing factions either co-opted or indulged by the new government, and a disillusioned Marcuse moved to Freiburg and studied Hegel.

As the 1920s wore on the National Socialists grew in political influence and Marcuse began to search for academic positions outside the Nazifying German university system. In the early 1930s this led him to an association with the Institute for Social Research, a coterie of heterodox Marxist thinkers gathered around philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Marcuse joined the Institute in Geneva in 1933 and then followed it to America in 1934, where it found shelter within Columbia University in New York City. A passionate opponent of the Nazi regime, Marcuse did not hesitate in offering his assistance to the Americans during the Second World War. He was given a position in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner to the CIA, as an analyst focused on parsing the dynamics of German society. At the war’s end he returned to academia, taking up a succession of posts at Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis.

Marcuse’s entire adult life had been shaped by the Nazi catastrophe. In the immediate aftermath of the war, he now sought to turn his formidable intellectual powers into explaining how it had come about. To do so he would depend on theories of human sexuality grounded in Marxism and Freudianism. From the Marxist tradition, Marcuse drew upon a long-established set of beliefs about the relationship between capitalism and sexuality. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had argued that capitalism led to the commodification of all social ties. In all aspects of intimate life—in the family, in courtship rituals, and in the bedroom—they observed the influence of exploitative sexual relations that mirrored exploitative economic relations. The revolution they envisioned would necessarily transform sex as much as it would economics. They looked forward to the abolition of the family, the demise of prostitution, and the extinction of seduction itself. All these phenomena were relics of a corrupt bourgeois sexual culture ripe for destruction.¹ Subsequent Marxist intellectuals took up this sexual theme. In Women and Socialism (1879) August Bebel imagined the “woman of the future” as being “socially and economically independent,”

She is no longer subjected to even a vestige of domination or exploitation, she is free and on a par with man and mistress of her destiny. In choosing the object of her love, woman, like man, is free and unhampered. She woos or is wooed, and enters into a union from no considerations other than her own inclinations… . Under the proviso that the satisfaction of his instincts inflicts no injury and disadvantage on others, the individual shall see to his own needs… . No one is accountable for it to others and no unsolicited judge has the right to interfere. What I shall eat, how I shall drink, sleep and dress, is my own affair, as is also my intercourse with a person of the opposite sex.²

Socialism would liberate women and in so doing liberate sexuality. One corollary of the emancipation of women would be the obsolescence of seduction. Men and women would now meet on terms of parity. Sexual partners would be chosen frictionlessly on the basis of mutual attraction. This was a recurring theme in socialist literature, popularized in best-selling books such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890).³ Following the implementation of Marxist precepts in Russia after 1917, Bolshevik politician and feminist theorist Alexandra Kollontai foresaw the emergence of a “communist morality” that demanded an end to “the buying and selling of caresses.”⁴ The end of seduction, along with the abandonment of other manipulative and exploitative sexual practices, would be but one of many happy side-effects of the new socialist order.

What interested Marcuse was why capitalism depended upon this repressive sexual order. It was here that the writings of Sigmund Freud became relevant. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Freud had argued that repression was central to the entire enterprise of human civilization. Each individual was a seething cauldron of appetites and desires which, left to their own devices, would preclude the possibility of collaboration in pursuit of a larger, more harmonious social order. The solution was to prevent the individual, by coercion where necessary, from realizing their own selfish, chaotic impulses and instead divert their energies into productive and peaceable activities. Marcuse sought to challenge Freud’s pessimistic prognosis by reference to Marxist theory. It was surely the case, he reasoned, that modern industrial economies were capable of producing enough goods and services for their populations, yet humans were obliged to work harder than ever. Marcuse suggested that Freudian repression was indeed going on in these economies, but that this repression was in excess of what was needed to meet the material needs of the workforce. Echoing the classical Marxist theory of “surplus-labour,” he referred to this phenomenon as “surplus-repression.” Marcuse believed that surplus-repression was a feature of the capitalist economic order and that it was having disastrous effects on the collective psychology of those trapped within it. “Suppressed sexuality,” he wrote, leads to “hideous forms [of release] so well known in the history of civilization; in the sadistic and masochistic orgies of desperate masses, of ‘society elites,’ of starved bands of mercenaries, of prison and concentration-camp guards.”⁵ By marrying Freud and Marx, Marcuse believed he had identified the sexual origins of fascism that lurked within all capitalist societies. The delusion of the capitalist system was that there was no alternative to this system of repression—that human progress and civic order depended upon it. Marcuse argued that this was not the case and that “the possibility of a non-represssive civilization is predicated not upon the arrest, but upon the liberation, of progress.”⁶ He imagined a new kind of civilization, socialist and sexually liberated, where “no longer used as a full-time instrument of labor, the body would be resexualized.”

The regression involved in this spread of the libido would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all erotogenic zones, and, consequently in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality and in a decline in genital supremacy… . This change in the value and scope of libidinal relations would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the … interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and patriarchal family… . The process just outlined involves not simply a release but a transformation of the libido: from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to the eroticization of the entire personality. It is a spread rather than an explosion of the libido.

These theories were outlined in his magnum opus, Eros and Civilization, published in 1955. Marcuse did not use the phrase “sexual revolution” (although he was familiar with, if disdainful of, the work of Wilhelm Reich, a fellow Jewish émigré with overlapping research interests, whose corpus included the 1945 book The Sexual Revolution) but with the publication and popularity of this book he would be forever associated with it. This tall, dour man, with his pipe and widow’s peak and old-world manners, became the unlikely hero of a whole generation of student activists, radical intellectuals, and exponents of sexual liberation. In charting the relationship between the economic and the sexual spheres, Marcuse unleashed a discussion about the political significance of sexual behavior that reverberated around the Western world. As the Fifties gave way to the Sixties, Marcuse’s reputation as the prophet of the Sexual Revolution continued to grow. In 1965 he moved to California to teach in the Edenic surroundings U.C. San Diego. There this unassuming old man with his rich German accent, who could be found most afternoons smoking a cigar in his La Jolla garden or walking hand-in-hand with his wife down beneath the cliffs on Torrey Pines Beach, became the epicenter of the culture wars that wracked the West. Styled the “angel of the apocalypse” by the New York Times, he received death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, and an offer from the American Legion to pay his salary on the condition that he never teach again.

His supporters were no less ardent. His books were read from Oakland to Bonn; student protesters in Paris and Frankfurt marched with signs that read “Marx, Mao, Marcuse;” he was credited (probably apocryphally) with the slogan “Make Love, Not War”; he counted Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone, and Kathy Acker among his disciples; students flocked to his classes in such numbers that loudspeakers were rigged up to broadcast his words to the crowds gathered outside the lecture hall. When in the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, he told students in Berlin that “we have to develop the political implications of the moral, intellectual, and sexual rebellion of the youth” he announced himself as the intellectual idol of a whole generation intent on proving that the personal was indeed political.⁷ At the heart of this fascination with Marcuse was his passionate insistence on the centrality of sexual questions to political affairs and his original insights into how intimate matters were correlated to economic structures.

One young person whose early life seemed evidence of the radical promise of sexual liberation, was Janine Ceccaldi. Born in colonial Algeria in 1926, Ceccaldi’s family was firmly bourgeois. Her father was a prosperous functionary of the Third Republic; her mother an elegant housewife. Despite the conservatism of her surroundings, Janine quickly emerged as a precocious daughter. She was a brilliant student at school, and her intellectual curiosity led her to literature—Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann in particular—and to Marxism. Aged fifteen when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Janine’s communist sympathies were a rebellion against the stifling circumstances of her upbringing but also an act of individual courage. France was occupied by the Germans, and the Vichy regime actively persecuted left-wing groups. She involved herself in the communist underground in wartime Algiers and got herself excluded from school for a term for calling her anti-Communist philosophy teacher “a lackey of capitalism and colonialism.” Janine tested the limits of her society in other ways, too. From her early teens, her parents worried about her apparent sexual permissiveness. She also rebelled against the spiritual norms of a uniformly catholic society by showing an adolescent interest in mysticism and the occult.

Shortly before the war ended, she took her Baccalaureate and looked to attend university. Characteristically, she was drawn to the two degree courses she considered the most masculine: law and medicine. Her parents considered the latter the more appropriate course for a woman and she took up the grueling course of studies, eventually specializing in anesthesiology. All the time, she maintained her communist sympathies, participating in 1944 in the first conference of the Algerian Communist Party after it was formally reconstituted after several years underground. There she marveled at the sight of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, French and Arabs working together and “expressing in many languages the same dream of fraternity.” After qualifying as a doctor in 1948 she left Algeria for Slovakia, where she helped “build socialism” as part of a volunteer brigade working on the railroads. Once that project was completed she attended a Communist youth conference in Budapest.

Back in Paris, she found herself at the Gare de l’Est without a job or a home but free to live her life as she wished. She found a job as a medical adviser to the Social Security bureau responsible for working-class districts in suburban Paris. In 1951, while on a trip to the forest of Fontainebleau she met René Thomas, a casual laborer from Clamart, a solidly proletarian neighborhood in southwest Paris. The couple cohabited for two years before moving to the French Alps where René hoped to get a job as a ski guide. They moved around from Chamonix, to Albertville (where they married), before settling in Pralognan-la-Vanoise where she got a job as doctor at a ski station and he found work on the mountains. In 1955, Janine’s contract in the mountains expired and she accepted a posting on an anti-tuberculosis project on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. While she waited for her husband to join her she had an affair with a local diver, who she referred to as her “dolphin.” When René arrived a few months later, the afterlife of this affair did little to improve the state of their marriage—already afflicted by the tension between her impassioned bourgeois Communism and his pragmatic working class upward mobility—but she became pregnant shortly afterward and they spent those months awaiting the birth of their child nursing exotic travel plans. They would kayak down the Nile, scale the peaks of Africa, drive from one end of the continent to the other.

When their child, Michel Thomas, was born in February 1956, they decided that they should not let him interfere with their travel plans. Only five months old, Michel was entrusted to his paternal grandmother Henriette in Clamart. At their farewell in Réunion, Janine took a final look at him, said goodbye with a “l’oeil sec” and went off on the long-planned African adventure. At the end of their trip, in 1957, René and Janine separated. Janine returned to Réunion and practized medicine. Single and working long days at the hospital she decided she could not raise Michel herself, but was uncomfortable with his upbringing in Clamart and insisted that he be transferred to her mother’s care in Algiers. Algeria was then in the midst of a brutal insurgency mounted against French colonial rule. For the first few years of his time there, Michel’s own life was blissfully unaffected by it. His grandmother lived in an apartment of five or six light-filled rooms, down whose corridors and balconies he rode his tricycle. At a young age he was clearly an intelligent child, reading by the time he was three and inventing elaborate games at the age of four. There was little time to get comfortable in Algiers. He was four and a half when his parents formally divorced—still something of a rarity at that time in France—and only five when his grandfather died of cancer and his father came to Algiers, escorted by two parachutists, to get his son out of a city that was fast becoming a permanent war-zone. Once again he was sent to his grandmother’s home on the periphery of Paris. Michel would be raised by Henriette, his loving surrogate mother, with her reliably working class ways and reflexive communist beliefs. He would see his parents on holidays—hiking or skiing with his father in the Alps, the occasional trip to Réunion to see his mother—but otherwise they were absent from his upbringing. His father prospered as a mountain guide, traveling around the world for work, expeditions to the United States, to Chile, to Nepal, two trips to Afghanistan. His mother remained in Réunion but traveled a great deal too, sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure. As time passed she drifted away from communism and passed through several phases of belief—Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and New Age—what her son would later disdain as “spiritual channel-hopping.”

In his teenage years, Michel also had a spiritual awakening of sorts. Although his childhood was largely happy, thanks to his adoring grandmothers, and the permanent cast of aunts and uncles, his own worldview took a pessimistic turn in his mid-teens. A bright, bookish boy, he read Baudelaire and listened to Pink Floyd. The turning point, in his telling, came during a school trip to Bavaria in 1971, when he was fifteen. There he first read Blaise Pascal’s notoriously gloomy Pensées. It was a transformative experience. “There must have been some secret flaw in me,” he later wrote, “that I tumbled, feet together, offering not the least resistance, into the abyss that Pascal opened up beneath my feet.” From Pascal it was a natural progression into Nietzsche, The Velvet Underground, Kafka, The Stooges, Dostoyevsky, and Schopenhauer. This anxious philosophical turn took place against the backdrop of the turbulence of France in the Sixties and Seventies. The tremors of 1968 were felt even in his exurban lycée and his formative years were played out amid the disintegration of the values of his childhood—the values of his grandmothers. Michel came to believe that his experience of abandonment and family breakdown was somehow symptomatic of the new world born in those decades. “In a sense,” he later commented of his parents decision to transfer him out of their care, “this was a precursor of the vast movement towards the dissolution of the family which would follow. I grew up with the clear awareness that a great injustice had been committed towards me.” His parents were too old to be Soixante-Huitards, but he judged them as the necessary “precursors” to that generation, two canaries in the coal mine of the post-war West. The world he would mature into would be populated almost exclusively by people like them: hyper-mobile, sexually free, and unashamedly individualistic. It was a world defined by unending interpersonal conflict, what he termed la lutte, the struggle. The world of the struggle was far removed from what he remembered as the tranquil, loving world of his childhood, of France in the Fifties and early Sixties. Many years later, in his second novel, he would refer to this world as the “Lost Kingdom” whose values were embodied for him in the figures of his grandmothers. In tribute to them, and in homage to that lost world and those lost values, Michel took as his nom-de-plume his grandmother Henriette’s maiden name, Houellebecq.

One of Michel Houellebecq’s contentions about the post-1968 world is that rampant materialism, consumerism, and individualism, have effectively attenuated experience to the extent that it would be naive to consider individuals as having something so dramatic as a unique biography. Furthermore, the “progressive effacement of human relationships” means that individuals cannot even orientate their lives in relation to those of others. Westerners live within a spiritual and emotional void; as such there is no narrative arc to their existences, simply a period of growth, consumption, and decay lasting several decades.⁸ Consequently, outside of the circumstances of his early childhood and the immediate family drama triggered by his wayward parents, Houellebecq’s own life sheds little light on the themes of his writing nor on the history of seduction. This is, however, completely in line with his intuition that this crisis in personal history mirrors a larger stalling in Western history—that the societies he has lived in and describes in his writing are simply spinning their wheels. It was appropriate, then, that his literary debut should have occurred in the 1990s, the vaunted decade of the “End of History” as described by American political theorist Francis Fukuyama.

Yet in terms of Houellebecq’s own analysis of the cause of this societal crisis, occasioned by the Sexual Revolution, a different idea of Fukuyama’s is germane. In 1999 Fukuyama published The Great Disruption, an attempt at explaining some of the centripetal social forces he observed at work within the developed world. Fukuyama argued that the trends associated with the Sexual Revolution—the collapse in the fertility rate, the demise of traditional marital norms, the deterioration of the family unit—should be understood not as a consequence of a revolution in values but as the result in a revolution in economic structures. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s, he argued, was a transition in advanced economies away from manufacturing and toward services. Physical labor lost its primacy and was replaced by intellectual labor. This leveled the labor market for men and women. In aggregate, men might enjoy a natural advantage over women in physically demanding jobs in heavy industry. There is no such advantage in service roles that rely on intellectual and interpersonal abilities. The onset of the much-trumpeted “Information Age” effectively ended centuries of male economic advantage. Female labor force participation soared; the wage gap narrowed. A strata of economically independent women sprung into being, their ranks growing with each passing year.^{9 10}

This economic narrative runs counter to the popular narrative that foregrounds the cultural dimension of the Sexual Revolution. John Updike’s couples, frolicking in their “post-pill paradise.” Alexander Portnoy’s complaints. Isadora Wing traveling from New World to Old in search of the “zipless fuck” in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Brigitte Bardot—who claimed she was the “first to demonstrate that a woman could very well lead a man’s life without being a prostitute”—taking the role of the historically male ur-seducer in Don Juan (ou Si Don Juan était une femme) (1973). Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je t’aime … moi non plus.” James Bond and the Bond girls. The landmark obscenity cases over Lolita, Howl, and Naked Lunch. Jim Morrison telling reporters “We make concerts sexual politics. The sex starts with me.” The list goes on: Twiggy, Alfie, Deep Throat, Mick Jagger, Hair, Hugh Hefner, Helen Gurley Brown, The Graduate, Janis Joplin, Oh, Calcutta!, Last Tango in Paris, Les Valseuses, Emmanuelle, hippies, Haight-Ashbury, the Latin Quarter, Swinging London, miniskirts.¹¹

The cultural map is, however, a poor guide to the terrain of the Sexual Revolution. As entertaining as the output of these years was, and as stark a contrast as it provided to the bland offerings of the 1940s and 1950s, it was not in historical terms a unique explosion of transgressive creative expression. The 1920s were a remarkably fertile period for cultural iconoclasm and was by a number of metrics a more progressive era than the decades that immediately followed it.¹² As discussed in earlier chapters, Venice, London, and Paris had been hotbeds of cultural and sexual experimentation throughout the eighteenth century. (It is telling, on this point, that Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the text at the center of several obscenity cases on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s, had been written in England in 1748, the same year that the first volumes of Clarissa were published.) The cultural manifestations of the sexual freedoms of these years were brilliant but they were not new and they were not decisive. By contrast, the transition from a labor-intensive economy to a knowledge economy was without historical precedent.

There are two critiques that might be made of this line of argument. The first is political. Many of the transformations of the 1960s and 1970s occurred because of legislative action. Changes to the law helped liberalize social norms on, for example, divorce, but also had economic implications. In West Germany, for instance, married women could not get jobs outside the home without their husband’s permission until the law was changed in 1957; similar laws (the so-called Marriage Bar) persisted in the United States into the 1960s. Likewise, well into the 1970s English women could not get loans or mortgages without a male guarantor on their applications. In Britain these and other economic inequities were not challenged until the passage of the Equal Pay Act (1970) and the Sex Discrimination Act (1975). In other words, the Information Age economic revolution was still constrained by antiquated laws. The fact that these were eventually abolished had less to do with pure economics than it did with the fact that women had been enfranchised earlier in the century and were able to mobilize to bring about legislative reform. In this narrative, it was suffrage, not economics, that sparked the Sexual Revolution.

The second, connected criticism relates to contraception and abortion. The Sixties and Seventies saw a wave of landmark legal rulings and legislative events that transformed women’s control over their bodies. The development and popularization of oral contraceptives (“the pill,” marketed under the brand-name Enovid) in the 1960s was feted as one of the greatest technological breakthroughs in human history. In the next decade, the incremental successes of the pro-choice movement granted women even greater sexual freedoms. For feminists, it was taken as writ that sexual freedom was born of contraceptive rights. “It is no longer possible to deny that we face the certainty of a sexual revolution,” Margaret Drabble wrote in 1971, “and that this revolution, which much affects the institutions of marriage and parenthood, is caused largely by the development of contraceptive techniques.” This focus on contraception was a motif of much of the literature of the Sexual Revolution. One of the few things that really shocks Alexander Portnoy is the discovery that the prostitute he sleeps with in Rome has neither diaphragms nor oral contraceptives. Much to her dismay, he gifts his girlfriend’s supply of Enovid to her. Likewise, the whole plot of Fear of Flying hinges on Isadora’s easy access to, and generous use of, contraception.¹³

Taken together the political and the contraceptive cases for the Sexual Revolution constitute potent criticisms of the economic argument outlined above. The shortcoming common to both is the outsized emphasis both place on events within the particular decades of the sixties and seventies. In the United States, for instance, the campaign for contraceptive rights dated back to the 1920s. This scored major successes in the pre-pill era. By 1955 seventy percent of white married women age eighteen to thirty-nine had used some form of contraception at some point in their lives, a figure that had risen to eighty percent by 1960. Furthermore, the uptake in usage of the pill was a lengthier process than is typically allowed for in the more breathless accounts of the Sexual Revolution. Due to state laws, racial and economic disparities, and information deficits, the pill did not become truly widespread in America until the 1970s. The situation was even starker in Europe. In France and England the pill was not totally legalized until the late sixties and not made available through state health services until the seventies. The circumstances surrounding abortion were even more diverse. Sweden legalized abortion in 1938; Ireland legalized abortion in 2018. In America, Roe v. Wade has been constantly attacked and circumscribed at a state and national level since 1973.¹⁴ The point is not that contraceptive and abortion rights are peripheral to questions of sexual freedom but that the accumulation of these rights have been far more piecemeal and contingent than is normally articulated in narratives of sexual liberation. Zooming out, it is clear that while the struggle for these rights was integral to the Sexual Revolution, local and national circumstances were paramount in deciding their success. In contrast, the economic story was the same across the West. In the same decades, across a wide variety of countries with a range of social policies, manufacturing as a share of economic activity declined, female participation in the workforce shot up, women flooded into the professions, and female incomes rose. This “Quiet Revolution” in the economy grabbed fewer headlines but underwrote all the other changes that occurred in public and private life.

There is space for a synthesis of these competing yet interconnected arguments. Again, it is the language of economics that comes to the rescue. In 2004 economists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs published a groundbreaking theory of sexual behavior that they termed “Sexual Economics.” For most of history, they argued, women had exchanged sex for male resources. Denied full or fair participation in the economy, and unpaid for domestic and care work, a woman’s “value” lay in her sexuality. In contrast, male sexuality had a very low value but men could “trade” non-sexual goods for access to female sexuality:

Men will offer women other resources in exchange for sex, but women will not give men resources for sex (except perhaps in highly unusual circumstances). In any event, the bottom line is that sexual activity by women has exchange value, whereas male sexuality does not. Female virginity, chastity, fidelity, virtuous reputation, and similar indicators will have positive values that will be mostly absent in the male.¹⁵

At the heart of sexual economics is the notion that female sexuality is a “good” with a “price.” For much of history that “price” had been kept very high. Baumeister and Vohs argued that the pressure to keep this price high explained many of tropes and taboos of Western sexual discourse, most notably the double standard which held a promiscuous woman to be worthless but a promiscuous man to be worthy of admiration. Furthermore, they noted that in the absence of alternatives women were incentivized to police sexuality in their own ranks as the collective could not afford to allow the actions of one individual to “lower” the price of all female sexuality.

The language of sexual economics can come across as cold and dehumanizing. Nonetheless, its insights closely correspond to those of the Marxists critics of bourgeois sexuality who had claimed that capitalism had commodified all interpersonal relationships. Socialism, they believed, would liberate woman by allowing them to share equally in the fruits of the economy. As discussed above, this was a recurrent theme in socialist literature. In News From Nowhere, William Morris showed how gender roles and sexual expectations would be upturned by the restructuring of the economy under socialism:

By far the greater part of these in past days were the result of the laws of private property, which forbade the satisfaction of their natural desires to all but a privileged few, and of the general visible coercion which came of those laws… . Again, many violent acts came from the artificial perversion of the sexual passions, which caused overweening jealousy and the like miseries. Now, when you look carefully into these, you will find that what lay at the bottom of them was mostly the idea (a law-made idea) of the woman being the property of the man, whether he were husband, father, brother, or what not. That idea has of course vanished with private property, as well as certain follies about the ‘ruin’ of women for following their natural desires in an illegal way, which of course was a convention caused by the laws of private property.

In sexual economic terms, what Morris is saying is that under socialism the “price” of sex would fall. Women would no longer depend on men for resources and would no longer need to suppress their sexual desires in order to maintain their “value.” A “low” price for sexuality is indicative of improved gender equality. Women no longer have to depend on men and marriage for survival; they need men, as the feminist quip went, like a fish needs a bicycle. (“We had more in our lives than just men,” Isadora Wing declares in Fear of Flying, “we had work, travel, friends.”) One way of understanding the Sexual Revolution of the twentieth century is to consider it as a sustained decrease in the price of female sexuality brought about by increased economic independence, improved contraceptive rights, and expanded legal protections for women. In this low price sexual economic market, expressions of sexuality proliferated because they were no longer attended to by the same risks as they were in the past. Love did not become free, it became cheap.¹⁶ It was not at all clear what this meant for seduction. Feminist thinkers were split on the issue. In her essay “Seduction and Betrayal” (1973) Elizabeth Hardwick argued that the Sexual Revolution meant the abolition of seduction. “Now the old plot is dead, fallen into obsolescence.” She wrote. “You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value. Technology annihilates consequence.” Margaret Drabble, writing in 1971, was not so sure. She accepted that the contraceptive revolution had irrevocably altered the morality of sexual relations because “morality is inseparably connected with the notion of responsibility, and an act which cannot have the consequence of conception, of producing a new helpless life, cannot be irresponsible in the same sense as an act which risks such an event.” Still, this did not mean that manipulation and exploitation were no longer possible:

This does not imply that sexual relations that don’t risk conception are unrelated to personal responsibility and morality; clearly there is still room, in the most technically sterile relationship, for treachery and loyalty, generosity and abuse.¹⁷

At the height of the Sexual Revolution the future of seduction was in the balance.

Marxists are often more certain of capitalism’s strengths than capitalists themselves. In the decade after the publication of Eros and Civilization, with the American economy still booming, and the Sexual Revolution in full flower, Herbert Marcuse began to have doubts about the imminent arrival of the socialist revolution. Capitalism, he complained, had been too successful. Workers with full fridges, cars, and homes were not primed for revolutionary action. In One-Dimensional Man (1964) he struck a pessimistic tone absent from his earlier work, decrying capitalism’s infernal ability to absorb and redirect potential challenges to its hegemony.¹⁸ The flourishing of sexual freedoms and the enthusiastic participation of many women in the modern economy were further causes of concern. Under the influence of radical feminist thought, in particular the writings of his graduate student Angela Davis, Marcuse began to develop a theory to explain how capitalism had been able to adapt so readily to women’s liberation and the spread of sexual freedoms. His argument foreshadowed Fukuyama’s made twenty-five years later. “Under the impact of technological progress, social reproduction depends increasingly less on physical strength and prowess,” Marcuse wrote, “either in war or in the material process of production, or in commerce. The result was the enlarged exploitation of women as instruments of labor.” The transition toward a knowledge economy more welcoming of women’s contributions as well as the success of the Western democracies in meeting women’s political demands and contraceptive needs had unleashed a revolution within the capitalist order that did not challenge its basic structure.¹⁹ “These liberating tendencies,” he continued,

are made part of the reproduction of the established system. They become exchange values, selling the system, and sold by the system. The exchange society comes to completion with the commercialisation of sex.

The sexual revolution he had prophesied in Eros and Civilization had arrived but it was decidedly capitalist in its characteristics.^{20 21}

While Marcuse fretted about the fate of the Sexual Revolution from his sunny perch at La Jolla, a group of French intellectuals in Paris published a series of books that described with eerie prescience the post–Sexual Revolution world. In 1970 Pierre Klossowski published La Monnaie vivante (Living Currency) a brief, dense work of critical theory in which he described how in advanced industrial economies sexuality, intimacy, and emotion were becoming increasingly commoditized. This ran counter to the predictions of several generations of socialist intellectuals, who having identified “erotic enjoyment” as one of “the most vital human needs … decided to extend the ‘communization’ of all goods to the living objects of voluptuous desire.” In reality, Klossowski observed, sex had been privatized, not collectivized, and so it was better to think of modern sexuality in capitalist terms as something that was marketed, bought, and sold, something that circulated like currency within society. Klossowski’s ideas were developed by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1974 work, Libidinal Economy. Written during a period of disillusionment with Marxism, Libidinal Economy was a paean to capitalism’s immense energies. Far from depending on the repression of sexuality, Lyotard wrote, capitalism was riven with “libidinal intensities” and was more sexually liberating than socialism.

Jean Baudrillard drew upon the work of both Klossowski and Lyotard in the composition of his 1980 book Seduction. Baudrillard, like the others, accepted that the Sexual Revolution had happened but was essentially capitalist in nature. The exercise of one’s sexuality, he reasoned, was now conducted along entrepreneurial lines. “As a mode sex takes the form of an individual enterprise based on natural energy, to each his desire and may the best man prevail (in matters of pleasure). It is the selfsame form as capital.” What interested Baudrillard was the role seduction would play in this new order. Socialists had imagined that seduction would be abolished along with private property. Now, with the triumph of sexual freedoms alongside the survival of private property, some argued that seduction was anachronism that would vanish in the face of women’s liberation and permissive sexual mores. Not so, Baudrillard declared. “Revolutions and liberations are fragile,” he wrote, “while seduction is inescapable.” The fallacy common to both notions was that sexuality was simply something that could be transacted. In reality this was not the case. “To believe in sex’s reality and in the possibility of speaking sex without mediation is a delusion.” Outside of prostitution, sex cannot simply be purchased. (“In the last instance, a purely sexual statement, a pure demand for sex, is impossible.”) In this respect it is different from other “goods.” Sex occurs between individuals after a period of mediation. Seduction is that mediation. Although liberated sexuality behaves in all other ways like any other liberalized market, in this respect it is unique. Sexuality responds not to impersonal market mechanisms but to what Baudrillard calls the “poetry of desire.” By unleashing sexual freedom, the Sexual Revolution had greatly multiplied the number of potential sexual encounters occurring between individuals. In the process, far from being abolished, seduction became ever more important to the lives of sexually liberated peoples.²²

In the early 1980s, Michel Houellebecq got a job in the exemplary profession of the new data-driven economy—he became a computer engineer. He loathed this profession (“Computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert … has no meaning.”) but it did give him an early prospect on the digital revolution and how vast flows of information, enabled by computers, would upend society. More unusually, Houellebecq connected this technological transformation to the Sexual Revolution. In his first published work, a long essay on the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, Houellebecq wrote scathingly of modern capitalism, in words that recalled Marx and Engels’ famous passage in The Communist Manifesto:

The reach of liberal capitalism has extended over minds; in step and hand with it are mercantilism, publicity, the absurd and sneering cult of economic efficiency, the exclusive and immoderate appetite for material riches. Worse still, liberalism has spread from the domain of economics to the domain of sexuality. Every sentimental fiction has been eradicated. Purity, chastity, fidelity, and decency are ridiculous stigmas. The value of a human being is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential.²³

This was to be the philosophical launchpad for his first two novels: Whatever (1994, published in French with the more explicitly Houellebecqian title Extension du domaine de la lutte) and Atomized (1998), two books that by virtue of their subject matter and their bitter, brooding tone, might be considered as the first two novels of the twenty-first century. Both dealt with the condition of men and women in the post–Sexual Revolution era and both considered the primacy of seduction in newly sexually liberalized societies. It is not clear whether Houellebecq was influenced by the works of Klossowski, Lyotard, or Baudrillard. If he was not, then he arrived at startlingly similar conclusions. Whatever, which details the miserable existence of its unnamed narrator, an IT technician with a taste for pessimistic philosophizing, contains the canonical passage:

In societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as “the law of the market.” In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is the extension of the domain of the struggle, to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, to all ages and all classes of society.²⁴

The Sexual Revolution, in Houellebecq’s account, was not a liberating event along the lines that socialists has predicted. Rather it was the triumph of a certain kind of social libertarianism that in the sixties and seventies had been masked by the rhetoric and costume of the hippie movement and other cultural phenomena. By the eighties and nineties, flower power and bell bottoms were long gone, but the permissiveness of the Sexual Revolution had persisted. These were the same decades that saw neo-liberalism triumph on both sides of the Atlantic. For Houellebecq, this was no coincidence as both valorized selfish individualism. His key insight, however, is that sexuality “represents a second system of differentiation.” This is the vital distinction. Houellebecq is not arguing that all capitalist societies will be sexually liberal, or vice versa. There are several examples—most notably in Scandinavia—of social democracies where sexual freedoms are the norm. Houellebecq’s observation is that it has proven easier to manage capitalism than it has sexual liberalism. A socially democratic society is readily conceivable but what he terms a “sexual social democracy” is not. This is because although sexuality mimics economics in its fundamental dynamics, it assigns value differently—it is a second system of differentiation. In a society tolerant of unrestrained sexual liberalism, the sexual “economy” recognizes seduction as its only unit of exchange. Market forces, once unleashed, might be reigned in with regulation; sexual liberalism, once unleashed, is much harder—perhaps impossible—to bring under control. In this sense, it is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of seduction. With typical bathos, Houellebecq inserts this insight into a ludicrous conversation between Bruno (one of the antiheroes of Atomized) and an old hippie at a New Age summer camp Bruno is attending in hope of finding a sexual partner. “You must have a lot of stories about this place when it first opened,” Bruno asks, “—the Seventies, sexual liberation …” “Liberation my arse,” the hippie replies, before going on to disabuse Bruno of the notion that free love meant on-demand sexual pleasure for all. The encounter leaves Bruno with much to consider:

“So, what you’re saying,” said Bruno thoughtfully, “is that there never was real sexual liberation—just another form of seduction.”

“Oh yeah …” agreed the hippie, “there’s always been a lot of seduction.”

This didn’t exactly sound promising.²⁵

For almost three centuries the seduction narrative described sexual relations in societies where sexuality was still shrouded in custom and taboo. In particular, female chastity was prized highly and scrutinized closely. Seduction narratives drew their drama and their moral power from these high stakes. Indeed, the stakes were so high that seduction narratives tended to focus on the susceptibility of women to confusing passions, momentary impulses, and devastating lapses in judgement. There were also counternarratives, those that argued for the primacy of reason in sexual relations. Hitherto the history of seduction was played out in the rivalry between these two narratives, that of passion and that of reason. Post–Sexual Revolution, reason won. Sexuality was essentially rationalized. Long held in suspicion, seduction now triumphed. The seducer was no longer a villain or a transgressive figure but someone at ease in the new sexual order. Houellebecq is profoundly skeptical of this development. His oeuvre and his public utterances are filled with suspicion of seduction, something he sees as impure and inauthentic, something that precludes the possibility of love. His sympathy is with those men and woman who cannot navigate the new sexual marketplace. His books are, in a sense, anti-seduction narratives, tales of sexual failure. Sometimes this sympathy is expressed with feeling, at others with bitter humor. However it is depicted, Houellebecq understands the experience of sexual inadequacy as among the most potent of the post–Sexual Revolution era.

In a shocking episode at the end of Whatever, when the narrator encourages his hapless colleague Rafael to kill a young couple whom they have followed to an assignation on a beach, sexual inadequacy is portrayed as the source of a murderous rage. The scene looks forward to the subculture of incels (“involuntary celibates”) formed online in the early years of the new millennium. Specifically, it forecasts the rage of Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who in 2014 published a 140-page manifesto entitled “My Twisted World” in which he bemoaned his lack of sexual success shortly before going on a heavily armed rampage at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Rodger’s killing spree began with the murder of his male roommates. Shortly before heading to his principle target on campus, the Delta Delta Delta sorority house, he uploaded a video under the tagline “Retribution” in which he explained that he was targeting the sorority house because he considered the sorority sisters (none of whom he knew) as symbols of a world of sexual freedom from which he was excluded. In the event, nobody answered when he knocked on the door and denied access to the object of his loathing he began shooting random passersby. The Isla Vista attack killed seven and wounded fourteen. In the wake of these killings Rodger became a hero in those pestilential corners of the internet where incels congregated. Lauded as the “supreme gentleman” (a term he had used to refer to himself in his video “Retribution”) and as the “Saint” of the incel community, his actions inspired a slew of copycat killings. In the years, since dozens of people have been killed in acts of incel-related terrorism. Alek Minassian, the 25-year-old man who drove a van into pedestrians in Toronto in April 2018, praised the “Supreme Gentleman Elliott Rodger” on Facebook shortly before his attack, and claimed in the same post that his actions were the first strike in an “Incel Rebellion.” A mass uprising of sexually frustrated men has yet to occur although the threat posed by these men is being taken seriously. In June 2019, slides were leaked from a briefing for airmen at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, outlining incel ideology and the risks posed by its adherents.²⁶

Houellebecq offers no solutions to the problem of incel rage. From his vantage point, these are merely the inexorable consequences of sexual inequality. This does not go far in explaining the particular pathologies of the incel subculture. Even if one accepts that the phenomenon of sexual loneliness—and indeed, loneliness and isolation of all kinds—has grown in the last fifty years, it cannot be said that this is an experience limited to men. Indeed, feminists were among the first to complain of the coarsening of gender relations as a consequence of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet only men are doing the killing. It is probably not necessary to over-intellectualize the incel community. It clearly arises out of the intersection of mental illness, social maladjustment, and intense misogyny.²⁷

There were those, however, who recognized early on that the male loneliness, frustration, and periodic rage produced by as a byproduct of sexual liberation was the occasion for entrepreneurialism. Among them was Style, who in 2003 took a couple of men to a bar in Belgrade and advised them on how to approach women. One of the group, Sasha (“who was twenty-two, said he had been with one woman, though we suspected he was exaggerating by one”) followed his recommendations and approached a girl, spoke to her, and then got her email address. Sasha was so excited that after they left the bar he skipped down the street. Watching him go, Style waxed sociological: A significant percentage of violent crime, from kidnappings to shooting sprees, is the result of frustrated sexual impulses and desires of males. By socialising guys like Sasha, Mystery and I were making the world a safer place.

Style was the nom de guerre of Neil Strauss, and in 2005 he would write The Game.

One of the more durable concepts developed by the French critical theorists was that of “capital.” In 1986, Pierre Bourdieu wrote a landmark paper suggesting that the concept of economic capital could be extended to other, less tangible, forms of wealth. Bourdieu had in mind social capital and cultural capital both of which he identified as “convertible” into material wealth, power, and status. In 2010, sociologist Catherine Hakim extended Bourdieu’s idea yet further, suggesting that in addition to these pre-existing categories of capital, individuals also possessed a stock of erotic capital. “In the sexualized culture of affluent modern societies,” Hakim wrote,

Erotic capital is not only a major asset in mating and marriage markets, but can also be important in labour markets, the media, politics, advertising, sports, the arts, and in everyday social interaction.

In the post–Sexual Revolution world, seduction was a competence that every individual was incentivized to develop. Unsurprisingly, ever since the early days of the Sexual Revolution men had been seeking to do just that.²⁸

In 1965, an NYU graduate named Eric Weber found himself working in Manhattan, toiling in a lowly job in the advertising industry, and struggling to meet women. “The Beatles had just hit, the times were changing, sex was in the air,” Weber recalled. “I’d ride the bus home to Englewood and see the kinds of girls I always thought I should marry. But I was shy.” In the late 1960s Weber decided to take matters into his own hands. He began systematically seeking out how to improve his chances at meeting women. Part of this involved a series of frank interviews with twenty-five unattached young women from which he tried to derive a set of rules for negotiating the new, unregulated singles scene. What Weber realized in the course of his research was that in his own lifetime the rules for sex, romance, and relationships had radically altered. Sex had been decoupled from marriage. Moreover sex had been decoupled from morality.²⁹ “Twenty years ago you would have been right in assuming it was almost impossible to strike up a relationship with a strange girl.” He wrote. “But … that was before the Pill and miniskirts and see-through blouses and the whole sexual revolution type thing.” In 1970, Weber wrote up his findings in a book entitled How To Pick Up Girls! which he self-published and promoted independently through magazine commercials. Within a decade he had sold 650,000 copies, grossing $5 million.³⁰

Weber was the first to realize that post–Sexual Revolution men were desperate to learn how to navigate the currents of sexual liberation. He succeeded in monetizing seduction. He did not, however, succeed in creating what in the fullness of time would be known as the “Seduction Community.” That dubious honor belonged to Ross Jeffries, a Californian who in 1992 authored the spectacularly obnoxious and singularly successful seduction manual How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed. Operating in the very early days of the internet, Jeffries built an online community of several thousand men who followed his advice and shared their own experiences of putting his teachings into practice. Jeffries very much presented himself as a guru. Whereas Eric Weber had been something of an enthusiastic dilettante, Ross Jeffries presented his work as a coherent system. He brought into his seduction theories other strands of thought, in particular the pseudoscience of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), thus connecting his twentieth century body of seduction theory with the old Victorian anxieties of the seducer as hypnotist, as the bridge between the rational and the irrational worlds of the mind.³¹

The conflict between reason and passion, the rational and the irrational—the debate which has been at the heart of the history of seduction since the Enlightenment—was central to the work of the most influential seduction theorist of the post–Sexual Revolution era. Well into his twenties Erik von Markovik was a luckless, lanky young man failing to find love in Toronto. Markovik did possess a passion and ability for magic and he determined to make a career for himself as an illusionist. Plying his trade in the late 1990s, operating under the pseudonym “Mystery,” Markovik began to develop alongside his stage routine a system of seduction that he came to believe was practically infallible. He called it Mystery Method. A synthesis of evolutionary psychology, sales and marketing techniques, stagecraft, and self-help, Mystery Method was the most sustained attempt yet to teach men seduction. Although infamous for popularizing the technique of “negging” and widely mocked for its dependence on magic tricks and New Age–inspired personality “tests,” from a historical perspective, it was also a milestone in the rationalization of sexual relations. For Markovik, seduction is a science. He refers variously to the “science of courtship” and the “algorithm for getting women.” There is an algebraic quality to his formulations (A1A2A3—>C1C2C3—>S1S2S3) and his scheme is meant to be obeyed, not played around with. “The game is linear,” he intones. Markovik propagated his theories in a self-published book and also in costly private seminars.³²

In 2002, one of the men who handed over $500 to learn the secrets of seduction was writer and journalist Neil Strauss. Taken under Markovik’s wing as a promising young student, Strauss later became a master pick-up artist (PUA) in his own right. By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the seduction community had swelled to tens of thousands of men communing on online forums and in real life at “boot camps” run by a multiplying number of seduction coaches. It was this subculture and his participation in it that Strauss chronicled in his 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. His book went on to sell over 2.5 million copies worldwide and propelled Strauss to media celebrity as the face of contemporary seduction. For a brief window between 2005 and 2010, the seduction community enjoyed something of a moment in the sun. There were talk show appearances, spin-off TV shows, friendly interviews, and fascinated profiles. This period of grudging acceptance was not to last.

If the seduction community was one product of the Sexual Revolution, then so too was a feminism that was skeptical of the new permissiveness. Doubts about sexual liberation had been around since the early 1960s. In 1962, in an otherwise upbeat article on the new sexual freedoms enjoyed by young women, Gloria Steinem included the proviso that “the main trouble with sexually liberating women is that there aren’t enough sexually liberated men to go around.”³³ By the time Shere Hite came to publish her epochal feminist survey of female sexuality (The Hite Report [1976]) the mood among radical women had soured. Hite’s respondents described the bleak topography of sexual freedom. “The sexual revolution liberated a vast amount of masculine bestiality and hostility and exploitativeness” one woman wrote; others described it as “male-oriented and anti-woman,” “the biggest farce of the century for females,” and as “late sixties bullshit. It was about male liberation.”³⁴ Everyday women recounted what feminist commentators saw abroad in Western culture at large. One feminist study of contemporary film (revealingly entitled From Reverence to Rape) listed the various roles women were allowed on-screen: “Whores, quasi-whores, jilted mistresses, emotional cripples, drunks. Daffy ingenues, Lolitas, kooks, sex-starved spinsters, psychotics. Icebergs, zombies, and ballbreakers.”³⁵

Throughout the seventies the feminist vanguard identified and objected to a coarsening of attitudes toward women advanced under the standard of sexual liberation. The result was a new attitude of suspicion. At the very moment that much of the old apparatus of sexual discipline was being dismantled, radical women were beginning to agitate for the improved regulation of heterosexual relations. Andrew Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon famously campaigned in favor of anti-pornography ordinances and helped steer feminism back toward an interest in jurisprudence, in particular with respect to the workplace. Both evinced doubts about the very possibility of sexual freedom for women. Dworkin extended this doubt to seduction itself, half-joking that “seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.” One consequence of this new trend in feminist thought, was a notable attempt to revive the old seduction laws, or some version of them.³⁶ Jane E. Larson was a Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School who spent a good part of her career studying the history of sexual legislation, including the development and repeal of state seduction laws. To her mind the repeal of the seduction statutes from the 1930s onward was a consequence of a misplaced faith in sexual liberation. Gains in female educational achievement, economic independence, and reproductive control did not obviate the need for protections in other spheres. Permissiveness, she suggested, did not de-complicate sexual power dynamics:

Having gained the right to say yes, women found they had lost some of their previous power to say no. The new sexual liberalism was an attack on sexual repression … but it was more specifically an attack on women’s control over men’s sexuality.³⁷

Larson married this insight to her deep knowledge of the law and proposed a feminist defense of the now-defunct seduction statutes. In civil law, the tort of seduction was part of a larger body of contract law that regulated how individuals deal with one another. In business it was illegal to engage in “intentional misrepresentation,” that is to wittingly deceive one’s counter-party. It was perverse, Larson argued, to allow this principle to apply to some of the blandest interactions between corporate entities but not extend it to the most intimate relations between individuals. She proposed a modern tort for sexual fraud that would grant this protection to women who consented to sex under false pretenses. The proposed law would provide a way out of a binary view of the sexual landscape that offered women the choice between “Orwellian oppression and the Hobbesian jungle.”³⁸

In the early 1990s Larson launched a short and ill-fated campaign to introduce these laws. She soon discovered that there was little public appetite for a bold legislative attempt to regulate sex and courtship. In retrospect the nineties constituted a period of ideological and institutional retrenchment, a hiatus between two great waves of feminist activism. Circa 2010, feminism and feminists burst back into public discourse. Rallying around an emergent discourse that identified the existence of “rape culture” on college campuses and in society at large, a new generation of activists began to challenge sexual norms. The activities of the seduction community did not escape their attention. Self-identified pick-up artists were soon enveloped by the new critique and confronted online and in-person. This was a conflict waged largely outside the public eye. Then in 2014 it was thrust into the news cycle.

In November 2014, Julien Blanc was traveling in Australia for business when a hashtag, #TakeDownJulienBlanc, started circulating, first in American activist circles, then across the world. In Melbourne, an event held by his company attracted 900 protesters—some of them violent—and had to be canceled. Under pressure from campaigners, businesses started to refuse to serve him or his associates, websites took down all reference to his events and venues canceled his reservations. On November 5, barely a week after he had entered the country, an online petition was set up called “Cancel Julien Blanc’s Visa.” It was addressed to Scott Morrison, an MP and the Minister of Immigration and Border Protection, and sought the immediate withdrawal of Blanc’s right to be in the country. The next day the petition’s aim was fulfilled. The Australian authorities revoked Blanc’s visa and by November 7 he had been flown out of the country. Nor was this the end of Blanc’s woes. The tale of his unceremonious eviction from Australia was now a global news story. Activists all over the world sought to prevent him from entering other countries. Similar petitions began to circulate in Japan, Canada, Argentina, Iceland, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and New Zealand. Some of these met with success: Blanc was denied entry to Singapore and the United Kingdom and was told by the Brazilian and South Korean authorities that they would deny him a visa were he to apply for one. In a matter of weeks he had become an international pariah. Time magazine asked: “Is Julien Blanc the most hated man in the world?.”

Blanc was a seduction “coach” associated with a company named Real Social Dynamics (RSD), which had been referenced in The Game, that was part of a new ecosystem of seduction schools that had come into being over the previous decade. RSD was known for its hyperactive tactics and brash methodology which bordered on harassment and assault. The immediate cause of the campaign against Blanc was the circulation of a video of him in Tokyo where he was shown grabbing and pushing women and in one instance violently handling a woman’s head. In the same period, Blanc had been bragging on social media about the effectiveness of his aggressive and manipulative techniques. The global media storm surrounding Blanc’s Tokyo misdemeanors and subsequent expulsion from Australia was the occasion for the collision between a revitalized feminism and a complacent seduction community. Feminism won. The episode marked the end of the era of the pick-up artists social acceptability. The attitude toward them shifted from tolerance to disgust. Many seduction “professionals” closed their businesses or rebranded as conventional self-help authors, life coaches, and charisma experts. The community’s final demise was signaled by Neil Strauss’s disavowal of the theory and practice of seduction in a series of interviews given in 2015 to mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Game. In The Atlantic, Strauss characterized the methods of the PUAs, the same methods he had, a decade before, practiced and popularized, as “objectifying and horrifying.”³⁹ In The Guardian he further distanced himself from the movement:

[The Game] was really a book about scared men who were afraid of women. But then it became a part of the culture. And it became a reason for women to be afraid of guys.” He’s sad about that. “It was never meant to be an advocacy of a lifestyle, even though it’s come to symbolise one.⁴⁰

Ironically, at the very same time as the seduction community was being exiled from polite society another dehumanizing, more Houellebecqian trend in seduction was rising to dominance.

In Whatever, Houellebecq had imagined a world where “every human relationship is reduced to an exchange of information.”⁴¹ A world where humans were reduced to data, managed and studied by computers. In the two decades since his novel’s publication this prediction has been vindicated in the growth and social acceptance of online and app-enabled dating. In 1995, only two percent of the couples met online. By 2017 thirty-nine percent of couples were first connected through the internet and as many as twenty percent of newlyweds had first interacted in cyberspace.⁴² Tellingly, the gains made by online dating websites and apps have been made at the expense of more traditional, communitarians ways of finding love. As late as 2000, about a quarter of couples met through family, neighbors, or in church. A decade later this number had plunged to ten percent while online dating had soared in popularity.⁴³

Dating apps and websites have created an actual libidinal economy. They are marketplaces for desire where attractiveness is the dominant value expressed in a currency of likes, swipes, and messages. Houellebecq had surmised in Whatever that unregulated sexual markets would create huge disparities in sexual outcomes. This is a view that has been utterly vindicated online. On dating apps and websites inequality is ubiquitous. Data from the dating app Hinge in 2017, found that the top 1 percent of men on Hinge received 16.4 percent of all messages; the top 1 percent of women on Hinge received 11.2 percent of all messages. To put these figures in context consider how they would translate into economic measures of income inequality, typically measured by a Gini Coefficient whereby 0 is perfect equality and 1 is perfect inequality. On this basis, the “economy” of Hinge for women has a Gini Coefficient of 0.376, and for men a Gini Coefficient of 0.542. In the real world the Gini Coefficient for OECD-EU nations on average is approximately 0.3. In other words, at a time of yawning economic inequality, hundreds of thousands of people are looking for love on online platforms whose dynamics are even more unequal than those they are subject to in their everyday lives.⁴⁴

On the surface this looks like men have a harder time online than women. The data points toward a more complex set of circumstances. Men and women seem to interact differently online. On Tinder, one study found that men typically “like” more women but engage less when they match. In contrast, women on Tinder “like” fewer men but are more likely to engage when they match.⁴⁵ Moreover, attractiveness is judged differently by men and women. Data from OkCupid found that women are far harsher on men than vice versa. On a 1 to 5 scale of attractiveness the average man judges the average woman to be a 3.0; the average woman judges the average man to be a 2.0.⁴⁶ The obverse of this phenomenon is that female judgements of male attractiveness have less variance whereas male judgements of female attractiveness run the gamut from 0 (perfectly ugly) to 5 (perfectly attractive). This matters because across all dating apps and websites there is evidence that both men and women are aspirational in their pursuit of an attractive partner. On OkCupid it was estimated that the average man sought a partner 17 percent more attractive than himself but the average woman sought a partner only 10 percent more attractive than themselves. Another cross-platform study found that these figures were even higher: 26 percent for men and 23 percent for women.⁴⁷ This leads to the perverse outcome whereby at the extremes the most attractive men are getting more messages than the most attractive women, while on average women are more forgiving in terms of looks, and message men they deem to be of below-average attractiveness at far higher levels than they do men who they deem to be of above-average attractiveness. Men act differently, increasing their message flow in proportion to their judgement of the attractiveness of the woman in question.⁴⁸

Furthermore, these inequalities are exacerbated by the relative weight given to visual information on individual profiles. When OkCupid experimented with changing the format of dating profiles such that images of each individual came to dominate the screen—at the expense of non-visual written information—then the most attractive people saw their message inflow increase by up to 75% while the least attractive people saw their already meagre message count decrease by 5-10%. “All those extra pixels allowed the pretty faces to outshine the others all the more,” OkCupid founder Christian Rudder wrote of this phenomenon, “the rich got richer.”⁴⁹

However the data is interpreted, it is clear that online dating rewards the beautiful and ignores the less desirable. The result is the creation of a Houellebecqian residuum of undesired and uncontacted people, a struggling middle class of middling looking individuals just getting along, and then a minority of ultra-desirable men and women under virtual siege from suitors. In 2014, New York Magazine profiled some of these ultra-desirable individuals by reaching out to the four most contacted OkCupid profiles in New York City. The article detailed lives of unimaginable sexual opportunity. The most contacted woman was receiving 245 messages a week. The most contacted man revealed that he was using two different dating apps and that the week before had matched with 890 women on Tinder.⁵⁰ This theme of superabundance for an attractive minority replicate across platforms and across studies. A 2018 study of online dating in four major North American cities identified one woman in New York who was receiving messages in such quantity that it amounted to a single message received every half an hour, day and night, for an entire month.⁵¹

Attractiveness is not the only driver of sexual inequality on online platforms. Age is major determinant of message traffic and acts differently on men and women—with women typically experiencing a drastic reduction of interest from men as they age while interest in men tends to rise into their forties. Race is another factor, with numerous studies showing that online dating has created a racial hierarchy of attractiveness.⁵² What is most wretched about the creation of these new, uncomfortable dynamics is that they seem to be a product of the particular experience of being online. Based on the data available, Christian Rudder found that on OkCupid people seemed to be operating from certain assumptions and preferences that did not reflect how they behaved in the real world. “In short,” he wrote, “people appear to be heavily preselecting online for something that, once they sit down in person, doesn’t seem important to them.” If sexual inequality does not describe our past, then given the growing pervasiveness online dating, it likely describes our future.⁵³

Yet even this is not the whole story. Increasingly, the unequal dynamics of online dating do not simply resemble the unequal dynamics of advanced economies—they actively feed into one another. This is because the majority of the most popular dating apps are either subscription services, “freemium” services, or some mixture of the two. Raw desirability—what Hakim called erotic capital—is no longer enough. Actual capital—money—is needed to have a hope of finding love online. The pay-to-play aspects of online dating arise out of the simple need for the companies hosting the platform to turn a profit. This is not in itself bad. But the mechanics of how they monetize online romance are often overlooked. This is a shame because it reveals a great deal about the workings of modern love. To start with, like much of the tech sector, the online dating world is highly concentrated. One company, Match Group, owns forty-five different platforms, grossing close to two billion dollars in revenues each year. Almost half of those revenues come from a single product: Tinder.⁵⁴

When Tinder shot to popularity in 2014, much of its appeal derived from its democratic architecture: the app was free to download and all the users were simply thrown together and left to choose among themselves who they engaged with. Over the years, Tinder has become noticeably less open. The rise of paid subscription services like Tinder Premium and Tinder Gold as well as the introduction and heavy promotion of in-app purchases to improve the chances of matching have reduced the viability of simply using the app for free. The enhanced user experience given to those who pay for Tinder has come at the expense of those who do not. In the process, what has been revealed is that the algorithms that run Tinder are not intended to be democratic at all. By way of example: one of the most popular products on Tinder is “Boost,” a feature that promotes the profile of the person who purchases it. Tinder claims that people who buy Boost will get tenfold exposure for half an hour when there is peak traffic on the app. Boost works because Tinder is essentially a long line of profiles queuing up to meet each other. Customers who use Boost essentially cut in front of other profiles. In 2019, Tinder introduced “Super Boost,” a product that would function the same way, allowing users, in the words of the company, to “cut to the front and be seen by up to 100x more potential matches.” Tinder boasts that “Super Boost” is “the ultimate Tinder hack,” essentially acknowledging that the Tinder “economy” is rigged in favor of those willing to pay to get ahead. The real-world equivalent would be a night club filling up with wealthy individuals bribing the doormen for entry while a long, static queue builds up outside.⁵⁵

The phenomenon is not limited to Tinder. Almost all online dating companies offer products whose workings basically admit to the inequitable premise of the services they provide. The prices of these services vary. Depending on how long a user commits to, a subscription could cost between $10 to $30 per month. Likewise, onetime app purchases can cost between $5 and $30. These are not huge amounts but the target market tends to skew young and hence lower-income. Furthermore, prices can be variable. Age and location (and, it is rumored, attractiveness) can impact the cost of both subscriptions and app purchases. Paradoxically, the increasing popularity of these products is testament not to the merit of any one dating platform but to their failings. However, because they enjoy oligopolistic status, the companies behind the apps can afford to keep pushing paid products while systematically undermining the user experience of those who refuse to buy in. This might matter less if the product being sold by these companies was not love. The financial statements of Match Group are filled with cynicism. Under “Risk Factors” in the annual report, the accountants wring their hands about the possibility of “a meaningful migration of our user base from our higher monetizing dating products to our lower monetizing dating products [which would] adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.” Meanwhile, in the quarterly investor presentation the marketing team trumpets the new Hinge brand campaign “resonating with users and the press.” Its slogan: “Designed to be Deleted.”⁵⁶

Online dating is the logical end result of a Sexual Revolution more informed by liberalism than liberation. Technology has merely better enabled an impulse unleashed many decades ago. Writing in Seduction, Baudrillard suggested that

The sexual jurisdiction is but a fantastic extension of the commonplace ideal of private-property, where everyone is assigned a certain amount of capital to manage: a psychic capital, a libidinal, sexual or unconscious capital, for which each person will have to answer individually, under the sign of his or her own liberation.⁵⁷

This seems to capture the reality of contemporary online dating. It is a commonplace to state that dating is now a kind of work, a form of labor. In her 2016 book Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, Moira Weigel suggested that the work of online dating resembled that of the unpaid internship. This, it seems now, does not capture the extent to which online dating requires investment—the investment of time, money, emotion, and erotic capital. The user of a dating app or website is engaged in the work of investment rather than the work of labor and this work is performed “under the sign of his or her own liberation.” In this sense, the hundreds of thousands of online daters engaged in the daily speculation on themselves are a kind of fractal reflection of the entrepreneurial Silicon Valley business culture that gave rise to the dating apps and websites that host them. The Sexual Revolution has turned its grandchildren into startups. And most startups fail.

The general acceptance of online dating stands in stark contrast to the widespread revulsion at the seduction community. An oddity, for both are part of the same post–Sexual Revolution phenomenon of the rationalization of sexual relations. Eric von Markovik dreamt of creating an “algorithm for getting women”; the immensely profitable corporations that own and operate the online dating platforms have in their own way realized that dream, only at the level of populations rather than individuals. If the true legacy of the Sexual Revolution is sexual liberation with capitalist characteristics then OkCupid, Tinder, and all the other dating companies are its true beneficiaries. In the tug-of-war between reason and passion that has been the overriding feature of the history of seduction, reason, for now, seems to have won. Modern Westerners, as Houellebecq recognized earlier than most, live lonely, diminished lives in part because their capacity to forge and sustain human connections enjoys an inverse relationship to their capacity to internalize the logic of liberal capitalism. The decrepitude of the average individual’s emotional vocabulary and sentimental universe is a poignant testament to this. “Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction,” Houellebecq writes in Atomized, “which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.” Increasingly, this small hope has been surrendered to profit-minded tech companies. The desocialization of Western nations proceeds apace while at the same time hundreds of thousands of lonely people flock to online dating services who treat their dreams of romantic happiness with spectacular venality.

At least such were my own thoughts upon encountering a would-be pick-up artist in the wild. It was in London, one Saturday in the January of 2016, not long after Strauss had renounced the methodology of seduction that he had once been a master of. The day had been gray and dismal. I had been invited to a friend’s birthday drinks in Clapham that evening. Shortly before I left it began raining torrentially. It stopped not long before I arrived. Water covered every surface, including the awnings and the tables in the forecourt of the pub where we were meeting, as well as the short, steep, stone steps that led up to its front door. Inside, it was quiet on account of the rain. There were a few couples having dinner and a few small groups of friends. The group I joined was by far the largest and the most boisterous in the place. I went to get a drink. Waiting for my order I noticed a boy, he could not have been much more than twenty-two, standing alone at the bar a few meters down from me. Something about his pose caught my eye. He looked hunted. He held his pint glass close to his chin in between sips, the arm holding it held tight against his chest, the other thrust into his jean pockets. His eyes moved nervously around. Occasionally he would turn to survey the room in a single, sweeping, anxious movement before turning back to the bar. On the other side, two barmen were drying glasses and chatting casually, their relaxed informality a counterpoint to his clearly agitated state. He was of average height, a slight build, his upper half bulked out by a beige fatigue jacket and beneath that a blue jumper. He had dark brown hair in a slightly mussed side parting. He had soft eyes, gentle features. He looked like the kind of boy whose mother worries about him; indeed, it seemed as if his mother no longer dressed him then the ghost of her past purchases still haunted his wardrobe. He was quite good looking, or would have been if he was not in a state of such obvious discomfort. My drink arrived; I returned to the group.

Some time later the party decamped to the beer garden out front so the smokers could smoke. Outside it was dark, cold, and wet. The streetlights made moons on the pools of rainwater that now sat atop all the tables and all the benches. We huddled at a row of tables that were sheltered by an awning and warmed by a single patio heater that deactivated every couple of minutes. After a period, I went back inside to get another drink, mindful as I went of the perfectly slick steps at the entrance. I was at the bar again. The boy was no longer there. I assumed he had left, as he had arrived, alone. I got my drink and turned and began to walk the ten meters or so from the bar to the front door. It was then that I saw him. Just to the right of the door was a low, oblong table with two velveteen pouffes on either side and two candles in the middle. The light was particularly dim in this portion of the room and the candlelight moved atmospherically across his face and across that of the pretty brunette now sat across from him. I can see the tableau in my mind: she is leaning forward, her right hand resting on her face, her lips apart in anticipation; there are four cards on the table and his hand is poised over one of them but his eyes are looking up at her through his lashes with something like happiness.

I experienced a shock of recognition. This was Mystery Method in action before me.

My interests being what they are I was now in a heartbreaking position. I was too committed to turn back to the bar and could hardly stop and stare from the middle of the room. Instead, I decelerated in order to soak in as much of the scene as possible before I was obliged to exit. Over at the table his little magic trick was arriving at its conclusion. He turned over the final card and said something in a low voice. Both hands flew to her face. She squealed and rocked back with glee. He smiled and made some modest motion with his hands but I could see that he was basking in the glow of his success.

I was now only three meters or so from the door. One of the maxims of Mystery Method is that “seldom will you see women of beauty alone” in a bar, or anywhere else. It occurred to me at this point that this was likely true of this girl as well. Not many people go to bars alone on a Saturday night, excepting the guy she was now talking to. Then I noticed at table against the wall just in front of the door a group of three, one blonde girl and two well-built men. One of them had his back to the wall and was staring at the aftermath of card trick with undisguised disdain. His friend was hunched over the table. “It’s this thing from a book,” he said to the girl, “so you can trick a girl into bed.” She looked utterly distraught at the news, one hand covering her mouth in horror. She half stood up in her seat, her eyes searching for her friend’s attention.

I stepped outside and went back to my seat beneath the awning. I had a view across the empty beer garden of the front door. Barely a minute later he emerged. Defeat was stamped all over his face. He looked up at the night sky and turned his jacket collar up to the cold. He took a step down. The rain and the smooth stone collaborated in his humiliation. He slipped and collapsed down the steps onto the asphalt. Instinct had saved his face from harm but he had landed hard on his forearms. He was still for a moment on the floor. Then he stood up and checked to see if anyone had seen him fall. Nobody on my table seemed to have noticed. He dusted himself down, put his hands in his jacket pockets, and walked away into the night.