In 2014, self-proclaimed âpick-up artistâ (PUA hereafter)
Julien Blanc was denied entry to the UK following a
campaign against his promotion of sexual violence and
assault against women (Travis 2014). This intervention
was one of the first occasions where the strategies
of the PUA community shifted away from the confines
of private online settings and into the media limelight.
Although PUA communities generally position themselves
as âself-helpâ fora for men to discuss methods of attracting
sexual partners, the linguistic strategies used in these
communities, including how women are represented, discussed
and positioned, remain relatively underexplored in language,
gender and sexualities research (although see Jones
and Merrison 2012; Dayter and RĂŒdiger 2016).
In this paper, preliminary results of a corpus-based
study of the online PUA community âThe Red Pillâ, a
Reddit board (âsubredditâ) with ~200,000 subscribers
are presented. The corpus was constructed by extracting
comments and submission text from the 100 top submissions,
totaling ~2m words. The focus is primarily on dominant
(i.e. frequent) forms of social actor representation
and practices that are part of the construction of online
masculine identities. This work contributes to current
debates concerning contemporary constructions of masculinities
in online spaces (cf. Hardaker and McGlashan 2015),
and highlights potential research directions in terms
of âalt-rightâ masculine identities.
References
Dayter, D. and RĂŒdiger, S., 2016. Reporting from the
field: The narrative reconstruction of experience in
pick-up artist online communities. Open Linguistics,
2 (1).
Hambling-Jones, O. and 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.
Hardaker, C. and McGlashan, M. 2015. âReal men donât
hate womenâ: Twitter rape threats and group identity.Journal
of Pragmatics, 91 (1): 80-93.
Travis, A. 2014. Julien Blanc barred from entry to
UK.The Guardian. » . Last accessed 9/02/17. |