Pickup artist
man who practices finding, attracting, and seducing women
Pickup artists (PUAs) are a group of predominantly heterosexual men whose goal is to seduce women using psychological manipulation referred to as "game". PUAs often refer to themselves as the seduction community or the pickup community.
The rise of "seduction science", "game", or "studied charisma" has been attributed to modern forms of dating and social norms between sexes which have developed from a perceived increase in equality of women in Western society and changes to traditional gender roles. Commentators in the media have described "game" as harassing, as well as sexist or misogynistic.
History
Modern pickup artist practices have been traced to the 1967 publication of The Art of Erotic Seduction by rational emotive psychotherapist Albert Ellis and Roger Conway and the 1970 publication of How to Pick Up Girls! by Eric Weber. These how-to guides encourage men to meet women through the "pickup".
Ross Jeffries taught workshops, promoted a collection of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques called "speed seduction" from 1988, and in 1991 published How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed. Other exponents established themselves in roughly the same era but lacked contact with each other. In 1994, Lewis DePayne, then a student of Jeffries, founded the newsgroup alt.seduction.fast (ASF).
The public source identifies “Pickup artist” as man who practices finding, attracting, and seducing women. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pickup, artist and practices.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Pickup artist”, the useful work is to connect “man who practices finding, attracting, and seducing women” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q637304. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1970, 1988 and 1991.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pickup artist” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.