Analyzing the Language of Pick-Up Artists:Online Discourses of the Seduction Industry

The pick-up artist (PUA) community unites men who learn and engage in 'speed seduction'. PUA practices encourage men to use manipulative strategies to select, pursue, and sexually conquer women. The movement as such is highly commercialized: the experienced members of the community (so-called 'gurus") go on seminar tours around the world, write books, and offer personal coaching sessions. While also active offline, the main means of contact for this community is via online platforms and social media.

In this talk, I present a corpus-based discourse analysis of the communicative practices of pick-up artists, offering a systematic exploration of their distinct language use. Drawing on a corpus comprising data from online forums, social media, and YouTube videos, I explore the verbal practices and techniques that pick-up artists draw upon in their interactions with women and the terminology-heavy language used in teaching pick-up to foster perceptions of scientific validity. Specifically, focus on the PUA lexicon which appropriates terminology from the military and sports domains to reframe male-female interactions and outline the strategy of pseudo-scientification as an important legitimization practice. Finally, I illustrate how the 'gurus' discursively construct an expert identity in their YouTube lectures and how-to videos and how this is used to teach and sell seduction.

Sofia Rüdiger is Guest Professor of Applied English Linguistics at the Institute for English Language and Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She has a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and her academic work has taken her to the University of Basel (Switzerland), the University of Helsinki (Finland), RMIT (Australia), and Tampere University (Finland). Her research interests revolve around World Englishes, pragmatics, digital communication, and the intersection of language and food.

Together with Daria Dayter from Tampere University, she has investigated the language of pick-up artists for more than a decade, resulting in numerous publications in journals (e.g., Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics Review, Open Linguistics, and English Today) and edited volumes. Their monograph The Language of Pick-Up Artists: Online Discourses of the Seduction Industrywas published by Routledge in 2022. She is co-organizer of the conference series Influence, Manipulation & Seduction: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Persuasive Language, with its third installment scheduled to take place in Finland in November 2026. Her recent editorial work includes the volumes World Englishes and Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2025), Manipulation, Influence and Deception (Cambridge University Press, 2025), and Entangled Englishes (Routledge, 2025).