Out of the Closet and Into the Fire

**Reposted from the first Lair, original date: 1/13/04

Well, I was going to address this issue after the NYT article hit this weekend, but it seems like Minger has beat me to the punch.  For those of you who don’t know, Minger is the head of the DC Lair.  Unlike some of the other lairs out there, he’s fostered a pretty tight-knit group and their e-mail list always has some of the best discussions going.  He also writes a regular newsletter, which he sends to his subscribers.  Usually the newsletters just contain links to interesting discussions going on in the mASF boards, but this time around Minger has actually included a rather eloquent and (dare I say it) journalistic article concerning the future of the seduction community.  It’s a pretty good read, and I have reposted it here for all of you.

Swimming Across the Channel Dept.
What happens to the seduction underground when it ”reaches the outer shell of mainstream consciousness?”

A Rolling Stone writer has been ”quietly gathering material” for an article, spending time with the gurus and interviewing a few aspiring PUAs.  Our founding brother RJ was profiled by Rolling Stone and Playboy back in 1998, but he, and not the community, was the centerpiece.  RJ probably received a lot more business from the free advertising, and more brothers found their way into the community.  Six years later, the mainstream has returned, our community has grown and a new generation of charismatic gurus has arisen.

Not only is Rolling Stone back, the New York Times, a global newspaper with over one million readers, is on the scene too!  And it seems that both will include the broader community in the coverage, which includes the nextgen gurus, the local lairs and the boards.  Will this blast of light prove to be a blip in the evolution of our community or will it snatch away the cloak of anonymity that has encouraged robust sharing and drive the key participants further underground?  (WD disappeared after receiving the shock last year of finding himself watching documentary footage of the FS forums at a theater in his small Canadian town.  Then last week, one of CJ’s girlfriends let him know she read his FS comments on her!)

Aside from having covers blown, people worry, ”will ‘Powerpuff Girls’ lose its zing after everyone knows about it?”  ”Dork” zings too and everyone knows the word, yet you’ll hear very few guys saying it to a girl.  The IC pattern, much older and despite RJ’s publicity, hasn’t lost its potency one bit (when used at the right moments).  And you haven’t seen ‘Powerpuff’
really zing unless you’ve seen TD deliver it himself; his effective subcommunication can’t be fully conveyed in words, certainly not in broad article.  However, all bets are off if some screenwriter reads the RS story, and the world sees Tom Cruise PowerPuffing chicks in a blockbluster movie a year later.

What about the pulse of newbies?  The various boards or lists have only several thousand members each.  FH and ”Mad Dog” R already have their hands full as moderators dealing with the continual and accumulating incoming trickle, not to mention the occasional outbursts from the regulars.  What happens when some small fraction of the one million NYT reader base, men and women!, flock to our lists and forums?  Will we see ”a chaotic refugee flood” from AFCdom or ”an orderly transition”, like the integration of East Germany into West Germany?  The outcome is hard to predict.  The NYT has been covering subculture institutions the past few months.  Last week saw stories about swing clubs in NYC and the LiveJournal blog.  The swing club profiled will definitely see a boost in applicants but each will still be individually screened.  LJ new account stats are not available for the period during and after the NYT article, so we don’t know the impact of media coverage.  We do know that they have 1.8 million accounts, almost one million active accounts and, unlike the incompetents who run Friendster, they know how to architect and implement a robust system with room for growth.  The LJ community is really a subexponential number of subcommunities, so as long as underlying servers hold up, LJ can collectively absorb a blast just fine with little social disruption.

The NYT is too influential to ignore.  RS and PB are themselves on the fringe compared to the NYT, the anchor of the establishment.  The NYT starts memes and amplifies memes to a vast important audience.  It was on the pages of the Sunday Magazine last year that they questioned the ”carbs good” orthodoxy and gave support to the Atkins revolution.  Today, major food companies and restaurants are putting low carb on their product lines and menus.  Even Italian pasta makers are developing ”low carb” products.  McDonalds just announced the patty-less burger!  We don’t know the arrow of causality but the article was certainly a strong predictor of the direction and momentum of public sentiment.

*Off-Track Betting Dept.* I predict several months from now, after the publication of the NYT article, supposedly this Sunday, that 1) the business or traffic of the gurus or sites, especially the open ones like FS, spotlighted in the article will rise significantly; 2) the exposure will drive the skittish board posters underground and limit their experiences to smaller audiences (the capitalists withdraw to Midas Gulch), while we see new gurus sprouting to give workshops and seminars while established ones pick up their activity; and 3) the article will draw the attention of the television or movie producers and result in the introduction of seduction community activities into plotlines, TV talk soaps or reality shows. 

-Minger
minger@dcseduction.com

So the paranoia has begun.  Honestly, I don’t think it will be a big deal once this hits the mainstream.  It might be a bit of a curiosity for a while, but chances are it will be met with such disdain from feminists, Alpha Males, AFCs, and any church based institutions, that if anything it will be driven further underground.  You might see a lack of traffic on ASF because of people afraid to be exposed as seducers, while something like the rather exclusive and ”invitation only” Mystery’s Lounge becomes more important.

In a way, the whole situation reminds me a lot of where bodybuilding was in the early 80′s.  You have this wierd little world-wide subculture right on the fringe of society with it’s own superstars and competitions and politics.  It’s something anyone can partake in if they are willing to commit significant time to it to get good, it’s got its own jargon, and it’s even got lairs and clubs meant to promote it.  The only thing it’s been lacking up to this point is mainstream acceptance, something which body building achieved with the documentary ”Pumping Iron.”  Once the press hits, next will be books, movies, maybe even TV shows.  Nevertheless, when this hits, it could hit big.

I’ve gotten more than a few private e-mails concerning this topic because of the knowledge that I had been approached to be a part of this mainstream exposure, and there is a big worry out there that bringing seduction to the masses may ruin the free excahange of ideas that we currently have going.  So this may be on a lot of people’s minds in the coming months.  I’m honestly not too worried about it, but only time will tell how it will affect the community as a whole.

Until then, props to Minger for such a great article.

Thundercat