By now, you’ve perhaps heard of looksmaxxers, the young men pursuing extreme physical transformation in the belief that appearance is the sole determinant of social and sexual success. If not, I’m sorry to have to inform you that they’re injecting gray-market steroids and peptides, getting experimental cosmetic surgeries, even hitting their own facial bones with hammers — and they’ve become the subject of a full-blown media spectacle, especially their most prominent representative, a twenty-year-old influencer and streamer who goes by Clavicular.

If you’re a newer observer of the manosphere, you may be less familiar with their antecedents, the pickup artists of the mid-2000s, who developed elaborate behavioral scripts to manipulate women into having sex. At their peak twenty years ago, pickup artists were a genuine cultural phenomenon: their guidebooks topped best-seller lists, and their online workshops were heavily attended by men eager to learn the trade. The goal of pickup artistry was to “score” with women, and being talented in this endeavor was referred to as “having game” — archaic terminology to describe objectives that seem almost quaint from where we stand now, amid the jestergooners and chadfishers of the looksmaxxing scene.

Pickup artists conceived of women as automata whose bioevolutionary programming could be overridden by men of superior cunning and intelligence. Adherents sought to short-circuit a woman’s brain to get access to her body — something that could be accomplished through calculated behaviors like backhanded compliments (“negging”), feigned disinterest, and strategically isolating women from their friends.