South Australian pickup artist brotherhood, Adelaide Fraternity, boasts more than 600 active members online.

The vast majority are men, operating under pseudonyms such as “Sinister”, “mrbiggles” and “Dostoyevsky”, to share experience, tactics and advice on how to seduce the opposite sex.

It remains unclear how many members practice their craft in real life – in Adelaide’s pubs, clubs, parks and supermarkets.

What is known is that small groups meet regularly in the city at night, to test their theories of seduction – experiences they later detail online in “Field Reports”.

Dex, also known as “the Godfather”, set up Adelaide Fraternity after establishing popular pickup brotherhoods in Perth, Brisbane and Ottowa (Canada).

“Without question, do not talk about the Fraternity to people who aren’t close friends. … Especially the media – speak to Dex first.”

– Fraternity Rules and Guidelines, 2013.

Neither Dex nor any current Adelaide Fraternity member approached by InDaily would speak about the group.

Pickup training

“Without someone watching these people, they’d just go out to bars and stare at women until they get punched, because they don’t know what to do,” says former pickup artist trainer, David Bartholomeusz, the only person willing to expose his real name for this story.

“We felt like we were doing them a favour, and we saw so much success there.”

Bartholomeusz, who has a degree in evolutionary biology and a keen interest in the neuroscience of sales, was one of several Adelaide nightclub DJs recruited and paid to be “pickup” trainers by the Adelaide Fraternity, because of their reputations as “natural” pickup artists.

“Ruthless”is another DJ, “natural” and former trainer.

“When we used to do a seminar it might have been 20-50 guys (and) I’d be paid about a grand for a whole day,” he says.

“It was more kind of like a big brother project … saying to them, if you go talk to a chick and she rejects you, don’t go have a cry about it – there’s another 50 girls over there.

“You’re trying to teach these guys to have better self esteem, to be confident.

“A lot of them were too afraid to talk to anybody, no matter what gender.”

“I do have anxiety, but I’m trying to use it as a catalyst to improve my confidence by doing things I know make me uncomfortable (like picking up da ladies).”

– Adelaide Fraternity forum post by ‘Bill’, March 2014.

But neither Bartholomeusz nor Ruthless teach “pickup” anymore, and both give caveats to their involvement.

“I didn’t really consider myself one of those people,” says Ruthless. “I’m certainly not an advocate for pickup; I was asked to do it, and so I was happy to help,” says Bartholomeusz.

These caveats distance them from the most potent criticism levelled at the practise of “pickup” – that it often dehumanises women, and is, at worst, aggressively misogynistic.

Dehumanising “the target”

Many Adelaide Fraternity pickup artists are avid readers and viewers of the international seduction community canon.

It includes the pioneering 1970s pickup text, How to Pick Up Girls! by Eric Weber – a new copy can now set you back between $300 and $500 – and the 2005 New York Times bestseller The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, by Neil Strauss.

Indeed, hundreds of books, DVDs, courses and youtube videos are aimed at helping Average Frustrated Chumps (AFCs) become Pickup Artists (PUAs) and even Pickup Gurus (PUGs).

This material aims to break down social interactions into predictable and identifiable elements of a “game”.

Women are deemed to be “targets” and categorised on a one-to-10 scale of physical attractiveness.

A central technique of pickup is “negging”, where a pickup artist delivers a backhanded compliment in order to lower a woman’s self-esteem, and increase her vulnerability to suggestion.

Women are also said to deploy “shit tests” and “bitch shields”: ostensibly negative reactions, considered by pickup artists to be invitations to try harder.

“I have this belief that a brotherhood is the ultimate expression of a man… like someone who belongs to a brotherhood is then capable of expressing themselves to the world in a really authentic way.”

– Adelaide Fraternity forum post by ‘Calligraphy’, July 2014.

These dehumanising terms – there are hundreds more – are central to mainstream pickup vernacular, and appear regularly on Adelaide Fraternity’s online forums.

At its worst, the consequence of pickup terminology is open, aggressive misogyny.

One of the six “Best Posts” featured on the Adelaide Fraternity website – entitled Tarzan Caveman Method – recommends the following:

“A caveman shows his sexual desire and doesn’t give a fuck what other people think. He will aggressively do what he pleases to women …Where he is dominant and she is submissive, the way NATURE WAS INTENDED!!”

Another post reads:

“How many of you guys have had sex with a drunk girl? Guess what! She can accuse you of rape and win. … if she is the least bit uncomfortable with you, she can decide she was raped because she was drunk (read: got taken advantage of) and pin you to the fucking wall”.

These posts represent some of the most extreme text on the Adelaide Fraternity forums.

But Bartholomeusz agrees there is a link between the dehumanising language of a “game” and the expression of real contempt towards women on the site.

“If you take this language in isolation and look at it, it is completely unacceptable; absolutely unacceptable,” says Bartholomeusz.

“Yes I am a female, recently just joined as friends are PUA’s (male). I am not in it for the scores as many as you may be, no I do not have a high score and plan to keep it that way, as I do not want to be labelled as a whore, plus I have more respect for myself than that (not trying to offend anyone). I’m in it to make new friends and for the fun of socialising in unique ways.”

– Adelaide Fraternity forum post by ‘Mady’, June 2013.

Many of Bartholomeuzs’ students, he says, were socially awkward young men who required a toolbox of terminology in order to conceptualise social interactions which they could not understand at face value.

“They’ve come to us because reality is too complex,” Bartholomeusz says.

“We had to make it simple so that people could understand, but then if you make it simple … it becomes dehumanising, and you get words like ‘target’.

“This language is primarily coming from people who are intensely frustrated because there is no connection between their desire and reality.

“The worst offenders in that regard were the people that were getting the least result.”

Bartholomeusz says the best way he could tell if one of his students was improving was that the dehumanising language would slowly disappear from their vocabulary, “and you see this person has actually dealt with something deep-seated about their emotional selves”.

Beyond Adelaide Fraternity

According to Ruthless, most of his students stopped attempting pickup when they found girlfriends as a result of his training.

“They’ve got the mentality of ‘I want to pick up these girls, blah, blah, blah’ but most of these guys fell into relationships anyway,” he says.

“They’ve grown up. I think it’s definitely a young man’s game.”

Ruthless does not know how many Fraternity members are active today, or how many are merely “keyboard warriors”.

But he warns that even the most successful pickup artist has to stop eventually.

“In a long-term approach, you end up having an empty life. You’ve been with these women, but then, where’s the substance in it?

“You’re just going to end up left on the shelf, and old and lonely.”