Out of such anxiety was born the “seduction community,” part band of brothers, part nakedly commercial and ferociously competitive business enterprise. The birth of the seduction business coincided neatly with the sexual revolution: with the 1970 publication of sometime film editor Eric Weber’s bestselling manual (later made into a movie) How to Pick Up Girls. Left behind like flares, double-knits, and dancing the Bus Stop, the art of the pickup was reborn in the 1990s and rebranded as an exact science. A cadre of guru-like leaders appeared with a set of elaborate rites, precisely defined techniques, and an acronym-laden private language known only to initiates—purposely designed to appeal to men, whose minds seem to thrive on ritual, hierarchy, and complex esoterica (think baseball statistics, Scout badges, the military, the Catholic Mass, and the Freemasons).