The Pickup Artist

Puts the place where you see more girls that you'd like to pick up than any other place? The street of course, and that's why it's so important that you master the basic elements of the street pick up. There are a few basic principles that you have to master before you can move on to wild uninhibited street play. Remember, girls like guys who know what they want, and a girl likes to think, "You think she's something special." Let's watch Mike in action in downtown Dallas when he was in town on business, and it looked to him like every secretary in town was taking her Texas-sized titties for a lunch hour exercise walk. "Oh, brother, look at those knockers." "Jesus." "And those. Look at the points on those. No problem, that's you." A pickup is meeting somebody without a formal introduction. If you're at your aunt's house, and she says, "Oh, this is the girl from next door, Eric. This is Ellen. Ellen Mederick. Eric Medellin. That ain't my pickup." A pickup is when you don't know somebody beforehand, is nobody around to introduce you, and you introduce yourself to a woman on a subway, on a bus, at a bar, a restaurant, a green shoe store on the street. And it doesn't mean that you have to take her home with you and have sex. It just means you've met somebody, and I would say you've exchanged at least email or phone numbers. That was Eric Weber, talking about his best-selling book, "How to Pick Up Girls." Published in 1970, "How to Pick Up Girls" was a pioneering, mass-marketed book, offering young men advice on how to introduce themselves to and seduce women. Since it first came out, "How to Pick Up Girls" has sold more than 3 million copies, and has been translated to 20 different languages. The book inspired a 1978 made for TV movie, and it spawned several sequels and countless imitators. It also helped usher in the notorious pickup artist advice genre. Pick Up Advice is still tremendously popular among men, who devour infamous guides like the game, which became a bestseller in 2005. Eric Weber's book taught men that they had an opportunity to turn any encounter with an attractive woman into a sexual conquest. He modeled a number of pickup scenarios in places like libraries, clothing stores, beaches, and other public spaces. He suggested using oddball pickup lines, such as those found on his 1975 album, "Picking Up Girls" made easy. The success of "How to Pick Up Girls" in 1970 signaled that a profound change had occurred in American culture. Today, we take for granted that sexual experiences often take place outside of marriage, and between people who barely know each other. But for much of the 20th century, respectable men and women met in tightly regulated ways, through family connections, in their religious and ethnic communities, at school, or at work. These contexts, as well as formal introductions, were the prerequisite to courtship or dating, which in turn were supposed to lead to marriage. How to Pick Up Girls represented a very different set of sexual expectations and practices. The book appeared at a moment when droves of men and women had broken away from middle-class norms and embraced what they called "free love" or "sexual liberation," and what more conservative observers called "sexual permissiveness." How to Pick Up Girls found an audience among men who wanted to participate in a looser sexual landscape, but did not know how to do so. Eric Weber's book offered these men an etiquette guide for casual sex in the 1970s. The book celebrated informal introductions, and it encouraged equally spontaneous sexual connections between men and women. Weber encouraged men to approach women that they did not know for no strings attached sexual encounters. But how to Pick Up Girls also encouraged men's sexual aggression, and took for granted that any woman could and should reciprocate men's sexual interest. In short, how to Pick Up Girls taught white men in particular that they were entitled to a sexual revolution in which they could have sex without commitment or consequence. Straight white men's sexuality is too often imagined as natural, timeless, and unchanging. But in reality, the ways in which white men experience and express desire for women has changed. In this episode, we explore the ways that how to pick up girls contributed to a male-dominated sexual revolution. In doing so, we tell a story in which white men came to demand ever greater access to any woman's time, body, and attention. I'm Lauren Gutterman. And I'm Gillian Frank, welcome to Sexing History. When Eric Weber encouraged men to pick up women, he didn't innovate so much as he promoted sexual practices that were decades in the making. The history of pickups and advice about picking up long predated Eric Weber's best-selling book. The term pickup came into use in the early 1900s in cities crowded with working class and immigrant men and women. There, young people from different neighborhoods, religions, and ethnic groups socialized with each other in commercial spaces like dance halls and amusement parks. Adults rarely supervise this rowdy working class youth culture, and youth quickly created a practice they called pickups, which described their own etiquette for speaking with and making sexual connections with strangers. White middle class authorities viewed pickups with suspicion and alarm that continued to promote a formal supervised system of courtship to channel young people's sexuality toward marriage. Their warnings competed with major transformations and how young people met. Young people in high schools and colleges increasingly forged their own sexual values, apart from their parents, teachers, and religious leaders. In greater access to cars, which more or less called brothels on wheels, provided some young people with greater mobility and privacy. Increasingly, young people had the ability to travel and engage in sexual activities beyond the watchful eyes of their families and their neighbors. Critics explained that men who picked up women were only doing what came naturally, but without formal introductions and parental supervision to rein in-male impulses, they cautioned, "No one could protect the nation's daughters from male sexual exploitation and violence." At the same time, moralists depicted women who actively sought out sexual pleasures beyond marriage as cheap and low class. Girls and young women who ignored these columnist warnings did not find support or sympathy. Normalizing five decades of wisdom, a columnist in the 1950s warned young women about pickups, stating, "She's taking a chance and she knows it. If she gets into trouble, it's her own fault." Women, it was widely agreed, were responsible for saying no to men's unseemly and unceasing advances. Those who did not reaped what they sowed. Here's a clip from the 1958 film "How Much A Faction." "First, well it all seems quite a lot. You like someone, he likes you. Everything is fun and affection. Then all at once, you can find yourself in a situation where your physical urges fight against your reason. Then those fine thoughts of love and affection can suddenly get twisted. In the height of emotion, it's not always easy to stop and think things through. But if you just slow down the rush and pressure of your feelings a little, then judgment has a better chance to take hold and guide you away from wrong behavior." A racial double standard was also at play when it came to casual sex. Communities across the United States responded to white boys' sexual behavior with an understanding that boys will be boys. But black male youth and adults alike could lose their freedom and even their lives if their advances crossed racial lines. And black women rarely enjoyed the same social protections and concerns as their white counterparts. The term "pica" took on new meanings during World War II. Public health experts expected that men in the military would have casual sex with women that they had just met. To discourage this behavior, or at least to scare men into wearing condoms, national public health campaigns warned that women who had casual sexual encounters were not simply cheap. They were also dangerous, diseased, and contagious. The government's office of war information portrayed pickup girls as one of the primary carriers of venereal disease and warned soldiers that the teenage pickup girl, in their words, was frequently crowding out her step-sister, the professional prostitute, as a public maness. Here's an excerpt from a 1944 government-produced film called "Pica." "I could have swore she was alright. She was so young, she looked so clean. Of course she looked clean. That's how you get infected. Or do your men have sense enough to let the women who look like real thoughts alone? But it's the clean kids that worry us. That's our problem today. Keep your men from playing around with the so-called "nice girls." In the years after World War II, warnings about pickup culture increasingly competed with popular messages that men had voracious sexual appetites, and that picking up girls was a right of passage. Journalists documented the growth of pickup culture among white middle-class teens in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1955, one newspaper columnist interviewed a group of boys from Forest Hills Queens about their dating experiences. These middle-class youth assumed that it was their right to approach girls they didn't know and proposition them. And they believed that unescorted women in public invited sexual advances. Girls they explained went unescorted to movies, dances, and skating rinks for one purpose, to meet boys. And these young men used predatory language to describe such encounters, calling public entertainment venues, happy hunting grounds. Sociologists like Lester Kirkindall also documented this misogynist sexual culture. In 1961, Kirkindall published his findings in a book called "Premarital Intercourse and Interpersonal Relationships." In it, he shared excerpts from his interviews with 200 male college students about their 668 "Premarital Intercourse Experiences." Kirkindall and his team found that these young men viewed women who consented to a pickup as sexually loose and available to anyone. They talked about these women as unsuitable for marriage and not worthy of respect. They even used words like sluts and pigs to describe them. Here's an excerpt from the 1964 documentary "The Young Americans," which includes young men sharing similar views on premarital sex. The girl you're considering marrying is one that you shouldn't have premarital sex with. I would say to the women with the girl that you don't care about or that you don't know at all. Well, that kind of destroys sex in itself, you know what I mean? You should only have intercourse with somebody you don't care about, somebody, and that may be the revolution. That sex is safe for somebody you don't really care about or don't think anything of. Maybe it was loose, somebody who, you know, you can get something off of it. I mean, I think that might be the sexual revolution. Also, I think most guys would rather marry a virgin than some other girl, but you know, maybe the chance they're half-and-half or not. It's just as long as the girls tell them that they are, that's the important thing. And before you're married, you know, go off for what you can get, and you marry, though, I want a virgin. I mean, you know, that seems to be the attitude that everybody seems to be well. I'll take her out and I hope I can, you know, do some good work with her, and that's, and that's, you know, before you even start dating a girl, that's the idea. I mean, go out and see what you can do. And then when it comes to being married, they say, "Well, I'd really like to marry a virgin." When Eric Weber published How to Pick Up Girls in 1970, he codified many of the ideas expressed by the young men who participated in Kirk and Doll's study. He also turned six decades of middle-class sexual advice on its head. Weber rejected the need for formal introductions. He celebrated the gamification of sex among young men, and Weber used the very same language as the boys in Forest Hill Queens, happy hunting, to refer to picking up women. In short, How to Pick Up Girls represented an idealization of pickup culture, and saw men begin to reshape the public conversation around it. How to Pick Up Girls drew from post-war youth pickup culture, but it also was indebted to a growing number of post-war adult publications such as Playboy, and also more niche publications devoted to what was called Girl Watching. Both Playboy and the Girl Watching Phenomena acknowledged and celebrated a voracious, white, middle-class male sexual appetite. Most of Playboy's readers were married men, but the magazine's ethos chafed against matrimony. Instead, the so-called Playboy philosophy offered its married readers a fantasy. In the words of Hugh Hefner, Playboy's founder, and editor-in-chief, men should enjoy the pleasures the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved. The naked women of Playboy, Hefner told his readers, were a symbol of disobedience, a triumph of sexuality, an end of puritanism. And Hefner touted what Eric Weber would later assume that sexual fulfillment and emotional detachment from women was essential to personal happiness. Another significant influence on Weber was the Girl Watching Phenomenon. If Playboy's sexual fantasies were mostly staged indoors, a spate of Girl Watching Guides took white male sexuality to the street. The banner publication of The Girl Watching Genre was Donald Sauer's 1954 The Girl Watcher's Guide. Sauer's was a New York-based advertising executive who spent his lunchtime's ogling women with his colleagues. He wrote The Girl Watcher's Guide on a lark and loosely modeled it on birdwatching books. A savvy publicist, Sauer's secured national media coverage for The Girl Watcher's Guide, and he promoted the book with his Girl Watching Club, the American Girl Watching Society, which even had membership cards and lapel pins. Sauer's packaged the book and his club as a gentlemanly way of publicly but discreetly enjoying beautiful women. In doing so, he disavowed many aspects of pickup culture. Sauer's explained in 1955 that a man with taste does not whistle at girls anymore. It is not considered sporting. He does not utter any sound which might betray his joy. In fact, any watcher of today who makes a passing remark or heaven forbid asks a girl for her phone number is no better than a bird watcher who steals eggs. By disowning the more aggressive and working class aspects of pickups, Sauer's sought to make it more respectable for middle-class white men to sexually objectify women in public. Members of his club even received a guide book to catalog types of specimens and advice on likely hunting grounds to observe women on city streets. Sauer's Girl Watching Guide became a fixture in American culture for over a decade, in large part because of his corporate partnerships with popular brands like Pepsi and Palma's cigarettes. Advertising campaigns for each of these brands enshrined Sauer's style of Girl Watching within mainstream culture. For example, in 1967, Pepsi launched a national advertising campaign with Sauer's help to promote Diet Pepsi as the drink for Girl's Big Girl Watchers Watch. We're a nation of sightseers and this is one of our nation's most beautiful sights. The kind of girl girl watchers watch. The kind of girl who keeps her figure, keeps her cool. With the help of ice-cold diet Pepsi Cola, one bottle, one calorie, and that honest Pepsi taste, the one taste that beats the others cold. Diet Pepsi, try it and someone will be watching. Despite this emphasis on being a girl watcher, the boundaries between looking and touching were always thin. There were ample reports of Girl Watchers cat-calling and approaching women. In 1968, Girl Watchers in New York City provided an extreme example of how watching turned to stalking. Over the course of several weeks, thousands of men gathered on Wall Street to hound 21-year-old Francine Gottfried, a well-endowed clerical worker, as she went to work each day. Gottfried's breasts and the men's behavior became national news. Eventually, police became concerned by the rowdy crowds and began escorting Gottfried to work. Eventually, Gottfried had to start taking new routes to work to avoid the crowds of men awgling her. In the years leading up to the publication of How to Pick Up Girls, these Girl Watching Campaigns, Clubs and Books all eroticized the street for a white male gaze. Meanwhile, mainstream advertisements and a burgeoning erotica market told men that it was their right to look and to touch. This increasingly overt sexualization provided Eric Weber with an opportunity to help man navigate the ever-expanding sexual possibilities of the street. Eric Weber came of age amidst this increasingly sexually explicit public culture. Weber grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey, a middle-class suburb 30 minutes northwest of New York City. He graduated college in the mid-1960s and got a job writing direct male advertising letters for the Prentice Hall Book Club, which sold instructional books. A few months later, Weber went to work as a copywriter at the advertising firm Benton and Bulls. With both jobs, he learned how to write for and appeal to broad audiences, skills that would contribute to How to Pick Up Girls' widespread appeal. When Weber recalled his early years working in advertising, he noted how his jobs exposed him to sophisticated women who intimidated him and made him feel insecure about his masculinity and his sexual prowess. And I kept on seeing all the kinds of women, I used to say, girls, that I thought looked like the kind of women you would want to marry. They were attractive, they were well dressed, they had good jobs, they looked educated and classy, and they terrified me. So I was always thinking, God, how could I ever meet them? They won't like me. I'm too short. I'm not good looking enough, I'm not successful enough, I'm not interesting enough. Because of his shyness and feelings of inadequacy, Weber initially experienced the sexual revolution as a voyeur rather than as a participant. Around him, society seemed to be erupting in pro-sex attitudes and movements as the sexual revolution called middle-class white people and women especially to engage in sexual behavior more freely and for pleasure. An avid girl watcher, Weber became inspired to write a book about how to pick up girls after he witnessed his coworker translate looking to action. Here's Eric Weber. One day, a friend and I, another junior copywriter, were staring in the window of the Alitalia office and sitting behind the reception desk was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman. She had that Northern Italian look, dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, in a summer half-shell. And I, in no way, could even dream of talking to her. As it turned out, my friend, David, waited lunchtime the next day and watched her pack up her things for lunch, leave building, go buy a sandwich, and then walk up to Central Park. He followed her, what a sandwich along the way. She sat down on a bench to read a book at lunchtime, and my friend sat down next to her, began talking her and within two days he had slept with her. I was, of course, incredibly envious and in awe of his pickup skills and I said she write a book together on picking up girls. You obviously know how to do it, I don't. As Weber tells the story, he researched his book by interviewing women about being picked up. He asked them whether or not they had or would consent to a pickup. And he tried to figure out what men should do in order to successfully pick up women. The message Weber took away from these conversations was that despite pickups being socially risky, women felt flattered when strange men propositioned them. Well, once I had the idea, I asked my secretary at work. I could ask her questions about how people meet for about 15 minutes. Almost everybody said sure. I, they were people I knew in the age of chair work, a couple of women around town who might go to college with friends of girlfriends, male friends, girlfriends. And I would say, like the beginning, would you let yourself get picked up? And often the answer was, well, I don't like to turn pickups, but yes, sure. It's very exciting if somebody has the confidence to come up to you and introduce themselves. It's like in the movie. And I would say where would be good? Some girls would say, well, I don't like bars, I don't go to singles bars. I don't like to use them would be great. In your office building, in the elevator would be good, a shoe store, a department store when looking for clothes, when the big department stores in New York, even the park is okay. So that was starting to be encouraging to me that they actually saw, you know, done politely, as a sign that this is a constant man. Eric Weber felt that men and women alike could participate in the new sexual freedoms of the 1960s. Weber told his readers that an increasingly explicit popular culture had shifted ordinary people's sexual behaviors and expectations. He wrote, "Now we see movies in which people cavort around nude and talk dirty and make love in living color, and it's influenced our everyday lives." That sexual permissiveness extended beyond the screen. Weber believed that women's changing fashions, including mini skirts and see-through blouses, signaled their desire for sexual attention for men. He also believed that the birth control pill had freed sex from emotional commitment and pregnancy. These transformations signaled to Weber that women, especially white middle-class women, could now behave just like men when it came to acting on their sexual desires. Weber's observations drew directly from a wider culture. Infamous bestsellers like Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 sex and the single girl had already conveyed that nice girls do have affairs, and were entitled to shameless sexual pleasure outside of marriage. Weber echoed Gurley Brown in how to pick up girls when he wrote, "Suddenly nice girls are sleeping with men before they get married. Young, modern women are thinking to themselves, why should I tell a pleasant attractive man to get lost if he happens to approach me on the street? No man would do that to a woman, so why should I pretend I don't want to sleep with someone I really do want to sleep with? Women are discovering that just like men, they too have a right to act the way they want." For Weber, the sexual revolution liberated men and women from needless sexual restraint. Weber ignored women's concerns about pickups, including sexual violence or unwanted pregnancy. He chalked up women's reservations to antiquated ideas about sexual respectability. Weber wrote, "Most chicks are a little bit ashamed when they're getting picked up. They've been taught ever since they could walk that it was naughty to talk to strange men. They know there's nothing really wrong with it, but they can't quite erase all that early neurosis and caution that was drilled into them by overprotective mummies and daddies." It's difficult to know how women felt about the men who used Weber's techniques. Newspaper accounts suggest that some women responded positively, and Weber's own book cautions men that women might have mixed responses, but Weber largely emphasized women's positive reactions. You can hear some of these acted out in his 1975 LP, "Picking Up Girls" made easy. The beach is a good place to pick up girls because you can really see what you're getting. Most beaches are crawling with chicks, and they're all there for just one reason to get a terrific tan so they'll look great and attract all the men they want. But why wait till they've got the perfect tan? Why not pick the best looking chick right off the beach and have a really great afternoon in the sun? Remember, that's what she's there for. And because girls are more self-conscious about their looks, they'll be more chicks than guys catching the rays on the beach any day. This works in your favor because it makes the girls competitive for the guys and easy pickups. Just pick out a pretty girl, put your towel down in her line of sight, and spread out your gear, let her see that you're well equipped with a radio, thermos of drinks, and magazines. Social know you're a serious sunworship or two. Don't let her know yet that you've noticed her. This is easy because her eyes will probably be closed against the sun until she hears you unpack in your gear. Settle down and then take out your empty sun tan oil spray, shake the can angrily, making as much noise as you can as you pretend to discover it's empty. When you've got her attention, notice her noticing you. You probably won't even have to speak for us this is such a perfect pickup technique. Weber's ideas dovetailed with the growing consensus telling women to be sexually accessible to men, lest they be thought of as prudish, square, or aptite. In other words, how to pick up girls contributed to a sexual revolution that pushed women from saying no to sex, to saying yes to sex, and for Weber and his readers, sexual freedom increasingly meant that he and other men had even greater access to women's bodies. How to pick up girls is part self-help book, part how to manual, and part polemic about men's right to look at, talk to, and sleep with women. It provides a series of lessons instructing men to adopt a particular kind of masculinity and heterosexuality. One that Weber insists can become second nature. Weber directed his book toward those men in particular who doubted their sexual appeal and felt intimidated by women. His intended readers were not the ever-charming, conventionally attractive, urban sophisticated, featured in Playboy magazine over the prior decade and a half. Rather, Weber spoke to men who aspired to the Playboy's sex life, but who lacked his skills at seduction. In the introduction to his book, Weber spoke to men who were dumbfounded when they saw a beautiful woman on the street. Weber narrated such men's experiences of finding themselves powerless and insecure. Your mind draws a blank. You don't know what to do. You worry, maybe she'll think my ears are too big. Maybe God forbid she'll notice my bald spot. You're terrified that if you do get up enough nerve to say something, it'll be silly. She'll ignore you, or even worse, she'll tell you to get lost or report you to the nearest cop, or both. I remember, in my late teens, having a very good-looking male friend who was taller than I would see two women. He'd say, "Oh, let's go talk to them." I would so reluctantly say, "I'm expecting both women to like him, neither to like me." I think tens of millions of young men have those feelings extremely deeply and they're very paralyzed. In how to pick up girls, Eric Weber boosted his reader's confidence by telling them that they didn't need to be attractive in order to be successful with women. All men needed Weber reassured them with self-confidence. In some ways, Eric Weber's advice echoed the banal messages of other self-help literature. But Weber gave this advice a modern twist. He encouraged men to stimulate women by being sexually explicit with them. He wrote, "Women get horny, and when you talk dirty to them, it stimulates their horneiness." Weber continued, "Women love it. Of course most girls will never admit to like-encrued men. Many of them even pretend to be offended by sexy talk, but that's just a front." Most importantly, Weber told his insecure male readers that it was their masculinity that was their ticket into the sexual culture they saw all around them. Weber celebrated their male privilege, praised sexual norms that required men to approach women, and underlined social standards that labeled women as physically attractive and desirable for only a brief period of their lives. Weber wrote, "Whether you know it or not, you already have one great thing going for you when it comes to picking up chicks. And that is your a man." What's so special about that? It puts you in the driver's seat, that's what. As a man, it's your right, your privilege to approach a woman any time you want. But women, they've got to sit there and wait. Keep this in mind the next time you find yourself shivering with fear and the thought of approaching a strange woman. You are a man. When she turns you down, you can try picking up another two seconds later, but she, she may have to wait two months for the next man to come along, or even longer. Weber's book aimed to boost men's self-esteem. But in doing so, he blurred the line between sexually confident and sexually violent. Weber himself never endorsed the use of physical force in a pickup. In fact, he explicitly told his readers to be nice to women and had managed them with, "Don't be nasty." Yet early editions of how to pick up girls are littered with casual references to rape. Weber portrays men's sexually violent urges as a natural reaction to seeing an attractive woman. For example, on the very first page of how to pick up girls, Weber stages the drama of male physical attraction, writing, "And suddenly you spot a girl. You've just got to see more of her long, lean legs, her fine rounded breasts, her high from behind. For an instant, you even consider rape. You rack your brain. What can I say that will make her melt into a little pool of butter at my feet?" Later editions of how to pick up girls have removed this violent language. In the most recent edition has an entire section on consent. Although Weber has revised his own thinking, the angry undercurrent of the original volume remains one of the troubling legacies of this book among a new generation of pickup artists. How to pick up girls inspired a whole genre of advice books on how to pick up women. Since the 1990s, online forums have allowed self-identified pickup artists to share their experiences using this advice while trading their own tips and techniques for seducing women. Journalist Neal Strosses, 2005, Bass Selling Book, The Game, captured this online culture. The game details Strosses' introduction to, and immersion in, online pickup culture. And it chronicles his experiences at a pickup boot camp, led by the professional pickup artist, Eric von Markovik, Markovik, who also goes by the name Mystery. Here starred in a VH1 reality show called The Pickup Artist. Last season on The Pickup Artist, a man named Mystery took eight lovable losers. "I'm petrified with trying to go up to a woman." And turned them into Casanovas, and this time around the challenge is even bigger. To sum, the journey may seem impossible. I'm still afraid of not being able to really shot me as much as I should, but I'm hopeful that I'll be able to learn and grow more. Will Mystery be able to find his next protege? One day, you'll be so good at this that you will teach it to your sons. Who will make the ultimate transformation? You are The Pickup Artist. Although the game, like how to pick up girls, similarly describes techniques and strategies to help men seduce strange women, it adopts a much more aggressive and dehumanizing approach. Following Mystery's lead, Strauss learns to refer to women as targets, and he adopts negging as a key seduction tactic. Negging, or the neg, is the practice of providing a strange woman with a backhanded compliment in order to get her attention and tip the balance of power into the man's hands. A chapter on how to blast last minute resistance instructs men on how to overcome women's reluctance and force them into sex. As proof that such tactics work, Strauss's book listed all the women he slept with as a result of his education in pickup artistry. Strauss recognized his indebtedness to Weber. Near the end of the game, Strauss even includes an interview with Weber. In that interview, Weber rejects his role in laying the groundwork for the more blatantly exploitative and abusive pickup culture of the 1990s and early 2000s. Part of what came along after my book was repellent to me, he told Strauss. I was never interested in conquering women in a despotic way. Eric Weber remains intent on celebrating his contributions to pickup culture, and he remains an active contributor to this culture. In 2017, he even began producing a new YouTube series called Wing Dad, which focuses on Weber's attempts to help his adult son meet women. Weber continues to convey his advice with humor and charm, but he regrettably still invites men to see women in transactional terms, what they can get out of them or get from them. He still sees sex with women as a means of boosting men's self-esteem. Hey guys, Wing Dad here. I know a lot of you are probably thinking that a pandemic is a terrible time to meet new women. In actuality, it couldn't be better time. Even are lonely right now, they crave affection. They crave connections, email, text, Facebook, Instagram. Every woman you know and ask how she's doing. You will be astonished at how responsive most of these women are. They will be thrilled that somebody is connecting with them. Make these connections online. You may surprise yourself. You may find all of a sudden you've got a wonderful new sex team partner. I see it as an opportunity and I'd like you to see it as an opportunity too. It's now been over a century since the term "pick up" entered into the American lexicon and his men continue to be attracted to strangers and to fantasize about making sexual connections with women that they don't know. They continue to look for guidance in the pursuit of sexual thrills that are both strange and all too familiar. ♪ It gets captured by the gang ♪ Sexing history is written and produced by Gillian Frank and me, Lauren Gutterman. Our senior producer is Sonia Lieganawi, Rebecca Davis is our story editor and producer. Our assistant producers are Chris Babbitts, Isabel Makado, and Mallory Zemanski. This episode is made possible by the hard work of our interns, Katie Kenny, Hugh McNeil, Ian McCabe, Emily Vaughan, and Felix Young. Julia Zackzack, also provided research assistants on this episode. A special thank you to Eric Weber for speaking with us. To see our liner notes for this episode and all our previous episodes, please visit our website at www.sexinghistory.com. Sexing history is made possible with generous funding from Alan Zwickler of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation. Created in honor of the journalist, filmmaker, poet and gay activist Phil Zwickler, the foundation seeks to promote human rights, education, health, and the arts, specifically with respect to the gay and lesbian community and generally with regard to those individuals and groups who need assistance to survive and be heard. Visit them at pzfoundation.org. We are also grateful for the support of the University of Delaware College of Arts and Sciences Program for Undergraduate Summer Research. Sexing history is also supported by funding from the Humanities Media Project in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas Austin. The Humanities Media Project aims to tell human stories and invite critical conversations that educate, inspire, and connect communities. They believe that the Humanities play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy, democratic society. Sexing history is grateful for a grant from the program in American Studies in the America's Center, Centro de la Semedicus at University of Virginia. The America's Center promotes the interdisciplinary study of the arts, cultures, histories, and societies of the Americas. From all of us at Sexing History, thanks for listening.