S3: E2. The Pickup Artist
Straight white men’s sexuality is too often imagined as natural, timeless, and unchanging. In “The Pickup Artist,” we showcase the 1970 bestseller, How to Pick Up Girls, in order to explore the cultural forces that have shaped how white men experienced and publicly expressed their desire for women in increasingly casual and aggressive ways.
How to Pick Up Girls by Eric Weber was a mass-marketed book that advised men on how to introduce themselves to and seduce women. The book spawned several sequels and countless imitators. But more importantly, How to Pick Up Girls represented the triumph of a male-dominated sexual revolution that allowed men to demand ever-greater access to any woman’s time, body, and attention.
Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman
Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui
Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis
Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski
Interns: Katie Kenny, Hugh MacNeil, Ian McCabe, Emily Vaughn and Felix Yeung. Julia Zaksek provided research assistance on this episode.
Thank you to Eric Weber for sharing his stories with us.
Episode Music:
Bob Crewe Generation, “Music to Watch Girls By”
Phil Baugh, “Girl Watcher”
Little Rock Brotherhood, “The Morning After”
Ron Jeffery, “How to Pick Up Girls”
Della Humphrey, “Don't Make the Good Girls Go Bad”
Lee Moses, “Bad Girl”
Monica Lewis, “I'm Gonna Be a Bad Girl”
Robin Luke, “Bad Boy”
The Vel-Tones, “Playboy”
The Four Lads, “Standing On the Corner”
Little Rock Brotherhood, “Girl Watching on Broadway”
The Chris Barber Band, “Cat Call”
The O'Kaysions, “I’m a Girl Watcher”
Tony Alvon and the Belairs, “Boom Boom Boom”
Syd Dale, “Penthouse Suite”
Neil Hefti, “The Game”
Neil Hefti, “Sex and the Single Girl” (Instrumental)
Powerful People, “(Little Girl) Say Yes”
Norma Jordan, “Sexy Man”
The Van Dykes, “You Need Confidence”
Johnnie Taylor, “Try Me Tonight”
The Pretty Things, “I Want Your Love”
Dave Berry, “The Crying Game”
The Marvelettes, “The Hunter Gets Captured By the Game”
Little Rock Brotherhood, “The Morning After”
Archival Audio:
Girl Watchers. Diet Pepsi (1967)
How Much Affection? Crawley Films (1958)
Pick-Up. U.S. Office of War Information (1944)
Picking Up Girls Made Easy. Eric Weber (1975)
“The Young Americans,” America’s Crises. National Educational Television and Radio Center (1964)
Selected Bibliography:
Bailey, Beth L. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bailey, Beth. Sex in the Heartland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Fraterrigo, Elizabeth. Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Littauer, Amanda. Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
May, Elaine Tyler. America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation. New York: Basic Books.
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Simon, William. Sexual Conduct.New Brunswick N.J.: Routledge.
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Further Readings
