198 | Love class teaches you to "be yourself": are you to be yourself, or are you a cultural commodity that is mass-produced?

 Text/Cai Yiwen (7th grade student, doctoral student of Qing University, former office worker, slash housewife, self-house security guard, freelance writer. The theme of the column is love and emotional education. I love vulgar novels and dramas, so I care about political affairs. )
(Originally published on August 16, 2022)

Recently, after Facebook fan pages and IG accounts such as "Straight Guy Behavior Research Society" and "Magic Girl" began to expose the courses and exercises of street chatting, there has been a discussion about "love courses" on the Internet. Opening these course profiles, we can find that the target groups are often men who are less experienced in getting along with the opposite sex, have a smaller life circle, are socially awkward or lack skills.

These courses tend to emphasize the past personal experiences of the coach/tutor (depending on how they call the instructor): how they went from being "a shy man of the opposite sex and inexperienced in relationships" to being now "well-rounded and able to talk to the street." Beautiful women have beautiful encounters and can even find 'high-quality' women with whom they associate."

In student feedback, we can also see a similar process. For example, the well-known talk show artist Dong Yude mentioned in his feedback on the AMG pickup course: "I never thought that I would have the opportunity to interact with live girls or female college students in drama, but I just did it."

This kind of class looks like some kind of "picking up teaching" - such as how to respond when chatting, how to strike up a conversation on the street, etc. Using this set of their tools, you may be able to gain a sexual experience or relationship Object.

But if we scrutinize carefully, we can find that in fact, besides skills, the most common selling point of these courses is actually a specific lifestyle: a man who was originally shy and had no experience in social interaction, became a confident, A man who is rich and has access to many women.

buy "lifestyle"

Lifestyle has been around for a long time, either as a commercial or as an actual purchase.

For example, when we buy LEVI'S, we may buy a kind of "tannin spirit" (whatever that spirit is), or every festival in recent years, department stores will frantically tell women to love themselves (as if women usually hate themselves more than others) ), these are also used as one of the selling points of life style. It's just that in these examples, "lifestyle" is more like an added selling point or value to a commodity, at least it's attached to an actual item (like jeans or a designer bag).

Now, with the prosperity of self-media, the consumer lifestyle seems to be less and less dependent on the entity.

Even without bags or watches, Internet celebrities use social platforms to share their lifestyles to get clicks, or various dating coaches, self-confidence lecturers, etc., we can see more and more different lifestyles. The form is presented in front of us, and you can choose it.

These courses, or Internet stars with famous quotes, often use "be yourself", "find yourself" or cultivate self-confidence as the main call, emphasizing that the audience and the audience of the course "become a better version of yourself". This is not the first case in the consumer society.

Pop culture researcher John Fiske mentioned in the first chapter "Cowboy America" of his classic book "Understanding Popular Culture" that jeans have been given a sign of freedom in American society, liberated from social norms, but contradictory The thing is, this desire to be yourself has everyone wearing the same outfit (aka mass-produced jeans).

Does the same contradiction arise when the way of life, the life course of each person, such as "love", becomes the commodity itself? Do we actually end up with a mass-produced "self" when we pretend to be ourselves and find our truest self?

commercialize "self"

I want to stress again that these courses are not the first, nor will they be the last, whether it is lifestyle as a commodity, or "being yourself" as the reason why capitalists make us consume in a consumer society. I would like to discuss: Take this type of love course as an example, what are the possible consequences of this mass-produced "self" after removing the possessive object of the physical commodity?

Through the seemingly liberating vocabulary of "becoming your truest self" and "answering the truth of the world", we instead see more detailed disciplines targeting single gender and gender temperament in these courses.

[This article is not over, see "Walk the World" for the full text: Love class teaches you to "be yourself": are you to be yourself, or to become a cultural commodity that is mass-produced? 】

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198. Love class teaches you to "be yourself": are you to be yourself, or are you a cultural commodity that is mass-produced?

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