Manbragging online: Self-praise on pick-up artists' forums

This article investigates the use of self-praise in an online community of pick-up artists (PUAs). The male community of practice engages in speed seduction of women, drawing on a shared repertoire of techniques and scripts. The field reports, which are produced to process the experienced interactions and posted online for evaluation by others, are at the centre of our investigation of positive self-disclosure. We find that PUAs rely on three kinds of self-praise: brag statements, proxy brags, and evidential brags. Self-praise (of any type) is by no means a rare occurrence as revealed by a quantitative breakdown of self-praising speech acts in the data set. The analysis of the reactions towards self-praise, as evidenced in forum replies, shows that self-praise is not censored as it is part of PUA interactional norms. The self-praise iceberg which emerges in this paper posits that self-aggrandizing discursive behaviour is more widespread, and less censored, than previously assumed.