Chinese pickup artist locked up for sinister lessons in manipulation
- Police shut down website offering courses which included encouraging women to kill themselves
- Women referred to as ‘pets’ and ‘prey’
A website which offered single men courses in manipulating women into killing themselves and referred to them as “pets” and “prey” has been shut down and its operator detained by police in eastern China.
A 24-year-old man, surnamed Xu, was detained for five days and fined 5,000 yuan (US$730) by police in Jiangsu province for fraud and “spreading obscenity” in the courses he posted online as a pickup artist, claiming to teach seduction skills to socially inept men.
The website contained blog posts and courses with names like “Encouraging Suicide” via emotional manipulation, “Keeping Her as a Pet” and “Crazy Extortion”, according to a police statement posted on Thursday on Weibo, China’s microblogging platform.
The latter course taught men how to pretend to be successful and accomplished in order to “seduce inexperienced women into giving them money and material goods”, while other courses advised men on how to use physical violence to conquer women into submission.
A screenshot of a WeChat conversation posted on the website showed a man bragging that he “wanted women to kill themselves to prove they loved [him], as [he] really liked the feeling of thin women killing themselves because of [him]”.