AFC

By June 2003 the abbreviation needed no spelling out on alt.seduction.fast (opens in a new window). A man who had asked a woman out and heard she was “booked” for two weeks was told he had followed advice “spouted by people who’ve been duped by society into the AFC mindset.” In January 2004 The New York Times (opens in a new window) gave general readers the expansion, as part of a world with its own jargon: “A.F.C., for example, denotes an Average Frustrated Chump, P.U.A. a Pickup Artist.” A post on the group that May described the condition as a belief, the “Romantic Fallacy that he has to provide something of value.”

Every product in the market starts from the label. The same article reported that men who earned their peers’ respect “can make money writing e-books or running workshops,” and its author’s own way in was $500 in an envelope with an instructor’s name on the front. On the lobby couches, the instructor began by explaining “that he was once like us.” A newsgroup post in May 2004 recommended another teacher on the same grounds: he “has been an AFC (average frustrated chump) long time ago.” By 2011 The Rational Male (opens in a new window) was cataloguing “AFC Social Conventions” as an aid to “unplugging an AFC.”

Under load, the abbreviation is a before photograph. It names no behaviour a man could stop, only a stage he has not yet paid to leave, and its definition is an absence: he lacks the training. That makes it the one diagnosis that covers every man who has not bought the course, including the ones who have never heard of it. Instructors are qualified by having once had it. A graduate whose results fall off has relapsed, which returns him to the top of the funnel as a customer for the next workshop.