The pickup-artist canon. The wish is to be wanted on command — to study and master the mechanics of attraction the way you'd master a craft. The counterfeit substitutes a script of dominance routines for the substantive vulnerability that actual intimacy requires, and pairs it with a worldview where the opposite sex is an opponent to be defeated rather than a person to be met.
Anchor works
The Game (Strauss); The Rational Male (Tomassi); manosphere blogs
Catalog detail — status & engines ↓
Status
Slot-proven (Strauss + Tomassi)
Engines
mastery + being-desired + apotheosis + impunity (+ order/legibility in Tomassi)