The downfall of a predatory Glasgow pick-up artist

It’s the classic tale. Boy meets girl. Boy pursues girl through a shopping mall. Boy continues to chase and harass girl. Boy attempts to intimidate and manipulate girl. Boy films it. Boy won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Girl runs away. Boy says girl has a cock-killing feminist agenda. Boy puts video of it on the internet.

Welcome to the world of the pick-up artist (or PUA, as they call it, because there’s nothing in this world sexier than acronyms), a world that’s come back under the spotlight this month thanks to the antics of failed rapper and self-proclaimed fanny-aficionado Addy ‘A-Game’ Ahmed. Glasweigen Addy plays ‘the Game’ in and around the greater Glasgow area, the aim of which is to seduce as many women as possible in a bid to secure the maximum amount of sex, which ,of course, is the PUA’s holy (or should that be hole-y) grail.

Addy’s game seems to boil down to him following nervous women through the streets of Glasgow while occasionally getting his walloper out and screaming at them to show him their camel-toe. He’s like some hideous cross between Jeremy Beadle and Ted Bundy, directed by Roman Polanski.

Last week, though, the hunter became the hunted. Addy was arrested following numerous complaints to the police about his behaviour, which had been brought to wider public attention after BBC Scotland released a short documentary film about his antics on-line. While it’s not illegal to talk about women as if they were mindless vessels fit only for the insertion of an engorged penis, it’s definitely illegal to harass, alarm and panic women in broad daylight as they go about their business, and there’s something spectacularly illegal about filming people without their consent and uploading the videos to social media, especially when those videos happen to contain sex acts (albeit – as far as I’m aware – audio-only).

For now, at least, it’s game over for Addy.

Mind you, that’s what we thought when David Cameron was accused of jamming his Johnson in a dead pig’s mouth, and again when the president of the United States confessed to sexual harassment live on tape, so we can’t discount the possibility that Addy might yet return to plague the internet with his unique brand of crass and objectionable, occasionally illegal trash-talk videos.

Just to ensure that we keep the horror fresh in our minds, let’s learn a little bit more about this guy, and, through him, the wider PUA community. Let’s – if you’ll allow me to set the childish tone early on – bone up on him.

See how he likes it.

If it hasn’t already been removed, Addy’s YouTube channel is called D.W.L.F, which stands for Dicks Will Live Forever. It’s a name that sounds very much like it was made up by a giggling four-year-old who’d had too many Smarties before bed-time. One of Addy’s videos features him and a monosyllabic cohort ‘interviewing’ two intoxicated female students on a city street at night, and asking them to guess what the letters in the acronym stand for. It’s a scene that plays like an audition reel for the world’s very worst game-show.

As drunk as they are, and despite being heavily guided towards the answer, the two young women can scarcely believe that anyone anywhere would name anything Dicks Will Live Forever. What the hell does it even mean? DWLF must either be some sort of radical men-inist statement, or else an attempt to lend a bit of rappist sheen (it’s telling that my auto-correct program kept trying to change ‘rappist’ to ‘rapist’) to the already deeply misogynistic PUA movement.

The video raises a huge question mark over Addy’s position as a sexual self-help guru. After all, the point of Addy’s videos – beyond vainglorious self-promotion and hollow boasting about his questionable exploits – is to teach men how to be better seducers; how to boost their self-worth by cajoling, tricking and exploiting drunk and vulnerable women.

His winsome banter in this particular video is about as charming as a weeping testicular welt and only half as engaging as the outpourings of your average head-trauma victim. Why would you want to take a leaf out of this guy’s sex-book? At one point during the engaging repartee, Addy digs deep into the well of his childishly perverted imagination and pulls out a line about penises having little tongues that can lick lady’s pussies. It’s a line that you can well imagine being uttered by someone like Lord Byron, or lovingly recalled by your own grandfather as being the line that finally captured your grandmother’s heart.

“Don’t you remember, Jean? It wasn’t long after that that I was taking you up the aisle. And then we got married.”

There’s a pseudo-scientific sheen to the field of pick-up ‘artistry’ that exists to lend credibility to its practitioners and to forge legitimacy in the eyes of its critics. Newbies are bombarded with acronyms and scene-specific in-speak, like Same Day Lays (SDLs); Same Night Lays (SNLs); Bait, Hook, Heel, Release (BHHR); Instant/Interactive Value Display (IVD) and Wee Boaby Syndrome (WBS). OK, I made that last one up.

Sometimes PUAs like Addy co-opt the language and framework of self-help seminars; sometimes they adopt the stance of sexual terrorists filming basement manifestos in which they encourage their followers to literally ‘rise up’.

Sometimes PUAs come across like sports-casters or football pundits. Is there a single activity on this planet that men won’t turn into a fucking team sport (again, literally in this case )? PUA videos are usually awash with discussions about formations and tactics, dissections of previous games, action replays, and live commentary. All that’s missing is the mascots and the referees.

“Great Bait, Hook, Heel, Release from the young player, there. He’s one to watch this season.”

“Absolutely. There hasn’t been young talent like that in the game since the late 1960s, when my Dad was pumping both of my mum’s sisters behind her back.”

Where’s the ‘artistry’? I thought seduction was supposed to be sexy, not the province of some geeky statistician telling you to the nearest centiliter how much cum was produced in Glasgow during the summer of 1986.

Sometimes PUAs will do video phone-ins with special guests. In one DWLF video, Addy A-Game interviews a fellow game-player from across the pond, Everett Overton. Mr Overton apparently belongs in the upper echelons of the world’s PUA rankings despite his tendency to wear turtle-neck sweaters under a suit jacket, like some off-brand Roger Moore. With his shiny, orangey-purple skin and beard that’s so surgically-neat it must have been drawn on with a permanent marker, he has the look of a man whose DNA has been melded with a Snapchat filter.

Overton preens and prattles on as if he’s appearing on Graham Norton by satellite link instead of being beamed directly into a Bellshill bedroom. Addy asks his guest a series of increasingly insipid questions, each of them delivered in the flat-toned cadence of a psychopath. The droning quality of Addy’s voice – a cross between Kevin Bridges and historian Neil Oliver – allows some unexpected jolts of horror to be smuggled into the conversation; like when he shares his experience of having sex with a drunk girl he picked up at a club, who had to break off half-way through having sex with him to be violently sick, after which he fucked her again; or when he uses the phrase “If you’re going to be a clown, you’ll attract clown bitches.”

In many ways he’s the Poldark of Glasgow.

The best thing about the video, though, apart form absolutely nothing at all, is when Addy starts blending US and Scottish lingo. At one point he tells Overton that he ‘went up to some girls crib for a cup of tea.’ Did you, aye? Did you remember to axe her if she had any motherfuckin’ scones, yo?

Addy’s output veers from the ridiculous to the sub-slime. While it’s easy to laugh at his frequent bouts of buffoonery and delusional blind-spots, it’s not so easy to laugh at the more sinister elements of his quests and rituals.

In one excerpt he films the aftermath of a sexual encounter and makes it clear that he’s just had unprotected sex with a drunk stranger. In another he asserts that women’s opinions about ‘the game’ don’t matter. In yet another he talks about initiating sex by unexpectedly yanking his cock out to take a piss. He talks often about over-coming LMR. What’s LMR, you might ask? Oh, nothing. Just ‘Last Minute Resistance’. Perfectly innocent. Nothing rapey about that at all.

While it’s true that some women sometimes respond positively to displays of strength, virility, prosperity and confidence in men – whether that’s attributable to evolutionary biology, hormones, personal taste, mood, chemistry, or all or none of the above – that’s never to assume consent. The dangerous take-away from ‘disciplines’ like pick-up artistry is the suggestion that if a man follows steps a), b) and c) he’ll be guaranteed to unlock a woman’s libido, and if the woman doesn’t immediately thereafter dispense the prize of her private parts, then she’s a witch, a bitch, a tease, or a feminist agitator. How dare she string you along like that. How DARE she say no. Doesn’t she know that you’re a man, and if you want something, you’ll TAKE it?

Most men who seek out the advice of a PUA are probably deeply sexually insecure or uncertain of themselves as both a man and a human being (or else a naïve and impressionable little boy); most men who style themselves as PUAs are probably dead-eyed narcissists with a giant but fragile ego, who are unused to taking ‘no’ for an answer, especially from women. Put the two elements together, and you’ve got yourself a toxic, and potentially very dangerous and volatile, combination.

There’s nothing wrong with desire. There’s nothing wrong with flirting, seeking out sex, or enjoying sex. Not when it’s mutual, honest, and consensual. It’s when the pursuit of sex becomes pathological that the poison sets in. It’s not normal to throw on psychological camouflage to hunt down multiple women for sexual sport. It’s creepy, verging on the psychopathic. It’s what serial killers do in their down-time.

Women are not semi-autonomous sex-bots whose bodies exist solely to boost the male ego, or opponents in some age-old battle to be tricked, over-powered or defeated. For men to think and act that way is a detriment to us all.

It’s about time we men grew TFU, and encouraged the PUAs to GTFO of town ASAP.


Addy had something of a video ‘war’ with a YouTuber called Brodan White, which Brodan has chronicled here.

2 thoughts on “The downfall of a predatory Glasgow pick-up artist

  1. “Addy had something of a video ‘war’ with a YouTuber called Brodan White, which Brodan has chronicled here.”

    It wasnt a war. Addy bullied HP and HP murdered him.
    Not a war. It was EndGame on Addy.

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