Craig Hendleman, 25, is a big, bullish man, his head a closely shaved dome punctuated by two gold rings that cling to his left earlobe. He is from Redgrave in Essex, the regional sales manager for an educational website, and has an obsession for seducing girls. He lost his virginity at the age of 11. At 13, he began cruising night clubs to pick up women. “I created my own method,” he says. “I have been with unattractive women, who are, say, about a six, and catwalk models. When I got them into bed I was expecting some kind of vagina deluxe, but it was just the same as any other. No girl can affect me now with her beauty.”

There was a time when Hendleman’s tales of his exploits with what now adds up to more than 300 women would be reserved for drinking companions. In the past two years, however, a pseudo-science of seduction, filled with strategies and missions, has arrived from the West Coast of America to infiltrate British social culture. The Game, an account by the writer Neil Strauss of how these “technologies” transformed him into an arch sexual operator, has spurred the development of this subculture into fledgling industry. Seduction societies or “lairs” have sprung up across Britain – the largest in London has a cast of 3,000. Videos of men with Home Counties accents demonstrating their “game” on unsuspecting female targets have begun to appear on YouTube, and every weekend, from Bournemouth to Glasgow, groups of adherents go “sarging” for girls.

Suddenly, Hendleman’s way with women has become a marketable commodity: desperate men will pay money to hear him speak. He stands like Superman beside a white board in a seminar room in a hotel in central Glasgow. I am among a group of “students” who have each paid £300 for a weekend “Boot Camp” run by Alpha Interactions. (This, by the way, is comparatively cheap: many seduction courses will set you back £1,000 or more.) Hendleman is a part-time director of the company, and one of six seduction instructors who will be initiating us into the secrets of the master Pick-Up Artist, or PUA. “As you approach, imagine that you have just been given a blow job by the most beautiful woman in the club,” he says. We scribble notes.

Among the students is Stewart, a wiry 28-year-old, who works in a television factory in Cumbernauld. “I haven’t had much success with girls,” he tells me later. “I’ve generally shied away from it.” Stewart has been fighting a long battle with his own shyness: this seems to manifest itself in a perpetual frown. This is his third course, and he feels he is improving. He has stopped wearing dark clothes and developed a pronounced hairstyle. He wears luminous T-shirts. “Girls are reacting to me more,” he says.

Then there is “Junior”, a 23-year-old engineering student from Glasgow, lounging at the end of the table in a hooded top and jeans. Junior is the pseudonym under which he appears on seduction community forums – the seduction instructors all have code names, too, which serve their brand in the seduction industry: Hendleman is Craze, but here too are Gem, Ice Dragon, Demo, Mist and Skippy.

Junior, who wouldn’t give his real name, is amiable and relatively good-looking, but few girls have noticed. He had thought university would be a place of unbridled passion. “There were four hot girls doing engineering in my year,” he says, bitterly. “Four out of fifty. And two of them dropped out in the first year.”

The oldest student is Gareth, who works in financial services, and has driven up from Dunfermline. Gareth is 30 and resembles a teddy bear. “I just hadn’t had a girlfriend for a couple of years,” he says. Then a friend lent him The Game. “I’m not interested in a harem.I just want to go out there, interact with people, have relationships.”

The “Boot Camp” begins on Friday evening: our instructors demonstrate their skills “in field”, in bars and restaurants. On Saturday, we reconvene in the hotel seminar room for five hours of lectures. Our leaders give confessional accounts of how the teachings they are about to impart changed their lives immeasurably. “Well done for being here,” says Mist. “You have taken the first step to say, ‘There is something wrong with my life.’ ” Already it feels like an AA meeting.

The crucial thing, apparently, is for us all to assume that women are attracted to us. “Everything a girl does, assume attraction,” says Mist. “She talks to me: she is attracted to me. She touches my necklace, she is attracted to me… assume all that, and you will do fine.”

We have to conquer the fear of approaching women, which, we are told, is a hangover from an earlier evolutionary state. “Our bodies are like outmoded operating systems,” says Mist. “We are Windows 98 when we should be on Vista.”

Alexander Locke, a 26-year-old recruitment consultant from Hertfordshire, whose PUA name is Gem, takes the floor. “What if I told you that less than 100 years ago, there was no such thing as white bread?” he says, pausing to let us ponder this amazing fact. “That’s how fast the world is moving.”

His shirt is partially unbuttoned to reveal a heart-shaped medallion, his hair is highly styled, he resembles a Mediterranean shipping magnate the morning after the night before. Gem expands upon his theme by drawing from Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene, one of three texts which, he says, taught him “everything I know about pick-up”. We must banish our primordial fear, he says, and realise that looks are less important for women than they might be for men. “I am clinically obese,” he continues. “Every day that I go out, I’m disproving the idea that looks are important to women.”