The Game - Neil Strauss

This post may appeal to the smallest subset of my readers so far. Nonetheless I have been claiming that I was going to read this for a while and I finally got around to it. The above image is of a man named Mystery (real name Erik James Horvat-Markovic) who is a pickup artist. He is mostly well known by the fact that he had a show of the same name of his occupation (The Pick-up Artist) and because of this book. A pickup artist is someone who develops certain lines, strategies and skills to be able to attract and seduce women. If this sounds creepy, it is.

The Game is the writer Neil Strauss' introduction to, and development within the pickup community. Strauss is a writer for Rolling Stone magazine and was known before for ghost writing many books for rock stars. He starts out as an awkward average guy, who gets introduced to the pickup society by an article suggestion from an editor. What follows is a description of the characters and methods of the pickup society along with his personal development. I didn't read this book to try to learn the art of the pickup, but read it because I had seen The Pick-Up Artist and found Mystery to be equally ridiculous and fascinating. Just look at his outfits! He is very rarely seen without that large feathery hat, and often comes dressed in goggles, platform shoes (even though he is 6 foot 5), leather pants and various other ridiculous accessories. However he seems to be very successful with the ladies; at least when it comes to initial conversations at bars and clubs.

Most everyone found within the seduction community comes from the ranks of socially awkward computer (or otherwise) nerds. Many of them start off as virgins who have no idea how to talk to the opposite sex. Strauss wasn't that socially awkward initially, but admits to having some problems with the ladies. After getting his first taste of the seduction community, he gets sucked in until it reaches a full blown obsession. It seems that the first thing that someone has to do when entering the pickup community is to get a silly nickname, and Strauss chooses 'Style'. He starts to learn from many of the masters and eventually settles in with Mystery. He then proceeds to start teaching pickup seminars with Mystery and becomes his main wingman. These seminars involve them teaching a handful of young men how to interact with and pickup women. They lecture and give them notes, and then go out with the students into the 'field' and watch their interactions with women to give them further tips. This takes them all over the world (there is a pretty funny series of events that happen in Eastern Europe) and eventually settles them in as the head of the pickup community.

The techniques of the pickup community (at least the Mystery Method) focus on social manipulation of women and groups. The technique that grabs you immediately is their 'peacocking'. This involves wearing ridiculous outfits in order to stand out in a crowd (see above and below for a picture of Mystery and Style) and seems to work. Other techniques involve ignoring the 'target' (or woman of interest) in order to make her more interested in you, giving her backhanded compliments ('negs') in order to lower her apparent worth in comparison to yours, and many more sneaky techniques. The Method also develops a set of 'openers' or ridiculous lines in order to break the ice of groups. Their idea is that it really doesn't matter what you first say to someone, as long as it gets them interested in talking to you. Additionally Mystery himself uses sleight of hand magic tricks to charm women and has aspirations to be a world renown illusionist (thus his nickname).

After Style and Mystery seem to conquer the seduction world, they move into a house together with other pickup artists to make a pickup community called Project Hollywood. The group rent a large Hollywood mansion in order to organize their pickup seminars (in which they make thousands of dollars) and to have a place to party and bring girls. You can imagine what happens when a bunch of socially awkward misogynistic people get together to live under one roof. They almost immediately begin to backstab each other by stealing each others girls, pickup tricks, and just by being all around jerks.

Mystery is a complete mess throughout the book. The reason I decided to read this was because how ridiculous I think Mystery is, and was not disappointed. He has breakdown after breakdown in the book, needs various psychotic medication and has to be taken to a mental hospital multiple times. He also dates completely unstable women which doesn't help the situation. One of these girls causes the breakdown of Mystery and the entire idea of Project Hollywood by falling for one of the other guys in the house.

Because these men are socially awkward and insecure at the core, they are unable to have stable relationships after they get past the tricks and lines that get women to give them their number and on occasion into their beds. As the house falls apart Style starts to see how shallow and empty many of the men are in the community are and becomes distant from the other house mates (other than Mystery with whom he is still close). He starts to desire a real meaningful relationship, rather than a series of hookups and week long stands. After meeting and temporarily boarding Courtney Love, Strauss falls for one of her band mates. Realizing that all of his 'tricks' won't work on the confident guitarist, he acts like himself and eventually gets the girl (it should be noted that they are no longer together).

Although the motives of many of the men in this book are suspect, there may be something useful to be found in the seduction community for awkward men. It teaches them how to approach women, and how to have the confidence to interact with them beyond a predetermined set of lines. The moral issues come in when men use these techniques to bed woman after woman while treating them like objects. The community does frown strongly against using drugs or alcohol to try to pick up women as well as lying (beyond the initial silly lines), but they end up treating women no better than many of the douchebags that picked on them back in high school do.

This book got a little graphic at times so it's not for someone who wants to avoid the occasional sex scene. It's fairly well written for a book about the seduction community, and is broken up into small chapters making it easy to read. The look of the book matches the ridiculousness of the characters within; it has a leather cover with gold rimmed pages and a red satin bookmark, just like the bible. Strauss is able to walk to line between being the journalist who is an outsider, and someone who is ingrained as an important part of this society. He obviously cares about the seduction community, and thinks it teaches mean important things about themselves and others. While at the same time he is able to critique the people within the community and the ways that the techniques that he has helped develop can be misused.

So ladies, when men dressed in ridiculous outfits or accessories come up to you and ask 'if you believe spells work' walk away. Just walk away.