the art of getting laid: a review of the game, 20 years later

Edouard Manet, Quatre Pommes, 1882

Announcement: I am raising the prices of paid subscriptions to $12. I am doing this because one of the tenets of Bookbear Express is that you should do what your close friends tell you to do and someone I trust a lot has been urging me to do this for a year. I have been procrastinating because the idea makes me anxious. However recently at a matchmaking event a very sweet subscriber told me apropos of nothing to do the same and I had no choice but to take it as a sign from God.

My guarantee to you is that I will release at least one post for paid subscribers every week, starting with this one. There will probably be some free posts too but the paid posts will be mandatory. Some of them will just be weekly recommendations; some of them will be reviews; some of them will be the classic Bookbear Express post, i.e. meditations on relationships and feelings.

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Second announcement: I’ve been experimenting with some coaching and matchmaking and have been really, really enjoying it. If you are interested in working with me you can find more information on my website: ava.space

About 84% of the way through The Game, Neil Strauss describes a woman he’s sleeping with as “all holes: ears to listen to me, a mouth to talk at me, and a vagina to squeeze orgasms out of me.” Upon reading this, I thought: Man, it is not 2005 anymore.

Like you, I’ve read a million think pieces about the sexlessness of our present culture. People are still having sex, but the moment in time when groups of men flocked to the Westfield San Francisco Centre and approached women trying to buy TNA leggings at Aritzia seems to largely have passed. The greatest seductions of our time are happening over Instagram and Twitter DMs. The Game is a book that defined a moment in the early 2000s, and there is something distinctly nostalgic now about the swagger, desperation and horniness of pickup artist culture.

Neil Strauss and I have a couple things in common. For one, we’re both writers. Also, an ex once told me that if I were a guy I would be excellent at picking up women, which I was really touched by—in the parlance of The Game, I guess he thought I was a “natural.” I wouldn’t actually know; as Strauss observes, “Men and women think and respond differently. Show a man the cover of Playboy, and he’s ready to go. In fact, show him a pitted avocado and he’s ready to go.” However, I am obsessed with interpersonal dynamics, and you could say that all of pickup culture is an exploration of interpersonal dynamics and, uh, how relationships form

At the beginning of the book, Strauss is a nerdy writer who has no success with women (in pickup parlance, he’s an AFC: an “average frustrated chump”). He’s short, bald, and more importantly awkward. He is also clearly talented and smart—he mentions casually in the beginning of The Game that out of school he took a job at the New York Times as a cultural reporter and goes on the road with Marilyn Manson and Motley Crüe; over the course of the book he interviews and befriends Tom Cruise, Courtney Love, and Britney Spears. He is a self-described “deep man” (apparently, he rereads Ulysses every three years for fun, a whole lot more than I personally reread it), but he struggles with women. Through a phone call from a reporter, he discovers the layguide, short for The How-to-Lay-Girls guide, a book that goes on to change his life more than “the Bible, Crime and Punishment, or The Joy of Cooking.” Through it, he discovers the pickup community—men who “claimed to have found the combination to unlock a woman’s heart and legs.” He signs up for a workshop with Mystery, a Toronto pickup artist who becomes one of the main characters in the book. This is how his hero’s journey begins.

Pickup artists believe that there is a set of things you can do and say to make a woman amenable to having sex with you. (Kerouac: Soon I’ll find the right words… they’ll be very simple.) A lot of it centers around proving that you are not like other guys. In other words, you’re faking total security (according to Mystery, the characteristics of an alpha male are confidence, a smile, “being well-groomed, possessing a sense of humor, connecting with people, and being seen as the social center of a room”). The genius of it is that in fact if you are a very serious student you can learn to fake security for long enough to get a woman into your bed (or you into hers). Neil Strauss becomes very good at picking up women because he’s very good at studying. The name he adopts as a pickup artist is Style.

Pickup basically involves a series of “routines”: openers, negs, and various ways to escalate. Some wisdom that Mystery imparts to Strauss: never approach a woman from behind (always come in from the front, at an angle), the three-second rule (a man has three seconds after spotting a woman to speak to her), demonstrating value (Strauss learns magic and buys books on handwriting analysis, rune reading, and tarot cards), kino (touching a girl), looking for IOIs (indicators of interest). “If she asks you if you’re single, that’s an IOI. If you take her hands and squeeze them, and she squeezes back, that’s an IOI. And as soon as I get three IOIs, I phase-shift. I don’t even think about it. It’s like a computer program.”

The Game as a book is rather sprawling, perhaps unnecessarily so: multiple chapters are dedicated to an Eastern European road trip that Strauss does with Mystery, for instance. The latter half of the book is dedicated to a house that Strauss, Mystery, and a few other pickup artists establish in Los Angeles, called Project Hollywood. The house, as you might expect, eventually devolves into disaster. This is not the most well-adjusted group: as Strauss notes in his first workshop with Mystery, “The reason I was here—the reason Sweater and Extramask were also here—was that our parents and our friends had failed us. They had never given us the tools we needed to become fully effective social beings. Now, decades later, it was time to acquire them.”

Some lessons from the book:

1. It’s good to go out, ask for what you want 100 times, and get rejected, as long as you keep refining your approach.

   Again, this is what makes Strauss so effective as a student: he studies, observes, and continually experiments.

2. Charisma is something you can learn

   For the record, I absolutely believe that charisma can be learned. In fact, I even believe that you can follow a rule-based system a la How to Win Friends and Influence People to get the fundamentals down and then if you are sufficiently sensitive and dedicated you can achieve mastery.

   This description of Tom Cruise from the book haunts me (I am obsessed with Tom Cruise; he is the only celebrity I am interested in): “His approach was hypnotic: There was no doubt in his walk, no effort in his smile, no intricacy in his intentions.” Strauss points out that every pickup artist is basically just trying to copy Tom Cruise’s personality.

   Now, faking security is not the same thing as achieving security, and I think the biggest critique of pickup is basically that there is a definite expiry date on faking security.