The Game
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October 22, 2005
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Women have little to fear when a pick-up artist reveals the secrets of his success.
The Game
By Neil Strauss
Text, 368pp, $32.95
I have not the slightest idea how I landed the brainy beauty who became my wife, and even 10 years and two children later I suffer the occasional night terror imagining how I'd pick her up now.
I've just tried some of the sure-fire pick-up artist (PUA) techniques in Neil Strauss's The Game - in case I ever need them - and she just rolled her eyes. As I did all the magic tricks, the "negs" (put-downs) and the NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), I could see the insult to her intelligence. "I'm already taken," she said. "Luckily for you."
So Strauss has nothing for me. Nothing of a self-help nature, that is. I doubt he has anything helpful for anyone except those men whose emotional maturity stalled at age 15. (A massive constituency, I'll allow.)
Despite Strauss's assurances that the PUA techniques work on smart women, he provides no evidence. At one point, he "sarges" (chats up) an apparent law student at UCLA. The reader thinks, "At last!" She gives him her phone number, but it turns out she's a Playboy Playmate. This anticlimax is, for Strauss, a triumph.
But I'm barking up the wrong tree. This is not a self-help book, though many will comb it for tips. Contradicting its own hype, this book is a cautionary tale. Strauss's mentor, a self-pitying Canadian named Mystery, staggers between breakdowns. Their Rat Pack house, "Project Hollywood", sinks into its creepy overgrown adolescent filth. Strauss is a moralist. The first woman who is impervious to his "material" is the one he falls in love with. He realises how shallow he is. Ho-hum.
If the reader is too far ahead of the author, a book has a problem. On page 406, Mystery's mother says his problems are caused by his low self-esteem. Strauss reflects: "Only a mother could reduce a person's entire ambition and raison d'etre to the one basic insecurity fuelling it all." No. It's taken 406 pages for Strauss to realise what most readers will have got by page 10.
The other false advertisement is that Strauss has "penetrated" a "secret society" of geeks-turned-gurus including Mystery, his rival Ross Jeffries and renegade PUA teachers nicknamed Papa and Tyler Durden. Yet when Strauss writes about them in The New York Times, they're thrilled. Hungry for publicity, they use it to fleece more losers as if they'd offered penis implants by email. A very American kind of "secret society", this one.
Which points to what is valuable in this book. Once you disengage yourself from the unpleasantness of Strauss and company, there is an interesting study of contemporary capitalism here.
Many of us know pick-up artists. I once knew a collective. Their love of jargon and their competitiveness (ultimately it's about impressing men, not women) are identical to Strauss's community's. But the difference is my friends never turned it into a business.
The techniques might be old, but the organisation of the "community" into a commercial entity is new, or newish. Using the internet, they create a fetishistic, acronym-heavy jargon. They professionalise their "game". They organise into seminars and workshops. The evolution of this industry, and its eventual self-consumption, is the most valuable part of The Game. Strauss eventually finds himself in Sunset Strip bars where every man is dressed according to the PUA rules and every woman has heard all the lines already. Hollywood, he finds, is "sarged out". At book's end, the surviving gurus are branching into Eastern Europe. What we have is American industry, circa 2005.
Strauss has an engaging prose style and The Game is a compelling and enjoyable book, if you're compelled by sheer appalled disbelief. Although I was reading through the cracks between my fingers, I couldn't put it down.
The most intriguing character is Courtney Love, who moves into Project Hollywood. Which says something about everyone else. For all their numbers, The Game's great blind spot - Love aside - is women. Strauss discovers, in the last breath, that women do the choosing. It needn't have taken the poor bastard 400 pages and two years to work that one out. My wife could have told him. You're not the one who picks them, buddy; they're the ones who pick you.
Which points to what is valuable in this book. Once you disengage yourself from the unpleasantness of Strauss and company, there is an interesting study of contemporary capitalism here.
Many of us know pick-up artists. I once knew a collective. Their love of jargon and their competitiveness (ultimately it's about impressing men, not women) are identical to Strauss's community's. But the difference is my friends never turned it into a business.
The techniques might be old, but the organisation of the "community" into a commercial entity is new, or newish. Using the internet, they create a fetishistic, acronym-heavy jargon. They professionalise their "game". They organise into seminars and workshops. The evolution of this industry, and its eventual self-consumption, is the most valuable part of The Game. Strauss eventually finds himself in Sunset Strip bars where every man is dressed according to the PUA rules and every woman has heard all the lines already. Hollywood, he finds, is "sarged out". At book's end, the surviving gurus are branching into Eastern Europe. What we have is American industry, circa 2005.
Strauss has an engaging prose style and The Game is a compelling and enjoyable book, if you're compelled by sheer appalled disbelief. Although I was reading through the cracks between my fingers, I couldn't put it down.
The most intriguing character is Courtney Love, who moves into Project Hollywood. Which says something about everyone else. For all their numbers, The Game's great blind spot - Love aside - is women. Strauss discovers, in the last breath, that women do the choosing. It needn't have taken the poor bastard 400 pages and two years to work that one out. My wife could have told him. You're not the one who picks them, buddy; they're the ones who pick you.
