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 Lady Killers
By his own admission, Neil Strauss is not your standard-issue pickup artist. An L.A.based journalist - and the co-author of several raunchy celebrity tombs, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt and Jeanna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star Strauss describes himself in grocery-list form: I’m short and I’m bald. I have a big nose, a receding chin and weird indents on the side of my head. But put him in a bar filled with beautiful women, he says, and he transforms into a sort of superhero. A dark horse Casanova. A walking, talking hunk of human catnip.
Strauss wasn’t born with these superpowers. In fact, only two years ago single, miserable and in his early 30’s he had zero confidence with women. I was so unhappy with myself, he says. I used to fear women because they had this power over you to make you feel inadequate. Then one day, he received the phone call that would alter his dating trajectory forever. An editor he knew asked him to take a look at an online guide to seducing women as fodder for a potential book. The next thing he knew, he’d stumbled into the heart of a cover online community of international pickup artists self-styled masters of seduction with names like Mystery and Twotimer who devote all their waking hours to perfecting and teaching the science of scoring.
Strauss embarked on a two-year crash course in advanced womanizing under the tutelage of this ragtag band of gurus, ultimately achieving MPUA (master pickup artist) status in his own right. He chronicles this journey which consumed his life and landed him in field-training workshops in Toronto, Montreal, New York, Belgrade and beyond in explicit and often revolting detail in his controversial new book, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, in stores Sept. 6.
In hindsight, what really blew Strauss away about this community was how organized and sophisticated it is in its methods. These guys are like social scientists, he says. They read a lot of books about the evolution because they want to tap into the primal brain. They field-test their techniques hundreds and thousands of times. They’ve really figured out what you won’t find in a psychology research papers or books.
Early on, still feeling a little embarrassed about the whole thing, Strauss took part in an L.A. workshop offered by one of the group’s luminaries, a six-foot-five Toronto-born illusionist named Mystery, whose Mystery Method involves manipulating social dynamics in order to snag the most beautiful woman in any room. It was like seeing The Matrix, he said of that first experience. Everything was so counterintuitive. I learned that the more unavailable you make yourself, the more people would want you. The more you say, stop touching me or I’m taken, or your just not my type, the more they’d actually chase you.
From Mystery, Strauss learned about ‘Peacocking’ (dressing in flashy clothing and accessories to nap women’s attention). He learned how to disarm AMOG (alpha male of the group), and how to deliver an effective ‘neg’. (This is a backhanded insult used on a beautiful woman to demonstrate your lack of interest and to provoke hers. For example: Wow, you’re, like, the fifth person I’ve seen tonight wearing that exact skirt.) As you’re hearing it, you’re thinking, ‘these things would never work on me,’ says Strauss. But the scary thing is having approached thousands and thousands of people it will work on just about everyone.
It wasn’t long before Style was inventing and refining his own signature techniques. He began attracting disciples, neophytes within the community to whom he would offer counsel, and encouragement. By this time, he had picked-up, or sarged, hundreds of unsuspecting women (I changed their names in the books so they could read it and say, ‘Well maybe that wasn’t me,’ he says). One night he used his skills to out-seduce Heidi Fleiss, the infamous Hollywood madam, who was trying to lure women into working for her at a bar in L.A. And for his piece de resistance, while conducting a magazine interview, he managed to disarm and charm a cranky Britney Spears with rudimentary chick crack (subjects of a spiritual or physiological nature—such as astrology and personality tests—that, he says, appeal to most women.) By the end of their meeting, Spears had asked him for his phone number.
In 2003, emboldened by his success, Strauss was ready to take things to the next level. Along with Mystery and several PUA’s Strauss would open Project Hollywood, a lavish L.A. mansion in which the seduction masters would live and offer workshops to pilgrims from all over the world. Here, they would raise the art of picking up from a pastime to a full-fledged lifestyle. (Soon, there was Project Austin, Project Perth, Project Sydney.) Later, they would watch powerlessly as their sociological experiment collapsed in an implosion of clashing egos and wounded pride. I really felt like it turned into Lord of the Flies or something at the end, says Strauss, who has since moved in with his girlfriend, Lisa, the one woman who seemed invulnerable to his shtick.
The Game, which has already been optioned by Columbia TriStar Films, is in many ways a triumph of misogyny, though Strauss prefers to paint it as an honest, heartfelt examination of male sexual frustration. On the surface, it was about picking up women in a crass way, he says. But beneath it, in order to do that, you have to learn to love yourself if you expect other people to love you. Yes, self-love. And if you believe that, this guy also wants you to know another think: it’s not you, it’s him.
Excerpt from The Game
We piled into the limo and drove to the Standard Lounge, a velvet-rope-guarded hotel hotspot. It was here that Mystery shattered my whole model of reality. Limits I had once imposed on human interaction were extended far beyond what I ever thought possible. The man was a machine.
The Standard was dead when we walked in. We were too early. There were just two groups of people in the room: a couple near the entrance and two couples in the corner. I was ready to leave. But then I saw Mystery approach the people in the corner. They were sitting on opposite couches across a glass table. The men were on one side. One of them was Scott Baio, the actor best known for playing Chachi on Happy Days. Across from him were two women, a brunette and a bleached blonde who looked like she'd stepped out of the pages of Maxim. Her cut-off white t-shirt was suspended so high into the air by fake breasts that the bottom of it just hovered, flapping in the air, above a belly tightened by fastidious exercise. This woman was Baio's date. She was also, I gathered, Mystery's target.
His intentions were clear because he wasn't talking to her. Instead, he had his back turned to her, and was showing something to Scott Baio and his friend, a well-dressed, well-tanned thirty-something who looked as if he smelled strongly of aftershave. I moved in closer.
“Be careful with that,” Baio was saying. “It cost forty thousand dollars.”
Mystery had Baio's watch in his hands. He placed it carefully on the table. “Now watch this,” he commanded. “I tense my stomach muscles, increasing the flow of oxygen to my brain, and . . . “
As Mystery waved his hands over the watch, the second hand stopped ticking. He waited fifteen seconds, then waved his hands again, and slowly the watch sputtered back to life-along with Baio's heart. Mystery's audience of four burst into applause.
“Do something else!” the blonde pleaded.
Mystery brushed her off with a neg. “Wow, she's so demanding,” he said, turning to Baio. “Is she always like this?”
We were witnessing group theory in action. The more Mystery performed for the guys, the more the blonde clamored for attention. And every time, he pushed her away and continued talking with his two new friends.
“I don't usually go out,” Baio was telling Mystery. “I'm over it, and I'm too old.”
After nearly ten minutes, Mystery finally acknowledged the blonde. . He held his arms out. She placed her hands in his, and he began giving her a psychic reading. He was employing a technique I'd heard about called cold reading: the art of telling people truisms about themselves without any prior knowledge of their personality or background. In the field, all knowledge- however esoteric-is power.
With each accurate sentence Mystery spoke, the blonde's jaw dropped further open, until she started asking him about his job and his psychic abilities. Every response Mystery gave was intended to accentuate his youth and enthusiasm for the good life Baio said he had outgrown.
“I feel so old,” Mystery said, baiting her.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-seven.”
“That's not old. That's perfect.”
He was in.
Mystery called me over and whispered in my ear. He wanted me to talk to Baio and his friend, to keep them occupied while he hit on the girl. This was my first experience as a wing-a term Mystery had taken from Top Gun, along with words like target and obstacle.
I struggled to make small talk with them. But Baio, looking nervously at Mystery and his date, cut me off. “Tell me this is all an illusion,” he said, “and he's not actually stealing my girlfriend.”
Ten long minutes later, Mystery stood up, put his arm around me, and we left the club. Outside, he pulled a cocktail napkin from his jacket pocket. It contained her phone number. “Did you get a good look at her?” Mystery asked. “That is what I'm in the game for. Everything I've learned in the last decade I used tonight. It's all led up to this moment. And it worked.” He beamed with self-satisfaction. “How's that for a demonstration?”
That was all it took. Stealing a girl right out from under a celebrity's nose-has-been or not-was a feat no other man I'd ever met could have accomplished. Mystery was the real deal.
--
As we took the limo to the Key Club, Mystery told us the first commandment of pickup: the three-second rule. A man has three seconds after spotting a woman to speak to her, he said. If he takes any longer, then not only is the girl likely to think he’s a creep who’s been staring at her for too long, but he will start over thinking the approach, get nervous, and probably blow it.
The moment we walked into the Key Club, Mystery put the three-second rule into action. Striding up to a group of women, he held out his hands and asked, What is your first impression of these? Not the big hands, the black nails.
As the girls gathered around him, Sin pulled me aside and suggested wandering the club and attempting my first approach. A group of women walked by and I tried to say something. But the word hi just barely squeaked out of my throat, not even loud enough for them to hear. As they continued past, I followed and grabbed one of the girls on the shoulder from behind. She turned around, startled, and gave me the withering what-a-creep look that was the whole reason I was too scared to talk to women in the first place.
Never, Sin admonished me in his adenoidal voice, approach a woman from behind. Always come in from the front, but at a slight angle so it’s not too direct and confrontational. You should speak to her over your shoulder, so it looks like you might walk away at any minute. Ever see Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer? It’s kind of like that.
A few minutes later, I spotted a young, tipsy-looking woman with long, tangled blond curls and a puffy pink vest standing alone. I decided that approaching her would be an easy way to redeem myself. I circled around until I was in the 10 o’clock position in front of her and walked in, imagining myself approaching a horse I didn’t want to frighten.
Oh my God, I said to her. Did you see those two girls fighting outside?
No, she said. What happened?
She was interested. She was talking to me. It was working.
Um, two girls were fighting over this little guy who was half their size. It was pretty brutal. He was just standing there laughing as the police came and arrested the girls.
She giggled. We started talking about the club and the band playing there. She was very friendly and actually seemed grateful for the conversation. I had no idea that approaching a woman could be this easy.
Sin sidled up to me and whispered in my ear, Go kino.
What’s kino? I asked.
Kino? the girl replied.
Sin reached behind me, picked up my arm, and placed it on her shoulder. Kino is when you touch a girl, he whispered. I felt the heat of her body and was reminded of how much I love human contact. Pets like to be petted. It isn’t sexual when a dog or a cat begs for physical affection. People are the same way: we need touch. But we’re so sexually screwed up and obsessed that we get nervous and uncomfortable whenever another person touches us. And, unfortunately, I am no exception. As I spoke to her, my hand felt wrong on her shoulder. It was just resting there like some disembodied limb, and I imagined her wondering what exactly it was doing there and how she could gracefully extricate herself from under it. So I did her the favor of removing it myself.
Isolate her, Sin said.
I suggested sitting down, and we walked to a bench. Sin followed and sat behind us. As I’d been taught, I asked her to tell me the qualities she finds attractive in guys. She said humor and ass.
Fortunately, I have one of those qualities.
Suddenly, I felt Sin’s breath on my ear. Sniff her hair, he was instructing.
I smelled her hair, although I wasn’t exactly sure what the point was. I figured Sin wanted me to neg her. So I said, It smells like smoke.
Noooooo! Sin hissed in my ear. I guess I wasn’t supposed to neg.
She seemed offended. So, to recover, I took another whiff. But underneath that, there’s a very intoxicating smell.
She coked her head to one side, furrowed her brow ever so slightly, scanned me up and down, and said, You’re weird. I was blowing it.
Fortunately, Mystery soon arrived.
This place is dead, he said. We’re going somewhere more target-rich. To Mystery and Sin, these clubs didn’t seem to be reality. They had no problem whispering in students’ ears while there were talking to women, dropping pickup terminology in front of strangers, and even interrupting a student during a set and explaining, in front of his group, what he was doing wrong. They were so confident and their talk was so full of incomprehensible jargon that the women rarely even raised an eyebrow, let alone suspected they were being used to train wannabe ladies’ men.
I big my new friend good-bye as Sin had taught me, pointing to my cheek and saying, Kiss good-bye. She actually pecked me. I felt very alpha.
I was in high spirits in the limo by the next bar. Do you think I could have kissed her? I asked Mystery.
If you think you could have, then you could have, he said. As soon as you ask yourself whether you should or shouldn’t, that means you should. And what you do is, you phase-shift. Imagine a giant gear thudding down in your head, and then go for it. Start hitting on her. Tell her you just noticed she has beautiful skin, and start massaging her shoulders.
But how do you kiss her? Sweater asked.
I just say, ‘Would you like to kiss me?’
And then what happens?
One of three things, Mystery said. If she says, ‘Yes,’ which is very rare, you kiss her. If she says, ‘Maybe,’ or hesitates, then you say, ‘Lets find out,’ and kiss her. And if she says, ‘No,’ you say, ‘I didn’t say you could. It just looked like you had something on your mind’
You see, he grinned triumphantly. You have nothing to lose. Every contingency is planned for. It’s foolproof. That is they Mystery kiss-close.
I furiously scribbled every word of the kiss-close in my notebook. No one had ever told me how to kiss a girl before. It was just one of those things men were supposed to know on their own, like shaving and car repair.
Sitting in the limo with a notebook on my lap, listening to Mystery talk, I asked myself why I was really there. Taking a course in picking up women wasn’t the kind of thing normal people did. Even more disturbing, I wondered why it was so important to me, why I’d be come so quickly obsessed with the online community and its leading pseudonyms.
Perhaps it was because attracting the opposite sex was the only area in my life in which I felt like a complete failure. Every time I walked down the street or into a bar, I saw my own failure staring me back in the face with red lipstick and black mascara. The combination of desire and paralysis was deadly. Perhaps singing up for Mystery’s workshop had been an intelligent decision. After all, I was doing something proactive about my lameness. Even the wise man dwells in the fool’s paradise.
Excerpted from Maclean's Magazine |
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