There's an interesting article I found before I read this book that really gives some insight into the pick up world as it stands now, years after The Game came out. ANTI-PUAS

When I first noticed that title, on a site like Jezebel, I just naturally assumed it was a place devoted to dissecting what's so broken and wrong about pick up artist culture. But nope, it's basically the equivalent of an anti-scam artist page. These guys are all furious and filled with misogynistic rage because the canned patter and mind games didn't get them laid.

Here's the thing, and it's something that even Strauss discovered by the end of the book: memes have a saturation point. Trying to use the standard pick up artist tactics from these books is like asking "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Most people are at least passingly familiar with the concept, and will not be impressed. Even as a person who never watched Mystery's TV show I still had at least a basic knowledge of negging and peacocking just from people making fun of it.

Because really, anytime pick up artists are mentioned outside their own context, it's to make fun of them. A PUA (which sounds like the noise you make when you spit out something that's gone bad) will try to tell you that we're all just jealous or in denial of our primal instincts or just lack what it takes. But PUAs seem to be powered by two things, acronyms and rationalizations.

Strauss' book is rotten with acronyms and PUA slang. 3% of the book is entirely devoted to a glossary of all these needless terms.

And the rationalizations about their behavior are a constant force. Most of the PUAs are constantly reading, so they can throw out some biology study to justify their promiscuity and bad behavior. The most memorable justification to me was "It's not lying, it's flirting." After a while it's hard to not just yell at my Kindle, "No. You're lying. It's all lies, deceptions, or manipulation. You know who else uses this much weaselly language to support their behavior? Con artists. You are a sexual con artist."

What separates Neil Strauss from most of the people he documents is that Strauss internalized the reasons why all the advice and tactics worked, and used it to build his self esteem and create new tactics. And because he's a thinking person who got into it because he genuinely felt he lacked something, he's the same type who would of course leave the community when he realized that the community had much more limited interests and values.

Because really, the bulk of the pick up artist industry is basically trying to turn horny, socially-retarded nerds into sexual sociopaths. They aren't using this information to teach true confidence, they're memorizing the words and patterns like it's a cheat code in a video game. Just type IDKFA to get 9.5 ho at a club to kiss you!

No wonder they get angry when they realize everyone's already heard these cheesy lines, and that sometimes even the dumbest girls have already had more than one guy in a flamboyant outfit try to screw with her head.

What really fascinated me was a comment that even Strauss himself made early on, that some girls just don't respond to the pick up artist tactics. He dismissed this by saying those are the girls they don't want anyway, but it's worth digging into. Some people, no matter how fancy your pitch, know bullshit when they hear it. The demeanor of a sales pitch, no matter how sly, is going to be visible to some people. So the PUA tactics, by nature, remove any girls who are even halfway perceptive. This, at least to me, actually makes the whole thing more predatory.

It also makes it terrible for those few PUAs in the book who say they're looking for a girlfriend. If we're all looking for a partner with quality, this is narrowing it down to some of the wrong traits.

The best put down to the whole process actually came from Tom Cruise, who Strauss interviewed because unlike a lot of the PUAs, Strauss actually had a pretty decent career, which allowed him to do celebrity interviews for places like Rolling Stone.

To quote Cruise, ”A lot of that stuff is about trying to control people and manipulate situations. Can you imagine all the effort they’re putting into that? If they took that effort and put it toward something constructive, who knows what they could accomplish.“

Like a bullet through the heart of all other arguments. Tom Cruise may be one of the most ridiculous figures in acting, but the guy is more or less made of confidence.

Even when I was young at utterly clueless about women, this sort of behavior never really appealed to me. Sure, I wanted a girlfriend, but the methods PUAs use involved spending massive amounts of time, money, and effort. While it seems to provide some measure of sexual success, it doesn't seem to make most of them any smarter, any more successful, any wealthier, or any healthier in anything except perhaps pelvis strength.

One of the PUA techniques they kept referring to was to "show value", where you do a magic trick or otherwise entertain the target. You know what attracts normal women? Actual value. Seriously, pick up a new hobby, go back to school, start working out, join a book club, anything that would give you more value in mind or body. There are probably women who will respond to that.

I'd like to give this a higher score, since it's well paced and Strauss has a knack for being thorough without it being unwieldy, but I feel like his journalism is miles ahead of his writing.

Hunter S. Thompson always had a knack for writing from inside hellish scenarios with a good perspective. The trouble with Strauss is that the perspective only comes in sporadically, a line pointing out the foolishness of the PUAs before diving back into denial. Only at the end does he deliver a moral about the hollowness of the lifestyle, and it's hard to really swallow after reading the Wikipedia article about him breaking up with the girl he's with at the end and starting a dating business.

There are also times when it seems like Strauss still speaks from a place of insecurity. Name dropping the books he's reading to show off his intellect just raises an eyebrow, but the narrative seems to give the impression that he's somehow above the behavior other PUAs engaged in, even when he's just described himself participating in that exact same behavior. It feels like we're getting a picture of Strauss himself that's distorted by his own ego. His own journalistic clarity doesn't extend to himself nearly as consistently.

But the most offensive blind spot is how little he seems to comment on the misogynistic nature of the whole affair. When you basically treat women as disposible targets, it's weird not to comment on how objectifying that is. Considering how much he talks about the community turning men into robots, the absence of much discussion of how it teaches them to view women feels like a lost opportunity.

It's still an entertaining read, and definitely worth recommending to anyone with a young daughter. The guide ends up being a very effective guide on how to spot a pick up artist in the wild.

I enjoyed the plot but spent much of my time reading this book with my eyebrow raised. I honestly do not understand how the men in this book succeeded in getting laid quite so much. The PUA's tactics were just so cringeworthy and sad.

I have subsequently enjoyed putting names to faces through Google. Tyler Durden couldn't look further away from Brad Pitt if he tried, Mystery holds little mystery, and Style has no style (hello, noughties). The real turning point in the book was naturally, when Courtney Love showed up.

I don't get the hate for this book; people seem to think it's a how-to on manipulating and objectifying women, while it is a narrative and something of a cautionary tale. In fact it reads almost too much like a novel and maybe even a screenplay for a docudrama complete with a happy ending and a moral. In spite of all this and the fact that at times it is too graphic and crude for my taste -- it sometimes reads like a badly written erotic novel -- I give it three stars because the story it relates is interesting and certainly worth a read.

I read this for research purposes. Was gross. Did not enjoy.

There are some very valid reasons to skim through this controversial, pornographic, poorly written, and often obnoxious anthropological tour of the "seduction community," a network of men who use social psychology and hypnosis to pick up women. First, women should know that this exists and defend themselves accordingly -- if you don't want to wade through a whole book on the subject, here's a synopsis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seductio...

It's fascinating and queasy at the same time.

The second reason is that although this book got slammed by feminists, Strauss is actually a whole lot smarter and more thoughtful than he first appears on the surface. The book is a pseudo-memoir in the gonzo journalism style, mixing participant observation with tall tales about life in the meat market. Strauss is not a missionary for the movement, but instead charts his own relationship with the seduction community from skepticism to enthusiasm to ambivalence to rejection. I don't know how anyone could miss this, since the opening chapter is about a famous pickup artist's psychotic break and existential despair, and the book continuously circles around the underlying anxiety and loneliness that drives the pickup mentality. Compared to "Fear and Loathing," which does hilariously glorify drugs, sex, and mayhem, Strauss's gonzo style is more critical and distanced. Here is how he ends the book: "And though I've learned everything there is is about attraction, seduction, and courtship in the past two years, I learned nothing about maintaining a healthy relationship. Being together has required a lot more time and work than learning to pick up women ever did, but it has brought me far greater satisfaction and joy. Perhaps that's because it is not a game."

The third reason is that if you factor out all the misogyny and silliness (a tall order, I know), then there is actually a surprising amount of good advice in here -- advice I myself would give, albeit within a different philosophical and ethical framework, to any guy who was currently lonely, bored, desperate for human contact, and terrified of talking to women -- and sadly there's a whole lot of people like that in our society, people paralyzed with anxiety and anomie wasting their lives in social and emotional vacuums. Sometimes it takes some baby steps to break out of a disabling mental box, and Strauss charts how sex can sometimes function as a psychic icebreaker to get somebody who is stuck moving forward towards real life. The sex drive is powerful enough to motivate someone who has dug themselves into a deep and alienating silo to climb out of it, and that motivation, under the right circumstances, can help break them out of dysfunctional patterns that are not working. For example, my favorite part of the book comes early on: Strauss has just signed up for a "workshop" with a pickup artist, who is bringing him and some other shy and geeky guys to night clubs and teaching them how to pick up women. Another guy in the same workshop is 26 and never even kissed a girl before. He is so shy that he cannot use a urinal, because peeing in front of other guys terrifies him. A few weeks later, he excitedly shares, "I can pee beside people now! It's all about confidence. So the stuff I learned in the workshop isn't just for chicks after all...it's for pissing too!"

So to summarize the good advice that is threaded through the book: if you are miserable, try changing. Just because you've always done something a certain way doesn't mean you are eternally doomed to repeat it, people can change and grow and learn. The self is flexible. Social skills, like any skills, can be learned, studied, and honed. It's better to take a risk and throw yourself out there than to waste your life accruing bitter regrets. The only way to learn new skills is to be willing to experiment and fail and sometimes look foolish, but if you stick with it and pay attention and get good advice and mentoring, you will get better at it eventually and be glad that you had the patience and balls to move out of your crippling little box. Our society is filled with women and men who are lonely and bored and stuck and who want desperately to connect and live and have fun but don't know how to get there. The sad thing about the book is that it documents the tragic lack of vision in people who settle for the shallow, canned interactions of casual sex rather than taking a real risk with full, authentic relationships.

Nisam pronašao ono čemu sam se nadao u ovoj knjizi, nažalost.
Plitka je i ne mogu shvatiti ozbiljno nekoga tko savjetuje da se u klubu ili nekom trećem mjestu koriste hipnoze ili mađioničarski trikovi( i to loši npr broj od 1 do 10)


Ne činiti isto što i drugi.

Čovjek u rano odraslo doba ima dva primarna motiva koja ga pokreću:jedan ga pokreće prema moći, uspjehu i postignuću, a drugi prema ljubavi, društvu i seksu.

I couldn't put this book down. When the craziest adventures are done by someone who also happens to be a writer by trade, GOD we are so absolutely spoiled.

Under the shame of his nonexistent dating life, the book follows Neil as he swallows his pride and takes a dating seminar from a "pick-up guru". As he gets sucked further into the world of pickup artistry, he eventually comes to find himself crowned as the number one guy by the community.

To get it out of the way, this book will not help you get girls. It'll straight up actively hurt your chances. It has a lot of flack for its association with the antiquated canned-lines, routines, and manipulative tactics of the pickup artist scene. There are a lot of ethically hairy things here, and it will be an uncomfortable read for women, as there is no shortage of objectification and ego validation.

With all of that said, none of that matters. Its clearly a memoir/underground journalism as opposed to a guide, and I read it as such. It chronicles Neil's early successes before the whole community devolves into losers devoid of any personality or authenticity, repeating the same obnoxious lines whilst crossing their fingers. Neil frustration and cynicism grows in the last third, as he see's guys shaving their heads (Neil is bald), getting goatees, and claiming to be writers in hopes of raising their odds.

What fascinated me the most is how, for all of the meticulous theory-crafting that the lab of pickup artistry churned out, what ultimately got Neil his dream girl was ditching all of the tactics and ✨ just being himself ✨. Cliche`s are lame, what made it REALLY interesting was how conflicted he was, because it took two years of hookups and a few dozen threesomes of fake-it-till-you-make-it for him to have the confidence to finally unapologetically put his true self forward. The journey is what granted him the courage to be authentic.

Lastly, the book is a fantastic prequel to The Truth (his other book about polyamory and trauma, which I recommend far more). If you ever wondered how he got three women to spontaneously agree to move into with him and start a three-spoked relationship, wonder no more.

Would I recommend the book? Honestly I don't know. Its got some crazy stories and crazier characters, and Neil's writing is reaaally good. For me, I related to Neil's feelings of inadequacy followed by renewed questions as he becomes grounded in himself, and it was fun exploring those themes in the larger than life tale (like 10,000x larger) of a man discovering himself in the complicated world of romance. If any of that sounds interesting, give it a shot (but really, go read The Truth first).

Check out my video review on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLcqx...

Book Review on The Game - Neil Strauss

Probably the most read book on pick-up and seduction. It also sparked various worldwide communities on dating and picking up women.

In the book the author shares his story how he went from someone who never got laid during college to getting voted the nr. 1 Pick Up Artist worldwide.

Message: Seduction is not something "magical" that only a select few "naturals" get to enjoy. It is an art and skill that EVERYONE can learn and master, whenever they commit to do so.

Key ideas:
11 Steps to Pick Up:
1. Select a Target
2. Approach and Open
3. Demonstrate Value
4. Disarm the Obstacles
5. Isolate the Target
6. Create an Emotional Connection
7. Extract to a Seduction Location
8. Pump Buying Temperature
9. Make a Physical Connection
10. Blast Last-Minute Resistance
11. Manage Expectations.

Become an alpha male:
1. Smile
2. Well-groomed
3. Humor
4. Connect with people
5. Be the Social Center of the Room
6. Confidence

Key take-aways:
- As men we owe it to the pleasure of women all over the world to become better men and pick up artists. Everyone benefits (but women will never admit it).
- Women want sex as much as -if not more than- men, they just don't want to feel like a slut. They want to be turned on and picked up.

Advice:
- Keep working on becoming a better, cooler person by gaining new skills such as following dance classes, learning cold reading (handpalm, handwriting, ...), going to speech classes, working on your body language and posture,... and getting a life.
- Have personal life goals.
- Find new ways to stand out how you dress up, like with accessories.
- Get as much practice at possible

My actions:
1. I will continue with the weekly salsa dance classes and not let anything get in my way of attending them.
2. I will search for, attend and engage in activities every evening and weekend that allow me to:
+ learn new interesting skills,
+ improve my physique,
+ meet new people or connect with inspiring friends.
3. I will get as much practice as possible, joining as much local pick-up events that I can fit in my agenda.
4. I will add some accessories that make me stand out more.
5. I will focus more on smiling and having fun, especially upon meeting new people, entering a room,...
6. I will let the 3 second rule push me to engage in interactions before my overanalysing mind gets in the way.

I very highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to become better with relationships, seduction and women. The story is inspiring and the lessons are useful. I'm gonna be reading it again later this week, but slower so i can read more of the story this time

I first heard of this book back in 2011 when a newly single male acquaintance of mine told me about it after some random guys in a club approached our group of friends. He was a guy who had very little success with women and so believed that he needed to use the techniques to convince girls to sleep with him. I find it concerning when I hear that people of both genders are only interested in sex with people they barely know as it masks deeper problems with themselves that they’re neglecting to address. Intimacy ends up evading them as is shown in the book. These guys end up sleeping with lots of women and living in a house together where they have a pathetic drama fuelled existence. Tricks and manipulation may indeed get you a person for a night but as soon as that person realises what and who you are they won’t remain with you. You also end up with people you wouldn’t dream of having a relationship with due to their questionable morals. Therefore in order to find a true connection with someone you must always operate with integrity and show your true self. Pretending to be something you are not never ends well. That said some people do lack confidence in even having a simple conversation with someone they are attracted to as there is always that irrational fear of rejection and so these techniques do help with that. The most attractive people are those who are comfortable in themselves so they are confident enough to have a normal conversation and don’t complement you on what you look like but seek other aspects of you that are interesting to them. However, they also understand that every person is different and what would work to attract one person won’t necessarily work with another; and so persist when they are not validated. If a guy ‘negged’ me I would think he was rude and an arsehole. In fact this happened in a club recently when a guy tried to aggressively tell me he had been clear about something and I responded with a matched tone that if he had been clear I wouldn’t be asking him for clarification and he looked ashen that I had stood up for myself in response to his clear condescension. I then continued with the conversation in a friendly tone to show I was not the arsehole here and he should not try that again unless he wanted the same response. I pitied him if he thought this was a way to undermine my self-esteem so I would seek validation from him. Also if anyone ignored me by freezing me out of a conversation by talking to another person when it’s clearly a group conversation I would equally think they were strange with limited social skills and avoid them. Sometimes being nice to someone and being genuinely interested in them works wonders. There’s lot of literature out there to help with confidence and relationships but if you want to be an arsehole, manipulate people and be dead inside then read this one.

Neil Strauss descubre la comunidad Pick-up, un club que enseña a seducir mujeres. Atraído por esta idea, asiste a un taller práctico que lo llevará a convertirse en un maestro de la seducción, con todo lo bueno y lo malo que ello implica. El libro es entretenido, pero no demasiado instructivo si lo que se busca es aprender sobre seducción; para eso, el autor publicó un libro de autoayuda más específico. Incluso se realizó un reality show sobre el tema.

El libro afirma que todo lo que cuenta son hechos reales, y en gran medida resulta creíble, ya que Strauss no omite los costos psicológicos que muchos enfrentaron al intentar adoptar este estilo de vida tan promiscuo. El famoso Mystery, por ejemplo, sufría de severos cuadros de depresión, al igual que otros que intentaron seguir sus enseñanzas sin éxito.

No es una gran novela, pero cuenta algo interesante y, en gran parte, realista. Puede ayudar a algunos hombres tímidos a replantear su relación con las mujeres al exponer los entresijos de la naturaleza humana en lo referente a la atracción. Es una obra entretenida, aunque también deprimente en ciertos momentos al tratar el tema del amor de forma cruda y racional.

No es un imprescindible, pero vale la pena dedicarle un rato.

A great story about a world we did not even know it existed. And, again, another story that you can only find inside you what you're missing.

People are likely to have strong feelings about this book, from disgust to bemusement to desperate interest on the part of the AFCs ("Average Frustrated Chumps") that Strauss talks so much about, after confessing to being one. However, it should be understood that this particular book is a memoir and an expose by a Rolling Stone journalist, not an actual pickup guide. While Strauss talks a lot about the "seduction techniques" he and his fellow PUAs (Pick-Up Artists) developed, this isn't a self-help guide for teaching them. (If that is what you're looking for, Strauss still runs a company call "Stylelife Academy" which sells workshops and DVDs and coaching, etc.)

I listened to this book (narrated by the author himself) because of course I have heard of these "Pickup Artists" and while I have no interest in playing "the Game" or becoming the sort of person they describe, it's an interesting, fascinating, somewhat pathetic subculture, but it's also instructive. For example, feminists tend to react most strongly to PUAs and their philosophy, which tends to treat women as puzzles you have to unlock. Get the right combination of words and gestures and you score the poontang. It's obviously dehumanizing in its implications, and Strauss keeps going back and forth, admitting on the one hand that PUA lifestyle is dehumanizing and tends to lead to misogyny, but on the other hand, defending the poor involuntary celibates who are just looking for love and can't figure out why what they are doing isn't working.

The more interesting thing (and possibly infuriating, fascinating, or disturbing, depending on your POV) is that it's evident that these routines work. It's not mind control or a secret passcode that will get women to have sex with you, but Strauss and his PUAs really have figured out a series of approaches that can be executed in an almost algorithmic fashion, and which elicit desired responses (i.e., interest, arousal, disinhibition, etc.) The key to it is that they are playing a numbers game, which means getting over the natural aversion most people have to making countless approaches and being rebuffed the vast majority of times, and perhaps more importantly, they are looking for certain types of women and certain types of relationships. After spending a couple of years in this lifestyle, Strauss becomes weary of it because he and his posse are living like unwashed bachelors in a Hollywood mansion, with hot and cold running women, internecine catfights (male and female) over everything from relationships to money to household chores, and in the meantime, while PUAs do get laid a lot, very few of them wind up in fulfilling long-term relationships. Their original objective (getting a woman to bestow interest and affection and sex) has become an end in itself, and as Strauss describes it, the very process becomes addictive.

That said, listen to how he describes these techniques, and you can see that while most women will say "Oh, that would never work on me," in fact it does. I think what a lot of PUAs miss is that perfecting calculated psychological manipulation as an art and a science isn't gender specific - you could easily develop similar techniques to work on men, or for application outside the domain of romance.

Anyway, Strauss starts out his career as a PUA by attaching himself to a MPUA (Master Pick-Up Artist) named Mystery.

Mystery (who teaches the Mystery Method) looks like this:



PUAs call this "Peacocking." Yes, they deliberately dress flamboyantly and outrageously, in a way no real person would dress when not cruising for chicks on the Sunset Strip. (Keep in mind that these guys, in the book, are mostly operating in Hollywood. You can do this in LA or Vegas or NYC - I suspect they wouldn't advise you to "peacock" in quite the same way if you are trying some Game at your church social in Boise.)

Mystery, it turns out, is a mess, and that's true of pretty much all the PUAs. None of them start out as "alpha males," which is why they do so much posturing to convince everyone they are one. Most of them are really sad, damaged little boys. This shows itself over and over again as no matter how much Mystery and Strauss score, inside they are still the same old insecure, needy guys seeking female approval that they always were.

Strauss's account of life in the PUA community makes it easy to see how they'd attract a certain sort of person, and yet it doesn't seem to lead anywhere but emptiness. But there is more to them than desperate guys trying to get laid. Strauss manages to use his "Game" even on celebrities. In the presence of Tom Cruise, he sees a true alpha male; Cruise may be a Scientologist wacko, but he's also a genuinely charismatic and forceful personality. Strauss ends up sharing a house with Courtney Love for weeks, dates one of her band members, and during an interview with a very bored and uncooperative Britney Spears, uses his PUA techniques to turn it around and have Britney eating out of the palm of his hand.

It's also funny when he talks about the splintering and franchising of PUA "Projects," particularly towards the end, as Strauss goes cruising Hollywood bars and finds all the women reacting with bored amusement to his lines, which have now been disseminated so thoroughly that everyone has heard them.

This book isn't going to help you with your love life, but it's a fascinating look at psychology and a subculture that seems most fit for reality TV shows.