THE FOLLOWING IS A TRUE STORY: at approximately 3:00 a.m., knee-deep in an internet rabbit hole, I detoured to the world of pickup artistry. What I knew about pickup artists then was limited to Tom Cruise’s portrayal of Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia. In my fact-finding stupor, I kept seeing one thing, a book called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss. I had never heard of it. The Game is almost as old as me (published in 2005), has sold over three million copies, and has graced the New York Times bestseller list several times. The book is covered in black leather and bookmarked with red satin like a bible. I, ever the go-getter, found a PDF and read it. 40 pages in, I realised it was nearly 500. I’m not a quitter, but I knew that this challenge could destroy me.
The book depicts Strauss’s journey into the world of pickup artistry, the art of seduction, and his ensuing sexual success. Strauss details strategies, his meteoric rise in the community, and the many many women he encountered. He meets celebrities like Tom Cruise, Paris Hilton, Courtney Love, and Dennis Rodman, and eventually creates “Project Hollywood.” He lives in a high-end mansion with fellow pickup artists (PUAs) by the dubious names of Mystery, Playboy, Papa, Tyler Durden, and Herbal, alongside a revolving door of PUA hopefuls. They make a small fortune selling their expertise to disillusioned young men, and are prominent in online communities and message boards.
The lifestyle is not a thing of the past. I had the opportunity to speak to an ex-PUA (active in the community from 2018-2023), who asked to be referred to as “Erik”. Erik called The Game “a good collection of techniques for somebody who struggles with women.” He adds “But it could easily be taken to the extreme, which probably happens more often than not.”
The following sections correlate to chapters in The Game, which are conveniently the roadmap for a pickup. I am not advising any reader to follow these steps, and am in fact begging you not to.
Select a target
Linguist Amanda Montell coined the term “The language of fanaticism”. She argues that cults use specialised language that fosters a sense of an “in-group” and shared secrets in order to maintain power and membership. PUAs do the same. The glossary of The Game is extensive and disturbing. Strauss called it a new “permanent lexicon”. The lingo makes a special point to denote “tiers” of PUAs. It includes AFCs (average frustrated chumps, before they turn into pick-up artists), RAFCs (reformed AFCs, on their PUA journey), MPUAs (master pickup artists, the top 1% of the PUA community), WBAFCs (well-below AFCs, who have to work harder than average), and AMOGs (alpha males of the group, an obstacle for PUAs). Strauss said the “lay guide” (PUA doctrine) changed his life “more than the Bible, Crime and Punishment, or any other book combined”. The architecture of the lay guide would suggest that it’s closer to cult than religion.
Approach and Open
When Strauss first joined the PUA community, he was told “it’s not lying, it’s flirting.” PUAs use what they call “technology”, tried and true tactics to get women. The most simple (and widely-known) PUA tactic is “negging.” Negging is when you insult a woman, but disguise it as a compliment. For example “Nice hair, are your roots your natural colour?” Negging works because it lowers the self-esteem of “the target”, giving the PUA power, while simultaneously relinquishing the PUA of responsibility for cruelty.
Illustration from Mystery via The Game by Neil Struass
Negging is just the start. PUAs have multiple tactics and tests to open conversations. PUAs perform pseudo-psychological tests on women because “women love feedback”. A staple is “the best friends test” where a PUA approaches two women, inquires as to whether they’re best friends, and then asks if they want to be tested. The PUA will ask something like “What is your friend’s astrological sign?” As all pairs of people do, they will look at each other when attempting to answer. The PUA will then reveal that it wasn’t whether they got the answer correct, but that they looked at each other.
Aspiring PUAs have a plethora of such tactics. Strauss’s mentor, Mystery, likes magic tricks and sham psychic readings. When Strauss begins his journey, he’s sent out with a bag containing materials to make beer bottles float and cigarettes disappear. He also brings wooden runes (for rune readings), a blacklight (to wave over women to expose stains, for negging), dryer lint (to plant on women and then remove, to lower their self-esteem), a notebook and pen (for handwriting analysis and a tactic cheat-sheet), and about fifteen other props.
Another school of PUA thought is neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). This borrows from hypnosis, and was pioneered by Ross Jeffries – the “godfather” of the modern PUA community.
PUAs across the board, however, believe that interactions with women should be over 95% tactics.
Demonstrate Value
Aspiring PUAs are told to change everything about their identities. “Nobody wants to sleep with a writer.” Strauss was told that in order to become a PUA he had to acknowledge defeat, inferiority and inadequacy with women. Abandon completely. “All your emotions are going to try to fuck you up.” PUAs say women are attracted to “high value men.” The book advises that if you don’t have high value, fake it.
Erik agreed. He told me pickup artistry is all on dating apps now. “A lot of these techniques have become mainstream, so women are more aware and less willing to deal with the bullshit approaches.” Demonstrating higher value is all online. “The best angles, the best pictures, you’re creating a version of yourself that only exists in theory.” Erik’s technology borrowed from the community (upon actually meeting up with women from apps), but included opening messages with “high conversion rates.” “You showcase the best 1% of yourself, then it’s a numbers game.” He called dating app meetups “pickup-relevent” and mostly scripted in advance.
“The beauty of the date is you’ve already isolated by definition, and its already clear it’s a romantic interaction.” I asked him “IOI?” (indication of interest, PUA term) and he laughed hard. “You know!”
Disarm the Obstacles
About 200 pages into the book, I had to set it aside for a few days. I started thinking every comment was a neg, I was being maliciously hypnotized with slights of hand, and all the men in my life were sex-obsessed schemers. So begs the question, what kind of person is a PUA?
There are three loose rules:
- Men who are unsuccessful with women. Erik told me “you cannot imagine the lionisation of success with women among men.” The Game and Erik both say that men who are not conventionally attractive, successful, or charming, can easily get caught up.
- Men who are highly analytical and logical. Erik explained being a PUA means rigidly abiding to a code, measuring outcomes with numbers, and employing the scientific method. Strauss says “I began as a small boy obsessed with taking things apart.” It’s the kind of cliche you might hear in a documentary about an astronaut or a chess player.
- Men who have been victimised. Strauss casually quotes MPUA Ross Jeffries saying “I think 20% of my students have been abused.” He does not go into further detail.
Isolate the Target
The mood of The Game rapidly oscillates and swerves between scary, interesting, sad, and weird. In that mess, you start to get the picture: being a PUA is more about men than women. By the time Strauss has a foothold in the community, you start seeing one-off thoughts like “it didn’t even matter when I got laid or not, because this was the game artfully played.” In his own words, he“saw the matrix.” Within the community (and outside) it seems success with women is so glorified and so important that just belief is enough. Strauss writes in a moment of reflection “I still wasn’t above shallow validation-seeking. None of us were. That’s why we were in the game. Sex wasn’t about getting our rocks off; it was about being accepted.”
Create an Emotional Connection
I asked Erik how many first dates he’d go on monthly over his five years of activity in the PUA community. He asked “On average?”
I said “Yeah. Ballpark it.”
He paused, “Harper.”
I replied, “Yes?”
Erik: “You have to promise not to judge me”
Me: “I won’t. I promise.”
Erik: “Pinky promise?”
Me: “I pinky promise.”
Erik: “Well, okay, no judgment?”
Me: “No judgment.”
Erik: “Okay just don’t react”
Me: “I won’t.”
Erik: “About 15 per month.”
Me: “Okay.”
And while I withheld judgment as per my pinky promise, I could not prevent mental maths. 15 dates x 12 months x 5 years. 900 women.
Extract to a Seduction Location
It is worth noting that most of these men, Strauss, Erik, and PUA interlocutors in The Game are successful. Before The Game, Strauss was already an accomplished journalist and Erik maintains a lucrative finance job. Both say that they learned charisma from pickup artistry, and the optimisation-oriented approach was actually a helpful tool.
Talking to Erik about being a PUA (surprisingly) gave me the impression that he was intelligent. He explained why and how available single people have shifted to dating apps with percentages and studies off the cuff, alongside differing accounts and narratives as to why certain groups (like “single women in their early 20s, 7/10+” and “single men making €x per year”) have grown or shrunk. Even his system for rating the attractiveness of women is rigorous, meticulous, and scientific – and equal parts nauseating.
Strauss thinks everything is pickup artistry. “Religion is pickup. Politics is pickup. Life is pickup.” He could be right. If pickup artistry is considered without its goal (sleeping with women), it’s rigorously developing oneself and achieving some aim through machiavellian means armed with data, repeated confirmation, and rigorous methodologies. The PUA may be capitalism’s strongest soldier.
Pump Buying Temperature
Women are, however, inextricable from this equation. To PUAs, women are a means to an end, and the deeper you go, the worse it gets. Hole singer Courtney Love asks Herbal, a PUA in the mansion Strauss shared with Mystery “Do you like women?” Herbal responds “I wasn’t a misogynist when I started this […] but you get good and you start sleeping with all these women who have boyfriends, and you stop trusting women.” Erik parroted this sentiment “Women blur together […] when you do the same thing over and over again, and women react the same way […] it’s rare these interactions aren’t basically identical.” Though, Erik added “It’s just people meeting other people, and I was the one being fake.”
Strauss and Erik both said “Some [PUAs] become misogynistic.” The finger-pointing at other men’s flaws is disturbing. While Strauss and Erik could both readily admit to deceit, perversion, and cynical views about “all women”, neither would call himself sexist. The PUA community is an online community of men that Strauss himself refers to as a “cabal” with the explicit goal of lying and manipulating women. How could they not see it?
PUAs are incels who have sex: chatrooms, coded language, and unquestioned premises about “how women are.” Being a PUA stems from being unsuccessful with women, highly logical, and traumatised. This familiar cocktail of traits seems to leave modern men of this kind at a crossroads: Tinder or 4chan.
Make a Physical Connection
As the book closes, Strauss introduces the “Our world” conspiracy. PUA circles are tight. Their world, while dogmatic and unyielding, is theirs alone.
Strauss started with pickup artistry as a journalist, and ended after a three year bender. Erik started as a Tinder finance bro, and got to year five. When I read The Game, I found myself remembering and reiterating. Desperately discussing with friends “do you know about pickup artistry? It’s crazy, I can’t explain it. The layers. The terms.”
And that’s the thing, it is incomprehensibly what it is. A vortex of language, doctrine, and ploys, so abundant and engrossing – a car crash you can’t look away from.
Blast Last-Minute Resistance
Both Erik and Strauss used the exact same words, “something was missing.”
Strauss laments that PUA almost ruined him. Reflecting on his long-gone mentor Mystery, he noted “He’d been so neglected as a child that the withdrawal of love [an actual long term relationship gone wrong] pulled all his emotional triggers, exploding the carapace of narcissism built by his childhood escapism.” Strauss’s diagnosis is eerily specific.
When I asked Erik about that missing thing, he didn’t hesitate for a second. “Yes, 100%. I needed PUA to feel okay about myself. I needed it.”
Manage Expectations
By the end of The Game, Strauss likens the life of pickup artistry to “filling a bucket with a hole in it”. He believes that the lifestyle breeds an acutely rational and utility-maximising mindset. Everything can be manipulated. He comes to this conclusion after finally meeting a woman who can “match him” (Lisa Leveridge, the guitarist for Courtney Love’s all-girl band, The Chelsea).
Erik echoed these sentiments. By the end of his stint, he was miserable. The preconditions of its end for him were:
- His cynicism about human behaviour after going on hundreds of identical dates with identical outcomes, and
- That it bled into the rest of his life. “Friends, family, you drink too much […] it’s almost like an addiction. People in my life have called it an addiction. I say almost”.
Like Strauss, Erik said “But really, you have to meet someone who is special. That’s a necessity. The rest is a precursor.” I was curious about Erik’s person (now his wife) and her thoughts on what I could only call “the whole thing.” Erik said “I have to give her a lot of credit. She at least tells me she doesn’t judge me for my past and she’s proud of me for overcoming it. I think she’s telling the truth. She’s a very forgiving woman. I’m very lucky.”
Erik, however, maintains he wouldn’t have met and charmed his wife without everything he learned. Strauss agrees, saying “the only way to win the game is to leave it”. But you still have to play.
These days, Strauss has abandoned pickup artistry. In 2015, he published The Truth, a sequel to The Game where he admits being a PUA was wrong. Sex addiction, uncontrollable erratic behaviour, and a mental state verging on sociopathy line the pages. Today, he has a son and a divorce.
I asked Erik if he missed the game, and he quickly said no. “My wife is perfect” he beamed – “why would you ever miss it?”
