In which your blogger gives a long and rambling review of Neil Strauss’ The Game, and compares it to Fight Club, in the hopes of getting mad hits when the movie comes out. There are spoilers, but not nearly 500 pages worth of them. You could read this whole thing and still be suprised by the book.
So recently there were some interesting discussions (and some unhelpful mockery) going around about fight clubs, boys clubs and the whole got-your-back concept of brotherhood in general.
All that talk about Fight Club reminded me about guys I know or know about who want to be Tyler Durden. You know the type: somewhat cool but hiding massive insecurity behind a tough-guy brag sheild. I graduated with a guy who fit the mold perfectly; mostly harmless, a little unstable, and full of unsubstantiated stories of asses kicked and authority figures humiliated, women fucked and scars earned-most of which are obviously exaggerated. We all liked him just fine for who he was, but still the bragging never stopped. It only become hilarious after he got engaged to a girl who had the girls version of the same issues and decided to brag to us how quickly she could make him come (Her: “I can get him off in ONE MINUTE!” Him: “*choke sputter* Uh, usually closer to forty-five!” Ahhh, priceless. Hold on a sec while I relive that….OK)
He had a parallel issue with identity. His own, probably, but mostly pther people’s. Everyone had to be pegged with a high-school like tag; Emo him and Goth her and Preppy and Nerd and so on and so forth, which we all thought was a bit odd. Once, the new transfer student asked him why he did that. He didn’t understand the question, and proceded to explain to her what the different labels meant. So we repeated the question for him, but he still didn’t get it. The idea that a person’s clothes or music or major didn’t define them completely, that you couldn’t just peg a person and build or save a relationship becuase you liked the same band or wore the same clothes just didn’t compute.
He was just kind of stuck in this mindset of a social heirarchy based on complete bullshit, spouting somewhat harmful stereotypes and adhering to fairly stupid gender expectations, and the idea of opting out or changing his attitude was so far off the radar that he didn’t understand when it was suggested, much less get offended by the idea. As a result, he gave undue thought and influence to stupid little details that most adults stop caring about about 3 minutes after graduating high school. Tragic, really, because he was a pretty smart and cool guy when he wasn’t hung up on crap. It will suprise no one to learn that he was a white guy who was raised in a boring sprawl filled suburb that had a reputation for being white & wealthy.
That got me thinking about another Tyler Durden, this one a character in Neil Strauss’ book The Game: Penetrating the Secrety Society of Pickup Artists. So I got the book out from the library and re-read it. Two things struck me: 1) most of the guys spotlighted in the book reminded me of my friend and 2) it was a lot like Fight Club. I didn’t notice the first time I read it, but if you read that book with Fight Club on your mind, the parallels are unmistakable. Then I remembered that in some post awhile back, someone asked for a review of The Game, since they were only aware of the Pickup Artist part and not the Giant Freaking Theme part. Since I fear the movie will only make that misunderstanding more common, here is that review.
The Game: Long Story Short
Cultural journalist, notable for co-writing books with rock stars and porn stars, claims to be unattractive dork who has difficulty getting girls to pay attention to him. Now while my cornfed Ohio self would not really disqualify him based on looks or job he lives in Los Angeles and wants the type of club girl who normally chases rock stars and movie stars. Ok, fuck him says me and you and everyone else who can’t live the lifestyle, but it still ends up being a pretty good book, so stay with him.
Given a copy of the Layguide, a how-to guide for picking up women, from someone who wants him to turn it into a book, Strauss finds the secret internet community of pick-up artists. He discovers it at a key time, when a new group of master pick-up artists is about ready to get rolling. He signs up for a seminar and is chosen by the charismatic but unstable seminar leader to be the Next Big Thing in the pick up community. They travel around the world banging chicks and having a great time and becoming more and more popular. Eventually, they start a clubhouse in Los Angeles that is supposed to become the hot-chick supercenter of LA.
After a promising begining, it all goes to hell and Strauss gets his hot rock star only when he stops playing the game. Actually, basically everyone gets their cumuppance in this book-half the reason I don’t believe everything is true in it is not because it’s so unbelievable, but because everything ends up so movie-option perfect. But it makes for great reading.
OK, on to the Fight Club comparison.
For starters, much like the boys who watch Fight Club a jillion times and then go on to miss the point entirely and start a fight club, this book offers the chance for a certain type of guy to miss the fucking point entirely and try to use it as an actual advice guide to picking up women. The point, and Strauss comes right out and says it several times, is that while it was fun and started as a harmless enough way to boost confidence and get some action, eventually it turned into an unhealthy obsession that had less to do with women the further people got into it. Nearly everyone in the book who didn’t have issues when they started playing the game certainly aquired them by the end of the book, with few exceptions.
It starts, like Fight Club, with two guys. One, Mystery, is the unstable, unpredictable master pick-up artist that every man wants to be. The second, Strauss (in the book, Style) is Ed Norton’s character, the straight man who gets swept up in a wonderful new lifestyle that will eventually spin horribly out of control. Unlike Fight Club’s “Jack,” Style actually has to buy into our vapid culture more completely to find himself-or at least to portray the proper image. He shaves his head, buys new clothes, new accessories, new toys, gets Lasik, gets his teeth whitened, starts tanning, spends hundreds of dollars on books on everything from feminist anthologies of women’s sexual fantasies to hypnosis. Then he sets out to meet all master pick up artists and creates a Mega-Pick-Up style that combines the best of all of them, eventually becoming one of the most renowned and copied men in the community.
Mystery turns out to be completely fucking insane. Charismatic and talented, yes, but also clinically depressed and harboring massive issues about his father. He wants two things: first, to be a famous magician. Second, two girlfriends, a blonde and an Asian, both stunningly hot bisexuals who love each other as much as they love him. His current girlfriend, who agreed to breast implants, oral and a career as a stripper to please him and who didn’t break up with him after a LA bartender emailed proof of his hobby to her, was not good enough (or pliable enough) because she refused to buy into his fantasy. Yet, he reacts so badly to rejection that when the relationship ends, he goes to pieces.
Other men show up with equally unrealisic expectations. Sweater wants a woman whose beauty and intelligence cause other men to envy him, and ends up having a be-careful-what-you-wish-for epiphany before his divorce. Others want threesomes, models, actresses, you name any cliche porn fanstasy and it’s a goal for someone taking Mystery’s workshops. Together, online and in workshops, they create a tightly knit community of men who use women as scorepieces in an increasingly elaborate game. The word “homosociality” does not appear in this book, but it really really should.
Like Jack, as Style gets more into the club, the more uncomfortable he gets. First, the misogyny creeps into his thoughts. Then, he begins to notice that newer, younger pick up artists are a little too into it. They quit school, get fired from jobs, spend all their money trying to play the game. People stop talking to old friends or family.
Then Tyler Durden shows up. The kid who has taken Brad Pitt’s character’s name gives everyone the screaming heebie jeebies, but they try to give him the benefit of the doubt. He becomes very important later.
Mystery dreams up “Project Hollywood,” a pick-up artist mansion near all of the best clubs. He and Style recruit a younger pickup artist Papa (the son of a wealthy man, who would eventually screw himself out of law school because he couldn’t focus on studying after he joined the online pick up community) to put his name on the lease, they get two more roommates and move in. Project Mayhem-style, other cells pop up around the world. “Project Austin,” “Project Sydney, ” and so on. Like the Fight Club, no one uses their real names in the Projects. Mystery (whose name is Erik) and Style live with Herbal, Papa, Tyler Durden, and associate with men named Grimble, Extramask, and Juggler.
Tyler shows up and causes Project Hollywood to actually resemble the bunker in the Paper Street Soap Co. Tyler and Papa set up a competing workshop business to Mystery, they recruit newbie pick up artist drones who live in closets and bathrooms in the mansion. Style realizes that Tyler doesn’t care about picking up women, Tyler only cares about control, about being the alpha male. The mansion falls into disarray. No one knows how many creepy boys live in Papa’s room, or what they’re doing. Mystery has a psycotic relapse and Style, like Jack, loses the absolute control he used to have.
Meanwhile, the other Projects also run into problems (pick up artists being too cool to pay the utilities or clean). Women stop coming over. The routines that used to delight them become played out as armies of freshly-trained pick up artists run around urban club scenes spouting the same lines, wearing the same clothes, all using stupid nicknames. One newb derives his stupid nickname from Style’s stupid nickname. Style, meanwhile, is trying to impress Courtney Love’s guitarist with only intermittant success-every game-rehersed tactic backfires.
Unlike Robert Paulson, no one gets shot. But lives are still wrecked. Mystery overstays his visa, meaning if he ever leaves the country, he can’t come back which might affect his goals of being a famous touring magician. Papa loses his chance law school and ends up running pick-up and internet business seminars. Sweater ends up contemplating suicide before divorcing his perfect wife.
Others manage to put their lives together, but they have to leave Project Hollywood to do it. Extramask spends awhile studying Eastern religions around the world. Style gets shut out of Project Hollywood by Tyler but that’s OK because he has his guitarist. Herbal just goes home. Papa and Tyler skip out on the lease and move their army to an apartment by the free mental health clinic. They don’t have a lot of success with women, but that’s OK because that has long since ceased to be the point.
The lesson is not that finding efficient ways to convince women to sleep with you sans commitment is fun and awesome and totally consequence-free, it is that becoming unhealthily obsessed with women and easy sex and keeping score makes you a misogynist loser who doesn’t have any women, or any friends, or any money, or a real job. Balance, people, Strauss is advocating a balanced life here, not glorifying pickup artists uncritically. While he stresses that some good came out of the experience for him and others (dorks got more confidence, he made some good friends, they mostly had a good time) it quickly spun out of control and then the bad outwieghed the good. And when that happened he stopped, and left, and regained some perspective and got the happiest ending of any character. The End.
Great stuff.
Even before Fight Club, there was another misunderstood buddy movie featuring a cartoon caricature of the Male Asshole and the straight man he tries to mold that ends when the fallacy of Asshole-dom is exposed and the straight man just acts like Himself.
That movie?
Swingers.
When I was in college, scores of morons took on Vince Vaughn’s Double Down persona, thinking the movie was the bible of scoring chicks. Of course, in the end, Trent (Vaughn) is revealed to be a bit hapless and fraudulent while Mikey (John Favreau) gets over his depression and scores a Great Girl by dropping the bullshit. But that was all glossed over by the moron crew, and like Fight Club, they learned all the wrong lessons.
Some guys are just fucking stupid, I guess. Even a fictional alpha male who’s exposed as a fraud still exerts enough dominance to run their lives.
It really shows the power of the Alpha Male that he can be a complete joke and some guys will still idolize him, I guess. Why, I cannot figure out.
Well, besides the standard issue some-people-are-stupid explanation.
What was weird was none of them saw themselves as alpha males. In fact, the reserved the term for larger, more intimidating guys who they occasionally ran into while hitting on women. It was only when Tyler showed up and started applying their chick-manipulating techniques (lots of talk about framing, social dynamics, etc.) to every other area of social interataction and started freezing out Mystery and Style did Style realize he was considered an Alpha Male by the rest of the group.
[...] Because “players” are stupid. And any woman worth your time will look over a “player” for the earnest guy with a sense of humor. Because any woman worth your time will value herself enough to not be a plaything for a player and perhaps hook up with a guy she actually likes and values, and you, Pete, will actually get something out of that relationship other than laid. It’s called a win-win situation, and you, Pete, might win if you get into the groove and out of the game. Women may be competitive creatures, but they don’t want to play a part if they’re the prize and not active players. If you learned anything from your women’s studies classes, Hugo may have taught you that. It’s called “agency.” Crazy, I know. I don’t know how much Pete got out of our conversation, but when he left, he said “Hugo, thanks. I know I’m going to be a pro-feminist — soon. But not just yet.” I laughed and told him “One day at a time, buddy, one day at a time.” [...]
This is a really fantastic review, the only one I’ve read from any perspective that really gets it. Sorry about the late response, but I really wanted to state that while there are a lot of aspects of the so-called ‘Community’ that are misogynistic, homophobic and damaging, I’ve found some of its core teachings very powerful, positive and, yes, compatible with feminism.
Thing is, while 70% of the dating advice the ‘Community’ gives is patriarchal, evo-psych rubbish, 95% of the advice that’s already out there is horrible patriarchal bullshit. Even if, like Strauss, you embrace everything you’re told, maybe the 30% good advice will win out and you’ll be a better man than when you started. If, like me and many other men I’ve met, you take only the parts that are about meeting and attracting women and not the stuff that’s about impressing other guys, you’ll get there faster and avoid falling off the deep end.
I’ve been sympathetic to feminism for as long as I remember but I never had much luck with women. I was a virgin until I was 23 and until I was 28 had one more short-lived relationship. I was horribly timid with few social skills, in fact I was the stereotypical skinny emo ‘male feminist’/'Nice Guy’ who said the right things but scared women off because I was creepy and desperate. When I discovered David DeAngelo’s stuff and went to one of his seminars I worried about becoming a jerk and losing what few female friends I had, but the opposite has been true.
You’ve made fun of David D in another post, but beyond the marketing-speak and evo-psych stuff which is mostly irrelevant, the core of his methods is to examine what humans find attractive, *really*. Not by extrapolating from the animal kingdom (his evo-psych fixation is post-hoc application to what humans do, which is why it’s wrong but irrelevant), not by John Gray’s cosmology, and not by assuming what worked in a more patriarchal past is still relevant. By that I mean buying dinner (’sometimes the rapist brings a bottle of wine’), putting women on a pedestal etc. which worked when most women were economically forced to choose a husband who could provide for them rather than who they were attracted to.
The ‘Community’ has grown not only through marketing and male bonding, but because the techniques *work*. Most of them aren’t even new, they’re stolen from women or from men who are ‘naturally’ attractive. Much of the work we do is internal, changing our self-image so when we do the external flirtation stuff it’s not just a smokescreen. In his book Strauss has a few mentors who point that out but he doesn’t get it until the end.
I totally agree that homosociality explains much about ‘The Game’ but I have to say when I read about that concept on a feminist blog I laughed out loud because I first heard it from some dating coaches. It wasn’t expressed in the same way, but the central message was there; that to grow as a man you need to stop being defined by what other men think of you. I’ve met several of the people you see in the book including David D and Tyler D and I want to testify that while there are some people I would never associate with, others I would trust with a sister or girlfriend more than any man in the wider community. Incidentally if you’re curious how they look in the flesh there are clips of most of them at the bottom of this page: http://www.cliffslistconvention.com/
I can’t imagine many people will believe my post; all I can say is like anything else there are good and bad parts to anything and there are elements to the new dating advice industry that are genuine, positive and respectful to women, and if you act with honesty and ethical intentions you can improve your life and the lives of others. Here are some quotes from David D:
“Honestly, I think some of the stuff that’s showing up has questionable integrity, questionable ethics, questionable motivations…”
“If you’ve got any issues with women, if you’re projecting your insecurities onto them or you’re upset with them because they ‘manipulate men’ or because they’ve cheated on you in the past or whatever it is – if you’ve got issues with women, and they come up for you, get them handled. Write them down, journal, get a therapist, get some female friends, do some affirmations, do whatever you have to to root out those issues that you have with women, whatever they are, and address them. They must be addressed [...] just get over it, you really need to deal with it.”
I agree with the above post. This book takes quite a bashing in this review. I would definitely suggest anyone that reads this review, to put themselves in perspective in the writers shoes. Being a lonely desperate man will drive you to just about anything to get what you think makes you happy. Just as in martial arts, studying something profusely will give you insight into yourself and make YOU a better person… if you don’t get lost in the process…
I totally agree with the above review. I am speaking from experience. I divorced my ex-husband due to marital problems, like being violence (married 7 1/2 years). During our marriage he had very low self esteem and confidence. After the divorce he started reading all kind of material about the dating women. He actually got very addicted to this kind of material. to make this story short – he is deep in death, does not talk to his old friends much, he is always on the internet looking into dating sites. He is going to end up on the streets with no job and no future. All, please be aware of this scam and don’t buy into this bullshit. you will end up more fucked-up then went you started.
That’s a pretty strange and cynical review of the book. Having lived there, I can tell you that there was a lot more positivity, fun, and adventure than you’d lead people to be. It sounds like you enjoyed reading the book anyway, though, and that’s good.
Herbal
its possible you missed the point. if neil strauss is telling you in the book that he’s a master at creating whatever impressions he wants to create… then what makes you think he hasn’t left you with whatever impression he wanted to leave you with?
reading the book – you’ll notice that Style doesn’t argue with people. if he disagrees with them, if he doesn’t know what they’re talking about, if he doesn’t like them… he just smiles and goes with the flow, sometimes with a slight backhanded jibe added on.
and thats how the book came across to me.
question – what kind of general response is the mainstream public going to have about a group of grown men who spend all their time and much of their money learning, teaching and actually picking up women?
answer – “their sleazy”, “they’re pathetic”, “they’re lame”, “they’re empty inside” etc.
what impression has Neil Strauss given of the seduction community? they’re sleazy, pathetic, lame and empty inside.
Readers – you have been successfully “gamed”.
cheerio,
Sting
No one is all good or all evil. It really depends on their context.
I think “the community” for lack of a better word, teaches men important social skills. Like anything, too much of it is probably bad, and like anything, used the wrong way it can be bad.
I’ve lived this stuff for two years and I’m proud of what we’ve done. The thank you letters, the testimonials, the success stories are all real. Some people who get the most attention tend to be the most nutty, but it’s like that in many fields.
But yeah, there are a lot of crazy people out there. I have enough stories to fill my own book
For now, I’ll just blog about them (http://therealsavoy.blogspot.com)
then what makes you think he hasn’t left you with whatever impression he wanted to leave you with?
He’s a professional author. Leaving me with the impression he wanted me to have (or as I would call it, communicating his point) is his fucking job.
“For starters, much like the boys who watch Fight Club a jillion times and then go on to miss the point entirely and start a fight club, this book offers the chance for a certain type of guy to miss the fucking point entirely and try to use it as an actual advice guide to picking up women. The point, and Strauss comes right out and says it several times, is that while it was fun and started as a harmless enough way to boost confidence and get some action, eventually it turned into an unhealthy obsession that had less to do with women the further people got into it. Nearly everyone in the book who didn’t have issues when they started playing the game certainly aquired them by the end of the book, with few exceptions.”
Neil is just dealin with his own insecurities. Or – I suspect- he paints himself more insecure and obsessed to gain some credabillity. After all, the whole story sounds unbelieveble enough, so nobody would believe it if these people did not only pull, but were also happy, confident people.
“The game” is actually a good guide to get started. You dont get it, but that is ok