Tommie Hu$tle
Member
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/books/10/05/books.neilstrauss.ap/index.html
Now lames like Pimpwerx can get his freak on without shelling out 39.95/month at AFF PEACE.
NEW YORK (AP) -- If you want to meet Neil Strauss, you have go to a bar. You just have to. That's his territory.
Strauss, you see, has spent the past two years turning himself into one of the best pickup artists in the world. He's gotten so good that he even teaches others.
"I can get any guy to go up to the most unapproachable, stunning girl and make her interested, make her laugh and make her love him," he says.
Make no mistake: Strauss, a Rolling Stone writer who has ghost written books by Motley Crue and porn star Jenna Jameson, is not particularly gorgeous. With his shaved head, goatee and slender frame, he resembles an emaciated Howie Mandel. But the dude's got game -- a series of techniques he has adapted from a secretive community of seduction artists that can beguile and hook the hottest of women better than if he looked like Brad Pitt.
"I'm messing up the genetic code," he says with a laugh.
He says this from a banquette at K Lounge, a sultry watering hole over an Indian restaurant that has Near Eastern furnishings and statuettes depicting positions from the Kama Sutra. House music plays and the cocktails have names like Aphrodisiac.
A perfect pickup place.
But alas, we can't see Strauss in action. He's semiretired from babe wrangling for one very good reason: She's sitting beside him -- his stunning blond girlfriend who towers several inches above him.
See? This stuff seems to really work.
Strauss has put what he's learned into a book, "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists," that arrived in bookstores a few weeks ago bound tongue-in-cheek like a
Bible, complete with fake leather cover and bookmark. It lays out the art and science of seduction, the often bitter feuds among different schools of thought and the startling news that successful mackin' can be learned.
"Guys who are not naturally successful with women ... weren't genetically born to fail. They just had bad habits," he says, "like I did."
"Women have Cosmopolitan to show them 30 ways to drive a man crazy and they have 'Sex and the City' to learn how to deal with men. ... Guys have these dumb buddy movies that are made to titillate them but show them nothing about how women really work."
'Negs' and 'targets'
What works on women, apparently, is a carefully scripted series of moves and dialogue to convey absolutely no interest at all. "The great lie of modern dating," Strauss writes, "is that in order to sleep with a woman, a man must pretend initially as if he doesn't want to."
Forget about your stereotype pickup artist -- that 1970s lizard with shirt cracked to his navel and sledgehammer style. "The modern player is totally under the radar," Strauss says.
Though each school of seduction differs, various techniques -- learned online or during seminars -- can be mixed and matched. Many of the estimated 1 million members rely on jargon -- these are guys, after all.
There's the "neg," a casual insult that conveys lack of interest ("Those are nice nails; are they real?"), the "false time constraint," lying that you have to leave soon to lessen anxiety, and looking for IOIs, or "indicators of interest" such as the hottie leaning in close.
This is a community where the woman you want to meet is the "target," where anyone she's with is an "obstacle" and where men learn magic and ESP tricks to show value and avoid LMR ("last minute resistance").
All this can take you from an AFC (average frustrated chump) to MPUA (master pickup artist). It worked for Strauss, who bedded dozens under the nom-de-guerre Style and became a guru in his own right.
"All this stuff is backward engineered from what works. Nobody sat at a computer and invented these techniques. They watched guys who are successful and broke it down to what works," Strauss says.
What also works is "peacocking," wearing loud flashy outfits to get women's attention (Strauss shows up for his interview wearing a pair of gold boots), and psychological weapons like "push-pull," showing no interest at first, followed by intense attention. A few keys rules are constant: Never stoop to buy your target a drink -- let her buy you one. Always make yourself the center of attention. And always get her phone number.
Souls at stake?
cover.game.jpg
Some 100,000 copies of "The Game" have been ordered by publisher ReganBooks, and the book hit No. 10 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction list in its debut week.
Reviews have been somewhat mixed. Publishers Weekly called it "often tedious but hilarious." The Times said it was "far more frightening than funny."
A London Times writer observedexternal link that Strauss is brutally honest about the value of "sarging": "There are, as Strauss is keen to stress in his book, two sides to all of this. On the one hand, a guy -- any guy -- really can learn to pick up women, and can do so far more effectively than the 'naturals' of whom they may have grown up in awe. On the other, they risk losing their soul."
"Strange as it seems, it's one of the more universal books I've ever worked on," says ReganBooks editor Cal Morgan. "What it amounts to is a book about how difficult it is for men and women to talk to each other."
With all this attention, is Strauss concerned that his book might disarm future pickup artists by revealing their techniques? After all, won't women now be able to recognize the game?
"I'm not worried about it because guys will always need to find a way to meet women," Strauss says. "Attraction is always the same. You can't help it. You can't disarm that."
Strauss' book comes at a time when there seems to be a spike in interest from Hollywood in pickup routines. Witness the films "Hitch," "Wedding Crashers" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."
One thing Strauss stresses is that the techniques he's describing can only get the conversation started. After about 15 minutes, a pickup artist's real personality will begin shining through the cracks.
"On the surface it might sound like a horrible thing -- men learning tricks to manipulate women. But any guy who doesn't have anything inside -- like confidence and self-awareness, some sort of spirituality or goodness, being in touch with their emotions -- is not going to do well anyway."
Strauss, who's in his 30s, has veered away from the pickup community since meeting his girlfriend, Lisa Leveridge, a guitarist for Courtney Love. Even so, he still conducts seminars and workshops at bars.
"You feel for that really good-looking 25-year-old guy who's got no self-esteem and probably only gone out on maybe two dates before in his life," he says. "You want to help him. You want to say, 'You are a cool, good-looking guy. Here's what you do to get your confidence going.' "
Often he will teach novices with Lisa by his side. She acts as "pivot" -- providing proof of his good social skills, creating jealousy in the target or helping show he's not threatening.
Is she worried that Strauss has become a one-man seduction machine?
"Oh please," says Leveridge. "I've got more skills than him. And anyway, why would I date somebody I didn't trust? My boyfriend's got some skills and I'm not worried about it."
Strauss met Leveridge toward the end of his two-year odyssey, and she was powerfully immune to his tricks. He eventually stole her heart by being himself. Yet she endorses her boyfriend's mission: "Women want to meet men. We're glad these guys are getting the skills so that they'll actually be able to approach us and not gross us out."
As for Strauss, he's not concerned that the techniques he writes about will put new powerful pickup skills into the hands of unscrupulous men. Women will be fine, he insists.
"Women are born with a thing called intuition and it's their best defense against these guys," he says.
Now lames like Pimpwerx can get his freak on without shelling out 39.95/month at AFF PEACE.
BTW, I thought this was about the rapper. :lol PEACE.
