Self-improvement as self-deception

On the plane ride to Chicago I read Neil Strauss' The Game, the bestselling account of life inside the pick-up artist (or seduction) community.

There's a lot written about the specific pick-up techniques detailed in the book, usually in the context of "How misogynistic is this?" A lot of the methods involve subtly insulting or rejecting the pick-up target (that's a lady), performing prepared routines specifically designed to build rapport (a lot of these are like Cosmo quizzes), or even forms of hypnotic suggestion.

I'm going to stipulate that these techniques work and that they are prima facie deceptive. The fact that both of these things are true raises some interesting questions about how men and women attract one another. But there's a more interesting seduction going on in the book.

It's not about sex

In many ways, The Game, and even pick-up itself, is not really about sex. Yes, that is an objective. But sex is just one way the pick-up artist measures success. Other objectives include: getting a woman to give you her phone number (known as number close) or kissing a woman (kiss close).

Referring to these acts as different types of closes is telling as this is also the language of salesmen. Extending the metaphor, one paradigm of pick-up is known as FMAC, an acronym for Find, Meet, Attract, Close. This recalls Baldwin's speech in Glengarry Glen Ross when he berates the salesmen with another 4-letter code, AIDA (Attention, Interest, Decision, Action).

The point is that power and manipulation are the fuel for this obsession. As with salesmen and their marks, there is an antagonistic relationship in which one person's will is pitted against the other.

The metaphor that Strauss uses more than once is that of a comedian. Comedians go out looking to 'kill' and, like salesman, use prepared routines to manipulate and seduce. As with comedians, the pick-up artist starts out being fearful of rejection and eventually becomes contemptuous of his targets (once he learns how easily manipulated they can be.)

The important point is that seduction is about the exercise of power and the manipulation of perception. So what are we, as readers of The Game, being led to perceive.

I want you to hit on me as hard as you can

One way to understand what's going on in the The Game is to look at the parallels between it and Fight Club. That there should be a connection between the two makes sense; superficially, both are perspectives on contemporary masculinity.

There are a number of explicit connections as well. One of the pick-up artists goes by the handle Tyler Durden. The pickup artist commune in LA is branded Project Hollywood; a conscious echo of Fight Club's Project Mayhem. Project Hollywood becomes home to an ever-increasing number of apprentice pick-up artists who live in barracks-like conditions. And the whole situation takes on a destructive momentum of its own that confounds the expectation of the narrator.

Parallels also exist at the thematic level. Fight Club is a work of seduction. The reader is seduced by Tyler Durden who declares "I look like you want to look. I fuck like you want to fuck. I am smart, capable, and more importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not."

In Fight Club we are seduced by nihilism. But those who mistakenly portray Fight Club as a valentine to ultra-violence miss the crucial point: the reader has been deceived. Tyler is not an external antagonist at all. We are told from the outset "I realize all of this — the gun, the bombs, the revolution — is really about Marla Singer." As Palahniuk has stated, "the whole story is about a man reaching the point where he can commit to a woman."

In a way, so is The Game. After spending two years climbing his way to the top of the pick-up scene, Strauss finds a woman who is resistant to his seduction techniques. So, of course, he must have her.

The important difference is that the collapse of Project Hollywood (and Strauss' pick-up lifestyle) seems to happen to Strauss rather than because of him. The pick-up artist known as Tyler Durden turns out to be a borderline personality who ends up deriving more satisfaction from manipulating the apprentice corps than in actually picking-up women. Mystery, Strauss' closest ally in the community, falls apart from a combination of heartbreak and what seems like manic depression.

As things unwind, Strauss carefully portrays himself as being adjacent to the downfall. Mystery is suicidal, Tyler is manipulating the other guys, Courtney Love is a mess (she's a house guest at one point).

In Fight Club, the antagonist-narrator is responsible for the inevitable collapse of the male fantasy world he created. In the Game, Neil Strauss portrays himself as almost a victim of the community he helped nurture.

It's all in the game

This, ultimately, is the real manipulation in The Game. The author gets to be both a vehicle of hetero-male wish fulfillment and the guy who leaves with the girl when others wreck the party.

That Strauss is able to pull off this maneuver is illuminating if somewhat unsurprising.

At one point, the dysfunctional Tyler coins the term "stylemog" (after Strauss' pick-up handle Style) and defines it as "a subtle set of tactics, mannerisms, backhanded compliments and responses used to keep a pickup artist dominant in a group." So, too, does Strauss put himself in a position of power over the reader while feigning vulnerability.

On one hand he confesses that "a sequence of maneuvers and a system of behaviors would never fix what was broken inside. Nothing would fix what was broken inside. All we could do was embrace the damage." However, whatever Strauss considers broken inside himself is never really explored.

The more important part of this quote is at the end. By ending up with the perfect girl, Strauss has embraced his unnamed damage and treats his journey through pick-up culture as a path that had to be followed. He never would have had the courage to approach his girl without the lessons learned from pick-up.

This sort of weak-sauce Nietzschism, in which the past is justified as it led to the present, feeds into the idea of pick-up as self-improvement. Rather than seduction or manipulation, learning pick-up is a way to overcome one's limitations.

But passing off pick-up as self-improvement is highly disingenuous and purposefully manipulative. It's a way of disguising power obsession in the same way that greed can be disguised as "Jesus wants you to be rich" Christianity.

In the course of The Game, Strauss impressively manipulates women, his fellow pick-up artists and the reader of his book.

Wouldn't you be disappointed with less?