![]() So I think all of a sudden there were these horrid ideas that people read about in The Game and. But because no one had even heard of this world, and the techniques, let’s face it, are so objectifying and horrifying, that the book became the bible of what it was trying to chronicle in a more neutral way. Strauss: Obviously I was a journalist, this community already existed, and I went in to describe my experience of it. Gilsinan: Why were people angry about it? I don’t think I’ve gotten any angry emails from people who’ve read it, per se. I think more people have heard about The Game than have actually read it. Gilsinan: If I read it right, you start out scared to talk to women, you learn all these techniques and score a lot, and then, to spoil it, you meet this woman for whom none of it works and you fall in love and swear off your player ways. #Happy game art book manualI was surprised when I first read that in addition to being a sort of how-to manual for picking up women, it’s kind of a Neil Strauss coming-of-age story. How appropriate, right? That was the plan. Kathy Gilsinan: It’s hilarious that this interview got postponed a couple of times. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of a conversation I had with him recently. ![]() If anything, Tinder has only facilitated this probability-based approach to courtship, but Strauss’s new book, The Truth, is about how he ended up settling down and making peace with the fact that you can’t be monogamous with everyone. Tinder has happened, Strauss is older, and he knows not all of the book ages well he now calls some of the techniques he documented-and used-“objectifying and horrifying.” He’s married to a woman he loves very much, for which his pickup-artist friends of yesteryear might accuse him of having a case of “one-itis.” For The Game was also a numbers game: Hit on enough women and eventually one of them was bound to succumb to your advances. I like eye crusties.” That’s a direct quote. If she doesn’t notice you’re ignoring her, then you’re both just standing there not talking to each other. ![]() (Sample: Do not make a move until you get three IOIs, or Indicators of Interest, such as a slight touch on the arm.) Indeed, the neg itself could be seen as a way to address the problem that sometimes the best way to get a gal’s attention is to ignore her. Obviously, it was important not to seem desperate while applying these very detailed rules you learned in a self-help book. Any way you could do this-and there were lots of bizarre techniques with goofy names, like “peacocking,” where you might wear an outlandish hat to give people something to comment on-helped you get the access you needed to try to convince someone to sleep with you. That’s how I ultimately read the book-the tactics were about starting conversations with people you had no business talking to. The Dark Side of Saying Work Is ‘Like a Family’ Joe Pinsker And what the hell is that even supposed to mean?” ![]() If, however, you say something like, “Those shoes look really comfortable,” you may have started a conversation, even if the response is, “They’re not. If you tell a girl she’s busted, you are a jerk. This is a subtle thing, and it’s not the same as being bluntly mean. Another tactic, one for which The Game became particularly famous, was the art of “negging”-that is, giving a woman a semi-insulting compliment so that you a) distinguish yourself from the pack of people she’s accustomed to have hitting on her, and b) slightly lower her self-esteem to the point that she wants your approval and is vulnerable to your advances. It seemed like dangerous stuff, in that it might actually work. (The cube represents the woman’s ego or something-so if it’s big, it means she’s self-confident if it’s transparent as opposed to opaque that means she’s open as opposed to guarded if it’s pink that means she’s bright and energetic … basic non-falsifiable horoscope-type material she can read herself into and then find you perceptive.) It was basically a way to harness people’s love of talking about themselves in order to score. student named Jon had mentioned The Game, and was demonstrating how it worked by means of “The Cube” routine, where you ask a woman to imagine a box standing in the desert, and you tell her about herself based on how she describes it. ![]() When Neil Strauss’s blockbuster book about pickup artistry came out a decade ago, I was a Midwestern ingenue in New York City, and I read it mostly as a defensive measure. ![]()
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