The game the secret society of pickup artists

Yet, in terms of The Game, he won. He left with a girl's number - a girl with a boyfriend, no less. He could have gone home and bragged online about the pocketful of phone numbers he got, even if they wouldn't have got him any closer to sex or a girlfriend. He could have had approval from other men, and that is the whole point of The Game.

View all 5 comments. Nov 16, Chance rated it did not like it. This book was fucking terrible. I'm ashamed to have read it.

Mar 27, Isa K. I'll start with the Cliff Notes for those of you who don't like long reviews: This book would be five stars if it was about pages shorter. And if you're one of those people who takes things way too literal, confuses the opinions and attitudes of the subject for the opinions and attitudes of the author, or needs every report of observed misogyny to be prefaced with twelve paragraphs of either apology or condemnation At the same time this book makes a I'll start with the Cliff Notes for those of you who don't like long reviews: This book would be five stars if it was about pages shorter.

At the same time this book makes a rather revolutionary suggestion that I think more women NEED to open their minds to. But that's not the way things go with this one They either eagerly attach themselves to the promise of some secret seduction technique, or they become blinded by their offense. It's true, there are a lot of offensive things in this book. But that seems to be par for the course with social commentary nowadays.

If no one is pissed off, no one is listening. My first exposure to this book was Arden Leigh's column on being a female pickup artist here after PUA.

I was fascinated by the idea, but like most I didn't really believe her claims. She looked perfectly pretty to me. Doubtful her "technique" played that much of a significant role in her seduction success. Probably more like a combination of actual attractiveness and good old fashioned confidence. Then a female friend described this book as "amazing" and "life-changing" and I thought "waaaaaaaatt? Talk about cognitive dissonance. This is a book that tries to trick you into thinking that it's about having sex with the hottest girls possible, because that is way more marketable than the actual content especially to a male audience.

But that is not what this book is about. The amount of actual advice on how to pick up women is tiny This is a memoir -slash- cautionary tale about the dangers of living your life constantly seeking validation from others. The various PUA artists in this book are all depicted as sad, pathetic, self-loathing, mentally unstable people who truly believe that being desirable to others will make them like themselves more.

But from chapter one Strauss makes it clear that doesn't happen. They get everything they think they want and end up more miserable for it. The problem is this book is too fucking long. I half suspect that most of the people both women and men who talk about it in terms of its seduction secrets did not read it to the end. Add to this the fact that Strauss is trying to stay in character as he narrates his journey from True Believer to Disillusioned Master and the profound brilliance of The Game barely has a chance.

There are plenty of hints dropped throughout the book about Strauss's eventual enlightenment, but some people have no mind for subtly I guess. Part of what annoys me about the so-called "feminist" reaction to this book is that there's a multi-billion dollar industry built around convincing women of the exact opposite and humiliating anyone who dares to call bullshit.

An industry that makes the bulk of its money by inventing flaws and imperfections to make women feel horrible about themselves. And yet the best we can come up with to combat it are fairytales about "different standards of beauty"?

These feminists act like liberation from the image-obsessed media is all about accepting your lot in life and just waiting for a partner whose standard of beauty happens to fit your look to come along. They accept the underlying notion that some people are "pretty" and some are not The big problem with this thinking is that people are not static.

Looks change over time. If the answer was to rely on the off chance someone somewhere thinks you are beautiful exactly the way you are By contrast Mystery's Method claims attraction has more to do with how people feel around you than how you look.

Mystery teaches his students about group think and instructs his pupils to focus on the friends of the hot girl, rather than the hot girl. People are strongly influenced by the opinion of the group. Anyone who's taken a basic organizational behavior class has read the mounds of research on this. When your target sees everyone around her acting like you are amusing and desirable, she will be more attracted to you.

People become much more susceptible to that suggestion when they themselves feel insecure. So the second thing Mystery teaches his students is the "neg". Probably the most controversial part of the book, the neg is basically just a back handed compliment. It's teasing, innocent, and delivered in a flirtatious manner.

It's this disconnect between the words which sound like a criticism and the way they are delivered which sounds positive that makes people second guess themselves. And the suggestion that maybe the PUA isn't interested in the target makes the target more likely to convince themselves of an attraction.

The group desires something apparently unattainable Of course some readers seem to have interpreted the passages about negs to mean "act like a fucking jerk" That's not at all what Strauss is describing.

Most of The Game's secrets resonated with me because I've been there. When I was twenty-two my life fell apart and I moved to the Czech Republic to escape my demons. My first week there I fell for a stocky, thirty-six year old statistician with a bowl cut and coke bottle thick glasses Revenge of the Nerds all the way. I knew objectively speaking this man was in no way attractive, but I couldn't help myself. I had the biggest crush. I was also in a strange country where I didn't speak the language.

I had no idea where I was going to live, whether I could get a job. Of course I was smitten. At the same time two of my American roommates were fighting over a balding, short, bespeckled geologist who smoked way too much pot and had abandoned his pregnant girlfriend back in the states to run off to Prague So yes, it's not that people have "different standards of beauty", it's that attraction is psychological.

Now take a minute to consider what that means: you can be with any person you want. Right now. Absolutely anyone. The determining factor is not perfecting your physical form, but making them feel a certain way around you. They won't suddenly think you're beautiful, they will suddenly not care that you aren't. Consider that unlike your physical appearance, your personality and social skills don't change. Every girl in America should read this book.

Strauss moves from discussion of technique to long rambling conquest stories with backgrounds of various PUA mixed in. Although the PUAs become important later, at least half of these could have been cut. Prior to this Strauss has tried to maintain the voice and perspective of someone who believes he has discovered the secrets of the universe. There is the occasional remark that alludes to problems with the PUA lifestyle many of his Until Strauss's mentor begins to self-destruct.

At this point Strauss realizes that most of his students haven't gained anything by being PUAs, they've actually lost a lot. Even though they win the women they want, they only wanted those women in the first place because they were trying to impress others.

Instead of seducing the crowd to win the girl, they are trying to win the girl to seduce the crowd. Instead of surrounding themselves with awesome people who make them happy, they inevitably surround themselves with people who they think will make them look attractive and successful to others but ultimately do not like.

This soulless existence only increases their underlying self hate. The tragedy being that as soon as the PUA gets to know the person providing the validation, once they become a human being with their own flaws and insecurities, they're approval is no longer valuable. And so the cycle continues until everyone is miserable. View all 6 comments. Nov 29, Leajk rated it it was ok Recommends it for: women who need help spotting a-holes at night clubs. Recommended to Leajk by: male acquaintances of the past.

Know thy enemy. One extra star for pure entertainment value, especially the very first scene where 'the hero' of the book, Mystery, lies curled up crying on the floor of the communal pickup mansion dressed in the bathrobe previously belonging to his stripper ex-girlfriend.

Apparently he misses her, like a lot, which is quite sweet I suppose. That is for a man who reinvented himself from a living-in-his-parents-basement type of guy, to the cons-insecure-wannabe-starlets-in-LA type of guy. And the Know thy enemy. And thereby invented the trend of men wearing ugly hats.

And ugly jewlery. And doing 'negging'. And who destroyed magic for me. And briefly dating. Actually strike what I said earlier: I think I just enjoyed to read about him crying. You know how there's always the shy, but kind of nice, guy in every group of men? Me and my friends knew two of those in two separate groups of guy friends during high-school. The funny thing was that they were so similar to us, despite their groups being very different, that we thought they might've been twins.

Both were tall, thin which they tried to hide with ill fitting clothes and with blonde badly cut hair. Both of them were as I said quite shy, and were both hoping to have future careers within computer sciences of some sort. One of them once arrived at one of our parties to cry on a couch during the rest of the evening. He had just reached the profound realisation that he was never getting laid. One of my girl friends force fed him ice-cream in an effort to make him feel better. So I understand the frustration of teenage boys not getting laid.

Hell, I understand the frustration of teenage girls not getting laid. I've been there. Then on the other hand you have the other of my blonde geeky high school friends, let's call him Mike. Mike was always one of the most talkative ones in his group of friends.

He was friendly and easy to get along with, although shy around girls he didn't know. Then suddenly at one party he started to become really snappy. He'd criticize all the female attendants clothing and most of what they said.

We asked him what the hell he was doing and it turned out that he had just read this book It turned out to be 'The Game naturally. We asked him to please stop and go back to being, you know, a normal polite human being.

He insisted on keeping up with the book, and although his clothing and hair style went from bad to worse, he did eventually get laid. Though he never seemed too happy about it. She wasn't hot enough or something. This was my first exposure to The Game. Years later I met this other quite shy but friendly guy who due to certain circumstances, such as the number of people left in that town during summer being low, I ended up spending some time hanging out with.

Physically he was the absolute opposite of those earlier male friends, but this guy had constant diet and self-improvement plans going on so it shouldn't have come as a surprise when he drunkenly confessed to having read The Game after I had previously made fun of the book at a book shop. He even confessed to trying to use the techniques in the book on me. This was when I decided to read this book, in pure self-defense. And I found it a great read. In fact the rest of that summer I wouldn't shut up about it.

I felt it was my personal calling to tell all of my girl friends about it so that they wouldn't fall for any of the tricks. In fact I even managed to detect this awful 'are the two of you best friends? So is my rating of two stars really fair? After all I did found it funny, fascinating and it made for a great conversation piece. However as I said in the shorter version of my review, it also brought so much pain and suffering into this world. Neil Strauss might be the sane straight man in the story, the one who points out all the follies in the system and who eventually gets out and gets a 'happy ending' i.

I say obviously because I keep meeting these men who just didn't get it. Who buy into the negging and peacocking, but engage in no genuine self-improvement I'm not talking about them buying more self-improvement books here, I mean coming to peace with one self. This might not have been Strauss' intent, but his description of how he went from sexless nerd to sex stud, sure did not help. I think it's that last aspect that disturbs me the most. That the book implies that men and women are really all that different.

I mean I read The Selfish Gene which I think sadly is on Mystery's recommended reading list , and that is not the message I took away from that at all. And that's why this book is sad on so many levels, it makes women out to be this exotic species to be studied from afar. It also makes it so that there are no cultural differences.

Instead Strauss claims that since their strategies worked both all over LA and once in Bulgaria or was it Romania? Oh, and it's not only the wanna be actresses women you meet in the night clubs in LA, actually one of the women in the Eastern European country they were in, she was a doctor of some sorts, and she liked them, so boom - it works on all smart women as well!

I could go on and on, but I'd like to end this review by issuing a warning for all potential readers: - DO read this book as an anthropological study of LA and how far women and men have come from each other in some sub-cultures - DO NOT read this book as a instruction manual - IF you do want better sucess with the opposite sex, you already know what to do: smile, have interests that not only involves your own sex, and don't panic panic makes you smell gross Or possibly read The Art of Love , it seems like fun View all 25 comments.

This is a fascinating trip to vicarious realization of Eros' dreams of shy guys--e. Yet, a journey that--as one might suspect--comes to the author's recognition of the emptiness of sexual prolificity. I concede this isn't one most of my friends will read. I would drift off to sleep nights, praying for a cure. In fact, up until I was maybe 17, it was dreadful: I would clam up even around girls who pursued me.

Anyhow, Strauss, a reporter for Rolling Stone, decided he was tired of losing with the ladies so he signs up for some pickup artists' courses and infiltrates the pick-up society. As it turns out, these guys are far from the bores I pictured when I heard "pickup artist. When I look back on those long ago days of a quarter century ago when I was single, I would have given anything to know the secrets of "Mystery" and his "Method.

Apparently, this " negging " is a well-worn technique of initial primitive attraction, much more successful than not, if the man can maintain his confidence and her interest.

Examples include: " Aww, that's cute, your nose wiggles when you laugh. There it goes again! What are you, like 4'9" without 'em? Well, not like cute-cute, more like puppy-cute " " I think I saw you here a few weeks ago. Were you wearing that same dress? It IS a nice dress. You really wrecked a moment! Your old boyfriends must have really hated that about you.

It's all so demeaning to the female. Nonetheless, given my background, yes, it is true that I would find this all very fascinating, notwithstanding its lack of practical use to me now given my age and marital status. Strauss becomes so proficient and successful that he became somewhat of a mythical figure in the pickup society. Given his appearance and comportment at the beginning--bald, a big honker, short--I seems quite astounding. I was experiencing seducer's paradox: The better a seducer I became, the less I loved women.

Success was no longer defined by getting laid or finding a girlfriend, but by how well I performed. People develop a desire for something more. And when one person's expectations don't match the other person's, then whoever holds the highest expectations suffers. There is no such thing as cheap sex. It always comes with a price. Aug 22, Jim Reaugh rated it did not like it Shelves: psychology. I think The Game straddles the line between comedy and tragedy. If, as I truly would like to believe, Strauss is joking, then the book is a comic masterpiece.

If the book is an attempt at non-fiction, then the number of devotees is nothing short of tragic. Some of the recommended pick-up techniques are sinister. One involves discreetly undermining a woman's self-esteem by paying her a backhanded compliment in the hope that she will hang around to seek your approval!!?? Honestly, sinister I think The Game straddles the line between comedy and tragedy.

Honestly, sinister soon gives way to pathetic in this book. The Game is really a book about the fragility of male ego and how it seeks refuge from the complexity of human relations in a puerile cult of sexual conquest.

I find it remarkable how Strauss races up the ranks of the pick-up fraternity even before he has procured so much as a snog from a lady. So bereft of charisma are most of the people who haunt the lothario chatrooms that anyone with a modicum of self-awareness and humour can take command. It soon becomes clear that the approval PUA's get from other men is more intoxicating than the pleasure they get from sex.

Mar 05, Heather rated it did not like it Shelves: bookclub. I don't usually say I've read a book when I haven't finished it. But I simply can't read the second half of this book without losing little parts of my soul on every page, and I damn well want recognition for those parts of my soul I have already lost. So here I am, reviewing a book I haven't really read.

Let's start with something important - Neil Strauss is a very talented writer, His style is not only engaging but often even literary, and I didn't just enjoy turning pages quickly but was quite I don't usually say I've read a book when I haven't finished it. Let's start with something important - Neil Strauss is a very talented writer, His style is not only engaging but often even literary, and I didn't just enjoy turning pages quickly but was quite comfortable in the warm bath of his prose.

So full points for style no pun intended. It's the content that stinks. The kind that is scared of women - and we all know fear breeds contempt, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation. He admits his nerdery freely, but what he seems to have missed in the detail of this horrifically graphic, autobiographical book of sexual exploration and psychological navel gazing, is that pick-up does not transform him.

While he is swept up in a world that gives him magical powers to overcome his own shortcomings again, no pun intended , he doesn't understand that the essential problem in his sex life is that he doesn't see it as social life - in other words, he still sees women as objects, not people.

Style still doesn't understand women because he has failed to identify with them. If this is a book about freeing your sexuality, it is also a book about stifling your humanity. It is about using your words to manipulate, and using sex to dominate. Without throwing a single punch, it is fundamentally violent. It claims to be about demystifying women, but really it is about stripping them of all reality and moulding them into what some men would rather they were - mindless, obedient pliable, and constantly, overtly sexual.

There may have been some kind of redemption later in the book, but I could not wait around for it - too much had already been said. Too many stereotypes had been promoted and too many coded ways of undermining women had been let loose into the slimy gutters and the minds of readers. I couldn't handle this book. It made me nauseous. Mr Strauss, please use your powers of writing for good next time. Edit : I wrote this 7 years ago; forgive me for being naive.

I didn't know what an incel was, or that PUA culture was already the sewer of the internet. I now know this book is partly responsible for fuelling the rise of violent misogyny that normalised and formed the breeding ground for the resurgent far right.

This book is garbage and if you have a copy, I recommend incinerating it. Zero stars. View all 9 comments. Mar 11, Derek rated it really liked it. Impossible to put down. This is a fascinating tale of a guy with marginal skills with the ladies despite fame , who sets out on a life changing mission to master picking up women. I dare you to try and not get hooked in the first few pages. The characters are philanderers, gigolos, wannabes, braggarts, and every dysfunctional category in between.

Their quest is obvious, and thrust in your face; to hook up with as many beautiful women as possible. Strauss becomes prolific at the social marketing Impossible to put down. Strauss becomes prolific at the social marketing skill, and becomes addicted to his casanova killer abilities. But as is so often the case, the higher levels of his skill seduction lessens the inner drive and excitement he feels towards his conquest.

The chase becomes not only boring, but a bit frightening. Not a spoiler here, but the author reflects.

He ponders. He accidentally finds an inner moment observing from third person where his life has now taken him. He wonders if it is all he wants to become. He looks closer at his bizarre friends.

All of them have major issues. Is this what he really wants? Strauss has written several best sellers, as well as for Rolling Stone, and literally has no competition when it comes to spinning tales of this type. For this genre, I recommend picking up the best three.

His encyclopedia-like book reads like a PHD college course on seduction. It is the template for what Strauss uses in the Game. It lays out the techniques, terminology, and methodology for anyone to learn. This is a devious sexual persuasion guide for hooking up, written by a psych doc who cruised the nightclubs with great success for a decade.

It also contains an asset protection guide to set up pre-marriage to shield you from divorce. Get these three, and get ready to laugh and learn. Really interesting books. Oct 14, Giselle rated it did not like it Shelves: 1-star , age-adult , problematic , borrowed , non-fiction.

Read this almost ten years ago and was appalled that there is a community of PUAs Pick-Up-Artists that go around doing all of this just to get laid. So I read the book so I can be aware of these sleaze bags and their methods. They actually think Read this almost ten years ago and was appalled that there is a community of PUAs Pick-Up-Artists that go around doing all of this just to get laid. Such utter BS! This is why men dehumanize women. Use women as objects, make them their property.

Add another notch to their belt and brag to their buddies about how many women they have bedded. A whole community of disgusting advice like this exists. Wish more women read this disgusting book so they can be more aware of what type of predator these men can be.

Mar 27, Polly Trout rated it liked it. There are some very valid reasons to skim through this controversial, pornographic, poorly written, and often obnoxious anthropological tour of the "seduction community," a network of men who use social psychology and hypnosis to pick up women. It's fascinating and queasy at the same time. The seco There are some very valid reasons to skim through this controversial, pornographic, poorly written, and often obnoxious anthropological tour of the "seduction community," a network of men who use social psychology and hypnosis to pick up women.

The second reason is that although this book got slammed by feminists, Strauss is actually a whole lot smarter and more thoughtful than he first appears on the surface.

The book is a pseudo-memoir in the gonzo journalism style, mixing participant observation with tall tales about life in the meat market. Strauss is not a missionary for the movement, but instead charts his own relationship with the seduction community from skepticism to enthusiasm to ambivalence to rejection. I don't know how anyone could miss this, since the opening chapter is about a famous pickup artist's psychotic break and existential despair, and the book continuously circles around the underlying anxiety and loneliness that drives the pickup mentality.

Compared to "Fear and Loathing," which does hilariously glorify drugs, sex, and mayhem, Strauss's gonzo style is more critical and distanced. Here is how he ends the book: "And though I've learned everything there is is about attraction, seduction, and courtship in the past two years, I learned nothing about maintaining a healthy relationship.

Being together has required a lot more time and work than learning to pick up women ever did, but it has brought me far greater satisfaction and joy.

Perhaps that's because it is not a game. Sometimes it takes some baby steps to break out of a disabling mental box, and Strauss charts how sex can sometimes function as a psychic icebreaker to get somebody who is stuck moving forward towards real life. The sex drive is powerful enough to motivate someone who has dug themselves into a deep and alienating silo to climb out of it, and that motivation, under the right circumstances, can help break them out of dysfunctional patterns that are not working.

For example, my favorite part of the book comes early on: Strauss has just signed up for a "workshop" with a pickup artist, who is bringing him and some other shy and geeky guys to night clubs and teaching them how to pick up women. Another guy in the same workshop is 26 and never even kissed a girl before. He is so shy that he cannot use a urinal, because peeing in front of other guys terrifies him. A few weeks later, he excitedly shares, "I can pee beside people now!

It's all about confidence. So the stuff I learned in the workshop isn't just for chicks after all Just because you've always done something a certain way doesn't mean you are eternally doomed to repeat it, people can change and grow and learn. The self is flexible. Social skills, like any skills, can be learned, studied, and honed. It's better to take a risk and throw yourself out there than to waste your life accruing bitter regrets. The only way to learn new skills is to be willing to experiment and fail and sometimes look foolish, but if you stick with it and pay attention and get good advice and mentoring, you will get better at it eventually and be glad that you had the patience and balls to move out of your crippling little box.

Our society is filled with women and men who are lonely and bored and stuck and who want desperately to connect and live and have fun but don't know how to get there. The sad thing about the book is that it documents the tragic lack of vision in people who settle for the shallow, canned interactions of casual sex rather than taking a real risk with full, authentic relationships.

Mar 22, Marrick rated it liked it. I learned that I am what, in pick up artist "PUA" parlance, is called a "natural. So I didn't pick this book up for its instructional content.

Rather, I was intrigued into reading this book by curiosity. I wanted to see how my life experience stacked up with my preconceived notion of a true PUA. I envisioned a PUA as being a highly confident, suave, cool operator that women swoon over without being able to control themselves. I learned that my concept of I learned that I am what, in pick up artist "PUA" parlance, is called a "natural. I learned that my concept of what the PUA is, prior to reading this book, was wrong.

In fact, PUAs are very insecure, needy, but intelligent people that have figured out how to give off the illusion of being confident and interesting, to trick or some may say "persuade" women into casual, short-term and primarily physical relationships. Yet, they long for the long-term relationships, built on emotional connections, that us "naturals" seek and often maintain, but have mistakenly chosen what they perceive to be the best path to get there- i.

I'll cease any further substantive review because I don't want to spoil the book for anyone interested in picking it up pun intended. But I will add two more comments: First, viewed in a general sense, the concepts discussed in this book within the context of meeting and successfully "closing" women, can be applied to all other aspects of life.

I plan to incorporate them into my practice and use some of them to "pick up" new clients and negotiate and close business deals. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.

DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.

Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, psychology lovers. The book discusses neil strauss' personal journey during which he discovered a secret society of guys who use secret.

Visit the game book official website to learn more… Neil strauss had only ever had one girlfriend and slept with six girls. Some of the techniques listed in the game:. Great story and addictive to read. Hidden somewhere, in nearly every major city in the world, is an underground seduction lair. You can read the game penetrating the secret society of pickup artists pdf direct on your mobile phones or pc.

Penetrating the secret society of. Penetrating the secret society of pickup artists is neil strauss's foray into the world of dating. Penetrating the secret society of pickup artists may require a sound knowledge of hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. How Pickup Artists Work Howstuffworks.