Scattered thoughts on The Game
After several years (yes, years) of encouragement by a friend, I finally read Neil Strauss’s book, The Game. It’s very funny, and I endorse the recommendation.
A lot of the joy of reading the book is just the joy of getting to witness Mystery, the PUA, who’s an amazing character. For a sense for what he’s like:
“Besides, my goals are changing,” he continued. “It started with wanting attention. Now I think I’m looking for love. I want to be in a relationship where I can feel butterflies in my stomach. I want a woman I can respect for her art, like a singer or a super hot stripper.”
and, after he breaks up with his girlfriend and she, at his encouragement, sleeps with his roommate:
“I want to kill her.” He rolled onto his back and moaned like a dying dog. “Logically, I know I’m being controlled by my emotions. But my logic is just 2 percent right now. I feel emotionally raw.” He clenched his bedsheet in his fist. “I feel strange and empty, like after a shit.”
He rolled over and started sobbing again. “I feel shit empty.”
I love this man.
At some point, Strauss is seduced by the sister of two of his fans, and she becomes his first groupie.
“My last boyfriend was the sweetest guy, and he did everything for me,” she went on. “But I didn’t like him. He got on my nerves. After I started reading my brothers’ pick up stuff, I understood why I wasn’t attracted to him or any of the other guys at school. They’re all so boring. They don’t understand cocky funny.”
What’s funny about this quote is that, uh, PUAs are losers. I don’t mean that people who are unsatisfied with their lives and try to improve them are losers, in general. I also don’t mean that guys who try to sleep with lots of girls are losers, necessarily. I mean—as Strauss describes it, PUAs at seminars would routinely copy his and Mystery’s outfits and routines wholesale:
Every Friday when they arrived, Mystery or Tyler Durden stood in front of the pillow pit and taught them pretty much the same openers, body language tips, and value-demonstrating routines. On Saturday afternoon, they all went shopping on Melrose. They bought the same four-inch-platform New Rock boots and black-and-white striped shirt with bits of rope hanging from the sides. They bought the same rings, necklaces, hats, and sunglasses. They went to the tanning salon.
We were breeding an army.
At night they descended on the Sunset Strip, a swarm of player bees. Even when the seminar and workshop ended, students lingered in the clubs on Sunset for months afterward, working on their game. You could spot them from behind by the matching boots and the rope dangling from their shirts. They clustered in groups, prowling for open sets and sending in emissaries to say, “Hey, I need to get a female opinion on something.”
It’s all in such poor taste. If the main reason Strauss is interesting is that he has a cult following, but everyone following him is clearly an idiot, should that count against him? At what point should his groupie recognize that his status rests on weak foundations?
But I suppose if there are men, like her brothers, with bad taste, then why not women with bad taste, too. I hear taste runs in families.
Another thing that jumps out at me is the dissolution of Project Hollywood as the different factions fight for control and over women. “A bunch of PUAs decide to move in together to work on their art” sounds like the beginning of a comedic tragedy, and of course it is, partly because PUAs are typically socially awkward nerds who don’t know how to build community, but mostly because they’re hyper-sensitive to social dynamics and hyper-obsessed with status.
I’ve read that cats and rabbits coexist peacefully despite one being a predator and the other prey. For cats, to groom is understood to be dominant behavior; for rabbits to be groomed is—so the cat grooms the rabbit and everyone is happy. But I guess this is impossible if you all go for the same girls and read the same Real Social Dynamics pieces about Stylemogging.
I’m reminded of this excerpt from BLAP’s essay on characteristics of scenes and villages:
[E]very scene suffers from the absence of the traits it selects against. The paucity of old people and children is common across most scenes. But each has its own vices, too. A common one is an undersupply of people who serve as social glue; scenes are often peopled by nerds or quasi-nerds, because they so heavily reward singleminded intensity of interest. But failure modes abound. An artsy or anarchist scene can end up unable to organize or coordinate groups or maintain physical infrastructure. A libertarian scene that prizes independence can fail to achieve the communitarian ties required for people to coexist in peace. A tech scene can throw party after party with no music, the vibe foundering for lack of the two or three hyperextroverts needed to imbue a gathering with life. A leftist scene bringing together all the most conscientious activists can collapse under internal policing.
A PUA scene involutes under the weight of everyone AMOGing each other.
Near the end of the book, when Strauss’s two-year-long sex binge finally lands him a girlfriend, the quest arises as to whether he needed game to get her.
She rolled me off her, so that we were facing each other on our sides, our faces an inch apart. “You don’t need to take their advice,” she said, her breath intoxicating and intoxicated. “Everything I like about you, and everything that makes me think you’re rad, is all the stuff you already had before you met those PUA guys. I don’t want you wearing dumbass jewelry and Pee-wee Herman shoes. I would have liked you before all that self-improvement shit.”
From outside, we heard the sounds of men climbing the hill, flush with the excitement of another night out almost getting laid. “All the things you learned from the PUAs almost made us not come together,” Lisa continued. “I want you to just be Neil: balding, nerdy, glasses, and all.”
In the text, Strauss ends up with a kind of compromise conclusion: what Lisa likes about him is his nerdiness, but it took all of the self-improvement shit in order for him to have the confidence for them to get to know each other.
My read is somewhat more cynical. I think that people generally don’t understand the reasons why they like things, and that more often than not the cause is other than what they attribute their liking to.
Maybe this will be clear with an example. I used to live near Alamo Square, in SF. Alamo square is a beautiful park on an SF hilltop with gorgeous views of the city, large Monterey cypresses, and, for much of the year, the fog melting overhead as it dissolves on its flow westward across the city. The thing that draws tourists to Alamo Square is that the Painted Ladies, a row of colorful Victorian houses, one of which was the fictional setting of 90s TV show Full House. These tourists can often be overheard remarking on how beautiful the houses are, but I don’t buy it. My belief is that it’s the cityscape and the trees and the fog’s melting that are what really make the experience beautiful, and that the houses, as the most salient, discrete aspect of the park, get the credit. Maybe you need the houses there to get people to remark on the beauty, but they’re not its cause.
Here’s Amy Chua in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:
In imparting these lessons to the girls, I’d constantly remember things my own parents had said to me. “Be modest, be humble, be simple,” my mother used to chide. “The last shall come first.” What she really meant of course was, “Make sure you come in first so that you have something to be humble about.”
And I think, similarly... make sure you get the girl, so she can believe she likes you for your balding, dimpled head.1
As I was reading the book, the thing that seemed least appealing to me about being a PUA the apparent repetitiveness of it all. Evidently, if you’re committed to maximizing throughput, you basically need to memorize a bunch of routines and apply them over and over again.
Strauss mentions, but doesn’t deeply interrogate, a few aspects of his experience of being a PUA that are related. He does mention that it feels rote; he also says that the use of canned lines creates a feeling of separation between himself and the character that he plays for women.
But, on reflection, I’m not sure that these criticisms are sound. Most of the things that people do for fun are repetitive. Think: chess, tennis, swing dance, League of Legends, running, mediation, teaching, jigsaw puzzles, swimming, cooking—most people who spend their time doing anything at all spend it in repetitive ways.
In fact, the primary substitute to sleeping around, being in a relationship, is also often very repetitive. As ava says, this is a major challenge:
I believe that romantic relationships are really difficult because you are trying to surprise and delight someone over a long period of time, and most people don’t really have the attention span or the stamina for that. Or, honestly, the psychological acuity. And it’s not just about dedication to the person—over a long time, in order to be interesting, you have to keep pulling from the external world. Like how you want to arrive at lunch with your best friends saying: Guys. You will not believe the gossip I have for you. You have to remain generative in order to keep things interesting.
For all of these activities, presumably including PUA, the repetitiveness is countered by growth and a changing relationship to the activity. Growth is the most legible, like an increasing ELO score in chess. Changing relationships are usually mediated by an increased sensitivity to and appreciation for differences between different instances of the activity, like a finer sense for the contribution of different spices to the flavors of different meals. And, with enough presence, any can become a flow activity—like breathing meditation.
Anyway, now I’ve convinced myself that the least appealing thing about pickup would be having your social life be PUAs and party girls.
See also sympathetic opposition’s discussion of a related phenomenon:
People discuss members of the other gender who are particularly salient to them—for instance, very attractive people, or the kind of person who is most likely to approach you. Then cross-gender eavesdroppers read these discussions as if the women are discussing men in general (or as if the men are discussing women in general, mutatis mutandis, god this is gonna be confusing to write). This is pretty understandable because the discussion is usually phrased as “men do x” or “women do y” but it doesn’t work. The biggest failure mode is that cross-gender eavesdroppers lean hard into not doing the things that salient people do, when those cross-gender eavesdroppers might be better served by thinking, “Huh, these are the kind of men/women that women/men think about & talk about. Are there ways it would be helpful for me to be more like them?”