The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss Vs. The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida.
Firstly, before you decide you want to hunt me down and punch me in the face, know that the title of this Throwdown is taken straight from The Game. Secondly, I could at least use a hug before I get a punch, because I’m pretty sure books like these are what drive sweet, sane feminists like me to become one of those man-eating, half-gorilla femi-zombies I keep hearing so much about. Reading these selections definitely made me feel like I was PMSing to the max, but I persevered for you, dear Rumpus readers! Let’s puke together, shall we?
Bummer: There’s a lot of sexist bullcrap in The Way of the Superior Man. Deida reiterates many times that men need a “mission” or a “purpose” in life, while women only need a relationship, and that women’s moods are illogical and rarely rooted in real problems. Furthermore, women are so obsessed with their partners that they “feel [them] all day” and “do not frequently consider other options.” (Don’t worry about your wife cheating on you. That doesn’t even appeal to her in her fantasy life!) For men, “their woman is replaceable.” But “your woman” will never be able to replace you.
In this murky misogynist soup, one line in particular made me straight up sad: “Your need is far deeper than any woman can provide. Your ultimate desire is for the union of consciousness with its own luminosity.” Damn. It’s deeply depressing on a semantic level (“provide” a “need”??) but even more depressing when I focus on what he’s trying to say, and realize that some guys actually believe this—they think women are not human beings like them who need self-actualization beyond relationships and parenthood, who are interested in a spiritual life or serious self-inquiry. In Deidaland, a woman is not very curious about her own consciousness because an intimate relationship is always the highest priority of her life. Your consciousness does it for me, you big strong masculine man!
Pick Up Artists Fight Back: You might be thinking, surely those pick up artists put Deida to shame in the arena of archaic sex stereotyping! Maybe they do. I had a hard time concentrating on what exactly was going on with them because they’re such a flat-out pitiable lot. They give themselves names like “Grimble” and “Sisonpyh” (hypnosis, backwards) and their conquests, girls they’re allegedly attracted to, are called such flattering nicknames as “Wideface.” The general public became familiar with techniques like “neging” (saying something rude about a hot girl to lower her self-esteem) back when the pick-up artist world was getting a lot of media traction and that ridiculous Mystery had a show on VH1. (Is it a Fruedian slip that I first typed “VHS”?) To his credit, author Neil Strauss is aware of how the men who join this community seem to move from dysfunction into more dysfunction, evolving from guys who don’t know how to connect with women into guys who still don’t know how to connect with women but can at least con a make out session out of them.
Anyway, a lot of their picking up (which can be as tame as just getting a phone number) takes place at spots like California Pizza Kitchen and T.G.I.Fridays—which reminds me, I came up with a great neg: “Hey, you’re in a T.G.I.Fridays.”—and the girls they designate “10s” are inevitably self-styled tan, big boobied blondes.
Finally, the number one item in their pick-up arsenal is gum. Ew. There should be an age limit to buying gum and that limit should be 12. If you’re an adult who still thinks gum-chewing means “fresh breath,” you can come over sometime and we’ll eat a bag of sour cream and chives potato chips together. Then we’ll take turns smelling each others’ mouths after we suck on some Wrigleys. Oh, no takers? How strange. Plus, have you ever seen someone chew gum and manage to look even halfway intelligent while they do? Smoking a cigarette is sexier, and smoking is gross. Hell, gnawing on a piece of hay is sexier. (Free tip: add “piece of hay” to your pick up gear. It will also be a good conversation starter.)
David Deida is a Terrible Writer: You can like his ideas. You can think he’s a brilliant public speaker. But the guy has atrocious word choice instincts. Most of the time he treads in the water of obtuse new age nonsense, but on occasion he gets carried away and earnestly pens some high hilarity. Here are a few choice phrases that should make his editor curl up in shame:
“Bloom her into fullness.” This is kind-of fun in a koan way, since “bloom” is a verb that can’t be done to something but only by something. I tried to think of another verb like that and all that came to mind was “fart.”
“Thrust love from the freedom of your deep being even as your body and mind die blissfully through a crucifixion of inevitable pleasure and pain[…]” The sentence I pulled that from is three times as long. Language is a privilege, David, not a right!
“Your masculine thunderbolt of love can brighten her darkness.” I can’t even. Thunder? Thunder is brightening something? I just can’t.
“You will not want to [have sex with her] that’s for sure. When you are depolarized, the last thing you want to do is get it up for that potato.” I LOLed.
“Know eternity. Do whatever it takes.” Pretty weak sauce. Whose definition of eternity is he using? How does one know when they truly know? It’s a cop out, on par with “Feel through not only your boundaries, but also her boundaries, so that you are both dissolved.” That type of instruction is not helpful because it’s not instruction at all. It’s just an imperative. Not everyone is mentally prepared to “die in the giving of your gift.” Or even understand what it means. For some people, that’s going to lead to a crack up.
Which brings me to my next point—
Deida Wants You Dead: There are some practices that require education to be undertaken safely and effectively. One of these, I would say, is going to “the middle of the woods by yourself” and fasting and abstaining from sleep, which Deida recommends rather flippantly with the additional advice “don’t quit before you fall through the hole of your fear and emerge with a vision.” Well, starving, exhausted people do have visions, I guess that’s true. And they may fall into a hole while deliriously stumbling around foraging for berries. David Deida: results guaranteed!
I know we’re Americans, so we can do anything we want and be awesome at it without any training, and I know (with a 50% chance of accuracy) that you’re a man, and you’re super tough and capable and have watched that TV show where the British guy lives from drinking his own pee—but maybe your should hold off reliving “Grizzly Man”/”Into the Wild” for the time being? Don’t forget that, according to Deida, your woman is replaceable to you but you are not replaceable to her. So, really, you’ll end up with two deaths on your head if you pull this stunt.
Homoerotism: The Game is doing it right. To start, there’s the subtitle. “Penetrating?” Ok. You penetrate that secret group of dudes, Neil! Then come back and tell us about how good you are with women.
Although the men of The Game are obsessed with ladies and with fucking said ladies, there’s little joy in their conquests, and the time not spent out hunting for poon is whiled away on the computer, where they diligently type up reports about who they had sex with or made out with. They may even upload audio or secret video records of their pick up attempts for feedback. The most important thing is not that they connect with a woman, but that they gain affirmation and recognition from their partners in pick-up.
In this way, they are entirely like the members of TheEroticReview, a popular site where johns brag about how they are The Shit because they’ve hired, like, three hundred prostitutes in the past two years, and written up reviews about every one, so other guys can read about it and get hard and then hire the same girl and think “awesome, I’m boning the chick that BigOne69 got a mind-blowing BBBJTC from! I’m king of the world!”
(Quick disclaimer: Non-sex workers get very excited about TER. They think it is the most fascinating site of all time and that they have stumbled on a “secret society,” just as Mr. Strauss seemed to think that the easily locatable, internet-based, seminar-offering pick up community was somehow “secret.” But don’t bring TER up to a prostitute or you’ll sound like a jackass. It would be the equivalent of asking a banker, “Hey, have you ever heard of this thing called the Wall Street Journal?”)
Winner: On the occasions that Deida said something I agreed with— “[Your woman] knows when you are just dicking around”—I comforted myself with that old adage about monkeys and typewriters. I’m not saying that he’s a bad person, per se. Mostly he just seems confused. He says women possess destructive energy but that men have “Shiva” energy, when everyone knows Shiva is the destroyer. He says “beer” is a form of “feminine energy.” He writes that women “surrender” while men “release,” although, true to form, there’s no elaboration as to how those are different. He’s under the impression that all women everywhere love soap operas. And he throws out statistics he clearly made up off the top of his head about how many women have a “masculine core” and how many men are “balanced.” (10% and 10%, if you’re curious.)
Neil Strauss also seems like a nice enough guy, and he happened to stumble into this crew of men who should have also been nice guys, but instead they became bitter and misshapen with neediness and aggression. He ends the book with: “We were all searching outside ourselves for our missing pieces, and we were looking in the wrong direction. Mystery didn’t have the answers. A blonde 10 in a two-set at the Standard didn’t have the answers. The answers were to be found within.” This would seem like a nice conclusion if I weren’t so poisoned from Deida. Now all I can think is, that’s easy for you to say, Man! If only women had such inner resources…. Sadly, we have only our men to turn to for fulfillment. The femi-zombies can’t invade fast enough.