Tuesday, September 16, 2008

the game.


The Game is at heart a cautionary tale, the sort told by rock stars. Strauss, a writer for Rolling Stone and other publications, has co-written books by porn star Jenna Jameson, rocker Marilyn Manson, Motley Crue, and Jane's Addiction bandmember Dave Navarro. Strauss' PUAs appear as implausible and out of control as any rock star, including a pre-rehab Courtney Love, who visits Project Hollywood, a house near the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles that Strauss moves into with several other PUAs.
The pick-up artists come across as nerdy, emotionally underdeveloped men, usually young, who have chosen to reinvent themselves as sexually irresistible predators by analyzing the nuances of social behavior and "running programs" that hijack these social structures. If this sounds like computer hacking, that's not too far off: Ross Jeffries, one of the first people to run lectures on PUA techniques (and supposedly the model for Tom Cruise's character in the film Magnolia), promotes a technique called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that combines hypnosis with a language of gestures and verbal cues to entice women to have sex.

Other PUAs employ other techniques, including the "Mystery Method," a technique based on the concept of an "indirect approach," befriending the companions of a target while ignoring her in order to make the PUA more attractive. Strauss befriends Mystery, a profoundly damaged professional magician, who developed this technique, and learns his secrets. After learning and some practice, Strauss shaves his head, trades in his clothing, and becomes "Style." Style successfully hits on dozens of women, possibly hundreds-if this story is to be believed. (Strauss insists that this is a true story.)

This is a book that had a change on my life and past the secret on to you my blog viewers.

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