Coming off the success of his first bestselling book, The Mystery Method, Mystery once again teams up with writer Chris Odom to "impart some pearls of wisdom," and this time, he has quite a story to tell. Just as his VH1 reality show The Pickup Artist is about to debut in the United States, Mystery and his crew have withdrawn to their gorgeous Miami mansion to get into shape and plot their next move. A one-on-one pua student, Adam, comes to stay at the house and get his every question answered. As a kaleidoscope of crazy pua characters enlivens the scene, Mystery begins to draw Adam deeper and deeper into his world, where he witnesses firsthand the pitfalls of the pickup artist lifestyle, and gains an intimate portrait of Mystery's ideas and struggles. Eventually Adam must decide whether the powers of the pua game are worth the surreal lifestyle that comes along with it. As the book progresses, Mystery and his partners, Lovedrop and Matador, travel from the sands of South Beach to the strip clubs of Las Vegas, criss-crossing the country to teach their seminars on pickup and seduction. They party in the Hollywood Hills, set up their own Pleasure Bubble, and taste the high life among the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan. Along the way, Mystery reveals the next level of game theory and technique, designed to catapult timid and insecure men into a world of confidence, attractiveness, and all-around success with women. Mystery serves another rich helping of knowledge this go-around, for those readers seeking his techniques…
• A list of all the triggers that create—and destroy—attraction
• A new way to approach strangers and start a conversation: microcalibrated openers
• Mystery’s most powerful humor technique, The Absurd—so you’ll never run out of things to say again
• A full chapter on physical escalation (touching, kissing, “making a move”)
• The solution to inner-game issues, for improved confidence
• A chapter on exotic dancers and strip clubs
• How to set up your pimp pad
• Mystery's philosophy on life
• Plenty of gambits
• And much, much more…
When it comes time for Mystery to reveal the secrets of physical escalation (touching, kissing, 'making a move') he says,
"Physical escalation is actually quite easy. Just read along with me, and I will show you how. Just do what I say and it will work. Don’t worry, it’s easy, and the moves I’m going to teach you will not get you rejected. Trust me, it’s fun and you can stop anytime. Now, let’s get right into it…"
Every week, "The Pick-Up Artist" begins with a group hug. The contestant who narrowly escaped elimination in the previous episode returns to the rest of the survivors and is fully embraced by them, in a combination of brotherhood and desperation.
There is much to loathe about "The Pick-Up Artist" (VH1, Sundays at 10 p.m.), from its astonishingly callous disregard for women to its sometimes laughable protagonists, but this moment is unfailingly genuine. There are nominal alliances and friendships between certain players, all socially awkward young men badly in need of a confidence boost and a personal shopper, but mainly each sees himself in the others. A victory for any one is, by extension, a victory for all.
From week to week on this show, you can watch these men being nourished, with transformations no less revelatory than those on "The Biggest Loser." Their tour guide into the world of human interaction is Mystery, a well-known leader in the "seduction community" (their term, not mine), who plies the noble trade of instructing the hapless on how to be less so, particularly in regard to women. He speaks deliberately, is irritatingly sure of himself and dresses ridiculously (last week, he paired what appeared to be shiny vinyl pants with a furry top hat; tonight he sports goggles similar to those Snoopy wears when fighting the Red Baron). It should come as little shock that in his previous life, Mystery was a magician.
And here, magic — shaking off the past and giving one’s personality a complete reboot — is what Mystery sells. This season’s contestants, a predictable assortment of virgins, dweebs and eccentrics, badly need the help. They are given haircuts, piercings and the wardrobe of the average unbearable Hollywood nightclub denizen. Then they are brainwashed with a series of tricks on how to chat up women that are largely designed to destabilize and recalibrate the interaction so that the man remains in control. Each week, they are sent into the field, generally a club, to practice their game.
Mystery says things like, "The contestant who kino-escalates" — that’s "kino," as in touch, and escalates, as in successfully — "to a kiss, while preserving comfort in the target, will win the field test." Sexy, right?
Mystery is accompanied by two wings, or assistants: the stoic and flamboyant Matador, who is the show’s secret star, and Tara, a young woman of great empathy and curvature. (Last season’s second male wing, the creepy J-Dog, is nowhere to be found.) Tara, who helped with some challenges in the first season, lends an imprimatur of female approval to the show, a necessary corrective that would be welcome if it weren’t so ridiculous.
Women, of course, are only objects here — targets, marks, penny stocks to be acquired and dumped. When these men are sent out on field tests to demonstrate their acquired aptitude in all things pickup, there’s no discussion of the sort of woman they might be seeking or what, if the first encounter is a success, the second one might look like.
Only the right sex organs matter. In tonight’s episode, Matt attempts to get the phone number of a bikini model but fails. Moments later, Simeon succeeds at the same task. We never so much as get her name.
There is a crude elegance to this strategy: For someone who has, say, never kissed a woman before, depersonalizing might be a useful means to overcoming fear. But as a life strategy, it is repellent.
There is little pride in getting shot down, though, as many of these men invariably are. To see these transactions laid bare is demoralizing, for both parties.
Mystery’s playbook is changing a bit. One of the techniques that last year’s show emphasized was peacocking, or dressing flamboyantly in order to attract attention. Strangely, Alex, the first contestant eliminated this season, was also the most natural peacock, with his semi-trendy glasses and fake gold chain. Why Mystery made him trash the latter is never fully explained. Maybe he didn’t see any voyeuristic potential in it.
Some of this show’s most amusing moments come from watching Mystery’s reactions to watching his charges in the field via hidden camera. Sometimes he’s stern. Sometimes he’s incredulous. Sometimes he realizes a particular student is taking to the teachings perhaps a bit too easily.
"Wow, look at that," he says, watching Brian approach a table full of models in tonight’s episode. "He has no fear," echoes Matador.
They both snicker a bit: They’ve created a monster.
Mystery, Matador, and Lovedrop back to tell Young Hollywood their secrets to scoring women. We join them at their viewing party for VH1’s “The Pick-up Artist” at Neil Strauss’ house. The guys take us inside the party to view Season 2 of their show and give some pick up advice along the way. Hosted by Mystery.
Prophet here just letting everyone know that they can check out behind the scenes footage of Mystery’s “The Pick-Up Artist Premiere Parties” over at http://pickuplabs.com/ featuring Mystery, Matador, and some of the Season 1 crew!
There’s also a whole bunch of other cool and educational goodies over there from Style and his coaches so be sure to check it out.
Happy sarging!
Prophet
About Prophet
Prophet is a VA Coach operating out of Toronto. Aside from his work as an instructor/site admin for Venusian Arts, Prophet is a software consultant at a leading software development firm. In his spare time, he finances, writes, and produces independent films with his wingmen, Showcase and Wild Card.
Not every guy’s got game when it comes to the opposite sex. That’s why ladies’ man extraordinaire Mystery is back with a second season of The Pickup Artist. On the reality competition, he schools nine would-be Romeos in the art of seduction and takes them to meet women as hidden cameras follow their progress. The pupil who learns Mystery’s moves best will bag $50,000, which he could use to start a love pad of his own.
So how does the expert school the love-challenged? In one training exercise, the socially awkward contestants - including a 21-year-old who’s never kissed a girl - mingle with a group of elderly women, removing sexual attraction from the equation. "Then when they go to a nightclub, they have that no-pressure experience to fall back on and can think, ‘I have to be the way i was with the old ladies,’" says Mystery, 37.
Here are Mystery’s three keys for a guy to be a successful pickup artist. he’s not worried if they get out, because, as he says "You can reveal everything about the pickup to women, and it will still work!"
1. PLAY UP TO A GIRL’S PALS.
A practiced pickup artist doesn’t just chat up the pretty girl he’s been scoping out in a bar. He also gets in good with her friends! "Women of beauty are rarely alone; they’re usually in a group," says Mystery. "A guy must go in and talk to everybody…without ruffling the feathers of guys or making the girls feel uncomfortable."
2. SHOW NO FEAR.
Guys should act confident - even if they don’t feel confident - when getting to know a hottie. "You can be scared, but don’t show it," says Mystery. "It’s like having a pebble in your shoe. If you don’t walk with a limp, no one would know."
3. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST.
Mystery’s students are taught to make sure the ladies they’re interested in know that they are nice guys, not players - even if they’re a bit of both. Says Mystery, "As long as you’re a good person and you can convey it, you’re going to trigger attraction mechanisms that are hardwired into women’s brains."
A second season of “The Pickup Artist” begins on VH1 Sunday (10-11 p.m. ) and no hour of TV this week can be more joyfully spent. Ostensibly, this is a show about how to attract women, following the “scientific method” developed by a professional picker-upper known as Mystery (aka Erik von Markovic). Its wider appeal is as pure theater, where a colorful cast does the oldest dance on earth.
With his ponytail, piercings, dark-painted fingernails and outlandish clothing, Mystery is not every woman’s cup of tea. Nature did not even endow him with a deep, manly voice. Yet as he and legions of devotees seem to have discovered, almost any guy can get into the game with just a few simple gambits. Like it or not, the basic strategy is sound: Make the beautiful girls feel insecure (they will respect you for it because most guys drool over them) and make all the others feel safe.
The real point, though, is to make men feel confident. On stage for training by Mystery, and as entertainment for us, are an assortment of young men so inept and unappealing, so geekish and freakish, that they seem beyond hope. Even after hair and apparel makeovers to erase the worst of their self-inflicted flaws, the essential nerdiness of these guys is verging on tragic, even as we laugh at them like the mean girls surely did in high school.
Perhaps their neediness is exaggerated for the show, but not entirely. When Mystery tells his charges that after training with him, they will one day be able to teach their sons the same skills. The looks on those suddenly hopeful faces could not easily be faked: Our sons! We will indeed become men!
Mystery is not the only instructor on the show, giving tips on dressing for success: “Do you look like the type of men that are sexually active?” There is wingman Matador, who appears to have raided the costume archive of “The Quest for Fire.” The mind boggles as we see (via hidden camera) women in a bar lining up to stroke his fur vest and nuzzle this 21st century hunter-gatherer.
“It’s like watching lions in a shepherd’s den!” an excited trainee exclaims approvingly. As wingwoman Tara certainly knows, however, the sheep can take care of themselves.
Mystery’s Back For Another Round Of The Pickup Artist
Hot off the press! New season debuts Sunday, Oct. 12 at 10/9c on VH1!
Based on the tremendous viewer response to the series The Pickup Artist, VH1 has once again teamed up with world renowned pickup guru Mystery to help guide nine new socially awkward students overcome their biggest fears - meeting women. As we saw last season, Mystery has developed a foolproof formula for these men to follow, whether they’re in a bar, club or coffee shop. Through his various teachings and in-the-field tests, Mystery will prepare these men with the skills they need to overcome their shyness and confidence issues in the real world. The Pickup Artist 2 premieres on VH1 on Sunday, October 12 at 10:00 PM.
The Pickup Artist 2 brings a new twist to the show, as Mystery and Season 1 wing-man and fellow pickup artist Matador are joined by new wing-girl Tara. Viewers may remember Tara as Season 1’s kissing coach. In this second season she will expand her role by adding a female perspective. Tara will serve as full time wing-girl to Mystery and act as a confidant for the contestants.
This season, The Pickup Artist 2 moves to Phoenix, AZ, as the guys sample the local night life in hopes of perfecting their skills and winning the title of Master Pickup Artist. In each episode, one contestant will be declared the winner of a challenge and granted immunity from elimination, while the loser will be sent packing. The challenges this season are even more intense and personal. The dating neophytes will be tested in a local supermarket, a charity auction and various area nightclubs outfitted with hidden cameras that capture women?s real responses to the contestants’ come-ons.
“It’s certainly no mystery why we’ve partnered again with Mystery. He already had a legion of followers from his book when we launched The Pickup Artist series last year, and now he’s grown into a pop culture phenomenon. He’s even been parodied on Saturday Night Live, a true indicator of water cooler buzz.” said Jeff Olde, Executive Vice President, Original Programming & Production.
?This series is so much more than just how to pick up a woman. It’s about instilling confidence in these young men. As each week goes by, you cheer on this crew of socially awkward men who ultimately flourish with some hard observations of themselves, gut-wrenching experiences in the field and even a little TLC.?
In the end, only one guy will remain and be worthy of the title Pick-Up Artist. Whoever claims this title will also win the cash prize of $50,000 to use towards his new social life. Catch The Pickup Artist 2 on VH1, premiering Sunday, October 12 at 10:00 PM*
Dressed in tight leather pants, patterned vest and a V-neck muscle shirt, Matador, of VH1’s “The Pick-Up Artist,” cut an intimidating figure Wednesday night in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall.
As part of the latest event in the Sex Week at Yale series, Matador spoke to a packed audience for 90 minutes, revealing tips and tricks from his unusual trade: seduction. Mystery, the creator of the VH1 program, could not attend because of illness.
“The Pick-Up Artist” is a reality television program pitting eight socially tactless men against each other in a quest to become the “Master Pick-Up Artist.” Mystery and his “faithful wingmen,” Matador and J Dog, educate and evaluate the competitors.
Offering a brief summary of the pick-up routine known as the Mystery Method, Matador led his audience through the three major steps: attraction, comfort and seduction. He began his talk with a lengthy discussion of his past, regaling the audience with a litany of awkward personal encounters.
“I got girls, but not ‘quality women,’” Matador told the crowd.
This and several other moments were punctuated by laughter from the audience. Speaking in bits of pick-up jargon like “cutting a thread” — stopping conversation — and “stacking forward” — redoubling efforts — Matador continued, detailing the proper way to approach a girl.
Adopting an over-the-shoulder body stance, the pick-up artist explained, “I’m not so invested in the conversation, and I’m willing to walk away. That should suppress any discomfort she might experience right off the bat.”
Matador described the “tribal” existence of some places in Africa in order to convey the “way in which we used to live.” The social roles of prehistoric men and women heavily influence the way people approach sexual interactions today, he explained, and primal instincts continue to affect how we behave.
Outlining how to work a “cold approach,” in which men seek out women in nightclub environments, Matador emphasized a man’s need to assert himself as a leader and protector. Working off of pre-formed material can be helpful, he added.
“If you do these things, and you systematically hit these objectives, it is scarily consistent how well you can guide interactions any way you want to go,” Matador said.
After the “attraction” stage, Matador moved on to the “comfort” stage. As the most time-intensive part of the Mystery Method, this step involves developing a rapport with the “target” in order to gain her trust, Matador said. He recommended cultivating a body of knowledge that lends itself to good conversation.
“You know when you have a good conversation?” asked Matador. “It’s a harmonious free flow of information.”
Finally, Matador spoke about seduction — specifically, the arousal process. Women cannot be talked into sex, he said, especially as an act that is just as much about giving as receiving. He emphasized the need to ensure that sex takes place somewhere that is clean and comfortable and has a well-stocked refrigerator.
“You want to make sure your place is sex-worthy,” he said.
While at least a third of the audience left before the end of Matador’s presentation, student reaction among those who remained was fairly positive.
When asked whether she found the pick-up techniques offensive because of the attitude toward women they might seem to suggest, Victoria Wild ’08 responded, “No, not at all. I thought it was pretty hysterical.”
In general, students interviewed said they found the talk more entertaining than instructive.
“I actually came more for the guys’ reaction in the audience than anything,” Sofia Medina ’09 said. “I feel like a lot of the guys here maybe need to learn just how to use the respect aspect of it.”
Other students noted that, beneath its sensational exterior, the Method possessed a certain practical value. Techniques could easily be adapted for social networking and interview situations, they said.
“He definitely had some good points,” Wild said.
But Rosa Li ’09, who led the Yale Precision Marching Band in storming SSS, playing Akon and Bon Jovi, before Matador’s presentation began, disagreed. While formalized seduction methods are helpful for men who have trouble approaching girls, she acknowledged, “the idea of having a scripted way to get a girl into bed” is in poor taste.
Other Sex Week at Yale events on the schedule include a lingerie fashion show hosted by AIDS research and awareness groups, along with the Great Porn Debate featuring Ron Jeremy, Vivid Girl Monique Alexander, Craig Gross and Donnie Pauling.
Excerpted from yaledailynews.com, read original article HERE
Mystery and Matador are two stars of the VH1 reality show The Pickup Artist. Mystery is heralded by many as the best pickup artist in the world. He has helped create a multimillion dollar industry around the “art” of attracting women.
Matador is the cofounder of the Venusian Arts and one of the top instructors of the Mystery Method.
Quick Bio
Mystery’s exploits have been covered by publications such as The New York Times, Elle Magazine, The Montreal Gazette, and Saturday Night Magazine.
Exploding onto the pickup community in the late ‘90s, Mystery quickly gained underground fame for his groundbreaking contributions to the practice. Mystery popularized indirect game, canned material, group theory, and hoop theory, along with a wealth of useful tactics such as the Neg and the three-second rule. Mystery was the first to offer live, in-field instruction, and he has trained hundreds of students all over the world, including a who’s who of the most respected pickup artists in the community.
Matador is an entrepreneur at heart and runs a successful real estate development company. He’s Mystery’s wing and has taught live boot camps and seminars with him all over the world. Matador was the first instructor besides Mystery to lead his own live programs.
Matador and Mystery live in the Project Miami mansion and enjoy winging each other night after night, refining their game in the process.
THE INTERVIEW Q-1:You have traveled the globe teaching groups of men your “method.” What do these men want to get out of your seminars?
Mystery: Overwhelmingly, most men that come to my boot camps are looking to get a high-quality girlfriend. It’s not the quantity thing. They mainly want a good girlfriend.
Q-2:After years of crafting your method and creating the Venusian Arts, would you say your method is complete or still evolving?
Mystery: Just like the world, it’s always evolving. My method is complete enough to help people. No method is ever 100% complete.
Q-3:Will we ever see Mystery get married?
Mystery: Yes, absolutely. I faked my marriage for two weeks with Katia [a former girlfriend]. This was an eye-opener. One week into this so-called marriage everyone thought it was an April fools’ joke, but we kept it going and it made me feel good.
Q-4:Who is a woman that you find sexy?
Mystery: I have a strong belief in leaving a woman better off than when I met her. When I draw a woman in my life, she has to fit my life not because she is beautiful. That is not reason enough, but because I understand the direction she wants to take her life. The way she wants to be viewed, her career and all that stuff. Do I want a girl that is in music or acting? Sure. Because I’m here in LA and I understand what it is to go off and do a project and then come back and see each other and have a good time. I understand the traveling and the nightclubbing.
I would say Megan Fox [from Transformers]. She would be at my speed and wouldn’t be riding my coattails.
Q-5:Who is the woman you admire the most?
Mystery:Oprah, for her power. I’m not attracted to her power, but proud of her for it.
Q-6:What is your definition of love?
Mystery: There is a parallel between love and magic. If you know the secrets, for some it becomes less potent and for some more potent. Just because you understand the laws of physics it doesn’t make the universe any less wondrous. Similarly, if you understand what love is, instead of that ethereal feeling which is a subjective reality, you can objectively backwards engineer and figure out what its purpose is and how it functions. This doesn’t mean that when you experience it that it is any less.
Love is also pair-bonding: Quite simply, we have a mechanism in our brain that is evolutionary-calibrated to align with those who have high survival replication value for us. When a man is with a woman, all that he has to do is prove to her that he will stick around and that way she can have sex, and sex equates to babies and that is wired in our ancient circuitry. It doesn’t mean she wants him to stick around, but that the choice is hers.
Love is magic.
Q-7:In your opinion, what is the No. 1 mistake average guys make with women?
Matador: They communicate interest to women without showing value first. For example, if George Clooney or Brad Pitt communicates interest it will work most of the time because we have a concept of a George Clooney or a Brad Pitt. We do not have a concept of the average guy until he communicates higher value. Women need to have data to figure out who the hell you are. That is why the average guy needs to demonstrate higher value before showing interest.
Q-8:Where do you see yourselves in five years? Mystery: I see myself married and settled.
Matador: Married with kids.
The author of The Game, Neil Strauss, joins the interview session.
Q-9:Can any guy get their perfect 10? Or do they have to have some predisposition?
Mystery: As long as your survivability and replication value is up there you can get your 10.
Neil Strauss: A man’s status in some degree is an attractive quality to women. You can always get new status no matter how old you are.
Q-10:Does your method work on all women in all different geographical locations? Will your method work in all countries, all nationalities and ethnicities?
Matador: “Attraction is not a choice” — that’s a quote from David DeAngelo. A woman’s emotional circuitry and attraction switches are ubiquitous in that regard. Human beings are human beings. They have evolved a certain way. Just because you draw lines on the map, doesn’t mean people are different.
Neil Strauss: I’m going to give you an extreme proof of Mystery’s theories. I was in Bangladesh in a small village in the middle of nowhere. They had no TV and no internet. Not only did the game work on a girl that was completely Muslim and her family wanted to kill me, but because I was peacocking and wearing special earrings and stuff I had a bunch of girls attracted to me that were following me everywhere. Peacocking is universal.
Q-11:What do you want to say to your critics who say what you are doing is disingenuous?
Matador: What is disingenuous about it? Putting up with a woman’s unacceptable behavior because you are operating from a point of view of scarcity? Or being true to yourself and being selective to what you need? Women are far more genuine as they exercise their ability to say no more frequently. The Mystery Method gives people the ability to have higher standards for themselves and be selective.
Q-12:How would you save a troubled relationship from ending?
Matador: Things are not as they appear. Everything is transient no matter how great they seem. Over time, no matter how great the honeymoon was, a woman might see you as a threat if she thinks she is wasting her time with you. You have to always have value for your partner; it’s a way of being.
Q-13:What is necessary in order to develop a meaningful relationship with a woman?
Matador: It’s a real process and it takes time. Listen to what is positively unique about that person. Prove that you’re an attractive guy and that you are filled with positive emotions. You need to really like her for who she is trying to be, for her attempt to be a successful woman, which is what is needed for a deep, meaningful relationship.
Q-14:With all your skills and techniques, why aren’t you in a committed relationship now?
Matador: I’m evolving with this knowledge; I have yet to see what I can offer this world… I would like to chase this notion of love and pair bonding to the point where I’m consumed by a women. And I’m not going to FAKE it. I have no agenda when it comes to women; I don’t go out with a girl because Hollywood says she is hot. I want to be so attracted that I lose myself in her. I want my woman to be my muse.
Q-15:One may argue that because you meet so many women on a regular basis, you should have met your counterpart by now?
Matador: At first glance, your logic seems to be right, but as a man that has choice… REAL choice, [I am] not forced to be so optimistic when it is not deserving. You don’t take any girl and make her your girlfriend because you don’t know when the next will one will come by.
Some girls are so beautiful but do drugs. Some girls are so beautiful but are shallow and they have not invested in themselves. Had I not been a man of choice, I would have given them the label of acceptance from the beginning.
Yes, we are all looking for that special someone, but now we are operating from a non-scarcity mentality. That makes us more pure than others… we have the power to say no…
Mystery: When I meet women, I have no apologies for being Mystery. There is dissatisfaction when I realize this girl I spent time with is not worth spending any more time with. If I would stay with her I would be pulling her down the wrong direction as well.
Q-16:What do you want to have written on your epitaph?
Mystery: “The pickup arts enrich my life but they do not define it.” “There is more information in my head that is of great value to others… please revive me!”
Matador: “Life is about creating oneself and not waiting to find it.”
Q-17:What is next for Mystery? Mystery: I have always been fascinated by magic and in magic there is a particular specialty area that is called Attraction Magic. Having completed the VH1 show, I know I can pull off another show on “Attraction Magic.”
Yashar Moieny is an international entrepreneur, sales communication specialist and freelance writer. He currently lives in California.
The descriptions of romantic ruin given by the eight goofballs who show up for sexual makeovers tonight on VH1’s “Pick-Up Artist” feature more slapstick than misery. The dateless guys use metaphors involving pratfalls, bottles that break on their heads and even backward cartwheels to evoke how they feel when stunned into terrified silence by desirable women.
Surprisingly none of these guys mumble or stutter when talking about their awkwardness. Rather, they laugh and ham it up. They have antic personalities, and make self-effacing jokes. (“I had a woman come up to me only to reject me,” one says, guffawing.)
It’s entirely appropriate, then, that the man brought in to reform these loners on this reality competition and to teach them how to get girls encourages them above all to be theatrical. Mystery, the womanizer impresario who has made a name for himself as a seduction coach, does not tell his charges, as love counselors from grandmothers to Men’s Health magazine have, that they should “be themselves,” “smile” and “ask girls about themselves.”
No way. Instead he simply teaches the buffoons a whole new way of clowning, complete with its own costumes, sketches and stagecraft. They lose their computer-schmo uniforms in favor of regalia — eyeliner, hair dye and accessories that seem lifted from John Malkovich’s “Dangerous Liaisons” wardrobe. And they learn to deploy elaborate forms of social manipulation in place of nervous banter.
This is a shrewd bit of coaching — more artifice, not less — and it’s no wonder that Mystery has a reputation for getting results, turning schlubs into ladies’ men. (Neil Strauss, a former reporter and critic for The New York Times, chronicled Mystery’s methods and adventures in his best seller “The Game.” He was also won over to the technique, and used it to seduce women himself.)
The advice to do more acting is a terrific counter-directive to the commands that young people get from all sides in our therapeutic culture, with its focus on internal calm and personal authenticity. These keyed-up young men are unlikely to relax anytime soon, and “being themselves” has landed them nowhere so far. (At least four confess to being virgins; all are sorely disappointed with their romantic track records.) The guys are all at their happiest when mugging with one another or for the cameras.
It’s likely that women find these men not too “insecure,” “inadequate” or “shy” — as they typically fear — but too madcap. They are comic actors who need to learn, for the short term at least, to play suave leading men.
“The Pick-Up Artist,” which began last week, brings together men who appear to have been waiting their whole lives — in one case 45 years — to see seduction codified in some way, and essentially turned into Pop Art. When, in the first episode, Mystery and his henchmen — Matador and J-Dog, themselves former nerds — are seen triumphantly working a roomful of bubbly girls, the art of courtship seems like prancing: like rich comedy and a great time. It does not seem boring, honest and wrenching, like therapy.
Watching the gurus on a hidden camera, the nerds are in awe. They seem to have approached sex and romance as abstractions that need to be approached through a series of bitterly difficult chores — like, say, conversation with women. Observing the maestros strut and play brings smiles to their faces. Could picking up women be this easy?
We’ll see. “I think they don’t understand the purpose of life,” says Mystery, simply, speaking of his pupils. He’s confident he can teach them in eight weeks.
“The Pick-Up Artist” is intriguing — far more intriguing than its tawdry subject might suggest. Mr. Strauss’s thoughtful book showed how sophisticated Mystery’s experiment actually was: What if modern men could be taught the art of swashbuckling Byronic seduction and thereby be saved from the depression and loneliness induced by therapy culture?
This series adds another dimension to this ingenious hypothesis.
THE PICK-UP ARTIST
VH1, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
J. D. Roth and Adam Greener, executive producers for 3 Ball Entertainment. Michael Hirschorn, Jeff Olde and Claire McCabe, executive producers for VH1. A production of 3 Ball Entertainment and VH1.
Excerpted from The New York Times. View original article here.
When you first see the towering, 6-foot-5 man who goes by the name "Mystery," there’s almost too much to take in. A floppy top hat and goggles, bright red lips tattooed on his neck, kohl-lined eyes, platform boots, black nails, binoculars slung around his neck: These are just a few of Mystery’s unexplainable accouterments. But Mystery says he knows just what he’s doing. He calls his look "peacocking" — and explains that it’s a way of capturing women’s attention, to intrigue and, ultimately, sleep with them.
At 35, Mystery (aka Erik Von Markovik) is widely considered one of the most successful pickup artists in the world and makes his livelihood by getting other men laid. He first shot to fame in 2005, after a best-selling exposé by journalist Neil Strauss, "The Game," brought readers inside his life within the Los Angeles seduction scene. Mystery then published an instructional manual titled "How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed: The Mystery Method." Now he’s starring in his very own reality-TV series, "The Pick-up Artist," premiering Aug. 6 on VH1. There, with the help of his wingmen, Matador and J Dog, Mystery plans to fix the luck of a 45-year-old virgin and seven other hapless Don Juans.
When he’s not in front of the camera, Mystery pays homage to his two idols — Tony Robbins and Casanova — by traveling the world offering seduction workshops, some of which run nearly $5,000 a pop. During these seminars, he roams hotel conference rooms in a headset, scribbling Venn diagrams and flowcharts meant to illuminate the female mind. Later on, students accompany him to a nightclub, where like a skilled magician, Mystery produces three platinum blonds on his lap or summons a phone number from a woman standing next to her boyfriend.
As it happens, Mystery used to work as a magician. But he says that he found he could cut the magic from his interactions with people and still captivate them — especially women. Paired with some self-taught psychology, those mind games developed into "The Mystery Method," which, he says, teaches men to rewire a woman’s "attraction circuitry."
How do you "rewire" a woman? According to Mystery, it involves meeting the objectives of her phases of attraction in order to establish comfort inspired ire, to be sure — particularly his use of the "neg," a "subtle-yet-negative statement that puts a target off-guard and makes her question her own value." Along with "peacocking" — which, some might say, paints women as house cats easily distracted by shiny objects — Mystery has also developed "cat theory," which he defines as "keeping ‘bait’ just out of a woman’s reach and continually enticing her in small increments. She must be baited to chase like a cat with a string." He dubs this school of thought the "Venusian Arts" — the end goal of which is "replication." and successfully seduce her within seven hours. It’s a method that has
Salon spoke to Mystery by phone in San Diego (where he was filming an upcoming product) about sexual psychology, the "need to be hugged," and the loneliness of life as a pickup artist.
What can viewers expect from your upcoming VH1 reality-TV show?
It’ll be heartwarming. Eight lovable lonelies are coming to me — one moment. [Yelling in background: Dude, it started!] Forgive me, I’m being pulled from several sides. I have, in this show, eight students and my job is to get them up to speed in a game their dads never taught them. In order to make it challenging we added in an elimination game to it, whereby by the end, only one of them will have earned the right to hang with me, travel with me and teach others.
Were you worried that someone wasn’t going to be qualified by the end of the show?
No, I wasn’t, simply because I’ve done boot camps for quite some time and learning the elegant art of cold approach pickup is definable, it’s quantifiable. You can do it. It’s a lot like getting on a motorcycle. The first time you get on it you’ll be afraid, just like the first time you approach a girl. The same sort of full-blown adrenaline release will take place. If you desensitize yourself to those foreign environments you’ll get yourself up to speed.
You’re already fairly well known, but what does this show mean for your future as a pickup artist?
[Laughs] I’m a 35-year-old man. I don’t need any more friends. I have all the friends that I need in my life to share challenges with. The women in my life, they’re good friends. I’ve never hidden any of this pickup stuff from them. If you had to hide pickup secrets from a woman, I think those secrets would be unethical. During my boot camps, over the years, I’ve invited girlfriends to these events. And, really, they’re great sounding boards. I get to find out what they feel is moral or immoral.
Have they helped you to tweak your method at all?
Well, what a woman says she wants and what she responds to are two different things.
That brings me to another question. You’ve said your method addresses female psychology.
Human psychology.
So what kind of psychological theories underpin your method?
Well, that’s a loaded question.
It is?
I’m fascinated by psychology and one aspect of psychology, if you’re going to zoom into it a little bit, is sexual psychology. We’re not out to try to figure out the opposite sex, we’re trying to figure out ourselves.
If we could reverse-engineer the way the emotional circuits in our brain work, how they function and why and how they systematically trigger when we’re faced with certain events, we could figure out how to do it right. How do you approach a woman without freaking her out?
A woman wants to align with a man of high value. How can a man systematically convey his value to a woman if she won’t even let him? A woman, by the time she’s 23 years old, if she’s a beautiful young lady, she’s going to have been hit on a good 7,500 times. So we have to approach differently. We can’t approach saying, "Wow, I like you, do you like me?"
There are some differences among men and women when it comes to our attraction circuits. A man’s circuits are calibrated primarily to respond to a woman’s replication value — to her hip to waist ratio, facial symmetry, breast shape and size, health characteristics, and all that, right? And a woman, her attraction mechanism is evolutionarily calibrated to respond to more of a man’s social value. In other words, when I hang out with a woman, I don’t hang out with her because I need to be protected. Men, we respond to her replication value. Women, they respond primarily to a man’s survival value or social value. The purpose of life is to survive and replicate and we’ve got 28,000 days — all of us — approximately, give or take, to make that happen.
But survival and replication have a different importance in today’s world than, say, in hunting and gathering days, right?
Well, the purpose of life is to survive and replicate, whether you know that or not. If you don’t survive long enough to replicate, well, then your genes will not replicate. It’s very simple. Our brains, when you’re looking at it from an engineering point of view, every single circuit, every emotional circuit that exists — there’s got to be a good 300 of them — every one exists for a social purpose.
You want to hang out and share challenges with people who can help you in this life. From a woman’s perspective, there is nothing more helpful than having a relationship with a man who can take care of her. Not that she needs to be taken care of. But it certainly would be nice to have someone in your corner that you can truly trust and has your best interest in mind. Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone in your corner that would remove the weight of the world from your shoulders?
Sure.
To give you direction and advice. And help you with all those other emotional things like the need for sex, the need for companionship. The need to be hugged.
But men need that too, right?
Of course. One of my students in the show is a 45-year-old virgin. [Pauses] Wow. It’s not even about sex at that point, it’s about hugging. That man had just not been hugged enough.
I’ve read that, as a teenager, you were a Dungeons and Dragons devotee and a virgin until age 21. So how did you transform into, arguably, the world’s most well-known pickup artist?
Who said "arguably"? [Laughs.] I’m teasing, I’m teasing. Well, I was a late bloomer — went through puberty at 16 and a half and lost my virginity in my 21st year. In order for me to get social, while I was a kid, I used — and was fascinated by — of all things, magic. This is how it all started: I read a book called "501 Magic Tricks." What was amazing was it wasn’t four or five or six different ways of screwing with someone’s head and showing the holes in their perception. There were 501 ways, all in one book. It was mind-altering to me.
By my 20s, I was doing hundreds and hundreds of magic shows all around the world and when I was in my mid-20s, I went down to Florida because I wanted to perform magic on a cruise ship. And while my promo pack was out there and being looked at, I needed to make some money. So, I started working in a restaurant doing what we call intimate interactive illusion. But how the hell do you walk up to a group of strangers and say [adopts dopey voice], "Hey would you like to see some magic?" I needed to come up with a way of making it cool, adding a personality to it.
What I ultimately discovered was that I could remove the magic from my interactions and keep their attention. People would be captivated — they would gravitate toward me because of my fascination in things.
So, maybe it’s no great surprise that you’ve become skilled at interacting one-on-one with people. But how good is the average guy at summoning that kind of charisma and confidence?
I’m less concerned about confidence than I am about competence. Charisma is a very ethereal word …charisma. It’s more about what value you have for a woman and how you can systematically demonstrate it to her without appearing as if you’re one of those seedy players wanting to brag. It’s not about bragging, so you disqualify yourself by throwing out what we call a "neg."
I was just about to go there. Explain for a minute what the "neg" is.
A "neg" is a concept. A "neg" is a statement or action one would make to briefly disqualify oneself from being considered a potential suitor. It’s not an insult, I’m not putting the girl down. For instance, if I’m in a group of people and I say, perhaps to my girl of interest, "Hey, can you pass me that napkin, please? Thank you." I go to blow my nose and I look at her and I say, "What, are you gonna watch?" She’ll laugh, of course, and I’ll blow my nose. I’m not insulting her by doing that but I am disqualifying myself as being considered a potential suitor. Her friends know I’m not after her — I’m blowing my nose in front of her!
Then the friends are disarmed and she’s gonna think to herself, "He’s not after me." If she’s particularly beautiful, she’s gonna wonder why. The only solution to why is either that he’s gay, in which case he’s not threatening, or he’s so accustomed to beauty that he must have beauty in his life. So he must be pretty selective and a hard-wired attraction switch gets triggered.
One "neg" that I’ve seen you do is to walk up to a woman and say, "What do you have going for you other than your looks?"
I would never just walk up to her and say that, no. But, three to five minutes in … My job is to first disqualify myself then to get into a conversation where I can demonstrate higher value. Once you’ve done that, she’ll start throwing subtle indicators of interest. Subtle cues like scratching the back of her hand. That area of the hand gets itchy when a girl is attracted to a man from ape days, you know — it means, "Groom me." That’s a subtle indicator of interest. Once we get that, then and only then, can we qualify her. I’m being social, I’m showing that I have social values, and once she has qualified herself — I ask, "What do you have going for yourself more than your looks?" — and she starts answering. Well, that’s an indicator of interest. She’s actually trying to qualify herself. Then and only then can I give her indicators of interest.
The theory of "negging" is controversial. I’ve heard it criticized as simply veiled insults and misogynistic.
Those are the people who haven’t seen it in action. The result of any "neg" is laughter.
Doesn’t this kind of scheming ultimately harbor a more deep-seated sense of inadequacy in men? Don’t you start to worry about having the "real you" discovered?
You’ve never met me in person, have you? And you wrote that question down on a piece of paper before you met me. Here is the word that I don’t enjoy, "scheming" — I’m not a schemer.
What word would you be more comfortable with?
Let’s go through it again. What’s the question?
OK … would this kind of scheming create a sense of inadequacy in men — a fear of being found out?
Wow. Did you write that? Snap out of it, woman! Oh my god. Let’s come up with better questions than that — that just doesn’t fit into my reality. Are there people out there who scheme? Perhaps. Are there people out there who don’t like themselves? Yeah. I like myself, I’m a good person.
This is really how I see it: If you don’t learn these skills, if you don’t learn what knowledge already exists in the Venusian Arts, your chances of survival and replication in this life will be compromised.
OK, how is this question: When you start looking at women as "targets," as a power to be overthrown, do you lose any intellectual respect for them?
That’s a very loaded question. That doesn’t fit into my reality. Forgive me, I don’t look at women that way. So you’d have to ask someone who does. That’s just not even in my reality. I have a lot of women in my life — do you know what they’d do if I talked like that, if I thought like that? They’d kick my ass!
But if you can, as you say, so effectively summon virtually any woman’s interest, wouldn’t you start to lose respect for them?
In my life, I am very fortunate to have choice. If I’m not in a relationship, there are women who are actually kind of keeping track of that. So that they can, you know, jockey for a position.
That’s just not my reality. The misogyny thing, of course I’m going to have to deal with the preconceived notions of the stereotype of a player. But that’s why we don’t even call it the pickup arts. We call it the Venusian Arts.
If your method is as effective as you say it is, do you worry about it getting into the wrong hands and being abused?
Well, I can’t worry about it. Are there bad people out there? Yeah. Aren’t there people who want to use any tool for evil?
Is it at all lonely, though, having to always follow these rules, rather than telling it like it is, saying things as you feel them?
Wow, yeah. Yeah, it is. How unfair is it that when I see a woman from a distance, I may not know her name and my god has given me attraction circuits in my head that make me want to mate with her. Even though I don’t know her name, right? Women don’t generally feel that. They have to know the man’s name and his Social Security number.
I might disagree with that. I know plenty of women who aren’t that way.
Uh, are they cute?
Well, that’s the end of my questions, is there anything else, though, that you’d like to add?
[Snickers.] You’re funny. Have you ever been to a club?
Yes.
How many boyfriends have you had? Have you had more than one?
Yes.
So you’re one of us then. You’re sequentially monogamous. You’ve had more than one man in your life.
Right. And?
These are just statements. I’m trying to understand who I’m speaking with. What city are you in?
San Francisco.
San Fran. OK, there’s a [seduction] lair there.
I’ve heard.
Excerpted from salon.com View original article here.
HERE in the Golden Age of Nerds, it’s hardly surprising that guys who can’t get chicks would band together to intellectualize the process, deconstructing the emotional mapping of females to unlock secrets that both heredity and upbringing failed to provide them.
The guru of this movement is a man who calls himself Mystery, a Canadian magician who charges thousands of dollars for three-day seminars to help men figure out how to talk to women and turn themselves into masterful PUAs - pick-up artists. His methods, which include such techniques as “negging,” obliquely insulting a woman to get her to want to please the PUA, were documented in Neil Strauss’ book “The Game.”
VH1 has now corralled Mystery for a reality series called “The Pick-Up Artist,” where eight seduction-deficient men come under his tutelage to learn the secrets to attracting these mysterious creatures we call women, while vying for the title of “Master Pick-Up Artist.” Exactly how charming is this conqueror of the female mind? Tune in tomorrow night - or, just read for yourself.
Q: In the show, we learn that you started life as a dork. How big a dork were you?
A: I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 21, or go though puberty until I was 16. I was a late bloomer.
Q: What turned it around?
A: I got into magic. I could hide behind the routines, and it allowed me to be social.
Q: So it was as a magician that you learned to get comfortable with women?
A: Hmm. Ask me other questions, because I don’t think in these terms. You know, I’m a 35-year-old man, and the world wants a great deal from me, and I need nothing. I kind of put my life together now.
So yeah, there was a time it wasn’t together, and I was lonely and needed to get out of the house. I didn’t know what the purpose of life was. Most people don’t. I have clarity now on that, and that’s what I give others clarity, so they can get their s— together.
Q: Was there a revelation for you in this area, or was it gradual?
A: Both. It’s information. I’ve had many epiphanies throughout my life. When I started out, I would be attracted to a woman from a distance, because that’s how a man’s attraction mechanism is wired. The women’s attraction mechanism is not designed that way. It’s designed on a man’s social value, because she has a much better chance of survival and replication if she allies with a man with high social value so she’ll be protected - from an evolutionary standpoint.
She has to see him being surrounded by women, or being a leader of men, or know that he’s a protector of his loved ones. Back when I started all this, I’d just walk up to a girl and say, “Hi, I like you. Do you like me?” That’s how stupid I was. And of course they wouldn’t, because here I was all alone in my little ski jacket, 21 years old, with no value for a woman. If I have no value for a woman, why would she find me attractive?
Q: The method you teach has been tested and calculated over the years to get around women’s defenses.
A: This has become an international cultural phenomenon. This is not just about a television show. The TV show is a way for bigwigs to latch on to something that is already, for the last 10 years, happening. Everywhere I go, I get recognized. It’s f - - - ing cool, dude. In every city I go to, the reaction upon meeting me is touching-the-hem-style craziness. “Oh my god! You’re changing my life! Thank you so much!”
Q: Do you have a girlfriend?
A: Am I seeing someone special?
Q: Yes.
A: Well, they’re all special.
Q: You know what I mean.
A: Actually, I don’t know what you mean. Am I married? No. I don’t believe in marriage. I believe in marriage-style relationships, and I love committed relationships, but I’m a humanist. I believe in marriage as one year with an option to renew.
Q: So it’s not about just hooking up?
A: Well, you haven’t met me, so you’re gonna have a preconceived notion about me being a pick-up artist. I’m traveling now, so I have a tough time having a relationship. To be honest, my teaching others has really compromised my relationship life. I feel martyred in a weird way, but I’m doing something really special.
Q: Do you really believe any guy can be comfortable talking to women?
A: That’s a loaded question, isn’t it? Man, you’re very rich with these questions.
Q: Why is that loaded?
A: Because there’s a life of experience that men need to develop to feel comfort with people. You’re asking, if they learn these tips, will they feel comfortable? Well, how do you define comfort? We’re evolutionarily hard-wired to feel discomfort. I give permission to all the men who are afraid to approach women, that it’s OK.
Q:Where and when were you born?
A: My name is Mystery. So, being from places unknown, and all those little silly questions that don’t matter to people, but they encourage open-ended loops that people want to close off, they go on the Internet - any marketing ideas here?
Q: Sorry?
A: Any marketing ideas? I’m 35 years old, Sept. 24, 1971, but you can decide for yourself whether you’re going to print that. The idea can also be, “He won’t tell me.”
Q: But you did tell me.
A: Yes I did. And you’ve got yourself a dilemma, don’t you? Let’s see if you’re on my side or not - and, if there will ever be interviews again. Ahhhh-haaahhhh! I’m f - - - ing with you.
The score
Birth date: Sept. 24, 1971. Born Erik James Horvat-Markovic in Toronto, Canada. He legally changed his name to Mystery.
Master of “The Game”: No big shock, folks - little Erik was into Dungeons & Dragons.
Notice me! Mystery believes in “peacocking:” getting women to notice you by wearing an outlandish piece of clothing
The Ultimate Late Bloomer: Mystery’s late coming of age was nothing. One of the contestants on “The Pick-Up Artist” is a virgin - at 45!
Excerpted from The New York Post. View original article here.
“Make love, not war” isn’t the explicit theme of VH1’s new reality series, “The Pickup Artist” (Mondays, 9-10 p.m.). But the guys recruited for this hilarious show are so desperate to meet women that they have no time for much else. Their teacher is professional babe magnet Erik von Markovic, aka Mystery. His book “The Mystery Method” is a sort of “The Rules” for men. (Along with some nonsense, it reveals an uncanny grasp of human nature and what women want.)
Whether this knowledge can be absorbed by the eight dipsticks here remains to be seen. One guy can’t help giving off strong, if false, gay vibes. Another longs to meet a woman of “moderately Jewish appearance” so that their children will “look like white people with tans all year ’round.”
As fascinating as it is to peer into the minds of insecure guys, Mystery steals the show when he appears with his “wingmen,” Matador and J-Dog. In keeping with their theory of attention-getting, or “peacocking,” all three men sport two earrings this week. Matador appears to be wearing silver lip gloss, and J-Dog looks like a miniature Helen Mirren with a wacky dye job. Mystery has a long, dark ponytail and possibly uses eyeliner. The overall effect is of a Serbian war criminal in Halloween drag.
But you know what? After the geeks bomb out in a bar full of single women, a hidden camera shows Mystery and his wingmen strutting into the room, and BAM! Within seconds they have clouds of females surrounding, and even pawing them. Once you stop laughing, you can’t take your eyes off the spectacle.
It’s Blitz… here to finally let the cat out of the bag.
Dunno about you, but I’ve had enough of the rumor and
innuendo.
All the talk about Mystery becoming scarce this fall for
some big, bad "reason we can’t disclose".
To hell with the lawyers.
The secret is out anyway, if you read entertainment industry
blogs. And casting calls. And other rags that Hollywood folk
read.
————————————————————
Mystery is going to star in his own VH-1 show this August
————————————————————
That’s right……… I said it!
(Did I get that right, Erik? Oh don’t start!)
"The Pickup Artist" is VH-1’s newest reality show… and it
features our own Mystery, co-starring VA Co-Founder Matador
as well as VA master instructor J-Dog.
In the eight-part series, they do what Venusian Arts does
best: transform a bunch of "nice guys with likable, quirky
personalities who have trouble asking women out"… (That
quote is from the VH-1 casting call, by the way.)
Well, I personally met the student who "won" the show… the
best of eight guys who survived weeks of "grueling" training
and selection by Mystery himself.
Let me tell ya, "asking women out" is not one of his
problems any more!
Can’t really say much more than this…
…except for that "minor" scheduling detail:
————————————————————
The show has been bumped up from "fall" to August 6th!!!
————————————————————
Pardon the exclamation points but that little detail is the
part that got ME excited.
Do you realize that our upcoming MYSTERY SPECIAL TRAINING
events will overlap the pre-show promotion and the actual
airing of the show?
Yeah we had no idea, either, thank you very much.
But that’s sometimes how planning decisions are made at big
television networks.
They liked the show so much, they wanted to get it out
sooner rather than later.
Fine.
————————————————————
But this means: Due to publicity, MYSTERY SPECIAL TRAINING
spots will fill up EVEN QUICKER than we anticipated.
————————————————————
Here’s the current timeline for MYSTERY SPECIAL TRAINING
(MST), and how it overlaps with the VH-1 show (visit the
links for more information):
————————————————————
Remember, this will be the LAST TIME that Mystery will train
one-on-one in an intimate 12-student bootcamp format.
————————————————————
If you’re grabbing one of the available spots, you know what
to do…
P.S. ${token2} seeing that timeline, I’ve been thinking…
(I know, Lovedrop usually does the deeper thinking around
here but hear me out…)
As VH-1 begins promoting the show in July, thousands of tv
viewers will discover Mystery and VenusianArts.com for the
first time…
And as the show itself begins airing August 6, add hundreds
of thousands of new Mystery fans, probably bringing our Web
server down altogether…
Remember, people will actually SEE Mystery, Matador and
J-Dog train eight "quirky guys" to become REALLY good with
women… "Mystery good"
And seeing is believing to tv viewers out there. Can you
imagine their jaws drop when they see just HOW drastically
Mystery can transform lives?
Can you see them jump out of their easy chairs and surf over
to Mystery’s Web site, to discover the training programs
there?
So here are Blitz’s conclusions… (drumroll!)
CONCLUSION #1: Remind Matador to have IT install a
stronger Web server. Project "calm before the storm".
CONCLUSION #2: If I wanted to catch the same kind of
training that VH-1 saw fit to put in the center of a
reality show this fall, I’d reserve my MYSTERY SPECIAL
TRAINING spot now, before the media hype REALLY starts…
But that’s just me… check current availability here:
You understand that this is simply a set of opinions (and
not advice). This is to be used for entertainment, and not
considered as "professional advice". You are responsible for
any use of the information in this email, and hold The
Venusian Arts, LLC, and all members and affiliates harmless
in any claim or event. If you are below eighteen years old,
please click the link at the end, and remove yourself from
our list.
============================================================
Mysterycame up with these as part of a recent interview with Playboy.com. We’ll post a link to the final article when it comes out.
1 ) Get into the habit of starting conversations just for the practice. Release your outcome and find a zen in the process.
2 ) Between approaches, always remember to smile while mingling.
3 ) Lean back and relax when you initiate conversations. Don’t lean in. Speak slowly and expressively. This alone will improve your game by 300%.
4 ) Be chatty – really – and convey a strong sense of fascination. Talk about relationships and the mysterious, and use lots of humor as well as emotional and sensory descriptions.
5 ) Don’t say anything to impress her, such as brag about your job, girls, friends, protectiveness, etc. Instead, obliquely convey value via demonstration and via incidental story details. If she can tell that you are trying to impress her, she will perceive you as lower value.
6 ) Don’t ever act as if anything is a big deal. Just be fun and playful all the time. Vibe with her but don’t have emotional reactions to her. The same way you would act with your 8-year-old niece.
7 ) As you hang out with her, and she has an opportunity to win you over, THEN show her increasing interest. She must recognize that she has genuinely won you over with her personality.
8 ) Balance indicators of interest with indicators of disinterest. Do this both in your conversation with her and also as you escalate with her physically. This has a nuclear effect.
9 ) Wear one accessory that gives other people on opportunity to initiate a conversation with you. Have a good story prepared for when this happens.
10) Have a life. Go to the gym and stay in shape, and continually improve your wardrobe. Cultivate your circle of female friends. Throw parties. Put effort into your social circle. A girl should imagine herself being a part of your cool life.
SAN FRANCISCO — Scores of singles are crammed into The Matrix, a storied local nightclub where Jefferson Airplane got its groove on 40 years back. Now it’s all thundering hip-hop, moody lighting and cubist furniture.
To the untrained eye, the scene is standard Friday night bacchanalia. But to Lance Mason, it is a battlefield waiting to be dominated. And as 2 a.m. nears, he urges Robert Kramer to attack.
"Those three girls over there — make your move, be confident," says Mason, founder of PickUp 101, a popular $1,800 weekend seminar on how to attract the fairer sex.
After a few minutes, Kramer, 24, an irrepressible investment banker from San Diego, has his targeted girls smiling. But Mason is horrified.
"He’s crouching, he’s crouching," he whispers code-red-style to an aide, who rushes over to Kramer and slyly slips him an ottoman.
"You always want to be at eye level with a woman," Mason explains after the crisis is averted. "Rob would have died in a few minutes in that position. But look, he’s still there talking."
Mason is a proud general in what is known as the Seduction Community, a loose-knit Internet clique of men who believe no successful hookup is accidental and all connections can be studied and deconstructed in the same manner as military assaults.
This 21st-century version of the comic book Charles Atlas ad — wimp gets sand kicked in his face, wimp pumps iron, wimp gets the girl — has picked up momentum since last year’s publication of Neil Strauss’ The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, an ode to his journey from female repellant to magnet. Strauss has graduated from a seeker of tips to a dispenser of wisdom, which he does through stylelife.com.
Other successful members of the community, many of whom once shared techniques gratis through blog posts, now offer their coaching services — either in person or through instructional videos — for healthy prices on sites such asmysterymethod.com and realsocialdynamics.com. And the scene has penetrated pop culture; a January episode of CSI: Miami focused on a pickup maestro and his murdered student.
If there is one thing that unifies these sleuths of the female psyche, it’s their former status as dweebs, nerds, introverts and dorks.
"To say I was shy doesn’t really get at it," says Mason, 33, now the epitome of suave. "I was terrified of women. Literally."
What’s the secret to a Pygmalion-like transformation? For one, gentlemen are not encouraged to be gentle. With this crowd, "Can I buy you a drink?" is as popular as touchy-feely Alan Alda. Instead, confidence bordering on narcissism is the tonic of choice. Think Tom Cruise in Magnolia.
Wide variety of approaches
Techniques vary with each teacher. Mystery is a Los Angeles-based magician who uses misdirection (make the woman think you’re not interested) to entice the opposite sex, while Badboy is an ex-Croatian army officer who touts "direct game," which means conveying your sexual interest immediately, as the path to success.
"What’s weird is I did hundreds of magic shows and never got much action," says Mystery, a Toronto native portrayed as a pickup virtuoso in The Game and whose given name is Erik Von Markovik. "Now, I’m famous. Women e-mail me. Porn stars e-mail me. Pickup isn’t going away. It’s controversial because it works."
Mystery insists, as do almost all pickup gurus, that the mission isn’t to get a woman in bed. "It’s about being a better person," he says.
And many guys need the help, Strauss says. "My site gets e-mail from everyone from 30-year-old virgins to Vietnam vets, all of whom need help with women," he says. "I’m not sure if this (Seduction Community) phenomenon will be a revenge of the nerds for the early 2000s, or if it’s the beginning of a brand-new form of men’s movement. But I do know that guys want someone to show them the ropes."
None of which surprises the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left. "When it comes to meeting and mating, most men are sort of clueless," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who also is co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. "It doesn’t help that many women today are highly educated and well-compensated, which makes them set even higher standards for men these days."
She gives pickup tutorials a qualified thumbs-up: "Though it seems rather artificial, if it makes men more confident, I’d think women would applaud this."
Just not women such as Rachel Kramer Bussel, sex and dating columnist for New York’s Village Voice. While acknowledging that "guys have pressure to make that first move," she cringes at "being seen as a target of a plan," she says. "If I found out a guy spent $2,000 to learn this stuff, I’d be a bit wary."
Learning from a master
On a recent weekend, a dozen such men gather in a former military facility by the bay — all cinder-block walls and neon lights — to learn this very stuff.
Mason has been offering his classes for three years, the offshoot of coaching sessions with friends. "I’d gained confidence, and was always the guy talking to cute girls, so my buddies asked me to help them," he says with a shrug. Business has boomed in the past six months; this Art of Attraction class draws attendees from multiple states, and Mason recently traveled to New York to hold a seminar.
Today, one man has traveled from London to get a piece of Mason’s mojo. The thirtysomething gent in a bespoke suit isn’t interested in disclosing his name; he’s married and wants to see if he still has what it takes to woo the ladies in case he had to.
In fact, most of the men insist on anonymity. Ranging from mid-20s to late 30s, the group tends to share the same sartorial vision (T-shirts, jeans, even flip-flops) and many post long hours in various technology fields. All feel they have something to offer women, but they just can’t get it across in the first few minutes of conversation.
"That’s what we do here, we spend three days on those first three minutes," says Mason, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
During hours of classroom sessions, Mason and three of his instructor pals (none reeks of ultra-coolness; one is a David Spade clone) take students through the basics. This includes how to stand (hands in front, head to the side, feet apart), how to walk into a bar (much eye contact, big smile, slow-motion stride) and how to "kino," or make physical contact (hand on shoulder for a split second).
The key is to be able to "open a set" (start talking to a woman) without the help of a "wingman" (a friend who distracts the subject’s friends), often using a variation of the "cocky and funny" approach (combining humor and arrogance to intrigue a woman).
"My game is no game. I’m not a closer, and women say I’m a dork who talks too much," says local Mike Connor, 36, a professional dog walker and recently divorced.
Connor is effortlessly self-deprecating, and that’s precisely what Mason encourages him to exploit when the class hits the bars that night. "Man, you’re cracking us all up," Mason says. "Now let’s use that on the ladies."
Rejection happens
The Matrix is thumping as Connor and Kramer cruise the club under Mason’s watchful eye. Each has been given a line to use as an opener. These inane quips are meant to test their courage, as well as show that what matters is not what they say, but how they say it.
"These are icebreakers that get you into a woman’s zone," Mason says. "But after you say them, it’s up to your own personality to keep them interested."
Connor’s opener is: "This place is crazy — women keep grabbing my butt." Kramer has to interrupt conversations by asking women what they think of his hair.
The students get busy like two flyboys who have been asked by their squadron leader to make flights into hostile territory. Both are immediately shot down.
"She rolled her eyes and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ " Connor reports back. "Mine didn’t speak English," Kramer says.
Mason orders repeated sorties.
Connor soon uses his absurd line to crack a smile from one woman’s face; she winds up text-messaging him in the wee hours to make sure he has gotten home OK. Kramer ends up getting ignored as often as he manages to charm. He’s thrilled.
"In the past, I’d go out for a drink, sit around and really not know what to say," he says. "But this has made me so much more confident. It’s even fun when you get rejected. I just go for it now."
Mason has the pleased look of a man whose work matters. "The point is to give guys a chance to be with more women, so they can make a better choice for a mate."
Speaking of which, Mason’s slinky girlfriend, Yuko Yamazaki, 26, appears from the shadows and nestles into his arms. "I tell you," he says, "if this pickup stuff had been out there back when I was in college, I’d probably already be married with three kids by now."
But as he dives in for a kiss from Yamazaki, it’s hard to imagine this pickup master has marriage and kids on his mind.
Excerpted from USA Today. View original article here.
Guys. How’d you like to meet any woman you fancy? Even in a bar crowded with competition? Not only meet, but get her phone number?
Yeah, right. Not in dating-brutal T.O., you say. And not for you, Mr. Joe Average.
You’re lucky to even get a smile returned, let alone a phone number.
But look at that guy over there. Short, fat, balding, big nose — yet he seems to be a babe magnet.
Is he a millionaire? A film or TV star? Maybe a famous author? Does he have a wing woman? (A hired woman who makes the approach to women for the man.)
Maybe he does have a charismatic personality. But it’s also possible he’s a student of The Mystery Method (themysterymethod.com), the infamous system of attracting and meeting women that’s become a legend in the world of PUAs (pickup artists).
It’s an intensive and unusual seminar course taught in workshops in Canada and the U.S. by an early-30s Toronto man who calls himself Mystery (real name Erik Von Markovik) and an approach that has turned him into an unlikely international celebrity.
Now living in Las Vegas, Mystery is a tall, colourful character who wears flamboyant clothes and always paints his nails black — both an important aspect of his "method"that he calls "peacocking," which makes sure a man "stands out" rather than "blends in."
He developed the basis of his Method during his experiences as a close-up magician working in Canada and the U.S. stating that his interaction with people helped him learn the complexities of human behaviour.
During this time he connected with the Internet seduction community, a loose-knit online community of men aiming to improve their success with women. (Visit alt.seduction.fast; fastseduction.com.)
It’s a community that attracted wide media attention when The Game by Neil Strauss was published and the seduction manual reached the New York Times bestseller list. A movie is now in the works.
Mystery quickly became known as one of the best "seduction gurus" and was the first to take students out in the field to clubs and bars to show them not only how to approach women but what they were doing wrong.
"The mistake most men make," he says, in a phone interview from Cornwall, England, where he’s visiting friends, "is that they try to seduce a woman right away. They have to realize that for women it’s all about feeling comfortable with a man first and not feeling he’s pursuing her for sex."
He says beautiful women (HBs — hot babes) have, after all, heard every line a thousand times before so men have to try something completely different. (The men are AFCs — Average Frustrated Chumps.)
For instance, Mystery teaches men about "negging," a term he invented. It means making a negative remark or ignoring a woman ("the target") so it disqualifies him as a potential suitor yet provokes the woman’s interest. She then has to position herself as a conquest rather than just ignore the pickup lines.
He also points out that most women today go out in groups so he offers the tip that in order to meet the woman he wants, he should always put a smile on his face and introduce himself to the entire group. Better still, he adds, is to introduce himself and his group of friends to the group.
"It’s essential," he says, "that he doesn’t indicate he’s after one particular woman, even if he is. That way she feels comfortable with him."
Von Markovik says his Method teaches nine phases that lead — in only seven hours, he insists (the hours can be spread over any period of time) — to the culmination of the liaison, although he says the method takes three-and-a-half years to really perfect.
There’s three states of attraction; three of comfort building and three of seduction.
"Every love story that has ever existed has been through these phases," he says, explaining that his methods are based on sound principles of psychology and social dynamics.
"As women’s emotional circuits are all the same and are triggered by the same responses, I help men find those triggers of connection."
Mystery’s seminars have been so successful he now has a coterie of trained seduction gurus to teach his seminars for him but he still conducts many himself.
With his courses now costing up to $2,500 (although the Learning Annex held a four-hour session recently in Toronto for only $109), he has long ago put away his magician’s cloak.
Now he prefers to perform the magic of getting sure-fire dates with hot women for the average Joe.
Magic indeed.
Excerpted from The Toronto Sun. View original article here.
He describes himself as a loveable loser, a computer geek who figured out an effective method for meeting women. He calls it the Mystery Method. And he calls himself "Mystery". In an interview with Fay Fredricks he tells how he analyzed the process of courtship and broke it down into three phases: attraction, comfort and seduction.
The story of Neil Strauss, AKA Style and his transformation from AFC to pickup guru at the hands of his mentor and now long-time friend, Mystery. Considered to be the world's greatest pickup artist, Mystery takes Style under his wing as they travel around the world teaching men the secrets of attracting and seducing women.
Hidden somewhere, in nearly every major city in the world, is an underground seduction lair. And in these lairs, men trade the most devastatingly effective techniques ever invented to charm women. This is not fiction. These men really exist. They live together in houses known as Projects. And Neil Strauss, the bestselling author, spent two years living among them, using the pseudonym Style to protect his real-life identity. The result is one of the most explosive and controversial books of the year — guaranteed to change the lives of men and transform the way women understand the opposite sex forever.
On his journey from AFC (average frustrated chump) to PUA (pick-up artist) to PUG (pick-up guru), Strauss not only shares scores of original seduction techniques but also has unforgettable encounters with the likes of Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Heidi Fleiss, and Courtney Love. And then things really start to get strange — and passions lead to betrayals lead to violence. The Game is the story of one man's transformation from frog to prince — to prisoner in the most unforgettable book of the year.
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists is a non-fictional book written by investigative reporter Neil Strauss as a chronicle of his journey from "average frustrated chump" to "master pickup artist" using techniques devised by a self-help network of men developing the art of seduction with women. In the book, he adopts the pseudonym Style, and details encounters with women as he studies with various experts at seducing women.
The book's publication began an explosion of pick-up artist jargon and introduced the world to a character known as Mystery. The book was featured on the New York Times Bestseller List for two months after its release, reaching prominence again during the broadcast of the hit series, VH1's The Pick-Up Artist. In its original published hardcover format, the book was covered in black leather and bookmarked with red satin, similar to some printings of the Bible.
Televised news programs criticized the book as a demonic "bible" of seduction arts. Many love-shy men avidly studied the book for inspiration. Despite the reputation that The Game has received as an expose on the Seduction Community, it was primarily written as an autobiographical work.
The book is narrated by protagonist Neil Strauss, with emphasis on the personal transformation he undergoes to become an "influential member of the seduction community". The dominant theme throughout the book is the doctrine of "the Venusian Arts" as taught to Neil by the Community. Although several wide-ranging beliefs and ideals for the perfect seducer are presented, Strauss takes after Mystery and his Mystery Method, providing what could be considered a literary endorsement for Mystery.
Believe it or not, this man has the power to seduce almost any woman he wants. Hugo Rifkind became his pupil, and put the secrets of the underground cult of the pick-up artist to the test
I must begin this article, I feel, by apologizing to every woman I have met over the past 48 hours. You, half of that couple in the Soho Hotel. You, that drunk, sobbing girl in the Sanderson lounge. You, those three model-esque waifs by that pillar in Soho’s Player bar and you, that bright-eyed young blonde in the VIP room of Mayfair’s Funky Buddha. You especially, actually. You quite liked me, I could tell. I do not have a best friend with a jealous girlfriend. I do not have another friend with two new dogs, both of which he is keen to name after Eighties pop stars. At no point, in all honesty, did I ever need a female opinion on anything. They were pick-up lines, every one. I’d just been taught them. And I didn’t even want to pick you up. Actually, I live with my girlfriend. But it almost worked, didn’t it? You will learn, Neil Strauss told me, to engineer every part of an interaction. You will open, you will demonstrate value. You will isolate your target from her group. You will make an emotional connection, you will make a physical connection. You will do this. Reader, I did not. Not quite. As both a responsible journalist and the faithful boyfriend of somebody already distinctly unamused, I was eager not to compromise myself in researching a story. Although I could have done. It was astonishing. I really could.
Although he would now describe himself as retired, Neil Strauss remains one of the greatest pick-up artists in the world. You know the Tom Cruise character in the movie Magnolia, who teaches hopeless men how to seduce women? Strauss was one of those. He has devised and taught techniques and routines that he believes will enable any guy to pick up women. He once sat and listened while one of his students used the exact words and phrases he had taught to make a date with Paris Hilton. I meet Strauss in the Soho Hotel in London. He’s American and in his thirties and looks, as one rival pointed out, like the butt of Bugs Bunny’s japery, Elmer Fudd. I am a small guy and funny-looking, he admits. Although short, he wears chunky platform trainers that push him up to around 6ft. I’d imagine that women often assume he is gay. But not for very long. There are four of us here me and two eager seduction students. Both have heard of Strauss before. Or rather, they’ve heard of Style, the pseudonym that he uses online. Every pick-up artist in the world has heard of Style. Within their strange, slightly terrifying community, he is a superstar. Two years ago, Strauss was living with a group of pick-up artists (or PUAs) in a luxury villa in Los Angeles, dubbed Planet Hollywood. The house was the physical hub of a vast PUA network that exists online, swapping tips and techniques for seducing women. PUAs call this the community. Within the community, Style and his housemates Mystery, Tyler Durden, Papa and others became something approaching legends. A steady stream of international visitors passed through, paying huge sums to learn their secrets. People would sleep on floors, and in cupboards, just to be able to stay, and learn. Then the housemates started to fall out. Eventually, Style left. Now, a year on, he has written a stunningly explicit book, exposing everything he learnt, everybody he met while learning it, and everything he thought about them. That’s why he is here. Within the community, he concedes, lots of people are going to be very, very upset. We will call my fellow students Energy and Puma, because, as you may have gathered, this is the kind of name that a pick-up artist has. I toy with being Ace, but it doesn’t catch on. Energy is 26 and from South Africa. He works in IT. A while ago, he says, he used to be fat. Puma is 35. He also works with computers. He’s tall, and a little bit gangly. He’s more comfortable in his skin than Energy, but no obvious Lothario. By the end of two nights, both will have flirted with scores of women, and extracted phone numbers from a handful. Puma will have kissed two. Without wishing to be too rude about either of them, these aren’t the kind of guys who would normally be in that situation. We will be making the transition, says Strauss, to PUA from AFC (Average Frustrated Chump). Jargon, we quickly learn, is very important to PUAs. Picking up girls is known as sarging, for reasons far too insidery and odd to divulge. You start a conversation by opening, you finish it by closing. A group of people is a set, in that two girls will be a two-set and two girls and a guy a mixed three-set. We learn of Anti-Slut Defences (ASDs), Indicators of Interest (IOIs) and Cat/String Theory. This is seduction by equation, the point being that no situation is entirely unique, and any situation can be dealt with. It’s not exactly romance. On night one, we concentrate on opening. Strauss teaches us two opening routines the Jealous Girlfriend Routine and the Eighties Dogs Routine. It turns out that Energy, although he has never met Strauss before, already knows the JGR. He learnt it from the internet. So. My first opening. Trembling like the AFC I am, I circle the Soho Hotel lounge, and approach a two-set, a pair of brunettes by the bar. I take one step past them, and turn, as though on a whim. I am supposed to say the following: I have to get back to my friends in just a moment, but I need a female opinion on something. My friend just started going out with a new girl, but he’s still in touch with his ex. Do you guys think that’s ok? In fact, I say this: Please excuse me. Very sorry to bother you, but do you have a moment? My friend has a girlfriend. And, um, she doesn’t like the last girl that he went out with. And what do you… I mean… is that… I get it out eventually, while the girls stare at me like I’m some sort of stammering sex pest. Back at the table, Strauss tells me where I went wrong. I missed the time constraint at the beginning (I have to get back to my friends), which would have relaxed them and removed their fear that I’d be plaguing them all night. Then I asked for their attention, rather than simply announcing that I needed it. Plus, I got all the words wrong. I’ve seen worse, he says.
Five or six girls and a bar later, I’m starting to get the hang of it. If you have your eye on a particular girl in a set, PUA wisdom states that you should ignore her at the expense of her friends. This should make her feel left out, and start to clamour for your attention.
After a while, slightly surprisingly, we are joined in our sarging quest by Daniel Ryan, the guitarist from rock group The Thrills. In his other life, Neil Strauss is a rock journalist, writing for Rolling Stone and The New York Times. He claims to have used PUA techniques in an interview with Britney Spears. He quit the PUA life when he met his current girlfriend, Lisa Leveridge, who plays guitar for Courtney Love. They’ve just moved in together, in LA. Ryan last saw Strauss on a night out in LA, along with Strauss’s own guru, a legendary PUA called Mystery. That was just astonishing, he reminds him. Mystery had that girl in the toilets in like, five minutes. And her boyfriend was still at the bar.
There are advanced techniques, I’m told, for dealing with rivals, boyfriends and even husbands the Alpha Male of the Group, or AMOG. AMOGing is entirely negative, designed to usurp a rival male by goading him into deferring to your superiority. Hard slaps on the back are a favourite trick. Strauss himself created Stylemogging, a more subtle technique in which one uses barbed compliments to establish oneself as the supreme arbitrator of whatever is under discussion. You’ve got better at that, a bit, is apparently a classic Stylemogging comment. At this level, it all starts to get a little scary.
Mystery is the inventor of a concept called the neg. One negs a girl by showing her active disinterest basically by being a little rude. Ridicule her, very slightly, in front of her friends. The best negs happen in response to IOIs (see above). If somebody asks you your name or your job, simply tell them they are being nosy and move on. I try my first neg on the very drunk blonde friend of an equally drunk Irish girl from whom Puma is extracting a phone number by the Sanderson Hotel bar. I forget exactly what I say, but it makes her start crying. About her ex-boyfriend. I think your negs are a little strong, says Strauss. Also, avoid drunks.
Mystery also invented a concept called peacocking. To peacock, a sarger must essentially dress like a rock star, in the most outlandishly confident manner that he possibly can. For night two, I decide to wear jeans, a leather jacket, a white dress-shirt and a thin black tie. Certainly, I feel my confidence growing. Although I feel like a bit of a tit on the Tube.
Night two gets off to a good start. Strauss makes us each open a few times to get our confidence up, and then we move on to more advanced techniques. We learn how to demonstrate higher value, to show that we are not just oddly dressed freaks with interesting dilemmas, but fascinating people with a wealth of interesting chat. There’s the Best Friends Test, in which you quiz girls about their brand of shampoo. There’s the Numbers Quiz, in which you pretend, in an isn’t-this-nuts kind of way, to read a girl’s mind. And to top them all, there’s The Cube, a psychological game in which you ask a girl a bunch of weird questions about objects sitting in the desert, and then describe her own personality back to her.
Midway through all of this, we are joined by a British PUA called Magnus, who has heard that Strauss is in town. Do you use The Cube? Strauss asks him. All the f***ing time, says Magnus, gravely. Magnus has four girls on the go in different parts of the world. He looks like a frog.
By the end of The Cube, your target should be enthralled. Never hit on a woman, says Strauss, until she is attracted to you. By now, she should be. In order to move things along, and go kino (get physical) we learn something called the Evolution Phase Shift. It’s a long, convoluted routine, progressing from hair-pulling, to touching, to biting, and ultimately to kissing. Normally, I’d never believe it would work. After meeting Magnus, though, I’ll believe anything.
After a little more practise, my game is improving dramatically. I can open with fluency, and there’s an injection of confidence which comes from knowing exactly what you are going to say next. And my negs are improving. Nobody cries. When one girl asks me what I do for a living, I tell her I scavenge in dustbins. Strauss approves. Ultimately though, we students only know two openings. There’s a limited amount of time we can spend in any one bar.
We end up in Mayfair’s Funky Buddha. Strauss has briefed us to look at nobody as we enter the bar. Beautiful women of which there are many must be utterly ignored. We must concentrate only on each other, so as to give the impression that we are the most fascinating, intriguing party in the whole nightclub. We do. People stare. It seems to be working.
After a decent interval, Energy approaches two rather stunning girls in a booth. One is a brunette in a fur coat who looks like Posh Spice. The other is a pretty, smiling blonde. Confronted with such women, 48 hours ago, Energy would probably have vomited. Nobody could possibly guess this now.
A few moments later, I follow him over, to act as his wingman. As instructed, I force myself to smile and chuckle, as though we’ve just been enjoying a shared joke. Are you talking about the… I say. This is the agreed, all purpose wingman opening. Yes, agrees Energy, and I gather he’s doing the Jealous Girlfriend. I join in. His opening has become a mixed four-set, and we are part of it. I follow up with the Best Friends Test, and then Energy does a Numbers Quiz, and then we shift our seating around (isolation) to each give our targets The Cube. I’m with the blonde. I smile a lot. I look at her eyes. I never lean towards her, which forces her to lean towards me, to catch what I am saying. By the time I’ve finished, she is quite honestly looking at me like I’m the most fascinating person she’s ever met. As a human being and, perhaps more crucially, as somebody with a girlfriend, I feel like absolute scum.
I’m certainly not going to go kino, but I don’t have any more routine. I make some excuse, and leg it to the bar. Which probably comes across as a neg. This is all so easy, it’s terrifying. Later I spot her again and attempt, in a guilt-ridden way, to have a normal conversation. I think she’s slightly puzzled as to why I’m no longer as interesting as I once was.
There are, as Strauss is keen to stress in his book, two sides to all of this. On the one hand, a guy any guy really can learn to pick up women, and can do so far more effectively than the naturals of whom they may have grown up in awe. On the other, they risk losing their soul. I must have spoken to 30 women over those two nights, and I couldn’t even tell you any of their names. The routines I was taught didn’t give me any opportunity to ask.
On top of that, some PUAs can seem downright sinister. Having begun learning pick-up lines in their late teens, they seem only able to relate to women as conquests, and men as rivals. At the end of that night, Strauss and I take a walk to Leicester Square. For PUAs across the world, Leicester Square has near legendary status as the best place in the world to pick up women. We meet, not entirely by chance, a group of early twentysomething men on a boot-camp (workshop) with a renowned American PUA who calls himself Tyler Durden, after the Brad Pitt character in Fight Club. He, like Mystery and Strauss, once lived in the Project Hollywood house.
Tyler Durden (according to Strauss and several hundred websites) is one of the most polished PUAs in the world, with routines for every occasion. No woman, allegedly, can resist him. Yet in Leicester Square, I watch him ridicule a homeless female beggar with such misjudged excessiveness that, mid-interview, I feel compelled to turn my back on him and empty my wallet into her hands. Magnus, likewise, occasionally comes out with comments of such startling crassness that my mouth hangs agape. These guys are awkward geeks who have learnt how to be arrogant Casanovas. Outside their routines, they are now arrogant geeks. Not a nice mix. Perhaps these guys could pick up any woman in the world, and perhaps they could show me how to do the same, but this still isn’t a world in which I feel comfortable. And not just because of my girlfriend.
Don’t worry, man, says Strauss, at one point. You behaved yourself. When I meet your girlfriend, I’ll tell her that. You are never, ever meeting my girlfriend, I tell him.
Excerpted from The London Times. View original article here.
By his own admission, Neil Strauss is not your standard-issue pickup artist. An L.A.based journalist - and the co-author of several raunchy celebrity tombs, including Motley Crue’s The Dirt and Jeanna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star Strauss describes himself in grocery-list form: I’m short and I’m bald. I have a big nose, a receding chin and weird indents on the side of my head. But put him in a bar filled with beautiful women, he says, and he transforms into a sort of superhero. A dark horse Casanova. A walking, talking hunk of human catnip.
Strauss wasn’t born with these superpowers. In fact, only two years ago single, miserable and in his early 30’s he had zero confidence with women. I was so unhappy with myself, he says. I used to fear women because they had this power over you to make you feel inadequate. Then one day, he received the phone call that would alter his dating trajectory forever. An editor he knew asked him to take a look at an online guide to seducing women as fodder for a potential book. The next thing he knew, he’d stumbled into the heart of a cover online community of international pickup artists self-styled masters of seduction with names like Mystery and Twotimer who devote all their waking hours to perfecting and teaching the science of scoring.
Strauss embarked on a two-year crash course in advanced womanizing under the tutelage of this ragtag band of gurus, ultimately achieving MPUA (master pickup artist) status in his own right. He chronicles this journey which consumed his life and landed him in field-training workshops in Toronto, Montreal, New York, Belgrade and beyond in explicit and often revolting detail in his controversial new book, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, in stores Sept. 6.
In hindsight, what really blew Strauss away about this community was how organized and sophisticated it is in its methods. These guys are like social scientists, he says. They read a lot of books about the evolution because they want to tap into the primal brain. They field-test their techniques hundreds and thousands of times. They’ve really figured out what you won’t find in a psychology research papers or books.
Early on, still feeling a little embarrassed about the whole thing, Strauss took part in an L.A. workshop offered by one of the group’s luminaries, a six-foot-five Toronto-born illusionist named Mystery, whose Mystery Method involves manipulating social dynamics in order to snag the most beautiful woman in any room. It was like seeing The Matrix, he said of that first experience. Everything was so counterintuitive. I learned that the more unavailable you make yourself, the more people would want you. The more you say, stop touching me or I’m taken, or your just not my type, the more they’d actually chase you.
From Mystery, Strauss learned about ‘Peacocking’ (dressing in flashy clothing and accessories to nap women’s attention). He learned how to disarm AMOG (alpha male of the group), and how to deliver an effective ‘neg’. (This is a backhanded insult used on a beautiful woman to demonstrate your lack of interest and to provoke hers. For example: Wow, you’re, like, the fifth person I’ve seen tonight wearing that exact skirt.) As you’re hearing it, you’re thinking, ‘these things would never work on me,’ says Strauss. But the scary thing is having approached thousands and thousands of people it will work on just about everyone.
It wasn’t long before Style was inventing and refining his own signature techniques. He began attracting disciples, neophytes within the community to whom he would offer counsel, and encouragement. By this time, he had picked-up, or sarged, hundreds of unsuspecting women (I changed their names in the books so they could read it and say, ‘Well maybe that wasn’t me,’ he says). One night he used his skills to out-seduce Heidi Fleiss, the infamous Hollywood madam, who was trying to lure women into working for her at a bar in L.A. And for his piece de resistance, while conducting a magazine interview, he managed to disarm and charm a cranky Britney Spears with rudimentary chick crack (subjects of a spiritual or physiological nature—such as astrology and personality tests—that, he says, appeal to most women.) By the end of their meeting, Spears had asked him for his phone number.
In 2003, emboldened by his success, Strauss was ready to take things to the next level. Along with Mystery and several PUA’s Strauss would open Project Hollywood, a lavish L.A. mansion in which the seduction masters would live and offer workshops to pilgrims from all over the world. Here, they would raise the art of picking up from a pastime to a full-fledged lifestyle. (Soon, there was Project Austin, Project Perth, Project Sydney.) Later, they would watch powerlessly as their sociological experiment collapsed in an implosion of clashing egos and wounded pride. I really felt like it turned into Lord of the Flies or something at the end, says Strauss, who has since moved in with his girlfriend, Lisa, the one woman who seemed invulnerable to his shtick.
The Game, which has already been optioned by Columbia TriStar Films, is in many ways a triumph of misogyny, though Strauss prefers to paint it as an honest, heartfelt examination of male sexual frustration. On the surface, it was about picking up women in a crass way, he says. But beneath it, in order to do that, you have to learn to love yourself if you expect other people to love you. Yes, self-love. And if you believe that, this guy also wants you to know another think: it’s not you, it’s him.
Excerpt from The Game
We piled into the limo and drove to the Standard Lounge, a velvet-rope-guarded hotel hotspot. It was here that Mystery shattered my whole model of reality. Limits I had once imposed on human interaction were extended far beyond what I ever thought possible. The man was a machine.
The Standard was dead when we walked in. We were too early. There were just two groups of people in the room: a couple near the entrance and two couples in the corner. I was ready to leave. But then I saw Mystery approach the people in the corner. They were sitting on opposite couches across a glass table. The men were on one side. One of them was Scott Baio, the actor best known for playing Chachi on Happy Days. Across from him were two women, a brunette and a bleached blonde who looked like she’d stepped out of the pages of Maxim. Her cut-off white t-shirt was suspended so high into the air by fake breasts that the bottom of it just hovered, flapping in the air, above a belly tightened by fastidious exercise. This woman was Baio’s date. She was also, I gathered, Mystery’s target.
His intentions were clear because he wasn’t talking to her. Instead, he had his back turned to her, and was showing something to Scott Baio and his friend, a well-dressed, well-tanned thirty-something who looked as if he smelled strongly of aftershave. I moved in closer.
“Be careful with that,” Baio was saying. “It cost forty thousand dollars.”
Mystery had Baio’s watch in his hands. He placed it carefully on the table. “Now watch this,” he commanded. “I tense my stomach muscles, increasing the flow of oxygen to my brain, and . . . “
As Mystery waved his hands over the watch, the second hand stopped ticking. He waited fifteen seconds, then waved his hands again, and slowly the watch sputtered back to life-along with Baio’s heart. Mystery’s audience of four burst into applause.
“Do something else!” the blonde pleaded.
Mystery brushed her off with a neg. “Wow, she’s so demanding,” he said, turning to Baio. “Is she always like this?”
We were witnessing group theory in action. The more Mystery performed for the guys, the more the blonde clamored for attention. And every time, he pushed her away and continued talking with his two new friends.
“I don’t usually go out,” Baio was telling Mystery. “I’m over it, and I’m too old.”
After nearly ten minutes, Mystery finally acknowledged the blonde. . He held his arms out. She placed her hands in his, and he began giving her a psychic reading. He was employing a technique I’d heard about called cold reading: the art of telling people truisms about themselves without any prior knowledge of their personality or background. In the field, all knowledge- however esoteric-is power.
With each accurate sentence Mystery spoke, the blonde’s jaw dropped further open, until she started asking him about his job and his psychic abilities. Every response Mystery gave was intended to accentuate his youth and enthusiasm for the good life Baio said he had outgrown.
“I feel so old,” Mystery said, baiting her.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-seven.”
“That’s not old. That’s perfect.”
He was in.
Mystery called me over and whispered in my ear. He wanted me to talk to Baio and his friend, to keep them occupied while he hit on the girl. This was my first experience as a wing-a term Mystery had taken from Top Gun, along with words like target and obstacle.
I struggled to make small talk with them. But Baio, looking nervously at Mystery and his date, cut me off. “Tell me this is all an illusion,” he said, “and he’s not actually stealing my girlfriend.”
Ten long minutes later, Mystery stood up, put his arm around me, and we left the club. Outside, he pulled a cocktail napkin from his jacket pocket. It contained her phone number. “Did you get a good look at her?” Mystery asked. “That is what I’m in the game for. Everything I’ve learned in the last decade I used tonight. It’s all led up to this moment. And it worked.” He beamed with self-satisfaction. “How’s that for a demonstration?”
That was all it took. Stealing a girl right out from under a celebrity’s nose-has-been or not-was a feat no other man I’d ever met could have accomplished. Mystery was the real deal.
–
As we took the limo to the Key Club, Mystery told us the first commandment of pickup: the three-second rule. A man has three seconds after spotting a woman to speak to her, he said. If he takes any longer, then not only is the girl likely to think he’s a creep who’s been staring at her for too long, but he will start over thinking the approach, get nervous, and probably blow it.
The moment we walked into the Key Club, Mystery put the three-second rule into action. Striding up to a group of women, he held out his hands and asked, What is your first impression of these? Not the big hands, the black nails.
As the girls gathered around him, Sin pulled me aside and suggested wandering the club and attempting my first approach. A group of women walked by and I tried to say something. But the word hi just barely squeaked out of my throat, not even loud enough for them to hear. As they continued past, I followed and grabbed one of the girls on the shoulder from behind. She turned around, startled, and gave me the withering what-a-creep look that was the whole reason I was too scared to talk to women in the first place.
Never, Sin admonished me in his adenoidal voice, approach a woman from behind. Always come in from the front, but at a slight angle so it’s not too direct and confrontational. You should speak to her over your shoulder, so it looks like you might walk away at any minute. Ever see Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer? It’s kind of like that.
A few minutes later, I spotted a young, tipsy-looking woman with long, tangled blond curls and a puffy pink vest standing alone. I decided that approaching her would be an easy way to redeem myself. I circled around until I was in the 10 o’clock position in front of her and walked in, imagining myself approaching a horse I didn’t want to frighten.
Oh my God, I said to her. Did you see those two girls fighting outside?
No, she said. What happened?
She was interested. She was talking to me. It was working.
Um, two girls were fighting over this little guy who was half their size. It was pretty brutal. He was just standing there laughing as the police came and arrested the girls.
She giggled. We started talking about the club and the band playing there. She was very friendly and actually seemed grateful for the conversation. I had no idea that approaching a woman could be this easy.
Sin sidled up to me and whispered in my ear, Go kino.
What’s kino? I asked.
Kino? the girl replied.
Sin reached behind me, picked up my arm, and placed it on her shoulder. Kino is when you touch a girl, he whispered. I felt the heat of her body and was reminded of how much I love human contact. Pets like to be petted. It isn’t sexual when a dog or a cat begs for physical affection. People are the same way: we need touch. But we’re so sexually screwed up and obsessed that we get nervous and uncomfortable whenever another person touches us. And, unfortunately, I am no exception. As I spoke to her, my hand felt wrong on her shoulder. It was just resting there like some disembodied limb, and I imagined her wondering what exactly it was doing there and how she could gracefully extricate herself from under it. So I did her the favor of removing it myself.
Isolate her, Sin said.
I suggested sitting down, and we walked to a bench. Sin followed and sat behind us. As I’d been taught, I asked her to tell me the qualities she finds attractive in guys. She said humor and ass.
Fortunately, I have one of those qualities.
Suddenly, I felt Sin’s breath on my ear. Sniff her hair, he was instructing.
I smelled her hair, although I wasn’t exactly sure what the point was. I figured Sin wanted me to neg her. So I said, It smells like smoke.
Noooooo! Sin hissed in my ear. I guess I wasn’t supposed to neg.
She seemed offended. So, to recover, I took another whiff. But underneath that, there’s a very intoxicating smell.
She coked her head to one side, furrowed her brow ever so slightly, scanned me up and down, and said, You’re weird. I was blowing it.
Fortunately, Mystery soon arrived.
This place is dead, he said. We’re going somewhere more target-rich. To Mystery and Sin, these clubs didn’t seem to be reality. They had no problem whispering in students’ ears while there were talking to women, dropping pickup terminology in front of strangers, and even interrupting a student during a set and explaining, in front of his group, what he was doing wrong. They were so confident and their talk was so full of incomprehensible jargon that the women rarely even raised an eyebrow, let alone suspected they were being used to train wannabe ladies’ men.
I big my new friend good-bye as Sin had taught me, pointing to my cheek and saying, Kiss good-bye. She actually pecked me. I felt very alpha.
I was in high spirits in the limo by the next bar. Do you think I could have kissed her? I asked Mystery.
If you think you could have, then you could have, he said. As soon as you ask yourself whether you should or shouldn’t, that means you should. And what you do is, you phase-shift. Imagine a giant gear thudding down in your head, and then go for it. Start hitting on her. Tell her you just noticed she has beautiful skin, and start massaging her shoulders.
But how do you kiss her? Sweater asked.
I just say, ‘Would you like to kiss me?’
And then what happens?
One of three things, Mystery said. If she says, ‘Yes,’ which is very rare, you kiss her. If she says, ‘Maybe,’ or hesitates, then you say, ‘Lets find out,’ and kiss her. And if she says, ‘No,’ you say, ‘I didn’t say you could. It just looked like you had something on your mind’
You see, he grinned triumphantly. You have nothing to lose. Every contingency is planned for. It’s foolproof. That is they Mystery kiss-close.
I furiously scribbled every word of the kiss-close in my notebook. No one had ever told me how to kiss a girl before. It was just one of those things men were supposed to know on their own, like shaving and car repair.
Sitting in the limo with a notebook on my lap, listening to Mystery talk, I asked myself why I was really there. Taking a course in picking up women wasn’t the kind of thing normal people did. Even more disturbing, I wondered why it was so important to me, why I’d be come so quickly obsessed with the online community and its leading pseudonyms.
Perhaps it was because attracting the opposite sex was the only area in my life in which I felt like a complete failure. Every time I walked down the street or into a bar, I saw my own failure staring me back in the face with red lipstick and black mascara. The combination of desire and paralysis was deadly. Perhaps singing up for Mystery’s workshop had been an intelligent decision. After all, I was doing something proactive about my lameness. Even the wise man dwells in the fool’s paradise.
Writers do not usually have teeth that catch the sun as brilliantly as Neil Strauss’s do. The teeth, along with the Lasik eye surgery, shaved head, defined goatee, tan and subtle extra inches on his boots all came to him on the orders of Mystery, the world’s greatest seduction master, and Strauss’s mentor when it came to writing his latest book, The Game, in which he penetrates the secret world of the modern pick-up artist, or PUA. The scar on his cheek is from Krav Maga, an Israeli self-defence class in which he failed to defend himself. It is, like surfing, a physical pursuit he took up in order to buff his puny body. He also did the Alexander Technique to improve his posture. When he helps other men now with their seduction art, he shows them where the top of their spine is (it’s always higher than they think) so they can stand up straight and look like the alpha male in the room. They listen to him because, somewhere along the line, in writing about the secret society of pick-up artists, he became one of its most infamous members.
He welcomes me at the door wearing jeans, a black T-shirt and gold leather boots, a hangover from Mystery’s insistence that his pupils always wear something that can be a conversation starter.
Strauss, now in his early thirties, has slept with hundreds of women, including a porn star in a bar who dragged him into the loo because she couldn’t wait to have him. He pulled a woman’s phone number while shopping for envelopes in the erotic environment of an office supply store, only to Google her and find she was the reigning Playboy Playmate of the Year. He got invited back to the hotel room of twin Goth burlesque dancers. He had on rotation a curvy Latina spitfire, a cool indie rock chick and Jessica 1 and Jessica 2, college students in a Miami hotel suite. And during a synthesis of his real job and new persona, he seduced Britney Spears during a Rolling Stone interview.
That he is very much an anti-hero is clear from the number of tricks and ruses he uses to bend women to his will. As pioneered by Mystery, he carried at all times a greatest hits packet of staged photos that he had ‘just’ had developed and which chronicled in one impressive roll his athleticism and daring (sky-diving), his tenderness (him with a puppy), and his close friendship with a celebrity. He used ‘waking hypnosis’ to lead girls up a ‘Yes Ladder’ (’Can I ask you a question’ leads to ‘Are you adventurous?’ leads to ‘Can you prove it?’). On Britney he used ‘chick crack’ - women’s addiction to tarot, astrology, runes, word association games - things that most men are not interested in, but that he mastered in devotion to his cult. She didn’t know this. All she knew was that they obviously shared a deep connection. He never used the cell phone number she gave him. By the time he met the love of his life, Lisa, he already had two huge manila envelopes of phone numbers, which he lovingly discarded in front of her the first night they spent together.
These are issues that aren’t bothering the clientele of Saddle Ranch, an exceptionally unpleasant Sunset Strip bar where Mystery is sending out his students to practise their technique. On a mechanical bull a wasted woman in a denim mini is now flashing her knickers; there is sawdust on the floor, though you can hardly see that for the scrum of tipsy girls in halterneck tops slamming jelly shots. The women here are poorly made-up and lairy, but they are myriad. Which is the point for the PUAs in training: go not for the best but for the most. When we arrive, trembling men come up to Strauss, or rather the legend known as Style. They ask him where he got his infamous flashing-word T-shirt (a conversation starter). A man who looks like Andy Bell from Erasure is wearing a bowler hat and carrying a Dr Seuss lunchbox.
Finally, as final call is announced, Neil introduces me to Mystery, who has forgone the top hat for a ski cap.
‘Hello Emma!’ He fixes me with an unwavering stare and Clintonian double-palmed handshake. There is no one else in the room but he and I. And then, just as quickly, he drops my hand as if it were a bag of cold chips on the high street, and turns his back on me to speak to another girl. I am unanchored. I am bewildered. But mainly I want Mystery to pay attention to me.
‘I wonder,’ says Strauss, as we head back to the car, ‘if that was accidental or on purpose. Whether he was negging you or not.’
There are groupies now for pick-up artists, which seems rather to be defeating the purpose. Indeed, it seems that Strauss got out in the nick of time. Now back in the game, Mystery’s legend has travelled so far that two siliconed Latinas have made the journey from Miami to be picked up by him, both fighting for his attention. He takes the two of them home.
The only pick-up artist Strauss has ever met who was better than Mystery was Tom Cruise, who he interviewed for Rolling Stone. And though the actor’s intensity was devoted not to seduction but to Scientology, Strauss felt they had a lot in common.
Would women, I ask, be able to work the equivalent to The Game?
‘But you already have it!’ says Neil. ‘It’s the cover of every woman’s magazine, of Cosmo and Glamour: "Six tips to get a man". "Six tips to keep him faithful." It’s already part of your culture.’
‘You have this perception,’ says Neil, ‘that it won’t work on someone classy. But many of these women were smart. As much as guys are dogs, most people’s 10s were always someone they could have a conversation with.’ There is a real tenderness to the chapters in The Game on falling in love with Lisa that leaves you thinking of Strauss’s time in the cult as a literal manifestation of the Courtney Love lyric, ‘I fake it so real I am beyond fake’. Every technique in the book will work if all you want is to sleep with women.
The Game, by Neil Strauss, is published by Canongate at £16.99
We’ll call this one Cupid because, with his golden curls and wide-eyed cherubic face, it seems like a decent handle. He’s 26, fresh out of the military and, despite his Abercrombie good looks, he tends to panic when he talks to girls. "I’m totally an introvert," he says early on a Friday evening.
But now it’s into the wee hours of Saturday morning and he’s at the Saddle Ranch on the Sunset Strip. He’s watched as a man called Mystery made out with a cute brunet with pale lipstick and another guy did a "bounce," leading the most scantily clad woman at the bar from one part of the patio to another.
But Cupid hasn’t approached anybody all night, and now that the bartenders are hollering for everybody to get out he’s worried it might be too late. He turns to Neil Strauss for guidance.
Strauss once counted himself among those who were panicked around women. Then he overcompensated. After attending a seminar on the art of seduction in 2002, the former New York Times columnist and current Rolling Stone writer has been obsessed with, even addicted to, a little-known community of men who consider themselves pickup artists. He posts to message boards, helps out with seduction courses, even concocted an ill-conceived plan to get the best in the business to live together in Dean Martin’s former mansion above the Hollywood strip.
He chronicles his ascent (descent?) into this world in the new book "The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists," which arrives in stores, bound like a Bible, on Tuesday. In it, Strauss describes in graphic detail a personal journey that begins with him being terrified of women and ends with him believing he could seduce any woman in a club, bar, coffee shop or elevator. He is a diminutive man with a shaved head and angular goatee, and though he seems gentle and sweet in person — nervous and cute and maybe a touch effete (affectations he’s learned in seduction training, perhaps?) — in the book he comes off as debauched and predatory.
But he is a hero to the 11 men who have signed up for the $2,250 Mystery MethodBootcamp — a three-day, 40-hour intensive seminar designed to help "men from any background meet, attract and build relationships with exceptional women of extraordinary beauty and quality," according to the workshop’s website.
"He’s supposed to be one of the best," says Chongo, a 30-year-old special effects designer who is on his third seminar this weekend.
"See that girl over there with the pink shirt?" Cupid asks Strauss, who is known as Style in the rapidly growing community of pickup artists and who once appeared in a porn movie while ghostwriting Jenna Jameson’s memoir. "I think she’s, like, the hottest girl in the whole place."
"You may have missed your window because now she’s with a guy. But go and approach her anyway. It’s a two set," says Strauss, in pickup lingo referring to the number of people.
"Can I do that even though the lights are on?" Cupid asks.
"Don’t even think about it and just do it," Strauss says. "If you don’t, you’ll be regretting it the rest of the weekend."
Strauss doesn’t have high expectations for Cupid. After all, this is only the first night. The whole point of the evening is for students to watch the self-proclaimed pros in the field and to take their own fledgling steps into the world of seduction by starting conversations with women.
"The first night we go out, the students will walk in and crash and burn because they don’t have a clue yet. The second day is more about the students and they’ll go and do openers and do OK, and the third day is kind of fun. On the third day, they actually start to have some success," Strauss says. "People forget how petrified men are to talk to women they don’t know." But Cupid does well for a first outing — the couple engage in conversation with him.
Strauss isn’t teaching this weekend’s workshop. He’s assisting his friend Erik von Markovik, arguably the best pickup artist in the community, who uses the name Mystery — and who first taught the course three years ago, the class Strauss attended. Now Mystery is teaching seduction seminars almost every weekend in cities around the globe. He isn’t the only one — Strauss estimates there are roughly 100 others.
Mystery is a 6-foot-5-inch lanky magician from Toronto who intentionally "peacocks" (dresses outrageously to attract women) — today it’s black fingernails, black cowboy hat, brown corduroy bell-bottom suit with little slashes of orange all over it and snakeskin boots. A virgin, he says, until he was 21, he developed the "Mystery Method" through trial and error and the kind of single-minded determination and willingness to practice that all magicians need to be successful at deception.
Mystery has a term for everything in the pickup game — a "neg" is a casual insult you tell a girl you’re interested in to show her you don’t think she’s so great ("Your nails look nice, are they real?" "Look, her nose wiggles when she laughs"). Walking up to a group of people and starting to talk to them is called "opening a set." A "false time constraint" is a white lie that implies you’re not going to hang around and bother anybody ("I can only stay a minute," "I have to get back to my friend"). Mystery encourages his students to tell stories that show DHV (demonstrations of higher value) and to look for IOI (indicators of interest) from their selected targets. (Yes, women are referred to as targets.)
In the field, he’ll speak over students’ shoulders while they’re talking to a girl and tell them "push, pull, push, pull," which means hold her hand, then drop it like you don’t care, then hold it again. He’ll tell them when to start to "kino," or begin the back rubbing, hand holding and arm stroking that indicates this relationship is about being more than just friends. He’s like a choreographer of the seduction dance and the boot camp is for people with two left feet.
There are two parts to every day of the boot camp — a classroom component and a field component. The classroom component this weekend was held in a small room at the Holiday Inn on Highland Avenue and taught exclusively by Mystery. In the field (the Saddle Ranch, the Standard and the World), he brings "approach coaches," guys like Strauss who have already taken his classes and have established themselves in the community, to advise the students while they are doing a set.
Dressed in his corduroy suit, Mystery paces around the Holiday Inn conference room talking about hard-wired responses in interaction between the sexes, refers to photocopied handouts with suggested openers on them (most begin with "Can I get your opinion on …"), and writes charts on a white board breaking down the time from "Meet" until "Sex" into three, then nine, then 13 sub-moments.
The students take careful notes on everything; Chongo even has his laptop. They range in age from mid-20s to mid-40s and come across as quiet and nice guys — maybe a little sad, or a bit lonely. Except for the gangly guy who walked in late wearing a tight red shirt with mesh panels in it. ("Love the shirt," Mystery says. "Got it.")
"There are three main types who take the seminar," Strauss says. "Guys who just got out of a rough breakup after several years and are out of the loop of dating, guys who have had no luck with women — whether it’s a 25-year-old guy who never held a girl’s hand before or guys who are 40 and are still virgins — and then there are guys who are attractive and socially adjusted but they feel the girl always chooses them and they never choose who they are attracted to."
Strauss admits that he got carried away as an MPUA (master pickup artist) but says for him it wasn’t about power but instead the fear of failure. "I do think I went through a dark period where I got seduced by seduction," he says. "It was about how far I could get, how far I could push it…. I’m finally able, for the first time, to go out again and not think of people as sets that I need to approach."
Over the last year he has begun to distance himself from the pickup artists a bit. He has a girlfriend; he’s been writing the book and now he’ll be promoting it. But he says he’s not done with the community yet.
"I still like helping the guys," he says. "If I can boost someone’s self-esteem, help him get a girlfriend for the first time in his life and keep him from opening fire in a supermarket because of his frustrations, then I’m doing something good in the world."
And Cupid, well, he already has some vague ideas about healthy relationships being so important they could put an end to wars. In the meantime, he says the class is really helping him get his nerve up for talking to strangers.
On Sunday, the final night of fieldwork is held at the World, a loud dance club on Hollywood Boulevard. Cupid approaches one set in the main room, but the girls can’t hear him so he backs away after just a few openers. Strauss suggests he go to the outside patio, where it is a little quieter. Mystery is already out there with some other students, towering above everyone in a red leopard print T-shirt and a top hat.
Cupid sees three girls leaning against the wall and decides to go in, but Strauss advises him against it. "Jon says that set has been done two times already," he says. "They’re going to think it’s a line."
"I don’t care, I’m going in anyway," says Cupid, who walks away, purposefully, to the girls.
"Oh, my God," Strauss says. "He’s going to be good."
Excerpted From Los Angeles Times. View original article Here
Attired as he is in ski goggles over a woolly hat, Mystery does not exactly cut a dash as your romantic hero. He’s unnerving rather than seductive. But this is the man that claims he is the world’s greatest pick-up artist, a modern day Casanova who boasts he can seduce any women he chooses. With that kind of build up, you’d imagine he could at least look like George Clooney.
It had taken some time to persuade Mystery to meet me. A phenomenon in America thanks to his alleged prowess with women, he’s on magazine covers, signing book deals and giving autographs all over the country. There is a waiting list for those anxious to attend his exclusive men only seduction boot camps (three-day workshops where his students are taught his copywrited seduction techniques). I am one of the first female journalists to infiltrate one.
Mystery bounces into the opening seminar, held in a hotel conference suit in Las Vegas, like Tiger-all smiles and affability. He’s wearing black nail polish, lot of jewelry and despite the 90 degree Celsius heat, his trade mark ski goggles over a ski hat. Anxiously waiting in the room are his seven students, who, in Mystery’s jargon (he uses a lot of it) are AFC’s (Average Frustrated Chumps). When they finish the course, they will be PUA’s (Pick up Artist).
None of them wants to talk to me. It is quietly explained how humiliating it is for a man to admit he has trouble attracting a women. None of them is particularly unattractive. One, a handsome doctor in his thirties, admits later that he works all hours at the hospital and has no time to find a wife. There’s a fireman in his forties who is divorced and just plain shy. There is one who is a lawyer-good looking but short. And there are several who are computer specialists. Probably rich and nerdy.
The purpose of you being here is to begin is to begin a sexual relationship with a woman, 32-year-old Mystery begins. But that doesn’t necessarily mean going out and laying a lot of girls. This is about the women of your dreams. Lets be honest, there are less than attractive women out there, but they are always available to you. I say Raise your standards. Tonight you’re going to learn how to approach really beautiful women without creeping them out. For most men, approaching women is as frightening as throwing yourself out of an airplane, but I am going to show you ways of desensitizing yourself. And you are going to practice. This is something you need to practice.
Mystery (real name: Erik von Markovik) is annoyingly likeable. You have to remind yourself that this is a man who rates women on a scale of nought to ten, based on looks. And that he also boasts that the female of the species ought to be grateful to him for ensuring that being picked up is fun. For his arrogance alone, he ought to be disliked. But there is something disarmingly charismatic about him. During breaks in the workshop, we get to talk. All this has come upon me, he purrs with what seems to be incredulity. If you had told me when I was 21, when I lost my virginity, that I would be known as the world’s greatest pick-up artist, that I would have this lifestyle and some very beautiful women in my life; if you have told me that what I do would turn into a nationwide culture phenomenon, I’d never have believed you.
Mystery draws breath for a second. The truth is, every man has to do what it takes to attract a women because if he doesn’t, he is effectively sterile. So for the first time in my life, I am doing the honorable thing. I am doing something where I can give to others.
Mystery’s method is based on human psychology. If a man approaches an HB (Hot Babe) and says something like, What’s your name? he is almost certain to get rebuffed. Beautiful women, Mystery explains, are constantly approached by men, so that questions will immediately put them on the defensive. The average frustrated chump goes wrong because he is telegraphing sex. But if a PUA were to approach a group of women and men and befriend all in then circle, he stands a good chance of eventually talking to the HB on a one-to-one basis.
By getting in with the group, the PUA demonstrates higher social value, meaning that he is gaining validation from the HB’s friends. It is crucial to show no interest whatsoever in the HB. He should even go as far as to deliver a well placed neg. This is a negative comment or veiled insult such as, I don’t think I like you. HB’s are not used to men ignoring or criticizing them. The lack of interest in her also disarms her friends.
The PUA must also use crucial body language. If he talks to the HB at all initially, it should be in a disinterested fashion over his shoulder. He should also aim to position himself at the center of the group, preferably sitting in the chair that the HB may already be sitting on. This is called being locked in. If a girl is sitting on a chair, and I’m leaning over her, it looks like I’m moving in on her. It will also make her feel uncomfortable, explains Mystery. But if I’m in a chair leaning back, and she has to lean in to speak to me, it looks like the girl is moving in on me. Here, let me show you.
Suddenly I find myself acting as the HB for Mystery’s demonstrations to his students. He offers me his hands to help me out of the chair so we can swap positions. I give mine to him. Ah, interesting he says slyly, and later explains that the PUA must also periodically test the HB’s indicators of interest (IOIs) by offering her chances to touch, such as this. Could I really be falling for this unlikely charmer?
Mystery’s fame grew first on the internet, in the underground subculture of men dedicated to chat rooms discussing ways of wooing women. Mystery’s second love after women is magic, and it was by doing tricks of illusion that he realized that he could disarm women. By hid mid-twenties, he realized he had a winning formula and began disseminating his seduction tips online. He eventually moved to Los Angeles and began his seminars.
He is at pains to point out that his classes are not about men simply trying to get laid. Why go to all this effort just for a one-night stand? And Mystery practices what he preaches- He tells me that he has a girlfriend for the last 10 months, but they are breaking up because she has a problem with him touring all the time.
Over three days, the would be PUA’s are subjected to more than 19 hours of classroom theory. Then each night, the class transfers to nightclubs to put the theory to practice. As Mystery’s pupils hit the Las Vegas bar later, all are nervous but expectant. Befriending a group of strangers when you don’t happen to do magic tricks is easier said then done. For this purpose, Mystery provides all his students with a number of openers, tried and tested lines and anecdotes to get conversation going with women. He also brings along some of his former students, who have spent the last year practicing.
What is miraculous is that it works. In four hours, I watch Mystery work his way into five separate groups of people in the nightclub, and target a beautiful woman who wraps her limbs around him in less time then it takes to say impressive. It also works for his former students.
In the first ten seconds, I saw these guys use this material and I knew they had it down, says Gary a computer system operator in his thirties, the only one who agrees to talk to me at the end. It’s remarkable. I tried out the material they gave me, and I’m not smooth yet, but these girls talked to me. Typically things don’t go too far when I try to talk to women. I’m a pretty smart person, but sometimes I don’t have the lulls in conversation and I know it’s a weakness. There is so much involved in attracting a woman. It’s really impressive what Mystery does. He’s given me confidence. I know that if I present myself right, I could probably seduce any woman.
Not his one, because like the girl who works behind the bar at the club where Mystery always brings his students, I’ve heard all the lines now. And if I hear another acronym, I may have to SLBM (Scream Like Bloody Murder). But I can see why Mystery is successful. I just wish there was a course like this for women.
As the evening draws to a close, Mystery is wrapped in the arms of another woman. I feel, in the spirit solidarity, I should let her know who he is. But she looks like she is enjoying herself too much.
Friday night and the Circle Bar inside the Hard Rock Hotel pulsates with music and energy, jammed with so many people that movement is sometimes difficult. Our group of six or seven guys has found a little corner, where we huddle together and nervously wait for our professor.
When he arrives, he’s impossible to miss. At 6 feet, 5 inches tall, his head rises above to crowd and he’s dressed like a rock star. He wars a black Australian raffia cowboy hat-with a star pendant and little black feathers on the front-and it covers his long dark hair. He is clad in a loud pink-and-black, leopard-print T-shirt. Around his neck is a feathered boa. He wears a pair of retro black-framed rectangular eyeglasses, without lenses. His fingernails are painted black. Heads, literally, turn as he makes his way through the bar, which is exactly the effect he sought. He calls it "peacocking," dressing to draw attention to yourself.
We have all spent the previous eight hours with him in a hotel conference room on the Strip on his "bootcamp" seminar on how to meet and pick up women. We have heard his stories- how he seduced the Penthouse magazine Pet of the Millennium; how he’s dated 15 exotic dancers; how he can not only strike up a conversation with the hottest woman in the room, but make her pursue him. He even has his super-hot girlfriend on-hand to help establish credibility. He says it’s all due to a system he calls "The Mystery Method" because it’s his method and his stage name is "Mystery." He has spent the afternoon teaching us the basics, and tonight at the Hard Rock, we are going to watch Mystery put his method into practice.
"I can pick up a girl without even thinking about it," he told us at the seminar. "It’s like driving a car; after a while, you don’t think about driving, you just do it. But it takes practice. Why be scared to approach a woman? It’s just a game. And I’m going to catch you up to speed on a game I enjoy playing."
It was all enough to raise a skeptic’s eye. The beautiful girlfriend could be a plant. The Penthouse Pet and the exotic dancers, inventions. The skepticism lasts right up until the moment he turns to scout the Circle Bar.
He spies a group of three attractive women sitting on stools by the wall. He walks up to them, smiles and strikes up a conversation as we mill around behind the women and eavesdrop. The first thing you realize is that Mystery’s voice has changed - it has turned noticeably feminine. He is playful. He laughs. He flirts. He wraps his scarf twice around his neck, then tugs at both ends, and it appears as though the scarf magically passes through his neck- a trick he learned in his career as a magician. He then wraps it around the neck of one of the women to let her try his trick; she giggles because when she tugs the ends, the scarf only tightens around her neck.
Mystery coaxes one of the women off her stool, and the somehow steals her seat. He leans back on the bar stool, and the women now lean in toward him. When the prettiest woman of the group asks what his sign is, Mystery throws his hands up in a dismissive motion. "you want my sign?" he says incredulously. "You’re losing me, you’re losing me." It’s a technique he calls "throwing a neg," and it works in textbook fashion: The woman who asked the question steps even closer to him and now seems willing to work to keep his interest. The tide has changed; she is now trying to impress him- just like he planned it.
Within 15 minutes, she has given Mystery her number and pleads with him to let her return to Vegas the next weekend to see him again. Over the course of the next three hours, he will utter almost the exact same lines to at least three other groups of women. And every time he approaches a group, he gets at least 20 minutes of conversation and banter out of it. He almost always gets a phone number. Not that he plans to call; it is, after all, just a demonstration for our benefit.
Late into the night, he sends us out to make our own first tentative approaches using the Mystery Method. We have none of his verve or panache. He is a silver-tongued devil; we are simply tongue-tied. For us, approaching a group of women means an awkward 30-second conversation that ends abruptly and crashes with a thud.
"That’s OK," Mystery says. "I’ve been where you are. This isn’t a quick fix. It takes practice. It’s going to take you six months to get this system down. It’s all about having a game plan. I’m giving you the gift to get women."
It’s after 3 a.m. when Mystery dismisses us. He looks at me. "Do you want to come back tomorrow?" This is supposed to be a one-day assignment, but how can I leave now? "Can I?" I ask. "OK," says Mystery. "See you tomorrow."
Mystery insists that he was once like all of us other AFC’s (Average Frustrated Chumps): he, too, found it difficult to approach a pretty woman in a bar or at a party and strike up a conversation.
It’s an affliction that affects most men. A man wants to be clever in that situation, he wants to say something to spin a woman’s head; usually he comes up with some line that either makes him look dumb or too nice to be interesting. So, most often, he does nothing. Every man can rattle off at least a dozen moments when his eyes locked with a woman’s, and he knew she was interested and yet he was paralyzed. That means at least a dozen women who may have been "the one" are now forever lost because he failed to meet his destiny.
And even if a man does summon enough courage to approach, how does he impress her before he bones her? A man who tries to be polite by asking her questions about herself might as well be greeted with a yawn. Mystery decided to figure out why that happens and, more importantly, how to beat the system.
His real name is Erik Von Markovic, and he was born in Toronto 33 years ago. He was a tall, skinny kid who grew up feeling alienated and lonely. His life was transformed when he saw David Copperfield perform. Markovic go videotapes of all 15 of Copperfield’s television specials and obsessively watched them over and over, dissecting Copperfield’s act until he had figured out the basic secrets behind the illusions. "My sister kept asking me why I couldn’t simply enjoy them like everyone else," he says. "But I wanted to understand, I wanted to know what he was doing."
After high school, Markovic began to perform magic tricks outside nightclubs in Toronto and parlayed that into paid engagements using the stage name "Mystery." Mystery was everything Eric Von Markovic wasn’t-bold, confident, outgoing and the center of attention. Yet, even as Mystery, he was still an AFC. Women remained, well, a complete mystery to him.
So he decided to put the same effort he had used to unlock the mysteries of magic into unlocking the mysteries of women. He drew on basic common sense, and combined that with some social history and reverse psychology. He them threw in a few performance principles, and came up with his Mystery Method.
"A lot of it comes from observing how a beautiful woman acts," he says. Example? He was once picking up a woman who was all over him. He said something she didn’t like, and she dismissed him by saying, "You’re losing me." She got up, walked back to her friends and turned her back to him. Mystery was astonished. Wow, he told himself, what a beautiful move; I’m going to use that. Then he went and won her over.
He has so good at being a pick-up artist that it has eclipsed over his career as a magician. Mystery left Toronto in 2000 and moved to Los Angeles, hoping to bread into television. When that didn’t pan out, he began to teach the Mystery Method in seminars. Men pay him $1850 to learn his secrets; his website (mystrerymethod.com) thrives with a members-only area where men trade stories and pickup lines and give one another support.
The New York Times has anointed him as "one of the most admired men in the world of seduction" in a long feature story. The writer of that article, best-selling author Neil Strauss, will publish a book on the pick-up artist culture in May (The Game: Undercovering the Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists, Regan Books) that focuses on Mystery. More than one television network has approached Mystery to star in a reality series; he’s also at work on his own book project explaining his techniques.
Oh, and he also wants to attempt his greatest illusion: jump off the top of the Stratosphere, and survive.
Mystery moved to Las Vegas a few weeks prior to our boot-camp seminar, and he hopes to land a gig as an illusionist at one of the casinos. But he’s barely had time to pursue that, or even move into his new place, because his Mystery Method seminars have kept him on the move from across the country each weekend.
The Vegas seminar has attracted eight men from as far ways as New Jersey and Louisiana. It is an eclectic group of students who range in age from early 20s to mid 50s. There is an investor, a developer, a shoe-store owner and several computer programmers.
The first lesson in the Mystery Method? Go out. "Girls don’t come knocking on your door," Mystery says. "Why are you staying in like a hermit in a cave?" Lesson Two: The old saying "be yourself"? Forget about it. If being yourself mean you aren’t getting women, then you need a change.
The Mystery Method is aimed directly at meeting HBs (Hot Babes), and based on the premise that nice guys will finish last. "Women have strategies to get rid of bores, nice guys, " he says. "If you introduce yourself and say, ‘Hi,’ you’re probably the fifth guy who’s done it that day. They have a protective shield. And the nicer you are, the more that shield rises. For a woman who gets his on 15 times a day, it’s a different reality."
That’s why Mystery directs us to throw a "neg" in the first few moments of conversation, such as: "A lot women are pretty; what have you got going for you other than your looks?" It’s intended to throw her off-balance, to entice her to pursue you.
Mystery—a maestro of the pickup artist scene—has cracked the code of getting a woman to yes, yes, yes. But can his choreographed come-ons really give men what they want?
In late-’50s Los Angeles, lore has it that if a man craved a cocktail of gin and nooky, he directed his limo driver to a mansion on Londonderry Place off the Sunset Strip. Under its cathedral ceiling, he’d find Frank Sinatra reprising one of his recent hits as Dean Martin charmed one dame after another into his bedroom, where the good liquor was kept with the between-the-sheets secrets. This was a few years after a young entrepreneur named Hugh Hefner launched the magazine that was to make him the alpha of Hollywood Romeos—before sex for the sake of sex and celebrity for the sake of celebrity had been imagined by most Americans.
Hefner, of course, built the country’s most famous sex palace, fairly wresting the word grotto from the vocabulary of geologists. But the alpha is now ancient—the Playboy Mansion will soon host Hefner’s eightieth-birthday party—and his successor may well be a man called Mystery, who has attracted the hero worship of thousands of sexually unfulfilled males worldwide. His den?
Mystery’s renown was spawned by a development the Rat Pack never could have imagined: the Internet. The cultish success of Ross Jeffries’ 1992 book, How to Get the Women You Desire Into Bed, gave rise to hundreds of free Internet newsgroups and message boards carrying advice and diaries posted by self-described pickup artists. (Jeffries is said to be the model for the Tom Cruise character in Magnolia who adapted neurolinguistic programming—embedding suggestive language in regular conversation—to arouse women.) Mystery is a luminary of the virtual pickup world (known as the “community”), whose hundreds of acolytes disseminate his mythology—he was a friendless virgin a decade ago who now counts the Penthouse Pet of the Millennium on his lengthy been-there, done-that list—as well as the Method he developed to jettison his celibacy. Mystery’s students also attend his boot camp-style seduction seminars—including former New York Times rock critic Neil Strauss. Whether his role in the community is a genuine one or an endeavor of undercover journalism (pun intended) may be revealed in his account of the pickup demimonde that will be published this spring by Regan Books.
PRACTICE MAKES PICKUP
Mystery has invited me to Los Angeles to sit in on one of his boot camps, making me the first female outsider ever to do so. When I arrive at Londonderry Place, I know I’m at the right address from the stretch limo parked in the driveway and the condom wrappers scattered on the street. Answering the door is a pale and neck-craningly tall vision of Don Juan de Marco, lips framed by a soul patch, hazel eyes smudged with eyeliner, nails varnished black. Mystery releases his dark hair from a ponytail, smiles politely, and introduces himself as Erik. Behind him a slate fireplace soars up the wall near a sunken pit filled with gold and silver pillows.
The house, known as Project Hollywood, is the flagship of several emerging franchises, Mystery explains, including Projects New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, London, and Sydney. He steers me past the bacheloresque Ikea breakfast set in the kitchen, past the Jacuzzi that flows into a kidney-shape pool, past the peaked tent that’s been pitched on the landscaped patio—“private enough to have sex outside.” He takes my hand and leads me inside to his granite bathroom, where a triangle representing wealth, health, and relationships is scrawled on the mirror in grease pencil, a configuration cribbed, he says, from Kabbalah. Then we move into his walk-in closet, featuring a milliner’s array of Seuss-like top hats over a rack of latex pants and Victorian coats, which he wears out “peacocking” to clubs. His bedroom, with its king-size bed facing a private balcony, is deluxe compared with the twin mattresses in closets that rent to former students who run their own pickup chat sites. The housemates’ online posts, signed with tags such as Papa and Sickboy, are written partly in code—“getting IOIs off a two-set in A1” translates to “receiving indicators of interest from two women upon approach”—a language in which I am about to receive the equivalent of a 72-hour Berlitz class. Sitting in the living room are four eager and fairly attractive PUAs (pickup artists), each of whom has spent a substantial amount of money to shed his status as an AFC (average frustrated chump): a local writer-producer divorcé nicknamed Madbad; an accountant from Omaha called Hawaii; TheGame, a businessman from Phoenix; and a techie originally from Calcutta named Das. As their guru settles at the messy coffee table that serves as his lectern, the men fall silent.
What the typical AFC does wrong, Mystery begins, is to hit on a woman by telegraphing sex and trying to get her into bed as quickly as possible. The Mystery Method compresses the nine stages of courtship—three stages of attraction, three of comfort building, and three of seduction—into seven hours (that can progress over an evening or several days). “Every love story that has ever been told goes through these nine phases,” Mystery asserts. (He is evasive when asked how he developed this scheme—“Experiment and study,” he says, citing influences as diverse as Socrates and scientists who research the mating patterns of grouses.) During each phase, the PUA lays hours of practiced routines upon his target to get her to eventually want sex. And while sex may be the desired outcome, this multilayered process opens the possibility of a long-term sexual relationship, not just a one-night stand. Three of the students announce that they couldn’t care less about a relationship, but Das is looking for a life partner, and when pressed even the threesome-obsessed Madbad says he would trade all the casual sex the Method promises for one night with the ex-wife who broke his heart.
First, though, they have studying to do. “You need to get good at about 300 set pieces if you want to pull this off,” Mystery tells his protégés, adding that one should never say anything to a woman “who counts” that he hasn’t rehearsed on at least two dozen less compelling women, like a comedian sharpening his jokes before a big show. “You can’t do that by talking only to hotties. You have to socialize yourself by talking to the UGs [ugly ones],” he says.
The routine begins with an opening parry directed at a group of women, or, just as often, women and men, to gain an “in.” Mystery likes to flash his black nails and admit that he gets mistaken for a devil worshiper. Once he has their attention, the PUA “demonstrates a higher value” to the group surrounding his target—either by doing a magic trick or playing one of the memory games Mystery teaches the class. Then he turns to his potential conquest and drops a “neg,” a negative comment or veiled insult. “What have you got going for you besides your looks?” he might ask. Or simply, “I don’t think I like you.” The idea is that beautiful women—HBs (hot babes)—are used to every man they meet flattering them and buying them drinks to get them into bed. What they never experience is a man ignoring them, dismissing them, criticizing them—at least not until later. (Lack of interest also disarms the HB’s friends, who are used to running interference.) Mystery claims that this tactic works because it forces a woman to pitch herself as a conquest instead of just deflecting the pick-me moves men have used since the dawn of courtship.
Only after the HB shows interest should the PUA signal his attraction. At this point he leads her away from the group to begin the comfort-building stage. The routines range from dodging questions about current employment by talking about childhood dreams (“I wanted to be an astronaut”) to demonstrating vulnerability. As Mystery’s charges sit rapt, he spins a 20-minute narrative about the time his baby niece fell down the stairs and broke her jaw and how he rushed her to the hospital in his arms. His eyes tear up and he takes a giant, spluttering breath before whispering, “I just love her so much.” Abruptly, he straightens up and resumes his usual confident tone. “And then you phase-shift into C3,” the final stage of comfort building. “It’s total chick crack.”
Mystery uses the Method on every woman he tries to bed. “I save the story about my dad dying for the ones I really care about.” (He claims his father died several months ago though he won’t say how.) “That’s for when I get you into C2,” he says, throwing me a flirtatious look. I try to hold his gaze to show that I can handle his game, but I’m immediately aware that I’m cooperating with a performance for the class and look down at my notebook. Mystery turns his back on me and continues the lesson.
Throughout it, Mystery uses body language and touch in a Skinner-esque behavioral system of reward and punishment. He’ll gently touch a woman on her wrist or cheek or take her hands as he is talking. If she doesn’t reciprocate, he’ll turn away and “freeze her out.” When he reengages, he’ll touch her again. Her discomfort during the freeze-out will be greater than her unease at the original touch and she’ll welcome the second attempt. “Airlines define comfort as a lack of discomfort,” he likes to say. “I’m just slowly eliminating her discomfort.” This reward and punishment can carry a man into his eventual push for sex. “The freeze-out is one of the best ways to eliminate LMR,” Mystery says, or “last-minute resistance.” He licks his lips, rubs his hands together, and cackles as his students erupt into lascivious peals.
But Mystery wants me to know he’s not a dog. “Seriously,” he says, hushing the room, “I’m a romantic. I fall in love all the time. The sexual thing isn’t enough. There was a time that’s all I was doing it for, but now I’d rather spoon with a girl all night than have sex.”
Madbad’s eyes widen in awe. “I’d just like to have the choice,” he says.
A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION
Mystery’s life has been one long search for validation, for visibility, for control. Erik von Markovik grew up in a Toronto suburb, a lisping, gangly kid who charted snaking detours to school to avoid the bullies. “I was the outcast of outcasts,” he says. “I made those Columbine kids look cool.” Puberty struck late; virginity seemed a terminal affliction. At 16 he quit school to sulk in his parents’ basement and practice his magic tricks, which offered him his only hope at an intriguing identity. (His PUA moniker refers to the shouts of “Hey, Mystery Man!” during his teen isolation.) It was at a David Copperfield show that von Markovik found life-directing inspiration. “Magic became my magnificent obsession,” he says, allowing (or conjuring) a stream of tears to roll down his cheeks.
His other magnificent obsession came at 21, when his first kiss was followed by the loss of his virginity to a girl he made disappear in a magic show. He was so impressed with this far more difficult trick that his new confidence led him to his next achievement—her best friend. Soon after he did a magic trick for some girls at a Toronto juice bar and scored his first pickup. It wasn’t a direct sexual move; it was, he realized, a demonstration of his value, intriguing enough to a woman secure in a social group rather than sitting alone at a bar. He felt he had cracked a code.
As Mystery, he started disseminating his seduction tips online; his advice was so effective that his growing community began traveling to Toronto to watch him work. Mystery decided to take his act to L.A. To raise money, he rented a limo and charged aspiring pickup artists for seminars while driving from club to club. A reputation was made; a guru was born.
Tonight, while the nervous plebes don their peacocking gear for the fieldwork portion of the seminar, Mystery appears in a simple pin-striped suit. Our first stop is Saddle Ranch, a Western-theme bar, where Mystery sics his students on group after group of women. When he notices a flaw in technique, he interrupts and delivers encoded direction. (“Pause. Phase shift to A3,” he says, a reference to the third attraction stage.) TheGame holds his own with a couple of tourists until he runs out of material. Despite the attention he gets for the silk lei around his neck, Hawaii is shot down by women he negs too quickly. Madbad tries lamely to work a waitress with a small- talk routine. Das, clearly terrified by the spray tans and clamor, sits alone on the patio, tearing through a pack of Dunhills. I realize I haven’t seen Mystery in a while when I hear sorority house screams over the blaring Bon Jovi. Surrounded by five women, Mystery is perched on a stool showing them a magic trick. By the time I cross the room he has a blond on one knee and is making out with her friend—two new phone numbers to input into his Sony Clié.
Next, Mystery leads his flock across the street to the bar at the Standard—the same crowd but with more expensive boob jobs and hipster ready-to-wear—where he is consumed with charming a statuesque brunet in a black tank top named Becky. After befriending her male companion and ignoring her for a few minutes, Mystery plays a memory game and finds out that what Becky has got going for her “more than her looks” is an interest in psychology.
“Really? Me too. You know, you made a pretty rotten first impression, but now that I know you a bit better I realize you’re pretty amazing,” he says by rote, pocketing Becky’s phone number within minutes.
Becky is stunning and engaging—no doubt the one in the room desired by every film producer or indie rock drummer who’d shelled out $12 per cocktail that night. In Mystery’s presence they are AFCs, every one.
A HARDWIRED HABIT
While Mystery refuses to talk about the psychological underpinnings of his Method, several experts I consult testify to its soundness. Desmond Morris, the British zoologist and sexuality expert, admits that the Method is a shrewd compression of the phases of love. “One of the great mistakes men make is not playing all the stages of courtship,” he says. “It has to be done stage by stage if it’s going to work.”
Cornell associate professor of human development Cynthia Hazan thinks the Method works on a deeper level than even Mystery knows. First of all, she says, “you knock [the woman] off balance” with the neg, so throughout the next phases “her judgment is impaired. She becomes focused on getting his attention and approval and getting back into the group.” From the point of view of evolutionary psychology, she adds, “it’s really anxiety-provoking, and humans have a built-in aspect where when we’re anxious we want to get closer to other people.”
The act of negging an attractive woman can even tamper with her brain chemistry, says Helen Fisher, the author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. “When you fall in love with somebody, what’s going on in the brain is an elevated activity of dopamine,” the main arousal chemical, and “the system that motivates you to win a reward,” she explains. “A woman who’s a 9 or a 10 doesn’t have to do any work to get a man, so the system usually isn’t triggered and she doesn’t feel romantic love. But when someone spurns her, that system will kick in and she’ll feel attraction.”
We can’t be blamed for our innate trigger systems, can we? But to be fooled by the crocodile tears of male "vulnerability"? Even here we’re conditioned to respond, Hazan says. “Vulnerability draws us to people—it’s clearly a hardwired characteristic. We have this spontaneous desire to nurture them, to alleviate their distress.”
And when the woman discovers she’s been conned? Once people learn the truth, says Fisher, it often doesn’t matter: “The thing is, once you’ve hooked somebody in, they’ll be willing to ignore almost anything.”
During the final afternoon of the seminar, Mystery calls a coat check girl he’d spoken with for seven minutes during a Chicago boot camp and persuades her to leave her fiancé to fly out to Los Angeles for a week—the fruition of a phone flirtation he has carried on during breaks in the seminar. “This is it,” he tells the group over lunch, eyelids fluttering. “She’s the one. I know it. I think I’m in love.” (Mystery e-mailed me a few weeks after my trip to tell me his coat check girl was moving out to L.A. and he was leaving his Project Hollywood lair for a new home with his new girlfriend. “She agrees this was the best pickup in the History of Mystery,” he wrote me.)
Playboys, philanderers, gigolos. Call them what you will; whatever their character flaws, pickup artists are, at least, confident, goal-oriented individuals with the wherewithal to get what they want. And "what they want" is hardly a secret: One vodka martini and the twinkle in 007’s eye betrays his every dirty desire. Commitment, as you might guess, is rarely among them.
But that might be changing. Believe it or not, today’s digitized world could be bringing the age of the one-night stand to an end. According to a cover story in Saturday Night magazine (July 2004), today’s seduction community (yes, there is such a thing, and it has blogs) is distancing itself from the sexcentric stereotypes of yore. As writer Christopher Shulgan discovers, the new seducers are looking for more than the usual Saturday-night hanky-panky — they also crave "a partner to snuggle with on Sunday morning."
These men are largely mobilized around FastSeduction.com, an online community of knowledge sharing at which the Internet is particularly adept. As the Web site’s tagline, "Class is now in session . . . ," suggests, the site is more than a boasting ground for the locker room chatter. Its purpose is didactic, and its discussion boards are filled with posts offering earnest advice on things like being mindful of nuance, staying attentive to your own style, and coping with rejection. It’s all part of the new world of digital folk knowledge, where one can get bona fide degrees, certificates of ministry, and plain old useful tips on cooking or gardening or meeting that special someone.
The harbinger of this seemingly contradictory revolution in the science of smooth is a 6-foot, 5-inch semi-employed magician from Toronto who calls himself Mystery. Mystery teaches a three-day seminar in seduction, consisting of both classroom learning and night-time field sessions in bars and clubs, which he calls "The Mystery Method." Since creating the course in 2000, Mystery, who does almost all his recruiting online, has trained hundreds, if not thousands, of aspiring seducers in the art of attraction, cinching his place as the leader of the ever-growing FastSeduction.com set, who refer to Mystery mostly in messianic terms.
These pickup artists (or PUAs, as they are called on message boards; seduction, like all viable subcultures, has a jargon all its own) are less concerned with the pickup than they are with the artistry. For many of them, seduction isn’t a means to an end (according to Mystery, a successful "close" to an "approach" is nothing more than a phone number — a bounty he reaps as often as 20 times a week). And an awesome girlfriend isn’t the only reward: Mystery’s disciplinal Don Juans often describe the benefits of the Mystery Method as augmenting not only their romantic pursuits but also their lives in general. They find they become happier, more confident people. Even Neil Strauss, The New York Times’ music columnist and author of an article on Mystery, has become one of the method’s most devoted followers. "It’s revolutionized my life," he says.
Mystery agrees that his method is about more than just meeting women. "My best friends tolerate my little hobby, but they don’t understand the Zen behind it," he says. "It enriches my life."
Which is largely the driving factor behind the vast and convoluted street fair that is the Internet’s educational potential. There are hordes of people online who, like Mystery, have mastered a skill or discovered a gimmick that enriches them and who feel an honest and candid impulse to let the rest of us in on the secret.
Excerpted from Utne Magazine. View original article here
In the game of love, Erik von Markovik, once a Dungeons and Dragons-playing teen in suburban Toronto, has become a major player. Now going by the name Mystery, he’s taught scores of men how to perfect the pickup.
During its lifespan, the message board at the online home of North America’s thriving pickup-artist subculture, FastSeduction.com, has included some strange announcements. But few puzzled readers more than the one posted early the morning of March 24 by the group’s unofficial guru, a man known among his acolytes as Mystery.
Born and raised in the Toronto area, Mystery, who also goes by the name Erik von Markovik, leads a series of educational seminars across the United States and Canada on what he calls the Mystery Method, which aims to teach men how to meet women. Customers are willing to pay because Mystery has developed a reputation as one of the world’s preeminent pickup artists. The system’s hundreds of devoted practitioners quote its founder’s wisdom the way Christians might recite the Gospel of John. "What he’s done is reverse-engineered human behavior," says one follower.
Several weeks before Mystery’s unexpected posting, writer Neil Strauss, in an article in The New York Times Style section, referred to the one-time Torontonian as "one of the most admired men in the world of seduction . . . He has single-handedly invented much of the jargon and tactics that men around the world are using to meet women."
In fact, it was Mystery’s stature among pickup artists that made his March 24 announcement so puzzling. His online disclosure consisted of a link to a self-created Internet movie along with a one-line announcement: "This is my new GF;" he wrote, using the community’s abbreviation for girlfriend. "I am in love. She lives with me now. I’m very happy."
Among Mystery’s pickup-artist peers, the reaction was swift and mixed. Everybody had questions, which were phrased with the disregard for grammar, spelling and punctuation that is typical of the group. "Your not pussy whipped are you?" asked a member. "I’m left scratching my head trying to figure out your motive for posting this . . . Why would you want to parade a woman you claim to be in love with on this place in this manner?" Typed another: "Is Mys going soft on us?" In this little-known backwater of the Internet, the alert was akin to a papal apostasy. The subtext was this: was the most prominent pickup artist of them all finally leaving the game?
For those of us unaware of Mystery and his peers, one of the most surprising things about the group of young males that calls itself the seduction community is the fact that a seduction community even exists. It does, and it’s bigger than one might expect: each day, hundreds of members from across North America log in to FastSeductioncom, or visit the alt.seduction.fast newsgroup. Thanks to the media attention he’s generated, Mystery is the most prominent among dozens of gurus currently peddling educational materials in exchange for fees in the hundreds of dollars. And each month, groups of men gather in clubs and hotel conference rooms across North America to learn, and to trade, tactics that they believe will help them meet women.
For the romantically secure, the story of Mystery is significant because it represents a new phase in the way that technology and the legion of solitary pursuits it has spawned are fundamentally altering the dating game. Mystery and his cohorts are a new class of caballero, one whose members’ ultimate aim—the very act of lady-killing itself—is a turn of events profoundly different from casual sex. The goal here? A long-term and loving relationship. In contrast to earlier generations, this new class of digital Don Juan doesn’t want sex on Saturday night-or, rather, it doesn’t just want sex on Saturday night — it also craves a partner to snuggle with on Sunday morning. Asked why he pursues the Mystery Method to the extent he does, one of the guru’s most devoted disciples offers a response that’s typical: "Dude," he says. "I want an awesome girlfriend."
That said, dating consultants are nothing new. Mystery-like educators for aspiring amorists were around long before Cyrano de Bergerac helped woo Roxane in the 1897 play by Edmond Rostand. Books that purport to teach one sex how to snare the other are stalwarts of the self-help publishing industry; comparatively current examples include 1995’s The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, and Eric Weber’s recently updated guide, How to Pick Up Girls. On the Internet, the father of the seduction community is Ross Jeffries, author of How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed (1992). Jeffries’ technique features something called Neuro-Linguist Programming, which is supposed to attract beautiful women. Jeffries, whose motto is, "You don’t get laid, I don’t get paid," charges an average admission fee of more than $1,000 for his seminars. By the mid-’90s his community of followers had established a thriving online presence in a newsgroup called alt.seduction.fast, where nascent Lotharios traded war stories and sought advice about how to bed the "gentler sex." But by 1998 his influence within the newsgroup was waning. Much of his advice was unhelpful to a younger generation of philanderers, who were more likely to make their approaches at nightclubs rather than the coffee shops, supermarkets and video stores that Jeffries favored "I don’t do clubs and bars," Jeffries acknowledges.
Mystery was different. He first stumbled upon the seduction community in September 1998, and his presence rapidly reinvigorated activity there. Altseduction.fast, or ASF as it was known to frequent posters, was characterized by a communitarian ethic. Most of the posts were candid appeals for dating advice from adolescents and twenty-something males. Realizing that the time he’d spent in bars made him far more experienced at picking up than most of the newsgroup membership, Mystery began answering these appeals, and it soon became apparent that the advice he imparted to the sophomore seductionistos contradicted much of the group’s conventional wisdom. "Don’t buy a girl a beer. Don’t buy a girl a flower. In fact, don’t think about picking her up," Mystery counseled one member. "Rather, think about attracting her [emphasis added]." Hostilities in the form of vituperative newsgroup posts, or "flames," developed between Mystery and a veteran poster, known as Jimmy the HuN, coincidentally also a resident of Toronto. Mystery challenged Jimmy to a battle: they would meet at a nightclub, and then compete to pick up the most beautiful woman. When Jimmy didn’t show, Mystery convinced the rest of the newsgroup to ostracize him, effectively consolidating the newcomer’s leadership.
From the beginning, Mystery preferred to keep his age and real identity secret. But as the months passed, he provided the then-fledgling seduction community with regular reports on his pickup experiences. The reports revealed details about his life. Mystery eked out a living as a magician, performing for corporate parties and nightclubs in Toronto and, occasionally, Los Angeles. He was 6′ 5", with a slim build, shoulder-length dark hair, hazel eyes and black-lacquered finger-nails. He lived in a suburb, but frequently traveled downtown to try to pick up women. At his busiest, in 2000, he went to clubs four nights a week and averaged three to five phone numbers a night. What the community referred to as "the game" was a compulsion he felt driven to pursue. But exactly what drove that compulsion Mystery didn’t explain. After meeting with three other pickup artists, Mystery posted to the newsgroup: "It was almost weird to meet up with people who share my interest this much. I have felt rather alone in this obsession. My best friends in Toronto TOLERATE my little PU [pickup] hobby but I don’t think they understand the ZEN behind it all . . . I LOVE talking about this shit and to do it live with people who share this obsession (without thinking its WRONG or something) is awesome."
In 2001, three years after he rose to prominence in the seduction community, Mystery began staging the seminars that would eventually land him his reputation as North America’s top pickup artist. Although his own reasons for beginning a "teaching career" were simply mercenary, Mystery succeeded in spinning these novel educational sessions to make it appear as if he were bowing to public demand. Here, Mystery took elaborate steps to protect his identity, even stipulating that prospective pupils sign a non-disclosure agreement. Students responded with enthusiasm. "This was a great workshop and definitely worth the money. I feel that I can take the skills and knowledge I picked up . . . and in a month or two, after tons of practice, become GREAT at doing pickups in bars and clubs," one participant posted to the newsgroup.
One recent Saturday in Manhattan, approximately 20 men gathered in a Marriott Hotel conference room for an education in the Mystery Method. Among them was Bob Williams, a 31-year-old accountant who had that morning driven five hours from his home in Washington, D.C., specifically to learn from the master. "I expected to walk into a roomful of losers," says Willaims. "But there was a real mix of people there, and pretty much everyone had successful careers. I mean, this wasn’t exactly a model shoot for GQ, but there was a wide mix of all ages and types."
In the three years since Mystery has begun teaching his sessions, he’s developed remarkably detailed repertoire of tactics and lingo, much of which Williams learned about in New York. For example, an "HB9" is an attractive woman; the HB stands for "hot babe" and the 9 refers to her looks on an out-of-10 scale. Peacocking is the practice of dressing outlandishly to attract the attention of good-looking women. (It’s the reason Mystery paints his nails. He also wears a top hat and platform boots that push his height past seven feet.) He says, "The idea is not to fit in It’s to stand out." The educational sessions evolved into two forms: workshops are intensive teaching sessions in which students join groups of up to six people, plus Mystery, then venture out to clubs to attempt to meet women. What Williams was attending was a larger scale two-day seminar that follows a classroom format. Both have taken place across the United States, Canada and Europe, in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam and Montreal.
The substantive part of Mystery’s education in seduction, his Method, is a step-by-step system that purports to allow its skilled practitioners to attract the best-looking woman at a bar or a club, regardless of whether she’s with male friends, female companions or both. "It’s the art of not weirding someone out," says Mystery. His lessons include group dynamics, which is important because most other dating consultants base their advice on situations in which the pickup artist targets a lone woman, a condition in which the human female is rarely found in the wilderness of an urban club scene.
Couched in the community’s own characteristic terminology, which borrows liberally from pop culture, martial arts and metaphors both athletic and military, the gist of Mystery’s counseling amounts to this: once a pick-up artist identifies an attractive woman, he should infiltrate the group she’s with. Counter intuitively, he should ignore the attractive woman and instead befriend her acquaintances. And if there are men with her, the pickup artist-whom Mystery refers to as a PUA-should befriend the men first, explaining, "You lead the men, the women follow." At all costs, Mystery advises, ignore the "target." Only after the PUA has gained the trust of her compatriots is he to engineer an introduction. Soon after, the PUA must issue to the target a "neg hit," or a harmless verbal jab: "Nice nails. Are they real?" Mystery believes such banter works to differentiate the pickup artist from other men in the mind of the target, whose good looks mean she’s accustomed to eliciting admiration from the males she meets rather than witty repartee.
The core of the Mystery Method is a series of pre-rehearsed routines that Mystery develops with his clients. The "routines," which are really only anecdotes, are intended to highlight the attractive aspects of the client’s personality. Often, such routines are couched as responses to questions that typically come up in pickup situations. If a target asks where the Method practitioner lives, for example, Mystery might suggest the client use that to segue into a witty account of the foibles of living in his particular neighborhood. Mystery then advises his disciples to "isolate" the target from her friends, perhaps with a polite request to speak in private, an inquiry Mystery tells his clients to make only after they’ve sensed from the target several "IOIs," or indications of interest. What Mystery calls "the close" involves getting the target’s telephone number. The client can achieve this by abruptly cutting short the conversation with an invented excuse — perhaps a previous appointment — and then following that up with the regret that he can’t talk longer. The hope is, by then, that the client has charmed the girl enough that she volunteers her number. Responding to the ancient dilemma about how soon to call a prospective date, Mystery advises his clients it’s fine to do so on the very next day.
Williams came away impressed with Mystery’s teachings. "Look," he says. "I’d be the first to say this is a gimmick. But this is also practical advice. He’s not preaching a quick fix. He says, we’ll teach you skills, and over the long term, you’ll make progress." Williams is right about one thing: unlike most dating consultants, who profess that their teachings will lead to quick success, Mystery champions the value of hard work, emphasizing that his system requires at least 200 "approaches" before one really becomes proficient at it.
The seminar worked for Williams, who describes his own personal style as "Banana Republic meets metrosexual:" While in New York for the workshop, he stayed at the chic W boutique hotel. At a bar, he approached a pair of leggy females, a redhead and a brunette. They turned out to be sisters, and Williams finished the encounter by getting a phone number. "I’m certain I wouldn’t have approached them had I not been at the seminar," he says.
It is through the staging of such seminars that Mystery has managed to create a cult of personality that has proven enduringly loyal. Many of his followers seem as devoted as the disciples of Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, in the 1999 cult flick, Fight Club. But his followers don’t just credit Mystery with helping boost their ability to pick up women. They credit him with improving the quality of their lives in general. "It’s given me confidence, not just with girls, but in life," says one practitioner. "It helps in so many areas, it’s retarded." Even Strauss, the writer of the New York Times piece, has become convinced. During the two years he’s spent researching the seduction subculture for a book entitled The Game (due out this fall from HarperCollins) Strauss has become one of the community’s most prominent members. Like the other PUAs, Strauss uses similar terms in crediting the Mystery Method with boosting his self-esteem. Says Strauss: "It’s revolutionized my life?"
However, that new confidence doesn’t mean these men are willing to disclose their PUA status to the world. Mystery’s students and peers are almost universally unwilling to speak under any condition but total anonymity. Even Strauss seems reluctant to admit his stature in the subculture, to the point that he declines to tell outsiders the handle by which he is known among fellow PUAs. (According to Ross Jeffries, it’s Style.) One PUA requested not only that I keep his name secret, but also that I refrain from disclosing his occupation, age, town of origin or any details about his appearance. When asked why, he verged on panic. "It’s just not cool," said the man, who later sent me an e-mail requesting that I also keep secret his request for secrecy.
According to Strauss’s article, Mystery was "born Erik von Markovik"
That’s close: Mystery’s name at birth was Erik James Horvat-Markovic; he legally changed it to Erik von Markovik in his early 20s. He claims to be 27; actually he’s 32. And his life has been considerably less glamorous than the legend he’s created around himself.
Mystery grew up in the lower middle class Jane-and-Eglinton area of Toronto and attended nearby Martingrove Collegiate Institute. His late father was a welding-rod salesman, his mother a clerical worker. "He was a shy and withdrawn child," says his older brother, Rolf Jr. "A real computer geek. He was always reading, or on the Commodore VIC-20." The boy who would become Mystery particularly loved to take apart electronic devices, such as remote-control model cars, to "reverse-engineer" them: a method of determining how something works. He also fought monsters in the imaginary catacombs of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game.
When Mystery was 12, his father, Rolf, suffered a stroke. According to Rolf Jr., it profoundly altered the Horvat-Markovic patriarch’s personality. "Before, [my father] wouldn’t eat sweets. And after the stroke, he was ice cream boy . . . What came back was not my father. The new guy was a cantankerous grump." And Mystery didn’t get along with him. "It got to the point that they just didn’t like each other," says Rolf Jr. "They couldn’t sit at the same dinner table. If Erik thought of something that would make my father crazy, he would do it."
Shortly after his father’s stroke, Mystery discovered magic, which provided him with a way to garner the approval from others that he didn’t get from his father. His brother says, "Magic allowed him to build his confidence?" Naming David Copperfield as a primary influence, the rookie illusionist performed tricks for his siblings, but after several years his brother and sister tired of their roles as Mystery’s perpetual audience. Still, when the teenage Mystery won a spot as a finalist in a talent show at the Canadian National Exhibition, his family agreed to attend the special event. The performance’s climax was an illusion that required Mystery to produce, seemingly from nowhere, a dove, which would then fly to freedom. But when Mystery brought forth the bird, it fell with a thud to the stage, directly in front of the judges. There was silence as magician, audience and judges all realized what had happened: wherever Mystery had had it sequestered, the dove had died — possibly of suffocation, according to Rolf Jr. "He’s standing there onstage like a deer in the headlights . . . Needless to say, he didn’t win"
The amateur illusionist chalked the experience up to bad luck. Undeterred in his quest for attention, Mystery, now 19, ventured to the bars and VIP lounges of Toronto, where bored drinkers were happy to witness his acts of levitation and ESP. Rolf Jr. explains, "Nightclubs became a place for him to perform, where people would actually watch him." Mystery had talent, and some managers began paying him to wander their clubs, performing tricks. Consequently, Mystery grew adept at ingratiating himself. "Approaching groups of people at clubs was my job," he recalls. "That’s how I really learned how to interact with others, because I was able to hide behind the magic."
Mystery also discovered something else: his stunts occasionally helped him to charm girls, whom he had previously found difficult to relate to. When he failed to engage a woman in conversation, Mystery used his considerable powers of logic to analyze what had happened, disassembling encounters the same way he had once examined remote-control cars. As his skill at magic developed, so did his ability to attract. Far from the awkwardness of his adolescence, Mystery was maturing into a man with a particular skill for charming women. His brother remembers how Mystery and a female friend would compete at lounges and nightclubs to see which of them could be the first to "make out" with an attractive stranger. At first, the female friend won, but eventually Mystery grew so adept at the pickup that his friend stopped competing. "It was remarkable," says Rolf Jr. "He could walk into any club and get any chick in the joint."
By 2000, in addition to placing copious Internet postings for the online seduction community, Mystery says he was regularly drawing fees of $1,500 a night to perform magic at corporate events. He also appeared on CTV’s late-night talk show Open Mike with Mike Bullard. But to really make it as a magician, he knew he would have to become known in the U.S. So he moved to Los Angeles, where he spent more than a year trying to land himself a television special that would showcase his conjuring talents. When nothing materialized and his money ran out, he returned to Toronto, where he discovered he could no longer get the corporate gigs that had once funded his lifestyle Broke at 29 and living with his brother, Mystery attempted to capitalize on his other skill. He posted an announcement at the seduction newsgroup, where he’d been a respected leader for about three years. "Master Pickup Artist ‘Mystery’ is now offering an IN-FIELD BASIC TRAINING Workshop in selected cities," began the announcement, which went on to describe an intense course that would take place mainly in clubs.
It was a desperate attempt to make some money. It worked. A single four-day workshop in Toronto led to another in Montreal. Soon Mystery was marketing his educational sessions through the proliferating message groups and discussion boards frequented by the online seduction community. As months passed and word spread, Mystery found himself bouncing between New York and Los Angeles, where his two-day seminars attracted dozens at a time.
I am far from attractive. My nose is large for my face and, while not hooked, has a bump in the ridge. Though I am not bald, to say that my hair is thinning would be an understatement. I have indentations on either side of my forehead, which I like and believe add character to my face, though I’ve never actually received a compliment on them. When I look down at my pale, skinny body, I wonder why any woman would want to sleep next to it, let alone embrace it.
So for me, meeting girls takes work. I’m not a guy women giggle over at a bar or want to take home because they’re feeling drunk and crazy. I can’t offer them a piece of my fame and bragging rights like a rock star, or cocaine and a mansion like so many other men in Los Angeles. All I have is my mind, and nobody can see that.
You may notice that I haven’t mentioned my personality. That is because, in the last year, my personality has completely changed. Or to put it more accurately, I have completely changed my personality. Researching a book proposed by an editor, I allowed myself to be taken under the wings of the greatest self-proclaimed pickup artists in the world and entered an underground subculture of men dedicated — sometimes to an unhealthy extreme — to figuring out the mystery of the opposite sex. For lack of a better term, they refer to themselves simply as "the community."
For most, entry into this cult-like cross between self-help group and locker room begins on the Internet. Type "seduction" or "how to meet women" into a search, and you will find hundreds of sites trying to part you from your money. But the lucky few, able to wade through enticements to "meet models now," may find one of the free Usenet groups, Internet mailing lists or message boards where hundreds of men labor day and night to turn the art of seduction into an exact science. From New York to London to Croatia — places my reporting took me — many of these men meet off line in groups known as lairs to discuss tactics and techniques before going out to bars and clubs to put their theories to practice.
It is a world with its own jargon (AFC., for example, denotes an Average Frustrated Chump, PUA a Pickup Artist) and luminaries known by pseudonyms like Mystery, Juggler and Formhandle. Those who manage to earn the respect of their peers through online postings or real-world prowess can make money writing e-books or running workshops. This has given birth to a seduction industry marketed almost entirely through online newsgroups and mailing lists. Some have turned it into a full-time career with six-figure incomes, others into a lucrative sideline allowing them to collect a few thousand dollars here and there.
My real-life entry into the community began when I took on a pseudonym and withdrew cash from the bank, stuffed it into an envelope and wrote "Mystery" on the front — not the proudest moment of my life.
I took the envelope to the lobby of the Roosevelt Hollywood hotel, where I found myself waiting with two other students (one had flown in from Australia, the other from Canada) who, like me, had arranged to spend four nights on the town with Mystery, one of the most admired men in the world of seduction. Born Erik von Markovik, Mystery is known for spitting out long, detailed posts that read like algorithms of how to engineer social situations to meet and attract women. In detailing his social life online, he has single-handedly invented much of the jargon and tactics that men around the world are using to meet women.
The "neg", for example, is his invention. Neither a compliment nor an insult, a neg holds two purposes: to momentarily lower a woman’s self-esteem and to suggest an intriguing disinterest. ("Nice nails. Are they real? No? Oh, they look nice anyway.") Mystery cautions online, however, that negging is only for exceptionally beautiful women used to a steady stream of compliments.
A thin, long-haired 28-year-old standing 6-foot-5, Mystery strode into the hotel atop a few additional inches of platform boot. When the four of us had gathered on lobby couches, he explained that he was once like us. At 21, he said, he was lonely and living with his parents on the outskirts of Toronto. In hope of improving his social life and perhaps landing a job as a magician in the process, he began taking a public bus to bars and clubs at night. After hundreds of rejections, he put together, piece by piece, a method that he called group theory, which allowed him to display his personality to people before saying no was even on their mind. He started landing magic gigs at corporate events and on talk shows. His goal in teaching workshops, he said, was to support a touring magic act.
Speaking in a booming voice that he said was modeled on Tony Robbins, the motivational speaker, he introduced his theory. "You will not be hitting on anyone tonight," Mystery said, making piercing eye contact with each of us. "Normally, the whole concept of meeting a woman is walking up to her when she’s by herself and trying to seduce her. The game doesn’t work that way."
If a guy wants to meet a woman who is sitting at a table surrounded by men, he continued, he will most likely be rejected — or beaten up — if he walks straight up and asks for her phone number. He will be much more successful if he befriends the men first. After winning the good will of the group, he will be able to talk to the woman one on one — especially if he has already shown a lack of interest with a well-placed neg.
After several hours discussing group theory, our style of dress (he wanted us to "peacock" more, or stand out with louder clothing) and the characteristics of an alpha male (among them: a smile, careful grooming and being seen as the social center of a room), we took a limo to the Lounge at the Standard, a hotel on the Sunset Strip. There, the limits I had once imposed on human interaction were extended far beyond what I had ever thought possible.
In one corner, two couples were sitting together. I recognized one of the men as the actor Scott Baio, who was with a blonde who could have stepped out of the pages of Maxim.
To me it defied all common sense to try to meet a woman who was apparently with her boyfriend, but success, Mystery said, requires "being the exception to the rule." He then demonstrated group theory.
He approached the men, and showed them a piece of magic by stopping Mr. Baio’s watch.
"Be careful with that — it cost $40,000," Mr. Baio said.
"Do something else?" the woman with him asked.
"Wow, she’s so demanding," Mystery said, turning to Mr. Baio. "Is she always like this?"
The more he performed for the guys, the more the woman clamored for his attention. After a few minutes, he relented and engaged her in conversation.
"Tell me this is all an illusion," Mr. Baio said at one point, "and he’s not actually stealing my girlfriend."
Mystery walked away 10 minutes later with the woman’s phone number, which he never called. It was only a demonstration, he explained to his floored students.
The seduction community dates to the late 1980’s, when Ross Jeffries, who described himself as unattractive and frustrated, wrote a small book called "How to Get the Women You Desire Into Bed." His method was based on an adaptation of neuro-linguistic programming, a school of hypnosis holding that one can communicate with the subconscious through seemingly normal conversation. When a student of his created an Internet newsgroup, the seduction community was born. Soon, Mr. Jeffries’s mailing list grew to 2,000, and the newsgroup took on a life separate from him as new attraction experts emerged, many with competing philosophies about how to turn AFC’s into PUA’s.
"I don’t know if anybody can really understand the community until they get involved in it," said Juggler, a comedian from Michigan who teaches his own method, focused on approaching women directly and mastering the art of natural conversation. "They view it as guys trying to be players and lying and doing anything for sex, and there are some people in the community that take that tack. But I find that the people who get really good at this aren’t like that. That’s because to get good, you have to believe that you are the prize. And when you are the prize, you start doing more giving instead of more taking."
An extraordinary amount of effort seems to be put forth to achieve something so shallow, raising a question: What, exactly, do men expect to get out of this? After talking to over 100 would-be Casanovas, I rarely heard the same answer twice.
Some students — in their 20’s, 30’s, even 40’s — said they were virgins who had exhausted most other options in trying to meet women.
"My goal is to get comfortable with myself and show who I truly am," said a 20-year-old virgin from Long Beach, Calif., known as Sky. "I feel like a Ferrari that is stuck on first gear when I know I have a sixth gear."
A millionaire known as Slippery joined the community to find a wife, and he soon succeeded. Their first child is due this week. And one pickup artist, who did not want to be identified, said his entire goal is to be in a committed three-way relationship consisting of himself and two beautiful women.
When I asked some women among my friends what they thought of this, most had no idea how much work men put into getting lucky. I also called Danielle Rose, a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, who had exchanged numbers with Mystery after meeting him this month at the Standard. Informed of Mystery’s sideline, she said, "It doesn’t change my impression of him, because some guys need the help."
Juggler’s girlfriend of a year and a half, a 21-year-old student, said his involvement with the community actually caused problems in the relationship. "The second or third time we saw each other, he said he had this job and taught guys how to pick up girls," she said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "So I got on the Web and found the community on my own. My initial reaction was disbelief. But the more I read, the more I felt that there was a huge objectification of women. And I started having pretty big problems with the entire community and his involvement in it."
In the months after I met Mystery, I went to seminars by David D’Angelo, who aims to teach men to stop being needy and start acting "cocky and funny," and sat in on workshops by Juggler, who demonstrated how to interact with women without a scripted routine. I also spent many evenings with Ross Jeffries, the father of the community (and, along with Mr. D’Angelo, one of the few who devote themselves to it full time), even meeting his parents. "He’s a genius," said his mother, who helped edit his first book, though she still insists that "he’d make a great lawyer."
I traveled with these men, lived with them and eventually taught. In fact, one of my former students, Papa, even started running his own seminars with a top PUA. known as Tyler D.
Then one night my journey came full circle. I was leading a workshop with Mystery, as his unpaid "wing." We had taken six students to the V.I.P. room of the Crobar in Miami. Two well-tanned women with matching platinum hair and white figure-revealing tank tops walked in, turning every head. Mystery looked at me and said it was my turn. Despite all my training, I was petrified.
The women were talking to a transvestite in a black tutu. In keeping with Mystery’s technique, I walked toward the group without even glancing at the women, focusing on the transvestite instead. I greeted him as if I knew him. Now that I was in range, I tried to break the ice. Nervously, I said the first thing that came to my head. "You know what?" I told them. "You both look like strange little snowflakes."
It was nonsense, but I had their attention. I continued with what I knew all along would be my true opener, the neg: "Is your hair real?"
The shorter girl looked shocked, but then recovered her composure. "Yes," she said. "Feel it."
I tugged it gently. "Hey, it moved. It’s not real."
"Pull harder."
I complied. "O.K.," I said. "I believe you. But how about your friend there?"
The taller woman’s face reddened. She leaned over the bar, and looked me hard in the eye. "That is really rude," she said. "What if I’m actually bald? That could really hurt someone’s feelings. It’s disrespectful. How would you feel if someone said that to you?"
I had provoked a negative reaction, but now at least we had a relationship. I just had to turn her anger around to make it a good relationship.
"I’ll tell you something," I said. "I live in Los Angeles. It’s where the most beautiful women in the country come to try and make it. And do you know what I’ve learned? Beauty is common. It’s something you’re born with, or you pay for. What counts is what you make of yourself."
Her face relaxed. They both stood there silently. Now I was in. I had, as Ross Jeffries once put it, entered their world and demonstrated authority over it. "And you know what?" I added, as an afterthought. "You have a great smile. I can tell that underneath all that, you’re probably a good person."
The shorter girl sidled up to me and said, "We’re sisters." I looked very slowly at both of them, evaluating her comment, and took a chance. "I don’t buy it," I said, smiling. "I bet a lot of guys believe you, but I’m a very intuitive person. When I look at you both, I can tell that you’re both very different. Too different."
She broke into a guilty smile. "We never tell anyone this," she said, "but you’re right. We’re just friends."
Now the hard part was over.
"You’re interesting," the shorter woman gushed at one point, pressing against me. "We have to hang out with you in L.A."
You may have noticed that I haven’t used the women’s names. This is because Mystery told me never to introduce myself. That’s for AFC’s. Wait for the woman to introduce herself: that way you know if she’s interested. It’s what Mystery calls an Indicator of Interest, or IOI., and when one gets three or four IOI’s, the option to see the woman again is on the table.
The taller one asked what my sign was — another IOI. She suggested spending time together in Miami, and gave me cell phone numbers for both of them. But what elated me even more was that she bought me a drink. I was excited not because I needed the free cocktail, but because she confessed that she and her friend had made a pact before the trip to sucker guys into paying for all their drinks. My days as an AFC, it seemed, were finally over.
Excerpted from The New York Times. View original article Here.
Men tired of being labeled the friend but never the boyfriend can turn to the "seduction community" for help.
A pretty blond passes by the group of single guys, but they ignore her as she stops to pour milk in her Styrofoam coffee cup.
The dozen men, in their 20s and 30s, are huddled at tables at the back of the St. Laurent Blvd. Cafe. Their attention is directed at the flamboyant 6-foot-5-inch "uber-trainer" from Toronto.
It’s a Friday night in July, and each of the men has paid to spend three days following Mystery (Aka: Erik von Markovik), an illusionist by profession who’s reputed to be one of Canada’s authorities on attracting women.
Mystery is well known in what is loosely called the "seduction community" — an international group of mostly guys who exchange views and dating advice online. Think of it as an interactive "how-to" guide, a male version of women’s dating books or magazines that vaunt "20 ways to get a man."
Beyond the garish online ads boasting "how to pick up strippers," the online forums off a place where contrasting seduction methods are debated, using jargon like "AFC" — for average frustrated chump — and "MLTRs" (multiple long-term relationships).
One popular place for these exchanges is an online mailing list of 3,000 run by a Montrealer.
Montreal is also the first Canadian city to follow London, San Francisco and other major cities in setting up clandestine "lairs", where guys discuss these topics in person. Lairs are invitation-only house meetings that also provide a support network for the men who attend them.
Because of social criticism attached to the notion of "picking up" women and paying for advice on how to meet them, the community remains furtive.
The Montreal lair would speak to a reporter only on condition that members’ real names not be printed.
One member said he was tired of being labeled the friend but never the boyfriend. After years of intermittent girlfriends, he said, he now wanted what he never had in the past — dates with different women each week.
He said he hoped Mystery could teach him how to approach and speak to women he found attractive — a prospect that initially terrified him.
Mystery doesn’t think twice about walking into a bar and chatting up a group of strangers. Often, the group notices him first.
Mystery has a silver stud below his lower lip and matching silver thumb rings beside black varnished nails. He wears a pair of silver goggles he purchased in Los Angeles above the black cowboy hat he got from Sydney, his black shirt comes from a trip to New York City. He constantly travels, performing and holding workshops on his method of "attraction."
His students have different uses for their skills. Some want a serious girlfriend, while others want to go out with several women simultaneously.
What they usually share is the experience of being hurt romantically — either by a former girlfriend or by a chronic failure to find a girlfriend.
One man, Jack, a Montrealer in his 30s, said he had no problem talking to a woman — only the usual topic of conversation was her problems. For years, he was the "therapist" but never the boyfriend.
That’s when Jack fell into a depression and began doing research online.
He read about Mystery and other experts and joined the Montreal lair, where their ideas debated: "It was amazing to have all these brains focusing on one problem."
For Mystery, the problem can be rectified through better social skills.
He teaches the men to approach women in the same way he used to solicit restaurant patrons as a budding magician in the United States. Just walking over to a table and asking the diners if they wanted to see a show wasn’t particularly lucrative, he recalled. He needed to approach them with pizzazz and he needed to do it quickly.
He applied the theory to Montreal on a cool summer night and changed the focus to meeting women. He took the guys out of the cafe and divided them into groups.
Three younger men followed him down Prince Author St. past bustling terraces and a crowd gathering in front of a street flamenco dancer.
"Is he a rock star?" passer-by Nicholas Tritsch asked after spotting Mystery and his entourage.
Mystery’s theory is this: since attractive women rarely hang out alone, the students will have to approach "sets," or groups.
He tells them to be friendly and not to "hit on" a woman or focus on her in a way that would make her uncomfortable.
What’s difficult, the guys said, is finding the confidence to initiate the conversation.
"You find confidence from competence," Mystery responded.
Before heading into a bar, Mystery waited for one last student who was busy talking with a "three-set" of two girls and a guy. Eventually, Terrence, a cute blond athlete in his 20s, returned.
"They loved me, but she’s been with her boyfriend for four years," he said, shrugging in disappointment.
The entourage moved on.
Success is partly contingent on the venue, Mystery said.
To his chagrin, later in the night, the guys ended up at the jazz festival. Apart from the noise, which makes it difficult to chat, spectators walking form show to show are harder to approach than three girls seated at a cafe.
Besides, Mystery prefers the fashionable women who hang out on the Main.
"Look around, is there anyone worthy of me?" he asked.
Such cocky remarks reflect a contradiction in the community: however sympathetic the motive for joining a lair, or studying "seduction," many guys aren’t sympathetic in the way they judge women.
Although Mystery stresses the importance of a good personality — he said, "All the girlfriends in my life have been my best friends" — he always approaches the best-looking women.
Many of the guys felt Mystery’s greatest moment was on Saturday night, when he chatted up two stunning women who had initially ignored him.
After joining the lair, Jack’s luck with women improved and he vowed to use his skills to date many of them. It was a way, he said, of making up for lost time.
Then he met a special one and realized that the others weren’t so important after all. Eventually, the two broke up and Jack was heartbroken.
Indeed, even the most experienced lotharios can — and do — get hurt, Mystery said.
He calls the act of approaching women "a game" to dehumanize it, so the inexperienced men won’t be devastated by rejection.
Even the experienced ones like Mystery have bad days where the approach doesn’t work. And the challenge doesn’t end after Mystery meets a woman he likes.
When he approached the two beautiful women on the Saturday, Mystery said his initial goal merely to "impress the guys."
But he ended up taking one woman’s phone number and called her the next day, because he said he really liked her. Only problem: she works in Montreal, while Mystery has to fly off to give another workshop in London.
He said it’s the only regret from his weekend here.
"Any woman I’m interested in having sex with, I’m interested in getting to know well," he said.
"The real reason we do this is so we can start a relationship."
Excerpted from The Montreal Gazette.
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