Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
Or me trying to become a pickup artist
Last week, I told you about my encounter with frats and frat parties as a 19-year-old college student from Turkey and how my dreams of a mini-sexual revolution failed to come to fruition. I did not give up hope, though. On the contrary. I took steps to remedy it. Pretty radical steps, actually, which I will tell you about in this post.
This is the first time I am telling this story in a public setting. In fact, apart from three or four of my best friends, nobody knows about it. I don’t even know whether I should write about it because it is a pretty (read: very) embarrassing chapter of my life. Frankly, it doesn’t show me in the best light. But, given the fact that this newsletter is an exercise in vulnerability, I might as well go ahead and see how it goes.
What, you may be saying at this point, am I so embarrassed about?
I’ll tell you: In my desperation to become better with girls, I decided to become a pick-up artist. Well, maybe not exactly become one, but at least know about the whole process of being unstoppable when it comes to women.
“A pick-up artist? What the hell is that?” you might wonder. Well, I decided to go with technology on this one and asked the ChatGPT to give me a definition of what a pick-up artist is. Here is what it came up with:
“A pick-up artist, often abbreviated as PUA, is an individual who practices techniques and strategies aimed at attracting and seducing potential romantic or sexual partners. These techniques can include various forms of social interaction, body language, conversation, and sometimes manipulation tactics. PUAs typically focus on short-term encounters rather than long-term relationships.”
The first time I came across the PUA community (yes, there is a whole community around this concept, which we will get to in a minute) was in early 2006. I was on a plane back to the U.S. from Istanbul, and there was a friend of mine from UVa on the same flight. At one point, he took out this book with a black cover and The Game written on it in large, gold letters. I hadn’t thought about this at the time, but it was very obviously designed to look like the Bible. When I asked him what it was about, he said that it told the story of this guy who learned and told the story of how to seduce women.
How to seduce women? Can you even teach that? To me, a 21-year-old guy, who was desperate to become better in his relationships with the opposite sex, these words sounded like music. I felt like the solution to all my problems and frustrations was finally within my grasp. The only thing I had to do was reach for it and take it.
And that’s exactly what I did. The first thing I did when I got back to campus was to order the book online.
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists was published by Neil Strauss in 2005. Strauss was a reporter whose work appeared in various news outlets. Despite having a successful career, however, his love life was abysmal, something he was desperate and determined to change (I could sympathize).
While working on an article, Strauss stumbled upon the PUA community/subculture. Intrigued, he met some of the key names and, after a while, got so involved with the community that he began to hang out with them almost 24/7. The book documents Strauss’s experience in the PUA community as well as the story of how he finally became good at seducing women. In the end, though, Strauss concluded that living life with the single goal of picking as many women as you possibly could was for losers (he was right) and advocated for a more balanced life.
As soon as I could get my hands on it, I devoured the book. The most fascinating aspect of it was that the pickup artists turned the whole seduction thing into a system, from the initial step of meeting a woman to building a connection with her to taking her to bed. They even had their own jargon with terms like “openers,” “negging,” and “sarging.” They seemed to argue that, if followed step-by-step, this system virtually guaranteed that you could seduce any woman you wanted.
For a guy like me, for whom finding a way to form a relationship with a woman I liked was more difficult than sending a man to the Moon, it felt like a godsend. The only thing I had to do was follow the path laid down by the PUAs, and it would take me where I wanted to go for years.
Despite my initial and profound excitement, though, I could also see that something was very off. Although I could not truly realize how misogynist the whole thing was at the time (that came later, along with a profound shame), I could sense that it more or less treated women as objects who could simply be manipulated to comply with men’s wishes.
Also, from a more personal standpoint, I could feel that it went against who I was and what I wanted from my relationship with women. Although my initial encounters with girls at frat parties have led me to fantasize about turning into a modern-day Don Juan, as the excitement wore off, I came to realize more and more that what I actually wanted has never been to have one-night stands or go to bed with as many women as I could. I knew that it was what was “expected” or the “norm” around me, especially as a 20-year-old male college student, but frankly, it just was not my thing. I was more in search of a relationship.
Nevertheless, I went ahead and basically willed myself to overcome these objections coming from deep inside my brain. I tried to convince myself that the way to find a good relationship was to meet as many women as I could, and I firmly believed that the only way I could do that was through the PUA tactics I was ardently studying. I was so convinced this would work that, at one point, I actually ended up meeting some of the pickup artists that Strauss wrote about in the book myself.
But that’s a story for later.
Until next time.
Brilliant !! 😆
This one looks great--waiting for the next installment! Wondering if I have ever been “picked up” by a student of this tactic myself! A friend recently told me about The Game -- I had never heard of this book.