First of all, my apologies for taking so long to respond to you. I’ve been working hard on the new post about the Sixties.

Second, I’m really glad you’re enjoying the blog! It’s great to have a vocal new reader.

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It’s probably true that Strauss was on a dopamine high while he was researching his book, but that’s not why I dislike him. I dislike him because he tries to put himself above Mystery by having a “real” relationship that transcends “the game” because his girlfriend didn’t respond positively (so she says) to the ways he tried to game her. Thus The Game, like Hitch and other such films, ends up re-inscribing authenticity as the primary romantic virtue by exaggerating the “fall” of scammers like Mystery.

Thus I’m a little confused by your reading of my post as an attempt to stand up for authenticity against insincerely and manipulation. Actually I’m standing up for creativity over imitation. To be “yourself” does not mean to be woodenly earnest, but rather doing the most with the specificity of an interaction: who the other person is, who you are. That creates the possibility of real intimacy. Many of the teachers of “the game,” and even more of the students, have some luck with it, which is fine, but also use it as a substitute for intimacy. They look for opportunities to fall back on a script.

You’re creating a dichotomy between engineered behaviour and natural authenticity, even if both look the same and smell the same. And that’s what makes it a false dichtomoy in my book. I’m not trying to make a purely teleological argument like “we all want to get laid”, but there’s a fine line between allowing people to express themselves and turning them into manipulators. Strauss recognizes that with great power cometh great responsibility, you’re selling him short by suggesting that he wasn’t able to think straight anymore because he was on a dopamine high. The difference is in the people themselves – this is Duerrenmatt all over – people who want to will be able to turn every piece of ability, knowledge and technology into something bad or selfish. Language is a wonderful tool to communicate, yet it can be used to deceive. Should we not talk? Knowing how to talk can be a great tool to increase opposite sexe’s attraction, and it can be used to manipulate. But then – where does the fun end and manipulation start? And where do you place seduction in all this confusion?

I’m a well-raised and well-read man of a little of 30 years, and “the game” has changed my life. I could still star in a Steve Carrell movie about late bloomers, but I am now able to initiate interactions which I wasn’t before. A couple of months ago, I got my first kiss from a woman. Am I not sincere in my interactions simply because I’ve learned something in my early 30s that other guys were told by their older brothers at sixteen, or never even needed to be told?

Being true to oneself means being willing to accept the possibility of learning to overcome ones weaknesses to the extent this is possible. I’m sure there are some psychological wounds no game will ever be able to heal. But taking this social technology, I was able to synthesize the different parts of my personality and become a more congruent, authentic being. The open minded playful and confident person that women like now was always there – it just needed a book to be unlocked.

Here’s a quoute from the introduction to Elana Clift’s thesis “picking up and acting out: politics of masculinity in the seduction community” that you may find interesting – actually, I think you may find the entire thesis interesting.

Sitting at the family dinner table, I watched as my older brother, a senior in high school at the time, pushed his food around on his plate and sulked. My mother, always intuitive and attentive to our problems, asked him what was wrong. He sighed as he admitted that there was a girl at school whom he liked. “What should I do? I don’t know if she likes me!” My father piped up to offer, as he always did, a simple and practical solution, “Well, why don’t you ask her out on a date?” With an exasperated tone my brother said, “Dad! People don’t do that!” At that moment, my mother and I gave the famously useless advice “Just be yourself and she’ll like you!” He responded only with a sigh. My mother began to name all of my brother’s good qualities, as if listing these would give him the sudden selfesteem boost he needed to pursue the current girl of his dreams. As she continued citing all that he had to offer the opposite sex, I could see him holding back tears; he was not listening to a word she said. He was unaffected by our attempts to help him. Neither my mother, father, nor I was surprised by this particular conversation, it was a common one at our house and it always ended the same way. Our parents would attempt to give him guidance, and my
brother would listen and nod, all the while knowing that neither of them had the advice he needed to get what he so desperately wanted: a girlfriend.

By the age of twenty-four, the advice “Just be yourself” had proved the extent of its uselessness, he had still never had a girlfriend. He came to the startling realization that just
being himself was not enough. At the advice of a college friend, he began to investigate the Seduction Community, a society of men who focus on bettering their skills at attracting
women. On message boards and websites he discovered literally thousands of other men with similar histories to his own. It was within this community that he finally found what our parents had never been able to give him well enough, the guidance and support he needed to finally become comfortable with the opposite sex.”

https://webspace.utexas.edu/ejc329/ElanaCliftThesis.pdf?uniq=-wk7fye

I just saw Superbad today, with your thoughts in the back of my mind. I thought it was an interesting and possibly insidious movie in many ways. I found myself laughing at it in spite of myself (analyse that…).

Just another half-related comment on the movie, the final scene. It’s telling the space in which the two male friends are finally torn asunder: the mall. And it seems inextricably tied to the young women they are with – the feminised sphere of consumption.

Not sure how/if that fits in with your programme, but just something to add I suppose.

Thanks for your terrific comment.

I’m willing to believe that Wallace makes some interesting points in his essay, especially since I enjoyed “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” more than many of my friends, who found it whiny and excessive. On the other hand, I found Infinite Jest excessive; like Dave Eggers, Wallace seems weighed down by a very noisy conscience that, for all of its breathless compassion, seems not to have chanced upon particularly original answers.

The heart of your comment, the long paragraph in which you question whether Strauss/Mystery, or capitalism, is the real target of my post, is so completely sympathetic that really your question answers itself. A book like The Game, or a show like The Pick-Up Artist, are half defusable parlor tricks, half earnest efforts to find relief from anonymity and loneliness. Misguided, occasionally misogynistic or delusional, they nonetheless will probably do as much good as harm. Strauss himself adopts a more sinister register than necessary when he writes sentences like “Seduction was a dark art.” I do think that much of this conversation revolves around phenomena that have existed for a while, but are now becoming culturally conscious.

I definite cynicism according to judgments about human potential: the potential for freedom, happiness, and social and intellectual progress. Thus it is something different to voice concern about how much freedom, happiness, or justice exists in the present; ultimately, I believe that sentimentality and false optimism are allied with cynicism.

I’m a little keen to see Your Friends & Neighbors. Nonetheless, I’m no fan of LaBute. As is the case with Apatow, a reactionary and intolerant morality shines through; as with Stephen Covey, no attentive filmgoer needs to be told that LaBute is Mormon. The Shape of Things strained credulity, and made people (particularly the culturati) out to be more sadistic and self-destructive than they really are. Possession was just insipid; it played up the worst aspects of Byatt’s finger-wagging, wore a glossy coat that didn’t fit, and evicted the literary pleasures of the original novel. Aaron Eckhart’s blandeur is the perfect match for LaBute’s flavorless notion of the good.

I was reminded here of David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he addresses things like irony & advertising, televisual culture, and postmodern self-reflexivity. If you haven’t read it, you should.

Some questions: Do you think that Strauss and his ilk are simply making public (if unctuously) aspects of 21st C. interpersonal phenomena that are more typically kept private, unspoken, hushed? I think you’re right to recognize that these guys have developed a product (effective seduction techniques) whose targeted consumer base (lonely nice guys) is vast and hungry. But I find Strauss and Mystery less insidious than you seem to imply they are. They’re merely symptoms of a market-driven consumer culture, just like Roger. I’m not suggesting that you hate the game, not the player, but rather that you might want to be less tongue in cheek about the true object of your scorn. To me, your post was far more an indictment of capitalism and its progeny than a critical assessment of sexuality in the advertisment age. Sexuality, like *every* aspect of our interpersonal relationships, is touched, if not inescapably determined, by claims on our time, selfhood, physical appearance, education, career choices, and livelihoods — claims made by capitalism.
Now I’m the cynic.

Do you think the films of Neil LaBute are in any way a reaction to or commentary on some of the interpersonal phenonmena you examine?

Overally, Joseph, I really enjoyed your post. One poster lamented its length, but I’d argue that it wasn’t long *enough*. Looking forward to your thoughts.

Here’s the thing, maybe all these rules and playing the game are necessary because perhaps in reality there are rules to our fundamental human behavior. There is a reason that we buy into all of this crap, because fundamentally we are attracted to that which will help us compete in society. Lets face it, in the end we all just want to get laid. Resorting to things like becoming a pick-up artist is just another avenue for helping our genes survive another generation.

Perhaps there are rules that govern all human behavior; if so, they don’t have much to do with the specifics of trying to make a good first impression in a club. At that level of detail, human behavior isn’t consistent across cultures or across time.

Is is that human behavior is structured a certain way, or is it the desire to come out on top, or is it that we just want to get laid, or is it survival of the genes? All of these have in common a clear desire to avoid responsibility, and that brings us to “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” I don’t hate the player, but I do hold him responsible for his actions. In any case, I don’t do well with people including me into flat versions of human nature, such as “we all want to get laid,” and I’m perfectly certain that the human race will continue to reproduce regardless of whether or not something I disdain, like The Rules, or something I like, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is reprinted.