Learn to Pick Up Women For $2000
My foray into the dark world of pickup artistry.
“What’s your body count?”
“Two,” replies a diminutive man who has recently introduced himself as Dan. His voice is barely audible above the hum and clatter of the coffee shop.
“Louder,” says the instructor with an imperious gesture of the hand. There are four of us sitting round the coffee-stained table. The two men on either side of me are wide-eyed and alert. My own hands feel hot and clammy. There is a sense of trepidation among our little group as the instructor takes turns barking the question at each of us.
When he reaches me his eyes narrow; he is looking for signs of low status, categorizing me based on the thousands of clients who have come before. And then the question:
“What’s your body count?”
“One,” I reply before surreptitiously scanning the faces of the other men for signs of laughter—a self-conscious tick I’ve internalized over the years.
This is the first time I’ve been asked for my “body count.” I briefly wonder if I have inadvertently walked into a serial killers’ meet-up. And yet this is the agreed rendezvous point: Starbucks, Leicester Square, 7pm.
The men sitting next to me don’t look like serial killers, if there is a “look.” Adam is in his mid-twenties and has high cheekbones, an expensive-looking tan and a carefully coiffured chestnut bouffant that bounces when he talks. Sitting next to Adam is Bruce, a stocky white South African with brown curls cropped neatly.
Adam and Bruce boast of double figure “body counts.” Dan and I look on deferentially as they reel off a succession of seedy anecdotes. Both men have always been good with “girls.” But as they see it, you can always get better.
Each of us has spent nearly £2,000 to be here. This is how much it costs in 2006 to learn how to be a pickup artist. We’ll be spending the weekend with Tux, one of the best in the business. Tux’s skills with women are legendary in the community. His fans say he combines the smoothness of James Bond with the wit of Oscar Wilde. And he does exude a certain narcissistic blasé, rumoured to be the afterglow of hundreds of successful conquests: the seducer’s aura.
For the next three days and nights, Tux will be our guru and guide. We will do as he says, however ridiculous or terrifying this initially sounds. The instructors are reprogramming us with a new belief system and it is incumbent on us to suspend any lingering skepticism for the duration of the weekend. It’s apparently for our own good.
It’s 8 o’clock and we’ve been sitting in Starbucks for nearly an hour. Through gaps in the condensation on the windows we see partygoers stagger across damp cobbles. They mingle effortlessly as if guided by a social instinct that is unfamiliar to at least two of us on this side of the glass. I look on with a tightening feeling in my stomach.
Suddenly Tux receives a message on his Nokia 3310 and pivots hurriedly towards us. He clasps his hands together, wraps his arms around us and ushers us towards the exit. “We’re here to get girls, guys. It’s time to step up,” he bawls. He gets a chant going with Adam and Bruce as he ushers us out of the coffee shop. “RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW... RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW... RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.”
Dan and I join in, reluctantly at first but with more gusto until we’re bellowing the words into the night air. A group of Chinese tourists cautiously files past. They glare at us and we try to look menacing. “RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW,” we chant as they hurry through the doors to join their tour party. I laugh with the others and feel vaguely powerful as I do.
It’s bitterly cold out on Leicester Square. We’ve been told to do warm-up approaches while we wait for the other instructors to arrive. At first we look around gravely, each of us waiting for someone else to take the initiative. I look at Dan whose countenance is wearing the most desolate expression I have ever seen.
All of a sudden, Bruce has darted off in the direction of three women in their early twenties; this is what the pickup artists call a “three set.” He moves towards them, loops round and comes back again to position himself so he’s approaching the group diagonally from the front.
“Ex... cuse me...” Bruce says while tapping one of the women gingerly on the shoulder as if touching something scalding hot. Straight away, a mass of blonde hair swivels round and two eyes scan Bruce up and down. The woman’s upper lip begins to curl and retract, exposing a set of luminous white teeth. The blonde woman turns back towards her two friends and eye-codes them before the group starts to slowly edge away from Bruce.
The entire scene unfolds in a matter of seconds. Even after the brush-off, Bruce continues to unload a fusillade of scripted one-liners at the women. He seems oblivious to the fact that it isn’t working, like a fly stupidly bashing itself against a windowpane. When the group is nearly out of sight, Bruce turns around and trundles back towards us pursing his lips. “Did you open them?” asks Adam. “Negative,” says Bruce. “I didn’t talk loud enough.” Bruce is shaking his head. “Fuck, I messed up man. Fuck!”
Bruce has performed what the pickup artists call a “cold approach” (this contrasts with a warm approach, which is when a woman has given some indication that she wants to be approached). The cold approach requires a single-minded willingness to potentially embarrass yourself in the hope that if you repeat the process enough times, proficiency will be attained. It’s called the “game” because viewing the process like a video game is supposed to make it easier and take the sting out of rejection.
I resolve to do my first approach before Tux comes back and catches sight of me standing around shivering. I spot a potential “target”: a woman in a white dress with a black and gold sash draped over her shoulder. She’s trailed by a small group of slightly inebriated women, all wearing different outfits but each with the same black and gold sash flopping diagonally across their bodies. I hesitate for a moment and then I hear Tux’s admonition ringing in my head—“RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.”
After a minute or so of mental torment, I decide that the women in the hen party are not good enough for me. They’re too prettified and bimboish; we wouldn’t have anything in common. I feel superior to them in some ill-defined way—yet still I want them. I bounce from one foot to the other.
A sense of resignation washes over me. I catch the eye of an Alsatian dog standing on the cobblestones next to its owner; it glances over mournfully at me and we briefly lock eyes; then it too turns its head away in disgust.
In 2006, pickup artistry is a multi-million-dollar industry. Whether you want to add more notches to your bedpost or find a girlfriend and fall in love, the industry’s gurus claim to have the secret formula that can induce any woman to fall under your spell. All it takes is a willingness to hand over your money, memorize some canned material and head out to the bars and clubs to practise on unsuspecting women.
I blame the American writer Neil Strauss. Pickup artists went mainstream largely thanks to Strauss’s 2005 book, The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. An overnight bestseller, The Game would go on to sell two and a half million copies. Strauss, a journalist for Rolling Stone and The New York Times, had immersed himself in Los Angeles’s seduction community. The resulting book piqued the interest of libidinous men the world over. Thanks to The Game, seduction boot camps are in high demand in cities across the world. Ask a pickup student how they first discovered the subculture and the reply inevitably comes: “I read The Game.”
Nobody is entitled to sex; however, it is not unusual to wonder why some men have it while others don’t. This felt like an especially pertinent question when I was in my early twenties. Aged 23, it had become clear to me that an urgent change of course was necessary. The alternative—rotting away at home until I finally expired in a moldy armchair—was too horrifying to contemplate. This was probably me catastrophizing a bit. But still, I shuddered at the prospect of going through life having to deal with scorn or pity for want of a girlfriend.
In societies conforming to traditional dominant male stereotypes, sex and romance were usually seen as the domain of women. Moreover, as a man, there was a tawdriness about asking for help. It is true that both men and women are judged on how much sex they have, albeit rather differently and on an unequal footing (women have it significantly worse). Whereas it can be socially lethal for a woman to be having lots of it, the sexless man by contrast is usually treated as an object of mirth.
The relationship advice given to me by well-meaning friends was questionable. People told me to be myself when what they really meant was “be attractive.” Things would “work themselves out in the end,” they reassured me—but why would they? From where was this magical property supposed to spring? In truth, the pickup artist adage—that if we kept doing what we were doing we would keep getting the same results—sounded more realistic to me than the soothing bromides I was constantly hearing from the people who loved me.
Of course, women are not interchangeable robots with predictable psychologies. They are not algorithms or pieces of computer coding. A man cannot simply roll up, say certain things and expect to elicit responses on repeat. But pickup was designed to appeal to someone like me: a 23-year-old moldering in a prolonged dry spell who is willing to overlook this elementary point. Indeed, we—for I became one of them—were happy enough to deploy our scrupulously rehearsed, prefabricated routines on unsuspecting women if we thought it might result in sex.
It was so bad that even Strauss would eventually come to denounce the industry. “The techniques, let’s face it, are so objectifying and horrifying,” Strauss told The Atlantic in 2015:
Why did I really stop writing for the New York Times, hang out with all these kids running around, you know, the Sunset Strip like a maniac in stupid clothing? I see those photos and I vomit in my mouth a little bit. Even when I wrote it, I didn’t think it would be a guide. I thought it would be a book about male insecurity. I even knew then that it was about low self-esteem.
I was a pickup marketer’s dream. The industry preyed on men like me—men who believed that in order to be successful with women we needed to efface our personalities. I’d briefly had a girlfriend when I was sixteen. I hadn’t exactly been the protagonist in that one: she’d taken an interest in me and I’d more or less gone along with it. She was more experienced than I was and made all the moves. We eventually had sex. It didn’t last long—the sex or the relationship—and for the next six years the only action my bedroom saw was dusting and hoovering.
My social skills steadily atrophied after that. I had left school and was living in the countryside with my grandmother. I had a dial-up internet connection and a cannabis dealer on speed dial. I worked in a petrol station two days a week but besides that I barely even needed to leave the house. I gradually became more isolated. A few drunken kisses occurred at the dwindling number of parties I was still invited to, but that was about it. On the rare occasions that I did go on a date I always blew it by failing to move things forward. At the crucial moment I would clam up and shut down out of some lingering fear of being rejected. Even outside of a romantic context I was afraid of raising my voice or taking up space in the world. Men hadn’t played a particularly impressive role in my life and I was, on some level at least, ashamed of my masculinity.
Attending a pickup artist boot camp was hardly my proudest moment. And yet at the time, feelings of frustration, rejection and thwarted romantic ambition were weighing
more heavily on my shoulders than any ethical considerations. What was the harm in going to a nightclub and trying out some scripted lines?
With time I would realize that the seduction community wasn’t for me. I didn’t need a taxonomy of womankind; I just needed to put myself out there more and work on my sensitivity to rejection. However, the solutions proposed by the pickup gurus involved effacing one’s personality and creating a new one based on dubious pseudo-scientific theories about what women were supposedly “hard-wired” to want. To be a pickup artist wasn’t to be free at all; instead, you simply ended up chained to a cartoonish, hyper-masculine husk.
In truth, a part of me had always blanched at the reconfiguration of love and romance into a cold and clinical “game.” Whatever my early setbacks in that department, there never came a time when I wanted to demystify love altogether—to turn it into another frigid outpost of evolutionary science. I was a rational person (or so I thought) but I wanted to be more than a “biological machine” intent on maximising its reproductive value. Men who hung around pickup for an extended length of time tended to develop a robotic and salesy way of dealing with people. I didn’t want to start treating other people as scientific variables; I didn’t want to be a scientific variable.
Maturity and the march of time undoubtedly played a role for me. A man invariably grows out of his adolescent fixation with “getting laid”—or at least he probably ought to. My own epiphany—that I didn’t need to swathe my personality in a contrived assortment of tricks and techniques to get a girlfriend—occurred gradually over time and was expedited by going out and making an effort to talk to people and a genuine effort to, well, be genuine. My social skills improved and my confidence with it. The more time I spent around women, the less I felt the need to leave the perfect impression.
People didn’t want artificial smoothness; they wanted connection. In this regard, having female friends did more for me than the advice of any self-appointed pickup guru. I was finally able to express my personality without hiding behind the scripted patter of some pseudo-authority figure from the internet.
James Bloodworth is a journalist and the author of Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere.
This article was extracted from Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, published last week by Atlantic Books.
Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
 | A guest post by
|