Sarah Fletcher is the author of the poetry collection “Plus Ultra.” This op-ed was adapted from an article in UnHerd.
I was 18 when I met my first pickup artist. It was my first year of university and I was at a Halloween house party, dressed as a magician’s assistant. The host had a Joy Division poster, which I complimented. He laughed. “A lot of girls pretend to like these bands because they want to get with me. What’s your favorite song on ‘Unknown Pleasures’?”
What I didn’t realize at the time was that he was using a well-rehearsed psychological trick to seduce women. If a slightly awkward young man approached you in the late 2000s or early 2010s and told you that the little speck of gunk in your eye was cute, he might have been a pickup artist, and his trick of choice might have been a “neg.” This was short for “negative feedback” — meant to both compliment and demean at the same time, in the hope that you’d seek his approval. In answering my host’s question about Joy Division, I was already doing just that. We ended up dating for two years.
During that time, the pickup artist surprised me by how open he was about the psychology behind his art — PUA for short. He unpacked some of the vocabulary and discussed some of the favored ploys: negging, comparing hand sizes, showing off card tricks and, above all, appealing to fate. The more you call upon any universal system — astrology, tarot, destiny — the less personal agency women have to take in making an impulsive or risky sexual decision. He introduced me to some of his pickup friends too. “When done right,” one of them told me, “PUA should be like makeup. It should enhance rather than cover. It should be invisible.” I was being given a privileged glimpse of what lay behind the curtain. I felt like a trusted ally. That, in hindsight, was part of the pickup.
These young men would all have read “The Game,” one of the most infamous books of the 2000s. Neil Strauss, its author, had collaborated with porn star Jenna Jameson and ghoulish musician Marilyn Manson on their memoirs, but PUA proved to be his most controversial topic. Strauss immersed himself in what was then a nascent subculture. Having rebranded himself as “Style,” Strauss attended a boot camp led by an arch-seducer known only as Mystery, whom he managed to befriend. Strauss joined the pickup community, imbibed — or rather, got drunk on — its teachings about body language, dress and conversation starters, and put these lessons into practice.
Ostensibly a memoir of that period in Strauss’s life, “The Game” was also a manual, promising men secret tips on how to get any woman into bed. Published with a Bible-black leather cover, the book was a bestseller, catapulting Strauss to the status of talk-show celebrity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was wildly popular among certain types of young men — including those I met when I was 18. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, the publication did not win Strauss friends in the women’s liberation community. The feminist blogosphere accused Strauss of advocating for anything from objectification to rape to merely being a pig, making “The Game” subject to one of the first digital-era moral panics.
It is now 20 years since the book’s publication. In the era of Andrew Tate, the initial backlash seems almost quaint. I was struck, on rereading “The Game” this year, by Strauss’s success in making the story feel more charming than sleazy. Our narrator is quick-witted and happy-go-lucky as he leads us through a simple story of boy-meets-girls. He picks up the reader, using jokes to preempt reticence, vulnerability to preclude annoyance. It worked on me.
Strauss himself came to disavow pickup, hosting a funeral for “Style” in 2013 ahead of his marriage to the model Ingrid De La O. (They are now divorced.) In hindsight, he got out in the nick of time. Social media was not only changing the face of dating, but of feminism as well. Young women became more organized and vigilant; consent classes and think pieces sought to stamp out any remnants of PUA. Men’s behavior that might previously have seemed innocuous, like looking overlong at a woman or offering compliments, suddenly acquired menacing undertones.
The movement naturally dwindled, and its methods began to appear antiquated. Why approach women in a bar when they are more likely to be on an app?
While PUA might have shrunk in practice, it continued to lurk in spirit — Patient Zero for digital-era misogyny. It was PUA forums that popularized the “red pill” meme, adapting terminology from “The Matrix.” Swallow the blue pill and you’ll share the unchallenging majority view that men and women are roughly the same and that neither is, or should be, in charge of the other. Choose the red pill, and you’ll see the world as it apparently really is: Men and women are fundamentally and irrevocably different, female sexuality needs to be controlled rather than enabled, and there is nothing worse or more humiliating than being involuntarily celibate. Incels, and their occasional acts of violence, are another offshoot of the red-pill view. It’s almost tragic that Andrew Tate looks like a gritty reboot of Neil Strauss: a badly rearticulated echo that is angrier, shinier and more ambitious and famous.
Today, discussion of “The Game” tends to consider it only in the context of the gender wars. But these critics seem not to notice that the book’s principal focus is homosocial: on male relationships, male approval and male identity. Even as they’re trying to pick up women, these men are thinking about what their friends would do in that situation. One pickup artist tells another that while kissing a woman, he was so preoccupied with imagining what it’d be like for his friend to kiss her, he forgot what the kiss was like altogether.
The pickup artists imitate each other, go out looking for women together and even live together. In the book’s climax, Style and his comrades decide to launch Project Hollywood — a house of pickup artists. Here, the squabbles become so all-encompassing that the pickup artists seem to forget what they thought they wanted all along, which was to get laid.
The phrase “intrasexual competition” is usually employed to denigrate women as petty and duplicitous, always looking to slyly damage each other. But in “The Game,” it’s men who are the connivers, stealing each other’s amatory targets and squabbling with the gossipy urgency of 14-year-old girls. Despite the book ostensibly being about women, the real romance story is between Strauss and Mystery. They fight; they get back together; they fall out of love and get jealous. Their dynamic has much more feeling and commitment than any of the relationships depicted with women. The queasy philosophical question at the heart of PUA: If a man picks up a woman in a bar and no one is around to witness it, did he even pick her up at all?
Rereading “The Game,” I was also struck by how much of a role magic played in their stories. Perhaps it made sense that I was dressed as a magician’s assistant when I met my first pickup artist. Unbeknownst to me, I was entering the domain of the fantastical and magical.
The pickup artists learn card tricks, read palms and perfect their mind-reading routines. Mystery outlines plans to become a professional magician as an exit route. As well as playing conjurers’ tricks, they often spoke to women about mystical magical concepts: not just horoscopes, but “the stars,” “auras” and “healing energies.” For many women, there is nothing more alluring than someone seeming to know you better than you know yourself.
But magic is more than a seduction technique. It is the folk-underbelly of religion. Tradition without the infrastructure. And seduction is magic. It’s what draws two people together in a way that feels natural, easy, but is also rare and urgent. Many of the pickup artists were clearly deeply unpleasant; but a lot of them wanted genuine enchantment, I think, even more than they wanted to simulate it. Yet we want our magic without magicians, for the existence of a magician undermines true enchantment.
One of the main criticisms that feminists, and women in general, make of PUA is that it’s just another magician’s con: a form of lying. And perhaps it is, but when it comes to dishonesty and sex, where do we draw the line? Persuading someone into sex isn’t a crime — but at what point is someone pressured, or tricked?
In the post-PUA era, “consent” has come to mean that we want all the facts available before we make a decision. But there’s still no consensus on which facts are relevant. Women wear cosmetics, but we’d be hard-pressed to see this as a form of lying. People also lie about their jobs when trying to impress the opposite sex — does that subterfuge violate consent? And what about alcohol? Alcohol can cause the hard edges of the world to blur handsomely. In that attractive mist, we might find our lips gravitating toward those of a stranger, only to wake up the next morning and regret our loosened inhibitions. We pad our CVs, we pad our bras: Is any of this so dishonest as to make a connection no longer consensual?
An encounter is magical, rather than a lie, when the fantasy is shared between the two participants, when both sides want to believe in the power of the moment and get swept away in the mutual frisson. That is what the seducer should aspire to, and it is timeless.
But “The Game” still feels like an artifact. Up until some point in the 2010s, people used to go out to bars to flirt and be flirted with. Were we more likely to believe in magic then? Magic needn’t be True Love, but the sparks could come from someone who asked you for a lighter in the smoking area of a sticky bar. Sometimes I think millennials and Gen Z are now too cool for magic. It has become old hat, like the idea of landing a dream job. By magic, I mean: the spark. The capacity for good faith between the sexes. The pickup, and then letting the chips fall where they may, and perhaps, within that, finding love or something like it. We might call this new attitude street-smart. We might call it cynicism.
It’s not that we no longer believe in magic. It’s that magic itself seems less present in the realm of dating and romance. Why? Many will proffer their pet concerns. Maybe it’s men and their lowered testosterone or addiction to pornography. Maybe it’s women and their sex-positive feminism, their sex-negative feminism, their hormonal birth control, their academic superiority over men. Maybe it’s the fallout of the #MeToo movement. Maybe it’s something else: dating apps, capitalism, socialism or post-pandemic atomization. With all these competing diagnoses, it’s hard to imagine what a cure may be, or if we indeed believe a cure is even desirable.
But I’ve seen magic happen — magic of the kind that, at their best, the pickup artists were striving to get at least a taste of. When I met my current boyfriend, over a year ago, I remember suspecting he might be a pickup artist. While we were leaving a get-together at the pub, he remarked: “You dress a lot weirder than you actually are.” For days, I wondered: Is this a neg? Is this something studied? Vegan cheese? Where does this electricity come from? But no. It’s better to fall into being spellbound, which I was, and remain. For what it’s worth, I still believe in magic.
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