I’d follow up with Strauss himself, but he didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.) The book treats women like objects, calling them “targets,” and suggests ways for men to manipulate women into dating them. (Strauss himself must know that too, since 12 years later, he wrote The Truth, which cataloged his treatment for sex addiction and his near-total reversal from party boy to husband and dad. There’s no question that The Game and pickup culture at large is rife with the kind of misogyny - entitlement, dominance, condescension, intimidation - that still influences how men approach women now.

“I’m starting Project Hollywood 2.0, just like in The Game,” he tells me.

He’s now 46, back in Toronto, living with his brother, Rolf, and waiting for a visa to come through so he can return to Hollywood, where he hopes to bring pickup artistry back to the forefront. Strauss maybe said it best himself: “To win the game was to leave it.”īut perhaps no one has told this to Mystery. Even in The Game, Strauss wrote about realizing that the new women he met had already heard the same scripts. But over the last decade, seduction became mundane, routine, and recognizable, so much so that women have learned to call its techniques out and even reject them.

After the success of its release, Mystery expanded his business, and eventually got a show on VH1 called The Pickup Artist where he taught hapless men how to seduce women for two seasons. The book, which followed Mystery after his move from Toronto to Hollywood, catapulted the pickup artist to fame and helped spread his gospel to the masses. (Max, you might recall, writes a story about convincing a girl to have anal sex and tapes it without her consent.) Instead of just being anecdotal, something to envy, The Game suggested you could learn the seduction lifestyle and live it yourself. The Game was a how-to guide, a self-help book for clueless men who couldn’t get laid, rather than a Tucker Max–type catalog of depravity. He was the focal point of Neil Strauss’s 2005 New York Times best-seller The Game, which was all about the seduction industry and the men who make a living from it. He’s made it his life’s work to teach men (for thousands of dollars) how to pick up, fuck, and date the women of their dreams. If you think about what a pickup artist is, you’re probably thinking of Mystery.

The game neil strauss review