The Game

partial use of his left arm after getting hit by sniper fire during the war, started a company called Playboy Lifestyle. Students flew to visit him in Zagreb for training in how to become an alpha male. Exercises included punching Badboy in the stomach and yelling, “Fuck you, Badboy!” as loud as they could. The average monthly salary in Croatia was $400; his workshops cost $850 per student.
    Wilder and Sensei, both Mystery Method graduates, led Pickup 101 workshops out of San Francisco. A mysterious website appeared offering a book called Neg Hits Explained. Vision quit his job to run one-on-one workshops. One of Sweater’s employees put together a seduction website and line of products. Three college students in London—Angel, Ryobi, and Lockstock—started teaching workshops called Impact Interaction. And even Prizer, the border-crossing hooker-fucker, put out a rambling DVD course, Seduction Made Easy, that doubled as unintentional comedy.
    Finally, Grimble and Twotimer jumped into the fray, each developinghis own method of seduction and writing an e-book on it. Grimble made fifteen thousand dollars the week his was released; Twotimer took in six thousand.
    The community was blossoming with enterprise.
    I realized that it was time for me to move. This was getting too big. The lid was going to blow.
    I’d been in the community for a year and a half since taking Mystery’s first workshop. It was time to stake a claim on the seduction subculture before another writer beat me to it. It was time to reveal myself. It was time to remind myself that I wasn’t just a PUA; I was a writer. I had a career. So I called an editor I knew at the Style section of the New York Times. It seemed like an appropriately named section to write for.
    No one ever posted their real names online; we called each other by our nicknames. Even Ross Jeffries and David DeAngelo were pseudonyms. Our real-world jobs and identities were unimportant. Thus, everyone in the community knew me as Style. Few, if anyone, knew my real name or that I wrote for the Times.
    It wasn’t easy to get the story into the newspaper. It took two months of going back and forth with editors, writing draft after draft. They wanted more skepticism. They wanted proof of the powers of the various gurus. They wanted the inherent weirdness of the techniques to be acknowledged. They seemed to have trouble believing that these people—and this world—really existed.

The night before the story on my double life as a pickup artist was published, I slept fitfully. I had created this character Style; now, in two thousand words of newsprint, I was going to kill him. I was sure everyone in the community would be pissed off that there had been a traitor in their midst. I had nightmares of sargers gathering outside my house with torches to burn me alive.
    But no amount of fretting and worrying could have prepared me for the response: There was none.
    Sure, there was a little bit of bellyaching about the community being exposed and potentially ruined. A few people didn’t like the tone of the story, and Mystery resented being called a pickup artist rather than a “Venusian artist,” his latest neologism. But Style’s credibility was safe: He had become so entrenched in the community that to the sargers of the world, he was a pickup artist first and a journalist second. Instead of being upset at Neil Strauss for infiltrating their community, they were proud of Style for getting an article in the New York Times.
    I was flabbergasted. I hadn’t killed Style at all. I’d only made him stronger. Sargers Googled my name and ordered my books on Amazon, writing long posts detailing my career. When I asked them to keep my realworld and my online identities separate—especially since I didn’t want women I met looking up field reports I’d written about them—they actually agreed. I was still in charge.
    Even more surprising, I didn’t want to leave the subculture. I was a mentor now to these kids, and I had a role to fill. I had friendships to maintain. Though I’d more than attained my goal as a pickup artist, along the way I had accidentally found the sense of camaraderie and belonging that had eluded me my whole life. Like it or not, I was an integral part of the community now. The kids were right not to feel shocked or betrayed. I was one of them.
    As for the women in my life, the article also had little effect. I’d already told them about the community and my