Neil Strauss, author of “The Game” (which I talked about previously), has a new book out: Rules of the Game, literally one half manual and pick-up workbook, one part stories of his adventures as a professional Lothario.

We haven’t talked much about pick-up and dating on Dethroner in the past, but as I’m now single, I think that’s going to change in the new year. To start, this short Q&A with Strauss, who is promoting the new book.

Dethroner: There seems to be a natural inclination from women and men alike to bristle at the concept of pick-up artistry. I know I tend to qualify my discussion of it with lots of caveats and reassurances of gallantry, even to my guy friends. What is it about making a method out of courtship that makes pick-up artistry feel so icky?

Strauss: It’s a horrible word. It implies trickery, one-night stands, and ego-gratification. In actuality, however, the goal of the game is not sex, but attraction. Because attraction can lead anywhere: friendship, sex, a relationship, marriage, alimony.

As an interesting side note, the people who have reacted the most hostilely to the books have not been women, but men. I’ve actually never received a negative email about the book from a woman.

Dethroner: Where is the line between “peacocking” and “total douchebag?”

Strauss: Someone who is a “total douchebag” is alone in the corner wearing ridiculous clothes; someone who is “peacocking” is wearing the same ridiculous clothes, but he’s surrounded by women.

Dethroner: I’ve actually been reading a lot of PUA books lately, in part because I broke up with my girlfriend (and in part so I can write
about it on Dethroner). It seems the primary take-home from all of the books, no matter what school of pick-up they may espouse, is that the average man has terminal problems with confidence and self-image. What happened to the modern man’s confidence?

Strauss: I don’t think it’s a new problem. What’s new is that men are actually admitting it and seeking help for it, rather than just putting on false bravado and defensive posturing.

However, when we reduce problems down to a generalization, it makes them harder to fix. All my life, I’d heard the advice “just be confident.” Better advice would have been: “Just be successful,” because success breeds confidence. And for some men, this is a longer road than others.

Dethroner: The more I absorb the applied psychology and, I don’t know, “gene selfishness” that seems to comprise most of pick-up theory, abstracting the emotions from the equation, the more I feel like an DNA-driven automaton. Which, at least according to what I generally believe to be true about human evolution, is pretty much what I am.

But boy does that take a lot of the romance out of it. Do you ever struggle with this? Is couplehood supposed to be a Randian meeting of two complete, confident souls, or does clearing away more of our faults, even in exchange for confidence, mechanize the whole endeavor of love?

Strauss: I read the same books you did. But that wasn’t my takeaway. I read them because I was learning some counter-intuitive behaviors, and in order to internalize these behaviors, I needed to understand why they worked. So rather than rob me of my imagined individuality, the ideas gave me freedom. They helped me see the so-called matrix.

And though the courtship process can be mechanized, as you put it, love remains a mystery – though Erich Fromm’s Art of Love does a good job trying to break that down. But that’s another discussion for another blog post.