Confessions of a Pickup Artist, pt. 2: The Mystery Machine
Cleaning up the fallout from the mid-2000s explosion of The Mystery Method
The Confessions of a Pickup Artist series:
Pt. 2: The Mystery Machine
In my previous post in this series, I described 8 things the Pickup Artists were right about:
Learning and applying these concepts changed my life: got me out of inceldom and eventually helped me meet and enter a relationship with my wife. That being said, as I explored the Pickup Artist body of knowledge, I learned that it contains a lot of stuff that is wrong, toxic, often misunderstood or out of place.
Much of the contamination I found in the seduction community turned out to be the fallout from the mid-2000s nuclear explosion of the Mystery Method. I decided to describe it in this post. I will follow up with another post with more failed ideas of the seduction community.
What is the Mystery Method?
Neil Strauss’ 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, subsequent books by Strauss and his guru, Mystery, as well as The Pickup Artist reality show hosted by Mystery are quite possibly the only works of the seduction community that successfully hit the mainstream culture and created a lasting cultural impact.
The Game is a well written, compelling lecture. It’s narrative is based on the well established Hero’s Journey template: it describes Strauss’ call to adventure, meeting the mentor, venture into the unknown, trials and challenges, facing the shadow self, catharsis, redemption and return with special knowledge1. Red Quest, author of a prominent seduction Substack, still recommends that men interested in learning about seduction should first pick up a copy of The Game.
As a consequence, the public perception of who pickup artists are and what they do is highly influenced by Mystery’s seduction framework: the Mystery Method, which became the equivalent of Microsoft Windows - a default operating system of the seduction community.
The Mystery Method was based on Mystery’s observation that the most attractive, high status women attending the top night clubs in Hollywood didn’t respond well to the normie guy strategy of signalling status by conspicuous consumption, flaunting their wealth, talking about high salaries and expensive lifestyles etc. They were looking for something else. Mystery decided to flip their game on its head and do the opposite of what the normie guys did in Hollywood clubs:
Instead of a polished look and expensive clothing, he wore funky outfits and weird hats.
As a consequence, instead of having to approach women, women would often approach him and comment on the outfit.
When he did approach, instead of directly showing interest, he would ask questions or tell stories.
Instead of presenting as a down-to-earth guy focused on results and pursuing money, status and women, he presented as a cool, laid back dude who goes to the club just to have fun and definitely doesn’t care if he meets and picks up any girl.
When talking to a group, instead of focusing his attention on the girl he liked, he would talk to everyone but her.
Instead of compliments, he uses his infamous negs - negative and sometimes rude comments that showed his confidence and further signaled his disinterest.
Instead of dealing with women who played hard to get, he was the one playing hard to get.
The emergence of the Mystery Method in early 2000s can be well described by the dynamic of collapsing status games and emergence of anti-status games, brillantly described by David Pinsof here:
It used to be that being rich, and all the traits associated with it, was sexy. Driving Lamborghinis, living in a mansion, being snippy to the waitstaff, having yacht parties—all these things used to be cool. Then, gradually, over the course of decades, that changed.
The game collapsed. Flaunting one’s wealth became gross. Greed became bad. The most lucrative careers, like business and finance, became douchey. The arts, entertainment, academia, and journalism—industries that offer limited or uncertain pecuniary benefits, but that still let people flaunt their wit and creativity—became cool. Anything that looked too expensive became gauche and tacky. Anything that looked rustic and dilapidated became chic. Neoliberalism and meritocracy were discarded and replaced with more fashionable, pseudo-egalitarian ideologies.
What happened? Somehow, perhaps through converging narratives from the media ecosystem, people gained common knowledge of the “rich person” status game. The jig was up. Everyone discovered what the rich folks were up to, and playing their game conveyed a sickening desperation for status. Counter-elites invented a new anti-status game, designed to differentiate themselves from the snobs, shills, and WASPs of the Reagan era.
One thing about status game collapse that David didn’t mention is that the fish rots from the head - the elites are the first to reject a status game that is starting to collapse and replace it with a new anti-status game. Then, the trends started by the elite slowly trickle down to lower social classes. Due to high inertia of the culture and society, this process takes years. A status game recently rejected by the elite doesn’t disappear, but for a while, it becomes a “poor man’s idea of high status”.
Mystery noticed that by early 2000s, the 90’s status game - the Yuppie - has begun to collapse, started to become “poor man’s idea of high status” and elite women no longer responded to it positively. He also noted the emergence of a new anti-status game - the Hipster - and based his method and persona on it. We think of hipsters as something from the mid-2010s, however this is when the hipster culture peaked, as already adopted by the young urban middle class millennials. Modern hipster culture originated in elite social circles in the early 2000s, and Mystery was there to take note and leverage it.
There is a long list of problems with the Mystery Method, let’s start from the biggest one:
1. It does not scale well
The Mystery Method was created to pick up attractive, high status women in the elite night clubs of Hollywood - effectively some of the highest status women on the planet. It was never meant for adoption on a mass, global scale, however that turned out to be the unintended consequence of the mainstream popularity of The Game and related media.
While an elite woman might be looking for a Nietschean superman, an ordinary woman may prefer an ordinary guy with a slave morality - humble, attentive, supportive and caring, considering her weaknesses and insecurities.
The vast majority of women approached globally using the Mystery Method since The Game hit mainstream were of the ordinary kind. And when an ordinary woman meets a man who acts indifferent and rude, plays hard to get and wears silly hats, she just thinks he’s a weirdo or a jackass. When considered at scale, it becomes possibly the main driver of the poor public perception of pickup artists.
The social and cultural inertia also contributed to above. By late 2000s, after The Game, the 90’s style Yuppie/rich-guy status game may have already collapsed in the elite social circles, but still held strong in the middle class and below - the ordinary women were quite possibly still fine with the old school wealth-based status signalling.
2. It’s fake
Some indirect seduction methods rely on creating a plausible deniability by not showing interest verbally but communicating it non-verbally. It is similar to the concept of Kayfabe, as explained by Abishek Basu here:
Kayfabe is a pro-wrestling term - a word that means "fake" or "scripted". Nobody can agree on who came up with the term or why they call it kayfabe, instead of just "scripted" but kayfabe is more nuanced than just something that is scripted.
When something is scripted, as in movies, you know that the thing is fake.
You're aware that everything you're seeing in a movie is 100% fake, and it's all about entertainment.
But kayfabe isn't the same thing as something being 100% scripted. Kayfabe requires you to either consciously or subconsciously suspend disbelief. It's great if it's subconscious - as it often is, but even when it's conscious, when you know something is fake but still continue to pretend that it is real, that's when kayfabe is most powerful.
However, Mystery Method is not like that. It is fully fake and scripted (like a movie) and requires actual acting skills to successfully pull it off (Mystery was a stage magician by trade, so he was no stranger to acting and performance). There is no element of plausible deniability - the Mystery Method is a Machiavellian approach that requires a fully convincing performance of acting independent, disinterested and detached, while secretly pursuing the ulterior goal of getting the girl. This method also strongly relies on canned openers and routines - prescribed conversation scripts that one has to memorize and enact.
3. Peacocking
Peacocking is a part of Mystery Method I mentioned above - dressing and presenting in a edgy, funky way to attract attention and show that you’re different. I especially despise this concept, since, in hindsight, it has backfired on me big time.
For me, peacocking was my decision to keep my hair long. When I joined the seduction community, I was a skinny guy with very long, straight, dark hair, which gave me a kind of Native American guy look. I immediately realized that I needed to cut them down, however I only did it halfway and made it shoulder-length.
I imagined that it gives me a look of a edgy, mysterious character that women apparently fantasize about - kind of like Antonio Banderas in Desperado.
However, Desperado was a 90’s flick, and the trend of semi-long hair of Banderas and the Backstreet Boys was long gone by 2009. To most ordinary girls, I was just a weirdo. I wore normal clothes, and my long hair just seemed out of place. It could also suggest that I was an emo guy - pretty far from the traditional male archetype.
Ordinary women, when asked about their preferences, typically say that they “just want to meet a normal guy”. They need a man who is confident, strong, reasonably good looking and provides for her, but they just don’t want to date and have sex with weirdos. Exciting as they can be, they’re also risky, unpredictable and possibly dangerous, and most women are risk averse enough to decide it’s not worth it.
As I realized later, with most if not all of my seduction attempts that went better than getting the girl’s number and having one date together, the girls were either part of the rock/metal subculture or at least listened to rock and metal and were familiar with the look of long-haired rock musicians. For them, I was not a weirdo - I was part of their in-group.
Still, I am happy they way things turned about, as the above category eventually included my wife that I am still happily married to2. However, I also know that if I decided to cut my hair short at the beginning of my seduction journey, I would face way less rejections, and this is something I would recommend doing to anyone facing the same dilemma while starting his pickup adventure.
4. Status is not important
The importance of social status and hypergamy is currently often discussed in both right-wing/evo-psych Substack/Twitter culture and manosphere & red pill content.
However, it seemed like, at least around 2010, the dominant narrative in the seduction community was that status is not important, and therefore a man should rather focus on improving his appearance and both inner (confidence and emotional state) and outer game (behavior) to increase his dating and mating prospects. The manosphere “Alpha fux, Beta bux” meme was on, and some seduction advice I read elaborated on that idea, suggesting to be less like the high earning beta male an attractive girl eventually settles down with, and more like the sexy bartender or yoga coach she apparently cheats on him with.
I believe one reason for that was the overtly simplistic, yet very common understanding of status as equal money. This, coupled with the notion of Mystery rejecting and subverting the 90’s Yuppie’s money-based status game gave a false impression that status doesn’t matter.
After reading a bunch of evo psych posts from Rob Henderson, David Pinsof and others, I can see that the Mystery Method is actually fully based on status, and the persona Mystery created is a true high status man: a guy with an abundance mindset, who really walks into a club to have fun and genuinely doesn’t care if any girl he meets there likes him or not. He has one or more things on his plate way more engaging and important than picking up girls in a club: a girlfriend (or two, or more), a big social circle, a high status job, a project to create groundbreaking art or save the world, etc.
Of course, the guy using Mystery Method is not this man - he is just pretending to be one.
But there is a second, more pragmatic reason. Most guys I met in the community were, like me, in their early 20s. For them, the truth about status and hypergamy would be a red pill that’s very hard to swallow, which provides no useful insight other than “graduate, work and wait a few years”. As William Deresiewicz notes in his landmark essay about Unfuckable Hate Nerds:
Women are sex objects, goes the cliché, and men are success objects. But success requires many years to achieve, if you ever achieve it at all. Young men, in that respect, are much like older women: Society has little use for them, barely deigns to notice them. I’m not talking about the advertising industry, or the entertainment industry; I’m talking about the day-to-day experience of living in the world. Young women often have a lot of social power, whereas, except for the fortunate few—the born rich, the strikingly handsome, the 6-foot-3—young men have none. Socially speaking, young men are shit, and nobody gives a shit.
Also, as I wrote in the previous part:
Sex does weird things to people: it builds emotional connection and makes them infatuated with each other over time. Sometimes it also makes them pregnant (contraception is not 100% effective) which may lead the man to either a shotgun wedding or at least seeing her every week for the next 20 years to pick up his kid.
From a young woman’s perspective, status is an insurance policy for sex, much like having proper standards for female attractiveness is an insurance policy for men. In both cases, it protects from getting inadvertently involved in some kind of a long term relationship with someone you would not like to be involved with.
A young woman can easily have sex with any man. Does it make sense for her to sleep with a 20 year old college student with no stable source of income? No, of course it doesn’t! It’s too risky and provides no benefit over choosing a guy in his mid-20’s or older, who at least has a degree and a job that would allow to either build a life together or at least pay child support in case their sex leads to any kind of serious consequences.
No one wants to have sex with young guys, who coincidentally used to form the bulk of the seduction community. This is why the community eventually spared them this ugly and bitter truth - hiding it under the false premise of “status is not important” allowed them to focus on more productive efforts. This is something that David Pinsof would call “good bullshit” - a heuristic that is factually or logically false, but nevertheless leads to good or otherwise productive outcomes.
In my next post, I described more failed concepts of the seduction community:
Continue reading: Confessions of a Pickup Artist pt. 3: The Bad Stuff
Disclaimer: I have never read The Game - the seduction community has written of and discussed the book and the Mystery Method so much that I never felt the need to read the actual book. As my writing is based on these secondary sources, I might be wrong about something - feel free to correct me in the comments.
Amazingly, the first time I managed to invite her over to my place was after she suggested I should play and sing her the Canción del mariachi from Desperado - my 90’s Banderas look worked precisely when the stakes were highest.
I stumbled upon your substack and hope you don’t mind if a woman weighs in on one point that you mentioned. I think there ARE good reasons for a young woman to date young men. When I was young and single I exclusively dated men close to my age, and eventually married one who is slightly younger than me. I had zero interest in older men. In hindsight, I think this was because I was very motivated to have a balanced distribution of power in the relationship - I felt an older man would expect to dominate me, or expect me to perform a role I wasn’t comfortable with instead of allowing me to be genuine and an equal partner. Plus I think women have the same reason as men for preferring a young partner - simple physical attractiveness. Younger men also may be less set in their ways and it may be easier to form a partnership without the woman being expected to do all the accommodating - you can decide together where to live, how to build a life, because neither of you is completely settled yet. Maybe younger men appeal to women who place a lot of value on independence.
Just food for thought! I enjoyed reading and there’s a lot of truth to your approach
Agreed with Brian and the others who said you should read The Game, it's pretty fucked up although it's written with more sympathy for the girls/women than Strauss had as a pickup artist as he'd begun to realize what he was doing. Also, he's a really good journalist - he's written for Playboy, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and other magazines.
Not ALL women are hypergamous. I wasn't, although I knew many young women in the '80s who were. I may have been among the few who recognized that older, rich men like young women not just because of their youth and beauty but because they're so malleable - more easily controlled, especially if he pays for everything.