When I picked up "Rules of the Game: Master the Art of Attraction in 30 Days" in the airport bookshop, I bought it for snark value. I'd already read everything in my carry-on bag thanks to a delayed flight, so why not laugh at the pickup artists?
I knew some of their techniques, made infamous by Barney on How I Met Your Mother: the "neg-banging" of women to lower their self-esteem and make them receptive to compliments, the canned anecdotes passed down from member to member like sacred treasures, the ludicrous formulas they devise ((C - R) + Q + SE = A) to measure attraction (that's the A). So I settled down, readying myself for an analysis of misogyny and male cluelessness.
Imagine my surprise when what I actually found was good advice.
Before I continue, though, let's be honest about the nature of manipulation: everyone does it, and nobody wants to admit it. Some people are really lucky in that manipulating others' reactions comes naturally: they know when to smile, know the right thing to say at a given time, instinctively understand how to make polite small talk. They're naturally gifted in getting other people to like them, which is a wondrous advantage; in many cases, they're no more aware that they're manipulating their audience than a cute baby is aware that he's inspiring "awwwwws" from the crowd.
Then there are the outcasts.
You know these folks, because they come in both male and female flavors. When they walk in to your party, you can feel that awkward pause wash across the conversation. They want to be nice - they are nice - but their smile's a little stiff, they nod their head at all the wrong times, and when they interrupt to say something they either get talked right over or their anecdote, laboriously told and having little to do with what you were talking about, brings an animated discussion to a screeching halt. You dread getting stuck in an elevator with them, because they're too sweet to blow off but they're somehow just a little... off.
They've hardly ever dated. They're continually told they're nice, they'll get their day in the sun - often by the same people who are blowing them off, because they're not evil, but do you want to spend an evening trapped under that awful, expectant gaze?
They don't know how to get people to like them. They suffer for this. They're 24-year-old virgins, wanting wanly to date, making spasmodic attempts at finding a partner and then giving up for increasingly longer periods of time.
"Just be nice," people say. But they've been nice. That generic advice they've been getting for two decades? Hasn't worked. They need specifics about how to make eye contact, how to tell a story, how to stand so they don't emanate that beaten-puppy aura.
And yet, because there's a clear hierarchy in society that hardly anyone ever talks about, if you weren't naturally gifted with charisma and have to develop it on your own, you must be a creeper. People in the know fucking hate hearing about the techniques that break down the fine details of getting people to like you - whether it's that Hooters waitress reading how touching you on the shoulder boosts tips, or the salesman who now knows that mirroring your body posture gets you far more likely to close the deal.
In other words, if you don't know it instinctively, the fact that you had to work to learn what the gifted do naturally is just skeevy. A Hooters waitress who touched you because she "liked" you? Oh, that's cool. The Hooters waitress who touched you for tips? OMG WHAT A HORRID THING. Even if her "like" merely means that subconsciously, she's realized that subtle flirting makes people like her back, and she has instinctively realized that being liked is a wonderful thing?
Is it a conscious effort? Hell, no, but that doesn't mean it's not manipulation.
What this means is that you have a whole class of reading that's gets pre-mocking right from the start, whether it's one of those books on how to land a husband or how to pick up a chick or how to market to a customer. "I wouldn't read that crap," some people say, because changing your personality to get better reactions from people is creepy, even if your personality has left you miserable and lonely. And those people usually say they wouldn't read that crap because they've mastered the rules of society without even thinking, and quietly consider it their birthright.
You either know or you don't. And to those who have the power, anyone who doesn't know is fucked.
But there are still the stranded, those dateless lonely people who drive folks away without ever knowing why. This book is not for you, most likely - it's written for the guys who are thirty and still sweat when they're in a room with a girl, because they don't know how to act. (They don't really know how to act with guys, either, but girls always have that extra societal pressure placed on men where you're supposed to be smooth with them.)
So you know what "Rules of the Game" does for these guys?
It breaks "socialization" down scientifically. The first couple of chapters don't even deal with women at all - it's about dealing with people. It's bare-bones exercises like "Make eye contact with five people today," or "Start three conversations with strangers." It's about breaking down how you dress, how you stand (no slouching!), your voice and how you use it (one exercise tells you to speak into a recorder and listen to yourself, giving specifics on what to look for).
Hell, there are several chapters devoted on how to tell a story. Not writing short stories, but just telling an amusing anecdote. Which is, as I realized, a vital skill in my socializing arsenal, but I'd never thought of how vital it was before now.
And it tells you how to listen, and constantly - constantly - tells you how to pay attention to what people are doing. Yes, the end goal is to get a date - referred to here as "a planned second encounter with a woman you've just met," and the fact that this is viewed as a task that requires thirty days of intensive exercises to get should tell you exactly what sort of guy this book is aimed at.
But in between the various ways you can refashion yourself to seem more appealing to women, there's a surprising amount of discussion about how your goal is to form connections that will be worthwhile even if you don't sleep with the person you're talking to.
For those who are starting from zero? It's all really good stuff.
Furthermore, the scientific approach in the book really takes the sting out of the inevitable rejections. Because when you get dismissed, as any human knows, it's hard not to take it as a rejection of you. But Rules goes out of its way to make excuses for other people - hey, they're busy, they might be wary for other reasons, if someone blows you off it means that your technique was incorrect. You're not allowed to go, "God, what a bitch," but rather are heavily pressured into going, "Well, she completely ignored me - what did I do wrong to deserve that?"
What you're do here is fulfilling quotas. You have to talk to three strangers and get a clothing store recommendation from them. That's all. Do that, and you've won for the day. And if someone won't give it to you, well, that's not the point. Just get your three. That's all you're concerned about: perfecting your technique until you get that bloodless, external goal.
It's an approach that nullifies the emotional damage of getting rejected... And yes, I know women have whole different sets of fear about strangers approaching you, which is entirely valid, but life also isn't a zero-sum game. Being turned down for a date is still something that hurts people, particularly when it comes over decades of rejection - and the exercises take that sting away by making sure you realize that hey, this is all about technique. It's not that they hate your soul, they hated what they saw.
You can work on what they saw.
In that light, the neg-bang becomes entirely different. The neg-bang (which isn't really referred to it as such in this book) is an excuse to get timid guys to do something that's often anathema to them: contradict a woman.
Because denial is a part of flirting, like it or not. If someone's just kissing your ass, agreeing with everything you say and never expressing anything of his own, then that's not flirting, that's an awful suckup. To interact with someone, you have to have the strength to stand up for your beliefs and say, "Whoo, you like country music? Lordy, that's not for me. Couldn't rope me into a George Strait concert if you tried."
To guys that timid, though, who've been taught that "being nice" is all it's about, having them take a conversation that's going well and then - to them - derail it by purposely disagreeing with someone they like is a Herculean act. They require that scientific principle that all but forces them to express their own opinions, because it's not something they'd ever do on their own. As such, there are of course exercises where you are called upon to say, "No, that's wrong." And getting them to do that is a good goddamned thing that will make them better conversationalists.
So what we have here is a book on "seduction" where 80% of it is actually not that at all. Scrape the surface, and what you'll find is a set of advice designed to get people - whether they're women or not - to like you. It's giving you all the little techniques for personal magnetism, something to amplify your personality without necessarily changing it wholesale. There are a couple of people I can think off of the top of my head who could genuinely use this book.
However.
...however.
I can also see where this approach would, over time, go desperately wrong. Because in taking the scientific approach to stave off the pangs of rejection, I can easily see where someone would take these rules and fetishize them.
I do not doubt at all that there are guys who have taken this to the limit of Total Crazy - utter nebbishes, once supplicants who spent thousands buying drinks and never getting a date out of it, who now are flush with power and want to see how far they can take this. I can easily see men running out to play the game of seducing as a replacement for self-esteem, seeing what exactly they can do with this set of rules, forgetting that the rules were guidelines to get them to a better place and not a goal in and of itself. And that is bordering on mysogyny (although given how you're treating the entire world as a scientific experiment for your pleasure, one wonders if it's not sloping towards misanthropy).
So what we have here is a paradox of a book: it's got a lot of solid advice that can take the hopeless to a point where they can, with luck and dedication, become a reasonably popular, friendly person. (And it does it in a way that's going to make them likely to pick it up, because "Rules of the Game: How To Stop Creeping People The Fuck Out" is never going to find an audience. People know they can't get dates; they often don't know they're putting out subtle, off-putting signals.)
But the method of getting those skills is something that can then be ridden beyond the pale to the point where you have a bunch of pathetic guys spouting hoary anecdotes, looking for empty love because they've never had it and now they want it all.
Those who read the book would be well advised to read the anecdotes at the end, wherein Neil Strauss discusses the crazy sex he's had in various countries. Those who've never had that kind of sex may well go, "Holy cow, a threesome! This guy is awesome!" Pay closer attention, my friend; look at how empty his life is, how full of wan longing and pathetic depression his words are, and you'll realize that you're gonna need to hop off of this game before you reach the end.
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Daredevil (vol 2)