The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed by Mystery
I’ve heard a lot about the “pickup artist” movement, especially on feminist sites, and couldn’t contain my curiosity. Alas, these books are frequently checked out of the library, so I had to wait my turn.
The basic theories of the book are soundly grounded in recognized psychological and evolutionary theory. Firstly, women are attracted to men who seem like they’d be good mates and providers. Just as men can’t help being attracted to big boobs, even if they’re fake, women can’t help but be attracted to men who demonstrate a high social value, even if it’s contrived.
Much of this book, especially in the first part, is about how to improve your perceived social value by being extroverted, confident, and most importantly, not doing things to make yourself look weak, creepy, needy, or undesirable. For example, no lurking, skulking, fidgeting, or extravagant compliments to strangers.
The basic structure of the seduction is as such: go to a “target-rich” environment and quickly (within 3 seconds) choose a woman you are attracted to. Using well-rehearsed stories (openers) you make friends with her group while ignoring or disregarding her. When she gives you indicators of interest (IOI), you then begin to talk to her. Over the course of about seven hours, you win her over by building comfort through shared experiences and small compliance tests, and then you arrange to have her go to the seduction location. This usually involves a second day and multiple scene changes.
It’s been a long time since I read THE RULES, which supposed to be the female counterpart to this movement. Both of them presume that all a woman has to do to get suitors is “be pretty” and “go to a bar.” This hasn’t been my experience, but then again, I wasted my college years studying instead of partying every night like I was supposed to. Presumably women who followed the traditional college-girl plan had to beat men off with a stick. As such, there’s not a whole lot a woman could take from this about how to attract men. Maybe women could use this if they wanted to attract women, and they could certainly benefit from practice in talking to strangers, but it’s not going to get women closer to finding a boyfriend. In this world, women sit there and look pretty and men pick the one they want.
One of the degrading/objectifying/sexist tropes of this book is that you rate women on a scale of 1-10, or rather, you rate them on a scale of 6-10, and anything below a 6 you don’t bother with. The strategies are different for women who are a 9 or 10 vs. a woman who is “merely” a 7 or an 8. Prettier women apparently need to be aggressively dismissed or ignored, because they’re so used to being adored that its lack will draw their attention quickly.
This is the other trope that raises hackles: the neg. Personally, some of the techniques he uses to neg would make me respond with something between a pout and tears. For example, asking a girl to do something, and when the obeyed action has an undesirable result, laughing at how dumb she was to fall for it. I must not be a 10, because a man treating me this way would not make me think “why is he unaffected by my beauty? He must be able to get any girl he wants.” but “what an ass” and “If he’s treating me this way when he wants to attract me, how much worse would he treat me after he got what he wanted? Do. Not. Want.”
Mystery makes assumptions about his readers. The obvious one is that his target reader is a hetero man, presumably young(ish?) who wants to sleep with beautiful women. I grant that for 98% of the readers, this is true. But he also assumes that the reader lives in a large city with an inexhaustible supply of “targets.” If there are only a handful of eligible women in your town, you don’t get a chance to practice.
And you would need a lot of practice to make this work. Lots and lots of practice. For an introvert (like me) just going up to strangers and talking to them is extremely difficult and draining. Mystery recommends four hours a night, four nights a week to just practice “opening sets” (making the acquaintance of a group of strangers.) I think that unless you’re an extrovert with a lot of time on his hands, you’re going to have to work your way up to that. You probably also want a mentor to let you know when you’re doing it wrong. I think sometimes people get so wrapped up in what they want and their own desires that they forget to watch and listen.
It’s not a terrible goal, however, and I say this as a feminist. Shocking as it may seem to the unlaid set, women do not say to themselves “Well, I spent over an hour agonizing over my outfit and putting on make-up and doing my hair and jewelry to go out to a bar. I just hope I don’t meet an attractive man who seduces me. That would be awful!” Having more men out there who are capable of seducing women isn’t a bad thing. This writer doesn’t strike me as a guy who dislikes women. He even says that a one-night-stand is not the goal, but an intimate relationship with a beautiful woman. There are distasteful parts of it. The idea of dog-training another person into doing what you want them to do is creepy, as is the idea of a supposedly spontaneous date that the guy you just met has been on with countless other women. I guess it must work, but it seems so false.
I recommend this as a beginning primer for men who are hopeless in meeting women. Absolutely read the glossary first. Mystery will SLAM you with buzzwords, TLAs (three letter acronyms) and other made-up terms that he presumes you already know.
1 comment
Excuse me: the guy doesn’t strike you as someone who dislikes women? Seriously? He might like them as the manipulable targets of his game, but you don’t have to read too much between his lines to see how much he utterly disrespects women as autonomous human beings. Some examples:
“Engaging a woman on an emotional level, even if it involves a ‘bad’ emotion such as frustration or jealousy, is preferable to not engaging her at all” (25). This is after he determines that you simply can’t engage women on a logical level, so you must play with their feelings instead.
“Attractive women are often found on boats or dance floors, at parties or in nice cars, around bad boys and rich men” (32-33).
“Soon she’ll derive pleasure from rubbing your back and cooking your dinner, but for now start small by making her guess your age” (131).
Need I go on? Because the books is literally filled with this kind of glib.