by Wesley Yang
Early on, we watched as Strauss transformed himself into the man he has since become. He studied hypnotism, voice training, the Alexander Technique, and the secrets of a sexual shaman named Steve P., who gave him a method of stacking orgasms to make any woman squirt. Once he mastered the Game, this lovable loser who used to constantly find himself in LJBF (“Let’s just be friends”) Land could walk into every encounter in a bar with an HB (Hot Babe) knowing that he would be able to “kiss-close” her within half an hour.
By this time, Strauss was living with Mystery and a handful of other PUAs in Dean Martin’s old mansion in the Hollywood Hills, a headquarters they named, in a reference to Fight Club, Project Hollywood. Men flew in from around the world to take classes with them. Soon Strauss would successfully run Game on Britney Spears. Courtney Love moved into the house. Strauss was about to stumble across a more or less foolproof technique for getting women to engage in a threesome.
And yet the whole endeavor had already begun its descent into hell. Strauss opens the book with a scene in which he drives a suicidal Mystery to a psychological clinic. Throughout the book, he builds a portrait of a profoundly damaged person with “a gaping hole in his soul.” Mystery’s goal in the Game was “a blonde 10 and an Asian 10, who will love each other as much as they love me.” His goal in life was “for people to be envious of me, for women to want me and men to want to be me.”
“’You never got much love as a child, did you?’ [Strauss] asked him.
“’No,’ he replied sheepishly.”
They were living with two other pickup artists known by the handles Papa—a rich Asian boy—and Tyler Durden—the name of the new identity hallucinated into life by Fight Club’s psychotic narrator. Papa’s immediate claim to fame was number-closing Paris Hilton at a taco stand (she never did come to a party at the mansion), but his obsession was building up the pickup-school business he was running with Tyler. Leading and profiting off men, rather than meeting women, becomes their dream. Tyler and Papa represented a new breed of pickup artist—preternaturally obsessed with observing and modeling the best PUAs, incapable of talking about anything else. These younger PUAs came to the Game before they developed autonomous personalities. They were nothing more than the sum of their programming.
Strauss began to see that the Game had turned many of these men into what he calls “social robots.” He produced a long post for the online group discussion board called “Are You a Social Robot?”; the answer for most of them was clearly yes. And from there on out, Strauss started to tally up all the costs the PUAs had absorbed in exchange for their conquests, and the costs they imposed on others.
So while the first half of the book induces an irresistible high as we watch Strauss’s brazen ascent, the second half of the book is a long, painful withdrawal from the inflated hopes placed on a handful of rather threadbare routines. Cruelty enters Strauss’s behavior. Misogyny insinuates its way into the others’. They manipulate people and then despise them for their susceptibility.
Given an opportunity to fuck a coked-up porn star in a bathroom, Strauss can’t get it up.
THE GAME SAYS, let whoever can attain transcendence attain it, whoever wants to pine for it, pine for it. As for us pickup artists, we serve the world as it is. We give it what it wants, and what it would ask for, if only it could bear the reality of its own desires.
The attitude of these men followed a sorrowful trajectory—from resentment toward women for their intractability to contempt for the same women upon their capitulation—though along the way, there were all the excitements that come with mastering a skill, as well as the incidental sexual gratification that one encounters in one’s homosocial quest for self-empowerment. The men gleefully pursued an antinomian goal, and grew powerful because of their disregard for limits that other less desperate and disenchanted men still obeyed—the illusions that give love whatever meaning it still sustains in a world that has systematically converted every transcendent value into a mere advertising slogan, except for the one illusion whose sanctity we cannot yet extinguish, advertising slogan though it may be—that two souls might meet and assuage each other’s loneliness.
The players of the Game made explicit the workings of a new sexual economy, one that was always implicit in the old, but was mediated by illusions that, it turns out, did more than merely obscure. We had disaggregated community, love, sex, and the family to allow a new protocol of maximum efficiency to establish itself. The Game players applied the logic of bourgeois productivity to slash open the myth of bourgeois romance. The mystery of romance yielded all its secrets to a method, ruthlessly deployed, which set its practitioners free from a fate that was never going to include them in its hoped-for happy endings anyway. Without explicitly criticizing it, they disclosed with unusual clarity the nature of the larger game we all play: one in which each player gives what he must and takes what he can. In this ordinary game, you judge your own value dispassionately, and cultivate the art of presenting it in the best light. Inasmuch as the purpose of the Game was to recalibrate a man’s own programming to make him a better kind of biological machine, it was also a form of self-discovery, because every step along the way brought a new discovery of how much his own programming, and the world’s, already consisted of self-maximizing behaviors that he simply hadn’t mastered properly: You neither offer nor expect loyalty; in place of this premodern virtue, you offer honesty, transparency, and efficiency. If you find a better deal, you are free to go. If both members of a pair rationally calculate that they aren’t likely to do better on the open marketplace than they are with each other, they commit, though they know that commitments are always reversible. They may search for stable foundations, but they should preserve flexibility for the day—its arrival is inevitable—when conditions change.
And so our individual quest to render ourselves invulnerable to the storms of fortune makes universal vulnerability the rule from which none of us can opt out. Inequality is built into the structure of this game, as nature assigns its endowments, and fortune doles out favorable circumstances in an unequal way. So the woman who does not have it all will not get it all: maybe she talks a little too loudly; maybe she weighs a little too much; and the man she wants will take what she offers without giving her what she seeks in return, and will not feel obliged to. So the man who has it all will get it all, and the man who has none will get none, and they all will be grateful for the little they get, or grow sickened on the excess of all they can have, or consume themselves with bitterness knowing they are stuck with nothing, and be given commercial substitutes for what they cannot get on their own—pornography that traffics in revenge fantasies, online dating sites that reinforce the world’s hierarchies.
The Game exposed that system by taking it apart piece by piece and showing us how it worked. But it also shored it up. It told us that through dogged effort and the application of science, anyone could transform himself from pauper to prince. Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics magnate, once said that there were no ugly women, only lazy ones. The promise of magical self-transformation offered by the marketplace is at the same time a pitiless injunction suggesting that women born without the favor of beauty deserve the neglect they experience from the opposite sex. And what good does our pity do them anyway, if pity alone is all we are willing to give to them? Better to give them the knowledge and techniques they need to remake themselves as the world will have them. Once informed, the responsibility for continued failure to rise above genetic inheritance is theirs alone. So too, now, for the men who didn’t acquire Game.
Strauss’s dark cautionary tale has a happy ending. The contrast is as glaring as in one of those Hollywood endings from the 1950s, the kind that spiteful directors would tack on at the behest of the studios, deliberately playing up the mechanical artifice to expose its falsity. In Strauss’s case, however, you feel that he is personally invested. He wants to tell us that after extending his capability to such inhuman lengths by such inhuman means, he’s st
ill human after all; he’s preserved that fragile part of himself that in the social robots has gone callous and cold. He wants us to know—and he wants himself to believe, you feel—that he’s still capable of love. And so, he finally meets a woman who is impervious to the tactics of the Game. She is beautiful, she is smart, she is unflappable, and she can’t be manipulated. “Lisa was neg-proof. Next to her, other girls seemed like incomplete human beings.” And so on. She becomes his case of “one-itis”—and though he does go on the sex rampage that is the preferred PUA cure for the syndrome, he can’t get her out of his mind. We are meant to diagnose this not as thwarted ego, or the Gamer Gamed, but as the stirrings of true love. When they finally fuck, he stays hard for four or five sessions in a row, and without the aid of Viagra. This must be the real thing.
At the end of the book, Strauss turns his back on the Game. It’s a nice ending, but just because you leave the practice of the Game, you don’t escape the world for which it is a useful guide. A year later, Wikipedia reports, Strauss’s one true love left him for the British pop star Robbie Williams.
n+1, 2008
PART IV
11
WE OUT HERE
A FEW YEARS BACK, I wrote an article about Aaron Swartz, a hacker and activist who killed himself while under indictment for the unauthorized downloading of millions of academic-journal articles from an online archive. Swartz was devoted to an ethic of candid introspection, which he had practiced even at the age of seventeen, on a blog he kept as a freshman at Stanford University, in 2004. In September of that year, Swartz published a short post confessing to something that few take the time to consider. “However much I hate prejudice at a conscious level, I am nonetheless extremely prejudiced,” he wrote:
At my CS class, my eyes just passed over the large number of foreign and Asian students to land on mostly white ones (black ones too, occasionally). My Asian neighbor tried to make conversation with me and even though he had no accent, because of his face I imagined that he did. Had he been white, there is no question I would have started talking to him about stuff, but instead I brushed him off. I begin to wonder how many people I’ve skipped over.
There’s no term that quite captures what Swartz is describing here. He is admitting to an assumption that results in no act of visible hostility or hatred. He simply declines to extend to the Asian man who is seated next to him in class the same degree of friendliness and regard that he would extend to a white man. Perhaps Swartz’s classmate asked himself later that day whether Swartz was merely a rude jerk, or whether there was a specifically racial component to what had happened. Maybe he didn’t pause to wonder if the latter was the cause; maybe, as an Asian person living in the most Asian region of America, in a classroom full of others of his kind, at a school where Asians were strongly represented, he had no reason to think that anyone would treat him unkindly because of his race.
Or maybe the nameless Asian man came away from that incident inwardly torn, uncertain whether he had encountered subtle racism, his own social ineptitude, or the intrinsic hardness of the world. Maybe he suspected that all these things were factors—knowing all the while that to make an issue of it would seem an excessive response to an easily deniable claim about an event of small importance with many possible explanations.
If Swartz had thought more deeply about the reflexive aversion he felt toward the Asian man sitting next to him, he might have said something like this: “This person is likely to be a bore. This person is likely to be a grind. This person is likely to be lacking in emotional resonance, presence, humor, individuality, spontaneity, energy, imagination, and warmth. This person is likely to be passive, obedient, submissive, a hardworking nonentity, a nobody, a nullity, one of those mute lugubrious bespectacled glum-faced inscrutable spiky-haired presences haunting the library behind a stack of books, who gaze impassively into a column of figures or drool onto the table while napping in the wee hours.” But it’s doubtful he would have compiled that list. The whole point of living in a culture is that much of the labor of perception and judgment is done for you, spread through media, and absorbed through an imperceptible process that has no single author. Perhaps you, too, can envision being surrounded by Asian faces, all of them merging into one another in their meek self-effacement.
What we know for certain is that had he gotten to know Swartz, who would soon drop out of Stanford to help found the startup Reddit—that is to say, had Swartz not brushed him off because of his race—that nameless Asian man’s life would have been changed for the better.
How do you quantify the effects of things that don’t happen to you? I thought of this question when I glimpsed a picture of protesters at Yale University last fall, many of them black and female, bearing a sign with the following message:
WE OUT HERE
WEVE BEEN HERE
WE AINT LEAVING
WE ARE LOVED
It was unclear to what extent the tension between insisting that you aren’t leaving (presumably in defiance of someone or something that would prefer otherwise) and declaring that you are loved (presumably in solidarity with others who might doubt that this was true about themselves and others like them) was intentional. But the slogans testified to the sad but unmentioned fact that seemed to be at the core of these campus protests: that while you can prohibit the use of racial slurs through rules and norms, no administration or law can force someone to befriend you, or to love you, or to see you as a person who matters, or to notice you at all.
I SHOULD CONFESS HERE to the biases that influence my thinking. At the YMCA camp I attended when I was nine—the first (and, as it happens, the last) setting in which I was subjected to daily racial slurs—my father asked the counselors to ensure fair odds in the physical confrontations between me and the tormentors that he made clear were to be expected. It would not have occurred to him to demand that the administration protect me from bullies. Growing up meant forsaking the frightened victim in yourself, which had a way of sliding into disdain for the category of frightened victims in general.
I don’t mean to suggest that I endured a tough upbringing or that my father was a hard man. My upbringing in a small New Jersey suburb was soft—especially when compared with the life, for instance, of my mother. The suffering she endured was squarely in the median range of what people born in Korea in the 1930s experienced. It was not unusual for American bombers to destroy your family’s house during the Korean War. It was not unusual for your brother or father or sister to be killed by friendly fire. It was routine for proud and ancient families like my mother’s to be reduced to a destitute rabble living off the charity of American missionaries. But her struggle did and does make most of the challenges that you are likely to face as the child of Americans in a part of the country where most of the kids assume they are headed to college seem fantastically trivial in comparison.
The theory of microaggression can’t help but seem to me mostly an indicator of how radically devoid of other threats our lives in America have become—at least in the fortunate part of the country where people go to college. But maybe I’ve grown habituated to conditions that today’s young people feel entitled to reject. And maybe I escaped the role of frightened victim by finding others to victimize. When I think back to those years when all my attitudes were formed, I think also of the only black girl in the gifted-and-talented programs where I first made friends. Her name was Shakina, and she was different in many respects from the suburban Jewish and Asian male wiseasses who were the norm in those classes (if not in the general population of their own schools). What an odious term, “the gifted,” to describe a group whose gifts mainly consisted of being the children of lawyers and dentists and professors and bankers—but let’s not deny that there was a certain facility we possessed or that it was a source of pride to be segregated into a place where our need for instruction tailored to our superior abilities would be honored. It should not surprise anyone that being bullied during our school days made us not lovers
of humanity but victimizers of others the moment we had the numbers on our side. And I guess it goes without saying that we abused Shakina mercilessly, and that even if our teachers had done more to forbid us from mocking how she talked, as they sometimes tried to do, to little effect, no one could force us to see her as our equal.
In later years, in those same gifted classes, I encountered omnicompetent, hyperarticulate black teenagers who seemed on the fast track to world domination. They could code-switch from street vernacular to the smooth diction of the lecture hall, using each idiom to swell the power and persuasiveness of the other. They had forged in the crucible of their souls the resources necessary to survive and triumph in a world that wasn’t inclined to believe in their existence until they had proved it. Everyone wanted to know them. Adversity, and the strength to meet it with forbearance and grace, had made them more interesting and complex than anyone who hadn’t been exposed to the same stimulus that adversity ends up becoming for those who aren’t destroyed by it. These people were cool.
They were also exceptional. The campus protests remind us that any system that requires exceptional fortitude from certain categories of people is an unjust one. The jargon that tried to name this injustice and serve as a tool in the struggle against it—white privilege, microaggression, safe space, etc.—caught on so fast because it named something that people recognized right away from their own lives. Like any new language that seeks to politicize everyday life, the terms were awkward, heavy-handed, and formulaic, but they gave confidence to people desiring redress for the subtle incursions on their dignity that they suspected were holding them back. The new vocabulary provided confirmation of what young people have always had reason to suspect—that the world was conspiring to strip them of their dignity and keep them in their place—and elevated those grievances to the status of a larger political project. Of course, the terms could easily become totalizing and portray the world as an “iron cage” in which crude identity categories determine everyone’s fate in a way that is demonstrably false. In practice, the protesters wound up appealing to college bureaucrats to wipe away the accretions of the world’s violent history.
