Neil Strauss

After approaching the group, he continued, the key is to ignore the woman you desire while winning over her friends-especially the men and anyone else likely to cockblock. If the target is attractive and used to men fawning all over her, the pickup artist must intrigue her by pretending to be unaffected by her charm. This is accomplished through the use of what he called a neg.

Neither compliment nor insult, a neg is something in between-an accidental insult or backhanded compliment. The purpose of a neg is to lower a woman’s self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her-by telling her she has lipstick on her teeth, for example, or offering her a piece of gum after she speaks.

Besides confidence and a smile, we learned, the other characteristics of an alpha male were being well-groomed, possessing a sense of humor, connecting with people, and being seen as the social center of a room.

I have an opener for you to use,” he said to me. An opener is a prepared script used to start a conversation with a group of strangers; it’s the first thing anyone who wants to meet women must be armed with. “Say this when you see a group with a girl you like. ”Hey, it looks like the party’s over here.“ Then turn to the girl you want and add, ”If I wasn’t gay, you’d be so mine.“”

A man has three seconds after spotting a woman to speak to her, he said. If he takes any longer, then not only is the girl likely to think he’s a creep who’s been staring at her for too long, but he will start overthinking the approach, get nervous, and probably blow it.

But how do you know it’s okay?”

“What I do is, I look for IOIs. An IOI is an indicator of interest. If she asks you what your name is, that’s an IOI. If she asks you if you’re single, that’s an IOI. If you take her hands and squeeze them, and she squeezes back, that’s an IOI. And as soon as I get three IOIs, I phase-shift. I don’t even think about it. It’s like a computer program.”

“I just say, ”Would you like to kiss me?“”

“And then what happens?”

“One of three things,” Mystery said. “If she says, ”Yes,“ which is very rare, you kiss her. If she says, ”Maybe,“ or hesitates, then you say, ”Let’s find out,“ and kiss her. And if she says, ”No,“ you say, ”I didn’t say you could. It just looked like you had something on your mind.“”

“You see,” he grinned triumphantly. “You have nothing to lose. Every contingency is planned for. It’s foolproof. That is the Mystery kiss-close.”

“Anything you want from a woman-attraction, lust, fascination-is just an internal process that she runs through her body and her brain,” he explained as he drove. “And all you need to evoke that process are questions that make her go into her body and brain and actually experience it in order to answer you. Then she will link those feelings of attraction to you.”

I needed to become confident, to become interesting, to become decisive, to become graceful, to become the alpha male I was never raised to be. I had a lot of lost time to make up for-and six weeks to do it in.

bought books on body language, flirting, and sexual technique. I read anthologies of women’s sexual fantasies, like Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, in order to internalize the idea that women actually want sex as much as-if not more than-men; they just don’t want to be pressured, lied to, or made to feel like a slut.

I ordered books on marketing, like Robert Cialdini’s seminal Influence, from which I learned several key principles that guide the majority of people’s decisions. The most important of these is social proof, which is the notion that if everyone else is doing something, then it must be good. So if you are in a bar with a beautiful female friend on your arm (a pivot, as they call it in the community), it’s much easier to meet women than if you’re hanging out alone.

I’d read Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.