Spinoff thread: Mystery Method (Pick-Up Artists): Manipulation or No?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

This is a really interesting thread. Prior to reading, I had some vague inkling that there existed an ill-defined “movement” of guys who were pre-occupied with improving their “game” to peak efficiency, but it seems I’d radically underestimated its size and accessibility. When I heard the words “seduction community”, I always envisioned shadowy cabals of single-minded loners burning lean tissue late into the night devising and implementing ever more oblique strategies to get women into bed and swapping them over the internet. Turns out, after doing a little research, that these “strategies” are not only fairly commonsensical, but the majority of people who invest time in perfecting them are just ordinary guys fed up with a lacklustre love life.

It seems to boil down to this: Women are, generally speaking, particularly attracted to certain key characteristics, the most pertinent of which are confidence, success, humour, and social status. Now, this is something that everybody should know intuitively, but a surprisingly large amount of men don’t, which is presumably why Mystery has a TV show. The “Mystery Method” is all about encouraging guys to acquire the aforementioned characteristics and present themselves in such a way that their effortless possession of them is easily detectable by members of the opposite sex. Since you can’t really expect an introverted, unsuccessful, boring and low status guy to acquire an overabundance of self-belief, material wealth, prestige and comic timing overnight, the Mystery Method advises guys to use certain routines and gimmicks when starting out.

People in this thread who say guys should eschew such duplicity and just “be themselves” are missing the point. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that guys who are willing to shell out megabucks for personal pick-up training have already tried flying in the dating scene armed with just their natural charm and inner magic and have crash-landed more times than they can remember, because the women they’re talking to simply aren’t interested in what they have to offer. Being yourself doesn’t really work when you don’t embody those characteristics women find attractive. Hence the initial artifice advocated by Mystery & Co.

And guess what? A guy who uses these methods to become successful at picking up women will genuinely become a self confident and high-status man.

We all employ a little artifice in our dealings with the opposite sex. Women anticipating an encounter with a desirable man will generally spend much more time preening themselves than they would do otherwise, and they will tend to act very differently around him than they will around anyone else. Similarly, guys will obsessively groom themselves, adopt a swagger, and lie about their income. All Mystery & Co. have done is systematise things a little for the truly clueless. Women may find it creepy in the abstract, but if they found their partner of ten years only had the confidence to make the first move because of something he read in a Mystery book, I think they’d be secretly thankful.

142

Okay, full disclosure: I’m a single guy. When my mates and I go out on the pull I’ll generally employ the “shotgun approach” to picking up women. That is, I’ll approach lots of different women in the hopes that, eventually, I’ll get a positive response. I’m not the best looking guy out there and generally it seems that, for every ten women I approach, I’ll come away with two numbers. If Lady Luck is feeling especially benevolent, I may take someone home with me. Put bluntly, my “game” could use a little improvement.

I’ve checked out this Mystery guy’s website and learned a couple of conversation starters (we pick-up artists call them “Openers”, apparently :wink: ) and I’m gonna hit the bars with my mates in a couple of hours. I’ll give 'em a try and report back. I’ve nothing to lose except my dignity, which I lose on a regular basis anyway :slight_smile:

143

At the moment I’m not picking up women at all. I have a girlfriend. But no, my approaches are neither aggressive nor condescending. If anything I go in a little too shy.

Maybe some do. I can only control how I act, not how others perceive me. Sure, I’ve been blown out a few times. That happens. Other times I’ve had success. That’s just the nature of meeting new people.

I don’t target insecure women. I tend to go for women that I perceive as nice, easy-going, and compatible. I try to stay away from women who have more issues than Newsweek.

144

Cool. I had that perception of you - for what its worth - I wasn’t seeing you as the type of creepy guy targeting messed up girls to get laid. There is a self awareness here that is, in you, intellectually honest.

(But the comply thing Lamia is talking about IS creepy in his writing…its one of those things that would make me toss this guys writing across the room and go read romance novels - no looking deeper, no excuses. But then, I tend to be easily pissed off about such casual use of loaded words).

145

Thank you for seeing that.

146

If it’s a group of multiple girls, you “dismiss” the unpleasent one and “neg” her but keep making moves on the other girls in the group. The theory is she will become jealous and work that much harder for your attentions.
The basic Mystery strategy:

  1. Dress like a buffoon so everyone notices you
  2. Swaggar around, smile and say hi to random people so you look like someone who knows everyone
  3. Quickly approach a “set” of women, starting with the most attractive and work down. Note that your body language should be such that you are sort of making offhanded comments to them as you were walking past.
  4. Say some stupid line to open (I suspect the actual content doesn’t matter. The winner of season 2 kept asking girls what movie the “nobody puts Baby in a corner” line was from. Every girl knows it’s Dirty Dancing.)
  5. Tell some inane story ("my friends just finished a caper and we’re celebrating like it’s the end of Ocean’s Eleven). Note that your body language should indicate that you are about to leave mid-sentence.
  6. If any girl in the group makes a comment (ie “what the fuck are you talking about?”) then “neg” her.
  7. When a girl stars showing IOI (Indicators of Interest), you invite the whole set to another location (typically a counch in the club where IRL you would need to drop about $200+ for bottle service)
  8. Isolate your target (“can I borrow your friend for a second”)
  9. Escalate “kino” until you are in make out country.

That’s what most men more or less do. You can dramatically improve your game with a couple of simple steps:

  1. DON’T COCK BLOCK EACH OTHER! - I can’t stress this enough. Nothing turns a woman off more than a bunch of geeks slobering over her. If your friend is talking to a single girl, either leave him the fuck alone or be helpful by walking by and say “hey I’m going to get a beer, you guys need anything?” If it’s a group of girls, include your friends but pay attention at let the coupling up happen naturally. Some of my friends in my 20s were such idiots whenever I would talk to a girl I stopped hanging out with them out of embarrasment.

  2. Don’t just hit on every girl in the bar - Believe it or not, people actually DO observe other people around them. If the bar isn’t that crowded, they will notice you bopping from girl to girl getting shot down, which lowers your value for the next girl.

  3. Make casual conversation to people around you. Nothing looks weirder than the lone guy in a bar not talking to anyone. Which is why you are better off going with at least one friend.

147

My thoughts about this have already been expressed by others in this thread so I’ll just say this:

Until now I never realized that the “Mystery Method” was a real thing that real guys pay real money to learn. I assumed he was as genuine as the “Flavor of Love Charm School”, which is to say not at all. He has a show on Vh1 for freak’s sake. He wears a feathered hat! And googles! Why are you taking advice from a grown man who shops in the girl’s section of Hot Topic?!

Auto, you seem like a good, if somewhat naive, guy. I’ve seen pictures of you, you’re cute. I would really advise you to stop overthinking the whole dating thing. I’m all for improving yourself and of course you should put your best foot forward when you’re dating, but you seem to think you need a major overhaul when just a tuneup will do. MHO, take it for what’s is worth.

148

From what I saw of the show, this is a major Achilles heel of women they’re meeting. Women set themselves up as inaccessible, and the PUAs immediately defuse that by appearing to playfully diss, then ignore, them. That makes the guy a “challenge” (gee, women like a challenge?) and she doesn’t realize she’s the one he was after all along, so she does the work.

My honest reactions?

  1. It’s a great illustration of “Pride goeth before the downfall.” A little humility could go a long way here.

  2. But it isn’t just women. I submit as evidence TV programs like “Elimidate.” In case you haven’t seen it, they get four men to compete for one woman, or four women to compete for one man.

I have such a disconnect on that stuff…it’s really hard to identify. They talk trash about each other, submit participants to “tests,” all that. I am convinced that for some (maybe most), the prize is beating the competition, not “winning” the affections of the man/woman. The mating thing is about competition, not a LTR—the methodologies are bound to differ and the zero sum games leave some of us sucking our thumbs, weeping quietly under a blanket, in the fetal position.

Agreed. Rephrasing, point-by-point, it sounds like:

  1. Dress so you’ll be noticed.
  2. Exude confidence.
  3. Rub elbows, but don’t come on too strong.
  4. Rehearse some sort of line that gets conversation going (helps if you go blank).
  5. Have a catchy story to elicit interest.
  6. Don’t tolerate disrespect.
  7. If someone is interested, move carefully.
  8. Isolate the person who is interested, once he or she is comfortable.
  9. Move on to touching the person to see if the interest is really there.

I don’t think a reasonable would find these behaviors objectionable (ethically) as I phrased them. Of course, I’m sure their game is more refined than that, but the principles must be similar.

149

It’s even worse than that. I’ve just been reading some of The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed on Google Books. I wanted to see if Mystery really uses the word “compliance” so much himself or if that was just the interpretation of the uncredited newsletter author in the OP. Turns out that “compliance” is indeed one of Mystery’s favorite words. And can you guess what he calls women who aren’t compliant? Not “uninterested” or “closed off” or even “bitchy”, but “defiant”. Since he’s using “defiant” as the opposite of “compliant”, he clearly does mean “compliant” in the usual sense of “submissive” or “does as is told”.

His method mostly involves conditioning the targeted woman to obey the man’s every request, whether it’s to “hold your drink, hold your arm, scratch your back, kiss you, or spread her legs” (p. 142), by rewarding her when she is compliant and punishing her when she is defiant. Seriously, this guy is like Mayor McCreepy of Creeptown, Creepsylvania.

So to answer the question posed in the thread title, the Mystery Method is openly based on the conscious manipulation of women through operant conditioning. The only mystery remaining for me about Mystery is whether he knows that Spinal Tap beat him to the idea of obedience training for women (link leads to video with NSFW lyrics and images).

150

But it seems to work. There are, as I see it, only two possible reasons for this. The first is that the women being “targeted” are mentally stunted Pavlovian dogs who would gladly trade their every shred of dignity for the fleeting approval of some guy they just met in a nightclub. The second is that these girls are clued up, know what they want and, most importantly, know what they want a guy to do to get their attention.

Based on my albeit limited research (and common sense), when the “Method” works, it does so only because the guys involved meet the standards of the women they’re talking to. At no point does the “Method” rob women of their free agency. If some routines recommended stress masculine assertiveness, that’s only because a lot of girls are actively turned on by guys who know how to take charge. If such a routine were tried on a girl who didn’t like that, the guy probably wouldn’t get any further and would end up wandering off to talk to someone else.

And by the way, I would really like to see some of the women objecting on principle to the “manipulation” used by Mystery & Co. to answer ultrafilter’s question in post 55.

151

By the way, I was out with my mates last night and I tested out some of the canned routines and had an absolute blast. Didn’t get laid, but I picked up twice as many numbers as I would’ve done otherwise in about a quarter of the time. I dunno if that’s going to lead to anything, but it’s a nice boost :slight_smile:

152

What you’re looking is not the difference between a natural impulse and a studied tactic, but rather the difference between a guy who’s interested in the woman as a person and wants to get to know her better, and a guy who views her as a target or a conquest. Would you agree with that?

153

Of course operant conditioning works. But the question posed in this thread wasn’t “Does it work?” If the “Mystery Method” never worked at all then no one would have heard of it. The question is “Manipulation or no?”, and the obvious answer is that it is manipulation.

*Pavlov’s famous experiment involved classical conditioning, not operant conditioning, and if you think conditioning is only effective on the mentally stunted then you should do a little more reading on the subject.

*What Mystery says is that a man can make a resistant woman submit to his every request by punishing her when she’s defiant and rewarding her when she’s compliant. That’s the famous Mystery Method in a nutshell. He’s quite open about it being all about conditioning the woman. To his credit, Mystery doesn’t claim that women want to be punished for not obeying men. In fact, he says that the woman should never realize that the man is deliberately punishing her. But if you think every woman’s secret fantasy is to be insulted by some creep in a feathered top hat then I can see why you have no objection to his method.

My objection is that he’s training men to act like abusers. Alternating between insults and acting nice is exactly what emotionally abusive people do to their victims. The verbal abuse is to make the victim feel vulnerable and worthless, and the “considerate” behavior is to make the victim feel like the abuser really loves them and is a worthwhile partner who deserves gratitude for putting up with the victim. This won’t work on every woman, and I certainly hope that most women are strong and confident enough to realize that when a guy they’ve just met starts insulting them it doesn’t reflect anything about the woman’s true value as a human being. But there are a lot of messed-up women in the world too. The stats on domestic abuse should be proof enough that there are plenty of women (and men) who can be exploited by a partner who thinks they have the right to “punish defiance”.

*Mystery instructs men to undermine women’s self-esteem so they will believe they don’t deserve to have high standards. The more beautiful and desirable the woman is, the more the man is supposed to do to tear her down.

He also encourages men to lie to women to trick them into believing that the man is both less interested and of “higher value” (that’s his term) than he really is. He explains how it’s difficult to use his method on a woman the man is already friends with, because if she knows him well he has to be able to back up his claims to be of higher value by getting a new car or something (p. 60).

*It wouldn’t be manipulation if it did, it would be brute force. Mystery’s method generally relies on lying and tricking the woman, not openly forcing her to do something. Not that Mystery specifically forbids the use of violence. He doesn’t say it’s okay either and the forms of punishment he focuses on are ignoring and insulting women, but here’s what may be the creepiest passage in the whole creepy book:

Of course he’ll never actually pull out a gun. That’s why Mystery brought it up, because it’s so totally something he’d never do. Getting compliance from women is his ultimate goal, but it’s not like he’s been thinking about how much compliance a man with a gun could get or anything.

Note that he doesn’t say there’s anything wrong with using threats. I could understand most dating/sex advice books not stopping to say “Threatening a woman into submitting to your sexual demands is both illegal and immoral”, but Mystery brings up how effective threats are and leaves the idea hanging. The only thing he specifically says a pick-up artist wouldn’t do to get compliance is actually rape a woman at gunpoint. He glosses over the obvious question of whether lesser forms of threats and violence are acceptable and moves on to how to manipulate women by pretending to ignore them. Then on the very same page he begins a section about how when women put up physical resistance they don’t really mean it. “She wants things to happen,” she just wants to “avoid feeling like a slut” (p. 148). If the man is clever he can train the reluctant woman to gradually tolerate more and more of his pawing her, then she’ll be less likely to object later on because she’ll feel bad about being a hypocrite (p. 148-149).

I did just browse through this book online, but at no point in my reading did I encounter even a hint of the idea that women have the right to make their own choices about who they want to have sex with and that when a woman refuses a man’s advances he should respect her decision and leave her alone. Mystery advises men to move on to another target in some situations, but not out of respect for the woman’s wishes but because some women (such as the man’s friends) are going to be more difficult to manipulate than others. Mystery recommends against pushing a woman too hard or being too insulting only because it hurts the man’s chances of getting her to comply sexually, not because her feelings deserve any consideration.

In Mystery’s world there are only two kinds of women, compliant and defiant, and even a defiant woman can be trained by a skilled “artist” into compliance with his desires. The only thing I can say in his favor is that he stops short of advocating violence. But that’s pretty faint praise for any man, much less one who’s giving advice to other men on how to treat women. Someone who follows every word of Mystery’s advice to the letter probably won’t wind up doing anything illegal, but he’ll at best be a creep and at worst an emotional abuser.

I sincerely hope that most men who have read Mystery’s books are picking out what good advice there may be, ignoring the rest, and not being influenced by his general misogynistic attitude towards women.

154

Responding to ultrafilter’s phrase

the difference between a natural impulse and a studied tactic

I once saw a TV doc about cats that said that they aren’t born knowing how to mouse: they have to learn it from their mother. Oh, they can catch the mouse and bat it around, and they probably desire to kill it. The killing bite is given at a precise point on the neck, however, and if the mother doesn’t teach it, they’ll never learn it.

Maybe men knowing how to attract women is the same: a case of nature loading the gun and nurture pulling the trigger. In some (many?) men, and I’ll include myself here, it lays dormant. My WAG is that we’re supposed to learn it from our fathers.

I’m not saying men sit the boy down and say, “Son, today I’m going to teach you how to attract women.” I think it’s probably more a way of being and acting that is supposed to rub off, over time, because fathers and sons spend so much time together. But um, what if that never happened? Mystery (assuming he isn’t a total charlatan, that the methods work, etc.) provides shortcuts, but without ethical oversight.

I started a thread about men and their fathers some time ago, wondering if mine was more or less involved than those of other doper men. FWIW…

I suspect an inverse correlation: the more a father is involved in his son’s life, the less he needs Mystery to teach him what to do.

I also suspect that the nice guy/Nice Guy thing represents the partialing of the under-fathered male.

IMHO it’s important to state that getting laid isn’t just fun and games…it’s an evolutionary imperative. I may survive without sex, but if I don’t reproduce, I’m irrelevant and evolution is having none of that. So eating, sleeping, drinking, love, all that—everything else is secondary to mating.

nice guys and Nice Guys alike are compelled to seek women. The nice guy may take no for an answer, strive to be patient, hope someone will see his qualities and come around. The Nice Guy may form calluses and try to bluster through it, breaking all the china in the process. But if they’re honest about it, nice guys can probably remember occasions of being Nice Guys. It’s like the difference between sky blue, royal blue, navy blue, etc. and you can gauge it by looking at his balls.

I’m reading a book by Jim Belushi…

A lot is tongue-in-cheek, but with at least a grain of truth. One piece of advice that he gives is that the man should ask her about her father. If she says, “Oh, my dad is the most wonderful man in the world etc.,” just_walk_away. I think, ‘Amen. Women usually set the bar high, and it always looks like a mountain you can’t hope to climb…but daddy’s girl, whoa, that’s Everest. You’ll never measure up to a daddy who treated his little girl like a princess.’

I guess Mystery would say he could have her too. If you can’t get her ethically, the ends-justify-the-means solution is not to sweat ethics. After all, it’s a club: who let these ethics in, anyway?

@Lamia: Unfortunately there are unethical women out there as well. Take a guy whose trust has been abused by many women (or abused severely by at least one) and give him Mystery’s techniques…misogynistic vendettas aren’t pretty.

But where’s the healthy/happy/win-win middle ground? Is it some prior status quo? Some men will say, “Great, so we should just continue to take shit from women, jump through the hoops they trot out for us? It never got us anywhere in the first place.”

We’re all familiar with the assertive vs. aggressive thing? You can assert your opinion politely but forcefully, yet not personally attack the individual whose opinion you don’t like? I think there’s a similar fine line (as evidenced by my previous post where I paraphrased the 9 points of the Mystery method) between succeeding ethically and unethically.

155

Reposting to make this easy to find:

156

I spend time on my appearance even if I’m not going to meet someone I’m interested in. I dress up and go all out if I’m going dancing at a gay bar where I am certain not to see a man I might be interested in. I do that for ME. Should I walk around with my hair matted and dirty if I’m not interested in a man?

If I knew someone I was interested in would be someplace I was going, I’d pretty much do what I always do as far as preparing. Would I stand around tittering and twisting my hair and hanging on his every word? Is this a John Hughes movie, or reality that we’re talking about?

Of course I would talk to him and pay attention to him. That’s hardly deception. I’m not testing him to see if he’s going to comply with my wishes. If you consider doing your hair and applying a bit of makeup to be deception, then I question your opinion of your own sex. These “deceptions” would be right there on my person for them to see. I’m not trying to hide them from anyone. I’m not trying to fuck with his mind and into his head with awesome and heady power of my lipgloss.

Jesus H.

157

ultrafilter, are you suggesting that men don’t consider their hygiene or appearance when leaving the house? 'Cause I’m pretty sure they do, so that puts us at equal footing there. I don’t understand the point of the question beyond that.

158

Question, though, for the guys using these techniques. What would you do if a girl called you on it? I mean, now that these pick up techniques are pretty mainstream, if you “negged” a girl and she responded by telling you to fuck off or by saying, “Oh, page 48 of the Game, how cute,”…is she a “bitch” or “defiant,” or what?

159

I don’t recall saying anything about deceptions. Where did you get that from?

What I’m trying to get at is the basic point of most dating behavior is that you’re trying to influence someone else’s behavior. If you take the Mystery Method and remove the specialized language, that’s all you get at the end: how do you get a girl you’re interested in to be interested in you?

The reason I asked this question is because earlier in the thread some participants seemed to be objecting to the notion that a man should do anything to attempt to influence a woman’s behavior, and that he should instead be himself and hope for the best. I’m trying to show that the people giving that advice don’t necessarily follow it, even if they think they are.

Maybe it’s not the best question to ask now, but I do think that at that point in the thread, it was apropos.

ETA: Just to be clear, I’m not a fan of the Mystery Method, and I can completely understand why some of the quoted passages are discomforting. But I’m also not a fan of the generic, cliched and ultimately useless dating advice that so many people like to give out.

160

Sure there are. I don’t know what that has to do with whether or not the Mystery Method is manipulative or immoral though.

*It would not surprise me at all if Mystery were the product of an abusive home. He learned somewhere not to care about other people’s feelings and to believe that women don’t deserve respect. It’s unfortunate that (unlike for instance James Randi) Mystery has chosen not to use the skills he learned as a magician to help expose con artists, but has instead decided to teach men to manipulate women. I’m sure Mystery thinks he is helping other men in his own way, although his concern even for his fellow man goes only so far – he says in his book that it doesn’t matter to him if his target already has a boyfriend, he’ll just get her to cheat.

*It’s people treating each other with mutual respect and not believing that others are obligated to do whatever you want them to do.

*I think the status quo for most of human history was that a man got to have any woman he wanted as long as he could get her father to give her to him. The “mating game” has never been fair, but it’s better now than it’s been at many times in the past.

*It’s funny that you mention jumping through hoops, because this is the exact phrase Mystery uses to describe what men should make women do. If you feel a particular woman is unreasonably trying to make you “jump through the hoops” then forget about her and move on. If she’s a gold-digger or something then you’re better off not even trying to impress her. I hope most women will do the same when confronted with a Mystery Method adherent and his “compliance tests”.

*I don’t think the line is very fine at all. The only way to make the Mystery Method non-creepy is to do some serious reworking and totally discard one of his central ideas: that a woman who doesn’t want to have sex with him should be trained into compliance. Believing that people who don’t do whatever you tell them to do must be punished isn’t even close to being in an ethical gray area.

By lying to her and making her feel bad about herself. That’s what Mystery says to do. Do you really not see any difference between people who take some care in styling their hair for a big night out, and people who deliberately strive to make themselves look better by insulting others? I guess they are both forms of trying to influence others, but as Mystery himself points out, so is waving a gun around. I hope we can all agree that some forms of influencing others are unacceptable in a social setting.

*I think what people object to is trickery and deception. Putting on a nice outfit isn’t dishonest. I don’t think any woman here, or any woman in the world, would object to a man dressing fashionably so as to make a good impression on women at a nightclub, smiling at a woman he thought was attractive, or even asking for a date or her phone number…as long as he’s willing to be gracious if the woman refuses.

*Thank you for that, and I mean that sincerely. There are parts in the book that I hope any decent person would find somewhat disturbing, but it seems like some of Mystery’s fans just try to rationalize their discomfort away.