Toward the back of Wesley Yang's new collection of essays, The Souls of Yellow Folk, is a treatment of Neil Strauss's book The Game. Published in 2005, The Game marked the arrival into popular consciousness of pickup artists (or the “underground seduction community,” as they sometimes described themselves), a loose network of men who claimed to have invented an effective and codifiable method for seducing women. Assuming even a moderate interest in pop culture over the last decade plus, the chances are pretty good that you already know something about these figures and the associated terminology of negging, peacocking, sarging, kiss-closes, yes ladders, average frustrated chumps (AFCs), chick crack and so on. All of those phrases belong to the system Strauss outlined in his book—the explicit promise of which is that there is no heterosexual man too ugly or feckless to be helped when it comes to sexual conquest.
The way I remember things, I bought my copy of The Game in a Waterstones bookstore on Oxford Street, sometime in 2008—the same year Yang wrote his essay—and I didn't feel wonderful doing it. I was embarrassed, for a start. Buying the book seemed like solid evidence of inadequacy as well as being faintly seedy. But I went ahead anyway, motivated in large part by the fact that a friend of mine's older sister (I was twenty, she would have been 22 or 23) had slept with me twice earlier in the year and then lost interest, although not before I'd managed to massively overinvest. It stuns me a little to think about it now, but the disappointment was so fierce it lasted for months afterwards, maybe even the guts of a year. In hindsight, the emotional shock seems both far less important—I mean, thank god—and still real enough to be disconcerting when I consider it. You grow up and get at least a little tougher, sure. But if you've ever had a lesson in how completely you can be wiped out by the vagaries of somebody else's attention, it stays with you.
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