Neil Strauss

Who he is

Neil Strauss is the Rolling Stone journalist whose 2005 book The Game turned the hidden world of "pickup artists" into a mass-market phenomenon. Embedding under the handle "Style", he trained with Mystery and Ross Jeffries and documented his own transformation — and is, per Wikipedia, "credited with popularizing the pick-up artist community and making its existence widely known". ^[1]

Why he matters here

The Game is the origin document for a huge slice of the modern manosphere: the pickup-artistry scene it popularised is where much of today's dating-strategy vocabulary — negging and the rest — was coined, and its premise, that attraction can be reverse-engineered and "gamed", runs straight into the site's check on whether women prefer jerks over nice guys. What makes Strauss unusual is the turn: a decade on, he became one of the scene's sharpest critics, describing it as attracting damaged people with distorted views of women. ^[1] He is both the man who built the on-ramp and one of the first to warn people off it.

Strauss was not offered a right of reply for this initial profile; if that offer is made, it and any response will be logged here.