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.

In the record

The Game's commercial reach and Strauss's later reassessment of it are documented across interviews and contemporaneous reviews. The Daily Beast reported in 2015 that the book had sold 2.5 million copies and quoted him contrasting it with his follow-up, The Truth:

The Game is a book about trying to heal low self-esteem with the bodies of others, and The Truth is about healing from within.

^[2] In a Slate interview published that same month under the headline "I Look Back on The Game and Cringe," he described the pickup scene as

going after sexuality for self-esteem purposes, not for the act and feeling itself

^[3] A more skeptical, contemporaneous 2005 PopMatters review of the book had already warned that

sarging could be hazardous to the soul

^[4]

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.