backseatjuan
Banned
Written by a lesbian Sian Gain,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...dating-guides-woken-up-to-new-sexual-politics
Game over: why haven't dating guides woken up to new sexual politics?
A domestic violence charity has criticised Neil Strauss’ pickup artist book The Game – but dating guides aimed at both women and men are full of retrograde advice
Before writing The Game, Neil Strauss was a self-described “lump of nerd”. But his 2005 bestseller, which has shifted more than 3m copies around the world (270,000 in the UK), revealed the secrets of his midlife transformation into a ladies’ man, through time spent in the company of professional pickup artists. Techniques revealed by Strauss – practised long before his book, but never before exposed to such a big audience – included “negging” (making negative comments to lower a woman’s self-esteem so she’ll stay to earn approval) and “cavemanning” (aggressively escalating physical contact).
None of this reads very well in 2019 and this week, the director of women’s charity Zero Tolerance Rachel Adamson called out UK publisher Canongate for publishing Strauss’s book. “The Game is marketed on the premise that men are entitled to women’s attention and affection,” she said. “It says women are something to be attained and then thrown away. These sexist attitudes perpetuate dangerous ideas and opinions that cause violence against women.” Canongate has declined to comment.
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Before The Game was even a glint in Strauss’s eye, dating books had been steadily reshaping romance into a hardened, cynical transaction, positioning both sexes in a standoff of mutual suspicion. Some books are harmless – big bestsellers, such as Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and Why Men Love Bitches are really, at heart, focused on building confidence and communication. Some adopt strangely corporate language – books such as The Elite Way dictate “discipline” and “strategy” – and others affect a coolness, such as The Code by Nate Penn and Lawrence LaRose, in which a section titled How to Meet the Relatives reads simply: “Don’t.” Increasingly, some have a faux-feminist brio: a range of modern guides telling women to push for better sex, to “**** like a porn star”, act like a Frenchwoman, and very often, approach gender with a retrograde conservatism.
Such a simplistic approach, when heterosexuality, binary gender and monogamy are no longer the only norms, works for dating books as they are really selling simplicity: there is nothing intrinsically wrong with you, you just need these six, 12, 15 rules! But the worst of them approach gender with the subtlety of a hammer: all women want to be dominated and are prone to discarding men like litter if they don’t order for them in restaurants or fail to present an engagement ring within two years. Men, meanwhile, are all utter messes and sub-bestial beings who must disguise their worst traits with false charm.
So why single out The Game? What about other bestselling dating guides such as Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, which includes the advice: “Men don’t come up to you to just talk. We come up to you with a plan. We’re looking across the room at you, and we don’t care about your hopes and dreams. We don’t care about what your future holds. We saw something we wanted.” (Something is telling.) Or The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, the 1995 shocker for single women that included the chapter Most Men Find Chatty Women Annoying and was updated in 2013 to include the new woke chapter about texting, Don’t Talk Too Much in the First Few Weeks? Or Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough, which instructs women not to be picky, because “some guy is going to have to focus on the good things about you, even though he may have wanted someone more easygoing or taller”. Or Susan Patton’s Marry Smart, which includes the questionable warning for women who just want to have sex: “It’s the lonely cow that gives away free milk.” Patton’s book was published in 2014.
Reading The Game in 2019, it is telling that Strauss himself has disowned it, having exchanged the glamour of fishing used condoms out of the jacuzzi at his LA mansion for babies and a wife, telling the Guardian in 2015 that “it was never meant to be an advocacy of a lifestyle, even though it’s come to symbolise one”. This seems disingenuous, given that Strauss wrote a sequel, The Rules of the Game, in 2007 – in his own words, a 30-day “how-to” guide that also sold well (85,000 copies in the UK). “Sarging” – approaching a stranger for a rapport – “can lower one’s opinion of the opposite sex”, Strauss admits, but he does also tell us how to do it: “lower her self-esteem” with negging, sidle your way past her “***** shield” (natural reaction to rudeness), then “isolate” her – because all is fair in love and war unless someone has a way to escape you.
While the responsibility for violence committed by men against women rests solely with the perpetrator, not a book, Adamson made a link between the behaviours encouraged in The Game and what such entitlement looks like in reality. In 2014, Elliot Rodger killed six people and himself because he wanted to “punish” women for not being attracted to him. In 2015, Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people and himself, angry because he did not have a girlfriend. In 2018, Scott Beierle killed two women and injured four women and a man in Florida, having previously posted YouTube videos of his rants about not having a girlfriend. Just last month in Utah, Christopher Cleary was arrested after posting his plan for “killing as many girls as I see” on Facebook. In the post, he complained of being a virgin.
After helping one awkward guy to get a girl’s email address in a bar, Strauss claimed in The Game that his work as a pickup artist was “making the world a safer place”, because violence was “the result of the frustrated sexual impulses and desires of males”. But so much of Strauss’s advice would also appeal to these men, whose desire for women borders on disgust. Tellingly, many pickup artists, including Strauss when he was one, reverently read evolutionary biologists – always hunting for support for their flatulent pseudo-science about polyamory and the inferior state of female brains. If any of Strauss’s acolytes obtained a modicum of self-awareness, they would spot that they got more pleasure from the admiration of men they were spending time with than from the women they were wooing.
As Strauss notes in The Game, many pickup artists are depressed: “I’d never heard grown men cry as much as I had in the last two years,” he writes, later describing some of the young men who came to live in his mansion as “vegetables” – barely speaking and never cleaning, always hoping that a woman with more breasts than opinions would someday whisk them away to mother them. But to this day, Strauss says he is approached by readers of The Game seeking guidance, despite his public disavowal. So, the book is not the problem but a symptom of another – the insurmountable truth that some men feel they are made inferior by women, because of their desire for them.
