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3.31 AVERAGE
3.31 AVERAGE
I can only really do this succinctly, so here it is: this is well written. I knew Neil Strauss was a good writer. But this book is tragic. It's a real life How I Met Your Mother Barney Stinson type playbook, but spawned into a community.
I can get on board with some ideas: self-improvement, confidence building, finding sexual confidence. But to boil everything down to a mechanical "this is how to get women into bed" is maddening. I don't doubt there are ways to woo the opposite sex with high rates of success, but I object to that being a life mission. Sleep with as many people as you like, but manipulating people into bed - no. It's not lying, it's flirting, the book repeatedly tells me. It's bullshit.
I'm glad a number of them saw the community as a negative on their lives eventually, seeking something worth more, but by the time that happens it's hard to maintain interest. All I know is I found it all really tacky. Really tacky.
I can get on board with some ideas: self-improvement, confidence building, finding sexual confidence. But to boil everything down to a mechanical "this is how to get women into bed" is maddening. I don't doubt there are ways to woo the opposite sex with high rates of success, but I object to that being a life mission. Sleep with as many people as you like, but manipulating people into bed - no. It's not lying, it's flirting, the book repeatedly tells me. It's bullshit.
I'm glad a number of them saw the community as a negative on their lives eventually, seeking something worth more, but by the time that happens it's hard to maintain interest. All I know is I found it all really tacky. Really tacky.
This book had a lot of rave reviews as a self help book for guys who couldn't manage to get a date. I'm not sure reading it would help them any further if I'm honest.
I didn't like it, but it did help me recognise that certain guys around me have been trying to apply the game to their dating lives. It will make me laugh at their feeble attempts to get laid.
The way women were diminished in the book was quite telling.
What was also telling was what happened to the various protagonists in the book.
I didn't like it, but it did help me recognise that certain guys around me have been trying to apply the game to their dating lives. It will make me laugh at their feeble attempts to get laid.
The way women were diminished in the book was quite telling.
What was also telling was what happened to the various protagonists in the book.
I feel like a lot of the people leaving negative reviews haven't finished the book. Yes, the PUA community is depraved and mainly about bolstering the egos of men... I think that's the point of the book. Yeah, it endorses and celebrates this lifestyle for the majority of it, but everything unravels pretty quickly in the final third. No one has a happy ending, no one ends up actually being better off joining the PUA community. Everyone involved here ends up a mess, including the author himself. Am I missing something?
thanks banging book club for introducing me to new books which are exciting, informative and interesting - then there's this one that just p***ed me off.
Interesting read for a book club. Definitely have heard those lines, witnessed the moves, though maybe because they are more in dating culture now? I didn't love it. I didn't hate it. It was written well but was expecting it to be a bit more expose and critical than it was.
I thought this book was a great read. It looks at the life he lived very analytically and looks at the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think through it I learned with him, and even though I am a girl I found the psyche of the females they look at very interesting, if not a little one-dimensional. Definitely made me think of past men I've been around and how they have treated me in comparison and was shocked by the results of how many of the systems they had used.
This book gets a big NOPE from me. When Courtney Love shows up at your house as a moderating influence on your lifestyle, many things are horribly wrong. The "format: imitation leather" really should have been a clue.
I disagree with the premise that interacting with more people is more desirable. It did not address how many women the game did vs. did not work on. The only failed attempts described in the book end in violence. He should have gotten rid of all the stuff about how to pick up women and focused on the emotional breakdowns and getting detained by the Ukrainian border police.
I disagree with the premise that interacting with more people is more desirable. It did not address how many women the game did vs. did not work on. The only failed attempts described in the book end in violence. He should have gotten rid of all the stuff about how to pick up women and focused on the emotional breakdowns and getting detained by the Ukrainian border police.
“If there was anything I'd learned, it's that the man never chooses the woman. All he can do is give her an opportunity to choose him.” (You can fuck off.)
I have so many feelings for this book and let me tell you, none of them are good. Don’t get me wrong, I knew what I was getting into when I started reading it, but it was even worse than I expected. I only read this book for the Banging Book Club so I could listen to their podcast because those ladies are absolutely funny and amazing. The things you do for stuff you love. (10/10 podcast, totally would recommend).
The Game is about the pick-up artists’ community in North America and the author’s experience with it and being part of it. Basically, before being part of it, he was simply a writer struggling with talking to women and being around them. But, lo and behold, he actually found online a group of pick-up artists who were teaching other men how to pick up women and getting laid. They have different methods and techniques which they teach and they get paid with good money. This is what happens in the book in a nutshell. Appalling, right?
While reading this book I noticed that for most of these guys, it stopped being important to impress women, to get laid or to lose their virginity, they wanted to show off in front of other men: to be able to tell or to show that they could be with any kind of women in the world, even celebrities. And then it was when women became to them simple objects. They did not care about their feelings, they just wanted to pick them up. And women do want sometimes to have fun, to have one-night stands and to forget about their worries, but these guys considered all women to be dumb and I rolled my eyes so hard at the things Neil Strauss was writing that my head started hurting.
Moreover, this book needed A LOT of editing because after the first quarter of it, the author becomes so damn repetitive. It doesn’t help that it’s a pretty big book (around 500 pages) and I truly believe that it could be reduced to half its size. The only thing that made this easier to read was the writing, it was pretty compelling and engrossing, and it made everything seem more real. But it didn’t help that the sex scenes were so explicit, sometimes I had to skip them because they were just gross. The author just grossed me out and I really wanted to flip a table at times.
All in all, I do NOT recommend this book. It’s completely sexist and it promotes the dehumanization and objectification of women in order to boost a dude’s ego. I still can’t believe that I read reviews written by women who praised this dude. I can’t even. I know the author wrote a sequel to this book and then he had to get help because he was struggling with sex addiction and depression (like many other pick-up artists mentioned in this book), but I’m not interested in any other of his experiences with the pick-up artists community.
P.S. The scenes happening in Moldova/Transdniester/Odessa had me laughing so hard. The only funny part of this book and it was about these guys almost getting killed. I can’t.
I have so many feelings for this book and let me tell you, none of them are good. Don’t get me wrong, I knew what I was getting into when I started reading it, but it was even worse than I expected. I only read this book for the Banging Book Club so I could listen to their podcast because those ladies are absolutely funny and amazing. The things you do for stuff you love. (10/10 podcast, totally would recommend).
The Game is about the pick-up artists’ community in North America and the author’s experience with it and being part of it. Basically, before being part of it, he was simply a writer struggling with talking to women and being around them. But, lo and behold, he actually found online a group of pick-up artists who were teaching other men how to pick up women and getting laid. They have different methods and techniques which they teach and they get paid with good money. This is what happens in the book in a nutshell. Appalling, right?
While reading this book I noticed that for most of these guys, it stopped being important to impress women, to get laid or to lose their virginity, they wanted to show off in front of other men: to be able to tell or to show that they could be with any kind of women in the world, even celebrities. And then it was when women became to them simple objects. They did not care about their feelings, they just wanted to pick them up. And women do want sometimes to have fun, to have one-night stands and to forget about their worries, but these guys considered all women to be dumb and I rolled my eyes so hard at the things Neil Strauss was writing that my head started hurting.
Moreover, this book needed A LOT of editing because after the first quarter of it, the author becomes so damn repetitive. It doesn’t help that it’s a pretty big book (around 500 pages) and I truly believe that it could be reduced to half its size. The only thing that made this easier to read was the writing, it was pretty compelling and engrossing, and it made everything seem more real. But it didn’t help that the sex scenes were so explicit, sometimes I had to skip them because they were just gross. The author just grossed me out and I really wanted to flip a table at times.
All in all, I do NOT recommend this book. It’s completely sexist and it promotes the dehumanization and objectification of women in order to boost a dude’s ego. I still can’t believe that I read reviews written by women who praised this dude. I can’t even. I know the author wrote a sequel to this book and then he had to get help because he was struggling with sex addiction and depression (like many other pick-up artists mentioned in this book), but I’m not interested in any other of his experiences with the pick-up artists community.
P.S. The scenes happening in Moldova/Transdniester/Odessa had me laughing so hard. The only funny part of this book and it was about these guys almost getting killed. I can’t.