Strauss has responded, too: The Game was partly a journalistic exposé of a secret society, but it could also be read as a self-help book. His latest work, The Rules of the Game, is more a Hayne’s manual of seduction, a step-by-step guide to building a love life.
The author has mixed feelings about the industry that he has helped to create. When he attended the very first pick-up seminar, “You could count the gurus on one hand,” he says. “Now every domain name with the word ‘alpha’ in it has been taken up. It’s a very young industry. There is still no assurance of quality with some of these guys.”
The current boom will, he predicts, either prove “a blip on the pop culture radar”, or the beginning of “a new self-improvement movement, rather like the fitness industry”.
Ross Jeffries, the man whom Strauss and every other “guru” acknowledges as the father of the modern seduction movement, believes there is a huge secondary market that is yet to be tapped. “At the moment,” Jeffries says, the seduction market is chiefly “guys who can’t get women at all”. The huge secondary market he foresees is “guys who want to trade up… guys who are living with women they are not attracted to and have to talk themselves into staying with”.
Jeffries had been a para-legal and then, as he puts it, “an awful comedy writer”, the man responsible for the 1987 film They Still Call Me Bruce. In 1988, after a long period of contemplation in the romantic wilderness, he emerged like John the Baptist, to herald the salvation of all lonely men with a technique he called “Speed Seduction”. It used neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), the principle that a person’s subconscious can be manipulated through words, suggestions and physical gestures. Needless to say, it was highly controversial: to some it appeared little better than a date-rape drug. Jeffries says it is setting women free of social controls that tell them that a certain man is not their type.
