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Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser
There's a huge subculture of men who trade tips, tricks, and tactics for seducing women. Within the last ten years, these underground "pickup artists" have burst into the popular consciousness, aided by Neil Strauss’s bestselling book "The Game" and VH1’s hit reality show "The Pick-Up Artist."
Some men in the seduction community are sleazy misogynists who want nothing more than power and control. Some are shy wallflowers who don't know how to say hi to a girl. The one thing they all have in common is a driving need to attract women.
Clarisse Thorn, a feminist S&M writer and activist, spent years researching these guys. She observed their discussions, watched them in action, and learned their strategies. By the end of it all, she'd given a lecture at a seduction convention and decided against becoming the next great dating coach. In "Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser," Clarisse tells the story of her time among these Casanovas, as well as her own unorthodox experiences with sex and relationships. She examines the conflicts and harmonies of feminism, pickup artistry, and the S&M community. Most of all, she deconstructs and reconstructs our views on sex, love, and ethics — and develops her own grand theory of the game.
Some men in the seduction community are sleazy misogynists who want nothing more than power and control. Some are shy wallflowers who don't know how to say hi to a girl. The one thing they all have in common is a driving need to attract women.
Clarisse Thorn, a feminist S&M writer and activist, spent years researching these guys. She observed their discussions, watched them in action, and learned their strategies. By the end of it all, she'd given a lecture at a seduction convention and decided against becoming the next great dating coach. In "Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser," Clarisse tells the story of her time among these Casanovas, as well as her own unorthodox experiences with sex and relationships. She examines the conflicts and harmonies of feminism, pickup artistry, and the S&M community. Most of all, she deconstructs and reconstructs our views on sex, love, and ethics — and develops her own grand theory of the game.
324 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 22, 2012
13 people are currently reading
214 people want to read
About the author
Clarisse Thorn
7 books43 followersClarisse Thorn is a feminist S&M writer who has delivered sex workshops all over the USA. She wrote a book about pickup artists called CONFESSIONS OF A PICKUP ARTIST CHASER, plus a collection of her best pieces called THE S&M FEMINIST. In 2009, Clarisse created and curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago’s historic feminist site, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. She has also volunteered as an archivist, curator and fundraiser for that venerable S&M institution, the Leather Archives & Museum. In 2010, Clarisse returned from working on HIV mitigation in southern Africa. Clarisse's writing has appeared all over the Internet, from The Guardian to Jezebel. She blogs about life, sex, feminism, and S&M at clarissethorn.com, and tweets @clarissethorn.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
March 1, 2021
Pickup artistry is one of those fascinating subcultures that I find it very difficult to look away from. There’s just a sufficient amount of good ideas in there to keep me from dismissing it as a morass of misogynistic drivel, and as befits what’s essentially a self-help community for people with poor social skills, it produces a fair share of unintentional comedy. It also, unfortunately, offers a forum and audience for a number of individuals that I wouldn’t characterize needing help so much as needing treatment.
Also, I thought The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists was a pretty good novel, though I’d describe it as the sordid tale of men with serious issues heading for rock bottom rather than the guidebook some people have understood it as.
So, enter Clarisse Thorn, a sex-positive feminist blogger and her series of posts edited into a surprisingly lengthy book. Thorn takes an almost ethnographical approach to studying and analyzing the PUA community from a feminist standpoint. Since engaging the notoriously jargon-heavy PUA community with the concepts of feminism must’ve seemed too understandable, she also inserts terminology from the S&M and polyamory scenes. Fortunately there’s a glossary, as the last of eight appendices.
Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser is a rather expansive work, and also functions as a popularized introduction to feminism with a clear explanation of the issues and a practical, grounded approach. Thorn is interesting, clear, sometimes funny, sometimes personal, very perceptive and always analytical in her writing. The book’s provenance as a series of blog posts is clearly visible, though – certain concepts are explained anew in every chapter when they first come up. I think the meaning of the S&M term “switch” is gone over six or seven times. Another thing is the hyperlink-heaviness of the ebook. Reading this on paper or off a device without internet access loses something when you can’t follow up.
I like her approach. She gives a picture of the community that is fair and balanced (a phrase I use hesitantly due to a violent allergy to the fallacy of the excluded middle). According to one of the many interviewed coaches, the vast majority of his clients are relatively ordinary people who just need a bit of help, a confidence boost, and once they have some success they’re never heard of again. “You can judge a self-help movement by how many people leave it. If people are leaving it, then it's doing something right."
Of course, it’s also doing some things terribly, terribly wrong. Some corners of the community are amazingly toxic in the “why are these people not in jail?” kinda way. And I do mean that literally – the PUA coach Gunwitch actually shot a woman in the face in 2010 (fortunately, she recovered – and what kind of woman-hater uses the word “witch” in their handle anyway?). He is arguably not even the worst example.
Also, probably worse in the large scale of things is the vocabulary used. The PUA phrasebook accepts and reinforces the paradigm that sex is a commodity, something with a price arising from its scarcity, which is such a wrongheaded way of looking at it that I don’t know where to begin (except, I suppose, in the sex industry, but that’s a whole different topic). This is a very prevalent mode of thought in western culture. Men “get some”, women “give it up”. It’s also at the root of the Internet Nice Guy way of thinking: “insert kindness coins until sex falls out”.
As a whole, I think our culture might be well served by learning away from this mode of thought. The market economy mode of thinking is bad enough when applied to stuff that’s actually subject to scarcity. Folks, as a species, we ain’t gonna run out of nookie.
The commodity model is, of course, unequal. Supply is controlled by women, demand comes from men. This reinforces another lovely social construct called “adversarial gender roles”, which is a whole pack of unspoken assumptions about the differences between men and women and their respective places in the world. A prime example of this in action is how sexually active people are perceived: if a man has many partners, he’s a “player” and gains social status. If a woman pulls off the same stunt, she’s shamed.
While I find the celebration of sexual conquest (see, there we go again with the adversarial vocabulary) rather distasteful, I feel the opposite is far worse. Having actually encountered its rare egalitarian strain (a surprising and unwelcome experience), I feel I can speak with a degree of authority on this.
Incidentally, as a semi-professional in the field of gaming, I also feel that using the vocabulary of games in the field of human relationships is… off. It presumes a certain goal-orientedness that is probably not at all useful in developing a lasting relationship. It’s not as terrible as the discourse of the market, but it’s… off. The logical culmination of this way of thinking is the notched bedstead. Of course, as Thorn points out, this all depends a lot on whether one thinks of their partner as a player character or an NPC.
No, really, she says that. The book has a very approachable style.
She also discusses what makes for a healthy relationship, common mistakes, dating, and so on. On a few occasions, I found myself nodding and going “Yeah, done that. And that. And that. Oops.” Of course, especially in the dating sections it was useful to remember that the American dating thing looks utterly foreign to me because it is.
For all its problems – and let it be remembered that they are many – it should be acknowledged that something like the PUA community is necessary. Since we no longer do arranged marriages and women have other choices than wife and dead, those of us who have trouble approaching the opposite (or same, for some of us) sex have, well, trouble. This shit isn’t taught at school, and we are a social species. As I was writing this review, I got linked an article by George Monbiot waxing pessimistic about "an epidemic of loneliness". It's hard to condemn something that is trying to help with that.
It is unfortunate that the market got cornered by a theoretical framework which emphasizes getting laid and offers pretty much nothing to someone looking for commitment, but this is what we ended up with. It is a very limited toolkit, and though when all you have is a hammer everything starts looking like a nail, it is also true that the tool itself is amoral and it is the user who decides whether to utilize it for good or evil.
Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser is a good book. Though approaching the subject from the context of a sex-positive feminist framework, it gives voice to a number of people from within the community, including an interview of Neil Strauss. It is fair, giving credit where deserved and condemnation when called for. It is also user friendly and explains the specialized terminology it uses from a number of fields and articulates its points well.
Also, I thought The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists was a pretty good novel, though I’d describe it as the sordid tale of men with serious issues heading for rock bottom rather than the guidebook some people have understood it as.
So, enter Clarisse Thorn, a sex-positive feminist blogger and her series of posts edited into a surprisingly lengthy book. Thorn takes an almost ethnographical approach to studying and analyzing the PUA community from a feminist standpoint. Since engaging the notoriously jargon-heavy PUA community with the concepts of feminism must’ve seemed too understandable, she also inserts terminology from the S&M and polyamory scenes. Fortunately there’s a glossary, as the last of eight appendices.
Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser is a rather expansive work, and also functions as a popularized introduction to feminism with a clear explanation of the issues and a practical, grounded approach. Thorn is interesting, clear, sometimes funny, sometimes personal, very perceptive and always analytical in her writing. The book’s provenance as a series of blog posts is clearly visible, though – certain concepts are explained anew in every chapter when they first come up. I think the meaning of the S&M term “switch” is gone over six or seven times. Another thing is the hyperlink-heaviness of the ebook. Reading this on paper or off a device without internet access loses something when you can’t follow up.
I like her approach. She gives a picture of the community that is fair and balanced (a phrase I use hesitantly due to a violent allergy to the fallacy of the excluded middle). According to one of the many interviewed coaches, the vast majority of his clients are relatively ordinary people who just need a bit of help, a confidence boost, and once they have some success they’re never heard of again. “You can judge a self-help movement by how many people leave it. If people are leaving it, then it's doing something right."
Of course, it’s also doing some things terribly, terribly wrong. Some corners of the community are amazingly toxic in the “why are these people not in jail?” kinda way. And I do mean that literally – the PUA coach Gunwitch actually shot a woman in the face in 2010 (fortunately, she recovered – and what kind of woman-hater uses the word “witch” in their handle anyway?). He is arguably not even the worst example.
Also, probably worse in the large scale of things is the vocabulary used. The PUA phrasebook accepts and reinforces the paradigm that sex is a commodity, something with a price arising from its scarcity, which is such a wrongheaded way of looking at it that I don’t know where to begin (except, I suppose, in the sex industry, but that’s a whole different topic). This is a very prevalent mode of thought in western culture. Men “get some”, women “give it up”. It’s also at the root of the Internet Nice Guy way of thinking: “insert kindness coins until sex falls out”.
As a whole, I think our culture might be well served by learning away from this mode of thought. The market economy mode of thinking is bad enough when applied to stuff that’s actually subject to scarcity. Folks, as a species, we ain’t gonna run out of nookie.
The commodity model is, of course, unequal. Supply is controlled by women, demand comes from men. This reinforces another lovely social construct called “adversarial gender roles”, which is a whole pack of unspoken assumptions about the differences between men and women and their respective places in the world. A prime example of this in action is how sexually active people are perceived: if a man has many partners, he’s a “player” and gains social status. If a woman pulls off the same stunt, she’s shamed.
While I find the celebration of sexual conquest (see, there we go again with the adversarial vocabulary) rather distasteful, I feel the opposite is far worse. Having actually encountered its rare egalitarian strain (a surprising and unwelcome experience), I feel I can speak with a degree of authority on this.
Incidentally, as a semi-professional in the field of gaming, I also feel that using the vocabulary of games in the field of human relationships is… off. It presumes a certain goal-orientedness that is probably not at all useful in developing a lasting relationship. It’s not as terrible as the discourse of the market, but it’s… off. The logical culmination of this way of thinking is the notched bedstead. Of course, as Thorn points out, this all depends a lot on whether one thinks of their partner as a player character or an NPC.
No, really, she says that. The book has a very approachable style.
She also discusses what makes for a healthy relationship, common mistakes, dating, and so on. On a few occasions, I found myself nodding and going “Yeah, done that. And that. And that. Oops.” Of course, especially in the dating sections it was useful to remember that the American dating thing looks utterly foreign to me because it is.
For all its problems – and let it be remembered that they are many – it should be acknowledged that something like the PUA community is necessary. Since we no longer do arranged marriages and women have other choices than wife and dead, those of us who have trouble approaching the opposite (or same, for some of us) sex have, well, trouble. This shit isn’t taught at school, and we are a social species. As I was writing this review, I got linked an article by George Monbiot waxing pessimistic about "an epidemic of loneliness". It's hard to condemn something that is trying to help with that.
It is unfortunate that the market got cornered by a theoretical framework which emphasizes getting laid and offers pretty much nothing to someone looking for commitment, but this is what we ended up with. It is a very limited toolkit, and though when all you have is a hammer everything starts looking like a nail, it is also true that the tool itself is amoral and it is the user who decides whether to utilize it for good or evil.
Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser is a good book. Though approaching the subject from the context of a sex-positive feminist framework, it gives voice to a number of people from within the community, including an interview of Neil Strauss. It is fair, giving credit where deserved and condemnation when called for. It is also user friendly and explains the specialized terminology it uses from a number of fields and articulates its points well.
June 21, 2012
If like me you've ever been curious about the pickup artist community, this is the book to read.
It's much better than trying to wade through the misogynistic nonsense that is typical pickup artist material, because Clarisse Thorn is a serious sex-positive feminist who (mostly) has her head on straight.
Yet, the weirdest part is... you come out kinda liking the pickup community, or at least some members of it, particularly Hugh Ristik and Neil Strauss. They aren't as great as they think they are, but nor as they as bad as some people say.
To be perfectly honest, I was hoping that reading this book would help me understand dating better. It hasn't really done that. But what it has done is helped me understand pickup artistry, which is also useful in its own way.
(By the way, in the two taxonomies, I am apparently an Analyst/Geek and a Young Professional. If you read it and knew me, this would make perfect sense.)
It's much better than trying to wade through the misogynistic nonsense that is typical pickup artist material, because Clarisse Thorn is a serious sex-positive feminist who (mostly) has her head on straight.
Yet, the weirdest part is... you come out kinda liking the pickup community, or at least some members of it, particularly Hugh Ristik and Neil Strauss. They aren't as great as they think they are, but nor as they as bad as some people say.
To be perfectly honest, I was hoping that reading this book would help me understand dating better. It hasn't really done that. But what it has done is helped me understand pickup artistry, which is also useful in its own way.
(By the way, in the two taxonomies, I am apparently an Analyst/Geek and a Young Professional. If you read it and knew me, this would make perfect sense.)
February 8, 2013
Thorn's honesty is admirable, but that doesn't change the fact that this book is written like an in-joke for friends, full of talky language and groaners that only resonate as sloppy writing. Toward the end of the book, Thorn tries to make her story worth telling (and insert a clever parallel to the popular memoir "The Game") by saying that it's time to exit the PUA community because of how insecure and needy it has made her, but she fails to show that neediness in the narrative, and so any emotional impact is lost.
July 4, 2012
I suspect that this book will serve as an excellent introduction to feminist theory for a lot of people who would never pick up a book about feminist theory, but would pick up a book about picking up chicks.
Not that this is really a book about "picking up chicks" - it's more like an ethnography on the pickup artist community, except without as much of the pretense of academic objectivity implied by the word "ethnography".
Pick-up artistry, for those not familiar with it, is a set of techniques taught to men to help them convince women to have sex with them. (There are fringe elements of pickup artistry that are devoted to women picking up men, or same-sex relationships, or which are actually focused more on relationships than sex, but the core of it is men's pursuit of women for sex.) Thorn does a good job of conveying the sense of horrified fascination that one feels on learning about this stuff. For anyone who's ever found the whole process of approaching an interesting member of the opposite sex really awkward, the idea that there are techniques that can make it go more smoothly is pretty appealing. On the other hand, the tendency of the movement to reduce women to Skinner boxes whose job is to dispense sex if you push the right buttons is pretty appalling, as is the fact that some popular techniques amount to a script for date rape.
Thorn uses this mix to spin out some pretty thought-provoking commentary on how we view sex and relationships as a culture.
Not that this is really a book about "picking up chicks" - it's more like an ethnography on the pickup artist community, except without as much of the pretense of academic objectivity implied by the word "ethnography".
Pick-up artistry, for those not familiar with it, is a set of techniques taught to men to help them convince women to have sex with them. (There are fringe elements of pickup artistry that are devoted to women picking up men, or same-sex relationships, or which are actually focused more on relationships than sex, but the core of it is men's pursuit of women for sex.) Thorn does a good job of conveying the sense of horrified fascination that one feels on learning about this stuff. For anyone who's ever found the whole process of approaching an interesting member of the opposite sex really awkward, the idea that there are techniques that can make it go more smoothly is pretty appealing. On the other hand, the tendency of the movement to reduce women to Skinner boxes whose job is to dispense sex if you push the right buttons is pretty appalling, as is the fact that some popular techniques amount to a script for date rape.
Thorn uses this mix to spin out some pretty thought-provoking commentary on how we view sex and relationships as a culture.
January 31, 2013
An elegantly confused treatment of the pickup artist community, written from the perspective of a feminist blogger with a perverse fascination with PUAs. The book embraces some of a blogger's sensibilities, interspersing stories, deeply personal reflections, and philosophy in one volume, and does a good job putting these elements in a logical order that gives you enough narrative to hang onto while you're going off on wild tangents.
Thorn's observations and stories about PUAs are interesting and sometimes horrifying. This is a community with some deeply misogynist beliefs and assumptions, some of them more subtle than others -- yet on the whole the book comes off sympathetic to it, portraying it as a self-help movement for men, without letting it off the hook. The best parts of the book, though, come as Thorn describes her own relationships in terms of "the game," feminism, and S&M, showing how each contributes something to understanding and living with male and female sexuality. Thorn frequently does not come off very well in her own stories, but oddly, this made me feel more sympathetic towards her rather than less. These are difficult waters to navigate.
I don't think this is a seminal masterwork, but it is surprising and unique, and it's some of the best writing on sex and romance in the real world that I've read.
Thorn's observations and stories about PUAs are interesting and sometimes horrifying. This is a community with some deeply misogynist beliefs and assumptions, some of them more subtle than others -- yet on the whole the book comes off sympathetic to it, portraying it as a self-help movement for men, without letting it off the hook. The best parts of the book, though, come as Thorn describes her own relationships in terms of "the game," feminism, and S&M, showing how each contributes something to understanding and living with male and female sexuality. Thorn frequently does not come off very well in her own stories, but oddly, this made me feel more sympathetic towards her rather than less. These are difficult waters to navigate.
I don't think this is a seminal masterwork, but it is surprising and unique, and it's some of the best writing on sex and romance in the real world that I've read.
May 14, 2013
This one is overly long and the TL; DR at the end of each chapter is completely unnecessary, but the concept is solid and the story itself is engaging. Since this was self-published, Thorn could have used a better editor to condense the material as well as proofread the text. I get the sense that her editor was only hired to format and proofread, but this book would have been stronger if Thorn could have reined in her impulse to share unnecessary details and asides.
April 12, 2012
Interesting- it read like an extended blog or magazine article. The author is well read and mentioned some sources that I really approve of, Jaclyn Friedman, especially. But she is not an academic writer and a lot of it is based on her own experiences. So as long as you go in with the right mindset, you are find but I often find myself wanting interpretation from a more academic perspective.
July 6, 2022
Disclaimer: the author is a personal friend of mine.
I have very mixed feelings about this book. It has three strands to it: tell-all dating memoir, summary of feminist theory, and journalistic exploration of the Pickup Artist scene as it was around 2010. These threads don't totally cohere and I suspect many readers will be primarily interested in one or two of them.
For me, the theory was well-trod ground and I mostly skimmed past it. The personal memoir part was perhaps more interesting for me than for most, because I know the author. I came for the journalism, and this was worth it.
One of the basic contributions of this book is to taxonomize the PUAs. In the author's account, and I have every reason to believe her, there area few clear groups. Some are clueless men who want a date; often a limited amount of PUA gets them dates and they go off happily ever after. Some are curious how the world works and engage in it in a spirit of social play. Some are grifters, selling PUA to the other groups. And sadly some are various level of predator who seek camouflage and sympathy by being in the movement. The latter two are the most visible but plausibly not the largest.
It did bring home to me how awful it is that we don't, as a society, do better in training men in socially appropriate courtship.
Last notes:
- The prose disappointed. It was distractingly wordy and this would have been a noticeably better book for me with more ruthless trimming. I believe it started as a collection of blog posts, but this is little excuse.
- It seems relevant that the author went on from studying PUA-land to studying the alt right.
- I'd love to know what happened to that world and whether it survived the rise of app dating.
I have very mixed feelings about this book. It has three strands to it: tell-all dating memoir, summary of feminist theory, and journalistic exploration of the Pickup Artist scene as it was around 2010. These threads don't totally cohere and I suspect many readers will be primarily interested in one or two of them.
For me, the theory was well-trod ground and I mostly skimmed past it. The personal memoir part was perhaps more interesting for me than for most, because I know the author. I came for the journalism, and this was worth it.
One of the basic contributions of this book is to taxonomize the PUAs. In the author's account, and I have every reason to believe her, there area few clear groups. Some are clueless men who want a date; often a limited amount of PUA gets them dates and they go off happily ever after. Some are curious how the world works and engage in it in a spirit of social play. Some are grifters, selling PUA to the other groups. And sadly some are various level of predator who seek camouflage and sympathy by being in the movement. The latter two are the most visible but plausibly not the largest.
It did bring home to me how awful it is that we don't, as a society, do better in training men in socially appropriate courtship.
Last notes:
- The prose disappointed. It was distractingly wordy and this would have been a noticeably better book for me with more ruthless trimming. I believe it started as a collection of blog posts, but this is little excuse.
- It seems relevant that the author went on from studying PUA-land to studying the alt right.
- I'd love to know what happened to that world and whether it survived the rise of app dating.
September 1, 2013
"I looked at him: this attractive, white, American, straight, cisgendered man with a great education and an upper-middle-class job. Granted, Jonnie Walker worked hard to get where he is... but really, why _would_ he think life should be fair? I felt a headache coming on." (p. 129)
Great definition: "[PUAs] figure out what makes charming assholes charming, and then they seek to bestow that same charm upon non-assholes." (ibid.)
"A delicious dose of strategic ambiguity can come from doing novel things together. It can come from compartmentalizing extremely intense ambiguities like S&M. It can come from adversarial flirtation that stops when the situation gets serious. It doesn't have to come from uncertainty about the relationship itself." (p. 217)
Great definition: "[PUAs] figure out what makes charming assholes charming, and then they seek to bestow that same charm upon non-assholes." (ibid.)
"A delicious dose of strategic ambiguity can come from doing novel things together. It can come from compartmentalizing extremely intense ambiguities like S&M. It can come from adversarial flirtation that stops when the situation gets serious. It doesn't have to come from uncertainty about the relationship itself." (p. 217)
April 17, 2012
It is an interesting glimpse the Pickup Artist, or seduction community, subculture as well as some very good information on feminism, S&M and even polyamory. With my background I really didn’t think those three things would go together, but my background is a little limited.
I was definitely impressed. A little exhausting to read because it makes you think...a lot...and the constant summarizing was a little annoying to me, but the book in general was most educational and intriguing. If you want something different I whole-heartedly recommend this book.
I was definitely impressed. A little exhausting to read because it makes you think...a lot...and the constant summarizing was a little annoying to me, but the book in general was most educational and intriguing. If you want something different I whole-heartedly recommend this book.
January 15, 2013
This book felt a little bit like two books smashed together - the personal and the analytical. While Thorn's perspective made me a bit more sympathetic to many of the individuals who are attracted to and involved in the "seduction game" culture, I found myself feeling much more hostile to the culture as a whole. I did not always find Thorn to be a sympathetic narrator, so it's possible I felt more open to the perspectives of the PUAs in contrast, though I think she brought a fairly good critical eye to her subject.
October 21, 2016
This was a really nice explanation of Pick Up Artistry that allowed me to understand it without having the navigate the horrendous forums where people actually talk about this stuff. It's one of those things where I kind of needed the information that it provided (because some guys I knew were reading those forums), but I needed a cleaned-up version of it so that I would not have to subject myself to the mind-fuck that is the worst corners of the internet.
April 7, 2012
It's scary to watch the author lose herself "down the rabbit hole" of her research into the seduction community - using words like 'target' to express her own ideas on emotional escalation, being unable to turn off noticing certain patterns of social interaction.
I probably shouldn't have read that; I over-analyze way too much as is.
I probably shouldn't have read that; I over-analyze way too much as is.
December 20, 2012
It's fascinating to have a basically misogynist dating system critiqued by someone who comes from radical and feminist influenced dating systems like polyamory and the more progressive parts of the S+M community.
September 3, 2012
Not exactly a pleasant read... PUA land is just too creepy for that. But it's well written and relatively insightful, and worth a read if you are interested in PUA land as seen from a feminist perspective. Just be prepared to feel like taking a shower afterwards.
April 5, 2013
It's framed as an book about how the culture of pickup artists work, however it also talks about ways relationships or sexual interactions work, discusses a lot about consent and the polyamory and S&M communities.
September 1, 2012
Would have been even better if someone had weeded out all instances of the word "incredibly", but still.
December 22, 2016
Sometimes I find the PUAs a little terrifying. It was good to deconstruct that scene with deliberation. Thorn does a great job of explaining what it is and how it works (or doesn't).
March 11, 2018
I love reading about weird subcultures and trying to understand the internal viewpoint instead of the outside one. I would have loved to study anthropology if it meant I could skip the jungle and immerse myself in a western subculture instead.
Pick up artists are a wonderful example of these kind of communities, and I'm almost jealous of Clarisse's chance to dive so deeply into it. I briefly dated guy in London who I (much later) discovered to be a pick up artist. It was fascinating to look back on every detail of our interactions and find them written down in a book somewhere.
Clarisse's book is a nice mix of personal story and narratively wrapped information about the pick up community. It reads like a blog, but I don't say that with a negative connotation like I've seen other reviewers do. I quite liked the casual style. About halfway through I was thoroughly fascinated by the topic and lost interest in the finer details of Clarisse's love life. I expect I will pick up The Game sooner or later, though with coming books I will miss Clarisse's feminist critiques.
Pick up artists are a wonderful example of these kind of communities, and I'm almost jealous of Clarisse's chance to dive so deeply into it. I briefly dated guy in London who I (much later) discovered to be a pick up artist. It was fascinating to look back on every detail of our interactions and find them written down in a book somewhere.
Clarisse's book is a nice mix of personal story and narratively wrapped information about the pick up community. It reads like a blog, but I don't say that with a negative connotation like I've seen other reviewers do. I quite liked the casual style. About halfway through I was thoroughly fascinated by the topic and lost interest in the finer details of Clarisse's love life. I expect I will pick up The Game sooner or later, though with coming books I will miss Clarisse's feminist critiques.
January 20, 2018
I expected bashing PUAs, for deserved and undeserved aspects. However, I got something different - a dissection of PUA community, activities and practices (good and bad), with a lot of insight. There is a lot of emphasis how do things work, what do people do, and which aspects of the dating culture are broken. While the narration revolves around her life story (a bit like in "The Game"), she quotes a lot, both from sources she loves and hates.
It's written by a sex-positive feminist nerd, with a lot compassion and understanding for everyone, men included. She is well beyond a typical tribal "we vs them", and isn't afraid to call out bad parts of mainstream feminism.
It's written by a sex-positive feminist nerd, with a lot compassion and understanding for everyone, men included. She is well beyond a typical tribal "we vs them", and isn't afraid to call out bad parts of mainstream feminism.
September 12, 2016
A great mash-up of pick-up artistry, feminism, and ethical behavior. Thorn does a solid critique on pick-up artist culture and methods, looking at them from a feminist, sex-positive, and ethical standpoint. It's more-or-less her story about her experiences with PUA culture (much like the Game) and it comes across as a very positive perspective on how to meet potential partners and what tools to use (and what tools to avoid.)
August 13, 2012
Not as good as I hoped.
April 19, 2017
Class Textbook
I read this for a class but if you want to know more about pickup artistry this is an account from a women who personally involved. It was a good book.
I read this for a class but if you want to know more about pickup artistry this is an account from a women who personally involved. It was a good book.
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