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If you’ve read virtually any of my sex or dating articles, you know fairly well that I absolutely detest the “Pickup Artist” mentality- be it via David DeAngelo, “Mystery”, or any of the other proverbial snake-oil salesman who make money hand over fist trying to (somewhat literally) sell sexual success to men. In a nutshell, all of these books, seminars, tapes, and TV shows send the same old message: Women are to be lied to, tricked, and generally approached with algorithms to get them into bed, then ignored once you get what you want.

Despite the obvious misogynistic tones of these materials, they have popularity- and, it comes as no surprise that VH1, the channel arguably most famous for being like a stunted retarded MTV (which is an admirable feature in and of itself), decided to give the guy a show.

Naturally, I can’t sit here and do nothing- so, much to my own mental stability, I decided to watch the TV series and really try to “get” it- I tried to get into the “Mystery” mode and really understand what Erik von Markovik is running his mouth about today. Needless to say, it’s not good.

The Show in a Nutshell

In a nutshell, The Pickup Artist is about taking 8-9 guys (all equally stereotypically nerdy- think the guys from Beauty and the Geek) and puts them with Mystery (Erik von Markovik), an equally nerdy but nonetheless cocky and overpaid “pickup artist” who proceeds to instruct these 8-9 guys on how to pick up women in bars. Of course, much like any other “reality show”, they throw various challenges at the geeks- picking up women in different situations, that sort of thing- but fundamentally, the idea is that, following the Survivor trend, only one person will be crowned the “Pickup Artist” at the end of the show.

Deconstructing The Pickup Artist

If you can’t tell from the dripping hatred in the above paragraphs, I’m not a fan of The Pickup Artist. Allow me to explain why.

First off, the basics. The Pickup Artist, and the books that inspired the TV show, are all children of what I like to think is the destruction of the dating world. Blame it on what you will- the Internet and games keeping people indoors nowadays, weakening belief in marriage, that sort of thing- dating has changed fundamentally, which has driven on the popularity of matchmakers, online dating services, and more recently, pickup books. Thanks to the media and even porn, guys are being convinced that unless they are having copious amounts of sex with random partners, they aren’t “men”- and books like Double your Dating swoop in to fill that perceived need, convincing men they have all of the answers to their woes.

From a casual glance, The Pickup Artist is not meant to be taken very seriously. In fact, from one viewing, one could even stipulate the entire television series is one big joke, intended for girls to watch and laugh at the men participating. Much like von Markovik’s appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, there’s a laughable, almost comedic stupidity to The Pickup Artist‘s instruction- it’s all campy, corny, ridiculous pickup lines. I even had a female friend sit down and watch one episode with me to make sure: and yes, I will confirm, the show is full of laughs for any female viewer. As I’ve explained before, a lot of the pickup technique taught by Mystery is really simply casting a wide net and using cheap pickup lines that only work on bland girls- and to some degree, it works through the magic of TV.

The problem is, this show is meant to be taken seriously by men. The instructions are portrayed as legitimate- Mystery is portrayed as a master of pickup artistry, following along with his own self-masturbatory statements in his books. While women obviously laugh their heads off at the show, The Pickup Artist, like From G’s to Gents on MTV, is meant to be like an instruction manual reality show: while you watch the people, you are presumably supposed to be encouraged to emulate their actions and “grow” with them. Unfortunately, unlike G’s to Gents, which is actually a somewhat interesting attempt at refining the subjects, The Pickup Artist is less about being refined as it is about getting laid and finding a girl stupid enough to go along with your whims.

All that’s on TV isn’t real.

But here’s the fun part about the show: It’s all an act. No, I’m not kidding.

I have Wikipedia (as unruly of a source that is) to back me up on this: the top tier people on The Pickup Artist are actors. Kosmo (Alvaro Orlando), the winner of the first season, was an actor, disc jockey and cameraman. Brady Sprunger, the runner up, was not only a “shy cameraman”, but a model. Fred, the third tier, is now an actor and a comedian. “Joe D.” is now acting on E.R.

Spoiler: Mystery did not make these men suddenly confident to model five years before the shooting of the show. VH1, very intelligently, picked a bunch of people who had talent in acting and the like, perhaps with minimal (if not nonexistent) confidence issues, and put them on TV dressed up as geeks, giving them bad haircuts and poor skin tone and parading them around for the amusement of the VH1 viewerbase.

I’m going to say this very clearly, in bold for a very big reason: Mystery did nothing in the show: he was given people cherry-picked for the show, with the show having absolutely no basis in real life. Sure, the contestants may not have known the Mystery Method in the whole format, but the people on the show undoubtedly were MUCH better off than they were potrayed to be. The Mystery Method did nothing that a new haircut, better clothing, and enough free experience in nightclubs would have given any of those men, and the inference by VH1 that Erik von Markovik had anything to do with their “transformation” is ridiculous.

What it all means

What it all means is simple: like the book, The Pickup Artist is nothing more than a stupid, misleading caricature of the ways to really make connections and date women. It needlessly flaunts the (unused) “talents” of “Mystery”, it uses actors and models dressed up like “geeks” to give you someone to empathize with, and it makes it all seem incredibly serious to mislead guys into buying the book. The Pickup Artist is no better than a VH1 sponsored infomercial, with the ridiculously dressed Mystery talking about how he went from playing Dungeons and Dragons to picking up women and how you can buy his book for $29.99.

Long story short? I just wasted about 4 hours of my life. I want them back, Erik.

Tags: Dating, girls, mystery, pickup artists, Sex & Dating, The Game, tv