The journalist Neil Strauss hit the New York Times bestseller list with The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, which detailed his “penetrating” investigation of PUA “secrets.” I recently found myself revisiting Strauss’s book and there I read about how Frogs into Princes was inspirational to Ross Jeffries, the so-called “ godfather” of pickup, and how Strauss himself read the book as a foundational text in his PUA journey. Mystery, a “seduction” guru with a signature fluffy top hat and a method for subtly insulting (or “negging”) women into bed, had a VH1 reality-TV show. They charged exorbitant amounts for “seduction” workshops, rated women on a one-to-10 scale, and talked about blasting through their partners’ “last minute resistance” to sex. The pickup artist, or PUA, scene exploded in the mid-2000s with a pack of flashily dressed men with nicknames like J-Dog and Matador. “It will get you almost everything,” Bandler and Grinder write, presenting themselves as spell-casters, magicians of humanity. They reject science and statistics, put “truth” in scare-quotes, and, above all, emphasize the ability to get your way using their tools. They write about hypnosis, the secret codes of human eye movements, and curing phobias and physical ailment in just minutes. The book, written by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in 1979, details their fringe, pseudoscientific theory of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a framework for purportedly influencing behavior using everything from touch to tone to hand movements. The psychedelic cover of Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming isn’t exactly typical of my bookshelf: It features an oversize frog, a potion bottle, a gilded torch, and an enchantress wearing flowing, celestial fabrics.
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