Blog of the Week — 07/20/09: Elysium Revisited

Sebastian Flyte is a 23-year-old Libra who writes Elysium Revisted, an obscure blog about a beta male picking up women. It is weirdly fascinating and sporadically updated — most recently on February 7, 2009. Its author was inspired to begin the site after reading Neil Strauss’ bestseller The Game, an investigation of “the secret world of pick-up artists–men who have created a science out of the art of seduction.”A serviceable review describes it as follows:

The Game is at heart a cautionary tale, the sort told by rock stars. Strauss, a writer for Rolling Stone and other publications, has co-written books by porn star Jenna Jameson, rocker Marilyn Manson, Motley Crue, and Jane’s Addiction bandmember Dave Navarro. Strauss’ PUAs appear as implausible and out of control as any rock star, including a pre-rehab Courtney Love, who visits Project Hollywood, a house near the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles that Strauss moves into with several other PUAs.

The pick-up artists come across as nerdy, emotionally underdeveloped men, usually young, who have chosen to reinvent themselves as sexually irresistible predators by analyzing the nuances of social behavior and “running programs” that hijack these social structures. If this sounds like computer hacking, that’s not too far off: Ross Jeffries, one of the first people to run lectures on PUA techniques (and supposedly the model for Tom Cruise’s character in the film Magnolia), promotes a technique called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that combines hypnosis with a language of gestures and verbal cues to entice women to have sex.

Other PUAs employ other techniques, including the “Mystery Method,” a technique based on the concept of an “indirect approach,” befriending the companions of a target while ignoring her in order to make the PUA more attractive. Strauss befriends Mystery, a profoundly damaged professional magician, who developed this technique, and learns his secrets. After learning and some practice, Strauss shaves his head, trades in his clothing, and becomes “Style.” Style successfully hits on dozens of women, possibly hundreds-if this story is to be believed.

We’re now ready to view Mr. Flyte’s inaugural post, dated May 31, 2008:

I have started this blog for thereaputic reasons. What she said. I am a soft and tired creature, prone to occasional bouts of depression and exuberance. This blog will catalogue the application of The Rules of The Game to my life (and a discussion thereof), my growing culinary experience, and maybe some flights into politics, genetics, music and religion. We’ll see how it goes.

Though it’s early yet, I’m guessing that it’s going to be a post from November 28, 2008 that affords the best insight into the author:

An ex-girlfriend wasn’t responding to my emails.

An American, about a 7.5, we dated for 6 months four years ago. I even trekked to the US to spend a summer with her. She was 17, I was 19. We ended OK. Why wasn’t she responding? Confused, I checked her out on facebook. And there it was – 520 friends! A large proportion male. She was always social and flirty, but jesus.

I got her at the right time, like Agnostic says, she valued the attention more when her horizon was smaller.

Facebook has let her become a kind of queen bee – a pile of worker drones collect all the honey for her. Ridiculous.

Update – She responded. Oh well.

Obviously the update is what makes this blog post special, but I’m also struck by the fact that in describing his ex-girlfriend the author rates her on a 10 point scale, seemingly because that’s just what strikes him as the natural thing to do. I can’t help but imagine an alternative universe wherein a journalistic convention is to introduce all characters that way. “President Obama, an 8.5 who jumps to a 9 without his shirt on, made another push for a health care reform bill Monday…”

Anyhow, stay tuned for more on Elysium Revisited tomorrow…