It's a sad, lonely world. So sad, so lonely, that the insipid, broadly-smiling face-lifted mug of John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, is all over magazines, talk shows, and infomercials, informing everybody "how to get what you want from relationships."
Fifty percent of all paperbacks sold are romance novels, turning the eternal boredom of married lives into forbidden fantasies of rape and romance. Porn movies, the male version of romance novels, flush men with the make-believe of big-dick power fucks.
Sadder still is the pathos of individuals who can't even find a way to get themselves involved in a relationship needful of John Gray and his repellent books. This loser contingent buy How To Pick Up Girls or other self-help tomes in the dating category. Others flock to Web sites promoting the idea of hypnotizing women to do their bidding.
One such site holds hundreds of porn stories of the mind-control genre, featuring titles like "Ass-Fucker Hypnotist" and "My Brother, My Master." A certain "Dr. Deeper" sells tapes for buyers to gain "Penile Enlargement Through Hypnosis!" Another site sells manuals that "instantly turn you into a ladies' man." An email spammer sends people 900 numbers that tell "HOW TO MEET PROFESSIONAL DANCERS AND MAKE A DATE ALMOST IMMEDIATELY!"
Many of these seduction teachers compete and bust each other's nuts on newsgroups like alt.seduction.fast, calling each other names like "worthless fuckwad" and "manipulative phony." The question remains: Who is the most masterful seducer of them all?
Ross Jeffries is certainly the most financially successful guru for the woman-starved. His come-on: "How To Totally Mind-Fuck Almost ANY Woman Into Screwing Your Brains Out... And Make It Seem Like You're Just Having A Normal, Innocent, Conversation!" was picked up and slobbered over by Rolling Stone and Playboy. Jeffries' painfully ordinary looks are used as a marketing device: "If someone like me can seduce hot women, so can anybody."
Jeffries' techniques, which he claims will induce "gorgeous" women to give unattractive losers memorable blowjobs, differ from competitors in that they employ neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP. NLP, the "art and science" of programming oneself and others, was developed in the '70s by UC Santa Cruz instructors John Grinder and Richard Bandler. Promoted through books like Grinder's Trance-Formations, which has a new-age cover featuring witches, dragons, and rainbows, NLP borrows from renowned 1950s experimental psychologist Milton Erickson. According to NLP experts Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour, Erickson "taught how to induce and maintain trance in order to contact the hidden resources of our personality."
Jeffries' Speed SeductionTM Web site promises to teach these trance techniques to give his customers access to such tricks as: "Getting Her Fast Despite A Boyfriend Or Husband!," "Eradicating Last Minute Objections To Sex!," and "Playing With Her Mental Pictures Using Language To Engage Her Sexual Fantasy Mechanisms." These promises attract customers galore, who pay a pretty price. This fall they will pay $2,500 each for an entire week of Speed SeductionTM lessons in the Bahamas.
I met with Ross Jeffries for an interview at a restaurant of his choice -- Santa Monica's Broadway Deli. Skinny, six feet tall, and sporting a face he describes as being Harold Ramis-like, Jeffries reveals himself in interview as one hard worker, fast in speech, vague and suggestive in terminology. He started right in.
ROSS JEFFRIES: There are a lot of people out there who fancy themselves as my competitors. The difference is that everything the competitors do is in the dating box, the dating frame. They may give you a different set of plays, but you're still on the same field, playing the same game. I think dating is a stylized form of humiliation for men, in which men play the supplicant, the beggar. So I encourage my men … uh, my students, to step outside of that framework and to build a better one that works. Dating for most men is a form of gambling, of supplication. You know what I mean by "supplicant"?
GETTINGIT: Yes...
RJ: I teach men a different framework that has nothing to do with dating. I teach them that dating is for women they're already sleeping with. Dating as a vehicle to give men a choice, a selectivity and power, just doesn't work unless they are part of the elite that society says is attractive to women. Good looks, fame, power, money.
GI: Then it's easy?
RJ: It's still not easy. Women still have the power. They're still controlling access to the sex. You're still playing the role of the supplicant. You just have a lot more tools. Regardless of what a man looks like, and how much money he has, for most men dating is still a form of gambling. They don't know what's going to happen... That's where they get the term, "I got lucky." Think about the implications of that term. Think what it means to get lucky. I think what it means is that you don't have control. You don't have the means. Do you fly?
GI: No.
RJ: Do you have a flying phobia?
GI: I don't have a flying phobia. I thought you meant, do I pilot an airplane?
RJ: Well, you've flown before on airplanes?
GI: Of course.
RJ: What if you get on an airplane and you ask the pilot, "How can we make sure we get to our destination?" And he honestly says, "I don't know. Maybe we'll get lucky." You'd get off the plane. So, for most guys, dating is a form of rolling the dice. I want to give them a much deeper measure of control, and a much greater measure of choice.
GI: There are specific words, phrases that you recommend and you have written down on cards. It's like you're writing a script.
RJ: [Ignores question] Let me back up. It's about understanding the entire concept of dealing with women on a completely different level. I'd really like to talk about that first. See this girl. She's got a lot of choice, a lot of power. You think, "Wow, I want to be with that." Okay. I can teach guys to so captivate her mind, touch her mind on deep levels.
Suddenly they have all the power. I have students that can astonish you with what they can do. They're not in the traditional mode. In my seminars, I'll get students up there who are fat, bald, old, broke. They go up there and tell their stories and people think, this is impossible. It can't possibly be true. And from the traditional framework, it can't be true. It's like a magic trick. It appears to be magic, but if you know the principals, the way the illusion is designed, you can probably ferret out how it was done.
Consider a woman's mind like this. There are different places, different structures, in a woman's mind. There's the typical everyday … what I call "culturally programmed woman." Consider a ship. A cargo ship. When it comes to sex, a man's mind is one cargo ship with one big container... [Jeffries yells at some unknown woman] CARLITA! CARLA! What's up, baby?
[An average-looking waitress comes to the table.]
CARLA: How are you? What have you been up to?
RJ: Just doing another interview.
CARLA: Yeah? Good for you. I've been meaning to call, but I've been so busy.
RJ: Ooooohhhh. Well, do you still have my number?
CARLA: I do.
RJ: Call me.
CARLA: Are you around?
RJ: I'm around. If I hear from you, I'll be wonderfully, pleasantly surprised. All right? So... [Carla leaves, leaving Jeffries to turn his attention from his seemingly unsuccessful pickup scheme to the interview.] Consider a man's mind when it comes to sex to be like a ship. One big hole in it. A woman's mind is like this ship with all these segmented, watertight compartments. One can be completely shut off from the other. There's the culturally programmed woman -- that's woman with all the rules, all the roles, all the measurements like "I'll only date guys who look like this." This kind of look, this kind of job, I don't do anything until the fourth date. All those kinds of things.
But on much deeper levels there's the natural woman, that's the one with all the indulgences, with the wild sexual fantasy. She keeps her daydreams, her secret hidden fetishes. Those things don't reach to dating. Dating just triggers the culturally programmed woman. The thing is, every woman longs to meet someone so fascinating, so compelling that those normal measurements -- like he has to look like this -- get set aside. She feels herself drawn in and she surrenders to this experience.
So the question is: What is the process that a woman can undergo that allows her to realize that she wants to be with a guy, not because he's her type, not because he fits all those pre-programmed stereotypes that she's used to, but because he touches her in a way that she experiences true passion, okay? And that's a function of how you use your language to capture and lead her imagination, and activate [snaps his fingers] those deeper structures. Those deeper structures are either out of her conscious awareness or they're slumbering. All right?
Now my claim is this. If you can learn to awaken those structures, link them to you, anchor them to some of those things you learn in NLP, and then accelerate them, you can have her doing things with you, for you, to you, that have nothing to do with all the normal measurements that have to do with dating. And you can do it predictably.
[Jeffries barely pauses, looks me straight in the eyes and points to his palm.]
RJ: Here's the thing. Think about this. If this is real, if this is not a scam, if I'm not exaggerating, think about the implications. Cuz I'm taking the normal power balance in society and screwing it, and giving men, who normally wouldn't have it, power. To me, that is one of the most subversive, revolutionary things you can do, take the normal power balance and fuck it up. It's like giving weapons to the settlers so they can fight the Indians.
[Another pause, another direct look into the eyes.]
RJ: Most men get into relationships by default, not by choice. They accidentally meet someone who ends their sexual starvation. You're more likely to be dishonest and cheat with something that's scarce. But when you have abundance and opportunity and choice, then you don't need to do those things. You don't need to cheat. Here's the greatest compliment anyone ever gave me. Two compliments. One person told me I was the Tesla of getting laid. Which was great. Edison, no… Tesla, yes. Someone else said I was Thorpe. Do you know who Thorpe was?
GI: No.
RJ: Thorpe was a British mathematician who so figured out the rules of blackjack that the casinos had to change the rules. I was like… wow, Thorpe!!?
GI: Do you believe you're good at hypnosis?
RJ: [Long pause.] Yeah, I think so. I think any communication that captures the imagination and forces the person to go inside and search for the meaning of words, is hypnotic. All communication has hypnotic elements. When a perfectly intelligent man looks at a gorgeous woman and goes into a state of sputtering lust and can't even think of his own name, that's a form of trance. Make sense?
GI: Do you have a long-term plan?
RJ: Eventually I want to get into psychic influence. I've got breakthroughs in psychic influence, too.
GI: Psychic influence?
RJ: Yeah. Remote influence.
GI: Remote viewing?
RJ: Remote viewing is passive. I take someone who's a thousand miles away, sort of merge with them and put thoughts into their head. Sounds wacky. I made some major breakthroughs in that, too. I'm as far from New Age, tofu eating as...
GI: But it pays well.
RJ: I don't care if it pays well or not. I'm as far from that as you can get. I also think that there are ways of going through psychic influence that can be precise.
GI: How can you measure it?
RJ: You measure it ... uh, hypothetically. Let's say there's a woman you know. You haven't talked to her in six weeks. I teach you something that sends her into a dream, that you're having wild sex together, and you'll talk to her. And then next morning she calls you and describes the dream in great detail and it matches, one on one, perfectly. You'd have to say there's something odd going on there.
See also: You Can Be a 'Speed Seducer'
Adam Parfrey denies being the puppet master behind "alternative culture," though he has put together Apocalypse Culture, Cult Rapture, the forthcoming Apocalypse Culture II, and Feral House.