The way I remember things, I bought my copy of The Game in a Waterstones bookstore on Oxford Street, sometime in 2008—the same year Yang wrote his essay—and I didn’t feel wonderful doing it. I was embarrassed, for a start. Buying the book seemed like solid evidence of inadequacy as well as being faintly seedy. But I went ahead anyway, motivated in large part by the fact that a friend of mine’s older sister (I was twenty, she would have been 22 or 23) had slept with me twice earlier in the year and then lost interest, although not before I’d managed to massively overinvest. It stuns me a little to think about it now, but the disappointment was so fierce it lasted for months afterwards, maybe even the guts of a year. In hindsight, the emotional shock seems both far less important—I mean, thank god—and still real enough to be disconcerting when I consider it. You grow up and get at least a little tougher, sure. But if you’ve ever had a lesson in how completely you can be wiped out by the vagaries of somebody else’s attention, it stays with you.

I bring up this old piece of personal debris because it seems to me now that what Strauss and his kin were advertising was something like a vaccine for that feeling of nullity. Getting women into bed is the overt goal. But (if I can hazard a generalization) what eats at the loser male most desperately isn’t the lack of sex exactly, it’s the sense of being powerless to make yourself matter—the lamest of all invisibility cloaks. Horny and sad as I was as a twenty-year-old, I don’t think it would’ve occurred to me to put it that way, and perhaps it doesn’t occur to most of the people who buy these books. Still, something like that is the trap you’re trying to escape. Like a lot of our culture, The Game feeds off the idea that sex and romance are the central—if not the only—sources of adventure open to most people, and from there it preys on the anxiety of what it would mean to be cut off from those possibilities. And at the bottom of that pit are the terrors of being someone to whom nothing ever happens; a nonperson, somehow excluded from living because you can’t persuade the world to look at you. In his essay, Yang zeroes in on the instinct for revenge flickering inside the pickup artist’s system (“the wicked gleam in the eye of a man putting one over on the world”). It’s the bitterness of people who know what it’s like to be ignored.