Dating Advice - Spotlight

The seduction community, or pick up artist community, also known as 'The Community' by its members, is the originating place of modern dating advice and knowledge for men.

Before the seduction community, dating advice was not based on proven science or real experiences. It was largely ineffective and misleading. Most of it was just plainly 'fraudulent marketers' taking advantage of men who were not happy about their success with women.

'The Community' emphasized real life results, it was and is a meritocracy of sorts, that has little time for men trying to teach or pass on advice unless they have a proven track record of a very successful dating life.

Secret Underground Community Formed in the Early 90s

The Community was a long time secret society of men that studied and tested approaches and techniques for dating and attracting women. Access to the best knowledge was hidden away in private forums that you could only access after having proven your pick up artist abilities to the elders of the community.

It sounds kind of cult like. And, in a way, it was. The members found they created much stronger bonds with their fellow community members and many found that over time their social activities became increasinly intertwined with 'the Community'.

The select members of the society did not speak about it with their friends or anyone else. It wasn't prohibited on any level, but it was commonly acknowledged that it mostly never worked out. A guy had to be mentally read for it. And that just seemed to happen naturally. You had to find the Community yourself. That's how it worked.

Pick Up Artist Thought Leaders Begin Selling their Knowledge

Around 2003 some of the members who had become the most successful, and had brought many of the additional knowledge to the community, began commercialising that knowledge. They offered one on one and group coaching (known as bootcamps) to members who had yet to achieve their own success. It promised to accelerate their learning, and for many to teach them social and attraction skills that they had not been able to master through their participation in the online forums.

As it became clear that other members were very willing to spend money on gaining this knowledge, many members of the community began selling their own coaching services and products. Soon there was a growing plethora of hundreds of products and coaching options. The knowledge had now become a product servicing a need, just like any other market.

Because of the sheer effectiveness of the content of many of these products and coaching services, word of mouth began to spread out of the community. Members began telling their friends or others about the bootcamp in particular - which literally always resulted in the students walking out at the end having completely changed their ideas of the world - through an intensive two day field and seminar experience. They were life changing experiences, and the men who went on bootcamps couldn't help talking about them afterwards.

It wasn't all good though. In any market that grows, there are good products and bad products. There will always be companies that see a good marketing opportunity and jump on it - even when they don't have the product or knowledge themselves. This is what happened here. Many products and services surfaced, and it became more difficult to know what was in fact the good knowledge and what was the bad knowledge (unless you had been in the community a long time).

For new comers (labelled newbies), it became very confusing. Especially as the knowledge and advice offered by different instructors and companies was in some cases directly opposing or conflicting. So some students were also walking away with bad experiences, if they having chosen to sign up for a service from an instructor with good marketing but not the successful results and real knowledge and experience to back it up.

The Seduction Community Explodes into the Mass Media

The Community and its knowledge remained a secret until 2005. In 2005 two of its most prominent thought leaders teachers: Mystery (Eric von Markovich) and Style (Neil Strauss) brought the seduction community into the limelight, revealing many of its secrets in the process. This upset many of its members, who saw this as revealing knowledge that shouldn't be available to just anyone. And most certainly not taken to the 'public eye' and presented on television shows and in bestselling books.

The seduction community was first revealed to the public in 2004 with an article in the New York Times by Neil Strauss. Neil had been put in a position where his involvement in the community was going to be revealed by a writer in a journal who had seen him teaching on one of the bootcamps. Feeling that it was better that he reveal the community himself, in its true light and nature rather than having someone possibly slander or present a biased view on a touchy subject - he wrote the New York Times article.

But it was his book 'The Game - Penetrating the Secret Society of Pick Up Artists', published in 2005, that really brought the seduction community into the limelight. Straight after its publication there was an explosion of media attention. An article from the BBC describes the rise in popularity thanks to this publication and another in the UK.

This popularisation was magnified considerably by the launch of The Pick Up Artist reality TV series on VH-1 with Mystery (Eric von Markovic) in 2007, and the second season of the series at the end of 2008.

The massive rise in the number of google searches on related terms track this growth in popularity of the seduction / pick up artist community.

The History of the Seduction Community

Since the early days of the seduction community, there have been many people besides those we've mentioned involved in its development. Today it has spread literally across the globe educating thousands and thousands of men, and improving their success with women (and their quality of life as a result).

It is impossible to estimate its influence on men today and indeed the world. We've captured the most important events over the last 15 years in a timeline of events.

We have constructed a full visual timeline of the history of the seduction community and its events, you can see the full timeline here: History of Seduction Timeline.

The timeline tracks the contributions of key persona to the development of the seduction community's knowledge and its dispersion throughout the community and to the wider world audience. These persona notably include:

• - Ross Jeffries: Founder and CEO of one of the earliest successful seduction advice businesses "Speed Seduction".
• - David DeAngelo (Eban Pagan): Founder and CEO of Double Your Dating, potentially the largest and most profitable dating advice business in the world today. The business has been estimated at $20 million in annual revenues.
• - Mystery (Eric von Markovik): Originator of the majority of pick up artist knowledge. Mystery has been and remains perhaps the most influential thinkers of the community. Today he provides services through Venusian Artsand continues to nurture his media image through The Pick Up Artist Reality TV show.
• - Style (Neil Strauss): Mystery's greatest and closest student (and wing). Today Neil has distanced himself from the community on some levels, moving on to other challenges. However he has a pick up coaching company,Stylelife, via which he continues to make guest appearances and offer his accumulated knowledge.
• - TD (Owen Cook): Co-founder and thought leader of Real Social Dynamics, one of the world's largest pick-up coaching companies. Today it is the most global, giving workshops in virtually every significant developed city around the world.
• - Nick Savoy: CEO of Mystery Method, later to become Love Systems, one of the world's largest pick-up coaching companies.
• - Gambler (Richard La Ruina): Founder and CEO of PUA Training, the most successful UK originated Pick-Up Coaching business.

Advice that Thousands of Men Report to have Transformed their Lives

The best advice from the community has proven to transform lives. Literally. Read through the reviews of users of the Top Knowledge and Advice from the Seduction Community below by clicking on the individual products. You will most undoubtedly be astounded by the pure enthusiasm and surprise captured within them.

A typical comment is that use of the knowlege is 'life changing'.

The way they talk about it, it sounds like they are having their eyes opened to the matrix, and its possibilities, for the very first time. This is possibly the biggest achievement of the community - bringing the world closer to the reality of men-women relations.

Note: If you explore this site further, be aware that not all of the products within its database originate from the community. It is a comprehensive database of all dating advice for men. Nonetheless, many products have come from some of its original 'thought leaders' like the persona in the timeline. Others are from people who learned from some of these thought leaders via mentorship, or from their products. Those students later went on to develop new knowledge based on additional research and field testing. This process continued for many years, so leading in part to the drastic increase in dating advice for men products, to reach a plethora of nearly 1000 products and services.

For more information on 'The Community' this Wikipedia entry is a relatively reliable source of information: Seduction Community Wikipedia Entry.