It's happened exactly once that I walked into a bar and picked up a total stranger. It was an entirely conscious move. Prior to leaving home, I said to myself, "I am going to bring someone home and fuck them." And then I did.

Other than that, I can't recall any other successful "pick ups." As a shy little undergrad, I wrote a few notes that began: "Hey, you don't know me, but" — none of which led anywhere beyond acute embarrassment. When I have, in fact, gone home with someone, it's been more of an accident than a plan. Or rather, it's a matter of two people acting upon a mutual charge, rather than me, sitting back, scoping out a soon-to-be victim, and bagging them unaware.

    
So when Nerve proposed that I shell out $350 of their money and order the Delux Speed Seduction Home Study Course, "Speed Seduction 2000: How to Create an Instantaneous Sexual Attraction in Any Woman You Meet," the idea appealed to my funnybone more than my boner. I found the idea curious, but also kind of appalling. After all, some people are obviously better than others at picking people up. But is there a quantifiable formula for creating human attraction?

    
The kit arrived, containing a video, ten cassettes, two books and a score of flashcards — everything one needs to discover the newest "technologies" for "How to Fake Like You Are Warm and Friendly"; and "How to Take That Bitch Who 'Just Wants to Be Friends' and Have Her Begging You to Bone Her ONE MORE TIME."

    
Ross Jeffries, a self-described "Skinny, Ugly, Six-Foot Geek from Culver City," is the man behind the Speed Seduction plan. (Tom Cruise's "respect the cock" character in Magnolia was loosely based upon Jeffries.) Jeffries' curriculum is complicated — partly because it's full of pseudo-scientific jargon, and partly because it's quite sophisticated, in its own way. Based on something called neuro-linguistic programming (i.e. hypnosis and mind-control, which is also the basis for Anthony Robbins' shtick), it goes more or less as follows:

1) Tell yourself that you're cool. Look in the mirror. Remember specific times in your life when you felt cool. Take a deep breath and hold that thought. Tell yourself the following: I make no excuses for my desires as a man. I move through the world without apology.



2) Go out and find someone you'd like to seduce. Tell her a joke. Break the ice.



3) Pose questions that generally begin with the phrase, "Have you ever," and get her to remember and describe to you experiences in which she's felt pleasure, or times she's been really turned on.



4) When she hits a high point in her description, touch her on the wrist. This will develop an automatic, Pavlovian response between your simple touch and her innermost self.



5) Keep repeating steps three and four, while telling stories of "friends" and "things you heard" about people who have had "unexpectedly intense feelings" and "close connections" to [repeat touch on the wrist] people they've just met.

The primary NLP aspect of all this is that, as you tell your stories, you're embedding commands. For example, you might say, "You know, some people find as they listen to someone who's very fascinating that they can feel very attracted to them." According to Jeffries, your subliminal prodding is inducing "trance levels" of awareness and suggestibility in her mind, until she's beyond the grip of morals, fears, worries about what her friends might think, everything that might distract her from having sex with a complete stranger.

The video included footage of one of Ross Jeffries' group seminars. The participants seemed to consist exclusively of members of a bio-engineered species of People Who Should Never Have Sex: chunky, Adams apple-y guys in shorts and dark socks, nodding dreamily as Jeffries blabs on about "patterns," "frames" and "submodality locations," all the while referring to women as "chicks," "snatch" and "bitches," alongside testimonials from men who've been transformed from virgin dweebs to dudes.