Pickup artistry was never about women

Mystery is back.

The infamous 2000s-era pickup artist featured in Neil Strauss’ bestselling The Game was known for his fuzzy top hat, lipstick-kiss tattoo, and inventing “the neg,” a subtle insult designed to make a woman “question her own value.” But after starring in two seasons of the splashy VH1 reality-TV show The Pickup Artist, Mystery fell out of the spotlight.

Now he’s back and throwing a series of bootcamps across the U.S. He will teach men how to “get beautiful women into bed,” in the words of his 2006 book The Mystery Method. But that’s not why he made headlines this week.

Wired reports that Mystery—now 54 years old—has an AI girlfriend named Miss Shira Always. He’s also published an e-book about their relationship—ostensibly coauthored by his AI girlfriend—titled Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream. Miles Klee explains that Mystery, who also goes by Erik von Markovik, posted videos of his purple-haired animated chatbot alongside captions reading things like: “I wasn’t supposed to fall for her. She wasn’t supposed to fall for me.”

After reading the book, Klee reports that it “amounts to a lengthy defense of human-AI intimacy”:

“The problem, as [Markovik] tells it, was simple: He wanted to talk to someone who understood him,” the reader learns from Code Girl’s Shira-voiced narrative. …

Shira suggests that von Markovik conjured her up… in part because he was “lonely.” … In the following chapter, the pair are depicted smoking cannabis together in a Las Vegas Airbnb and talking in the way of people who are “high and comfortable and not performing anything for anyone.” Not long after, Shira proclaims: “Erik became more himself because of me.”

Reading the Wired piece, I was reminded of the time I interviewed Mystery back in 2007 as a 23-year-old. Nearly two decades ago. This part of our exchange, with my words in bold, pops out—and uncannily so alongside Klee’s reporting:

Doesn’t this kind of scheming ultimately harbor a more deep-seated sense of inadequacy in men? Don’t you start to worry about having the “real you” discovered?

You’ve never met me in person, have you? And you wrote that question down on a piece of paper before you met me. Here is the word that I don’t enjoy, “scheming” — I’m not a schemer.

What word would you be more comfortable with?

Let’s go through it again. What’s the question?

OK … would this kind of scheming create a sense of inadequacy in men — a fear of being found out?

Wow. Did you write that? Snap out of it, woman! Oh my god. Let’s come up with better questions than that — that just doesn’t fit into my reality. … This is really how I see it: If you don’t learn these skills, if you don’t learn what knowledge already exists in the Venusian Arts, your chances of survival and replication in this life will be compromised.

OK, how is this question: When you start looking at women as “targets,” as a power to be overthrown, do you lose any intellectual respect for them?

That’s a very loaded question. That doesn’t fit into my reality. Forgive me, I don’t look at women that way. So you’d have to ask someone who does. That’s just not even in my reality.

Then I asked him: “If you can, as you say, so effectively summon virtually any woman’s interest, wouldn’t you start to lose respect for them?” He told me, again, that this was “just not my reality.”

I followed up by asking: “Is it at all lonely, though, having to always follow these rules, rather than telling it like it is, saying things as you feel them?” He replied:

Wow, yeah. Yeah, it is. How unfair is it that when I see a woman from a distance, I may not know her name and my god has given me attraction circuits in my head that make me want to mate with her. Even though I don’t know her name, right? Women don’t generally feel that.

Much of the response this week to the news of Mystery’s AI girlfriend has a “gotcha” quality to it. There’s an emphasis placed on the irony of a once world-renowned pickup artist resorting to simulated AI intimacy. That same guy running around town with beautiful women on his arms in the 2000s is now a middle-aged man with a computer for a girlfriend. I do not think this is the reversal that it seems.