The artful seducer

Erik Von Markovik, aka the pickup master "Mystery," chats about the "Venusian Arts," sexual psychology and why he can help 40-year-old virgins everywhere get laid.

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Read more: Sex, Relationships, Dating, Life, Tracy Clark-Flory

Aug. 6, 2007 | When you first see the towering, 6-foot-5 man who goes by the name "Mystery," there's almost too much to take in. A floppy top hat and goggles, bright red lips tattooed on his neck, kohl-lined eyes, platform boots, black nails, binoculars slung around his neck: These are just a few of Mystery's unexplainable accouterments. But Mystery says he knows just what he's doing. He calls his look "peacocking" -- and explains that it's a way of capturing women's attention, to intrigue and, ultimately, sleep with them.

At 35, Mystery (aka Erik Von Markovik) is widely considered one of the most successful pickup artists in the world and makes his livelihood by getting other men laid. He first shot to fame in 2005, after a best-selling exposé by journalist Neil Strauss, "The Game," brought readers inside his life within the Los Angeles seduction scene. Mystery then published an instructional manual titled "How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed: The Mystery Method." Now he's starring in his very own reality-TV series, "The Pick-up Artist," premiering Aug. 6 on VH1. There, with the help of his wingmen, Matador and J Dog, Mystery plans to fix the luck of a 45-year-old virgin and seven other hapless Don Juans.

When he's not in front of the camera, Mystery pays homage to his two idols -- Tony Robbins and Casanova -- by traveling the world offering seduction workshops, some of which run nearly $5,000 a pop. During these seminars, he roams hotel conference rooms in a headset, scribbling Venn diagrams and flowcharts meant to illuminate the female mind. Later on, students accompany him to a nightclub, where like a skilled magician, Mystery produces three platinum blonds on his lap or summons a phone number from a woman standing next to her boyfriend.

As it happens, Mystery used to work as a magician. But he says that he found he could cut the magic from his interactions with people and still captivate them -- especially women. Paired with some self-taught psychology, those mind games developed into "The Mystery Method," which, he says, teaches men to rewire a woman's "attraction circuitry."

How do you "rewire" a woman? According to Mystery, it involves meeting the objectives of her phases of attraction in order to establish comfort and successfully seduce her within seven hours. It's a method that has inspired ire, to be sure -- particularly his use of the "neg," a "subtle-yet-negative statement that puts a target off-guard and makes her question her own value." Along with "peacocking" -- which, some might say, paints women as house cats easily distracted by shiny objects -- Mystery has also developed "cat theory," which he defines as "keeping 'bait' just out of a woman's reach and continually enticing her in small increments. She must be baited to chase like a cat with a string." He dubs this school of thought the "Venusian Arts" -- the end goal of which is "replication."

Salon spoke to Mystery by phone in San Diego (where he was filming an upcoming product) about sexual psychology, the "need to be hugged," and the loneliness of life as a pickup artist.

What can viewers expect from your upcoming VH1 reality-TV show?

It'll be heartwarming. Eight lovable lonelies are coming to me -- one moment. [Yelling in background: Dude, it started!] Forgive me, I'm being pulled from several sides. I have, in this show, eight students and my job is to get them up to speed in a game their dads never taught them. In order to make it challenging we added in an elimination game to it, whereby by the end, only one of them will have earned the right to hang with me, travel with me and teach others.

Were you worried that someone wasn't going to be qualified by the end of the show?

No, I wasn't, simply because I've done boot camps for quite some time and learning the elegant art of cold approach pickup is definable, it's quantifiable. You can do it. It's a lot like getting on a motorcycle. The first time you get on it you'll be afraid, just like the first time you approach a girl. The same sort of full-blown adrenaline release will take place. If you desensitize yourself to those foreign environments you'll get yourself up to speed.

You're already fairly well known, but what does this show mean for your future as a pickup artist?

[Laughs] I'm a 35-year-old man. I don't need any more friends. I have all the friends that I need in my life to share challenges with. The women in my life, they're good friends. I've never hidden any of this pickup stuff from them. If you had to hide pickup secrets from a woman, I think those secrets would be unethical. During my boot camps, over the years, I've invited girlfriends to these events. And, really, they're great sounding boards. I get to find out what they feel is moral or immoral.

Have they helped you to tweak your method at all?

Well, what a woman says she wants and what she responds to are two different things.

That brings me to another question. You've said your method addresses female psychology.

Human psychology.

So what kind of psychological theories underpin your method?

Well, that's a loaded question.

It is?

I'm fascinated by psychology and one aspect of psychology, if you're going to zoom into it a little bit, is sexual psychology. We're not out to try to figure out the opposite sex, we're trying to figure out ourselves.

If we could reverse-engineer the way the emotional circuits in our brain work, how they function and why and how they systematically trigger when we're faced with certain events, we could figure out how to do it right. How do you approach a woman without freaking her out?

A woman wants to align with a man of high value. How can a man systematically convey his value to a woman if she won't even let him? A woman, by the time she's 23 years old, if she's a beautiful young lady, she's going to have been hit on a good 7,500 times. So we have to approach differently. We can't approach saying, "Wow, I like you, do you like me?"

There are some differences among men and women when it comes to our attraction circuits. A man's circuits are calibrated primarily to respond to a woman's replication value -- to her hip to waist ratio, facial symmetry, breast shape and size, health characteristics, and all that, right? And a woman, her attraction mechanism is evolutionarily calibrated to respond to more of a man's social value. In other words, when I hang out with a woman, I don't hang out with her because I need to be protected. Men, we respond to her replication value. Women, they respond primarily to a man's survival value or social value. The purpose of life is to survive and replicate and we've got 28,000 days -- all of us -- approximately, give or take, to make that happen.

But survival and replication have a different importance in today's world than, say, in hunting and gathering days, right?

Well, the purpose of life is to survive and replicate, whether you know that or not. If you don't survive long enough to replicate, well, then your genes will not replicate. It's very simple. Our brains, when you're looking at it from an engineering point of view, every single circuit, every emotional circuit that exists -- there's got to be a good 300 of them -- every one exists for a social purpose.

You want to hang out and share challenges with people who can help you in this life. From a woman's perspective, there is nothing more helpful than having a relationship with a man who can take care of her. Not that she needs to be taken care of. But it certainly would be nice to have someone in your corner that you can truly trust and has your best interest in mind. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone in your corner that would remove the weight of the world from your shoulders?

Sure.

To give you direction and advice. And help you with all those other emotional things like the need for sex, the need for companionship. The need to be hugged.

But men need that too, right?

Of course. One of my students in the show is a 45-year-old virgin. [Pauses] Wow. It's not even about sex at that point, it's about hugging. That man had just not been hugged enough.

Next page: A Dungeons and Dragons devotee and a virgin until age 21