The Game: The Game is a first person, text-based video game where players follow or reject the determined advances of pick-up artists (PUAs), which were generated from anthropological research on PUA figureheads and media. I chatted with the artist, Angela Washko, about her recent solo exhibition at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn, also titled, The Game: The Game.

Washko has been researching pick-up artists since 2014, when she was awarded a Rhizome Net Art Microgrant to interview women who have had sexual encounters with the particularly notorious pick-up artist Roosh V, who has capitalized on his ability to manipulate women and turned it into a global franchise. Roosh V’s online following harassed Washko after discovering her project, which inspired her to change the direction of the project and confront Roosh V himself. The gallery featured a row of computer monitors programmed to play The Game: The Game, footage from Washko’s extensive Skype interview with Roosh, as well as a small library of heavily-annotated PUA books. A projection in the back of the gallery played appropriated footage from “PIMP” by RSD Julien, which was used as research for The Game: The Game and scored by Xiu Xiu to sound like a horror movie; the sounds filled the room.

Randon Rosenbohm: When I was feeling upset in the gallery, I looked down on the floor and saw I was walking all over misogynistic popup ads. I found playing The Game: The Game empowering: seeing all of the different ways I could reject the advances of predatory men. How do you find empowerment and endurance when dealing with such discouraging content?

Angela Washko: Research for The Game: The Game started with my BANGED project in which I was looking at Roosh V’s seduction guides: Bang, Day Bang, Bang Iceland, Don’t Bang Denmark, and others. The project culminated in a 2-hour-long Skype interview with him. At first I was curious and fascinated by the existence of a community centered around books written by a pick-up artist (he no longer uses this term) traveling the world to seduce women with the most submissive, subservient, traditional values. However, once I realized how many people truly believed in these techniques and might actually be practicing them, the writing became less abstract and more disturbing to me.

After BANGED, I decided to pursue a deeper engagement with the field of pick-up art. I realized Roosh’s version might be more extreme than others, which I had been told focused more on self-improvement. I started reading other texts by Neil Strauss (Style), Ross Jeffries, and Mystery as well as buying and watching video-based PUA coaching programs by Owen Cook (Tyler Durden) and Julien Blanc. By treating this process like a research assignment, it is much easier for me to endure it. And again – not all of it is horrendous. I found The Game by Neil Strauss to be much more complex and nuanced than expected. On the other hand, watching so much of Julien Blanc’s hidden camera footage that he presents to his disciples was very, very hard. His program, “PIMP,” features many very intoxicated women trying to resist him. It’s very unflattering for him – I’m not sure how he sold his techniques as effective.

I can’t say I’ve found empowerment in consuming the varied PUA content I’ve spent two years combing through. However, I am pretty happy working to create experiences in which I can remove myself and place players into the position of using their own words to engage with the different strategies that these PUAs teach their students. There’s none of my opinion or projection of what these PUAs might say in scenarios where they’re trying to pick up women, and this is really important to me – that you can experience it and it speaks for itself.

RR: The very disturbing pick-up how-to video that was screening in the gallery (from “PIMP” by RSD Julien, scored by Xiu Xiu) reminded me of your earlier video Millionaire Worthy: A Primer (Home Edition), where you're in a wig telling women how to win over a millionaire. The subjects of the videos are both gurus explaining their game. Millionaire Worthy tells women how impossible men's standards are, similarly to how Julien Blanc tells men that women have no option but to submit to them. The theme that both videos underscore is women lack agency in male-dominated sexuality. Would you agree that these two videos are connected beyond their appearance?

AW: The set of videos projected in the back of the gallery were from Julien Blanc (known also as RSD Julien because he works with the PUA company Real Social Dynamics). PIMP, SHIFT and TENGAME – they are three separate video series he has released through RSD. I bought all of them to make sure The Game: The Game was fair and accurate to Julien.

I didn’t really think about how Millionaire Worthy: A Primer (Home Edition) might be related in form to Julien Blanc’s videos, and I definitely bought Julien’s videos three years after I made Millionaire Worthy. In Millionaire Worthy I was playing off the dating reality television format, which in the case of Millionaire Matchmaker and many other shows, frequently encourages men to make a checklist of what they are looking for. This process seems to undermine chemistry and weirder, queerer futurities of love and sexuality beyond the restrictions of existing socio-cultural ideas of what is desirable. Some PUAs do have a checklist approach to seduction. Roosh V., for example, has a very specific type of woman he is looking for. He writes many articles on this. You can read a portion of what he’s looking for in “7 Things I Require In The Future Mother Of My Child.” Julien and Owen Cook-- believe it or not-- actually seem to enjoy a broader spectrum of women, so I can’t really give them a hard time about that. Owen actually speaks a lot about his preference for enthusiasm and intellectual engagement over the unfortunately ever-stereotyped vapid-blonde-“10.” I will say this over and over again: the field is much more complicated than mainstream media, or either “side” (manosphere vs. digi-feminists) give it credit for. I don’t know that the millionaire men I profile in Millionaire Worthy are playing the same type of game that these PUAs are – they are seeking out a matchmaker instead of relying on their seduction skills, but at the end of the day, both camps do tend to exhibit a strong sense of entitlement to women’s bodies.

RR: Do you think the welfare of these men is a feminist issue? Is there any way to show them that the “game” is hurting them as much as it hurts women? What would you say to women who find strength in their desirability, who seem supportive of toxic masculinity?

AW: I think that the perceived need for pick-up art is a feminist issue. The desire for love and acceptance should be respected, but not everyone intuitively knows how to find that for a variety of reasons-- from the context they’re in, to social conditioning, to insecurity, and beyond. I do think providing a service that helps men learn what women respond to, what makes women feel safe communicating with them and how to not scare women that they don’t know is a completely valid service to provide. However, when those tactics generalize broad assumptions about what women are like, demand women to be one-dimensional, flatten women’s agency, and encourage non-consensual physical exchanges, the field needs to be critiqued. The language around consent that currently exists in the mainstream is still woefully inadequate. We need much better sex education that is as radical as it can be while maintaining mutual consensual communication. Consensual doesn’t have to be boring, which seems to be a common thought among the more aggressively “traditional values” PUAs. They are not focused on pleasure and equate engaging in sexual activity with women to beating a video game level. This entitled, goal-oriented sexual behavior needs to be examined much more as a phenomenon, in my opinion.

There is nothing wrong with women feeling strength in their desirability. However, I would advise women to be ready to find strength elsewhere as they age because men (if that is who their sexual audience is) typically prefer 20-year-old women, no matter what their own age. This OkCupid study shows that even men at 50 are most attracted to women at age 22, while women on the other hand tend to be attracted to men roughly their own age.

RR: You’ve read books, watched videos, and immersed yourself in forums: can you explain why “negging” is perceived to be a successful pickup tactic? What is “negging”?

AW: Negging in its PUA origins was really reserved for the most confident and “high value target” – basically the most attractive woman in the club. It is designed to help the PUA demonstrate higher value by showing that he is used to dating “hot girls” and that his target woman is not impressive to him. It also puts the targeted woman into a position of insecurity, which (according to PUA logic) she is not used to feeling since she is likely to get approached by men and be in the position to reject men’s advances often. So by PUA logic, a neg throws the hottest woman in the room off and she thinks “Who is this guy to insult me? He must be important to be insulting me! I never get insulted!” It’s a way of establishing dominance and making that woman work her ass off to impress the PUA and get his approval.

RR: I noticed the library accompanying your show at Transfer had a copy of Neil Strauss’s 2005 New York Times bestseller, The Game. Do you think the emergence of internet pornography, or the internet in general, is what has made pick-up culture the cult of toxic masculinity that it is today?

AW: The internet made Neil Strauss’ The Game possible. Mystery, the PUA most profiled in The Game, had a very popular web 1.0 internet forum where lots of men gathered online to work out strategies for seducing women and learned from each other as the field was emerging. Eventually Neil, Mystery, and even Owen Cook ended up living together with a number of other people (including Courtney Love at some point) and teaching seduction techniques out of a mansion in LA which they called Project Hollywood. This is the subject of my next project. ☺

RR: Tourism takes advantage of a site of difference. In your series Woman as a Place women’s bodies are an emblem of sexual difference. Are you still collecting postcards?

AW: Yes! I actually have a whole bunch more postcards to add to All The Places You’ll Go (Women As Place). I hope that the collection will be added to forever. Although that means there would be a seemingly infinite amount of ways that women’s bodies have been used as a stand-in for places (as you can read here) is also, um, problematic.

RR: I can’t wait for level 2! When will it be out? Will The Game: The Game ever be available to play online?

AW: The Game: The Game’s research process takes such a long time. I am aiming to release the complete work (4 chapters) by the end of summer 2017. Fingers crossed!