Models

Models: Attract Potential partners Through Honesty — by Mark Manson

A man walks into a bar in Buenos Aires and meets a potential partner who doesn't speak a word of his language. She's already in a bad mood. He has no script, no opener, no clever observation about her shoes. So he does what no pickup manual would advise: he makes a funny face, draws a stick figure on a napkin, and invents a fake sign language on the spot. An hour later they're dancing. A week later, Mark Manson has the thesis of his book.

That story sits at the front of *Models* for a reason. Most dating advice for men is built on the premise that the right words, told in the right order, with the right haircut and the right shirt, will produce attraction. Manson spent three years going to bars four or five nights a week in the Boston area trying to make that premise work. It didn't. Men paid him to watch him try. And somewhere along the way — in Argentina, in Russia, in Thailand, in his own messy private life — he figured out that the words were a side effect of something deeper, and the something deeper was the only thing that actually mattered. The book is his attempt to name that thing and tell you how to build it.

The Movement Behind the Book

Manson opens by placing the reader inside a generation of men he calls the first or second to grow up in the post-industrial, post-feminist world. The old script for masculinity — provide, protect, perform, propose — has been pulled out from under them, and nothing coherent has taken its place. Some people respond by faking the old script with money and muscles. Others retreat into video games and porn. A third group buys into the pickup artist industry and tries to hack attraction the way you'd hack a slot machine. Manson rejects all three.