Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

Hey Guys! This article contains players' reviews of Mark Manson's book "Models." Not from people who happened to buy the book at a store and know nothing about VA, social dynamics, pickup, or game. But from people who have devoted years of their lives to this. The overall score is based solely on its usefulness for a player.

Let me say right away that this book can be torn apart practically forever, because every other paragraph is packed with claims the author does not support in any way. And it is the author's job to prove his own claims. He makes the claim, he proves it.

None of the reviewers is obligated to prove a negative!

• Review by Dr. Manhattan
• Review by Mark Karlov

Dr. Manhattan

For the first third of the book, I thought I would rip it apart paragraph by paragraph in this review and atomize the scraps. But somewhere around the middle, when the author's imagination ran out, it evened out and turned into chapters of "useful advice" lifted from pickup forums in the author's unsurpassed style, and it stopped being a branch of hell on earth for players with an IQ above 70.

This work is an ode to the author's personal problems on paper, with bits of rational thought sprinkled in for housewives and local pickup forums. The author keeps making all sorts of claims which, combined with how he describes himself, his professionalism, and how he worked with hundreds of students around the world, sound incredibly, painfully cringe.

What is this book about?

Let's just take the opening lines of a few paragraphs from the very first chapter:

In 2011, men who wanted to date women were almost never advised to be open and honest.

Wonderful claim. A lie.

Almost all first-wave player literature is built around openness and honesty. The author was part of the third wave, along with RSD. And there too, the focus was on openness and honesty. So the author must mean the second wave, and is rolling along in his toy tank over prepackaged material and the A1 and A2 phases of the M3 model, where you first have to spark a girl's interest and only then honestly tell her that you are interested. And even there, there is not a single word saying that you cannot behave openly and honestly.

Either the author is very far from understanding game, which is unlikely, or he is deliberately misleading the reader.

Anything that did not lead by the quickest route to bed was considered meaningless and unmanly.

Another wonderful claim. A lie.

The author is writing about pickup and coaches. Pickup is an activity aimed at meeting women for seduction, as well as developing the skills necessary for it. In game, there is a beginning and an end. Game is the process of seduction from the moment of meeting to sex. And that process takes a certain amount of time. The goal of the whole exercise is sex.

Let me explain this for those to whom this book might have appealed. There is point A and there is point B. Your goal is to get from point A to point B. The faster you reach point B, the better. You achieve your goal with less effort in less time. There is nothing wrong with reaching a specific goal with the least effort.

And the idea that this was somehow considered meaningless and unmanly is, in my view, the author's personal pain talking. Since 2003, I personally have not seen a single such claim, and the representatives of the second wave, whom the author hates so much, do not consider fast sex to be solid game anyway.

But from working with hundreds of men all over the globe, I knew that most of their relationship problems were of a different kind.

Without evidence.

In fact, it does not matter at all whether this statement has evidence behind it. Because three sentences earlier, the author was talking about game in the context of "getting a woman into bed." Here he is writing about game with the goal of finding a long-term relationship. These are completely different goals, and you cannot mix these processes, because in the R phase there is no end point.

From here on, I just flip through the book and randomly jab my cursor into the text:

It's inevitable. Prepared lines won't change anything. A polished appearance won't change anything. Money won't change anything. If you can't stand what she loves, and she is sick to death of your preferences, there are no prospects. Period.

A claim for the sake of making a claim. A lie.

Context has left the room. Do I really need to give examples of women devoting their whole lives to some completely insane animals, or being ready to crawl on their knees over buckwheat just for a citizen with a wallet slightly thicker than average? And a well-groomed appearance definitely will not make me more effective when meeting women?

Emotionally independent people do not enter into relationships with dependent people.

A lie.

Where are the boundaries of emotional dependence? If this were true, such a thing as relationships would not exist on this planet. Every person is emotionally dependent on something.

A woman absolutely needs emotional pull. Without the need to feel chosen, she will not be able to feel emotionally fulfilled in life together or see that in the man beside her. In turn, male selfishness forces walls to be built between man and woman at the very moment when bridges should be built.

All right then:

Emotional dependence colors all of a person's behavior, inspiring and stimulating every one of their actions. Emotional independence colors all behavior in the same way. Since it underlies all words and deeds, to be independent means to be more attractive in every sense.

One of the two paragraphs above was written by me on the fly. Guess which one. Why invent terms and switch into this pseudo-intellectual style in a book written in such simple language? It is still nonsense on paper.

So, what is this book about? About nothing.

Isn't this the perfect scheme for writing a bestseller?

In the opening chapters, you write that everything before you was stupid nonsense, insulting to women and other minorities (did you catch the reference?), that their authors were just immature children with "achtung syndrome," narcissism, and daddy issues, and then from the middle onward you simply copy-paste information from those very same books.

For example, early in the book the author writes:

Emotionally independent and "high-quality" women who are not looking for male attention will not listen to your canned tricks and jokes for long. They will either understand everything and see that you are an insecure, complex-ridden guy, or decide not to waste energy on an empty chatterbox.

And then he devotes an entire chapter, "Conversation," to cold reading and specific canned lines. And in the chapter about masturbation he straight-up quotes Mystery. My compliments.

Verdict

In the end, this book is very hard to rate. As someone who has been in game since 2003, I would give it 0 out of 10. The book is disjointed, the author disses every pickup coach in sight, even though he himself was one, and then writes exactly the same things people were writing decades ago. The book carries no particular idea beyond a couple of banal phrases like "be a man," "love women," "be honest." On top of that, it is full of some unbearable stories. I honestly made it through only one, after which I started skimming. And I hate it when something pretentious gets passed off as something grand.

On the other hand, the book is fairly easy to read. There are pieces of advice that really do work. And if I were not so put off by the author's constant attempts to present himself as a pickup messiah and his vile attempts to belittle other players' achievements, I could well have given it a 4 or even a 5 out of 10. It's about nothing, but it is quite capable of motivating a beginner.

I decided from the start that I would make it different from most books on the subject. I've read so many of them! Most of them are nonsense.

In that case, he should not have written yet another piece of nonsense.

The one thing the author truly does well is explain certain "complicated things" in simple words. Though sometimes the meaning gets lost. All in all, the author's attempt to dilute his personal interpretation of things with useful advice from pickup forums, in his own words, looks like... Like if you let a perch loose in a sea of nonsense. A river perch.

Rating: 2.5 out of 10

Mark Karlov

Let me start with what I definitely did not like:

You live dishonestly, betraying yourself. Which means you are emotionally dependent and unattractive.

Probably funny for some Vasya making 10K a month while feeding a family and seven children to read that. I'm exaggerating, but the truth is somewhere nearby.

The author is subjective. Several times he cites some studies as proof of his arguments, but gives no references. Absolutely nothing new whatsoever. Re-reading MM would have been more useful.

What did I like?

The writing style is pleasant. You can tell he worked on the text for a long time. Overall, not bad memoirs, slightly below average.

At certain moments I recognized myself and drew parallels with Manson's observations about the average pickup guy: father issues, overprotective parenting, and so on.

Rating:

• As memoirs: 4 out of 10
• As a pickup book: 3 out of 10
• As a motivational book: 5 out of 10

It could be worse