Can Studying Turn Geeks into Casanovas?

Sept. 29, 2005 -- -- Go into almost any nightclub across the country and you'll see great-looking women and hungry men on the prowl, craving chemistry, connection -- and a phone number. They're all looking for love. But the oldest game in the world can be brutal.

"Either you have it or you don't. Some guys are smooth, some guys aren't. That's it," said an attractive clubgoer in South Beach, Miami, named Kristi. "There's the losers and the winners."

Maybe that's right, but there's also a movement afoot that says the art of seduction can be learned.

One of its students is Joel, a successful software engineer from Denver. He's clean-cut and nicely dressed, and has been practicing a scripted routine -- learned in a three-day workshop that cost him nearly $2,000.

When "Primetime" co-anchor John Quinones asked him why he enrolled in the class, Joel said, "A woman would come up to me...and she'd be really interested, and I could see this, as soon as I opened my mouth, she... would suddenly start backing away, and [say] 'Oh, I got to go.'"

Joel studied at a workshop run by a man who calls himself "Mystery" -- a kingpin in a new multi-million dollar industry where hundreds of so-called seduction experts promise love and romance to hapless Lotharios.

They sell CDs and DVDs in classrooms and on Web sites. This summer, Montreal even saw the first-ever international pickup artists' convention.

One of this movement's foremost figures is Neil Strauss, a former New York Times rock critic and ghostwriter of four best-selling books.

He recently penned "The Game," which documents his journey into the secret society called "the seduction community" -- a world where the latest pickup techniques are traded and "field tested."

He told Quinones, "To most women, it's a repulsive, disgusting thing -- guys meeting in lairs, figuring out how to work them."

But he added that before he became a part of this community, his love life was a joke.

"I'm a scrawny, 5-foot-6, not very attractive, super shy guy, and I'm competing in Los Angeles, against the richest, best-looking, most famous men in the world," he said.