Amy
Exactly. I know I’ve had satisfying sex with a bunch of people, but I don’t remember it the way I remember the disappointment, you know? I remember the time I put my hand down a guy’s pants and couldn’t figure out which was the testicle and which was the penis. I’m, like, “Ball. Ball. This, does he have three balls because, oh my God, no. This is his dick. That’s terrible. His life is terrible.” Then I’m just pulling on something, hoping it’s the right one.
JONATHAN AMES—WRITER, ACTOR
I tell women, if you want to hold on to a guy, just like every three weeks or so, just tell him he’s got a beautiful cock. Beautiful or not, whatever they want to say. “I just like your cock.” Perfect. Just say it like every three weeks or so, not too often so the guy gets cocky but just enough to keep him coming back for more.
ELNA BAKER—COMEDIAN, WRITER
I was a Mormon for nine years practicing, didn’t drink, smoke, I never tried coffee. I remember the first time I drank, I just remembered thinking, “Everyone is so agreeable!” I’m making so many friends, and I didn’t know why. “Tonight is so fun!”
Marc
Did that also happen with the sex?
Elna
Oh! That’s another story. Do you know Landmark Forum?
Marc
Yeah, it’s a self-help program. You didn’t go right from Mormon to that, did you?
Elna
Well, what happened was, I was so Mormon, but I was figuring out what I wanted to do or not, and for Christmas, someone bought me a Landmark Forum course, and it was expensive. The notion of like, “What do we buy our Mormon friend? She likes cults.”
The way I stopped being Mormon was that I went to the Landmark Forum and I thought it was really ridiculous the whole time, and I was judging it in my head. Then the guy called me up from the audience and he said, “I feel like you are a cynical person about this.” He said, “Just try on for a minute the idea that there is no God, and that life is meaningless and empty and that there’s no hope.”
Marc
That guy is hilarious.
Elna
I tried on the idea. I thought of a really sad moment, when my dog died. I tried it on, and I didn’t take it off, and I left, and I gave my very first blow job. To the guy I had been dating, but I probably cried the whole time, thinking about my dead dog.
Marc
Oh my God! That’s the hottest thing I’ve ever heard. A crying blow job! Whoa!
Elna
That’s how it all went downhill. I mean, I felt so bad for the guy.
Marc
I just want to hear how he coached you through that? Like, “It’s okay, baby, you’re doing a good job.” What did he say?
Elna
“Just let the tears land.”
NICK GRIFFIN—COMEDIAN, WRITER
I’ve done so many horrible things.
Here’s a thing I did one time when I was seventeen to have sex because I didn’t know how to get girls. I was in Florida on vacation with my family and we went to some little hamburger joint, a sawdust-type place, and my parents let me stay when they left. I remember I was drinking with this girl—it was eighteen at the time to drink. My parents left, we finally leave. This girl, she’s like two years older than me and I have no … I’ve had sex a couple times but it was because I was drunk.
We’re driving home, she’s got the radio on—this is absolutely true—and The Cars come on. The song “Drive.” I said, “Turn this off,” and she says, “What? Why?” and I say, “Just turn it off, turn it off.” She turns it off and pulls over and says, “Why?” and I said, “My girlfriend died at a Cars concert.”
I said, “We went to a Cars concert, she fell down, we were on the upper deck and she fell down the stairs and never regained consciousness.” I teared up. And I swear on my mother’s life I had sex with that girl that night. That’s a horrible, horrible thing to do, isn’t it?
I’ve done it since. A lot of people die when I’m trying to have sex. When I’m trying to create some quick bond with somebody, there’s a lot of death that happens.
AMY SCHUMER
When I hear, totally honestly, when I hear a guy say “I fuck a lot of girls,” I don’t believe that anyone thinks that’s cool anymore, unless they’re young enough to believe that. I’ve got guy friends who have a lot of sex and they’re really unhappy. I don’t know any guy that’s like, “Look, life is dope, I fuck every night.” Someone hurt them. They’re sad. I don’t think that those high fives are going around anymore.
Marc
When your book The Game comes out, I saw it and I thought, “Oh, Neil Strauss is doing another investigative thing. This time about pickup artists.” Then I started hearing, “No, he’s out there speaking. He runs workshops.”
I’m like, “Wait, Neil Strauss?”
They’re like, “Yeah, he’s like this pussy magnet, this pickup artist, he’s running these workshops, and he lives in a mansion in Malibu, and there’s women all around.”
I’m like, “Whoa, wait, this is the same Neil Strauss? How did that happen?”
NEIL STRAUSS—JOURNALIST, AUTHOR
Yeah, but see, you see it like I see it. I’ll do a news show, and they’ll be like, “Here’s the biggest douche bag in the world, who just wrote the manual for men.” You see it how I see it, which is, I was just a nerdy writer dude, who somehow went immersive in this community, wrote a book about it. Then, again I really got into it in the book, it wasn’t just detached.
I just got a call from Nightline, and they’re like, “We want to write about this pickup workshop, and talk to you.” No, that book’s ten years old, I don’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t go away.
What happened was, the publisher I already did a M?tley Crüe book with called me up, and he said, “Hey, I found out about this community of guys online, they don’t have money, looks, or fame, and they’re exchanging this knowledge on how to meet, attract, seduce women. They’ve got it figured out to a science.” He’s like, “I want you to take their information, and put it into a how-to book for me.” I said, “Listen, I write for The New York Times, I’m a serious writer, it’s not something I’m interested in. But can you give me the URL?”
I started reading this stuff, and there were all these posts with guys, with weird names like Mystery and Candor. All these weird names. And they describe, blow by blow, everything they did. I’m like, “Oh my God, this is it.” Because when I was writing for The New York Times, I’d go to these shows, concerts, and try and meet these women. I’d have tickets to the next cool concert, and they’d come with me. I’d just always end up friendzone, no matter what I did. If I slept with someone, I would try my best to make them my girlfriend, so that I could stay with somebody for a few years and not be so lonely. Maybe a couple years’ dry spell between that. I felt like these guys had the secret.