Sex Lessons: THIS MAN RUNS A
'GET LAID' WORKSHOP
From Marie Claire Magazine (UK Edition) May 1996
Ross Jeffries claims he can teach a man how to get a woman into bed within ten minutes of meeting her. Students pay to attend Get Laid workshops, subscribe to newsletters, buy videos and tapes, and fill in charts of their conquests. Jeffries now has more than 40,000 followers practicing his sales pitch. William Cash meets the self-proclaimed seduction guru.
Ross Jeffries is a tall, thin man with glasses, who dresses in technical black' and refers to himself as the 'Mighty, Flawless Incomparable Guru of Speed Seduction'. Known in America for his famous weekend seminars that claim to teach men 'How To Create An Instantaneous Sexual Attraction In Any Woman You Meet', Jeffries likens his techniques of sexual aggression to a lethal new form of verbal martial arts.
To demonstrate the marketing inspiration behind speed seduction, he switches on a teach-yourself street-fighting video by kung fu expert Jack Latourette. 'He teaches speed-hitting,' says Jeffries. 'How to hit guys fourteen times in a second. 'With similar levels of aggression, Jeffries specializes in turning around the sex lives of the most desperate of his fans and students. People, many of whom, Jeffries admits, are verging on the 'geeky' and who have spent their personal lives in a sexual wasteland. Jeffries claims he can teach his pupils how to get a woman into bed within ten to twenty minutes of meeting her. 'You don't need looks, fast cars or money to achieve the type of instant connection I teach - to capture a woman's imagination and give her the emotional experiences she longs for,' says Jeffries. 'I teach men the language they need to get deep inside her mind.'
Within moments of stepping inside Jeffries's
house in LA's Marina Del Rey, he's showing me his Waiter 9mm handgun.
Lying in one corner is what looks like a Japanese beheading sword.
On the kitchen table there are various cans of pepper spray. Upstairs,
I am reliably informed by his California-blonde, 'live-in assistant',
is a small armory. Whether Jeffries has amassed such weaponry out
of raging personal insecurity, or out of sensible concern for his
self-defense, is not clear. Jeffries held his first speed-seduction
seminar back in January 1993 at a low-rent LAX airport hotel, having
sent out a 'cheap-ass' flyer to people who had bought his first
book, How To Get The Women You Desire Into Bed. In October,
however, he will be hosting a special $3,000-a-head seven-day VIP
seminar at the Holiday Inn on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, for
up to 50 people. 'We've got a businessman from Australia flying
in, as well as lawyers, doctors and even a courier driver,' says
Jeffries's business partner, Canipe. 'We'll be having field trips,
with Ross taking groups out to practice techniques. But not in bars
or nightclubs - Ross tells guys to stay out of bars.
Jeffries, formerly a
comedy writer and self-confessed wimp/loser with women, now has an
estimated army of 40,000 followers (Canipe refers to them as 'Jedi
warriors'), visiting his Seduction site on the Internet; attending his
$850-a-head three-day 'Get Laid' workshops; or buying his 'confidence
tapes', or videos with titles like How To Get Your Girlfriend, Wife
Or Date To Blow You! or How To Get Strippers And Other Erotic
Professionals In Bed! (advertised bimonthly in Penthouse). Jeffries
says that most men prefer to study his methods at home, rather than
expose themselves to public scrutiny at a seminar 'Men have an ego
problem in admitting there's something they can learn on the subject. If
my course was "How To Seduce Men", women would be showing up
with their girlfriends and giggling.
Some may find it depressing that sex and
personal relationships can be reduced to the banal level of a
used-car-dealer sales pitch, but Jeffries encourages his students to
operate like zealous sales teams, calling themselves names like 'The
Sharks', and supplying him with charts of their recent sexual
conquests. One of Jeffries's prize students is 30-year-old Taylor
Nabokov, from LA's Long Beach. His specialty is reading women poetry
that he has composed. 'I'd say my sex life has improved by 60 per cent
and my love life by 90 per cent because of my improved communications
skills,' says Nabokov. 'Although it's got me into a lot of trouble,
I've experienced a lot of adventures with a lot of women - probably
about 35 in two years.
Jeffries's basic
technique for seducing women is an adaptation of the controversial
school of 'mind persuasion' known as Neuro Linguistic Programming
(NLP), as practiced by multi-millionaire guru Tony Robbins. Jeffries's
idea is to create a conversational framework that allows men to
induce very powerful emotional states in women. 'These tools are
not about tricking or preying on anyone,' he says. 'It's not about
exploitation, it's about creating a bridge into a woman's world
and giving her an experience that nobody else can give her.'
Once a woman enters her 'emotional
adventure zone', it is important to nail her as a soon as possible,
says Jeffries. This is best done by 'anchoring' her with touch
and sound, and with verbal commands, such as 'Do it... feel it...
now .. with me', that direct her arousal towards her seducer.
On a practical level, Jeffries
advises the adoption of a number of aggressive techniques. Men, he
believes should show their anger. 'Guys who never stand up for
themselves or show a woman a bit of unpleasantness are giving
themselves away for free,' he says. He also advises his pupils to be
unavailable and to cancel dates 'now and again'. Another rule is not
to return phone calls too promptly. And, on occasions- especially in
the beginning - to be first to hang up the telephone. Jeffries also
advises men on what to say if a woman cancels a date at the last
minute: 'Look, you made a commitment to spend time with me and now
you're blowing me out. You're disrespecting me and my time and I'm not
going to put up with it. My rule is, if someone makes a commitment to
me, I expect them to keep it. If they can't keep it, I need to know at
least a day in advance. Got it?' Then hang up. 'This may sound extreme
but, man, does it work,' adds Jeffries. 'She'll probably call back in
five minutes to apologize and ask you out.' But when I asked Philippa,
a 34-year-old English actress living in LA, about such aggressive
techniques, she wasn't impressed. 'It's nice to know that someone
knows their own mind,' she said, 'but if anybody behaved like that on
the phone, I'd think, "Thank God I've found out what an
unpleasant person he is."
However improbable it may seem that
any intelligent women would be taken in by such a gambit, the fact is
that Ross Jeffries does appear to have hundreds of satisfied
disciples, all of whom claim that his seduction methods have changed
their lives.
Jeffries has developed a range of
specialized conversation patterns for his Jedi warriors to follow.
These include the 'Friends Into Lovers' pattern, 'which works
best in a casual setting, like over coffee'. Then there's the
'Instant Blow-Job' pattern, which uses the metaphor of sucking
on a bar of chocolate and employs the line, 'You may think those
thoughts are above me, but really I think they're below me (pronounced
"blow me" - this is called "Phonetic Ambiguity").'
It may seem disturbing that people are so short of seduction skills
that they have to go around with a selection of well-polished
little sayings but then conversation has never been regarded as
a desirable social skill in California.
Much of Jeffries's seduction
expertise is spelled out in his monthly Get Laid newsletter. Each
edition consists of about eight pages and contains polished
conversational models, as well as cranking out what Jeffries calls the
basic Power Attitudes of sexual aggression. These are:1. Never attach
excess meaning to winning or losing with women. 2. Consistently
display willingness to walk away. 3. Think: being with me is the best
possible choice any woman can make. 4. Give a woman a little bit of
what she wants, and then pull back and make her work for more. Speed
seduction, says Jeffries, is ideal for using on strangers - especially
waitresses, cashiers and women in shopping malls. It is also suitable
in situations when you are limited to a brief encounter. According to
Jeffries, the sort of girls most likely to fall for such psychological
manipulation are New Age women who hang out in bookshops, gourmet food
shops or coffee shops, and the very worst are those in nightclubs and
bars, as they tend to be on the defensive.
Although his house contains a shelf of
old, sticky looking liquor bottles, Jeffries doesn't drink, and he says
speed seduction doesn't work so well when mixed with alcohol or
intellect. 'The sort of guy who really bores women is the type who goes
for intellectual understanding,' he adds. 'The purpose of talking is to
put women in certain states. On the surface it may look like you're
trying to get her to understand your point - in reality you are
"installing" an emotional state, to make her feel connected to
you, so she wants to f*** you. Nine times out of ten when you do this,
you won't have to make the move.'
The day after my speed-seduction seminar,
I tried out a few patterns myself on a LA commercials director at
a party. She just sat there with her mouth open, as if in a daze.
After employing a few more techniques with other women, I began to
realize what the problem was: not only is it boring and exhausting,
but it also takes the amusement out of conversation if you are walking
around with a juke-box of patterns in your head. More to the point,
I kept thinking I was going to be caught out. Says my actress-friend
Philippa, 'I can imagine it might work in California. But if you tried
these lines on an English girl, they would probably look at you in
a very puzzled way and think, "What are you on?"' The appeal
of Jeffries's techniques seems to cross class and wealth divides.
When I set up a special mini-seminar on the subject, 29-year-old film
producer Henry Brocklehurst, heir to Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire,
listened with interest, although he sniffed that speed seduction was
no different from any other seminar on the self help circuit.
Nick Camilleri, a successful 34 year
old real-estate broker said, 'He had some interesting ideas, a new
take on things I tried a few lines out and, you know what, it definitely
works.' He wanted to know where he could get Jeffries's book. For
the 'conversationally challenged', I'll concede that speed seduction
may be a way of getting your foot in the bedroom door Another convert,
Charles L. Brown, recently e-mailed Jeffries. 'Hey Ross,' he begins,
'I was skeptical but I gave your techniques a shot. I had heard
of Neuro Linguistic Programming, so I knew there was at least a
basis for your claims. First, a little about me. I've always been
the typical "nice guy", with dozens of women who would
call me a "big teddy bear". Even though I'm still a novice
at using your seduction techniques, I've been able to attract women
who before would barely glance in my direction.' He relates how
he tried a pattern with 'a woman who was humiliating me' and ended
up having sex with her that night 'on the hood of my little Ford
Escort in a parking-lot. As I was banging this statuesque, blonde,
married woman, I kept thinking to myself, "This shit really
works."'
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ROSS JEFFRIES
How he teaches his pupils to get a woman
into bed in ten minutes:
Rule 1:
The first speed seducer giveaway is if a strange man in a coffee shop
tries a line like 'I have an intuition about you' or 'I know something
about you.' Jeffries advises men to eavesdrop on their prey before
making an approach, so the woman thinks he understands her. Another
technique is to listen in on a woman's conversation with somebody
else, remember any key phrases she leans on or repeats, and then feed
them back to her.
Rule 2:
The next step is for the man to establish in the woman's mind an
emotional connection to him. Once that is achieved, he is advised to
'move in for the kill with any number of sexual accelerator patterns'.
Brief conversational 'fluff' (i.e. witty small talk) is used to get
the woman laughing, then followed up very quickly by the first lethal
Jeffries 'mind punch', known as 'How To Induce A Hypnotic Trance In
Three Minutes And Never Get Caught.'
A novice speed seducer will offer a
variation on the following line, raising and lowering the tone of his
voice to fill the woman's mind with subconscious commands: 'You know
that feeling when you have an Instantaneous connection with someone
[probably points to himself]? You know, that mysterious link that just
makes you feel like you've known someone for ever... like you were
meant to know them... and it's almost as if your future's right in
front of you... when you feel that... it's almost like a physical
click...?' and so on.
Instead of airing the subject
of sex in the open, Jeffries advises men to use sexual metaphors
subliminally, so that the woman imagines the experiences for herself
- the feeling is therefore much more powerful, as she feels the
thought is her own, not his.