Erik von Markovik, who calls himself "Mystery," is a decent-looking 6'5" beanstalk who has a Canadian accent, dresses like a peacock (a furry top hat and goggles), and calls himself the world's best Pickup Artist (of women, that is).

He's also the star of a new reality show on vh1 called "The Pickup Artist." In it, Erik (I refuse to call him by his nom de guerre) will teach eight hapless guys how to attract beautiful women. On the surface the show looks like slightly more instructive riff on the nerdy guy/beautiful girl pairing used for humor in countless sitcoms and reality shows like "Average Joe," but in the process, it taps into a larger --- some say sleazy --- community of men who follow Erik's methods to, as the title of his book plainly put it, "Get Beautiful Women Into Bed." All of which makes for a complicated and addictive reality show.

More on the community, which I find fascinating, later; first the episode. The eight nerds are an endearing mix of anxiety and excitement, each of them looking forward to the prospect of meeting women but petrified about actually talking to them. VH1 has cast the show well: most of the guys are awkward but in a cute way; most can speak comfortably to the camera, if not to a female; and a few are actually good looking. 

The opening scene when they get off the bus and see the house for the first time is much like it would be on any other show, except that the reactions are less, "OH DIP!" and "THIS IS THE SH*%" and more "OH MY," and "GEE WOW!" A lot of the show's beginning is taken up with everyone sharing their respective stories. Women think Joe, from Minnesota, is gay. Fred is a 45-year-old virgin who bails out of conversations early. Most of the rest have some similar defect, and all are uncomfortable talking to women.

They receive a surprise phone call from their new instructor. He's going to throw them into the lion's den that night; they all hop into a bus (the declared destination is "Manhood") and go to a club. Erik tells them to talk to women randomly; they do and basically fail miserably.

The most illuminating sections of the show were the parts filmed at some secret loft near the club where Erik asked each contestant of his hopes for the show. Spoon (short for Steve Poon), a flustered young man, declares he wants to live "like James Bond," and acted as if Mystery would be able to conjure this life up for him. Most of the guys were also painfully credulous; really, it's their rapt belief that Mystery will change their lives that makes the show so compelling. Some speak to the camera as if they'll give up girls forever if this doesn't work. In a sense, they're playing for much higher stakes than the average reality show contestant; they're not looking for money or fame but for an entirely different persona and basically a new life.

If that is the case, they might want to think twice before adopting whatever Markovik has in store for them. He and his wingmen, "Matador" and "J-dog," can pick up girls: after talking to the trainees, they walk into the club and, assuming the girls are not actors (which the show declares is the case), make them melt with alarming speed. They start talking to a group and after a few minutes girls grab them and beg them not to leave. They get women's phone numbers, and it looks as if they could take many home were they not tied up with the show.

The nerds want to be like them, or James Bond, or someone else, and it's actually not that hard to picture them achieving it, because Erik (and probably J-dog and Matador) went through a similar transformation. Erik has said he was once a hopeless Dungeons & Dragons player who had as little luck with women as the contestants. Now, depending on how you look at it, he is either supremely confident and self-assured or an asshole, and he charges thousands at seminars and gets paid by VH1 to teach men how to act like him.

He gets paid so handsomely because he is the leader, or most prominent figure, in what is known as the "Seduction Community." This is why the premise behind the VH1 show differs from, say, the movie "Hitch."Markovik is not a traditional "ladies man," or date coach who has a way with women and can dispense advice on them. He, and the rest of the Pickup Artists (PUAs) in the community, is a social interaction scientist, he experiments with then teaches tactics, based on empirical evidence, to get women to sleep with him.

The whole community is controversial for a few reasons. First, it is pretty open that the main goal of this seduction is not necessarily to build relationships but to get girls into bed. (As I said, Mystery's book is called "How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed"). Also, when Mystery first came into the public eye --- in 2005 when journalist Neil Strauss released an account of the time he spent in the seduction community --- his methods came under fire. The methods are very specific (usually used with previously unknown girls a person meets at nightclubs or other public places) and use a complicated series of terms and acronyms, and most refer to women as targets. One technique, called The Neg, essentially consists of insulting a woman, not harshly but not as a joke either, in order to demonstrate your value. It's one of the many interesting examples of pseudo-psychology the PUAs employ.

One could call it manipulative, and many people have. When Strauss went on a tour for his book, people accused the PUAs of tricking girls into bed with them. (Strauss was not a detached researcher; he claims to have had many a threesome because of the tactics.) He replied that if PUA's weren't bedding these girls, other guys would be, and that the people using these tactics were generally "nice" guys who hadn't had luck with women in the past. That doesn't change the fact that then, and now, these guys are basically treating women like video games they can cheat at: they want to beat the girls' defenses so they can have sex, and they do so using memorized or improvised scripts that use psychological principles to seduce.

(One more side note: The community doesn't advertise itself as misogynist; it claims girls want sex too, and that referring to them as "targets" is purely to get guys in a mindset. But on the message boards where PUAs share their experiences --- in what are known asField Reports --- they frequently refer to women as "sluts"; they call succeeding with a girl a "fuck close"; they talk about lying to women to get them into bed; and they say that no one girl can matter to a PUA at all.)

The whole thing is creepy and unnatural, and I hope the show, if it gets more men interested in the movement, also lets females know which guys are earnestly looking to get to know them and which PUAs are just looking for a "fuck close."