The Game
or the Girl

Introduction

A Brief Anthropology of the Pimp, and How to Read This Book

— attributed to Charles Darwin, though the attribution is disputed, and the writer of this book, per the practice installed in Chapter Fifteen, is telling you the attribution is disputed

The word pimp entered English in the late sixteenth century, probably through the French pimper, meaning to dress smartly, and possibly through the older French pimpant, meaning alluring or seductive. The word acquired its specific modern sense, of a man who lives off the earnings of a woman whose sex he manages, sometime in the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth century the word had also been supplemented by the term mack, an anglicization of the French maquereau, meaning a fish, a mackerel, and by extension a procurer, on the basis of a folk analogy between the marketing of fish and the marketing of women that says something specific and unpleasant about the history of both.

I want to spend the introduction on the anthropology of the role, because the role has been around for much longer than the word and because understanding what the role has actually been, across cultures and centuries, is a necessary condition for reading this book without misunderstanding what it is doing.

The role, in its most compressed anthropological form, is this. In any society that has developed enough stratification to produce a market for sexual access, there emerges a third party whose function is to organize the exchange between the person providing the access and the person purchasing it. The third party is not, in most historical cases, the person providing the access, nor the person purchasing it. The third party is a manager, a broker, a facilitator, a protector, an enforcer, a promoter, or, most commonly, some combination of all of these. The specific configuration of the third-party role varies across cultures. The existence of the role does not vary. Wherever the market has existed, the role has existed. This is one of the more consistent findings in the anthropological literature on human sexuality.

The role predates the modern city. Anthropologists have documented equivalents of the role in premodern Mediterranean societies, in classical Greece, in Rome, in medieval Europe, in Tang and Ming China, in Edo Japan, in premodern India, in the Ottoman Empire, and across the pre-colonial and colonial Americas. The specific gender configuration of the role has varied significantly. In premodern Europe, before the systemic reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the third-party role was frequently occupied by women. Elizabeth Creswell, one of the more famous London brothel-keepers of the seventeenth century, counted the king among her clients and operated at a level of political and financial sophistication that few of her male successors would match. In classical Athens, the role was often held by women called pornoboskoi, though a Greek word for the male procurer also existed. In medieval Japan, the yūjo system was managed by women called okami, and the specific power configurations of the pleasure quarters produced something closer to matriarchy than to the male-dominant arrangements of the modern Western pimp.

The specifically male, specifically Black, specifically flamboyant American pimp of the twentieth century, the figure Iceberg Slim wrote about in 1967 and that Milner and Milner studied ethnographically in Oakland in 1972, is a very recent cultural formation. The formation drew on older Southern practices, on the specific conditions of Black urban life in the post-migration American cities, on the collapse of certain older economic arrangements, and on the emergence of a specific style, called the game, that codified a set of psychological, verbal, and sartorial techniques that had, in various forms, been in circulation for centuries. Milner and Milner, in Black Players, argued that the pimp subculture they studied was, structurally, a matriarchy inverted, a specific ritual reversal of the sex-role economy of the dominant American culture, in which women were the economic providers and men were the ornamented recipients. This was one of the more unusual configurations of the role in the anthropological record, and it produced the specific visual iconography that most modern people, if they think about pimping at all, associate with the word.

But the visual iconography is a small and recent sliver of a much larger structural fact. The structural fact is that the third-party role, in some form, has appeared wherever the market for sexual access has appeared, and that the anthropology of the role tells us something specific and important about the anthropology of human sexuality, which is that a certain configuration of power, exchange, and mediation between men and women has recurred in almost every complex society humans have built.

This book is not about pimping. I want to be direct about this before we go any further. This book is about attraction, attention, and the specific ethical demands that arise when a person, usually a man, becomes capable of operating the small levers that move human desire.

I have opened the book with the anthropology of pimping because the anthropology reveals something that most books on this topic conceal. The techniques the pickup writers claim to have invented are techniques that a small class of operators, across cultures and centuries, has been using in various forms since the emergence of complex human societies. The techniques are old. The techniques work. The techniques have been used, in most historical instances, in the service of extraction. The extraction has been enormously costly, to the extracted and to the culture in which the extraction has been permitted.

The book is about a different possible use of the same techniques. It is about what happens if the techniques are separated from the extraction and rejoined to the specific ethical commitments that would make their use responsible rather than predatory. This is not a new idea. Every serious contemplative tradition has produced some version of this claim. The claim, applied specifically to the operations of attraction and attention that the pimp has historically weaponized, is what the book is about.

The book is not, therefore, a pickup manual. It is not, either, a debunking of pickup manuals. It is something more difficult, which is a manual for the specific use of techniques that have existed for centuries in a form that would honor rather than exploit the people they are used on. This is a delicate project. It is possible for the reader to misuse the book. It is also possible for the reader to use the book to become the specific kind of man that most cultures have produced only rarely and that most cultures have desperately needed.

How to read this book.

The book has twenty-one chapters. Each chapter has three parts: a quote, a guide, and a fable. The three parts do different work.

The quote is the frame the reader enters through. Each quote is drawn from a serious source. Each quote is doing the specific work of situating the chapter inside a longer tradition of thought. The reader who does not know the source is not disadvantaged; the quote will still function. The reader who does know the source will feel the specific weight the tradition provides.

The guide is the argument. Each guide is approximately twelve hundred words. The guide moves through the chapter’s insight in prose that is deliberately compressed. The compression is intentional. The book is not attempting to be exhaustive. The book is attempting to install specific principles in a form dense enough to survive the reader’s attempts to intellectualize them.

The fable is the demonstration. Each fable is a short parable, written in the register of Aesop but with the crudity and specificity of the actual sexual and psychological material that the guide describes in more abstract terms. The fables are lurid at times. The lurid detail is load-bearing. The fable’s job is to make the guide’s insight impossible to intellectualize away. The reader who is tempted to read the guides only, and skip the fables, is the specific reader for whom the fables are most necessary. Do not skip the fables. The fables are the test of whether the guide has actually landed.

The book is designed to be read in order. The chapters compound. Chapter Eight assumes Chapter Three. Chapter Fifteen assumes Chapter Eleven. Chapter Twenty-One assumes everything that precedes it. The reader who begins in the middle is welcome to do so but should be aware that the middle chapters are operating on principles installed earlier that will not have been installed in a reader who has skipped them.

The pace at which the book is read is up to the reader. The book can be read in a weekend. The book can also be read one chapter per week for twenty-one weeks. Both approaches have merit. The one-chapter-per-week approach allows for actual practice between chapters, which is the specific mode the book was designed for. The weekend approach allows for the immediate absorption of the whole architecture, which some readers require before they can begin practicing at all.

The book is short. Eighty-eight pages. The shortness is deliberate. Most books on this topic are three hundred pages of material that could have been said in eighty-eight. The compression is a demonstration of the principle from Chapter Three, which is that saying less and holding more is a superior mode of communication to saying more and holding less. If the book has done its work, it will feel, on completion, larger than eighty-eight pages could have contained. The largeness is the reader’s, not the book’s. The book has been a compression. The reader has been the one doing the decompression.

One final matter, before the reader begins.

The reader who continues past this introduction is consenting to the reading protocol installed in Chapter One. The protocol is that the book cannot be read without accepting the responsibility that its contents carry. This is not a legal formality. This is a specific structural fact about the material. The material is available to anyone. The responsibility for what the material becomes in the hands of the reader is the reader’s, and the reader’s alone. The book has been designed to make this responsibility unavoidable. If you would rather not accept the responsibility, this is the last opportunity to close the book without having entered into it. The next page is Chapter One. The next page is where the entry begins.

The book begins now. The end is a new beginning.