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.