from STUDIO For Men Magazine AUTUMN/WINTER ’97

Benjamin Long meets the man who’s taught speed seduction to 40,000 men worldwide.

“JUST THINK HOW exciting it would be to solve the answer to a problem that has plagued man since he first crawled out of the slime, which is: how do I get more sex, how do I get more women attracted to me?” Ross Jeffries says. “I found the answer.”

Jeffries is the man behind the romantic art of ‘speed seduction’. You may know him as the author of such books as How To Get The Women You Desire Into Bed or from such videos as How To Get Strippers And Other Erotic Professionals Into Bed! and How To Get Your Girlfriend, Wife Or Date To Blow You! Jeffries also offers The Basic Speed Seduction Home Study Course, which promises to reveal “the secrets that will have the hottest women falling MADLY in love and begging to bang you in as little as 20 MINUTES TIME!”.

Subscribers to his Get Laid! newsletter receive regular updates on such topics as How To Nail That Girl That Just Wants To Be Friends! and How To Induce A Hypnotic Trance In Three Minutes Or Less And NEVER Get Caught! Once you’ve advanced past the novice stage, you may want to enroll in one of his regular three-day Advanced Seduction Master Weekends where you will learn “the breakthrough secrets that will turn you into a scoring genius, humping and pumping every gorgeous girl in sight!!!!”.

In person, Jeffries is a little disappointing. I was hoping for a throwback to the glory days of swinging: elevator shoes, tight slacks, body shirt, hairy chest, gold chains and greased-back hair. Instead, the 37 year old is dressed conventionally and resembles a Jewish intellectual, rather like Harold Ramis, in Ghostbusters. On the walls of his house in LA’s Marina Del Rey, where I expected posters of naked girls draped over Italian sports cars, were saccharine photographs of Dalmatian and pussycats.

Jeffries claims the inspiration for speed seduction came from martial arts. “I thought to myself, a guy’s five-foot tall, 90 pounds, and knows wing-chun and he can kick the ass of a guy who’s six foot-five, 250 pounds of solid muscle – there’s got to be something like that when it comes to dating. Because I did pretty poorly at dating, I thought, there has to be a way around this, I can’t accept that the only thing I get in life is the women who like me or the leftovers. There has to be another way.”

The other vital ingredient to Jeffries’ breakthrough discovery was Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), an approach to psychotherapy that uses sophisticated language patterns and metaphor to communicate with the unconscious mind. It has been used as a therapy, as a self-help tool and, as practiced by millionaire business guru Tony Robbins, for making lots of money. Jeffries’ genius was to cast aside any moral considerations and use it to gain sexual favors.

“In 1987 I failed in my career as a comedy writer,” says Jeffries. “I started doing NLP on the therapeutic side and then I ran into the persuasion side – I’d always known there was a persuasion side, I just hadn’t been able to find anyone to teach it to me until around 1992. I thought, ‘Great I can create a martial art for guys to attract women using these principles’.

“Basically, it’s an odds improver. For most men, dating’s a form of gambling. They don’t know how to create a result on a consistent basis. Maybe she’ll like the way you look, or maybe you’ll accidentally say something she likes. So I designed a system of using hypnotic language in a way that invokes powerful emotional states in women.

“I think of myself as very average-looking with a tilt towards ugly. So how do you get past that? If you can get a woman to feel positive emotions, get her to feel totally connected, feeling like she’s known you forever, that will turn her up. If you can get her excited and imagining sexual fantasies as well, then you’ve got her. Her neurology is lit up. What women are looking for is men who light up their neurology. Voltaire said, ‘Give me 10 minutes to talk away my ugly face and I will bed the Queen of France’. He was a brilliant guy. He probably worked it out.”

The first important step in Jeffries’ technique is building self-confidence. “You’ve got to start with yourself. If you’re not feeling good, then you can’t make someone else feel good. So I teach guys how to design powerful self-images. You can take a guy who’s an air traffic controller, who has incredible focus, who can deal with incredible stress, and put him in front of a Penthouse pet in a thong bikini, all oiled up, and he won’t be able to put two words together. That’s an altered state of consciousness. Everything I do is designed around altered states of consciousness – designing an altered state of consciousness for yourself and building altered states for them. I teach guys to build clarity, so they know what to look for; thoroughness, so they do everything they need to; fun, so they have a sense of humor about it; and ferociousness so they really go for it.”

The second step is to use “suggestive languaging” to guide a woman’s imagination. “A lot of this is being vague. Being vague is very hypnotic. If I said to a woman, ‘The reason you should fall in love with me is that I’m very funny and I’m a great dancer and I’m really good in bed’, the average girl is not going to buy that. But if I said, [takes a deep breath] ‘I don’t know what it is you think about when you just stop and you go inside and you consider the ideal man you want to be with and you begin to imagine exactly what it would be like to be with this person, to feel all the things you really want to feel for all the right reasons, but I’ll tell you something, when I’m with a woman like that and they begin to see the possibilities of having all that with me, what a difference in the way they think’. And the amazing thing is, after they’ve banged you they’ll say. ‘I don’t know how you were able to tell me exactly what I was looking for in a guy, but you just laid it out word for word’. When in fact, I didn’t say a thing. I was very vague. Part of the skill is being vague and using sexual metaphor – ‘open’, ‘penetrate’, ‘come inside’, ‘surrender’ , ‘feel a powerful happiness’, ‘below me’, whatever.”

According to Jeffries, using such phrases as “feel a big happiness inside” (pronounced “hap-penis”) or “below me” (pronounced “blow me”) will invoke in your victim an uncontrollable urge to do just that. “It works at the end of a chain of suggestions and descriptions that evoke all these sexual and emotional states,” Jeffries elucidates. “If I’m building all this stuff and her unconscious mind is thinking ‘sex, love, emotions’ and then I say ‘below me’, it’s phonetic ambiguity. You don’t know if I’m saying blow or below. The mind will pick the one that’s consistent with train of thought that came before.”

Modulating the tones of one’s voice is another facet of the speed seduction technique. This basically involves putting on a deep, mellifluous voice and speaking slowly and rhythmically. Presumably, this helps to hypnotize the victim, though if you’re not careful it may just put them to sleep. Body language is also important. From what I can gather this mostly consists of pointing at your crotch a lot.

“Part three,” continues Jeffries, “are the frameworks that make it sound like an ordinary conversation – you can’t just walk up to a woman and start talking about her deepest emotions. She’ll slap your face. I’ve created conversational frames that allow you to bring up the most outrageous and wild topics and make it sound like normal conversation.”

While you may have your doubts, there are plenty of people willing to testify that speed seduction works. Jeffries’ website receives 85,000 hits a month and is littered with eager testimonial. “I had been after this girl who was just a friend for over two years! I used your ‘weasel pattern’ on her and within two hours we were back in my room and I had her shirt off and I was sucking away on what I had lusted after for so long!!!” writes one happy disciple. “Your methods have shown me how to create the emotional states in women that they CRAVE and long for, and, as a result, I’ve enjoyed more sex with more women in the past six months than I usually do in five years!” adds another.

During our interview, we’re interrupted by a phone call from a follower wanting advice on a particular seduction problem. “I didn’t plan this,” says Jeffries. “I get two or three calls a day; usually they’re guys who want to appoint me king of the earth. This is such an important area for a guy. If you take him from last place to fourth place he’ll love you. If you take him from last place to first place they’re in awe.” While he won’t tell me how much he makes, it’s obvious Jeffries leads a very comfortable lifestyle. And if he’s as popular as he claims – 40,000 followers worldwide and growing – then his wealth is unsurprising. His home study course costs $450 or $700 with the accompanying videotape. The three-day Get Laid workshops are $850 a head. Last October he hosted a $3,000-a-head, week-long VIP seminar in the Bahamas.

There are plenty of people, of course, who find Jeffries totally offensive. And there is plenty to be offended by. As you will have gathered from the titles of his books and videos, Jeffries delights in being deliberately provocative and politically incorrect. And the ethics of using hypnotism to lure women into bed are also questionable, to put it mildly.

The over-the-top offensiveness is largely a marketing tool. “If you want me to get cruder and more controversial just let me know,” Jeffries says cheerfully. At the same time ‘the chairman of the broads’ feels he’s not getting the respect he’s due, “I brought it upon myself,” he laments. “I’m intelligent enough to know if I go on talk shows and get attention by talking about banging any woman you want, then I can’t blame them when they turn around and point the finger and focus on that.”

While to some he will always be a despicable sleazebag, Jeffries sees himself in a more heroic light. I’m proud of what I’m doing, proud of my life. I went through years of failure, of being continually lost, to get to where I am. It was a form of hell. I understand those myths where the hero descends into hell and has to complete some tasks in order to come back into the world and be a hero, because it’s totally true.

“I know why this works, I know how this works,” he says. “But every time it works it still astonishes me. I’m like the magician who’s as surprised as the audience that he’s sawed the woman in half. I’ll tell you the truth. I’ve never told this to a journalist before: this is what I’m meant to be doing with my life. I can remember being a child, maybe seven years old, and having a waking dream of myself as an adult teaching a lot of men. I remember much later at college having been turned down for a date for the fifteenth time just crying and yelling out loud ‘When am I going to solve this?”. I swear I heard a voice in my head saying ‘When you solve it, you’ll solve it for everyone’. And I think I have solved it.”