Lairs first began as study groups soon after Ross Jeffries released his first products and began teaching sometime in the early 1990s. Within the community, seduction lairs are underground meeting groups for men devoted to the study of obtaining sex taught in the seduction community. The community was further publicized with the television show The Pick Up Artist (2007–2008) on VH1. The Game reached the New York Times Bestseller List, and made pickup techniques known to a wider audience. In 2005, journalist Neil Strauss published The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, an exposé of the PUA community. The community was brought to greater mainstream awareness with the 1999 drama film Magnolia, in which Tom Cruise portrayed a charismatic yet embittered and emotionally-troubled pickup guru who was loosely modeled on Ross Jeffries. Other pickup teachers emerged with competing methods, and became known within this community as 'seduction gurus' or 'gurus'. In the late 1990s, Clifford Lee began his Cliff's List Seduction Letter as a central independent voice of the community. This then spawned a network of other Internet discussion forums, email lists, blogs, and sites where seduction techniques could be exchanged. In 1994, Lewis De Payne, then a student of Jeffries, founded the newsgroup (ASF). Other exponents established themselves in roughly the same era, but lacked contacts with each other. In 1991, Ross Jeffries taught workshops, promoted a collection of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques called 'speed seduction' (SS), and published a short book of his techniques, How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed. However, one self-described 'picker-upper of women' preceding Weber was rational emotive psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who wrote The Art of Erotic Seduction, a how-to guide for men that encouraged them to meet women through the 'pickup', with Roger Conway in 1967. Modern pickup artist practice dates at least to 1970, with the publication of How to Pick Up Girls! by Eric Weber.

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