A review of the memoir “Balls Deep: From Jilted Lover to Lady Killer” by Nick Krauser Testing78378 Follow Aug 27, 2017 · 9 min read

We have a difference of opinion about “Balls Deep:” I think it’s totally fascinating and worth reading. C finds it vile and unrealistic. I think you can’t argue with success. C finds that ridiculous (though mostly she objects to the title). Read it for yourself to judge. “Balls Deep” is a sort of “Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia” for men.

In “Eat, Pray, Love” Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce leads her to find some spiritual something by abandoning everything she thought that mattered and wandering around and eventually getting fucked by a high-status guy or couple of guys (that’s not how she’d put it, but one can read between the lines). In Krauser’s memoir getting dumped by his wife leads him to a spirit quest to have sex with tons of hot girls and really learn how both women and himself work. “Eat, Pray, Love” is a memoir about rejecting weak men and finding exciting sex in exotic locations. “Balls Deep” is about self discovery and not being the weak man. Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorced husband is essentially the same character as Krauser at the start of “Balls Deep.”

(This is another review.)

You may think the comparison of “Balls Deep” and “Eat, Pray, Love” overwrought, but here is Gilbert in “Confessions of a Seduction Addict:”

I careened from one intimate entanglement to the next — dozens of them — without so much as a day off between romances. You might have called me a serial monogamist, except that I was never exactly monogamous … . In my mid-20s, I married, but not even matrimony slowed me down. Predictably, I grew restless and lonely. Soon enough I seduced someone new; the marriage collapsed. But it was worse than just that. Before my divorce agreement was even signed, I was already breaking up with the guy I had broken up my marriage for

When a famous, PC author like Gilbert says it, and frames it as a problem (it isn’t; her mindset is a problem), she gets in the most famous newspaper in the world. When Krauser says it he’d never be able to find a conventional publisher.

(Gilbert also needs to find sex parties and consensual non-monogamy, but that’s another story.)

Krauser gets hit by realizations many men never get,

Like most men, I preferred to believe the Disney version. While I was no hopeless romantic I truly believed in the white-picket-fence respectability of the suburban family … . So I worked hard at school, even harder at work, and by age thirty-one I was happily married to a sweet Japanese girl one year younger than me … . And then things went wrong. The Marriage turned sour, my wife left me, and I Lost all interest in my job.

It’s a wakeup moment. Years later he finds himself shagging virtual strangers in bar loos. There are no secrets, only open eyes. When Krauser’s wife dumps him in 2008, he says that “She changed, I changed, and the marriage was strained.” When he starts attempting to really meet women, he “couldn’t process” what he was seeing and doing, because he says that “There were so many mental barriers that I couldn’t take (in).” Those mental barriers must be dismantled and his whole mind reconfigured. That reconfiguration process makes the memoir hypnotic to J, who shirked an afternoon of work to finish it. That theme is repeated:

I was feeling at that point that things were somewhat surreal. This was an entirely new experience to me. I had been going along for most of my adult life living from one day at the office to the next and going home to my monogamous relationship. Here I was tonight at one of the hottest parties in the city with the coolest group of guys and hanging out with a relatively hot young twenty-six year old. As I watched Mick make the rounds, making out with first one girl and then the next I was filled with a renewed desire to make this work. No more boring office life for me.

Krauser is telling you that what others can do, you can do, if you want to badly enough and can effectively channel want into action. Most people cannot, so their lives spin in place instead of moving. I identify with this guidance function, because read properly our Tumblr and now Medium page is doing the same thing. Our favourite messages from followers tell us how we’ve inspired them to exciting new heights, whether that be the person of their dreams, the threeway they’ve fantasized, the indie porn they’re finally making, the weight they’ve finally lost (there is an intrinsic golden link between your body and the sex you’re having: quit sugar and start working out) or the sex party they’ve attended or organized. Presumably not all those who are inspired write to us, either. We’re showing you the possible. We’re showing you, in a small way, the Secret Society. When we graduated from high school the lives we lead right now, today, seemed impossible or at best remotely aspirational.

We leapt. Will you?

The book is structured like the journey of the mythic hero, in which Krauser falls into the abyss before being rebuilt into a different person. Few have the fortitude to go through such processes, which is why we so often enact them through art. This point is one we may come back to in a future post.

Everyone has a “lifestyle” or sorts. Krauser’s is amazing. Yours could be too. Ours is a little different, though. For us novelty, commitment, and support are not estranged or mutually exclusive, as they are for many people. You glided past the preceding sentence, but you should print it and pin it next to your bed or computer.

Many of those with the best lifestyles are the most despised. People who rise generate others who wish to cut them down. Krauser says, “there are many, many haters who will try to destroy you if they think you’re getting laid.” Everyone is obsessed with everyone else’s sex life. The exceptions are too rare. And the failure is real.

Failure is a persistent theme in “Balls Deep,” though maybe you wouldn’t expect that given the sweetness of the successes. Krauser brings failure up early but it’s worth emphasizing: “In the time period covered by this volume of my story, I failed with over two thousand women.” How many guys can endure that? Krauser anticipates that most readers will “focus on the lays and get the impression I was slaying right-and-left with wild abandon.” He isn’t. He writes of his own “ineptitude.”

He’s willing to be outrageously vulnerable. Read that sentence again. Krauser writes about how he plateaued with women and that he came to read “King Warrior Magician Lover,” which is now on our list, and which caused him to realize that he “scored as high in King and Warrior energy.” What that means is too complex to explain here. But,

My lack of Lover energy explained why I wasn’t very warm or brimming with passion for life’s hedonistic pleasures. My lack of Magician energy explained why I was repelled by much of the game theory that advised manipulating group dynamics or building entourages. I had a very clear sense of what is, what should be, and a drive to perfect my skill in imposing this vision onto the world. I somewhat flattered myself that I was a warrior king. Per Jung, ‘inflation’ is the condition in which a boy lives when he is at an (unwelcome) extreme of his archetype. He stays there into adulthood. Inflation is what we talk about to say ‘he has an inflated ego’ or ‘he needs to be brought down a peg.’

Reading “King Warrior Magician Lover” makes Krauser see his own deficiencies. With the help of his coach, Colin, Krauser realizes that he “was still quite antagonistic towards women and tended to treat seduction like a fight I had to win rather than a dance both sides revelled in. This is because I’d built up thirty-four years of reference experiences that I wasn’t particularly good with women and the rare pre-game successes I had were more lottery wins than carefully laid plans.” How many of you have the self-critical faculty necessary to make real improvements? And as for us, our first sex party blew away many of our reference experiences, never to see them return.

Women want to be seduced and loved, but too few men have the tools and mindset to give them what they want. The things men think women want women often don’t. Men need to understand and consciously build understanding. Krauser writes that eventually “My calibration was so well-honed that I could see men the way women do. I could look into their eyes and see fear and the need to pleasure others. I could see how brittle their self-esteem is, giving themselves away with little ticks and tells a keen-eyed observer can spot.” That means he understands women as Neo understands and see the Matrix. Most men never bother. Men who surrender and say, “What do women really want?” are ignoring the signs and knowledge all around them.

I could write much more about “Balls Deep” but I will emphasize a few points about why guys fail:

1. Be exceptional. The average American is fat, eats like a beast, watches insane amounts of TV, and reads maybe two books a year.

2. Political opinions are mostly pointless. Vote, read, but don’t identify yourself based on crazy national or global politics you can barely impact. Sex is physical and primal. Politics are cerebral and recent. Sex you can do something about, today. Have political ideals and opinions and all the rest but know when to flourish them and when to furl them. Most women want to be fucked by good guys infinitely more than they want to be with someone who is politically simpatico.

3. A lot of stuff doesn’t matter much. Money, school, the car you drive (or don’t: I’ve not driven a car for much of my adult life): those are excuses. Women will be with you for who you are and how you make them feel, not your resume.

4. Accept rejection. It will sting but it must be.

5. Find good people. Eliminate toxic ones. Good people enable growth. It is hard to grow without reinforcement. Other men are not your enemy.

Social justice warriors will hate “Balls Deep,” and for them reading it will be as futile as militant Christians reading Richard Dawkins. Women should read this book with as an open a mind as they can (to understand what life looks like for guys) and guys should read it to understand that what they thought was impossible is actually quite possible. Many guys have written us messages saying, implicitly or explicitly, that they admire and desire our hedonistic lifestyle and many sex partners. And yet compared to a couple like Gatsby’s Whore we’re not even that adventurous. Gatsby’s Whore is as inspiring to us as we might be to others. We mean: check out this massive download of their smut. Whilst people may think us adventurous they really have no idea how deep things go. We go to sex parties. Their lives seem to be sex parties.

Guys need to read “Balls Deep” because we get many, many pathetic messages, on here, Tumblr, Reddit, and elsewhere, from truly pathetic guys. Most of those pathetic messages we don’t even reply to, because the guys sending them are so hopeless that they don’t deserve help or guidance.

Plus, we know that it’s not hard for normal guys who aren’t freaks and weirdos to meet and get with reasonable women. It just isn’t, and if you’re a guy and you’re paying attention and you can’t get a girlfriend, that tells us and everyone else something useful about you, and it tells us that we don’t want to hang out with you. Even the guys we’ve had threesomes with are guys who at one point had good girlfriends. Having a decent girl validates a guy, and because, again, it isn’t that hard to do. Meditate on that, male losers reading this.

Loads of horny women out there are looking for decent guys. I’ve fucked many, strangely often via online dating, where something about my demeanor and first-date attitude says, “The sex we have won’t get back to anyone you know and will be held in your favor instead of against you.” Sex toy shops alone are good evidence for the pervasive, unfulfilled horniness of women.

Women’s magazines are another. Cosmo has been publishing sex tips for single girls for how many decades again? Many guys are too fucked up to be decent but most aren’t. Guys need some help. The dumb messages and cock shots we get are evidence of this. Guys need to hit the fucking gym and learn some decent social skills. In some ways that’s all Krauser is doing — just goes much, much further than most other guys ever will.

Part of getting better is getting off the fucking Internet and out among normal people. Krauser channeled his weirdness in a productive direction. You can too. This book demands close, attentive reading.

Most of you who started this post didn’t finish, and those of you who finished won’t read the book, and those of you who read the book won’t execute. Only a few will ever execute. Which is a shame. Women want you too. Rejection is nature’s way of telling you to adapt.