Roosh V, trolling for page views with deliberately offensive posts, finds some supporters in the Men’s Rights subreddit
The glamorous life of an internet king
So our old friend Roosh Valizadeh seems to have fully embraced the Matt Forney school of misogynist internet celebrity, posting over-the-top offensive posts in a transparent attempt to gin up controversy and blog traffic. And it’s working: he’s brought an avalanche of well-deserved hate down upon himself. But don’t worry: he’s still got some supporters — not only on his own blog but in the Men’s Rights subreddit.
The post that’s been keeping the servers hosting Roosh’s Return of Kings blog busy lately is a guest post by Tuthmosis with the title “5 Reasons To Date A Girl With An Eating Disorder.”
It’s pretty much as awful as you’d imagine. Reason 1: “Her obsession over her body will improve her overall looks.” Number 2: “She costs less money” because she’ll only order salads at dinner. Hilarious. It’s all so predictably “provocative” it’s not worth quoting in any more detail.
Roosh has responded to the controversy with an, er, “Publisher Response” that was clearly designed to further stir the shit. In it, he claimed that the original post
contains value for men who want to date thin women in America, a country that is currently facing a devastating obesity epidemic, which we recently highlighted with Fat Shaming Week.
He followed this by claiming that Return of Kings wasn’t promoting eating disorders, merely trying to help women struggling with eating disorders find happiness in love:
We are educating our masculine readers not to pass on eating disorder victims just because they have an illness, yet instead of receiving thanks, we’re receiving hate instead. If we all had cancer, and someone wrote an article titled “5 Reasons To Fornicate With A Man Who Has Cancer,” we would spread it far and wide to make fornicating with us a better proposition for women. We would not send death threats or calls for censorship like is happening to us now. I think a bit more graciousness is in order for our unorthodox method of outreach.
As a much less obnoxious internet celebrity once put it:
Despite setting out to offend as many people as possible, Roosh reacted with indignation when he discovered that someone on the Men’s Rights subreddit had dared to suggest that perhaps he had stepped over the line a bit.
What’s doubly ironic about this tweet is that he actually has a lot of defenders in that thread — and that the thread itself has gotten twice as many downvotes as upvotes. Only a few found the Return of Kings post offensive; the others dismissed it as clickbait — or agreed with it.
One commenter, posting under the name of a famous turn-of-the-twentieth centuryantifeminist and opponent of women’s suffrage, apparently sees Roosh as some sort of heroic defender of anorexic women:
Meanwhile, the ironically named LogicalDebater beamed us this message from his home planet:
And our old friend Demonspawn, quoting from a commenter on Return of Kings, blamed the outrage on fat, ugly feminists jealous because men would rather date thin women.
![Demonspawn [-1] 1 point 21 hours ago (8|7) This comment on the followup article nailed it to the wall: The anger was only thinly veiled by the eating disorder arguments. Ultimately the original article was about accepting women albeit with the benefit that she's thin and won't cost as much, but I think that is the rub. The feminist hate speech directed in the comments and emails to this site was latent anger at a man's desire to date thin women. Since feminism encourages the destruction of female beauty and femininity most feminists have a hatred toward anything that encourages or accepts women for these traits. The hate directed at this site under the guise of "eating disorders" is just that, the article hit a rough nerve with feminists who hate beauty and acceptance when it is defined by men.](http://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/demon.png?w=604)
Men’s Rights Activists often complain about being lumped together with pickup artists; here, many of them have chosen to associate themselves with Roosh at his worst.
The greatest human rights movement of the 21st century, folks!
EDIT: Belated thanks to Snork Maiden for pointing me to Roosh’s tweet and the Reddit thread!
Posted on November 21, 2013, in antifeminism, are these guys 12 years old?, attention seeking, demonspawn, doubling down, empathy deficit, evil fat fatties, mansplaining, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, playing the victim, PUA, reddit, rhymes with roosh and tagged anti-feminism, antifeminism, eating disorders, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, PUA, reddit. Bookmark the permalink. 437 Comments.
Damn! Gazumped again! I’d just finished writing a blog post on this when I clicked over to your blog.
My problem with the post is that it fails as comedy. If you’re going to write click bait, at least make it funny.
Failing at comedy seems to be ROK’s writers main goal in life.
If they could only learn to be genuinely funny, they might attract a real readership. When you get to generating desperate clickbait, where do you go from there?
Roosh’s first rule of holes: When you’re in one, dig to China because women know their place there.
I hesitate to visit his site to discover advertisers, but a boycott of the advertisers seems in order, assuming he has any of note.
Perhaps letter campaigns to booksellers which carry his books. Talking to him or about him only seems to fuel the fire.
That’s what I never got about this little tactic. Yeah, it generates traffic, but it’s not like you can write aggressively offensive trash and then switch back to high-quality material, can you?
And I’m really flippin shocked there’s no citation from LogicalDebater.
Roosh is someone who’ll spending weeks throwing rocks at a hornets nest, then when the hornets fly out and want to sting him from time to time, it’s all ‘Waaaah! waaaah! What about my freeeeedom!!’
In his oh so serious publisher response he emphasizes that them on ROK are not promoting eating disorders, they’re all about encouraging dudes to show compassion for anorexics (by suggesting they’ll make lovely submissive girlfriends). This sentiment is undermined slightly by a post Roosh wrote a couple of years back where he indulged in a fantasy about inducing eating disorders in overweight women as a miracle diet. I quote:
‘I like to think of myself as pragmatic, always aiming for the least amount of harm for all parties involved. Therefore I have concluded that having an eating disorder would be more beneficial to a girl’s health and society as a whole than weighing over 135 pounds.’
I’ll now go and read your post on this Bodycrimes, I really liked your post about long hair vs short btw.
@Snork Maiden – thank you!
Do you think Roosh really thinks all that, or is he just driving hits? I wonder what he’ll riff on next – the joys of going out with a girl who’s been genitally mutilated?
Wow, what a surprise, that these asshats COMPLETELY MISUNDERSTAND what eating disorders are, the variety they come in, and their impact on the people with them.
A lot of people with eating disorders aren’t skinny. A lot of people with eating disorders do not lose weight the way people think they do. Eating disorders will NOT MAKE YOU PRETTY. They have a whole complex of physical health issues that come along with them. They are not a fucking aesthetic; they are ILLNESSES.
THIS recovering non-anorexic (but starving variety eating disorder, which most people conflate with anorexic) wishes he’d go fuck a cactus. I don’t need his fucking attention, and I do not want a fucking chaser who thinks my propensity to starve myself is just soooo funny and sexually arousing.
And fuck you, size acceptance is AWESOME.
Sorry, I can’t get past his greasy hair. Ew ew ew.
Therefore I have concluded that having an eating disorder would be more beneficial to a girl’s health and society as a whole than weighing over 135 pounds.’
Okay, I’m going to go and do some other shit now, because EDs actually have the highest fatality rate of all mental illnesses, are extremely dangerous, and as someone who made himself pretty sick through starvation, this is making me very, very angry.
I like how they think accepting one group of people means that we have to hate everything else. Or that fat acceptance is entirely about wanting everyone to stay fat(it’s easier to lose weight if you aren’t shamed for being fat, as David posted about in his post about Fat Shaming week).
I guess Roosh can’t afford soap or shampoo on the salary his how-to-rape-drunk-girls guides generate.
Also that picture is fucking creepy. How is it possible to make a creepy picture like that with just a dude cooking chicken?
I had to check with a converter site since I’m used to thinking in kilos rather than pounds but… heck, I’m over 135 pounds! Barely, but still. And I’m fit! I really have far less body fat than your average gal (which is the reason, I guess, that my boobs are like 1/3 of an A-cup, meaning Roosh and all his readers would be like EEEWW upon seeing my body I guess…). And I’m quite a lot of kilos from the BMI “overweight” line.
I’m obvs not saying there’s anything wrong with having lots of bodyfat or being overweight, just that these people have a really skewed view on what overweight/fat is.
@katz – good point about the greasy hair. My question is, why doesn’t he shave/cut his hair? Instead of spending all that money to fly around the world and fail at picking up women, why not invest in some hairdressing? It might improve his pick up rate a smidgen.
Unless he’s totally pimply or something under all that hair.
RE: Dvarghundspossen
just that these people have a really skewed view on what overweight/fat is.
This is actually REALLY common. It’s rather embarrassing what people THINK fat is. And also, of COURSE they think that no people with an eating disorder would EVER be fat!
I’m sorry. It’s just a rife fucking problem where people have eating disorders, but are encouraged or completely ignored because of their weight, leading to much bigger dangers down the road. (Even if you aren’t lose weight, eating disorders CAN cause organ failure, among other fun things.)
Other than the fact that he’s probably dripping hair grease all over his future dinner, what makes it creepy is the way he’s leaning over the chicken and staring at it while holding the meat tenderizing hammer. I’m picturing a thought bubble over his head reading “I will pound you like the vagina of an unconscious girl who looks like one of the many girls who rejected me in high school”. He’s not quite at “it puts the lotion on its skin” levels of creepy, but he’s getting there.
Hahahaha making light of eating disorders is just so amusing. Roosh can GFH
Creepy men telling girls they’re “lovable” isn’t exactly helpful to them. They’re acting like their love is so much more important to women than, ya know, basic health.
Am I the only person shaking my head over the fact that he’s got raw chicken on a wooden cutting board? Totally hoping he gets a nice bout of food poisoning from that eventually :D
I’m concerned about the raw chicken juice all over that nice absorbent wooden chopping board…
Also aren’t you supposed to put plastic wrap over the hammer or chicken?
Now I’m thinking back to my time in the eating disorders loony ward. Nothing sexier than lanugo.
Then there was the woman who Roosh would consider fat–probably all of 140–who came to the ward straight from a week in the ICU after having a heart attack at 25.
The things is, they AREN’T telling people like me that we’re lovable. They’re saying we’re FUCKABLE, specifically BECAUSE we have an eating disorder and therefore are probably “pretty.” Which is first of all completely untrue, but also–fuck your penis, dude, I want to be HEALTHY, not laid. Fuck a cactus.
I sometimes follow Roosh on twitter, and one of the most sickening things I saw yesterday was his response to some young woman who had complained that that he was trivializing the horror of her very real, very life-threatening medical condition. Acknowledging her attractive picture, he offered her “some sweet intimacy” as a consolation, but admonished her that she needed to understand “our need to express ourselves.”
Yeah, developmentally he seems stuck in that prepubescent stage some neglected kids go through, where ANY attention is better than none. The strange thing, he was never neglected, at least not by his own mother, who is supposed to have positively smothered him with attention (and still would if he would stick around long enough).
Does he really believe what he writes? Who knows. At a certain point,habitual liars acquiesce to their own lies. Well, truth is hardly the point to him; His motive is to be recognized as somebody to be reckoned with, an alpha dog in a world of betas.
@opium4themasses
*applause*
RE: La Strega
Acknowledging her attractive picture, he offered her “some sweet intimacy” as a consolation, but admonished her that she needed to understand “our need to express ourselves.”
Wow. That’s the most condescending piece of bullshit I’ve heard ever.
:( I’m sorry LBT.
I remember how some of my female peers in high school had “starvation days” set in their calenders. They were twelve/thirteen year olds. It makes me sad that a freaking twelve/thirteen year old feels the need to starve herself in order to stay thin due to fucked up body standards.
Roosh can go step on Legos. Or get food poisoning, since he’s totally doing chicken wrong.
His hair alone would put me off my feed…but get me down under 135 it would not.
Roosh is the Platonic ideal of a scumbag and not just because he’s an admitted rapist, though that’s main reason he should be discarded by humanity.
What’s pathetic is that so many MRA’s truly believe that somehow their blogging really is going to return U.S. society back to good ol’ days before 60’s. They believe that getting 15 minutes of fame is the same as success.
I admit that I went over to Roosh V’s site to see what the fuss is all about. If you read between the lines you can see that he’s no where nearly as good at Game as he says he is, even in countries like Ukraine and Poland. How does he get the money that enables him to travel and live abroad like he does?
… I’m sort of guilty of not washing my hair that often too. Shampoos are actually pretty harsh, so I end up washing my hair once a week to not dry it out too much. >_> <_<
RE: Alice
Yeah. And contrary to popular myth, eating disorders aren’t restricted to just wanting to confine to body image ideals. I starved myself pretty regularly for a long time, but it had nothing to do with my weight. No kidding, my body image was warped, because I never noticed how sickly I was looking, but I did it for reasons pretty much completely unrelated to my weight. That was just the side effect everyone else noticed.
(On a side note, I decided that I wanted to spend today sitting in the sun and not going out to do my usual exercise. It is INCREDIBLY HARD to resist the panicky voice in my head that says if I don’t exercise, TERRIBLE THINGS will happen.)
As a woman currently suffering from anorexia this just makes me ill.
Also, I just remembered that there is a certain coterie of MRAssholes (or PUAssholes? or both?) who literally fetishize eating disorder victims. They troll these poor girls’ selfies for their porn, and I’m pretty sure they have a subreddit (or used to; they’re on the order of creepshots types). These girls are dying, and they call THAT beautiful.
A more clear and obvious misogyny would be hard to find.
LBT – Want a hug?
In my experience, I’ve used food to punish myself. Besides the loss of appetite thanks to depression (yayyyyy, not), I’d often not eat because I felt as if I didn’t deserve any substance. I’m glad that I actually want to eat now, but I still have self-punishment tendencies.
Not everything is related to body image issues, you’re right. But Roosh is a shithead for thinking that we should encourage women to become anorexics.
Kate – *offers hugs*
We knew he was a douche, and we knew there would be douches on r/mr to support him, so I am also fixating on WHY ISN’T HE WEARING A HAIRNET??!!?!!?!!?
(And I think it’s hilarious how two manboobzers pointed out the problem with the wooden cutting board. Feminist food-safety fanatics for-the-win!)
Dry, flyaway curlyhead here, so I hear ya. I keep the ‘poo down to once a week, follow it up with a good heavy conditioner, and in the meantime, I freshen my head up once or twice a week with a baking soda wash (concentrating on the scalp, then working my way down to the eds), followed by an apple cider vinegar rinse combed through and left on for a minute or so. A tablespoon of either in a cup of water, rinsing well after each. Nice and gentle, and keeps the Rooshy-douchey grodiness away!
Watch their income?! WTF?!
Roosh can go fuck off for this crap seriously.
And hugs for anyone who wants them.
And even MORE HUGS.
I also noticed the food safety issue but a. given how he looks I suspect raw chicken is the least of the potential hygiene-related hazards in his apartment and b. he deserves food poisoning. Hey, if he pukes for a few days it will make him lose weight and thus become a more valuable member of society!
*ends*, grrr
cloudiah – Regarding wooden cutting boards, my mother uses one cutting board for everything—vegetables, meat, seafood, poultry (cooked and raw), duran, sugar cane, etc—and as far as I know, so long as you wash that board really well with warm, soapy water, you should be okay. The only bout of food poisoning I got was because I accidentally took a small sip of expired milk.
That being said, I have two color-coded plastic cutting boards for raw veggies and raw meat and I wash the one I use for meat in warm soapy water.
Yeah, Roosh, please keep cooking your chicken that way; eventually, salmonella will deal with you.
I doubt Roosh washes anything much with hot, soapy water.
Bina – I have very fine, straight hair, and even when I don’t wash my hair for a week, shampooing strips away all of the oils and makes it feel so dry. :(
I might want to borrow your idea for keeping your hair nice and fresh.
cloudiah – Unfortunate implications abound!
N’thing the “ewww that hair is gross ewww” response. He looks like a bloke I used to work with. A co-worker described that guy’s hair as a bowl of oil with salt spread on it.
Bodycrimes, loved your blog article. :)
I shampoo twice or three times a week, and just rinse my hair in the shower in between times. Luckily my hair’s thick, and doesn’t get oily or dry these days. If I shampooed every day it’d get eaten: Mads has decided shampoo-scented hair is the BEST.
I think he should be covered in a full body condom at all times to protect members of the public. Like in Naked Gun, but tragic instead of funny.
With a full-length hessian sack over the top, preferably, so we don’t have to see him at all.
Another good thing for dry flyaway hair, that I learned about by googling no-poo and curly hair, is conditioner-only washing. Most drugstore conditioners are pretty thin soups anyway, and you could have knocked me over with your pinky when I learned that they all have a slight surfactant effect. Some curlyheads wash only with that! And it gets the hair clean. Also worth a try!
There are some nice leave-in conditioners around, too. I use one called Revitafoam; it’s a sort of conditioner and very soft mousse, and good for adding curl to the ends, without being stiff or heavy.
Wanna de-crown this “internet king”? STARVE THE BEAST! Here’s how:
The site is a money-maker for Daryush Valizadeh (“Roosh V”), who finances his ex-pat life on revenue coming from Amazon Affilliate click-throughs that appear on both returnofkings.com and rooshv.com. We can shut off that revenue stream by insisting that Amazon enforce its Operating Agreement, which is here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement/ .
Amazon shuts down affiliates if they have Amazon ads on sites that:
(a) promote or contain sexually explicit materials;
(b) promote violence or contain violent materials;
(c) promote or contain libelous or defamatory materials;
(d) promote discrimination, or employ discriminatory practices, based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age;
Wanna help? Complain here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/reports .
Seller nickname (affilliate name) is rooshlog-20
Then cite many specific posts on returnofkings.com and rooshv.com that violate one or all the above.
So there you go.
Bina – Really? That’s pretty interesting. I should borrow from the curlyhead cookbook and try that… well, as soon as I finish my Costco sized bottle of shampoo first.
My hair has like two settings: extremely oily or extremely dry. I can’t win. :(
Difficult hair certainly gets a pass, but Roosh’s hair looks more like it would be totally manageable if he just took a shower once in a while.
Hey, maybe that’s the way to troll Roosh, replicate his faux concern about women’s weight and health by deluging him with personal grooming tips. We only want to help raise his game to the next level, right? First, the hair…
Then, suggestions for waxing his arms.
Second, don’t keep your cereal boxes right next to the meat you’re tenderizing unless you want them splattered with chicken juice. Third, is that a milk carton on the far right, just sitting out unrefrigerated?
He isn’t just trolling. He, or his minions, also sock puppeting like mad on FaceBook. There have been at least a dozen sock accounts created to join feminist groups in order to post links to his posts.
katz – Looks like it. Also, Roosh, why are you pounding unwrapped chicken? Aren’t those kind of tenderizers hard to clean?
I want to suggest that he braid his arm hair into patterns because young women find that totally hot, just to fuck with him.
Maybe he should put gel on it for that armfauxhawk look.
Also, corks hanging off the bottom edge of his beard for that super manly Crocodile Dundee look. How he’s going to get anything to stay on with all that grease I’m not sure – super glue?
I hear you there, too. Scalp oil glands tend to overreact to harsh shampoos, so that may in fact be the root of your trouble right there (oops, pun). Just another thing I learned while researching no-poo!
No shit. Every time I see him, I get this mental whiff of old sweatsocks, grungy wool, and ten-day-old curry.
BTW, why does he feel compelled to pound chicken at all? The stuff’s not tough unless you’re a hopelessly inept cook who leaves it in way too long, or don’t add enough water while cooking. Just one more thing about him that totally won’t attract the ladies, but send them screaming the other way, if you ask me…
I can only assume your a Roosh Supporter. I mean you clearly state that these over the top offensive posts are a transparent attempt to fabricate controversy and traffic. You are either a mindless idiot falling for a trap that you have clearly stated you know is there, or you are supporting Roosh by backing his tactic to drive traffic to his site.
Now, now Bina, curry is too good for Roosh.
Ten day old dried cum.