UPDATE: Roosh has announced that he is cancelling all the meetups. For more see my post here.
Roosh Valizadeh may be getting exactly what he wants. The scuzzball pickup artist and would-be philosopher of “neomasculinity,” best known for his semi, demi, sort-of-satirical article advocating that rape be made legal on private property, has ignited a firestorm of controversy in the media and online by announcing plans to hold meetups for his fans in 165 locations worldwide this coming Saturday.
As someone who’s been watching Roosh for many years, I can certainly understand the outrage. Roosh is a thoroughly despicable person — a misogynist, racist, homophobe, and anti-Semite who has self-published a series of books of pickup artistry that many observers see as rape manuals.
He teaches his followers that a “no” from a woman is usually just an indication to keep trying; he fills his books with “field reports” of his own sexual experiences that often seem indistinguishable from rape. (That’s why some people describe him as a confessed serial rapist; he’s never been charged much less convicted of rape, as far as I know.)
And then there is that piece of his extolling what he sees as the benefits of legalizing rape on private property. (He now claims it was satire, but was unable to explain to the BBC what exactly he was supposedly satirizing.)
Unfortunately, some of the media coverage of Roosh and his planned meetups has been sloppy and misleading; assorted rumors about the events are flying around online.
This post is intended to give you solid information about Roosh and his meetups and to correct some of the misinformation floating around.
If you need more information about Roosh himself and his beliefs, please take a look at some or all of the posts of mine listed below. The headlines are pretty self-explanatory, and I carefully document every point I make in them.
Pickup guru Roosh V: End rape by making it legal
Are Roosh V’s “Bang” books how-to guides for rape?
Roosh V has a little trouble with the concept of “no.”
Roosh V: “Women Must Have Their Behavior And Decisions Controlled By Men.”
Roosh the PUA dude: Women are “lubricated holes that exist mostly for a man’s sexual pleasure.”
Why pickup guru Roosh Valizadeh is dangerous to women
Domestic violence laws are a crime against nature, according to pickup artist Roosh V
Roosh V: Gay marriage is part of “a degenerate march to persecute heterosexuals” and destroy society
Roosh V denounced as degenerate “muzzie” by white supremacists he’s trying to woo
Roosh V Is Angry That the BBC Has Portrayed Him as the Monster He Is
Oh, and I almost forgot this one:
Roosh V: It’s just a matter of time before one of my fans commits a mass shooting
And these are just some of my posts detailing many terrible things about this terrible man. See even more here.
Now that we know what sort of person Roosh is, we can move on to asking just what exactly he’s trying to do with all these meetups he’s scheduled around the world. I can’t answer that completely, but let me offer several caveats and warnings.
Whether you are planning something to counter a meetup in your area, or simply trying to understandwhat’s going on, here are a few things to keep in mind.
Roosh loves to troll
While it’s abundantly clear that Roosh means most of what he says — including the horrific things he’s said about rape — he is also a bit of a troll, and he’s clearly stoking the fires of the current controversy in order to get more attention for himself ad his noxious ideas. He’s also using the controversy in order to find new “SJW” villains that he and his followers can defame and harass.
Roosh is almost certainly NOT coming to your town
Roosh is planning 165 meetups; there is only one of him.
He originally said, in a FAQ on the upcoming meetups, that he plans to attend the one in Washington DC. But after the Australian media got wind of his planned meetups, Roosh stoked the firestorm by tweeting that he had booked a plane ticket to the land down under. Later, he followed up with tweets suggesting that he might instead travel there by boat in hopes of avoiding the authorities.
https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/694327787889528832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
He was almost certainly trolling. My guess is that he will indeed be going to the DC meetup, but only Roosh knows for sure.
He is not planning “‘rape should be legal’ meetups,” as the Toronto Sun claimed in a headline
The meetups, as Snopes.com has pointed out, seem to be informal get-togethers for his fans, not demonstrations or seminars or pickup bootcamps or anything much beyond a way for his readers to meet in person. Roosh no doubt hopes that the events will help solidify his fan base and make them more committed to him. They are also pretty clearly intended as a publicity stunt, and in this they have succeeded wildly.
The truth about Roosh is damning enough; there is no need to exaggerate or invent.
Roosh wants his critics to overreact and embarrass themselves in public
In a FAQ for the upcoming meetups, Roosh urges his readers to record any “crazy feminists” who show up
with your camera, upload the footage to Dropbox, and then send it to me at [email protected] afterwards so we can tear them up. …
I will exact furious retribution upon anyone who challenges you in public on that date (remember to record them).
Roosh is also planning “retribution” against journalists and presumably anyone else whom he thinks have maligned him
Earlier today, on his forum, Roosh announced the start of what he called “OPERATION BULLHORN,” a “counter-operation” against “lying reporters” who have presented him as “pro rape.”
Where did this worldwide mob get the idea that we are meeting to discuss rape tactics? Through the media. Dozens of reporters have now blatantly lied about all of us being “pro rape” and have a “rape advocacy platform.” They have frothed up a crazy mob that is ready to dox and assault. We must hold journalists fully accountable for their incitement.
For this operation, locate all media articles written in the past week that contained the lie that we support rape and harm against women. Then collect as much as you can of the following information and post it in this thread:
-Name of reporter
-Name of media outlet he/she works for
-Most likely city of residence (don’t publish addresses but save them for possible future use)
-Twitter account URL (if available)
-Their Facebook profile URL (if available)
-Their photo (uploaded to a service like imgur.com)
In the forum thread — now locked to all but forum members, but still up on Google cache — Roosh’s fanboys have started tracking down and posting info on a number of journalists. What Roosh intends to do with this information is not yet clear.
Roosh and his fans will almost certainly try to track down the personal information of any anti-Roosh activists they manage to capture on video as well. Roosh recently announced that he had finally identified the woman who so famously dumped a beer on him during his visit to Montreal last summer. So be careful.
Roosh is making the meetup locations for some of his events private
In a post today on his Return of Kings site, Roosh declared that “the world is moving against us,”and announced that he would be making a number of the planned meetups private.
Since this meetup was never intended as a confrontation with unattractive women and their enablers, I’m moving to save as many of these meetups as I can before Saturday so that men can still meet in private away from a loud, obnoxious, dishonest, and potentially violent mob. …
In the next 24 hours, many meetups will be made private. …
We’re not going to be able to privatize all the meetups that are being threatened with protest, but we’ll save the ones that are in the most critical danger.
For those organizing against Roosh, this may actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Instead of a potentially ugly confrontation with a handful of Roosh fanboys looking to provoke a fight (that they can capture on video), the protests can be reframed not as a protest centering around one guy and his followers but as a public rebuke of the rape culture they embody.
At least that would be my preference. If you have other and possibly better ideas, feel free to post them in the comments below, or share what you’re already planning.
Whatever you’re planning to do (or not do) on Saturday, be prepared.
Be safe! Lock down your social media presence online. Doublecheck your privacy settings, and don’t reveal anything you wouldn’t want Roosh’s fanboys to find. If you’re going to protest in person, go with friends.
Know what you’re talking about! Accusing him of things he’s not actually doing plays into his hands.
Be aware that whatever you do may get recorded and posted on Youtube; avoid tactics that may not play well on camera.
Again, if you think I’m wrong about any or all of this, please share your thoughts in the comments below. Unless you’re a Roosh fanboy; we don’t really need you stinking up the place.
Such great response from Maori & other pacific island & many other nationalities of men living in Aotearoa, New Zealand who worship their wives,partners,daughters,sisters,mothers,aunties,neighbours & friends, whom belong to the ‘Its Not Ok’ ‘White Ribbon’ ‘Shine’ & other Anti Violence Campaign groups in our Country for their comittment to confront perpetrators such as Roosh & others of his ilk… to educate him/them on ‘why’ he/they need to banish his/their ‘mentally retarded’ ideaology which may land themselves or himself in prison with the best of ‘lifer/rapists’ with absolutely ‘no sympathy…Looking at this poor excuse of a man in his mugshots show he is ‘very ugly’ & unkempt looking…I feel his people of Armenian & Iranian origin would be very ’embarrased’ that a piece of ‘faecal droppings’ came from them…Roosh may have been a victim of rape & incest as a child & therefore developed ‘stockholm syndrome’ hence his conniving,devious narcissistic personality short of ‘evil intentions’…In one way I was looking forward to the ‘education he would have got from our men by him being in our country…But nah…he just isnt clever enough to debate against our men…we would hang him…’verbally’…DAMN THE DAMNED !!!
‘In my own fine city, on the very same day, there will be a parade of Vikings pouring out of the castle to locations around where they will proceed to tell viking-ish stories to all comers.’
Oh man, where do you live? I’ll come to that meetup…
Re hate-reading: I downloaded the Roosh box set for free a while back; maybe someday I’ll take the time to flip through them.
@ guest
You like your travelling for culture, you ever checked this out?
http://www.uphellyaa.org
Wow, that looks pretty spectacular (though gotta say we burn a boat in York for Viking week, so….) I have not yet been that far north–a friend and I did a bike trip to the Outer Hebrides because I wanted to see Callanish (I was working at Stonehenge at the time)–I would like to go to the Orkneys sometime soon to see the Neolithic sites, and maybe we should just keep going…but January? Not so sure.
I actually popped back in here to say I just saw Roosh’s face on the teevee! He certainly is getting a lot of attention.
@ guest
Seeing all the Scottish Island sites is very much on my dream list. Some amazing things up there.
Did you see the latest Woodhenge analysis? Showing that people attended the big feast from as far away as Orkney.
As for burning boats, do you think in a couple of hundred years there’ll be a ‘Time Team’ equivalent where they dig up all the burnt-out stolen cars and some bloke in a stripy jumper will say “well, this is clearly ritual”? 🙂
roosh and majority of manospherians are chicken, when criticised too much, their last resort is “i didn’t mean it” plan.
now it’s a fun show when he desperately tries to prove that infamous article was satire.
As a Torontonian, I would advise you not to worry about whatever the Toronto Sun publishes. It’s a rag given to hyperbole and “truthiness”. Oddly, though, that’s usually done in favour of reactionary jerks. Google “Toronto Sun Welcome to Hell”. The newspaper by morons, for morons!
@Alan Callanish is amazing–we only spent two days there, after more than a week of cycling up the islands; I wish we’d arranged the trip differently so we could have had more time to experience the atmosphere and learn about the stones. (We did stay with a local who was something of an expert on them, so we ended up learning a lot more than we otherwise would have.)
I was working on the engineering, not the archaeology (I’d tell people at parties we were planning to move the monument closer to London to make it easier for the tourists) so wasn’t following much except what the archaeologists needed me to know, but I did read/hear that the monument really was a global attraction in its day–some of the remains there and at Durrington Walls are from thousands of miles away. (There’s a great book on the whole site by an English archaeologist who worked with an archaeologist from Madagascar, who said ‘yeah we have these all over the place where I come from–wood is for the living, stone is for the dead.’)
I remember hearing once that ‘ritual’ means ‘we have no idea what the hell this is for.’
@AW:
Could be worse, I live in the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s, where Toronto Sun columnist Sue Ann Levy (the one who used to regularly refer to City Hall under mayor David Miller as ‘Socialist Silly Hall’) ran for the provincial “Progressive” Conservative party in a 2009 by-election. (The previous Liberal MPP having retired to join a group doing development and revitalization, before retiring from that because he ran over a bicycle courier. “Progressive” in scare quotes because Hudak was never particularly progressive.)
When she lost by a significant margin to the Liberal candidate, she immediately ranted that, people were obviously going to get the government that they deserved, before walking that back and claiming she didn’t mean to disparage any of the other candidates.
There’s a reason why the Toronto Sun was jokingly referred for a while at City Hall as the ‘love letter to Rob Ford’.
For those familiar with the British press… the Toronto Sun used to regularly have a ‘page three girl’, albeit fully clothed. These days the ‘Sunshine Girl’ is usually at the back rather than actually on page three where she used to be, and they do at least often have a ‘Sunshine Boy’ as well; but I think the very existence of that tells you a lot about the level of news involved in the Toronto Sun.
@ guest
Ha, I have actually seen moving Stonehenge put forward as a serious proposal.
They’re doing isotopic analysis on the teeth from the Salsbury Plain burials (A Bradford lass developed the technique!) and so far it’s about 50% local and 50% ‘Flipping miles away’ (a technical term that includes all of Western Europe and the wild north of the UK)
Thanks as ever for your work. Just one point I’d like to make:
“Roosh wants his critics to overreact and embarrass themselves in public”
I think you mean he wants his critics to REACT so that he can embarrass them. It’s important that we warn people about his tactics and the possibility they may be filmed so that they can use that information as they want (and protest groups should discuss tactics) but I think when we talk about it publicly we need to make it clear that no protestors deserve to be mocked or harassed. These people can twist anything to try to make their opponents look bad, it is so important that our main message is solidarity. Otherwise our comrades are open game for Dworkins-style “I said SOME not ALL” bullshit.
Please consider making some edits with this in mind.
OK, so his meetings are going underground, and he is trying to video protesters embarrassing themselves. I don’t think they can embarrass themselves. Whatever they do I think they are in the right, unless they commit arson.
The real issue here is the legality of publishing these books. Surely, even inside freedom of speech laws, it is illegal to promote crime (rape, domestic violence) and anti-discrimination laws could be used to ban the production of the books?
It occurs to me that this fellow might be going the Westboro Baptist route. Many people know about the church and its protests against gays and picketing at funerals, but what isn’t publicized enough is that the whole protest thing is a big scam. They make bank by announcing some sort of social inappropriate protest (like at the funerals of children, celebrities, and military personnel) and a horrified populace complains and a panicked local government moves to block the protest. The church sues for a big settlement and wins, of course. I suspect that this fellow may be attempting to forge a similar scam. If a local government blocks his meeting or a venue cancels his meeting, he will undoubtedly sue them. Also, by encouraging his followers to video protesters and reporters, he could sift through them looking for anything that can be trumped up into slander.
@ guest
I’m quite into archeology as I think you know, and sometimes I tag along on digs. I’ve found saying “hmm, my gut feeling is it’s ritual” is a pretty good bluff.
Also whenever they find a pottery shard saying “looks like Samian ware” turns out to be right about half the time and the rest of the time you get “No, but I can see why you think that”. 🙂
She must not be getting her daily attention and wants money. She also has a video “a vote for trump is a vote for men” which is bull what she actually means is “a vote for white straight abled men” because that loud d*** is racist, against Muslims, homophobic and mocked a disabled reporter.
Tiahine Wharekura-Kingi
F*** you they’re not ‘mentally retarded’ and there are people who have been raped, etc and still turn out to be good people if you do something wrong then you are responsible for your actions. And people don’t rape because they’re ugly it’s because they’re narcisstic and sadistic hell demons who do it because they think they can get away with it.
I think Roosh V is to feminism as the Westboro Baptist Church is to LGBT Rights and Bull Connor was to black rights back in the day.
He is someone with views that are sadly somewhat common but are so extreme in the way he disseminates them that he does nothing but creates sympathizers for the other side.
I went to one of those anti-Roosh rallies, and we had tremendous support from bystanders. I’m sure many of them weren’t staunch feminists or anything. Some could’ve been those “I’m not a feminist but…” types. But when you get someone like Roosh to represent the opposition, people are gonna come flying to support your cause.
“The [feminist] movement should thank God for [Roosh V]. He helped it as much as [feminist icon].”
I am old, male and ugly. Tired also.
I will sleep with nothing and no one except my jammies. You are not a sex object to me, you are just an objection. I need you for nothing.
But decrepit though I be, if you imagine you will tell me how to obey your feminist agenda and kneel to our new homosexual overlords, I believe you will be disappointed