Well, I have to give the terrible, terrible fellows at PUAhate credit for one thing: it was thanks to a post there that I ran across the videos of the exceedingly creepy pickup “artist” and minor Youtube celebrity that I’d like to bring to your attention today.
Meet George Godley, possibly the world’s worst pickup artist. Actually, I’m being a bit generous in my description here, because there is no artistry at all to what he does, just a gimmick: he carries a small video camera with him as he wanders the streets of London, apparently thinking that this gives him an excuse to waylay every attractive young woman who’s unfortunate enough to wander into his field of vision.
Godley apparently wants us to believe he’s “flirting” with the women he so awkwardly approaches, but flirting, like the Tango, takes two, and all but a few of the women in his videos make it abundantly clear from the get-go that they want nothing to do with him. This doesn’t seem to faze him much, and he plunges ahead, trying his best to keep up with them as they endeavor to escape his presence as quickly as possible.
Take the unfortunate woman who catches his eye at the start of this video, and who finally manages to make her escape a little short of the one-minute mark.
In this next video – skip ahead to about 50 seconds in to avoid some rather pointless wandering about — we see two failed “flirts.” His first attempt, if we can call it that, consists of nothing more than him standing in the vicinity of an attractive woman while surreptitiously filming her. After giving up on her without saying a word he runs smack into the “beauty” of the video’s title, and pesters her for about a minute until she manages to get away.
After a brief and awkward attempt at conversation punctuated by her nervous laughter, Godley gamely tries to convince “Beauty” that he’s “doing a movie for the festivals.” When she asks which festivals he’s talking about he unconvincingly stammers something about “Cannes, Sund – the usual circuit.” Even though she clearly wants to put as much distance between herself and him as she possibly can, he tries to force his card on her and plaintively asks “do you want to meet again?” The answer, a nervous “no.”
This next encounter – in which our hero barges into a restaurant to pester a woman who apparently looked briefly in his direction as he walked by outside — even Godley recognizes is a flat-out failure.
Godley has posted literally hundreds, maybe even thousands, of these “flirt” videos. None of the ones I’ve seen have gone well. Once in a while an exceptionally tolerant woman will chat with him briefly without actively trying to flee; that seems to be about as good as it gets. The rest document what is essentially serial street harassment, with Godley approaching woman after woman, none of whom give him any indication that they want to talk to him, and “flirting” with them until they can get away from him. It’s the same story, again and again and again.
Why does he do this, making video after video of these so-called “flirtations” and posting them on Youtube? Is he simply a masochist, approaching women he surely knows have no interest in talking to him, much less “flirting,” and posting evidence of his humiliating failures to Youtube for all the world to see?
Perhaps. But even more disturbing than the masochism is Godley’s obvious sadism. Despite his social awkwardness, it’s clear from the videos that Godley knows full well that the overwhelming majority of the women he “flirts” with just want to be left alone; it’s clear from their body language before he approaches them, and from everything they say and do after he starts talking to them. If a woman literally flees from you, that generally means she’s not into your shit.
But Godley doesn’t really need to be reminded of this. He’s well aware that he makes women uncomfortable — in this video he asks a woman if she’s really talking on her phone or just trying to get rid of him. But that doesn’t stop him.
He’s not missing the social cues; he’s deliberately ignoring the clear “noes” these women either tell him outright or telegraph with their facial expressions and body language as clearly as if they were shouting “no” to his face. Were he to approach random men on the street in a similar way, he would almost certainly get himself punched on a regular basis.
Luckily for him, he’s approaching women, and they’re much smaller than he is. It’s telling that he almost always approaches individual women, not the “sets” of two or more favored by most pickup artists, and that he seems to prefer approaching the supposedly more pliable Eastern European women also favored by so many manosphere assholes and creepy pickup artists.
Godley’s not-so-well-hidden hostility towards the women he approaches comes to the surface at the end of this video, in which he attempts to “flirt” with a woman photographing a tree and then then asks for her phone number as she tries to get away, an all-too-common ending to his videos. SPOILER ALERT: She doesn’t give it to him. SPOILER ALERT NUMBER TWO: He pretends he didn’t really want it anyway.
Even if Godley has managed to collect a few genuine phone numbers or email addresses along the way – and I’ve seen nothing to indicate that this is a regular or even an irregular occurrence – his alleged “success” in this endeavor comes at a steep cost. Not just to his pride – I don’t actually give a shit about that – but to the hundreds if not thousands of women he’s harassed along the way.
George Godley, a terrible pickup artist and an even worse human being.
@kittehs
Tell me if you want me to butt out of this conversation, just adding in my two cents.
Imo, if you’re attracted to (for ex) white people and not black people it’d probably be b/c of racism, even not intentionally, b/c (in america and other places I think, just giving the america disclaimer) lots of the beauty standards are more euorocentric, especially for women.
I still wouldn’t say you’re racist though, since you seem to have single target sexuality (that’s what you said, right?). There’s a difference between saying ‘white people are pretty and black people aren’t'(in terms of attracted to them-ness) and ‘i find this one white person pretty but not anyone else'(in terms of attracted to them-ness)
idk am I making any sense or just rambling. Anyway, tell me if you want me to shut up :/
That sort of talk certainly isn’t right – especially the “every group except X” thing – though again, I have the privilege of being white and not interested in being sexually attractive to people in general, so if a person of colour said white people don’t attract them, it wouldn’t feel like any sort of put-down or racist or whatever (like I said, lots of privilege operating there). Perhaps this is more about how it’s discussed publicly or framed, than about people’s actual pantsfeelings? I’m just dubious about how it felt like it was getting into saying someone’s a racist fail (consciously or not) for not being attracted to people outside their own race.
Also! If the one racial group you’re not attracted to happens to be the one that the society you grew up in constantly frames as unattractive? Yep, that’s racism. Not in the burning crosses on someone’s lawn sense, no, but it’s a sign that you’ve probably internalized a lot of the racist ideas that are floating around in your culture.
Racism isn’t always about deliberate acts of malice, often it’s about ideas that are quietly internalized and then assumed to be just how things are. For bonus irony points, this is how misogyny works too, which is why I’m confused to see TTF not seeing the underlying misogyny here when zie could see it when we were talking about racism and similar social mechanisms were at work.
Take this statement and take out the references to race, then replace them with references to gender in which it’s a man in the position of privilege and saying that something wouldn’t bother him. See now why it’s a problem?
Which btw is not to say that people should or are obligated to try to change their preferences. It’s just a recognition that yep, there was probably racism at work in the formation of those preferences.
@M Dubz: Not a degree, but my University had an honors program where we were required to present a Senior Thesis. Mine was my planet, which was awesome. My degree was in psychology.
That RPG world sounds AWESOME! I’m still internalizing the changes to culture required since the bipedal species on the planet has the ability to heal/change/add too their physical bodies, which I realized a while ago meant XY could become XX or vice versa, including the ability to reproduce (I decided to draw the line at self-reproduction, though logically it should be possible, by wriggling my hands and saying GENETICS!).
Marie, that makes perfect sense (no I’m not about to ask you to butt out of any conversation, this is an open thread after all!) 🙂
I think the situation you described absolutely would apply to the US. For that matter, it’d apply even more here now than it did when I was a kid, because we have people from all around the world living here now; the demographics are changing fast. There were very, very few PoC to be seen in much of Australia when I was growing up; the immigration laws known as the White Australia Policy only ended in the early 70s, when I was at school. I’m thinking of the difference between someone growing up in an all white environment (hell, the Greek and Italian kids stood out at my schools) and having that sort of unconscious racism embedded in them,and someone growing up in a more varied country, as the US, and having a distinction made between people they saw, or knew about, all the time.
Now it’s my turn to ask “am I rambling” lol.
I certainly wouldn’t argue with the “this race is pretty and this race isn’t” bit being racist! I know I see people of all sorts of races and think “wow, what a beautiful person”. It just doesn’t happen to be sexual.
… I’m starting to think this isn’t really my conversation at all, I’m projecting stuff. 😛
Ok, between insomnia and the pill for that, this is one crazy signing off for the night.
Cassandra – precisely, that’s why I said it was my privilege and it’s not the thing for public airing that way (in my just-posted bit).
@kittehs
well, yay that I made sense 😀 And part of why I was asking if I should butt out was because it was in reference to an old thread I wasn’t on during.
@argenti aetheri
good night 🙂
I think this goes with a lot of different internalized bigotries and what we perceive as innate preferences. Liking-something-while-recognizing-the-problems-with-it is something I think everyone has to come to terms with when trying to uproot any form of prejudice.
Niters Argenti!
That’s an excellent summary.
Night, Argenti Aetheri.
Yeah I can work buttons.
I meant to add that I’ve seen the attraction and racism conversation go incredibly sour, I think that was over at *drum roll* Feministe. Yes, saying you don’t find X race attractive, period, is racist — obvious level of stupid here is that you haven’t met every member of X race and maybe someone of that race does tickle your fancy. No, having never been attracted to a member of X race doesn’t make you racist, any more than having never been attracted to a member of your same gender makes you homophobic…well, sort of…we like who we like, and particularly if looks aren’t a factor, or not a major factor, or you’ve only had pantsfeelings for a few people…hey, maybe you will be attracted to a member of X race at some point.
Did my terrible analogy imply the straight or gay people might turn bi/pan/wtf-ever if they meet the right person? Cuz I didn’t mean to, but can’t really imagine excluding half~ the population based on apparent gender (I’m a zombie, I want your BRAAIIINNS)
But yeah, I see no reason why “I’ve never been attracted to a person of X race” is inherently racist (now, if you require, say, high cheekbones, or some other euro-centric feature, yeah, there’s at least cultural racism there). Whereas “I refuse to consider that I could ever be attracted to X” is racist (hell, or homophobic, or cis sexist, cuz hey, it may never happen, but being all vocal “I could never do that!”? Well um, ok, you aren’t, so why are you screaming about it?)
*cough*Naïf*cough*men is skirts*cough*
Now I’m going to bed!
I wish it was as easy to do as it is to summerize. 8(
Yoyo also brought up a good point upthread about the inherent issues with women and calling out misogyny, referencing Adria Richards who just lost her job, but I don’t have much of an answer for that.
@deoridhe, that sounds well cool. I drifted off more into translation methodology by the time I got to uni and sublimated a lot of creativity into trying to craft beautiful translation works. This is also why i think i play world/city building sims..I have a fascination with the idea of world building. I now have an itch to start all over again with my pencil and paper…seriously though..plate tectonics? Love it.
Also, the argument that is happening here feels like when you’ve some friends over and one of them (though you all have been drinking) gets a bit too tiddly and says something that takes you aback and everyone tries to figure out what to do next. And there’s a nagging uncomfortable feeling and you just want to make everything OK.
In other derails, my daughter just finished watching Sleeping Beauty and, dodgy sexual politics aside, the witch in it is seriously badass. Daughter #2 just murmured “poor witch >sigh< poor dragon"
Good night guys!
@deoridhe, I wish I had done psych…I realised I should have pursued that as a career path a bit late, in my mid 30s with 2 kids, and no time or money to spare.
@argenti aertheri
um, so you probably aren’t straight or gay the 😉 Idk. I’m sleepy so probably not the most coherent. But I don’t really thing gender are race are exactly comparable like that. Or w/e. Idk I ramble. But I can imagine excluding half the population 😛 (well, mostly. I’ll make an exception for a few guys, but not many).
this comment kind of didn’t make any sense…so I should go to bed soon then. not yet though.
For some reason, when I read “I could never be attracted to X” I started thinking of aliens …
/weird
@BigMomma: Oooh, translation! I am a huge fan of that, though I don’t speak a second language well enough to try. A translation that manages to translate the meaning beyond literal replication is a work of art, I think. One translation choice I found fascinating in psychology was the translations of Freud and Jung; they used the same word, but for Freud it was translated “mind” and for Jung it was translated “soul” and now people argue about separating the mind and the soul!
hrovitner:
Of course. Just to clarify, my talk about one day having dogs is simply me daydreaming out loud. I have seen what happens to dogs when they are not properly cared for (a German Sheppard x who lived in a yard that I took away from a relative). I have my hands full in life right now and I know that I could not properly care for a dog, any dog, let alone a Husky. I think my hands will be full for a while to come 🙂 But it is something that I probably will look into – properly – in about 25 years from now.
I don’t know why I wrote that paper either. It’s possible that I was just the mouthpiece for an eldritch horror, awoken from her slumber and speaking out against the beast with one back and one crumb removal tray. (As Eldritch horrors are prone to do)
It could be that I was possessed by the spirits of the darned, cursed to forever haunt the laundrymat, planning a scheme that can only be disturbed by the union of bread crumbs and hand lotion, heated to about 140 degrees.
But the comment was in response to the question “Who ever said they hated this guy?”
“Spirits of the darned” – are we talking mild-mannered demons or the ghosts of old socks?
Reminds me of someone on a writers’ website getting called out because one of their characters said “Damn!” (there were a lot of fundies on that site). Said character was a vampire and we had some fun thinking of what terribly polite, repressed vampires would sound like.