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
Kitty zombie! 😀
@neoroticbeagle
Cutest zombies ever <3
@pentapus
It’s not, in theory, ableist to say someone may be mentally ill, because mentally ill isn’t a bad thing. It’s just saying that you think they are mentally ill because they are acting in a way that obviously not non-crazy person would do. It contributes to a lot of negative stereotypes.
As for the ‘are you drunk thing’, my question was b/c it seemed like none of their comments before. If it was someone I hadn’t seen I’d assume they were just an asshole.
@nerdypants
(feel free to ignore this, there have been plenty of better answers, just my 2 cents)
um, maybe, maybe when you actually know they have a mental illness? Idk much, cuz I’m still learning about ableism, but that’s my guess. Though someone w/ a mental illness being an asshole still can be being an asshole for reasons not to do w/ their mental illness. Idk, I’d only do it if you knew them and how they reacted. Like, this isn’t asshole behavior, but because of my depression I often get really hyper and maybe a little annoying when I’m in a mood swing going to good mood, so if someone who knew me thought I was being all hyper and that stuff b/c of depression they’d probably be right. Though it can also happen b/c caffiene XD
@disco
…O_o judging you.
@historophilia
That’s how I pronounce them too, but I’m not sure if it’s right :/
Sweet, nvm answers 😀
@frog
sorry you had to meet those jerks. 🙁
Emily: I love pinata for trolls, yes.
Nerdypants:
1: When that person is a regular part of your life, to the degree that their actions can affect it on a regular basis–family, friends, some co-workers.*
2: When you’re their therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, etc.
3: When you’re a judge or jury deciding on an insanity defense plea.
Outside of that, it’s to be avoided, for reasons others have articulated.
*: Here, your role should be to encourage them to seek out an evaluation and (if necessary) diagnosis; you should not attempt to diagnose them yourself. So avoid, “Hey, i think you might be suffering from depression”–preferable is, “Hey, you’re seeming kind of down, and it’s a bit beyond my depth as a friend to help you get out of it. If you’ve got the ability to talk to a professional, they might be able to help better.” If they cite cost, or something else of a resource-based nature (such as not being able to get to a clinic on the far side of town), offer what help you can as a friend to get past that barrier–help them find a free/sliding-scale clinic, offer to drive them if you have a car and they don’t, etc.
I finally caught up with this thread, and while part of me is glad I took last night and this morning off, the other part of me is glad I read it even though some of it was difficult to get through.
I know that’s not a very substantive comment, but the smart things have already been said!
@Great American Satan:
You’re conflating a few things here, so I’ll tease them out a bit but this will necessarily be abbreviated.
One major note – it’s people with schizophrenia, not schizophrenics. This is an area to be very careful about dehumanizing language.
some conditions cause people to latch onto frameworks to express their fear
I think a better way to view this is not that mental illness causes racism, for example, but that our society is imbued with racism and a significant proportion absorb racism unconsciously, with the end result that some will express it openly regardless of theirs metal health. The desire to make racism caused by mental illness is both a distancing tactic to protect the currently abl-minded and ableism.
I really wish we had better ways of getting help for people in trouble before they can hurt themselves or others, but the U.S.A. is a cold cold place.
Firstly, the mentally ill population you’re talking about is disproportionately targets of violence, not violent themselves. I don’t have the studies at my fingertips, but a google should find them (I’m on my phone).
Secondly, seine can be receiving the best treatment available and still be delusional. That is about half my caseload.
Thirdly, the right in the US to remove the liberty of people is necessarily limited to “harm self, harm others, or gravely disabled”. People used to be locked up for their entire lives without a possibility of parole for making others uncomfortable, and while that was less troubling for the average person, it was also a huge injustice.
Since the legal system came up, a quick note about that. Legal Insanity is not a diagnosis. It only means the person had/has no concept of right and wrong and so needs to be detained. If it works, the person is sometimes locked up longer than they might have been for the crime. It is a crappy “easy out”.
I can only find it behind a paywall, but the summary gets the point across — http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=208825
“Stigma against mental illness turns the world on its head. Blaming the victim rationalizes neglect and maltreatment. In the public mind, violence is associated with mental illness. Yes, there is a strong association, but the direction of causality is the reverse of common belief: persons who are seriously mentally ill are far more likely to be the victims of violence than its initiators. The evidence produced by Linda Teplin et al1 (this issue) settles the matter beyond question.”
Thank you to each of you who commented above since last night: starskita, Sid, Seranvali, Argenti, tedthefed, Marie, freemage. Especially thank you to those of you who said “I have a mental illness, and here’s how I see it…”. I’ve read all of your comments several times, and I’ve got this thread bookmarked to come back to again. I was going to try replying to each of you individually given that you took the time out to talk to me, however I think my response to each of you is the same and can be summed up as, ‘I understand better now. Thank you for telling me.’
I think there’s a saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. My words were motivated by a misguided attempt to be more understanding towards those who have a mental illness, but I can see now that this kind of thing has the opposite effect of perpetuating the conflation of mental illness and bad behaviour, by stigmatising mental illness, and by implying that if a person has a mental illness then their words and actions (and the consequences) can be disregarded. In other words, the exact opposite of what I’d hope for. So this is not a thing that I will not be doing any more.
Nerdypants — you threw a double negative in there, but thank you. Having “you’re being a royal asshole” met with “does your psych know you act like this?” — makes me want to go bang my head on the wall.
I’m all misty eyed, nerdypants. You got it!
The point above about mental illness 1) not being a discrete thing and 2) having a lot of prejudicial bias is very true. A handful seem to be fairly universal (schizophrenia seems to be; as far as I know, every culture has people who present with the symptoms of schizophrenia) but most are very culturally based and are very culturally influenced.
Also, mental health and studying mental health is a very new thing; the study of mental illness arose out of studying pathology, not health, or generalizing ones own neurosis to the entire human race (hi Freud!). These are all things that must be kept in mind wrt mental illness because the artifacts of them still remain, both within the psychology community and within the wider culture.
tedthefed – so true about the line not being as sharp or clear as we imagine it is!
There’s an element of belief systems in here as well. Person A believes XYZ. Person B thinks XYZ is nonsense, a delusion, whatever. But what matters is what XYZ does to, or for, A. Does it help zir? Does it give comfort, support, strength? Does it prompt A to harm zirself or others, or the opposite? That’s all that B, whether they’re a health professional or anyone else, should be concerned with.
Example, which I think someone mentioned here last time we were talking about this: a person who heard voices. She was happy with this, her voices were not the abusive, horrible kind – just the opposite, I gather – but felt, unsurprisingly, unable to converse with them in public. Solution offered: put in the earpiece for a phone and nobody would think twice if she was talking. (I’ve thought of doing this to talk to Louis, sometimes – never tried it though.)
I like this more utilitarian approach, rather than the “oh but that’s not NORMAL” crap. First off, what a narrow range is offered for “normal”; second, helping or harming should surely be what matters. There are doofuses (doofi?) who would label me as mentally ill/hearing voices/hearing demons/whatever, but I think it says something* that the two mental health professionals I’ve dealt with have had a completely different view.
I’m not trying to appropriate anything here; I’ve never had to deal with any of the godawful issues or conditions that can strike people, but the net of “not normal” or “mentally ill” gets cast remarkably wide, and I’ve felt its edge.
Oh and Freud, Mr Fern Phobia – aaaaaaaaaaaargh, douchebag of douchebags! ::gnashes teeth::
Hello all, I’m a long-time reader and lurker but I just wanted to say that you people are all fabulous (not the trolls, though) and thank you for putting into such eloquent words for me the whole discussion on mental health and blaming people’s actions on it. I completely agree with what’s been said, but I’ve never been able to put it so well.
Also, I know it was probably a rhetorical question, Argenti Aertheri, but I take 600mg of Seroquel at night (down from 900mg) and sometimes it can be quite hard to function for half of the next day which makes morning classes at uni a joy.
On a completely unrelated note, I know some of the regular commenters are Australian and I was wondering if you’d come across this: http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/rapists-are-to-blame-for-rape-20130321-2ghxa.html
I know it’s John Laws and sadly I shouldn’t expect better from him, but this is just made me so… ugh. I don’t even know. What a disgusting person. (Sorry everyone, I don’t know how to embed links or anything.)
Personally, on the clinician side, I am much more interested in “functional, safe, and happy” than whether or not a person has a given symptom that is strange. This may be why I work well with some of our more unusual clients. ^.^
Yes! I think that’s pretty much the stance my psychs have had.
I want to say thank you again to LBT for their wonderful blog. Reading it, and Rogan’s comments here, are an eye-opener. Plus they’re cool people. 🙂
Adelaide — first, let me offer the complementary welcome package consisting of a misandrist hard chair, matching bath towels, SCENTED MOTHERFUCKING CANDLES and cupcakes, delivered by female (whore) penguins in spanx.
That makes less and less sense the more nonsense our trolls spew…
Second, seroquel = fuck, I’m a zombie for a good hour and I’m unemployed and have nowhere to be. I can’t imagine that for half the day with classes, you have my respect already (forget that newb is not troll, right? period, you’re cool by me!)
Third, HTML! You embed links like this <a href=”link”>what you want it to say</a> so like this — I’m replying to your comment here
That’s done via this code — <a href=”http://manboobz.com/2013/03/21/george-godley-terrible-pickup-artist-worse-human-being/comment-page-7/#comment-274714″>here</a>
Do feel free to direct HTML questions my way!
Adelaide, welcome from one of the resident Aussies!
I hadn’t heard about Laws doing that. I knew he was a piece of human garbage but this is … gods, bottom of the barrel stuff, he makes Andrew Bolt look good.
Brain bleach: cat and fennec cub playing!
http://youtu.be/qyhnFzLUtPA
Part of the reason that the “but he can’t help it, he’s mentally ill” thing bothers me so much is that 90% of the time the people saying that seem to be implying that the person is on the autism spectrum, and the thing is, I know lots of people on the spectrum and none of them go around harassing women and filming it. Autism has become the go-to excuse when men who’re a bit geeky are behaving badly, and it doesn’t take much effort to see all the ways in which that’s not OK, or much engagement with geek culture to realize that a. the culture actively encourages shitty behavior from men towards women and b. most of the guys being shitty are neurotypical. So when you blame autism you’re letting people off the hook for being assholes AND contributing to the stigmatization of a group of people who already have enough shit to deal with without their diagnosis being used as a shorthand for “rapey asshole”.
Also! For bonus “this is why you should stop excusing men’s bad behavior as being about autism” fun, think about how all this plays out for women who’re autistic. IME autism tends to make women even more likely to be targeted for harassment than they would be anyway just because they’re women.
This is almost as bad as watching someone else’s home videos from 1992 when they just got a camcorder and are playing with the titles and zoom.
Holy fuck. I’ll take this as example one million why you should never check the internet while on vacation.
I’m just going to pretend ttf’s account got hacked, since that’s by far the happiest explanation.
Brain bleach coming up!
@Adelaide
Hello! Welcome from over here 🙂 Didn’t see you last night 😛
@Deoridhe
That sounds so much nicer than trying to force people to act ‘normal’. Not really adding much really, since it’s been forever since I’ve had/got to talk to any psychs. My regular doctor just gives me anti-depressants and I’m free to go 😀
@argenti aertheri
For some reason my brain was reading ‘misandrist hard chair’ as ‘misandrist hard hair’ 😛 I think diogenes is getting to me XD Some how I forgot how the spanx entered though…
Jeez I’m a blockquote monster magnet at the moment.
I know an autistic guy slightly younger than me. He’s smart, polite, and would never, ever do this. He’s a little shy–he’d never randomly approach someone on the street, and in the extremely unlikely event that he did, a simple “no thank you” would suffice. I also teach kids with autism and asperger’s (and another friend with asperger’s); I have specialized training in them. THIS ISN’T THAT. It’s Godfrey being a dick.