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.
https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/403290871854280704
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.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/demon.png?resize=525%2C242&ssl=1)
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!
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?
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 guess Roosh can’t afford soap or shampoo on the salary his how-to-rape-drunk-girls guides generate.
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
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 😀
I’m concerned about the raw chicken juice all over that nice absorbent wooden chopping board…
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.