Pickup artists, classy fellows that they are, are using Elliot Rodger’s killing rampage as a marketing ploy. In the comments to one of Rodger’s videos on YouTube, a company called Strategic Dating Coach offered their solution to prevent similar shootings in the future: send disturbed young men who can’t get dates to one of their coaching sessions!
While this response to Rodger’s mass killing is uniquely crass, the argument that “Game saves lives” is hardly new. To PUAs like Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh it’s practically an article of faith.
In the wake of George Sodini’s murderous shooting spree in a Pennsylvania gym in 2009, Heartiste (then known as Roissy) wrote
If Sodini had learned game he would have been able to find another woman and gotten laid after his ex dumped him. He wouldn’t have spent the next 20 years steeped in bile and weighed down by his Sisyphian blue balls, dreaming of vengeance. Game could have saved the lives of the women Sodini killed.
The fact that Sodini had in fact imbibed in the alleged wisdom of pickup artistry, going so far as attending a pricey seminar from old-school pickup guru R. Don Steele, a self-proclaimed expert on dating young women, didn’t lead any in the pickup community to reconsider this position.
Nor has it this time. It is clear that Elliot Rodger was steeped in “red pill” thinking about women. And while he wasn’t himself a PUA, he was certainly aware of the basics of “Game.” Indeed, he subscribed to a number of PUA channels on YouTube and was a regular commenter on PUAhate, a sleazy forum devoted to criticizing “game,” not because it is manipulative and misogynistic but because it doesn’t work.
On the Roosh V forum earlier today, Roosh acknowledged that Rodger knew at least a little about “red pill” ideology – noting that Rodger referred to himself as an”alpha” – but still went ahead and argued that Game was the solution to massacres like this:
He is self-delusional and massively entitled, but exposing him to game may have saved lives.
In a followup comment, Roosh expressed his concerns for the real victims of this tragedy – Pickup artists:
I’m trying to think of ways our enemies will come after us because of this, but if anything, we’re the solution to this sort of murder rampage. This is the society that progressives wanted, where women are fully able to choose the top 10% of alpha males while shaming masculinity, leaving beta males with modest resources in the dust. Of course they will simply push a ban on guns, but this wholly neglects the cause. Seven people died because this guy couldn’t get laid … .
Other commenters were quick to agree. According to someone known as Moma,
Roosh has a very valid point. This will continue to replay over and over again. As human beings, our wiring is very basic yet primal. …
When have you last heard of a porn star shooting up a place? How many have emptied their balls in a hot lizard and then felt the urge to go and smoke 50 strangers?
According to Samseau, the problem wasn’t that Rodger hadn’t heard the Game Gospel; the problem was that he had rejected his salvation:
He knew about Game. If he had an account on PUAHATE then he knew about game. He was just a denialist. There was no helping this dude.
Roosh seconded this bit of wisdom, seeing it as clear evidence that “game denialism kills.”
Michelin, for his part, hoped that PUAs would be able to use the massacre as a publicity bonanza and a great “told you so” to all the haters.
One should write a mainstream article about this case. The argument that game could have saved lives can be an eye-opener and a smash in the face to haters of game.
Tuthmosis, the man best known for a Return of Kings post on the “5 Reasons to Date a Girl With An Eating Disorder,” reported his joy that PUAhate was getting bad press:
Seeing your enemies fall is a delicious treat you only get to taste a few times in your life. I’m savoring this delicacy with a cup of freshly brewed coffee. It’s a shame real people had to lose their lives, but I can’t help but think this will discredit a horrible website, PUAHate–and a way of thinking–that could have harmed even more men and innocent people. Beta losers will never go away, but this will wake up a few men and, more importantly, scare others.
Zelcorpion blamed “girls” and MGTOWers for giving Rodgers bad dating advice:
I bet a few girls told him that he only needs to be himself, be nice, be a gentleman, have a nice car, looks etc. – only to realize that it mattered shit. Instead of learning from the PUA-community he chose to listen to PUAhaters and some of the anti-female comments of the MGTOWs who themselves are often refusing to accept Game or even basic concepts like Alpha/Beta. I think that problem will become way worse, since hypergamy and promiscuity will only increase and most men will be left in the sexual wasteland.
But it took a relative newcomer to the forum by the handle of thedavidgt to raise the obvious logical objection to the Game-for-everybody solution to incel rage:
If every sexless beta in the world took it upon himself to learn game, approach girls, lift, dress well etc, would it not simply feed women’s egos and entitlement? So instead of occasionally getting awkwardly hit on by skinny fat, poor-dressed chumps, the average 7 would then be approached several times a day by extremely high value men. We’ll have a society of men working to improve themselves for women who will get lazier and lazier while at the same time demanding more and more.
In fact, the “Game saves lives” mantra is dead wrong, but not for this reason. First of all, there is no clear evidence that “game,” per se, works, except insofar as it encourages men to pursue large numbers of women and numb them to the pain of rejection. It’s possible that a few of the conversational ploys invented by various PUAs may work better than having no conversational ploys at all. But there are no magic cheat codes to “getting with women.”
There is one more disturbing way in which “game” may increase “success” with women for unscrupulous men: many of the standard techniques of “game”– invading a woman’s personal space, touching her repeatedly, trying to “isolate” her from her friends – may serve as “tests” to find women who are less likely to resist violations of their boundaries. In this way, “game” may serve as a quite effective enabler of date rape. Indeed Roosh himself has admitted to raping a date too drunk to consent.
So how much of a solution is training a guy who is already filled with a toxic mixture of entitlement and self-loathing (yes, these strange bedfellows do often go together) in some techniques that might help him to tamp down his insecurities enough to manipulate some willing or not-so-willing women into bed?
You might have simply turned a mass killer into a serial rapist, or possibly a serial killer. Ted Bundy was quite the charmer. Somehow this didn’t make him a decent human being.
Even if “game” were the beneficient form of “self-improvement” that some of its proponents like to claim it is, teaching Rodger how to be a better dater would not make him a better person. Would having a girlfriend solve all his problems? Hardly. Relationships require patience and compromise and mutual respect, and Rodger seems to have had none of these qualities. Instead of directing his narcissistic rage at “girls” at large, he would likely have ended up abusing a string of girlfriends.
The problem wasn’t Rodger’s lack of “Game.” It was his lack of humanity.
Rancad, I read your comments on the other thread. While you claim to be interested in opposing points of view, you seem to have a spectacularly parochial focus and an incredible inability to actually pay attention to opposing viewpoints.
If people misinterpreted you, you might want to look at the particular bits they misinterpreted you on. If you do so, you might just notice choice bits of your own word choice that made your (allegedly) innocent thoughts look like the crass misogyny that commenters here saw.
You also made easily disprovable claims about a lack of education for men who wanted to not be seen as creepy and continually implied that it was women’s and feminists job (or ethical obligation) to provide that education.
Here, you are taking an argument and using it on something completely separate. WWTH suggested Aspergers was a correlated feature, not a causal one. You claim that we can use the same argument for his link to the manosphere.
The reason your claim falls short is this. The murderer shorts a manifesto filled with misogyny, made videos declaring how he had to do this because girls only want bad boys, and initially targeted a sorority house before switching to a rampage when he failed to get in. The wording of those videos and that manifesto are ridiculously similar to the words of various PUA’s, MRA’s, and associated online trolls.
Can we say the manosphere drive him to it? Not quite. However, they did provide a forum for his radicalization. They did support his entitlement complex by saying alphas (which he claimed he was) deserve lots of sex from whoever they want. They did reaffirm his beliefs that women were evil and only go for brutes.
Saying his crime and his influence by the manosphere are just correlated is ridiculous. Saying he’d still be a danger to himself and others without it is also disingenuous, because we can’t know that for sure.
We can be sure that he was a rampant misogynist.
Do you see the difference?
Now, please, go spend your day elsewhere. Feel free to step on a few hundred broken Legos while you are at it.
Viscaria
Yep; it’s pretty unpleasant but it’s worth bearing in mind the fact that PUA makes lots and lots of money for some people. Businesses try damage mitigation when their product is damaged, and mass murder is not the best of recommendations.
One point which is being glossed over is that vast numbers of MRAs are signed up to the ‘if I were good looking and rich and had an expensive car I’d be knee deep in adoring women’ myth.
Rodgers was certainly not bad looking, he had plenty of money and an expensive car, and yet women wouldn’t touch him with a 16 foot barge pole; the complete opposite of what MRAs claim to be a universal fact based on evolutionary biology.
Admittedly the concept of the alpha male has been significantly undermined by science- for example, we now know that real wolf packs don’t have alpha males- but MRAs tend not to know that because they tend not to be big on real science. So from their perspective this is the equivalent of discovering that the sun doesn’t orbit the earth; even if they win the lottery they’re still going to be unwanted.
Actually, now I come to think of it, perhaps this is the explanation for the weird stuff about homosexual impulses; the last desperate hope for MRAs hoping to win the lottery…
*wrote a manifesto, not shorts a manifesto. Autocorrect is beyond silly.
“Let me tell you, to empathize a bit with this psycho, feeling totally rejected by the opposite sex HURTS. Like, a deep down physical pain that stabs you day in and day out.”
You know, as someone who was generally described as ‘ugly’ and ‘uncool’ and ‘boring’ by the opposite sex in my dating years, I am fucking aware of this.
See, this happens TO EVERYONE.
WOMEN GET REJECTED.
MEN GET REJECTED.
And it sucks for everyone.
But if there’s anything that MRA rants have taught me, if women get rejected, it’s funny because women are worthless, and if men get rejected, it’s a huge trauma where violence is an acceptable answer.
*also, drove him to it, not drive him to it. Tiny keyboards are evil.
@cassandrakitty:
Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.
Wow, leave it to Fox News to find a way to demonize homosexuals in all of this. They couldn’t possibly have picked a group with less involvement, but they’ll still bend themselves into pretzels every time to deflect blame away from the real source if it’s uncomfortably close to their target audience (angry, entitled misogynists and hate-addicted racist octogenarians). Usually their slant is that the serial killer du jour had a “permissive liberal upbringing” or some such nonsense, even if the killer leaves behind a notarized statement from Beck, Hannity, and O’Reilly authorizing them to do it.
The aggravating thing is that they’re just as culpable in peddling violent fantasies as the MRM. There’s been a huge uptick in armed-revolution-wink-wink-take-back-society talk ever since Obama took office, resulting in murders of abortion providers, police officers, and churchgoers. It’s stochastic terrorism – trigger unstable individuals with disturbed beliefs, then step back, deny all responsibility and paint them as a lone wolf (playing the mental illness card if necessary). Rinse and repeat.
@Marie
Mine was at MY work, and I wasn’t allowed to antagonize a customer, so I had to put up with him, and try to be nice, while still trying to tell him no. And I was alone in the building, at the time, except for him.
I told him that it would be inappropriate for me to date a client (law firm). So, he went away, found a different lawyer, and asked me out again!
20 minutes freaking out in the bathroom after I finally got rid of him.
@contrapangloss: “Shorts: A Manifesto” would be well worth reading.
So this thread has gotten long and probably moved on and this might have been addressed (I last read earlier today when it was about 200 comments in), but I just want to point out the absurdity of claiming that a belief that one is destined to win the lottery = completely out-of-touch with reality (as was claimed by the ableist poster S.–sorry, can’t remember the name exactly).
That is a common belief among compulsive gamblers, along with other variations (that if you just spend a bit more you are guaranteed to win, that if you do a certain ritual you’re guaranteed to win, etc.). Most compulsive gamblers are quite capable of determining right from wrong in other aspects of their lives. The shooter’s conviction that he was fated to win the lottery is not at all an indication of his mental health in any area except possibly compulsive gambling.
And even for genuinely delusional people, it’s incredibly common for them to just be delusional in one specific way. If I were inclined to armchair diagnose, I’d actually see his conviction about the lottery as a symptom of his sense of entitlement rather than even a true gambling addiction.
@michelle
wow, that really sucks 🙁
Thanks for the definitions!
My first creepy grandpa tried to feel me up at the bus stop when I was a tweener. Curiously enough telling him my age seemed to make him more, rather than less, excited about trying to grope me.
This is not because I was super hot at 11 or 12, and blah blah cavemen fertility yada yada, it’s because predators tend to choose the prey that looks most vulnerable.
On a lighter, completely off-topic note: I love my Mom
I was just finishing up dinner, and she was putting away dishes. I said, “OK, dinner’s ready. Ring the dinner gong.” We have no gong. But we both, at the exact same moment, yelled out “BONG!”
“Bill would like to remind us to be excellent to each other.”
And…
PARTY ON, DUDES!
[CN: sexual abuse]
When I was first emotionally manipulated and sexually harassed, I was just a 11-year-old kid whose anxiety and sensitivity were out in the open for everyone to notice, and so people tried to exploit those things. My appearance had nothing do with it – the only reason I was targeted was that, on some level of perception, they knew I wasn’t like those “other boys”. I was “girly”, and people thought it was funny to treat me like shit because of it. It was nothing I had control over, and anyone who says otherwise can go stub all of their toes.
Yes, it certainly does. I’ve been hurting for decades (I’m 42 and never been kissed), and probably will continue to hurt for several, if not many, years to come. Yet, strangely, I’ve never felt the urge to KILL any of the men who have turned me down, no matter how rudely, or cruelly they have done it. I certainly never felt the urge to kill a man who didn’t throw himself at me, when I never even approached him, in the first place. I’ve snapped at the men who cruelly turned me down, and even felt the desire to slap them. But I’ve never acted on even that small violent urge.
Actually, lately I have found that stating aloud my urge to slap someone is usually sufficient, and the urge goes away. I don’t even have to say it TO the person. I can mutter it to myself, in the bathroom. It’s cathartic.
I never felt entitled to a date, let alone sex. All I ever felt entitled to, from a man, was the common decency to be polite to me. If you’re going to refuse my invitation, do it politely, and don’t leave me hanging. Don’t insult me. Don’t tell me I’m stupid or crazy (yes, it’s been done) to even ask you in the first place. Don’t tell me that you’ll “let me know” and then never speak to me again. Just a simple “No, thank you,” is not that hard to say, and it is clear and quick. THEN you can never speak to me again.
Do I dream of and wish for sex, love and romance? Yes. But I have absolutely no sympathy for this guy. Pity, yes. I pity him for his hate-filled heart and his eternal damnation. But I have zero sympathy for him.
Balm of Gilead, dude. Platonic love of friends and/or family, and the warm fuzzies of doing good works to help others – these are all ways to soothe that pain, and they are available to all human beings.
If these guys can’t deal with that sort of rejection from women, how can they deal with it in any other aspect of life? I mean, why aren’t they shooting their teachers any time they fail a class? If they go to an interview and don’t get the job, do they think it’s all right to pull out a gun on the employer then? If the military decides they can’t meet the criteria for joining do they get violent?
Gee, it’s almost like they’re actually perfectly capable of handling rejection but just making excuses not to.
[CN: child sexual abuse]
For fuck’s sake, when I was just 10, I was so afraid of being lured by predators and then “touched” that I routinely looked up the sex offender registry map in my neighborhood. So I could stay safe and also warn my friends not to go to this or that address.
And when I tried to vent to people about my fears of being hurt by strangers and people I trusted, they would often laugh at me and accuse me of worrying over nothing. Even if I really didn’t have any reason to be concerned, they didn’t know shit about consoling a little girl scared of predators. It was far more appropriate, in their view, to joke about me being molested by the neighbors and traumatized for life.
(Sorry for the venting – I just remembered that it has nothing to do with this thread.)
You know what would be nice – if they start making college movies that are a more accurate representation of being at university. For my own weird reasons I quite enjoy some of them, but I was sorely disappointed when I got to Uni and it was nothing like I expected.
They need to quit with all the lazy stereotypes and the cliques. I know that is a problem in a lot of movies, but it seems especially rampant in college and high school movies. Even in Monsters University which was about frikkin monsters, they have the same old tired cliques. It would be particularly nice to see a college movie with no reference to sororities or fraternities. Most of the world does not have these things! IME most Uni students live in crappy houses full of crappy “side of the road” furniture with other students living on noodles, or at home with their parents. Lap of luxury on campus housing is NOT the norm.
Not saying movies made him do it of course. Just that movies and tv are moving slowly in the right direction (more movies that show women as people for eg) and this is one genre that could do with some prodding.
I’d just like to say, this is my first time on this blog, I’m bookmarking it. These comment sections seem to contain the most reasoned, ethical, and intelligent arguments I’ve ever seen on the internet (minus the trolls). Then let me mention the fact that this terrible event has exposed me for the first time to PUAs, “game” and the like. I’m already on board with you folks. Thanks.
I really had no idea of the MRA/PUA depravity.
@Zolnier
Oh, go ahead and throw me. I’m fat, and can float like nobody’s business.
But as for “taking one for the team” and having sex with a misogynistic, murderous, selfish jerk, ummmmm, no.
I don’t mind taking the “you are so mean! mean misandrist meanypants!” complaints from the trolls for the team. Sex with an MRA? Nope, sorry, I love you guys and all but that is truly a bridge too far.
I would rather drink whiskey than have sex with an MRA.