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.
>Fuck that guy, and fuck the people who can go with “he’s crazy” to dismiss the very real effects of the growing reactionary-sexist side of the internet
It’s possible to consider him crazy without wanting to dismiss the real effects of the growing reactionary-sexist side of the internet. I am very much concerned about that; it’s why I read this site every day.
This guy was NOT the simple product of the reactionary-sexist side of the internet. Can you, otherwise, explain to me how MRA rhetoric provoked in Rodger a desire to kill his little brother for the crime of being socially successful and likely to lose his virginity before Rodger did? This is paranoid delusion, not the ideological misogyny of MRAs.
Yeah if you read this site everyday, you’d know why what you’re saying is so problematic. If you’re REALLY so confused about what ableism is and why what you’re saying is so fucked up, I suggest a little-known site called Google.
We’re telling you what you’re saying is fucked up. Until you understand why, I suggest you go away. Far, far away.
Yeah, I’m calling bullshit on “I read this site every day” too. We talk about this shit all the damn time and you’re claiming not to know what ableism is?
Are we looking at a sock here, or is this just the same old same old sameyness?
I’m not confused about ableism, I just don’t see how what I’m saying is ableist. I’m not suggesting that all people with mental illness are dangerous or violent. I’m saying that the cause of this guy’s misogyny is his delusion, NOT his ideology. Maybe you don’t think that’s an important distinction; I do. His decision to commit mass murder was also the product of his delusion. His first victims were innocent of any crime; he knew nothing about them, he merely killed them for being around him. Yes, he felt entitled to sex with attractive blonde girls. He also felt entitled to winning the lottery. That is not the product of ideology; it is the product of delusion.
Anyway, I’m tired of being yelled at when I just want to have a reasonable conversation about this, so I’ll just leave it at that.
@saurabh
I think a lot of the behavior you’re describing reflects Roger’s narcissistic grandiosity. I also think you vastly underestimate how much all us non-psychotic adults are “out of touch with reality”, yet are able to function and even thrive in life. The belief systems we use to explain and excuse our behaviors often have a very tenuous relationship with reality. Rogers actions show his extreme black-and-white thinking, but again that fits with his malignant narcissism. I’d argue people who are discussing his sense of entitlement and misogyny are doing a better job of explaining his psychology then those who are discussing psychosis. YMMV of course.
Yeah, because it’s so out of touch with reality when well-off white dudes think the world owes them everything.
Except it’s not, because that’s the way the world works, and “we are owed sex by any woman we want, and have the right to take it” is the core of every goddamn MRA and PUA site there ever was. Don’t bother with this hair-splitting nonsense and armchair diagnoses. All you’re ending up doing is saying “Not all MRAs are like that!”
Also ::points up:: what brooked said about this whole “out of touch with reality” thing. Name one person who isn’t, by someone else’s standards?
Oh, and the “Anyway, I’m tired of being yelled at when I just want to have a reasonable conversation about this, so I’ll just leave it at that.” doubles the bullshittery of claiming you read this site every day. How can you do that and NOT know what’s going to get you called out, and harshly? It also sounds very much like a few whiney trolls we’ve had lately. Funny how you don’t appear to recognise that.
“Getting into this guy’s head” is almost completely pointless at this juncture. He’s dead. 6 other people are dead. Trying to justify or ameliorate what he did by saying he was mentally ill is not only insulting to the many people who have a mental illness and aren’t homicidal in the least, it also neatly sweeps the real problems of misogyny and privilege under the rug, kicking the can down the road until the next time someone gets pissed off and unloads a gun into a crowd.
We can’t keep doing that.These shootings have been happening more and more recenrly, and while mental illness has always existed, the environment that’s leading people to resort to this kind of terrorism hasn’t, and the media and our leaders need to face it instead of insisting it can’t be helped.
QFT.
>Oh, and the “Anyway, I’m tired of being yelled at when I just want to have a reasonable conversation about this, so I’ll just leave it at that.” doubles the bullshittery of claiming you read this site every day. How can you do that and NOT know what’s going to get you called out, and harshly? It also sounds very much like a few whiney trolls we’ve had lately. Funny how you don’t appear to recognise that.
I usually don’t read the comments, I just read David’s posts, which is why I don’t know how much I sound like a whiny troll; I don’t doubt that I do, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I started reading the comments on these posts because I have been obsessively reading about this incident all day, and I wanted to know more. A few hours ago I felt pretty much the way you did, like this guy was a disgusting misogynist and an example of the damage the MRAs are doing; I felt differently after reading his manifesto.
Also, regarding being out of touch with reality, having been there many times myself, I agree one hundred percent. We’re all there a little bit, and I don’t really believe in the notion of a normative mental health or illness; but I still think we can make reasonable statements about what constitutes reality. A person who holds the belief that they are destined to win the lottery is nowhere near that.
I recommend reading this New Yorker article: nyr.kr/1k8WKfb about Adam Lanza, the Newtown killer, and comparing it to the writings of Rodgers. I think these are people who needed help recognizing their delusional states and did not get it in time and who were consequently driven to concluding that violence was their only remaining choice.
>Trying to justify or ameliorate what he did by saying he was mentally ill is not only insulting to the many people who have a mental illness and aren’t homicidal in the least
I absolutely don’t understand this. Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t consider mental illness in determining criminal cuplability? “Not guilty due to insanity” has been a valid legal defense for quite some time, and while we might question the idea of categorical insanity, I certainly think that holding people responsible for things they do as a result of delusion is not something we want to do.
Nor does it demean all mentally ill people to say that a particular heinous event was the product of mental illness. Some people get a fever because they are sick. That does not mean that all sick people get a fever.
I didn’t know anyone needed help to realise that murdering people was a bad idea.
Is this guy’s thinking completely outside the bounds of normal human behaviour? Yes. Is that in any way related to mental illness? Fuck no, and that is why what you’re saying is so disgusting.
Human relationships are not a gaaaaame !!
The other problem with the “game can save lives” argument is that it’s arguing that his problem was the one he identified – that he couldn’t get laid. Therefore, if he’d got laid, he would have been happy and wouldn’t have killed people.
No, the problem is that he was a twisted fuck and the extreme misogynistic ideology of the manosphere gave him a rationalisation and an intellectual framework for his killing rage.
Also
I’m in no way an expert on murderers or mental illness, but given the vast numbers of mentally ill people who manage to not murder people, I don’t think it’s mental illness that drives people to kill. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d say it was…hmm…perhaps an unbelievable sense of entitlement and an inability to see other people as people?
“We” are not sitting on a jury. Armchair diagnoses don’t help anyone, and only add to the stigma mentally ill people (who are far more likely to be victims than perpertrators of violence) suffer.
Rodgers was competent to make his videos and write his rants and manifesto and plan murders. Don’t try to pull the “but he was delusional” bullshit. It’s just defending him.
You’re talking as if delusion means someone can’t plan and think and commit crimes they are fuckingwell responsible for. You’re just excusing him, whether you think you are or not.
What the hell is the point of reading a blog and not reading the comments? They make up the bulk of the conversation, ferchrissake. You come in here claiming to read the blog every day, and then act surprised when you’re called out for ableism and what boil down to apologetics for MRA misogyny. Golly gee, imagine if you’d bothered to READ the hundreds of comments here in your visits, you might not have made a complete ass of yourself.
wewereemergencies – and conversely, think of all the women murdered every. fucking. week. by their intimate partners. Are the “but he was crazy!” brigade really stupid enough to claimall those murdering men are mentally ill?
Well, probably. That, or those women must have done something to deserve it (SARCASM. Major, major sarcasm) Have you seen the comments by a sorority girl who was a witness? She thinks *her* actions may have somehow lead to this. My heart just broke for her.
Have I mentioned how gross the “crazy” argument is even apart from the ableism? (I mean, that is the biggest gross part). No-one ever said “but maybe Muslim suicide bombers are mentally ill!” No, the conversation about mental illness is about divorcing yourself from Rodgers, detracting from the actual issue, and, because they can’t be racist, shitting on another oppressed group! Congrats concern trolls, you are terrible on multiple levels.
Oh crap, it looks like the comments after my sarcasm warning brackets were meant to be sarcasm. They weren’t. They were deadly serious. The line before was sarcasm.
I’m really really sorry. Should have been much clearer about that.
What utter bullshit! In fact, it is insulting to a bull’s anus to imply it would produce such a ridiculously useless pile of nothingness. *thinks of allotment with pride*
His misogyny WAS his ideology. And of ll the ideologies that an entitled, affluent, het, western, white boy could have fixed all his hatred and anger upon, misogyny is going to be the one, pretty much every fucking time. Because hey, welcome to our world.
Even if we were to buy saurabh’s argument (which I don’t), we’d still be left with a situation where it was the PUA stuff that Rodger was reading that handed him the gun. Stop trying to absolve that wretched, hateful ideology of responsibility for incidents like this. It’s not even as if this is the first time they have blood on their hands.
(I was really hoping for a more intelligent analysis of the situation than “well he was just crazy” here. Guess there always has to be one asshole who pees in the punch bowl.)
So, my understanding of narcissism is that it’s not a mental illness. Just a way of describing a set of behaviours that show extreme self-centeredness and entitlement. So saying he sounds like a malignant narcissist isn’t diagnosing him – just saying in different words that he was a nasty, entitled little shit. Does that sound right?
I read the manifesto. This fucking guy. Not once did he approach a woman, or talk to a woman, or proactively engage in any social interaction with a woman. Instead, he chose to sit around wearing cool clothes in heavily populated areas waiting for women to approach him. That was quite literally his entire strategy. Wear Armani. Go to Starbucks, or party, or walk around campus. Wait for a beautiful blonde to come and talk to him.
Shockingly, the results of this inaction were… well, no action. Then he’d notice happy couples and become so enraged he would either a) sit and seethe with hatred and indignation, b) run somewhere and cry bitterly, or c) toss his beverage at said happy couple and feel vindicated.
He had no female friends. He states that his first American friend was a girl, but then he hates her when they see each other again as teens because she grew up to be attractive, had equally pretty friends, and had a boyfriend. He hated his stepmother for immature reasons, and his mother was taken for granted as a dispenser of favours, opportunities and material goods (when she buys him a BMW he notes that she SHOULD HAVE bought him one during his first year of college and thinks that by the time it was actually given to him, it was too little too late). He disliked his sister too, and in one particularly creepy paragraph describes standing outside of her bedroom door listening to her have sex with her boyfriend and growing increasingly jealous and angry as he does so (of her boyfriend and the fact that she’s getting laid at her age – 4 years younger than him). He had a female counsellor he actually enjoyed talking to, but he made a conscious decision to not receive any further counselling from women after she left town because he deemed their interactions as “fake.”
He writes pages and pages about how women have wronged him, about how flawed and amoral and evil women are, but he came to these conclusions solely from watching attractive women interacting with men that weren’t him and drawing his own conclusions.
Hey, remember that asshole David posted about a few days ago that wouldn’t shut up about the solipsism of women? Somebody should point him to this spoiled, entitled brat’s manifesto so he can see what a solipsistic, vindictive, hateful monster actually looks like.
Is that what they call it nowadays?
According to rule 34 there must be a porn shoot of someone shooting while they shoot…
According to the BBC report, he went to a sorority house and, when they refused to open the door, then embarked on his drive-by shootings. Thank gods, they sorority did not let him in because how many deaths might this have been if they had!
Of course, the BBC report also ignores the fact that his street targets were women and talks of him “shooting people at random”. Thanks, BBC, for your sterling journalism whenever gender is involved. /sarcasm
>So, my understanding of narcissism is that it’s not a mental illness.
Narcissistic personality disorder is a category in the DSM-IV. Malignant narcissism is not, but some people think it should be. In any case, he certainly has many of the features of narcissistic personality:
(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
(3) believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
(4) requires excessive admiration
(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes