Heartiste – real name James Wiedmann – is a proudly racist, woman-hating “pickup artist” guru known for advocating manipulative and often quite abusive “game” techniques to give men the upper hand in relationships and in the dating market. These run the gamut from emotional abuse – what he calls “dread game,” an elaborate portfolio of gaslighting ploys to keep women feeling insecure and off-balance – to straightforward physical abuse – slapping women “when necessary” to assert “alpha male” dominance.
Now he’s suggesting that wannabe lotharios borrow some tips on how to “game” women from the Duluth Power and Control Wheel, a widely used violence intervention tool designed to fight abuse, not provide a blueprint for it.
The Duluth Wheel highlights some of the most prevalent kinds of abusive behavior. Heartiste mines its descriptions of abuse for dating tips, claiming to find in it “a few curious nuggets of anti-feminist truth about relationships and how to keep them going.”
In his recent post, Heartiste goes through some of the descriptions of abusive behavior on the Duluth Wheel – and recasts them as handy tools for would-be “alpha males.”
“make her feel bad and guilty” — reframing.
“play mind games” — that’s one way to provoke a vaginal gusher.
“smash things” — occasional bursts of anger, when justified, are cues of sexy male dominance and they do turn on women. …
“threaten to leave her” — dread game. …
“take her money” — aka make a woman feel like she’s invested in you. she’ll try harder to make it work.
“be the one to define men’s and women’s roles” — chicks dig a leader. and they also dig benevolently sexist men! …
“treat her like a servant” — 50 Shades of Gray has sold millions of copies. To women.
His followers are, if anything, even more enthusiastic about adopting these abusive tactics to their dating life.
“[T]hanks for the road map,” writes dog king. “[A] handy chart for aspiring alphas,” notes Laguna Beach Fogey, also an occasional commenter on The Spearhead. “Much Thanks CH,” adds Ang Aamer. “It’s posts like these that turn the Femi-Matrix Vag monologues into decipherable ideas we can use.”
One commenter calling himself maldek offers a personal testimonial, claiming to have used the tactics on the Duluth Wheel to keep his wife of 20 years on her toes:
This is a female wishlist indeed.
Take it word by word.Most of the listed items are things I do on a regular base. I mean it. And for more than 20 years it is working. Wife is looking top 5% in her age group, 3 kids, good life.
IT DOES WORK!
PS: That is 200% true for the darker parts of this list, you know the points those white knights would want to burn you on stake for. These are magic.
A commenter by the name of J Fisc seconds this endorsement.
This is an instruction manual for how to keep your woman happy. My marriage was doing pretty shitty until I said ‘Fuck it’ and started acting ‘abusive’. At least half the things on this list I do regularly and she eats its up.
One reader calling himself zaltyskaralius explains a favorite technique he (allegedly) uses to anger and excite the women – sorry, girls — in his life:
In the theme of brilliant game moves that bring the moist looks of indignation from girls, one of my old friends: The “Touchdown”:
When a girl says something (incredibly) stupid, interrupt and ask her if she knows what “touchdown” means.
Ignore her lack of football knowledge, shake your head and proceed to tell her that it has another meaning, as you put your hand on her shoulder with a grin on your face. Ask her if she has ever heard of Down’s syndrome. Tell her that it’s a tradition in your friend circle, that once someone says something not-so-very-smart, you proceed to do a “Touch-Down”. If she doesn’t get it, do another “touchdown”.
Congratulations, you just got a “pass this shit-test and collect tingles” card for the particular girl. From that moment on, anytime she says anything you dislike or throws a shit test at you, all you will have to do is simply place your hand on her shoulder and give her a knowing look, every so often muttering “touchdown” under your breath. No effort, no thinking, just a little touch.
Great move for AMOG [Alpha Male of the Group] friends as well. Great move for everyone in the know.
Luckily I think the chance that he’s actually used this “great move” on anyone outside of his own imagination is roughly zero.
Heartiste seems to think that the Duluth Wheel was conjured up by some Social Justice Warrior on Twitter. Only one of his commenters – at least only one that I noticed – admits to knowing where it really comes from.
“They made me memorize that graphic in a class i had to take because a broad said i hit her,” writes monster221.
Needless to say, he seems not to have learned anything from that class, noting that the experience convinced him
that i should act however i want and let them come and go. … Lifes great when its onyour terms, fuck anybody who tells you how to handle your shit.
Somehow I suspect that the “broad” who says he hit her was telling the truth.
RE: lacerta viridis
It’s just the way it’s always reported as “this thing WORKS EVERY TIME
Enh, it’s the myth that excuses their behavior, in their own mind. I figure, they keep repeating it because assholes BELIEVE it. It’s not that they’re abusive; they just do it to please women! It’s a COMMUNITY SERVICE!
If I recall correctly, don’t MRAs consider the Duluth model to be the pinnacle of mysandry ? I know that there is some “schism” between pua and MRAs but something tells me we wont be hearing much from them
Although I receive a more visceral feeling of disgust from Roosh V, I believe that Heartiste may very well be the worst person regularly covered on We Hunted the Mammoth. Advocating DV behavior as a means of picking up woman is unconscionable.
A good friend of mine is a survivor of horrific parental abuse and neglect. He is now in his late 40s, and has worked hard all his adult life to become a healing force in people’s lives.
@LBT Yeah, I suppose so. I’m just curious/puzzled about what percentage of these stories are complete fabrications versus how many are based on a catastrophic and/or wilful misunderstanding of people’s actual reactions, I guess.
Not that it really matters in the end, though, the main point being that anyone who thinks this is an acceptable way to behave is almost certainly a terrible person, ‘wounded’ or not.
There aren’t enough nope-animals in the WTF zoo to express the loathing I feel for Heartiste and his ilk right now.
For starters:
I’m so tired of the “some woman read about it in a book somewhere, so they must want it to happen to them in real life” trope. I’ve read “1984” multiple times – that doesn’t mean I secretly want rats in my face.
That goes double and triple for erotic fiction, a lot of which involves ethically dubious if not outright illegal scenarios. That’s why they’re fantasies, and why consenting adults carve out a separate, safe space for acting them out.
FSOG should never happen in the real world. It’s a textbook portait of an abusive relationship between one consenting adult. Anastasia is terrified and unsure throughout. She’s never all “Woo hoo! This is great! I’m going to throw myself into this relationship with abandon!” Instead, she just endures her time with Christonacracker and tiptoes around hoping not to upset him, because he’s convinced her that no other man will ever want her. Her own desire, when it’s spoken of, is either outsourced into some weird-ass “inner goddess”, or manifests itself as dread and humiliation. Anastasia does a lot of “flushing” in that book, and it’s not the good kind. (Except for once, where she flushes in the bathroom at the memory of an encounter, and thanks to the bad writing, you’re not quite sure which kind it is.)
And that’s the problem with PUAs – they think it’s all good, that because fear reactions superficially resemble sexual arousal, that they’re one and the same. They’re not.
Rosh is probably just jealous of Lindy because she is a better writer, more respected, and probably earns more than he does. Roosh is a non entity aside from perhaps at most a couple of hundred guys on the internet who hide behind the internet in their dark basements.
Roosh probably wants some type of book contract with some major NY publishing house for his pua garbage and of course he’ll never get one. So Roosh is relegated to remain a low key pua guru to maybe at most 200 gullible dudes.
On the other hand while I wish Lindy much success in her new gig over at GQ I am sort of surprised she took the position. From what I know of GQ magazine I always thought of it as kind of sexist and read by corporate conservative republican men that watch FOX news. I am sort of shocked she would work for a magazine like that. However GQ may have recently changed and more progressive, I have not really kept up with it. I am happy for her though.
I dunno jared, writing jobs aren’t exactly raining from the sky. You do what you can to pay the rent, you know?
RE: Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Hubby and I have a lot of lesbian porn. Obviously we secretly want to be lesbians! *eyeroll*
Holy projection, Batman! Everything he did to you, he accused YOU of doing? That’s got to be a new record for…something. Well, let’s hope that he got a good lesson out of it on how NOT to talk to others. Your reaction was exactly right.
That was my reaction too, the first time a friend on Facebook linked one of Fartiste’s posts in our feminist discussion group. It was so over-the-top and loopy that I figured it had to be sarcastic, and not until I scrolled down to the septic tank — sorry, “comments section” — did I realize that it was actually in earnest. It was all about how feminism and careers had allegedly made women fat, and how the “solution” was more housework, 1950s style. What the idiot of course failed to grasp was that in the 1950s, women weren’t thinner because they stayed home playing their “proper” role, it was because of a combination of post-war rationing, girdles, and amphetamine-based diet pills (which later became illegal, at least here in Canada). It was a classic example of anecdata and assfax coming together like waxy fake chocolate and rotten peanut butter.
Ditto. And another dystopian fave of mine, A Clockwork Orange — which is rife with robberies, rapes, murder and beatings. I don’t read it to get off on gang violence (which I abhor!). I read and reread it for the marvelously inventive futuristic slang (Nadsat, based on Russian) and for its impeccable structure (21 chapters, symbolizing the 21 years it takes to reach maturity, organized into three parts) — and oh yeah, for the final chapter (which was left out of the US version, very much under the author’s protest), in which Alex outgrows his “ultra-violence” and starts yearning for love and a family of his own. It’s actually a moral fable, not gore porn. But of course, these guys probably only read the truncated version that the movie was based on, if they’ve read it at all.
I don’t actually think people who like first person shooters want to be gunned down in their neighborhood either.
Wow, I had no idea my love of giant monster movies comes from a deep-seated desire to have a 50-meter radioactive lizard step on my apartment.
LBT is right. Redpill ideology isn’t about explanation, it’s about justification.
The “all women secretly want to be dominated and abused” conceit is, I think, pretty central to their whole worldview. It allows them to justify their horrible behavior toward women by claiming women secretly want it, even if they don’t always show it. (Given that another fundamental tenet of redpillology is to not listen to anything women say, this hypothesis is falsifiable by neither women’s behavior nor their reporting. This sort of thing is why it’s not necessary to take redpill claims about the world seriously.)
@LBT
I had a therapist actually tell me I should feel bad for my abusive stepfather because he was abused. That was the last she ever saw of me. Do I feel sympathy for the way he was treated? Of course. But we choose to break the cycle. We choose to help those like us, rather than hurt them. He chose to beat my siblings and me the way he was beaten and call it “good parenting”. He chose to set the precedent for “love” for me and aid in the belief that I deserved my later abuse at the hands of a partner.
There is no sympathy in me for those who choose to become the monster.
I feel like people are trying to answer a different question than the one I was trying to ask, kind of? It wasn’t “do they really believe in this philosophy?” that I was curious about, it was “do they really go out and say this shit to people in real life, or are they just sitting at home making up stories to tell each other?” Sorry for being unclear, I’m not always very good at explaining stuff with words; heavy painkillers plus weird brain issues don’t make for great communication skills.
@ryeash yeah, I spent way too much time in my childhood/early teens quietly having a breakdown because I had heard the ‘abused people become abusers’ thing and was terrified I would suddenly turn into a monster one day. It’s kind of not the greatest thing to constantly repeat to abuse survivors, to say the least.
They do spend their time testing peoples boundaries in search of prey, yes, I think they do.
@Bina; Like most Americans, I read the 20-chapter version first, and then got an edition with the 21st chapter. The problem, I find, is that Burgess is so very good at portraying an utter sociopath through those 20 chapters that I’m not convinced Alex is *ever* going to get much better. Oh yes, removing his free will did not and would not work, but I got the impression that even if Alex is growing beyond the random home-invasion robberies, rapes, and gang fights that he may *never* be able to settle down. At best, he might end up like Alfie (though, I fear, more willing to drug a girlfriend if she seems hesitant).
They fully expect to be told to piss off a lot of the time, too. The goal of the horrible boundary-testing behavior is to identify the women who they’ll be able to get away with abusing, at least for a while.
Yup. I counted up to 8 items on that wheel and decided I didn’t want to think about it any more. My first husband’s family might not be described as “loving” but they were pretty fair average quality parents with a stable marriage and they were nice people who cared about their kids. He was a shitheel of the first water. Good job we never had any kids.
My second husband? His family was the definition of dysfunctional in their own extremely peculiar way. He’s been a wonderful partner/ husband to me for nearly 40 years and a fantastic father to our daughters despite the fact that he’s needed several extended bouts of counselling whenever the family of origin stuff has reared up and bitten him.
So fuck that rubbish about abused people becoming abusers.
@lacerta viridis
I’m so sorry you even felt that way for a second. It’s such a hurtful myth designed to heap further guilt on victims. Right up there with “mutual abuse”. People don’t abuse simply because they were abused. They were taught that it was acceptable to take anger out on partners or children and decided to follow that example rather than practice empathy and self-control. They were taught to treat children and/or romantic partners as property rather than people and decided they liked that dynamic.
And then they write blogs like this ‘Heartiste’ (seriously?) creature and brag about perpetuating abuse.
It’s fairly easy to tell what monsters are and aren’t. We only convince ourselves it’s something you just “slip into” because we’re that afraid of becoming what we hate. Abuse isn’t some transmittable disease. It’s a form of control that people consciously subject others to in order to mitigate some failing they imagine they have.
@cassandrakitty …but then they go online and claim it’s a ‘brilliant game move’ that works every time? Idk, I’m probably trying too look too hard for sense/logic where there is none. I think it’s mostly just because I can’t imagine my reaction to that horrible touchdown joke being anything other than blinking and maybe giggling nervously while thinking ‘wow, did he really say that? I must have misunderstood, right?’, and I kind of started wondering whether these guys somehow actually interpret that sort of reaction as ‘yep, she totally wants me!’ (And I should probably clarify here that I am specifically talking about stuff like that joke, not about the general concept of using abuse tactics to control people within relationships; I don’t even want to think very much about that because it’s beyond disgusting.)
Nah, I’ve had that shit tried on me in real life. When women don’t respond the way they want they just get pissed off for a while, then move on to the next target. A few of the more naive/new to the whole thing ones might be surprised, but the ones who’re really involved in the whole thing know exactly what they’re doing – they’re looking for potential victims.
I haven’t been around much, and have nothing but noptopus for this shithead’s shit. But I see we’ve got a Latin (?) Italian (?) nym, so…
Lacerta viridis…green something…green lizards?
My Nivae Salamandra is being a goof and resting face in sand, tail over plant at like a 45° angle.
/totally OT comment
Here, have some QI hilarity —
I <3 Ross Noble
@ryeash Thank you. And I’m so sorry about your therapist saying that to you too, ugh.
@cassandrakitty Sorry, I think I’m still obviously not properly expressing what I’m trying to say/ask. My fault, I’m just not good with words today. I’m going to give up now though, because I don’t really want to derail the comments into the Lacerta Fails At Language show.
@Argenti Aertheri yep, it’s the Latin name for the European green lizard. (And my skink is currently mostly hiding under his substrate with just his head sticking out. It’s pretty cute.)