The so-called pickup artists who inhabit a large portion of this thing called the manosphere are a strange bunch: They devote much of their life to figuring out ways to appeal to women they don’t like or respect.
Apparently, for most of those who actually are out there “picking up” women and not just boasting about imaginary conquests on the internet, the sex is good enough (for them at least) to make their otherwise joyless endeavor worthwhile for them. And if the sex itself isn’t that great, well, at least they get to brag to their internet friends about how they conned some hot “slut” into having sex with them.
But what happens when the sex begins to lose its luster?
Well, we get what seems to be happening with pickup guru Roosh Valizadeh, who over the course of the last few months has been chronicling what amounts to an existential meltdown in a series of embittered posts on his blog. Roosh may not be self-aware enough to realize that’s what he’s been doing, but it’s pretty clear from the outside that he’s beginning to sense the fundamental hollowness of a life devoted to pursuing women he hates.
In these posts, Roosh spells out in detail just how resentful he feels to have to make even a small amount of effort to convince women to come home with him. In one post I wrote about earlier, he laments that his pursuit of women has turned him into a “clown” performing for the women he wants to fuck.
We are not men in the traditional sense—we are clowns. With our tight game we have to be entertainers who create drama and excitement in a girl’s life, just long enough so that she spreads her legs and makes sexy noises, and even though she did commit such an intimate act with us, she will soon lose interest or simply get bored, and then move on to the next shiny cock that catches her eye.
Huh. She’s using you, just as you’re using her? Poor baby.
In other posts, he seems almost ready to give up the lifestyle he makes a living promoting. In one, he complains about “expending labor and much more money to lay” a young women who looked a lot like one he had previously dated. Or, as he so charmingly describes her, like “an inferior version of a girl I had let go.” He complains that all of his options look bleak:
Unless I’m looking at an easy one-night stand opportunity, it’s illogical for me based on my experience to go on a date with a girl for any other reason than to enter some type of relationship with her, something that I don’t necessarily want. Otherwise it’s a waste of time that provides me with nothing more than entertainment. Even a one-night stand has lost its luster since the quality will be modest at best and condom use will be usually required, decreasing the overall sexual pleasure. It’s clear to me now that I don’t want what I used to want (as much), but at the same time I don’t care for something deeper. I’m afraid I may have already extracted the most satisfying rewards women could provide me in life, and that this particular oil well in running dry.
Emphasis mine.
In another, he wonders if, to paraphrase the old song, this is all there is:
Mini-relationships and harem maintenance are nothing more than entertainment and serious relationships are drudgery, one step away from slavery. Both are unsatisfactory.
So what’s the answer? Is it eternal bachelorhood, of banging a handful of new girls each season, hopping from one new mini-relationship to the next, but achieving no depth or novelty in what you haven’t achieved before, or is it making what could be the biggest mistake of your life by knocking a girl up and riding the fatherhood roller coaster for the next 20 years? … Or maybe the answer is that the happiness I have sought in women can’t be achieved at all, and whether I ride the slut carousel or settle down with one girl, I’ll still end up asking myself, “Is this it?”
Again, emphasis mine.
It’s a good question, and one I’m sure a lot of these women you “bang” ask themselves after you roll off them and go to sleep. Or possibly even during the sex itself.
But the strangest of Roosh’s many laments comes in a post titled “Men Must Groom More Than Cats To Get Laid,” in which he complains, in all seriousness, about having to clean the shit off his own ass.
The thesis of this odd little post of his is that these days straight men, in order to appeal to women, “have to groom more than women of 30 years ago,” a sad state of affairs that he fears “must make us the most feminized men to have ever existed.”
To make his case, he presents a long list of “the acts of grooming I’ve done at least once in the past week.”
You may notice that, despite the length of the list, most of the items on it aren’t exactly onerous tasks; indeed, many are pretty much the minimum required to function in a civilized society. I’ve bolded a few of them that caught my eye.
- Floss my teeth
- Brush my teeth
- Scrape my tongue
- Gargle with mouthwash
- Pluck extra long and curly eyebrow hair that began to obstruct my vision
- Trim my beard
- Shave my neck
- Trim ear hair
- Trim nose hair
- Apply baking soda to arm pits
- Apply and remove contact lenses
- Wipe my ass thoroughly
- Shower
- Stroke my balls with my hand and then smell it to ensure lack of odor
- Apply benzoyl peroxide to a pimple
- Apply lip moisturizer
- Apply face moisturizer
- Remove boogers and other debris form my nose
- Comb my hair
- Trim my sideburns
- Wash clothes
- Wash penis in bathroom sink after sex
- Trim my fingernails
- Trim armpit air
- Squeeze out blackheads on nose
- Remove residual sock fiber from underneath toe nails
- Remove ear wax using cotton swabs
- Remove eye gunk after waking up
- Dab off extra grease on forehead with napkin
That’s right. Roosh is literally complaining about having to pick boogers out of his nose and wipe his own ass “thoroughly” enough to keep skidmarks off his underoos. He thinks women are oppressing him by forcing him to clip his fingernails and brush his teeth.
A common belief in the manopshere is that women want masculine, alpha men, but what they really want is sexy clowns who are well-groomed. If you have bad breath, bad skin, or odorific armpits, you’re not getting far with women no matter how good your game is. The modern man has to essentially groom like women in order to attract them, because I highly doubt that tribesmen of ancient times cared if their breath smelled or not.
Your life has taken a wrong turn somewhere when you resent women for wanting you to smell better than a caveman.
H/T to @keithcalder for the graphic at the top of the post.
Also: Vikings were dandies of their era. http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/hairstyl.shtml
“Although the popular image of the people of the Viking Age is one of wild-haired, dirty savages, this is a false perception. In reality, the Vikings took care with their personal grooming, bathing, and hairstyling.”
@skiriki – thanks for the link. I particularly like THIS passage:
Somehow, it seems apropos.
Yo, Roosh! Thinking of entering the priesthood any time soon?
And!! I read somewhere once that the Vikings – this is the dudes we’re talking about – wore eye makeup. Wish I could remember where I read that.
Well, damn. This means that the Vikings put more effort into their grooming than Roosh does.
Vikings probably even washed their hands at least once a day! Which, Roosh didn’t ever admit to on his long list.
That’s still bugging me.
C-DIFF! HEP A! TYPHOID! GIARDIASIS! TAPEWORMS! SHIGELLOSIS! CLOSTRIDIUM! E-COLI! DUDE! FECAL-ORALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES! DOORKNOBS! SURFACES EVERYWHERE! STOP TOUCHING THEM UNLESS YOU WASH YOUR HANDS FIRST! EW-EW-EW-EW-EW-EW-EW!
I’m not typically a germophobe. Still, I draw the line at the germs in other people’s feces, unless they’ve been thoroughly cultured and deemed helpful, not harmful.
Yup. One thing MRAs and PUAs really seem to have in common is that both think women should be lowered in socioeconomic status to a degree where they are FORCED to put out. Legalized rape, in short. And in the case of prostitution, PAID legalized rape. Price: Whatever the market will bear.
Ohhhhh myyyyyy. The implications of this for PUAdom are positively hilarious. Say, didn’t Roosh also have a book out called “Don’t Bang Denmark”, in which he whined that Danish women are too socially secure, and thus unwilling to be picked up? I’d say it’s also because they’re accustomed to attractive, well-groomed Danish men, if historic pattern still holds true. Of course Roosh the Slob would never get a look-in there!
Flies put more effort into grooming than Roosh does.
Neanderthals probably did and they were considered dumpy beside Homo sapiens.
Yeah, they probably did. Their diet was more meat than plant-based.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27981702
Hard to sneak up on ambulatory food if you stink.
Especially if one’s hunting *****mammoth*****. Imagine how a nose like that would register a Roosh-level stench.
“Say, didn’t Roosh also have a book out called “Don’t Bang Denmark”..”
He also had a book “Don`t Bang Latvia”, and I`m strangely proud about that. Strangely, because generally I don`t care about others sex lives, but Roosh is so repellent that I`m glad he didn`t have much luck in Riga. However, Latvian media made sort of a big deal about this, because that was the time Riga still had that “sex-tourists capital” label.
P.S. How do you quote on this site?
“Ohhhhh myyyyyy. The implications of this for PUAdom are positively hilarious. Say, didn’t Roosh also have a book out called “Don’t Bang Denmark”, in which he whined that Danish women are too socially secure, and thus unwilling to be picked up? I’d say it’s also because they’re accustomed to attractive, well-groomed Danish men, if historic pattern still holds true. Of course Roosh the Slob would never get a look-in there!”
I’m Dane and I found his posts about Denmark particularly hilarious. Not only is nearly every observation he makes about our culture completely wrong, it’s obvious he mad because Danish women have too many options to ever give a pig like him a second glance. Oh, and they want to be treated with respect:
“Danish girls don’t like masculinity, cockiness, or outspoken guys. Because of Jante Law, any attempt on your part to even indirectly show that you’re more experienced, knowledgeable, or smarter than her will terminate the interaction. Even if you’re definitely more experienced than her (she’s likely to only be a student, after all), you must pretend that you’re both equal. I don’t care if you’re ten years older than her and have lived in a dozen locations around the world after succeeding at a million-dollar business built from scratch, but you must treat the stupid opinions of a 23-year-old Danish girl with reverence and respect if you want to get laid. In other words, you have to sell yourself out for pussy.”
http://www.rooshv.com/danish-girls-are-the-most-masculine-in-the-world
So much for the “Chicks dig Jerks”-theory.
Drdg
It’s like this [blockquote] text [blockquote] but with angle brackets instead of square ones.
Plus! There are html tips and all sorts of goodies in the Official Welcome Package!
Protip for Roosh — you’re not welcome in Finland either. Us skeery well-educated wimminfolk will absolutely pwn you if you try to do this.
If I remember my sagas correctly, viking women could divorce their husbands if /he/ showed too much chest!
Yay for equality!
I’m still stuck on the fact that he doesn’t want to wipe his ass, wash his balls, brush & floss his teeth or knock the crusty boogers lose from his nose, but he wants beautiful young women to enthusiastically throw themselves at him AND after experiencing the sort of horrible and abusive sex he promotes, pine after him. That’s just a bizarre thing to think of as reasonable. He could literally be the last man on Earth and that still would not be a reasonable thing to expect. He’s a very confused person.
Viking men and women took care of their appearances.
Men carried tweezers, combs etc. with them. These were people with heated bathhouses. Roosh would have looked like a slob next to them too.
Yup. And the consequences of women being able to readily divorce a bad husband were verrrrry interesting:
I would love to see Roosh come up against a woman like that in real life. He wouldn’t last a day.
I can hear that elephant’s ear-splitting trumpet from here! (Saaaay, maybe we should encourage him to go elephant-hunting. It’d be the last we ever saw of him…)
All hail the Danelaw…it keeps idiots like Roosh from trying to lord it over younger women! (Heh…actually, it’s not a law that does it. It’s the Danish girls’ collective good sense and taste.)
Yup. Actually, we can smell ’em (literally, in the case of schlumpy ones like Roosh) and we avoid them like a dirty toilet.
Quite literally.
http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/69942813470/4thmansionofthemoon-woman-kills-a-would-be
Vikings didn’t take rapists very kindly.
Can the people from the Spearhead also meet real shield maidens?
Viking misandry!
Holy hell, Roosh. First off, if you’re planning to have sex, YOU WASH YOUR GENITALIA. Regardless of your gender. It’s the most basic courtesy you can pay to the other person/people involved. If you expecting someone else to put their hands/face in the vicinity of your genitals, the least you can do is make sure that it’s not covered with residual shit.
Secondly, wow. It really does feel like he’s teetering on the brink of an epiphany, doesn’t it? Or rather, he’s stubbornly circling around the real source of his misery, refusing to acknowledge it while groping blindly for literally any other explanation of why his life feels empty and meaningless.
Roosh, next time you find yourself asking “Is this it?”, you might want to consider that:
– You have successfully alienated yourself from 50% of the population
– You view women as interchangeable drones who all act exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons, which means you can never have a fulfilling relationship with one.
– You are incapable of feeling love, respect, or even basic cordiality towards the people you want to have sex with
– Despite the deep and abiding contempt you feel for women, you have dedicated your life and career to pursuing them, obsessing over their behaviour and thinking of strategies for manipulating them into doing what you want
– You have reduced human relationships into a zero-sum transaction with winners and losers, and no room for genuine affection and mutual happiness
– You have turned sex – one of the most intimate and vulnerable of human activities – into a mechanical simulation that gives you empty physical release and little else.
– Your self-worth is tied up in an external factor that you have very little control over (i.e. how many women you can trick into bed with you) instead of your own achievements and goals and personal qualities.
– Your greatest fear is women treating you the same way you treat them (i.e. holding you to high physical standards, treating you as a disposable sex toy, talking about you with contempt and ridicule.)
Nthing everyone who has said that Roosh is a miserable piece of shit who deserves no sympathy, but all the same, the miserable aspect is really jumping out in this post. It all boils down to the fact that all the things that make relationships fun and fulfilling – respect, love, vulnerability, empathy, honesty, openness, wonder, acceptance – are also the things that are specifically precluded by the PUA philosophy. Even with a one night stand, you certain amount of trust and vulnerability and mutual respect, otherwise you may as well just go home and rub your genitals against a warm piece of meat for a while. Like OF COURSE you’re going to be miserable if your entire life is dedicated to fucking people you hate and don’t even really consider human. How could you not be?
vaiyt – I thought your link would be that story! Props to the Varangians as well as the Vikings.
Bina, I <3 those divorce laws. Damn, that is good stuff.
I also love the thought of Roosh being charged by an elephant outraged at his stench.
@tinyorc:
That for me is a very succinct distillation of the essential problem with redpill/PUA types. Why bother making so much effort to put bits of your body into receptacles you hate? If women are so loathesome it’s a wonder they don’t all try to sleep with other men. Except of course that the sex is secondary to the hating on women, and just a way of keeping score.