Julien Blanc, also known as RSD Julien, is a self-described “executive dating coach” seemingly without a conscience. In expensive seminars held in hotels around the world the Real Social Dynamics instructor teaches men to “Make Girls BEG To Sleep With You After SHORT-CIRCUITING Their Emotional And Logical Mind,” as his breathless promo material puts it.
What this means in practice? Manipulation, mind-fuckery and in some cases outright physical assault — none of which he makes any attempts to hide.
Indeed, a video Julien himself put out in September showed the “dating” guru working his particular magic on unsuspecting Japanese women — by putting them in headlocks and/or pushing their heads to his crotch.
In footage from one of his recent workshops, he told a roomful of hopeful creeps that in Tokyo,
if you’re a white male, you can do what you want. … I’m just romping through the streets,just grabbing girls’ heads, just like, head, pfft on the dick.
After discovering a video featuring some of this footage — the one I’ve embedded at the top of this page — feminist activist Jennifer Li set up a petition on Change.org urging the Como Melbourne hotel, and other hotels hosting Real Social Dynamics seminars, to boot Julian and his comrades, charging them with “[making] a living by teaching men how to violate women through physical and emotional abuse.”
Li also started up the hashtag #TakeDownJulienBlanc in order to spread the news and organize opposition to Julien’s seminars.
It worked. The video featuring Julien’s abusive tactics went viral, racking up a quarter million pageviews on YouTube, and the petition quickly garnered nearly fifteen thousand signatures.
And the Como Melbourne hotel listened:
Following an objective review, we are in the process of advising Real Social Dynamics of our decision not to proceed as their event venue.
— The Como Melbourne (@ComoMelbourne) November 4, 2014
[UPDATE: RSD quickly rescheduled the event at a different location.]
Li and the other #TakeDownJulienBlanc organizers are now aiming their sights on hotels hosting other RSD events in Seattle and Austin, Texas. Anonymous has also gotten into the action.
It’s easy to see why the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign has spread so quickly. Pickup artists are a sleazy, manipulative and generally pretty amoral bunch But “RSD Julien” takes PUA creepiness to a whole new level, teaching his acolytes a form of “pickup artistry” that bears a strong resemblance to domestic abuse.
In his promo material, he boasts that his approach is
Offensive, It’s Inappropriate, It’s Emotionally Scarring, BUT IT’S DAMN EFFECTIVE
He tries to pass this off as a joke, but it’s really not; his techniques are clearly abusive.
I pointed out some of his bizarre gaslighting tricks in a post last year. But if anything he seems to have gotten worse since then.
Indeed, Julien recently Tweeted a picture of the Duluth Power and Control wheel, a tool used by anti-DV activists to highlight abusive behavior, declaring it to be a handy “checklist” of techniques to use to “MakeHerStay.” (Another sleazeball pickup guru I’ve written about a lot, Heartiste, also claims to have found inspiration in the Duluth wheel.)
And then there’s what Julien calls the “Choke Opener,” which he has documented in a series of pics showing him with his hand around the throats of assorted women, all of which he’s helpfully tagged with #ChokingGirlsAroundTheWorld.
As Julien sees it, these, er, pickup techniques enable men to, as he declares in all-caps on his site, to
DEVELOP PANTY-DROPPING MASCULINITY WITH THIS ROCK-SOLID STRUCTURE TO SELF-GENERATE THE POWERFUL EMOTIONS GIRLS CRAVE
Well, he’s generated some powerful emotions, all right, though I don’t think anger and disgust were the ones he was going for.
*too light
brooked – oh, definitely. Though you can see the way even that would be used against women – “Why didn’t you take self-defence classes?”
Looks like all venues for his Australian tour have cancelled.
So awesome.
Given that this took place in Japan I’m waiting for some asshole to come along and argue that if the women in the video didn’t want to be harassed they should have just become actual ninjas, tbh. I’m fairly certain there’s no limit to the bullshit the kind of people who’d participate in this mess can come up with.
Like that fuckwit with his “Then get a gun!” mansplaining that’s been doing the rounds.
I love the facial expressions of the woman he’s “debating”. She goes from trying to be nice, to WTF, to you cannot be serious with this shit, to OK you are officially too ridiculous to even try reasoning with.
Cassandrakitty: “Why didn’t those women fight back? That’s what girls in anime do!”
@Boogerghost: He did it on purpose to make sure I wouldn’t complain to him about the encounter (we were in a relationship). He, like the man making duckbunny cry, used this kind of thing to manipulate me.
In St. kildas he apparently tried to find a venue and couldn’t so the plan was to meet up and do his show in the pier. The council threatened legal action. I love it.
I am technically challenged to an extent but did write a note to huffington post this am, with elections in US yesterday was understandable but I am more interested in seeing this on an aggregator than news about Game of Thrones or JLo. It is on huffpo France.
Jezebel hasn’t picked up on this yet, as far as I can see. I’ll try and contact them.
I’m not a fan of XO Jane but someone should probably send this to them too.
@Mewens
No big. I went to bed on time. LOL
I wouldn’t talk about the law in terms of good and evil either. Morality can be framed in terms of good and evil, but that’s not the only possible framing. Sometimes morality is instead framed in terms of good and bad. May seem like a distinction without a difference, but there really is a difference. “It’s immoral to break a contract” can be rephrased as “It’s bad to break a contract” or “It’s evil to break a contract.” “Bad” and “evil” are not synonyms. We can say it’s bad to break contracts because people are injured when you don’t do what you contracted to do, and it disrupts the orderly function of society, which is a practical definition of “immoral.” It’s very different to say that people who break contracts are going to hell.
“It’s illegal to break a contract” means that the public morality frowns on this activity, but the public morality is good/bad, not good/evil. There was a time when laws were good/evil, and that is still true in some parts of the world, but not really true anymore in the global West.
girlscientist: I’m really sorry you had to deal with that.
The ability of privileged men to turn even their own abusive actions into cries for sympathy is ridiculous. It really is all about their feelings, and nothing that makes then sad could ever be their own fault.
An example: I was, as a teenager, a pretty shitty sibling. I was consistently mean to my brother. Consequently, when I went to university, my brother spent several years not wanting very much to do with me. This made me sad, but it’s not something dreadful that my brother did to me. It was the natural consequences of something I did. Resenting it would have made me even more of an asshole than being consistently mean to my sibling already made me.
For privileged men, that lesson seems to be optional. But people don’t have to like you. If you behave shittily to people, those people are allowed to hate you for it. You don’t get to demand forgiveness. If you are feeling guilt and shame, those feelings are your problem, and you should listen to them. You can’t make yourself a less shitty person by bullying other people into telling you you’re nice.
That’s the thing, that guilt you’re feeling because you just raped a woman, or made her cry for some other reason? You should be feeling it. That guilt is your brain’s way of reminding you that you did a bad thing. If someone responds to your whining by soothing you, as you are demanding, you will still have done the bad thing, and piled another bad thing on top of it. The fact that you have browbeaten or manipulated some poor woman into apologizing for making you feel bad for victimizing her doesn’t make you less of a bad person, it makes you an even worse person.
@zennurse [AVFM White Ribbon fraud] White Ribbon Australia are making noises about suing them. I’ve emailed David a link to the news story about it.
When I was in Japan I saw a lot of street harassment. Very little of it was from foreigners, but I also experienced that whole “foreigners can basically get away with anything”. I knew two women who were studying in Tokyo, and they said men would expose their genitals to them virtually every day on public transit. Still, the foreigners I saw being inappropriate were WAY more persistent, especially at bars and restaurants.
I was staying in a very small town (the town that I’m pretty sure P4 is based on) and lots of the people I met there would talk about how they avoided going to Kyoto or Tokyo because they felt like people treated stuff like that too lightly. In Ise, I did witness an old man attack a street harasser with an umbrella, which was entertaining, but a different old man attacked me with an umbrella later when I asked for directions so maybe Ise was just full of violent umbrella-wielders that day.
brooked sez:
In my high school lunch line, I (rather feebly) kneed a guy choking me in the crotch. He didn’t escalate, but shoved me away into a cart of lunch trays, and I smacked my head on a raised bolt and had to go to the hospital for a single stitch. So even though kneeing him “worked,” it still earned me a trip to the hospital. (Though maybe he would have escalated and only stopped coming after me because at that point the woman running that counter noticed what was going on and pulled him behind the counter.)
A.Noyd — I know it’s probably way too late, but if it’s not, you should file a police report. Dude sent you to the hospital. That’s a CRIME. He should be led away in handcuffs.
Every person who is assaulted should raise a stink about it AND call the cops. Every time. If he makes you bleed–he’s not going to be able to talk his way out of it. Most states do not offer cops discretion in this regard. File the report. Even if you decide not to go through the hassle of formal prosecution, you have demonstrated that actions have consequences.
Do it for yourself and for everyone else.
In case we still need brain bleach…
http://31.media.tumblr.com/43bd8298d716fed7f6e90eca9315144b/tumblr_nehipiL9t51qh66wqo4_500.jpg
http://38.media.tumblr.com/ceeefc076364bc08646bc85fdb96ea8c/tumblr_nehipiL9t51qh66wqo2_1280.jpg
girlscientist, hugs if you want them. I am so sorry he did that to you. Here’s hoping the fleas of a thousand camels take up residence in his underwear.
Also here is a misandrist cat.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8v49zeZNV1rdmy1mo1_500.png
Kevin K
It was over 20 years ago and he was expelled from school for the assault. And if I knew then what I knew now, I’d have petitioned to have him allowed to finish high school (not necessarily at mine) and non-punitive help given to him to learn more constructive ways to approach issues. It was a race-based incident with me, despite my wound, as the ultimate benefactor of institutionalized racism and him as the loser. Getting cops involved and reports filed would have only exacerbated the problem.
Just no. Nowadays I’d be afraid that would get a young black man like him murdered. And I certainly wouldn’t want to have done more to make the guy another statistic in the school-to-prison pipeline. Yes, there should be consequences for assault, but the current system is so broken that a white person using the law against a black person for minor assault cannot be justice. It might end up being necessary for an individual’s immediate safety, but it’s still not justice and doesn’t make society as a whole safer in the long run.
And here is a misandrist fish.
http://i.imgur.com/3OlkDIQ.gif
“If he makes you bleed–he’s not going to be able to talk his way out of it.”
Well…actually I showed up at a police station in the middle of the night covered in bruises and concussed…and they sent me away. Seriously fuck you.
For further elaboration see the misandry cat above.