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.
I would imagine that any “bedding” Julien Blanc does is rape.
When he made that comment, I thought that nobody could possibly mistake what he was saying. But at that time, I wasn’t aware of the manosphere. Now … I’m not so sure.
Really? Someone just challenged David to a notch count competition?
You should try growing up sometime, d00d, it’s fun and rewarding.
Nah, then he’d have to see women as humans instead of fuckdolls, and that might make his alleged brain melt.
Too right, kittehserf! If he had to start treating women like human beings, then he’d probably never get laid again (at least, not without a personality transplant). And, as we all well know, a sad boner is the greatest tragedy in the history of the universe.
huh
So, either:
A) Comic amounts of book paraphernalia (it’s abundant, and it’s comic that the sheer volume is so much)
B) The books themselves are inherently funny (comic, abundant), and the comic abundance of books is a testament to a very large amount of comic books
C) abundant comic book paraphernalia, which is to say, action figures and other such paraphernalia related to comic books
D) abundant comic book paraphernalia, stuff related to books, like book lights and extra covers and lots of shelves and scribbled love poems to the dewey decimal system
E) the mountain dew is funny and so is the book piles
F) he owns stuff related to books and mountain dew (like collection of bottles?)
FORMAT YOUR SENTENCES IN WAYS THAT CONVEY UNAMBIGUOUS MEANING. If Futrelle has mastery over ever expanding venues depending on how one reads your sentence, then Futrelle really must be a master savvy social artist of all areas and all spheres.
Argh.
Absolutely, grumpyoldnurse! It’s a travesty of human rights and the UN is totally remiss in not including freedom from sad boners (for men, of course – not freedom for women from being harassed about them) in its human rights charter.
Yanno how some people give the impression that they leave a slime trail behind them as they move through the world? Alec is one who gives that impression.
Well, he is the Dark Lord, comprised of cats wearing ferret suits wearing cat suits wearing a human suit. Who knows what powers he/they may have?
Well, kittehserf, it’s not like women are human or something! Let’s not get carried away! You have to keep perspective on things like harassing women and physically assaulting them. I mean, it’s not like JB (julien, not janet) is hurting people or something! Besides, not only is it just feeeemalze, it’s only a joke! Why can’t feminazis laugh at stuff that normal people think is funny? /sarcasm
@ Fibinachi – may I please have option B? I would love to have a comically over abundance of funny books. (It would help take my mind off all this misogyny)
@ thebewilderness – Makes one wonder if he responds to salt the same way as slugs do? Sorry, but sometimes I just have evil thoughts.
Your fingers are flapping, but nothing intelligible is coming out. Please try again, this time with more intelligence and brevity.
thebewilderness – yes, and without any of the interesting aspects of, say, slugs and snails.
grumpyoldnurse, now that salt experiment is one I’d like to see, if he does. All in the name of science, of course. *cough*
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CFZ1vwft6Mw/TsqBpoeqsqI/AAAAAAAAAQk/qCUHYUkYwTQ/s1600/Far_SIde_Slug_vacation.jpg
Quite right, kittehserf, for science! Yeah! Yeah, that’s it! For Science!
I don’t know or care how many sexual partners David has had. What I do know is that he doesn’t condone sexual assault. That automatically makes him better than Julian Blanc
The “you can’t get laid, nyanyanya!” thing is one of those buttons that get implanted in boys by society at puberty — sort of the mirror image of the slut-shaming button that gets implanted in girls. It’s not that guys necessarily don’t feel insecure about their notch count, particularly when someone (occasionally it’s even a woman — ouch!) pushes that button. It’s just that using the lying, badgering, and even almost-rapey techniques on women (often women you don’t even find that interesting), that it takes for an average guy to build up an impressive notch count, doesn’t appeal to a lot of men. What good is getting laid if you feel like a weasel afterwards?
Guys who push that button are usually showing that they have no sense of weaselhood and that their own button is quite large and easily pushed. They think other men find their insult just as insulting as they do.
Bingo.
I find it so funny (peculiar AND ha-ha) that those things can exist simultaneously. It makes no sense, really, because to have a notch count, guys have to sleep with somebody, and to not be sluts, girls have to avoid BEING that somebody. Which then begs the question: Who are these guys with the notch counts doing it with, if no “good” girls will do it with them? And if all that these guys can get are “bad” girls, then what does that say about those guys?
Isn’t this where the tired old idea of women a sexual gatekeepers comes in? We keep them out (to defend our sexual ‘honour’) but the manliest men get in and thus up their notch count (and ‘score’).
Pretty messed up, IMHO.
The old “seduce” (or outright rape, little difference) and then discard thing, isn’t it? And of course women are to blame whatever happens. If we don’t have sex with them, we’re prudes or frigid or lesbians, but at the same time, if we have sex with anyone else, we’re sluts. Plus, of course, once they’ve got their notch count by shoving their dicks into us, we’re sluts anyway, even if we never had sex with anyone else before or since.
I think a lot of these guys think of sex as a battle game where if a man and woman sleep together then the man has won and the woman has lost. They are incapable of regarding sex as something that even could be mutual. That makes it almost a bad thing if a woman wants to sleep with you — if her will isn’t overcome, if there’s no conquest, then what’s it all worth anyway.
That’s my best attempt at mansplaining as a senior citizen past my bedtime.
That explanation works for me, GrumpyOldMan. They treat sex as something women don’t ever want (because no sex drive, blah blah blah) and/or that we’re meanly withholding from the men who have the right to fuck us, ie. them. So it’s all about punishing us, and that’s what gives them their jollies. There’s a hell of a lot of sadism lurking in all this.
Kittehserf:
I think it’s easier for these dudes to think that women don’t want sex than to engage in any introspection and realise that maybe they’re just not that interesting to women and to work on becoming actualised human beings. Because it can’t be possibly them. I simply can not be the common denominator (them) in their negative interactions with women.
The most taboo thing to their egos is the notion that a woman DOES want sex, but just not with them. That can’t happen! He’s an Alpha Male™! Women find him irresistible! (Says so right in the videos!) He must get his! So he does — forcibly — and then suddenly, SHE’s the slut? Um, NO. If the man’s got the style of a cesspit and the attitude to match, and he thinks he must “get it” by hook or by crook, then he’s the one who’s doing wrong and should be ashamed.