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.
“The most taboo thing to their egos is the notion that a woman DOES want sex, but just not with them.”
That’s a big part of it, of course. And they don’t have the interest or energy to try to figure out what a woman might be looking for in a sexual encounter (hint: it’s probably not adding to her notch count). And in that previous sentence I mean A WOMAN, not WOMEN — the PUA types are trying to work out a system that will work on any woman without having to know anything about her as an individual, which is just too much trouble. I will never claim to be an expert on women, but it is my impression that being treated as an anonymous conquest is not the golden way to get into the average woman’s pants. Some years ago I read an article where a woman wrote, “You have to seduce my mind before you can seduce my body.” The notch-counters don’t want to be bothered with a woman’s mind. And notch-counting is, of course, an implicit competition with other men with women as mainly the means of scoring — sort of like a glorified game ball. And there’s projection too — many men assume that women are just as interested in a man’s penis as they are in a woman’s vagina. I think a man like that doesn’t want a woman who’s too interested in sex because she might be treating HIM as a conquest — many men don’t like that kind of role reversal: they know how they treat women, and they don’t want to be treated like that themselves.
And then if you want to run up your notch count you need to stay out of relationships — once you’ve fucked a woman, you get no additional score for fucking her again. (That’s why it helps to not look at women as people, nor be able to relate to them as individuals, because you might discover that you actually like being together and that would certainly fuck up your notch count. My own notch count is in single digits, partly because I’ve been married for the past 46 years (except for about a year from when I decided to divorce my first wife until I got involved with my wife). There are absolutely no scoring points given in male competitions for having sex with your significant other.
Some years ago there was a best-selling book called “The Rules” whose premise was that men love the Chase and Conquest, so a woman needed to increase her Sexual Market Value (no, they didn’t actually use that term) by playing hard to get. Even with a man you’re dating, you should never call him, never talk for more than ten minutes when he calls, never accept a date for Saturday after Tuesday, etc., etc. The question they never seemed to ask was, if a guy is really into the Chase and Conquest, wouldn’t he just move on to another woman after his current objective says yes. And why would you even want an LTR with as man like that? Now I myself totally hated the Chase, so I never asked a woman for a date unless I was totally sure she was interested. (My wife even asked me out first.) (I even friend-zoned a couple of interested/interesting women who asked me out, but that was because they hadn’t made the final break in existing relationships that included children, and I just didn’t want to be involved in that sort of situation — and in fact they both got back together with their previous partners.) I always thought that it was better to explore relationships with women who actually seem to like you — in fact, that was my first requirement.
Yeah, that would make sense for me, too. There’s nothing that gives me the willies more than the idea of just cold approaching someone. I’d rather have a warm start than a cold one anyday.
My wife dated an Aussie before me. She brought him on a hiking trip I was leading, and near the summit I ended up standing on a ledge next to him looking out at the view. He made some comment about her and I answered, “Yes, Debi is a very attractive young woman, and if she were interested in me I would find it very difficult to resist her.” After she declined to move to Australia to live with him, he told her what I had said, so she knew she wouldn’t have to deal with a cold rebuff. As to whether things would work out — well, you can’t ever know that.
Me too.
Actually, I would be more shocked to find a troll who proofreads his own glurge before posting it.
@GrumpyOldMan
It’s all about playing on the easy level, with cheat codes. “Hacking” women gives them a thrill of superiority. Unearned superiority, of course (which is what’s so entertainingly hilarious about these self-styled alphas). It takes much more maturity, patience, and wisdom to treat women as fully rounded people and take on the challenges of adult relationships. Some people just aren’t cut out for emotional intimacy, and that’s fine, but it gets annoying when PUAs try to claim that their failings reflect some deep universal truth about gender relations. That’s when their “I must be a winner at ALL COSTS!!” mentality crosses the line from amusing to harmful.
Also, I totally agree that The Rules are full of terrible advice. Why would anyone want to be with someone that they had to trick into a relationship? It would be so exhausting playing all those little games to try to keep the other person interested and coax them into making a long-term commitment. The Rules makes it sound like men have to be lured into marriage and emotionally healthy self-expression like frightened little bunnies. That’s insulting to both men and women!
“Why would anyone want to be with someone that they had to trick into a relationship?”
But that was sort of the pattern for a conventional middle-class pre-feminist marriage. For a “Father Knows Best” family to exist there had to be a mother carefully stage-managing everything.
Lets all not forget that one or both (can’t remember) of the women who “The Rules” got divorced. Maybe tricking a man, any man as long as he is gainfully employed, into proposing is not really the key to a successful relationship. Who’d have thunk it?
But…but…it’s all about getting your Pretty Princess Party! It’s more important to be a bride than a wife, ya know.
Actually, I don’t understand the popular trope that men have to be dragged kicking and screaming into marriage. Marriage (the traditional kind celebrated in Bob Hope jokes) seems like a really good deal for the guy – free housework, sex, cooking, child care, nursing, etc. – but not so much for the woman, who gets a ton of additional thankless chores and the bottom spot on the emotional totem pole. (#notallmarriage, of course, just the 1950s kind beloved of social conservatives). Only an MRA would see that as some kind of gold-digging ball-and-chain arrangement.
Abundant Book Paraphernalia is my new indie band name. Mountain Dew shall open for us.
In my experience there’s only been one situation where the woman in a couple was more into the idea of getting married than the man was, and that was probably because she was a Mormon and he was an atheist. In every other case that I’ve personally witnessed it’s been the men pining after marriage and the women going yeah, sure, I guess we could do that.
May every PUA fall hard for a Rules devotee, and may they cancel each other out. Two birds, one stone.
And now I’m imagining a candlelight dinner where both the man and woman are frantically sneaking peeks at their instruction manuals under the table.
Ehhh, actually, that’s a bit too adorable for these folks. Let’s go with a perpetual misery of one-upping the other, each pointing to the “games” the other plays as justification for their own, but somehow still both obsessed with “winning” the relationship.
May they stride together, one hand on the other and one on their books, across a sea of legos for perpetuating this codswallop.
I always thought traditional marriage worked roughly 70/30 in favor of the man, and he got to grouse about “the old ball and chain” to boot.
I can understand why women are wary about marriage. A mistake in marriage carries a much heavier burden for women most of the time, particularly if there are children.
According to Wikipedia, one of the authors of “The Rules” was an accountant who later divorced and remarried and the other was a writer who never married. From my own point of view, if a woman had treated me the way they recommend I would have assumed that she was not interested and that continuing to pursue her would be borderline harassment.
That’s precisely the problem I’ve always had with the notion of “playing hard to get,” and all of that attendant philosophy. If a woman pushes me away, I assume it’s because she’s not interested, and I’m not likely to push the matter because I respect her boundaries. Granted, once I was madly in love and it was very difficult for me to stop pursuing her because I was hoping against hope that her feelings toward me would change. But that ended up annoying the hell out of her and putting a huge strain on our friendship. Stories like the ones that “The Rules” perpetuate put both women and men in an ugly position, where they’re constantly questioning their own judgment – “What if she’s just testing my resolve?” – and acting against our desire to be considerate of each other. It’s pointless, ugly antagonism, and deeply confusing to a young person who doesn’t yet know much about how relationships actually work.
And, it also adds to the notion that harassment is flattery.
Ugly behaviour on both sides.
It’s almost like saying, “Dishonesty is the best policy.”