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.
@fruitloopsie
MRAs are serial liars.
@zennurse, how do you know they cancelled in Austin? I did call them earlier and left a message with the event staff re: the tactics of the RSD, but didn’t get a straight answer.
I sm not surprised that he was able to get away with that in Japan. White guys get awsy with sexual assault all the time there. I have lived in Japan for about 6 years and have seen white guys do a number of weird things to Japanese women. Everything from catcalling to outright grabbing is very common.
KevinK: My point is, most of these women are likely unaware that they are videoed and on the internet in the first place. So they are not even cognizant of the fact that they have such blatant evidence available to them.
And even those who are may be reluctant, due to the system in place, to file charges, because they know the shitstorm that will be directed at them. One tactic for such cases is for the defense attorney to do slowed-down, frame-by-frame analysis of each moment (this was big in one of the videotaped rape cases and dammit why do we have so many of these fucking things that I can’t remember which one off the top of my head). So the victim is forced to watch their own assault in this decontextualized fashion, while listening to the lawyer claim, “Okay, so here, we can clearly see that she’s smiling,” while looking at a frame that’s halfway between grimaces.
Many women don’t want to go through that for actual rape cases; it may be easier to just walk away for ‘lesser’ violations, even if the offender should be behind bars.
Isidore, sorry for delay I’m baking a pie.
I looked at the Twitter. I can’t link because tablet grrrrrrrrr but its there.
This campaign has long legs, many links around the world on google.
Buzzfeed, salon, mult Australian, French and Asian. So far.
Jenn Li is fierce!!
Found it, @HGIAustin
Awesome :>
Need inspiration in the face of this nasty shit?
Go to upworthy.com and search for “a bevy of famous”
Watch and smile.
It wasn’t your fault. I guarantee you that many, many adults at the school knew about his behavior. You are probably right that they wouldn’t have done anything if you told, because they probably knew already.
This is the problem with saying that “we” should teach “girls” to “say something”. Because if the people who have the power to change the situation don’t care, how much can the girls really do? And we already know that people don’t care, because if they did care, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
It’s not wrong to encourage people to stand up for themselves. But what we really need to do is use our power to encourage others with power to not use it to abuse others. We need to tell the dudes doing these sorts of things that it is unacceptable. Their friends need to tell them it is unacceptable. Authorities need to tell them it is unacceptable. If all those things happen, then their victims will truly be empowered to report, because they know that reporting will actually do something other than invite shame and judgement on themselves.
I doubt that this guy has any interest in consensual sex, he only gets pleasure from hurting and humiliating women. I don’t think he’s a potential serial killer, though; I think he knows exactly how far he can go without having a serious chance of getting into serious trouble. He stays just below the level where the authorities are likely to decide it’s worth while to pursue criminal charges. If they did, he has certainly provided ample evidence of intent to commit assaults repeatedly, but the result would probably be nothing worse than a misdemeanor conviction and little or no jail time. The problem is that you have to prove a specific crime, and a “pattern of bad acts” is not usually admitted as evidence. As long as he doesn’t do anything that can be proven to be a clear felony rape, he is probably in little danger.
It is really difficult to figure out how to get the legal system to deal sternly enough with a serial sex offender who is careful and clever enough to always be in a position to claim plausible deniability. This is a situation that cries out for something like what is happening with Jian Ghomeshi (or happened with Bob Fillner, remember him?) where finally several woman come forward with a story that can’t be ignored. (And even these two merely lost their jobs — they aren’t being prosecuted.) But as long as he’s careful to choose vulnerable victims, and not assault too many in any one place, It’s going to be very difficult to give him what he deserves.
Wow. Yeah, randomly grabbing and choking women is not a “pick-up technique,” it’s straight up assault.
And this guy just goes around doing this? And filming it? And putting it up on the Internet as educational material? And people pay him money for this?
Wow. I am sad for humanity.
On the other hand, some of the men he is “educating” might have the potential to escalate to more deadly violence.
Odds are the MRAs would say there are no reports or arrests because the women liked the attention. The obvious disgust and awkwardness on the part of the victims would be dismissed outwardly by MRAs, but cheered internally.
I don’t even know where to start with this shit. I’ve done some problematic stuff. I got better, apologized to those I could, and do my best to be better. I wish on him the same self-awareness that causes me pain. (No sympathy for me or him, being shitty should be painful.)
Ugh, this is gross as hell. It’s actually kind of upsetting too, because I can guarantee that younger-me would have panicked and frozen and gone along with whatever he was trying to do out of sheer combined wtf and fear, and then been counted as a ‘success’ by assholes like this.
Also what the fuck is with the choking thing suddenly, anyway? I’ve seen two redpill guys in the last few days bragging about choking women that they’d just met while kissing them. I get that people have fetishes and all, but the first time you kiss someone? Without asking? The fuck?
Do these techniques actually work on real women anywhere? If some strange man came up and pushed my head to his crotch, he would immediately get a taste of my second-degree black belt because I would be defending myself against assault. So on whom, exactly, does this work?
@Circe, vulnerable, already previously victimized women and young, inexperienced girls. Among others.
Dude who tries to chokehold me, better be prepared to sing soprano.
Just sayin’.
Opium, I don’t think he’s capable of that level of self awareness. If you can see it, you can heal. Tincture of time.
Freemage, good to see you here. It’s hard to look at something like this and resist the urge to lash out with violence in return, though I acknowledge the truth of what you’re saying. I’m appalled that entire organizations like this can operate within the United States, encouraging and engaging in blatant abuse while labeling it “pick up artistry,” with so little concern given about their abhorrent acts being witnessed that they record it on video. I don’t have enough intestinal fortitude to contain the revulsion I feel for this criminal, and I eagerly look forward to his incarceration, the sooner the better. I just pray that it actually happens before another person is violated.
(grumpyoldnurse – Yes! we do need nurses in Australia)
http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/nursing/Pages/Overseas-Recruitment.aspx
I think it’s one of those boundary/sobriety/assertiveness testing things. If he does this to a girl and she doesn’t flip her shit at him (maybe she’s too drunk, or too polite, or too stunned), then she’s a candidate for being later forced into a taxicab.
Oh, wait, you meant does it work to get women to have consensual sex with him? No. But yeah, I don’t think that’s the point at all.
Ugh, this guy. His video about how to sexually assault random Japanese women in the street has been making the rounds on some of the blogs that I read for a while.
This is how rape culture is built, brick by brick. One guy lies, a roomful of guys eagerly agree with them because he’s telling them what they want to hear, and then they all sit around discussing how to assault women more effectively while telling themselves that hey, that startled woman who he just assaulted on video didn’t actually knee him in the nuts before he moved on to the next one so hey, man, chicks love this shit!
Also, I’m glad that we’re talking about the rape culture element of this, but let’s not forget the racist element either. There’s a reason he’s targeting this shit at Asian women and the guys who have creepy racist ideas about them.
I think that Blanc has been taking inspiration from a Sherlock Holmes villain (who had murdered his first wife):
“I will tell you Mr Holmes, this man collects women, and takes pride in his collection, as some men collect moths or butterflies. He had it all in that book. Snapshot photographs, names, details, everything about them. It was a beastly book – a book no man, even if he had come from the gutter, could put together. But it was Adelbert Gruner’s book all the same. “Souls I have ruined”. He could have put on the outside”.
The Toronto Star has an opinion piece about Ghomeshi and male rage that is worth reading. Can’t link but author is Gabor Mate.