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.
QFT
Also, an overlooked factor is that men feel entitled to women and women’s time in a way that they don’t feel entitled to other men, and that affects the way they interact with women and with men. Pushback from a man rarely needs to become physical in nature, because men just don’t put their hands on other men with the frequency and violence that they put their hands onto women.
If a man starts to put his hands on another man, real violence is probably unavoidable at that point because the situation has escalated beyond control. “Just punch the guy!” is valid advice, because what do you have to lose? Things almost never reach that point in the first place, and when they do the shit is already on its way toward the fan.
If a man puts his hands onto a woman, real violence may or may not be in the cards, for the reason that men feel like they are entitled to do that with women. It’s less clear that “Just punch the guy!” is a good plan to implement. Most of the time a woman can evade serious violence via appeasement, which sounds like (and is) essentially giving the guy what he wants and rewarding him for his bad behavior.
This really offends some men, ones who don’t behave this way. From my interactions with dudes, I believe that they feel like they are being cheated, in the same way that a person who finds out that everyone else is cutting line and getting their stuff first feels cheated. The douches are getting desired female attention through underhanded behavior, and that doesn’t sit right with a lot of men. That, I believe, is the foundation of the advice that men give to women, to stand up to douchey men, and men’s own experience with respect to when violence is inevitable leads to the advice for women to escalate an unwanted encounter into violence.
This is borderline-Nice Guy behavior. This is demanding that women put themselves into physical danger so that Advice Dude can feel better about the world, like the world is a fair place. Sorry, Advice Dudes everywhere: your feelings of truth and justice do not trump women’s physical safety.
Advice Dude is usually also going to be closer in upper body strength to the person he’s suggesting hitting than most women will be. But hey, go ahead and hit that guy who would still be bigger and stronger than you are even if he didn’t have a raging sense of entitlement that’s activated any time a woman resists him, ladies. What could possibly go wrong?
One story I heard was of a white American dude, contemporary to one of my friends, who needed to get onto the train in Tokyo but didn’t have money that day. So he just jumped the turnstile. The folks who were supposed to sell him a fare just watched him do it and said nothing.
He went on to do this every day for months. Nobody said anything. My friend described it as the “gaijin superpower,” more or less the ability to act like an asshole and Japanese people just accept it because white people are like dogs and you can’t really blame them for shitting in public.
Does anyone know if the Melbourne event has been moved to another venue? If so, I want to get on the phone to them & make some noise about it.
Brisbane venue canceled, don’t know about Melbourne. Its on a bunch of Australian news sites so I hope he’s having a very hard time and has to give all the filthy lucre back.
(Points up at Policy of Madness’s comment)
There’s that too. My friend describes this as cutting people the same kind of slack as you would if they were children and couldn’t be expected to know any better, so you only intervene and say something if they’re “yours” in some way.
QFT
I have a theory that you can judge a society by its legal fringes – the area where “illegal” isn’t overlapped by “actually prosecuted offenses.” Such areas show where the moral and ethical tapestry wears thin.
(I don’t like invoking morality when discussing the legal system, but choking strangers – especially with the social miasma this behavior lives in – is so outright odious that I think it’s safe to put it on a “good-evil” spectrum.)
If Advice Dudes really want to give useful advice, advice which would genuinely inhibit this behavior, it would be to other men. Tell other men that when they see this, step in and put a stop to it. Construct some kind of secret code with your female friends, so that, when you are all out together, your friends can discreetly inform you that this guy is unwelcome, so you know it’s time to intervene.
Enforce your own sense of rightness in the world, and don’t demand that women do it for you.
And yeah, to be clear, in a situation where the fan is already covered in shit and it’s quite clear that if you don’t react aggressively then you’re going to get hurt much worse then “just knee him in the nuts” becomes less foolish advice, though even then the woman in that situation is still in a much better position to make the call as to whether or not that’s the best way to proceed than anyone else is.
Why not? Laws are the manifestation of collective public morality.
The twitter says info sent to Vancouver and Montreal police to be investigated. Is he Canadian? Does he need a visa to come to Tx and Seattle?
I wanted to ask if anyone has heard more about the AVFM White Ribbon fraud? I don’t know how to find out, google has nothing.
But POM, it’s so much easier to displace the responsibility for handling this behavior onto women, and after all this is a women’s problem rather than a men behaving like shit problem, right?
I looked at the RSD site to see if I could find out if there’s still a venue in Melbourne . . . but . . . instead. . . I see . . . dudes pop around $2000 each to go listen to this slimeball??
All of the no in the world’s not enough. . .
$2000 a pop to listen to someone say “just ignore women’s boundaries, they’ll love it”. And lots of men will happily pay that fee, because the asshole is telling them what they want to hear.
Everything is women’s fault, and therefore women’s responsibility to fix. Men can’t possibly be held to any standard of behavior whatsoever, and yet in some fashion women are nevertheless responsible for forcing them to act like decent adults.
Also, when Advice Guy gives helpful suggestions to women they will at worse be irritated and tell him off (which is of course misandry and the worst thing ever), whereas attempting to get other men to change their behavior may result in those men getting angry and retaliating in a much nastier way. Let’s go ahead and make sure that any potential risk is born by women, as usual.
I’m white american ex-pat permanent resident of Japan and just: Fuck this guy!
Fuck him for being a serial sexual assaulter and douche-bag.
Fuck him for teaching this to other would-be douche-bags.
And fuck him for coming to Japan and worsening the already not too great Japanese perception of foreigners.
This guy is why I tell my students to be wary of white guys who want to date them. Sure, some of them are good guys (including lots of my friends) but there are so many of these creepy Asian-fetishizing, no-Japanese-speaking, I-can-do-anything-I-want-here-because-I’m-white douchebags it makes me sick. /rant
I have literally had a man berate me until I was crying, and then start telling sob stories about how it really hurt his feelings to think he might be hurting girls so it was very important to tell him if he was ever upsetting me, apparently unaware that I was crying.
Because noticing that you’ve hurt someone is just too hard. It’s their responsibility to manage your behaviour so that you don’t hurt them. It’s such a horrible experience to hurt someone, after all, and it’s really not fair for people to let you go through something like that.
Julien is one of many at RSD, they have conferences or “boot camps” happening through June of 2015 all over the world, Bulgaria, Brazil, London, Prague, all over the US. They must have a pack of these wolves.
Title of a comment from a forum. “Dancing with old bitches will get you a double make out…”
@ suzurin
This dude makes me want to try the same shit he does on one of his seminars, just walk in and start addressing him in what I know of the language of his people. McDonalds! Doritos! Mickey Mouse! Surely this will endear me to him and his tribe of inscrutable but super alpha males, yes?
POM: Because I think it’s fair to say that there isn’t a single collective public morality.
Sorry, wasn’t trying to invoke a political / governance theory discussion … just wanted to point out the cognitive dissonance inherent in the application of the law.
I read this morning that White Ribbon in Oz had filed against them. Don’t know about the others.
He chooses his victims wisely because in some countries he would get more than he bargained for. I hate the way he’s almost gleeful at what he is doing to get female attention and the stupid morons in his class are actually taking notes and laughing. What a sorry bunch of friggin’ losers they are and they have no idea how pathetic their behaviour is. I bet his mum is proud of him. That’s if she even knows she has a son who sexually abuses women and puts it all over the bloody internet.
@Mewens
It’s fine, and if you don’t want to go there, I won’t go there. That just struck me as a bizarre thing to say, and I commented on it.