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.
@M – you’re in qld? Me too! 🙂
I wonder if hate speech laws might be usable to get the seminar that are specifically targeting Japanese women shut down.
You’d think “incitement to violence” would be enough, since it’s one of the few types of speech that aren’t protected by free speech.
First you’d have to convince the cops and legislators that sexual assault on the street/in clubs is violence, and good luck with that when the counterargument is “but my penis”.
I don’t see how anyone who wasn’t an awful person could see grabbing a stranger around the neck and chocking them as anything other than assault.
hands up Scot in Aussie, Northern New South Wales, 5pm almost and hoping for a storm. My garden is getting crunchy.
sorry, Australia not Aussie. Otherwise that sounds odd.
On banning racist shitheads – it can be done. David Irving the Holocaust denier was banned entry here years ago. It’d depend on what grounds the authorities had available to use, I think. Like Kim said, we’ve a history of banning undesirables (the meaning changes with the government of the day, of course).
Now if only his country of origin would confiscate his passport …
Fascinating how people with drug convictions (no matter how minor) get easily refused entry into various countries, but abusive arseholes are fine to visit. The people with drug convictions do seem to be mainly ethnic minorities and the abusive arseholes do tend to be white…
But nah, that’s just coincidence. And my nasty suspicious feminist mind.
The Change.org petition now says the venues in Melbourne, Seattle, Austin and Brisbane have now all cancelled on RSD, and so has Eventbrite. What I’m wondering is how anyone found out where the venues were in the first place, and how to find out which venues are hosting them in the future . . . as the RSD FAQ states locations are kept confidential until someone registers and pays . . .
Ooh, that’s a point. Does this dude have any drug convictions? Because if so that would be an easy way to get him banned from visiting Japan.
Does that include the St Kilda venue he’d tried for after the Como dumped him, grumpycat?
I live in Melbourne too. I signed the first petition, but the next venue cancelled so fast I didn’t have time to sign the second.
There was going to be a protest in St. Kilda, but the council has just made a statement saying that they didn’t issue a permit for the Real Social Dynamics event (and weren’t likely to as they had made a White Ribbon pledge to take a stance against violence against women):
https://www.facebook.com/events/1510112842579012/
so, maybe this event will not be happening even though they moved it to a public space. WooHoo! Go the council! I don’t know if the protest is still happening though.
I am also pretty damn angry about the things this guy was doing in Tokyo. I lived there for two years and made friends, so it is a bit close to home for me. In terms of the lack of reaction, there is a big cultural push not to make a fuss, but underneath all that, people in Japan are pretty similar to people everywhere else. So angry.
I passed the Change.org petition on to a Facebook friend who’s a media person in Japan (deliberately vague for the win), maybe he can do something with it locally.
Excellent! Way to go, Port Phillip Council!
What a wanker! Why would anyone want anything to do with him?
Also, since nobody mentioned this that I noticed earlier – dudes, if you harass a woman who is working in a service job like a 7/11, coffee shop, restaurant, etc, and she doesn’t tell you to fuck off/slap you in the face, that doesn’t mean that she likes you or what you’re doing, it means that she doesn’t want to get fired. See that convenience store clerk in the screencap?She can’t tell the guy to go fuck himself with a cactus, because she is working. So if you harass a woman who’s in that situation, don’t even try to tell yourself or anyone else that she’s putting up with it because she secretly wants you, man. She’s putting up with it because she has no choice.
Or you could just stop being an asshole. That is also an option.
Yes, all those sexist and sexualised comments I got when part-time bartending that I sweetly smiled through for 3 years. It wasn’t because I thought the guys were wonderful, but because I needed the job and part of my instructions when I started – from my manager – was “be nice to the regulars”.
Maybe we should offer orientations for customers. They can start with “the waitress/bartender does not want your phone number”.
*headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*, *headdesk*.
*facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*, *facepalm*.
I know that it really shouldn’t, but this sort of thing just makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. Nothing makes the white male guilt burn quite like the attitudes of people like this guy, Aurini, Beale, Forney, Valizadeh, Weidmann & co.
“Asses are not for patting, even if she is wearing a uniform.”
Not the place for complaints about how bad this stuff makes white men feel, dude.
Although I don’t see the choking pictures anymore, I kind of wonder if they were voluntary set ups. I’ve had my throat grabbed. The instinct when this happens is to want to drop your chin and raise your shoulders; it isn’t lifting your chin and presenting your throat to your attacker like these women appeared to be doing. Of course, I’m speculating and generalizing, so I very well may be completely off base.
Also to further muddy the muddy waters in the discussion on whether to physically resist or not;
Being passive and playing along is not a guarantee that the violence will not escalate either. Of course this is obvious, but I don’t think I saw anyone actually say this. Personally, being grabbed by the throat by a stranger is a “nothing more to lose” situation for me.
But @cassandra, it’s all about the menz. And their feels, if not their penises.
When white people are racist shitheads it makes me feel just terrible! That’s what’s important here, my feelings.