Writing about abhorrent misogyny pretty much every day of every week can get a tad depressing. So I’m glad to have some actual good news to report. Good news, at least, for non-misogynists.
The #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign has taken off internationally, and the “pickup artist” who advocates choking women as a clever “opener” has been kicked out of Australia, his visa revoked.
In an op-ed in The Independent yesterday, self-described “Aggressive Chinese Girl” Jenn Li explained why she started the #TakeDownJulienBlanc campaign and what it has accomplished so far:
Julien Blanc, a “dating advice” consultant working for Real Social Dynamics (RSD), travels around the world teaching men how to manipulate, and in some cases, sexually assault women. …
In Blanc’s videos his treatment of women is – to put it lightly – horrifying. There are videos of him going up to women, clasping their throats, while putting his finger on his lips, saying “shhh”. For reasons beyond me, he has decided to document this abuse by labelling the videos of him doing this with his own hashtag: #ChokingGirlsAroundtheWorld. …
When talking about how to “seduce” a Japanese woman, he is quoted as saying: “Just grab her… To take the pressure off, yell Pikachu or Pokemon or Tamagotchi or something”. He is obsessed with degrading Japanese women, and abusing his white male privilege. “…
By perpetuating the idea that Asian women are a “free for all” for predatory men, he is encouraging other pathetic men to abuse them. …
When I first started the campaign, I had almost no strategy; I just threw things and hoped they stuck. I called the Japanese Embassy, reported him, wrote to the press, did the hashtag thing, and started a petition on change.org.
I’m now targeting venues who are hosting his events. The campaign is still in its early stages, but something has seemed to have stuck. We have been able to shut down events in Melbourne, Brisbane, Austin, and Seattle, and Eventbrite have stopped hosting his events.
In Melbourne, as I noted a couple of days ago, Li and her supporters convinced the hotel hosting his event to boot him. Blanc ended up having to host the event on a boat, and sent an assistant along to conduct the “seminar” in his place. Locals organized a protest and the event itself was shut down. Not long afterwards, local authorities reported that they had revoked Blanc’s visa. He’s now left the country.
Li’s next goal? To shut down Blanc’s scheduled seminars in Japan in two weeks.
RSD founder Owen Cook, aka “Tyler Durden,” has posted a weird, rambling “non response” to the controversy on his website, a strange mixture of apology, defiance and self-justification. After announcing that “we’re not NOT responding. :),” he basically throws Blanc under the bus:
I think Julien’s video was absolutely stupid. It was totally out of context and he posted it to get shock, not realizing the full outcome. I’m sorry about the video. I would have taken it down if I’d seen it, but don’t monitor all social media postings.
I watched Julien’s entire Free Tour from that event today, and he talks about not degrading women and how he’s just kidding around. The full infield clips have the girls laughing and asking him to kiss them and things like that. He deliberately left this out of the video to make it inflammatory. Again I don’t approve that behaviour and frankly neither does he, he was an idiot to post that.
Then he complains that #TakeDownJulienBlanc supporters are
deliberately taking things out of context. … I see fake twitter accounts claiming to be Julien, or videos from me with sarcasm that are cut to say insane things I’m not saying, and that have context when you watch the whole thing. They know they’re doing this and think it’s funny, so there’s not a lot of dialogue to be had.
So I’m not NOT talking… it’s just that there’s nobody to talk to. 🙂 I’ve apologized in other threads and condemned the behaviour. From there it is what it is.
He follows up with a weirdly self-aggrandizing spiel:
All I care about is my ability to do good in the world. RSD has been a cool vehicle to do that. If it isn’t a viable vehicle anymore, I’ll continue to do good. The people who watch our stuff honestly have no idea what it’s like to be a shy guy trying to learn to meet girls, or the pain it causes. They have no context for why we teach guys what we teach, after years of trying different things to see what works.
It doesn’t matter. I’ll always do amazing work and make the world better. As long as I can do that, I’m happy. The vehicle is just a temporary form that has to be discarded like anything else, whether tomorrow or in 50 years. As long as I’m alive I’ll keep finding new vehicles to do good things.
It seems like SJW’s cause a lot of trouble for good men as well as bad. I think it’s important people find out about them. I think the mainstream media does a lot of messed up things as well. I’ve honestly felt guilty for not addressing these issues for a while now, but was too busy teaching “pick up” which I’m sure people sensed I did more out of obligation to the community that helped me, than it being my main focus.
So regardless of what happens, I’ll continue to do good. I’ve spent days working on RSD related stuff, no different than before. I personally expect RSD to be fine. My life is basically the same as it ever was, not really different. I’ve been planning on building something new for a long time, and have a lot of things in the works with it even before this, so if it’s not fine I’ll do other things.
I suspect the plain English translation of all that is: CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP I THINK WE’RE SCREWED.
As far as I know, Blanc himself hasn’t offered any response to any of this yet — aside from quietly taking down Tweets featuring pictures of him choking women.
For the latest on all this, check out the #TakeDownJulienBlanc hashtag on Twitter, and follow Li herself at @JennLi123.
You can also sign a petition to Take Down Julien Blanc and RSD’s Seminars and Web content. Last I checked, the Change.org petition had garnered more than 30,000 signatures. There’s another one directed at the Japanese government here.
For more on the campaign against Blanc, see:
Julien Blanc, the ‘female attraction’ expert, glorifies sexual violence. The fewer seminars he holds, the better, by Somayya Ismailjee at TheGuardian.com.
Julien Blanc, self-described pick-up artist who promotes choking women, leaves Australia and has visa cancelled, at ABC.net.au.
Australian Government Deports Notorious “Pick-Up Artist” Julien Blanc, by Mark Di Stefano at Buzzfeed.
Oh man, Real Social Dynamics was the PUA group a former housemate of mine was a part of.
This was before I knew anything about feminism, mind, but it was pretty obvious to us that it was a crock of shit. One of my favourite stories was when I told him I was heading off to my friend Belinda’s house, and he couldn’t process that I was friends with a women and that we’d have anything to talk about. It was at that point I got the sense that PUA tactics only really worked on easy targets (although I get now that the point of PUA tactics is to force women to be easy targets).
Not surprisingly, he was also really racist.
I think I could just set up a bot that replies to PUAMRHRMRHM justifications with “what context could possibly make that okay?” and it would never go wrong.
I love it how these d-bags think SJW is a bad thing. That itself says everything one needs to know about their characters.
Sshhhh! Shut up everybody! His Most Serene Excellency Lord Richard Dawkins hasn’t weighed in yet. We should wait for his instructions on how to react to this. In the meantime, perhaps think of how mock humiliation isn’t as bad as FGM?
Pro Tip for “shy” PUAs:
If social justice causes you trouble, you are not a good man.
Many women are painfully shy too and some of us are survivors of sexual and violent crimes. (1 in 3) If you choke us out of the blue, it will not turn us on. It will likely trigger, flight, fight or freeze. In the case of some stranger suddenly choking us, you are likely to shock us into freezing. That is not us wanting to bone you. *That is the human autonomic nervous system kicking in because of the life or death dread you are causing. Maybe you, as a poor “shy” guy, have never had to smile at someone or laugh with them while they are sexually assaulting you in order to placate them so they won’t harm you further, but alot of women have. (You know who is really good at pretending to be comfortable while they are screaming internally? Shy people. We get lots of practice.)
My husband used to call the look women get when a man is making them uncomfortable or scared the “lips apart, teeth together smile”. (He ask me once, exasperated by having to distract a strange man so a female friend could get away from him, “How can they not see it?”. If you’re a PUA reading this, you should know that we know that you see it. You like it. It is why you do what you do.) You may not be around for the mental and emotional come apart that can happen when we finally get to a safe place, but they happen and you are human garbage for doing that to people for kicks. Those experiences make us more wary of men. They make us less likely to interact socially. You know why women go to the bathroom together in bars? It’s to protect ourselves from guys like you.
Not having a bevy of pretty ladies to touch your boner is not an excuse for sexual assault or harassment. You are not being harmed by women not lining up to give you BJs. Women do not owe you shit. Leave us alone.
*Trigger warning: Rape*
When a friend of mine was 13, two men broke into her aunt’s house and raped them both. She said that there was a loaded shotgun in the corner of the living room, but neither of them went for it. They froze. She said she could not react and compared seeing the men break into the house to coming home to find a dead dog in your living room when you don’t own a dog. It just seemed so morbid and unreal.
Freezing did not suggest that the aunt or the girl wanted it or liked it.
I wonder how many of the women these guys are assaulting have had to live through horrible shit like that, just to have these PUA scum use their normal reaction to being re-traumatized as evidence that they dig “domination”?
There are not enough Legos in the world for these guys to bathe in.
Jo: Yeah, I know he carefully picked targets that he knew wouldn’t fight back or be too surprised and frightened to do anything but try to calm him down.
In my neck of the woods, he would’ve gotten an ass kickin” by the woman he was trying to choke, if not her girlfriends.
Jo: Yeah, I know he carefully picked targets that he knew wouldn’t fight back or be too surprised and frightened to do anything but try to calm him down.
In my neck of the woods, he would’ve gotten an ass kickin” by the woman he was trying to choke, if not her girlfriends.
We should wait for his instructions on how to react to this.
Remember to have a trash can stationed nearby for any sudden feelings of nausea that reading Dawkins-the-thinkyleader-superior-manbrains-specialist tweets’s may cause you.
If symptoms persist, see your nearest kitty cat for scritches immediately.
Tylers non response:
“Hey I thought I’d mention…. we’re not NOT responding. 🙂
There’s just nobody who wants any real dialogue. I’d happily meet with anyone who genuinely wants to talk.”
You showed that really good in your article….. but i get it, hate is so much more fun than a serious discussion and acutal facts. Amirite?
So many things wrong with that “apology”, but this part sounds a lot like Ron Paul’s claim that he didn’t know anything about the racist newsletters that went out under his name for years. Julien was doing this stuff under the Real Social Dynamics banner, to sell Real Social Dynamics products. So Owen Cook is claiming that *no one* who knew about these videos thought to bring it to his attention? It’s not even the first time the company’s gotten negative press for something like this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-game-and-real-social-dynamics-is-the-seduction-community-pushing-the-idea-that-no-just-means-not-yet-8463333.html
This is from the above article.
The thread the article makes reference to seems to have been deleted since the article’s publication. It seems less likely that Cook doesn’t know what’s going on with his own instructors and more likely that he has no problem with it unless it gets the company negative attention from the media or the public – at which point it’s “Oh I had no idea any of this was going on and anyway I don’t approve of it and all that rapey stuff was just a joke anyway and I’m a good guy who just wants to do good in the world and don’t you know how hard it is for shy guys to get laid why do you hate shy guys so much and anyway this is all the SJW’s fault when you really think about it.”
Since Cook has zero sympathy for the girls who are harassed, terrorized and/or assaulted by his co-workers and acolytes I guess he and the meanie SJW critics who don’t know “what it’s like to be a shy guy trying to learn how to meet girls, or the pain it causes” are even. Oh wait, one of those has empathy for people not exactly like themselves and doesn’t make the world a worse place and it isn’t Cook, so actually it’s not so even.
I struggled with social phobia, diagnosed and treated by fancy doctor types rather than by PUA selling his odious psuedo-self help bunk, and I’m very positive that learning how to sexually assault women isn’t a good way to overcome it. Seriously, this guy needs to go fuck himself ASAP.
Cook sees himself as a “good” man because he spends all his time trying to help people. People of course being other men. Women are not people, which means any harm he does to them doesn’t really detract from all the good he does.
All of this and more. I know that when I used to go out of an evening, to bars and clubs in particular, and some random guy would accost me (everything from pursuing unwanted conversation, with the inevitable unsolicited remarks about how some aspect of my appearance pleased him, to trying to grab some part of my body and, ugh, sustain the contact even after I had tried to move away) I would do this ‘desperate smile’ thing and continue to try to leave the situation as inoffensively as possible. Because you know, you just know, that if you’re dealing with the kind of guy who thinks breaching those personal boundaries is ok, you’re probably dealing with the kind of guy who won’t react well to a forceful, negative response. You try to mediate the situation and fake ‘nice’ because you don’t want an already deeply uncomfortable situation to get any worse. Unfortunately this can backfire horrendously, and often did, as Mr Lack-Of-Awareness interprets this as “I’m still in there, I can go a little further, she clearly won’t put up a fuss” and continues to push those boundaries in the hope that they will break.
May they collectively sit upon a cactus.
Even if it wasn’t glass-transparent that this asshole is lying through his teeth, this statement would make no fucking sense.
PUAs claim that their techniques are supposed to make women more receptive to one’s advances. What better way to show that these techniques are effective than showing them being put into use and then showing the women laughing and smiling and interacting willingly with the PUA? What possible purpose would it serve to not show the positive results? It would be like having a detergent infomercial that consisted of throwing the soap in the machine and never showing the cleaned clothes afterwards.
Well, actually, it would be more like taking the detergent and violently hosing unspecting people down with it while screaming nonsense at them. Then when called on their idiocy, claiming that the people in the video were very happy with their freshly laundered clothes, for reals!
It’s already been said by other Mammotheers, but no. Go fuck yourself with a Freddy Krueger hand.
Sorry this rant is going to hetero-centric. I’m speaking from my own experiences and speaking of cultural expectations of women and don’t know how else to phrase it.
I’m a shy woman and that makes it hard for me to meet men. I know that it can be painful. Misogynists will say it isn’t as hard because men are expected to be the ones who ask the women out. That’s true. But it’s also true that women are expected to flirt with men they’re interested in. We’re expected to be able to let men know we are interested, but subtly so he thinks it’s his idea. Contrary to popular belief, being a woman doesn’t mean we can just sit back and rake in hundreds of adoring male admirers. Yet society tells us that if you’re a woman and not hideously ugly we’ll have no trouble attracting lots of great guys. When that doesn’t happen, we feel something must be wrong with us. We’re also supposed to just be born with social skills. Because only men are socially awkward. Women just magically know what to say and do at all times. Again, when a woman doesn’t inherently know how to act in every social situation, she is made to feel like a freak. At least socially awkward men are seen as sympathetic figures in popular culture. Socially awkward women are either portrayed as unlovable or crazy or just erased entirely.
But you know what, my being shy and bad at flirting is not the fault of men. It’s not the fault of women who are good at flirting and attract lots of guys. It’s not an excuse to become ragey and entitled. It’s not an excuse to start viewing men as objects who can be used and abused.
Once again, misogynist men are the ones who actually have the low opinions of men. They think men who are shy can’t react to their problems with maturity and perspective. They simply can’t help becoming abusers because they’re in soooooo much pain.
I on the other hand, am an evil SJW and hold men to the same standards as I hold myself and other women.
Good for Australia for denying this toxic grifter a platform. I think the only way these guys can be stopped is through their wallet. They’re incapable of shame and public opinion means nothing to them, but money speaks their language loud and clear. It’ll damage their brand irreversibly if they’re denied classy venues to peddle their assault tutorials. For $2000 a pop, people expect chandeliers and crystal decanters and Axminster carpets. It’s hard to convince people you’re a successful dominant alpha when even hotels reject you.
@Cassandra
I love that vagina whisperer quote.
First I’d wager this guy has taken zero psychology courses, since they don’t offer Sexual Harassment 101 and Intro to Roofies at any acredited colleges. But yes, dear sir, they don’t tend to teach unfounded horseshit that was unscientifically field tested by human rodents at actual schools. Excellent point.
I also can’t get over the racism in instructing men to yell “pokemon, Pikachu, tomogatchi!” at Japanese women. What’s next? Telling men to go to Mexico and yell Taco Bell menu items at the women there? Wtf? No.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Social justice only causes trouble for those out to perpetrate INJUSTICE. If you’re a PUA, that makes you a de facto perpetrator of social injustice. And a downright asshole, to boot.
@weirwoodtreehugger
After saying I was part Japanese during random conversations struck up by guys, I have genuinely had the response, “Yeah, Pokemon and stuff, yeah, I like that too”.
Barf.
Leaving aside the truth of the matter – that he’s running seminars which basically say to abuse women and other people…
…Even if it’s a joke, it’s a fucking shitty one. And when you crack jokes that bad you’re not going to be allowed to sell that shit. No one is arresting you for your speech, just saying ‘fuck man, no, you did an asshole thing, so you’re not going to be allowed to sell it or cross these boundaries.’
After all, if you made that sort of ‘joke’ to police or whatnot, they’d be required to exclude you from whereever you were at the time as a disturbance. Yeesh.
So if it was a joke, it just fucked up his ‘business’ big-time, because that’s how businesses work. Even in the US, free speech is for personal, political, or private speech – not commercial.
Some of these pick-up artists are so flagrantly, almost cartoonishly evil. I have not watched any Blanc’s videos and I never will, but I can’t help but imagine his voice sounds like fucking Skeletor or Cobra Commander.
Now I just wonder if we could pressure the captain of the boat he’s on to revoke his ticket somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Duh, culture is genetic.
All people of Japanese decent must have an intuitive and natural connection to Japan. Clearly you were born knowing how to put on a Noh drama.
@brooked – yep, there’s Scam Red Flag #1 right there. You know you’re in the presence of a huckster when they try to tell you “street knowledge” is more valid than centuries of academic thought, scientific observation, experiment, and consensus. Don’t listen to all those big words and professors, don’t waste time sitting in classrooms, don’t read and think and question and search and talk to a wide variety of people – you, utterly random but special and chosen person, can take the fast track to enlightenment!
You also know the advice is about the same quality you’re going to get from sponsored links – “What The Credit Card Companies Don’t Want You To Know!” “Skin Care Secrets You Won’t Hear From Any Dermatologist!” Well, yeah, because no reputable dermatologist is going to tell you to pour bleach on your forehead.