Pickup guru Roosh V: End rape by making it legal

“Game” guru Roosh Valizadeh is tired of hearing that “men can stop rape.”

As far as he’s concerned, the problem isn’t men — who already know that rape is bad. No, it’s women.

Looking back on his own life, he wrote in a blog post yesterday (archived here),

I saw women wholly unconcerned with their own safety and the character of men they developed intimate relationships with. I saw women who voluntarily numbed themselves with alcohol and other drugs in social settings before letting the direction of the night’s wind determine who they would follow into a private room. I saw women who, once feeling awkward, sad, or guilty for a sexual encounter they didn’t fully remember, call upon an authority figure to resolve the problem by locking up her previous night’s lover in prison or ejecting him from school.

Evidently, in Roosh”s view, women are at fault when they enter a bedroom with the wrong man, but men aren’t at fault for being this wrong man. It’s a convenient argument for Roosh, who by all accounts including his own is one of these wrong men. Indeed, in his e-book Bang Iceland he admitted, rather nonchalantly, that he once raped a woman who was too drunk to consent.  As he described the events of that evening:

While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she legally couldn’t give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated. I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.

Now back to the rapist’s proposal to end rape:

By attempting to teach men not to rape, what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions. At the same time, we don’t hesitate to blame men for bad things that happen to them (if right now you walked into a dangerous ghetto and got robbed, you would be called an idiot and no one would say “teach ghetto kids not to steal”).

I’m pretty sure that we already do teach “ghetto kids” — and non-“ghetto” kids — not to steal. And we put adults in prison for it.

It was obvious to me that the advice of our esteemed establishment writers and critics wasn’t stopping the problem, and since rape was already on the law books with severe penalties, additional laws or flyers posted on dormitory doors won’t stop this rape culture either.

Well, it didn’t stop Roosh. But it does stop others. While still horrifyingly common, rape rates have dropped considerably over the past several decades, helped by laws like VAWA and the sort of rape awareness campaigns that MRAs and other misogynists have always railed against.

But never mind, because Roosh has figured out what he thinks is a much better solution:

make rape legal if done on private property. I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds.

What!?

While Roosh thinks that “those seedy and deranged men who randomly select their rape victims on alleys and jogging trails” should still be jailed, if only to keep them off the street, he argues that “on private property, any and all rape that happens should be completely legal.”So how would this, er, solution end rape?

If rape becomes legal under my proposal, a girl will protect her body in the same manner that she protects her purse and smartphone.

Apparently in Roosh’s imaginary world, women are more concerned about the well-being of their iPhones than their own bodily integrity.

If rape becomes legal, a girl will not enter an impaired state of mind where she can’t resist being dragged off to a bedroom with a man who she is unsure of—she’ll scream, yell, or kick at his attempt while bystanders are still around. If rape becomes legal, she will never be unchaperoned with a man she doesn’t want to sleep with.

I was going to ask “what if her ‘chaperone’ decides to rape her,” but there’s no point in trying to address any of Roosh’s argument here logically.

After several months of advertising this law throughout the land, rape would be virtually eliminated on the first day it is applied.

Uh, how?

Without daddy government to protect her, a girl would absolutely not enter a private room with a man she doesn’t know or trust unless she is absolutely sure she is ready to sleep with him. Consent is now achieved when she passes underneath the room’s door frame, because she knows that that man can legally do anything he wants to her when it comes to sex.

Roosh seems to think that rape only happens when drunk women invite strangers wearing “I HEART Raping Women” t-shirts into their apartments. In fact, as RAINN points out, only about a quarter of all rapists are strangers. Roughly 40% are friends or acquaintances; another 30% are in a relationship with the victim, and 7% are family members. In other words, most rapes are committed by people that the victim knows and trusts.

Bad encounters are sure to occur, but these can be learning experiences for the poorly trained woman so she can better identify in the future the type of good man who will treat her like the delicate flower that she believes she is. After only one such sour experience, she will actually want to get fully acquainted with a man for longer than two hours—perhaps even demanding to meet his parents—instead of letting a beer chug prevent her from making the correct decisions to protect her body.

I don’t even know what to say to this. It’s not just that Roosh seems almost inhuman in his utter lack of empathy. It’s that the women he has the most contempt for are the very women he targets as a “pickup artist,” women at bars who are open to the possibility of casual sex.

Because women will never enter a man’s apartment without accepting that sex will happen, he can escort her to his bedroom and romantically consummate a relationship after it was certain he proved himself to be a good and decent man the woman fully trusted.

Does Roosh actually think he comes even remotely close to being a good man who is worthy of any woman’s trust?

It turns out that we don’t need more laws, policies, and university propaganda that treat every man like a criminal and every woman like a mild retardate—we need more common sense that can only come from making rape legal.

Yes, dear reader, you did just read a sentence in which the idea of making rape legal is described as “common sense.”

Such a change will provide a mature jolt to American women who have been babied for too long, who are protected and coddled as if they have no agency or intellect of their own. If a woman is indeed a child then maybe we really need to keep promoting “rape culture” as a way to keep them safe, but if they are actual adults, which is often claimed, then we can start treating them like adults by allowing them to take responsibility for the things that happen to them which are easily preventable with barely a strain of cognitive thought, awareness, and self control.

Huh. Earlier, Roosh compared rape to property theft. If the two are analogous, why isn’t Roosh advocating that we get rid of the laws that make theft illegal. By Roosh’s logic, don’t laws against theft “coddle” property owners and deny them “agency and intellect?”

Let’s make rape legal. Less women will be raped because they won’t voluntarily drug themselves with booze and follow a strange man into a bedroom, and less men will be unfairly jailed for what was anything but a maniacal alley rape. Until then, this devastating rape culture will continue, and women who we treat as children will continue to act like children.

Roosh seems a little confused as to who is acting like a child here.

So is Roosh being facetious here? Is this just a Swiftian “Modest Proposal?”

Certainly, Roosh is being deliberately provocative — no doubt hoping to generate as many pageviews as possible from whatever controversy ensues.

And I’m fairly certain that he is not altogether serious about his proposal, which would effectively mean that no woman would ever go home with him or any of his readers ever again.

But I don’t see a Swiftian satire here.  Roosh’s “argument” here, such as it is, repeats “arguments” he’s made in earnest many times before. He may be taking these arguments to their logical extreme, but he doesn’t seem to be doing so in an attempt to refute them. He clearly doesn’t give a shit about actually preventing rape. His absurdist “proposal” seems mostly to be an excuse to express his contempt for feminists and his hatred of women in general.

Roosh’s fans, for the most part, don’t seem to see the post as satire. Some echo his contemptuous attacks on women.

Others second his Men’s Rightsy attack on feminism as something that “infantalizes” women.

A few bring up the name of Jonathan Swift.  LoftBoy thinks Roosh’s proposal is “rediculous” enough to be satire, but thinks it just might work.

But the smartest take on the satire question comes from a commenter who is no fan of Roosh.