Roosh Valizadeh — the racist, woman-hating, fat-shaming pickup artist and rape legalization proponent — is trying to reinvent himself as a philosopher of sorts, a man with unique insights into the perils of masculinity in “a degenerate world.” He seems undaunted by the fact that his unique insights are neither unique nor, well, insights; he’s little more than a regurgitator of a lot of old, bad ideas, and a not-very-competent regurgitator at that. If he were a mother bird, his chicks would all die.
Part of Roosh’s attempted reinvention is a “world” lecture tour this summer that started in Berlin in late June and that will, barring mishaps, end in Toronto in mid-August.
Tomorrow, he’s making an appearance in Manhattan, where he will be making a canned speech on “The State Of Man” followed by several hours of Q&A and mingling with his fans. Or at least that portion of his fans who have managed to stay awake through 40 minutes of Roosh droning on in his characteristic monotone.
On his “Roosh World Tour” website, Roosh highlights some of the topics he addresses in his speech, including
- “How to mentally approach living in a degenerate world”
- “An examination of three different time periods men faced in the past”
- “The overall benefits we can expect from women in the pursuit of relationships with them”
- “One important need that all men require in life”
Based on the portion of Roosh’s oeuvre that I have managed to force myself to read, I’m going to guess that this “need that all men require” — isn’t a “need” by definition something that is required? — is women touching their boners (no fatties). Or something else equally stupid. Honestly, I don’t care. I feel a bit sorry for any man pathetic enough to pay the $47-$59 he is charging for his “4-hour event.”
Roosh is keeping the exact location of the event secret until the last minute “to prevent unattractive feminists from petitioning the event,” as he puts it on his reservations page.
Roosh’s so-called World Tour is only hitting 4 countries in total. One country he is not visiting: Iceland.
Why might this be? Well, the last time he went to Iceland, Roosh convinced a woman who’d lost her phone and been abandoned by her friends after a night of drinking in a Reykjavik bar to come to his apartment. Then this happened, as he himself tells the story in his Bang Iceland eBook:
I hooked her arm and off we went. … There had to be a moment when she realized that all her friends are gone and the only reasonable option left was to go home with a strange man she had just met.
While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally 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. If a girl is willing to walk home with me, she’s going to get the dick no matter how much she has drunk. I’ll protect myself by using a condom (most of the time), but I know that when it comes to sex, one ounce of hesitation or a feeling of morality will get me nothing.
Quotes his, emphasis mine.
This isn’t philosophy. It’s not even pickup “artistry.” It’s just what rapists do.
EDIT: A few tweaks and a fixed typo in the headline; added the bit about the “secret” venue.
@Nitram & estraven
I’m not trying to attack any individual parent, and it’s not the fault of any individual parent that circumcision is common in the USA. I’m sure there’s been a lot of misinformation and cultural pressure. However, none if this changes the fact that circumcision without informed consent is a violation of bodily autonomy. You can argue that this violation is/was necessary or preferable, but I don’t think you can deny that it is in fact a violation.
Nop: it is the first GIS result for “surinam board of tourism ad toad”. Google will probably try to correct “ad” to “and”. Tell it to stop.
For those of you who reacted badly to regular toads and the ‘phobia searches– stay away.
Guffaw. What’s that old saying about fools and their money, again?
And I hope she ends up shooting herself in the foot (again). Metaphorically, of course…but in this case, if it happened literally, I wouldn’t feel a bit bad for her either.
I agree, dhag85, but I’m just saying that at the time we were trying to do the best thing. An infant cannot agree to vaccination or to a life-saving surgery, either. The culture was different then and among the people I knew circumcision was the norm. Our going out of our way to try to find facts was not the norm and it was quite difficult–going to university libraries and reading journal articles and so on. Of course knowing what I know now I’d do things differently. At the time I knew absolutely ZERO men who had NOT been circumcised. I mean none. At that time and place, even questioning it was almost radical. I wish we hadn’t made the decision we did but I’m saying that it was not a knee-jerk decision.
As a circumcised male, this is one of the few times I get to mansplain without any feeling of guilt. Circumcision is not a big deal. There are arguments for it and arguments against it. When my older son was born (1970) it was basically done automatically, but watching a screaming infant less than 15 minutes old having a sensitive portion of his anatomy surgically altered without anaesthesia seemed barbaric to me. We chose NOT to have my younger son (1985) circumcised, mainly because I thought that evidence in support of it was not compelling enough to compensate for the pain. I am also not sure what evidence there is that circumcision is more difficult when performed on an older male if and when it proves desirable. My wife’s sister had her son circumcised when he was three or so because she thought the two cousins would be disturbed that they didn’t “look alike” — which seemed silly to me, but there were no problems with the procedure itself. For the record, regarding the locker room, someone might be kidded about “looking different”, but the only thing a boy is going to get really seriously made to feel bad about about is size. If you wonder why men are so sensitive about the size of their equipment, it is because you haven’t spent enough time in the boys’ locker room.
Yes, there is a bodily autonomy issue, but the problem is that it has been foolishly compared to FGM so often that it has been made into a much bigger issue than it is. It is not even close to be comparable to FGM. Nobody should ever think that they have done something really terrible no matter which way they went with the decision. It just is no big deal — the manospherians play it up because it gives them another excuse for bellyaching. I am not trying to belittle the autonomy issue, just that parents make much more important decisions for their children every day — for instance, whether to raise their sons to like respect women or to be a sexist, racist bigot . Frankly, I think the psychological damage parents can do dwarfs an issue like circumcision.
Cutting off part of a baby’s genitals for no good reason is nothing like a vaccination or life saving surgery.
I understand the reasons for your choice, but that comparison irks me. “Times were different” doesn’t mean bodily autonomy wasn’t violated or that circumcision was medically necessary. “Times were different” is used to excuse so many horrible things that it sends up a flag for me.
Just FYI: Not picking on you. Had my biochild been born with a penis (We did not know the sex til birth) I had left the decision whether or not to circumcise to my then husband. He chose circumcision because he asked some women he knew and they said they liked the look of circumcised cocks better. Stupid right? Brutally stupid. I’d have let him do it too because I figured he was the guy and he should make that call. That’s upsetting to me as are all of the horrible, no good, stupid mistakes I’ve made in my life. I believed my choice to not make the choice was a good one. It wasn’t. We sometimes do bad things for what we think are good reasons. Those bad things are still bad. We are agreeing on that point, aren’t we?
I disagree that it isn’t a big deal, Grumpy. But it is what it is to you. It’s your body.
At the time I also did not realize that the medical establishment believed that newborns didn’t have the sensitivity to pain that older infants and children do. Which, had I known, would have repelled me to no end. I didn’t actually realize that no anesthetic was used–even after all the reading I did. Maybe I just didn’t take that in because it was such a foreign notion that my brain rejected it. Who knows. I’m really glad that my daughter was more insightful than I and chose not to have her son circumcised. The thing is, there’s nothing I can do about my decision now and i’m really weary of being called a monster for having made a decision that my husband and i really agonized over.
Sorry for derailing the discussion.
Trypophobia explains why there’s always someone having to stick their hand in a hole in horror movie.
It also explains some stuff in Silent Hill 2.
I don’t wish to upset parents who have already had their children circumcised, especially people from the U.S. where RIC has been a cultural norm for many years.
However I think now more facts are at our disposal new parents should be discouraged from having it done. A few hundred years ago, when men might not have had access to running water and basic hygiene it might have made sense, but we’ve moved on.
I don’t think it’s right to compare it to vaccination, there’s a big difference between protecting your child and those around them from contagious diseases, and surgically altering a child because of tradition and outdated science.
I’m also against baby girls having their ears pierced.
Re:JB, she’s asking for a crossbow so she can show off about how good she is firing a bow and arrow. It cracks me up that she’s suggesting anyone would bother to travel over to her Ontario backwater just to take her to task for slandering Jessica Valenti. I may have to make a drawing of this.
Come on, guys, she started by saying she feels bad about it already, there’s no reason to make her feel worse.
What SFHC said. You can’t change the past.
estraven, you did the right thing for the time, even if it turned out to be not so good. Don’t hold it against yourself.
Oh crap.
I had hear Roosh was coming here, but it gets worse.
And looking at his schedule, he’s got the New York gig, then three weeks before the Montreal one which means he is probably going to be here by Monday.
We may have to start a “RooshWatch” or something to go find him and document his horribleness.
Is there any way to get him preemptively kicked out, like with Julien Blanc?
Medical opinion at that time was that it was a good thing. It was The Way Things Are Done. None of us ever gets to play with a full deck, so we make mistakes. I obviously would not have my older son circumcised if I had the choice to do over, but — speaking as a circumcised male — on the list of mistakes I’ve made in my life, it doesn’t come anywhere near the top.
Whether or not it was like vaccination is not as clear as some people seem to think. It’s cutting off a relatively insignificant part of the body compared to injecting a foreign substance into the body which can cause serious reactions.
@estraven
I hear you, and I sincerely did not mean to paint you as a ‘monster’ or anything of the sort. I apologize if I didn’t express myself properly in previous comments. My point was that of course we all agree that bodily autonomy is important, and we also all agree that health is important. I understand that there could be hypothetical or real situations in which we would rationally choose to violate someone’s bodily autonomy for health reasons, such as performing life-saving surgery on an infant who obviously can’t give informed consent. I also understand that we don’t always have all the information, and we are sometimes forced to make decisions based on limited or flawed information. Such is life.
@Lea
I don’t think estraven meant to use “times were different” in relation to bodily autonomy, but rather in relation to what was commonly thought to be the pros and cons of this specific procedure. Not trying to put words in anybody’s mouth, but that’s how I interpreted that comment.
@GrumpyOldSocialJusticeMangina
I’m pretty sure this is one of those occassions where you can speak freely about how it has affected you personally, but should refrain from commenting on how it should have affected other people. Otherwise you’re risking what I might call committing a Dawkins fallacy. Of course RIC is not comparable to FGM in any way, and I really hope nobody in here is making that argument. But violating somebody’s bodily autonomy is in itself not ok. We don’t have to appeal to the consequences in order to know that bodily autonomy is important.
[Hit post too soon.] You could argue that since vaccination alters the body’s immune system, it is much more invasive than circumcision.
Bodily autonomy is important, but parents have to make decisions for children all the time — and I’m much more concerned with what they do to their children’s minds than with the relatively small issues with the body. Infant circumcision would be entirely defensible, in my opinion, if the evidence in favor of it were a good deal stronger.
I never said it’s the biggest problem in the world..
@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
I doubt it. I think something like that would have had to have been organized well in advance. (Maybe someone is on that, I don’t know.)
Coming and giving the talk is bad enough. It’s the three weeks of him roaming the streets being horrible that I’m objecting to. (Especially since I know a fair number of downtown bartenders who might have to deal with him creeping on their patrons.)
I was somewhat surprised to discover that I am NOT a trypophobe. The non-body horror images did nothing to or for me. I startle easily (my siblings also have low stimulus thresholds), have mild claustrophobic and acrophobia so severe it’s almost a superpower. But holes? Nothing.
Regarding circumcision, both our sons were un- when we met them (both age five). My husband and I are both cut. As far as I know, neither of us ever thought of having them cut. I asked our younger son’s therapist about the “won’t he wonder why he looks different from Dad” argument. I have no idea what my father’s penis looked like, and couldn’t understand why that would even or ever be an issue. “Well, Robert,” she replied with great tact, “there are all sorts of families.”
I like Roosh.
I still have no power and neither the local news sites or the power company are providing accurate and up-to-date news. So frustrating.
I also just got one of those annoying ads that redirects you and you have to hit the back button about fifty times to get back. That’s never happened to me before. What a shitty day.