Yesterday was a big day for Roosh Valizadeh, pickup artist, rape legalization advocate and would-be philosopher of “neomasculinity.” Some highlights:
Roosh was the inspiration for a demonstration against rape culture in Montreal.
Roughly 100 demonstrators held a peaceful demonstration in Montreal’s Norman Bethune Square targeting rape culture in general and Roosh in particular. It is not known how many of the demonstrators were undercover Roosh operatives dressed as “a homosexual hipster (i.e. male feminist).” Best estimates put the number at zero. The rally was covered by both CTV News and The Montreal Gazette.
The mayor of Montreal weighed in on the issue, declaring in a tweet that as far as he was concerned Roosh was not welcome in his city.
On the Roosh V forum, meanwhile, Roosh’s fans scoured the news footage for identifiable faces of people they could smear, and debated whether or not they WB (“would bang”) or WNB (“would not bang”) various women who had attended the demonstration.
Roosh (apparently) gave his talk, celebrating afterwards by posting a video claiming a “historic victory in Montreal.”
After calling on his followers to spread false information about the super seekrit location of his talk, as part of what he charmingly called “Operation Goebbels,” Roosh apparently gave his talk in a rented room at a Montreal restaurant.
Afterwards, evidently quite proud of himself, Roosh posted a victory video on Youtube. On the Roosh V forum, his fans happily posted celebratory gifs, including this one.
Donning a wig — no, really — Roosh hit the bars in an evident attempt to find a woman in Montreal who was not repulsed by him.
He failed, as this video of a woman tossing a drink in his face suggests.
Roosh went on Twitter to report being assaulted by “a mob,” and apparently reported the incident to police.
He might have undermined his case a little by suggesting it was “worth” it because, well, he got some action out of it, sort of.
https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/630245564983169025
The woman with the “sexy legs” responded, and suggested that Roosh had in fact put his hands on her first.
On the Roosh forums, Roosh’s fans urged him to file charges for assault and to sue everyone in sight. And debated whether or not they WB the alleged beer-pourer.
Meanwhile, Roosh’s plan to smear his opponents online continued apace.
“By Monday,” one Roosh fan wrote, “we’ll have identified every single one of these pieces of garbage and work on decimating their future career options.”
According to this Tweet, Roosh himself was threatening to falsely report one of the organizers to social services as a bad mother.
https://twitter.com/ashleylynch/status/629954266380271616/photo/1
On Twitter, the #IStandWithRooshV hashtag has been having a little trouble getting going, generating all of 3 Tweets as of noon on Sunday.
This does not look like a grand victory for Roosh, unless his aim was to show the world what terrible shits he and his supporters are.
@Luzbelitx – sorry for misspelling your screenname.
Also I’m wordier than I need to be when I’m tired. I’m still sort of wired because I just finished an editing project (yay me) but sleep is good too.
epitome of incomprehensibility – fair.
In the end, I think you’re probably right in that he did the sort of “steering” thing. (I always find that super creepy.) But for me, personally, “grabbed” has a different connotation.
Mr Futurelle – It occurs to me that one weakness in the media coverage Roosh got last week was the fact they just sort of cited his infamous (and claimed saitirical) “make rape legal” post. I’m sure that even beyond your tag here, you might have a longer list of his racism, espousal of the belief in women’s inherent inferiority, the bit about “which no’s count”, and was it he who was explaining why eating disorders or maybe it was another condition made women more pliant and better to control?
I kind of think being able to show just how… complete… his mindset is might help?
This, my darlings, is what your redpillian alpha looks like. This is what in his mind constitutes success: having beer thrown in his face, being publicly humiliated, and kicked out of a bar is “winning” if the beer-throwing woman somehow “rubbed” her legs against you in the process.
I know, right? How pathetic do Roosh’s fans have to be that “A woman dumped a beer over my head, chased me out of the bar and down the street screaming at me to get lost, and posted online the next day to mock me for being such a pathetic creep, but YOU GUYS I THINK HER LEG TOUCHED MY LEG” gets drooling envy? This is what they pay money to learn how to do? How much worse could their current “game” possibly be?
Seriously, Roosh fans who are reading this (I know you all are). Just talk to a lady! It’s not that hard!
@Alan, GOSJM, luzbelitx:
I was also raised to believe in the whole “a man never lifts a hand to a woman” chivalry meme. In my opinion it’s a conflation of two things:
A) As luzbelitz said, a way of teaching men not to commit domestic abuse.
B) A belief that male-upon-male violence is an acceptable way of resolving differences, but that the habits thus learned should not be applied outside of the male-on-male sphere.
A is something I think we can all agree with: in a perfect society women wouldn’t beat men either, and nobody would beat their children.
B is, in my opinion, part of a much broader social narrative about the way we treat men’s bodies and women’s bodies. Women are supposed to be perfect and ornamental, and men are supposed to be tough enough to stop whining and put up with whatever we do to them. It’s why we discourage girls from doing rough sports but mock boys for liking nice clothes; why we are willing to put men in uniforms to be bullet-catchers but not women; why two grown men beating each other up is a sport but two grown women doing it ends up being sexualised; and why men are taught to be reluctant to see a doctor for fear of looking weak. The male body is inherently violable.
As such, in my opinion the real question here isn’t “is it okay for women to hit men?” but “is it okay for anyone to hit men?” Like a lot of patriarchal standards, at root it’s largely about controlling the menz.
Now, in the particular issue of Beer Girl, I believe it’s somewhat different. She was in the presence of a serial rapist who was touching her nonconsensually in a bar. His mere presence – let alone his alpha kino game – is a threat of imminent physical danger. The deployment of hops-based weaponry is therefore not only entirely reasonable, but is also a much lower level of force than she could have used given the threat.
@36000
Stop spinning so hard, you’ll make a mess and look like a fool. Oh…. too late.
My condolences to that poor beer that had to follow Roosh back to his hotel.
Charming GIF of goofy Nazis yukking it up. And that’s Joseph Goebbels in the middle, minister of public enlightenment and propaganda. He’s the one yukking it up the most. Say, do Roosh and his minions know that the Nazis LOST World War II? Goebbels killed himself. Not so many laughs in the bunker in the spring of 1945…
Read the complaint Rosh filed with the police department re: his assault. It’s quite something. For one, he claims that the beer-pouring woman… seduced him.
Watching this debacle has made me realize how profoundly withdrawn from the shared human reality Roosh is. The world he inhabits does not have much in common with that of the rest / most of us.
Better yet, Doosh fans: fuck off forever and don’t talk to anyone, ever. That would make the world a much better place.
Also, what the hell is “kino”? This thread has read very weirdly for me because I only recognize that word as German for “cinema”. That’s… not the intended meaning here, I assume.
Roosh, you’re a big crybaby. I call that neonatal masculinity.
I’m sitting on the fence about whether this is good or bad. “This” referring to polarization of people’s opinions, decreasing discourse between groups, tribalization of politics and so on.
There’s a small group of guys who would have ended up decent folks were it not for having been dragged into the manosphere echo chamber in an impressionable age. There’s more hatred and strife and less tolerance in society. Perhaps worst of all, it contributes to the phenomenon of politics becoming more and more about economically irrelevant but emotionally appealing red herrings, which can then be made unsolvable through the use of propaganda. This allows the elites to make a show of a democratic process without ever letting questions like economic inequality that could be easily addressed through economic policy come up for debate. These are huge, tragic losses for everyone.
But they might easily be outweighed by how much easier it is for women and good men to avoid these people now that they’ve shown their true colors for the whole world. The value of this is hard to overstate.
@Gipsz
“Kino” is PUA term for what they also call “physical escalation”. Basically, touching their target in increasingly intimate places (I don’t know why). It’s supposed to start somewhere innocuous like the shoulder and move on to tits and ass, but sometimes the
exceptionally shitty more extreme PUAs will just go for the waist or thighs like Roosh did. I’m reconsidering my previous stance that he grabbed her though, it was probably a manoeuvring tactic indeed. Still, not cool for a guy you’ve met only a few minutes before to put his arm round your waist.STRIKETHROUGH MAMMOTH! *shakes fist* The strike is supposed to end after “shitty”.
@ Lux and Kreator
I guess I’m just envious. I’ve got a secret fantasy that our Government here is mired in the occult. For example I was once on a military base where there were a series of well preserved long barrows. In my head I was hoping that that was were they preserved King Arthur; ready to come to the aid of the UK in times of crisis.
My illusion was slightly dented when someone pointed out the long barrows were in fact WW2 fuel bunkers; but I can still dream.
@ Everyone
I have no doubt that the ‘never hit a girl’ thing derived from the ‘women ae the weaker sex’ myth. I think now though that, for me at least, it’s a reflection on the general context of how women face violence that men don’t. Before someone steps in and says ‘Yeah, well men actually face more assaults’ let me explain.
Most M-M violence is to an extent consensual anyway. It’s practically ritualistic (we call it ‘the monkey dance’). It’s more about posture and submission than causing real harm; it’s a display like rams butting horns. Yes, men can get hurt but that’s often a by-product; almost an accident.
Violence against women though is real; it’s not about saving face in front of the group (although that can be an issue; especially when a woman has ‘humiliated’ a man) but more about control. It’s a way of a man demonstrating his will and suborning a woman’s agency.
In other words, even when the M-F violent act may seem trivial (like throwing a drink) there’s always the fact that (a) the violence could escalate to something really serious anyway and (b) even if it doesn’t there’s that underlying power imbalance in society.
This is why “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them” is funny (and quite cute) but “Cuddle with a struggle” isn’t. Only the latter represents something that’s a genuine threat.
To me then, that’s why say a woman giving a man a slap for something is fine and saying ‘well, you probably deserved that’ isn’t victim blaming, whereas the same act against a woman is completely anathema.
It may be benevolent sexism but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing similar to how ‘positive discrimination’ (what our colonial cousins would call affirmative action) on the face of it seems unfair, but might not be when you look at the context and history.
Hope that makes some sense.
Tl;dr – that beer thing was fine
@ lightcastle
Even in your description of what might have happened, she would still be justified. She knew who he was – Roosh V the misogynistic, racist, rape-advocating scumbag – and took action.
—
@ everyone else
I do wonder if he was planning to rape that woman and/or others. Or even commit another crime. I remember seeing on a donotlinked youtube video of his (I think it was the one here he said he was going to Montreal despite opposition) and in one of his own comments to it he said, “If I’m going down, I’m taking some people with me.”
I never liked the “Boys are stupid throw rocks at them” thing. I can’t wrap my head around how that’s funny at all, personally…
Well said, Alan.
@sunnysombrera:
I think the humour comes from the unexpected juxtaposition of the very girly “boys are stupid” and the very violent “throw rocks at them.” It comes from the same place as “the best foundation for a flawless look is the blood of thine enemies.”
It works because our culture assumes that femininity and violence are mutually exclusive traits, and therefore combining the two is unexpected and humorous.
Zoiks. To me that sounds connected to his retaliation against protesters but it wouldn’t surprise me if he went out that night with the intention of ignoring any “nos” from “uppity entitled Montreal women”.
@EJ
Ah. I didn’t see it from that angle before.
@ SunnyS
I don’t want to fall into ‘splaining, but (to me) it’s like EJ says; it’s the juxtaposition (and also the fact that it’s not a real threat; there’s no menace behind it like there is with a rape ‘joke’ t-shirt).
Another example might be something I once heard Jenny Éclair say:
“People say ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’; I prefer through the rib cage with a bread knife”
I have to confess I snorted beer though my nose at that one. If you’re familiar with Jenny’s style of delivery, it’s even funnier.
Ah, with perfect timing, speaking of jokes….
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/10/jokes-finally-funny-because-culture-at-the-butt-of-them
@Paradoxical Intention
Shit, I put my one comments as a quote too. Nevermind.