If the almost universally despised pickup artist and rape legalization proponent Roosh Valizadeh is able to deliver his planned talk tomorrow at some as-yet-undisclosed venue in Toronto, he won’t just be talking about the unoriginal blend of warmed-over misogyny he perplexingly calls “neomasculinity.”
He will also be selling his infamous “Bang” books, a series of pickup guides aimed mostly at North American tourists hoping to score easy sex in an assortment of countries in Europe and South America. These guides seem to have been Roosh’s main source of income for the past several years.
So it is worth asking what exactly Roosh is selling here.
Most of the “Bang” books are country-specific guides offering Roosh’s, er, insights into each country’s nightlife, dating mores, and women. “The best way to describe a Ukrainian girl’s personality is that of a corpse,” he explains in Bang Ukraine. “They really don’t show any emotion, interest, or spark when you first approach them. They just stand still with their eyes darting around.”
Alongside Roosh’s recommendations on cities to visit, bars to prowl, and dating “logistics” (rent an apartment near the bars you intend to frequent so you can easily get “girls” back to your place before, you know, they change their minds), Roosh also provides case studies of his sexual, er, conquests of women in each country.
Judging from Roosh’s own descriptions of them, many of these alleged conquests might better be described as rapes.
Again and again in these stories, presented as true, Roosh literally won’t take no for an answer, pressuring reluctant and resistant women into giving him what he wants, in one case using outright physical force in order to continue intercourse with a woman who had changed her mind.
In many of these cases Roosh tells us or at least implies that the woman in question consented to sex, but it is worth asking what kind of “consent” is preceded by literally hours of struggle against a physically imposing man who refuses to believe that no means no. It’s also worth asking what the woman’s own account of the experience would look like.
Are Roosh’s Bang books essentially how-to guides to date rape? Read some of his stories and decide for yourself. [Trigger Warning for the quotes that follow.]
The most notorious passage in any of Roosh’s Bang books comes from Bang Iceland, in which Roosh describes sex with a drunk woman he ushered to his apartment after she was left behind by her friends at a bar.
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.
Sex with women too drunk to consent is considered rape in Iceland as well as in the US.
Roosh continues:
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 figure my dick was inside her about forty minutes after meeting her, likely my fastest bang ever. The sex was as good as drunken sex can get, but I did notice her pussy was drier than the Sahara desert.
Roosh’s sense of self-awareness is as underdeveloped as his conscience.
With another Icelandic woman, Roosh reports:
In the middle of the night I got another boner, put on a condom, and jammed it back in while she was half-asleep. I came and passed out again with the condom still on my dick….
Roosh’s accounts of his sexual escapades in Iceland are sadly rather typical for him. In Bang Poland, he makes clear that the word “no,” won’t stop him, no matter how many times it’s repeated.
We moved to my bed. I got her down to her bra and panties, but she kept saying, “No, no.” I was so turned on by her beauty and petite figure that I told myself she’s not walking out my door without getting fucked. At that moment I accepted the idea of getting locked up in a Polish prison to make it happen.
After more such “foreplay,” Roosh gets what he wants:
I put on a condom, lubed up, and finally got her consent to put it in. … I put her on her stomach and went deep, pounding her pussy like a pedophile. She took it like a champ even though I imagine it must have felt like being fucked by a telescope. My orgasm was from another world.
This is what passes for a happy ending in Roosh’s stories.
In 30 Bangs, a collection of Rooshian case studies, Roosh gives his excruciating account of “sex” with an anonymous Catholic girl a similarly “upbeat” ending:
After dinner we went upstairs and I eased her onto my king-size bed. It took four hours of foreplay and at least thirty repetitions of “No, Roosh, no” until she allowed my penis to enter her vagina. No means no—until it means yes.
The sex was painful for her. I was only the second guy she’d ever had sex with. … She whimpered like a wounded puppy dog the entire time, but I really wanted to have an orgasm, so I was “almost there” for about ten minutes. After sex she sobbed for a good while, talking about how she had sinned in the eyes of God, but in an hour she got horny again and we went at it once more.
In Bang Ukraine, Roosh describes how he used “some muscle” to hold a woman down after she changed her mind during sex.
I was fucking her from behind, getting to the end in the way I normally did, when all of a sudden she said, “Wait stop, I want to go back on top.” I refused and we argued. … She tried to squirm away while I was laying down my strokes so I had to use some muscle to prevent her from escaping. I was able to finish, but my orgasm was weak.
Afterwards I told her she was selfish and that she couldn’t call an audible so late in the game.
Again and again in these stories – and there are more of them — Roosh misleads, manipulates, cajoles, pressures and intimidates women until he gets what he wants. The women could not be clearer in their refusals, telling Roosh no and pushing him away. He doesn’t care.
To judge from his own accounts of his sexual exploits in the books he published himself, Roosh is a dangerous sexual predator who has been getting away with it for years. In his Bang books, he teaches young men that they can get away with it too.
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Ah, cheers for those tips.
I’ll probably go with Catalpa’s rather simpler one. Despite my inherent XY chromosome tech skills I do have some trouble with Mark up stuff. One day though I *will* successfully put something in italics!
Looks like Roosh was not only antagonizing the crowd, he didn’t go to that bar alone.
@PI – no, he didn’t. Almost makes you think that maybe he thought he needed protection. Now, I don’t ever advocate hurting someone, but there was something cathartic about seeing that MoFo get a drink in his face. And then another. So much for his brilliant disguises. :3
You think he’d realize that maybe… just maybe… the crowd is reacting to what he actually is. But nope. Not that self aware.
Now to watch epic rap battles as my kiddo plays Animal Jam upstairs. Even she knows why Roosh got drinks to the face (though I explain the whole thing as ‘forced to make out’ since she’s eight and that’s all the detail she’ll get on it). She said, and I quote, “His mom needs to teach him to learn what ‘no’ means!”
Yay! It worked! Good to know, and bookmarking that!
Me neither, but I kind of hope that when he tries (and fails) to “Bang TO”, someone crowns him with a bottle or pitcher…as befits a would-be “king”.
I got a few Kindle “samples” of the BANG books, to see if they were really that bad. I was not disappointed.
I wonder if Roosh would even recognize genuine sexual arousal as such, in a woman.
This is Chira the cockatiel, who is very curious and camera shy.
@NicolaLuna
Thank you. It’s taken me a long time to admit the awfulness of what happened. It’s all too similar to other campus rape cases – I was attacked, I tried to resume normal life, and, as I had no choice given the social culture, I remained friendly with him and tried to establish a relationship, in hopes that that would somehow make everything alright. Obviously it did not. After that I went from shame, to anger, to relentless anxiety, poor relationships, and finally meeting my beloved Mr. GhostBird, whose love and support has allowed me to grow and finally acknowledge that I was, in fact, raped, and that I am stronger than what happened to me. Admittedly it wasn’t a primary stress point after the first year or two, but I’m still surprised by what makes me remember it. Trauma is odd.
A veritable ninjakeet!
@Alan:
I’ve never heard of Artemisia Gentileschi until now. What a remarkable woman in so many ways. I’m going to get better acquainted with her life and work. Thank you.
Can’t wait to see a lawyer use these against him in court when someone finally, and inevitably, presses charges against him.
I was raped in a way that is very similar to one of the situations above. I guess that’s why I get so angry with the Tales of Roosh. If that woman is anything like me she sees guys who look like him and gets repulsed and sick. She spent years recreating the drama in confusing ways and pushing back decent guys who didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t say anything to anyone because she knows the situation was ambiguous enough that no one would believe her, not even her friends. And she is angry. Very, very angry.
The Catholic schoolgirl story is almost word for word how I was raped, with the additional point that he invited his friends over and “forgot” to lock the door so they could walk in on us. Afterwards, I could hear them laughing in the living room while I was crying and bleeding in the bathroom.
Serious question, guys. It’s been years since this incident, but this guy sometimes pops up in my Facebook news feed. I really don’t think he understands how bad he fucked up. Would it be worth it to confront him about it?
I don’t think any of us could provide an answer for that.
It’s very difficult to know if this would be good for your recovery, or if it would just be venting that will only lead to making you feel worse in the long run, or if it will cause this guy to harass you in the hopes that you’ll shut up about it, or just to get his kicks out of tormenting you some more.
Roosh is lucky that he only got a drink in his face. I hope he falls into an open sewer.
Cyberwulf: it would probably improve his smell.
David: Just a little formatting issue; there doesn’t seem to be a cut here.
@NothingClever: *hugs* to you. That’s a horrible thing he did to you. And it sucks that he’s popping up in your FB feed.
I’m also a rape survivor, and I can understand your wish to confront him on FB. That being said, after quite a bit of counselling, I ‘ve learnt that for me, if things like that happen, the best thing to do in such a case is to block the rapist so I wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore: the potential for re-victimisation would be too high for me to risk, and I’m learning to walk away from that kind of thing. However, since I don’t know you or the other people involved, I can’t tell you if that would be a good course of action for you.
Reading these stories makes me appreciate my lover even more…
In all the talk of rape, we rarely seem to acknowledge that some guys only truly get off on the misery of others. Like someone else above, I find the Ukraine story perhaps the most telling. Here was a woman who WAS consenting, but just wanted to change position – and he deliberately made it into a non-consent situation. And then tried to shame her about it.
@NothingClever… that’s a tough one, I don’t know… One hopes that that kind of attitude is something that shifts with maturity and that he would be either genuinely remorseful or open to understanding your perspective and then remorseful. But I think the chance of that is probably lower than the chance that he’ll be an arse in the way Paradoxical Intentions describes. It’s up to you to decide whether the chance of a positive payoff and the emotional reward you’d get is higher than the chance of negative interaction and the further harm that would ensue. If you’re in a place where you can write off his actions emotionally if he doesn’t act right… then maybe worth a shot. But I think you need to ask yourself why you need his understanding to validate your emotions or what you hope to achieve from this.
Why hasn’t someone just turned these over to the police? Here or abroad? He doesn’t need to be beaten or hurt, he simply needs to be arrested and tried, by his own admissions
@samiam he is currently under investigation by the Montreal police’s cybercrimes unit for posting those women’s addresses. Though it happened before he set foot in Canada so likely would get turned over to the US.
http://m.thestar.com/#/article/news/gta/2015/08/11/pickup-artist-sparks-police-investigation.html
I hope this snowballs and the police start to take a look at the rest of his writings.
This bar seems to think so: https://twitter.com/LeighNaturkach/status/632366442403332098
They banned him, and his supporters.
Thanks, everyone, for the advice. I just recently came to terms with the fact that this was *not* okay, since my mother told me it “wasn’t really rape” when I confided in her. Seeing Roosh get called out for his shit has brought back some dark memories for me, but in a way it’s also very satisfying to see that there are literally thousands of people who are willing to stand up to this asshole and his kind.
@NothingClever- I am so sorry you had to hear that from your own mother. I know exactly what you mean, seeing that dude on fb, thinking he is just going about his regular day not knowing what he did and wanting the people that love you to validate something bad did happen. Honestly, the best part of this conversation about consent is I am sure he knows somewhere exactly what he did to you and that it was wrong.
Which can be the only possible way that he derives any kind of pleasure at all from what sounds like the worst sex imaginable. (His partner’s lack of pleasure is a given.)
Why would anyone actually want to penetrate a Sahara-dry vagina unless causing pain was a core motivation? It can’t be especially comfortable for him either, but I get the increasing impression that he has absolutely no idea what good sex feels like. Mainly because it involves such utterly alien concepts as consent, intimacy and mutual pleasure.
I can’t even begin to fathom the mindset of someone like Roosh, or someone who thinks that he’s any kind of role model.