All is not happy in the world of Roosh Valizadeh. The formerly amoral hedonist, who built his online fiefdom on a bunch of books urging men to “bang” women in an assortment of countries, is turning into a moralistic, hectoring scold only a few steps removed from the Taliban.
And some of his old fans are wondering what the hell has happened to him.
Earlier this week, Roosh posted an especially dour and authoritarian post titled “How To Stop The Fall Of Women,” telling his readers that
It is completely your responsibility to create the environment of a good home, a good city, and a good country to prevent the fall of your women. It’s your responsibility to create the right environment where all women remain good instead of succumbing to an evil where within a short amount of time she becomes a useless, tattooed, overweight, and masculine slut. It should be clear to you by now that women absolutely can not save themselves, and have no inherent resistance to the pollution that tempts them in this world. It’s solely up to us men to shield their natural virtue so that they become the wives and mothers that allow you to fulfill your biological destiny while furthering the health of your society.
He continues on in this vein for several hundred more words.
It’s a big change from his older PUA writings, but one thing is consistent: Roosh doesn’t think women have the right to control their own lives.
Still, some of his old fans are having none of it. A reader pointed me to this interesting exchange in the comments to Roosh’s post:
A lot of Roosh’s old fans — like “Former Banger” there — are sympathetic to his new direction. But clearly not all of them. Alexa (an admittedly imperfect cataloguer of web traffic) also suggests that Roosh’s sites are losing steam, and losing readers. He’s still a long way from irrelevant, but he gets closer every day.
No wonder Roosh is so grumpy.
I just read that article by Roosh. He seems to run from attractive, successful women. Or is it the other around? 😛
*way around
[“According to the comments on that article, the way to fix every ill and issue in the entire world is by controlling the sexuality of all women.
The decline of civilization is directly related to how much sex women are having? How very odd. And stupid.According to the comments on that article, the way to fix every ill and issue in the entire world is by controlling the sexuality of all women.
The decline of civilization is directly related to how much sex women are having? How very odd. And stupid.”]
I would say it boils down to male insecurity.
On the Taliban thing: Roosh has claimed to have converted to Islam. While I doubt the sincerity of his conversion, I’ve no doubt that he’s been mining these latest columns from a skewed, Western version of the worst of Sharia law.
Roosh has always seen sex as a means of degrading, “despoiling” and punishing women. The sex he describes is joyless, unrewarding, and rather tedious “work.” I don’t think he has ever experienced much physical, never mind emotional, reward in it, except insofar as it demonstrated his ability to manipulate, dominate, and humiliate women.
Ugh. it’s one of the stalest ideas in patriarchy: women have a natural virtue, but it is very fragile, and only men can preserve it for them!
Hi Cinzia!
It’s true, Roosh has never seemed to get much out of physical intimacy, why else would he badger women he doesn’t care about into sex they don’t want?
He’s going to wind up a very bitter, lonely old man.
What the!!! Is a “natural virtue”? I mean my only vague understanding of a phase like that comes from a childhood poem whose author or context I don’t remember.
‘Patience is a virtue,
Virtue is a grace
Grace is a little girl with a dirty face’
Absolutely no relevance to the Rooshters messed diatribe about garbage but felt like saying it anyway
It’s all about hating and controlling women. Making them objects for your satisfaction.
To demean them? Or at least that’s what I’d have said yesterday, in light of this, idfk.
That was in reply to sn0rkmaiden
Roosh has made himself unemployable with his short term plan to sell vulgar sex tourism guides and lead a misogynistic hate cult online. He at least could have been sensible enough to stay anonymous, but I suppose he was to proud to do that. So he says women are incapable of making intelligent decisions. The projection is just glaring.
Roosh has also never mentioned a father. And then he says women should be controlled by their fathers/husbands to stop them from making terrible decisions. Could it be you, Roosh, who needed someone to have stopped you from ruining your own life when you were in your 20s?
He has condemned himself to a life of loneliness. No person worth being in a relationship with would be with a man like him, even if he did reform now. It’s all gone too far. He is truly damaged goods. He is impure with a soiled reputation. His words are tattooed on him forever.
But maybe not. To quote Courtney Love at Kurt Cobain’s funeral, “if you hated it so much, why didn’t you just fucking stop?” Sorry your dad didn’t love you, Roosh V. Hope he can figure out how to just fucking stop all this shit and find some peace.
I hate to say that Former Banger has a point because he’s probably a misogynistic asshole, but he does. Conventionally attractive (or for that matter any other) college aged women are not typically interested in having sex with those creepy older men who lurk around bars and clubs, desperately trying to reclaim their youth. It’s not cute. I still remember those types of men from my younger clubgoing days. We all worked hard to avoid them.
I often think of this song when I read this site,
https://youtu.be/gra2V8Nz3dE
Probably projecting here, but he sounds of like a person raised in a very conservative (oppressive?) atmosphere who breaks free at a young age, indulges in everything forbidden, and when the party begins to wane, returns to how they initially understood the world. Except Roosh has spent a decade, rootless, sleeping with randoms for a living. Most people have had a one night stand where they feel empty after the experience, but imagine ten years of that feeling? Its gonna skew how you view the world and people.
Policy of Madness (@6.06pm): The thing you’re missing in the argument is that the rapist’s sense of entitlement is a power thing. A sense of entitlement is actually a fairly obvious power dynamic – as per the old Australian joke: “Why do dogs lick their balls? Because they can.” Being able to do things “because you can” is an indicator (a strong indicator) of social, political and/or economic power in this society and culture. Why do rapists rape? Because they can. Because they’re allowed to get away with it. Because they’re socially permitted to do so.
Rape cultures are about power – male power in particular.
In the same way, purity cultures are about power – they’re “sold” to men and women as a way of decreasing the risk of rape (the argument being that if men are just vigilant enough, if women are just controlled enough, rape will stop happening). But the problem is that a purity culture needs a wider rape culture surrounding it in order to thrive. Without the threat of rape as punishment (social and cultural punishment, not necessarily individual punishment – think about the ways rape victims in the USA are subtly and not-so-subtly discouraged from reporting the crimes committed against them) for infringements of a purity code, the code itself is quickly seen for what it is: an effort to control someone. A power game, in other words.
The thing to remember is that the wider power dynamics are not necessarily spelled out clearly at an individual level. A single particular rape is not necessarily an outright articulation of a social system which is determined to give men vast amounts of coercive power over women. But it functions as a part of the wider system, and part of a broader pattern. In the same way, a single white police officer shooting a single black suspect dead is not an indicator of institutionalised racism within a police force or culture – but a wider pattern of such shootings definitely points to this being a factor.
What a wider power dynamic looks like, down at the individual level, is someone getting away with something “because they can”.
Pulling this all back to Roosh and the original post, it’s hardly surprising that Roosh is now preaching a purity gospel aimed at women. He knows (intimately) how bad things can get, he knows (intimately) how little some rapists care for the actual sexual satisfaction, and he knows (intimately) how much the whole game is about power. He can’t get the power by coercing sex any more, so he has to get that power through other ways – such as by coercing non-sexual behaviour. It’s the same coercive coin, just flipped over. Oh, and he’s doing this because he can. Because he’s getting ego validation for doing it (attention, for example – and if you’re using attention as your primary motivator, it doesn’t matter which type of attention you’re getting. Negative attention is just as good as positive attention). Because nobody is stopping him from doing it.
It’s your responsibility, guys who read Roosh’s website, not his.
Two months ago, Roosh embarked on a worldwide tour to teach men how to seduce women.
In Montreal, Roosh became enraged that he was made to feel unwelcome in a bar because he had bragged in his book “Bang Iceland” that he had raped a woman.
Now he says that his readers must do what he won’t do: make sure that all women remain “good,” i.e., celibate until somethingsomething.
Which leads this reader of Roosh’s writings to conclude that Roosh’s seduction technique includes murmuring into a pretty ear, “Succumb to the evil that is me, and soon you will be a useless, tattooed, overweight, and masculine slut.”
@Policy of Madness
Men feeling entitled to do whatever they like with women is a display of power.
Ah, the classic, “we want women to be a very specific way, and if they don’t become that on their own, it proves women just can’t and shouldn’t even be allowed to try to make their own decisions.” It’s amazing how common this sentiment is in the manosphere. “If we give women their freedom, they won’t act just how we demand they act! Chaos!”
Talibans? Aren’t ISIS what the cool kids are doing these days?
harhar
I’m with Policy of Madness. Rape, like all violence, is an exercise of power, but it is not always a display of power. I think it’s safe to assume that “forcible rape” AKA “legitimate rape” AKA “rape-rape” is done by people for whom the violence and humiliation is the entire point. That’s where the phrase “rape is about power, not sex” is useful. The point is that no one ambushes women in alleys or drags them into vans because they have real bad blue balls or because she’s just so damn attractive. The (very small number of) men who jump women in alleys do so because they want to jump women in alleys, not because they can’t get laid.
When you get into “date rape” / “acquaintance rape” / “rape by intoxication,” I’m sure many of the perps are like the forcible ones in that the violation is what turns them on. But for many of the PUAs, it does seem like it’s sex and not rape-as-such that motivates them. I get the sense that they would be willing to have consensual sex if consent is obtainable, but also willing to commit rape if it’s not. For them, rape is not “about power.” It’s about sex, and using power to get the sex they feel they deserve.
Lurky, you mentioned fundamentalist Christians and how they’re equally awful. I know some definitely are. But there are some Christians who fall under the fundamentalist umbrella who preach purity for both men and women. This may be not be something that many people want, but it’s not singling out women and only expecting purity from *women,* while “boys will be boys.” It’s holding the same standard to both men and women. I can have some respect for *that* part of it. What they want from women, they also want from men.
What Roosh is doing is so far removed from all of that. He’s not living up to the standards that he wants forced on women. He’s exempt. He’s already “good,” just the way he is. It’s those filthy, weak women who need the likes of *him* to keep them from becoming *bad*. It’s absurdly laughable, isn’t it?
@freemage: Do you have a source on Valizadeh’s claimed conversion to Islam? That’s fascinating. That’s something that I want to sink my teeth into.
He’s been saying for years that Muslims immigrating to the west will destroy civilisation. Now apparently he’s changed sides? Amazing.
@EJ: There was that post where Roosh was claiming that anyone criticizing him was Islamophobic, so he can pull the “I’m an oppressed group, so you can’t criticize me, neener neener.”
It was around the time he was in Canada, and there was that shitty Photoshop of him in “traditional clothes”.