As many of you no doubt know, the BBC’s Reggie Yates recently did an hour-long documentary about the “manosphere,” paying particular attention to the rapey, repellent pickup guru Roosh Valizadeh. I’ve pasted the video below.
I have, well, lots of thoughts about it. It’s really pretty compelling, particularly the segments involving Roosh, which essentially offer him a nice sturdy — albeit figurative — rope with which to hang himself. Which he of course does. More on that, and Roosh’s response, below.
The non-Roosh segments are a mixed bag. Yates’ not terribly enlightening discussions with proudly reactionary GamerGate panderer and ostensible journalist Milo Yiannopoulos are pretty skippable.
More compelling is Yates’ interview with an infamous online bully who actually served a brief stint in jail for the threats he’d Tweeted to two prominent women, one of them a Member of Parliament. Their crime, in his eyes? They wanted to put Jane Austen’s face on the ten pound note. There’s something a bit chilling in the blase way the troll, a shaven-headed sad sack by the name of John Nimmo, recounts his vicious harassment campaign.
But most chilling of all were the segments with Roosh, which take up a hefty chunk of the program. Yates attended one of the little speeches Roosh gave on his “word tour” last summer, interviewing him afterwards; several months later he traveled to Poland for a followup.
Yates memorably introduces Roosh with a snippet from one of his videos in which he complains about how much effort it can take “to access [women’s] warm, moist cavity holes.”
Such a romantic!
We then get to see some snippets of Roosh’s mysterious speech, ostensibly on “The State of Man” in the world today. Nothing he says will be particularly surprising to anyone who’s familiar with his odious writings.
Still, seeing him present his ridiculous “philosophy” live highlights not just how noxious his ideas but also how incredibly, well, dumb they are. Roosh clearly wants to upgrade his status from that of a burned-out, rape-apologizing pickup artist to that of a great thinker. The only problem is that thinking isn’t something he does particularly well.
But it’s Yates’ interview with Roosh in Poland that really stands out.
In his hotel room before the interview, Yates reads out some of the more repellent and rapey things that Roosh has written.
“This isn’t about confidence,” he says, holding aloft one of Roosh’s slender volumes of dubious pickup wisdom. “30 Bangs isn’t about making young men feel as though they have value. This is about making young women feel as though they have none.”
Later, in Roosh’s apartment, Roosh waxes indignant about the public reaction to his infamous proposal to fight rape by making it legal. Roosh insists it was satire, but, as Yates tells him, it’s “quite hard to find the satirical angle to it.” (A point I and many others made at the time.)
And then, just moments after telling Yates that “I advocate for consensual sex,” he presents his own version of “no means no” in which no actually means pause for a moment before returning to doing whatever she said no to.
Yates asks him about a story in one of his books in which Roosh writes about penetrating a woman who is half asleep.
“Haven’t you done that?” he asks Yates. “When a girl is half asleep, when you’ve already had sex with her?”
Yates tells him that no, of course, he hasn’t. Roosh keeps digging his hole deeper, seeming genuinely puzzled that Yates isn’t nodding in agreement.
“So if you want to examine every instance, every thrust, maybe you can find something,” Roosh tells him. “But this can happen to every man.”
By “something,” Roosh seems to mean “an instance in which you put your penis in a woman without permission.”
In Roosh’s mind, evidently, rape (that’s really not rape), is something that happens to the rapist, not the woman he rapes; it’s the rapist who’s sort of the real victim.
On his blog, Roosh has denounced the documentary as a “hit piece,” suggesting that Yates — whom he describes as a “BBC host of questionable sexuality” — simply wasn’t man enough to really understand him or his comrades in the manosphere. (Yates isn’t actually gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
By “hir[ing] a non-masculine man to report on masculinity,” Roosh argues, the BBC is doing the equivalent of
hir[ing] a carpenter to review an Italian opera. Besides a handful of exaggerated facial expressions made for the camera, the carpenter will not be able to analyze the opera on a level above that of even a grade-school trumpet player.
That’s a new one, I guess.
Roosh then goes on to declare that this “hit piece on the manosphere” is actually a giant victory for him, because
it gets my ideas across to those who have yet to see it. Even if 0.1% of people who watched the BBC documentary become readers of mine, it’s still a huge win, since doing it only cost me a couple hours of time. …
The BBC program tried to paint me as a criminal, but instead I gained more fans and sold more books. As long as my name exits the mouth of my enemies, I win, and I will continue to win.
Didn’t Charlie Sheen once say something similar?
I hate to have to tell you this, Roosh, but no, you’re really not winning at all. Repulsing the general public with your repugnant ideas is not a victory. Every thought of yours that you put on the internet makes ever clearer what a huge loser you are.
Here’s the documentary. For anyone who doesn’t have time to watch the whole thing, I’ve attached a second video below that features nothing but the segments featuring Roosh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8RxL9kuBs4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsUh-Qisg2Q
It’s becoming really tedious to see these assholes, like Roosh and Vox Day, who think that if they say “I win no matter what you do!” enough times, it somehow becomes true.
I guess a ‘non-masculine’ man in Roosh’s nauseating sump of a mind is a man who isn’t a emotionally stunted, knuckle-dragging rapist and who sees containers of warm moist cavities as get this, human beings who deserve to be treated like human beings.
But I don’t wanna watch Roosh, even if it makes him look bad…
I am not surprised at all that Roosh tried turning his shit back on the interviewer. It’s a known thing that rapists believe that all other men are rapists too, so the “you’ve never done that?” is entirely expected.
And then he concludes that, since Yates isn’t out there raping women like a good alpha, he must be gay. So predictable, Roosh.
I haven’t seen the video yet, so I’m just responding to the post.
This is good for
BitCoin#GamerGateThe Sarkeesian EffectRoosh.I thought manurespherians thought all black men are automatically alpha males?
What a spoiled child.
The bit where he interviews Nimmo really spells out the importance of applying existing laws to online spaces. Too many times people just assume that the internet is a fake box filled with fake people that you can just abuse as easily as a Sims character and so making these people face genuine consequences for abuse, stalking, threats is the way to make it stop.
It also highlights the way that violence and hatred against marginalized groups is normalized. Everyone else he was hanging with was doing it and he didn’t think he would get caught. He didn’t think his victims would matter enough to mean he could possibly face consequences and that’s often why marginalized communities are targeted by bullies and terrorists. Because they trust society and law enforcement to have their back and let them slide.
And it’s also telling that he didn’t say anything about really getting anything out of it. It’s just done because that’s the price of toxic masculinity, how you show you’re in the club and not a “not-man” and it’s why Roosh’s accusation is so telling. As a lifelong participant in toxic masculinity, he needs to emphasize how his critic is a “not-man” by caring about women, as a message to all his terrified followers that if they break away from this PUA/MRA cult and start treating women like people, they will also be treated like “not-men” or as queers.
peaches-
Yeah, that’s the thing about rapists. They either believe everyone is doing the same or that everyone would do the same if they weren’t scared of (the law, women, getting caught, etc…). It was also a theme with that story about the woman who wasn’t believed about their rape and then they caught a serial rapist and found her panties as the first of his “collection”. The perpetrator thought that his actions made him cleverer than most. That everyone else would have done what he did, but that only he was clever enough to get away with it successfully.
They act like they figured out some ultimate secret trick for phasing through the wall in the video game of acquiring sex rather than them being people who brutalize and traumatize actual living breathing humans and stealing bodily autonomy.
Like it’s not actually all that hard to betray someone’s trust and hurt someone.
“What, he didn’t agree with me and paint me as the hero of my own story?! Hit piece! What, he doesn’t think rape is acceptable? He must be gay and therefore not MAYUNLY enough to understand me!
Either way, I win, because people can see what a shitstain I am!”
The only response I can muster to this is just a tired sigh and a headshake. I can’t manage much more. I’m not surprised in the least, but in the worst kind of way. I just want Roosh and his ilk to just stop existing as they are, to be honest. Not for them to just stop existing, but for them to just realize that they don’t live in reality with the rest of us.
Another day ending in Y, I suppose.
So, Roosh’s reaction is basically the same as (fascist group) Britain First’s reaction when Yates’ did a programme about them. Funny that.
Uhm, not that this is the only take away from the above article, but people do realise that carpenters and many other blue collar workers are amongst the most discerning and qualified critics of many a cultural thing; ballet, the symphony, and opera not exclusive to my declaration.
Also, Roosh is an idiot. Even grade school trumpet players know that.
Roosh and Paul Elam could not be more at odds. AVFM has denounced Roosh on numerous ocassions.
I’m actually pretty relieved that, for as long as I’ve known of Roosh’s odious existence, I’ve never once heard his voice. I’m wont to keep it that way, though a morbidly curious part of me wants to see what he did with the length of rope Yates gave him.
Also. Hi all, daily lurker, first time commenter.
Dammit M, you stole my line!
This.
Ugh, hearing Roosh talk makes me sick… It reminds me of the horrible fact that so many men like him are out there, every day, in every country on this planet, raping women without ever being held accountable.
In moments like this I find it really hard to remain anti-death penalty.
Sounds like Roosh thinks that not raping women is a “questionable sexuality”.
Once again, I levy upon Roosh the worst curse I can think of–self-awareness. I hope it strikes him sooner rather than later.
Paradoxical Intention-
It is always interesting that first moment for these hate groups. They insulate themselves with so much toxicity and fellow travelers that when they are ready to go more public with their “totally alpha and rational views” they really do think the whole world will sing their praises and recognize their genius and empathize with their hatreds or negative actions.
And they are shocked and then angry when the outside world is just horrified and baffled by it all. That even when they spell it out about the evil Jewish conspiracy or the secret homo mountains, people will look at them with the sort of combination of horror and pity that Yates’s face took when Roosh was trying to bond over the totally man experience of raping someone.
And so more conspiracy theories are grabbed onto to justify why their brilliance isn’t accepted and everyone else with the same facts isn’t seeing how the people they hate aren’t secret lizard people. Oh, feminists must be scaring people from telling the truth, Anita and Zoe must have vast networks of former sexual partners who are bribed to think of their manlogic as hate, or another hated group is playing ally.
All to hold onto this self-serving worldview, to avoid taking responsibility for one’s life. Roosh, so desperate to be told that everyone else is a rapist like him that he reveals himself this thoroughly on BBC…
And the sad thing is that being a PUA, he probably is used to everyone else around him being a rapist. Everyone else also having the “victimized experience” of raping a woman who could not consent or ignoring “noes” because that’s really all PUA teaches.
And that’s why so few of the patrons of that talk wanted their faces to be filmed*. Because they know they’re rapists who listen to other rapists.
*I know it is a small thing with everything else horrible and creepy Roosh said in that documentary, but the moment where he’s showing off how he put the sign about blurring faces in video in the bedroom is such an ugly abuser trick. Like, starting the woman off already a little scared that she’s going to be filmed without her consent, before he even starts with anything else. It becomes really obvious that his shtick is all about creating discomfort and fear in his target than anything else.
**Also it’s so sad and pathetic how much these assholes are such crybabies. He’s so determined to sell being yelled at and having drinks thrown on him as some terrifying assault and to discount the actual physical harm he perpetrates on women and encourages other to perpetrate on women. And it’s because he’s a privileged baby who has never really had to experience anything worse than being shot down at a bar. To him, that really was the worst thing that could happen to anyone because it was the worst that happened to him and he’s just too self-centered and deliberately ignorant to realize that it just makes him look petulant and pathetic***
***Also, I know this comment is way too tl;dr, but after watching the whole thing, it’s impressive how he’s not just a terrible man or has terrible “game”. He also is terrible at manipulation. He thinks he can just charm and manipulate Yates as easily as he threatens and pressures women into not pressing charges, but he’s got no personality. He’s just a dull, bigoted, ignorant rapist with a victim complex and a terrible sense of “humor”.
kale-
It is always interesting how heteronormative dude culture condemns itself by its own words.
This is just proof a patriarchy exists, the MRA are only called “men’s rights activists” because they see their privilege (to oppress women and anybody not fitting the patriarchal bs) as a right, if they really cared about equality and men’s issues they would be feminists because feminists are the ones treating them like adult human beings (responsibility for their own attitudes and behavior along with it).
GQfem:
but – but – but treating men as adult human beings is MISANDRY!!!!eleventyeleven
…And? Paul Elam and AVFM weren’t brought up in this article. Plus they’re still awful even if they’re not awful in the same way as Roosh.
Oh good. WoodyStyne has wafted into this thread too.
Yes they’re totally at odds. So at odds that AVFM posted an interview that basically licked his nutsack.
http://www.donotlink.com/framed?641433
Here’s Paul Elam defending the post
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/02/18/criticized-for-posting-a-puffball-interview-with-pua-dirtbag-roosh-v-paul-elam-reassures-readers-he-knows-how-to-get-his-dick-wet/
so much tedium and self-absorption.