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
Echoing what brooked said, but also: There is such a thing as professional expertise. On the matter of suicide, for example, groups like SAVE have full-time professionals studying the matter. They have access to much more information and many more personal experiences than you or I or Bane666, and can speak with far more authority because of this.
If in doubt, ask someone whose job requires them to know about it. If that person has written a website or a book, read that book. Information is out there and it’s free.
I know I’m late to this, but I just watch the video on iplayer and wanted to read the comments on it.
Nothing much to add, really, other than the point made about Roosh having the option of paying for sex. I think a lot of the point of PUAs is that they avoid paying.
Having tried a few dating sites in recent years, it seems very common. The men seem to think all the women are out to get free drinks/meals, and refuse to go on dates because of it. I actually managed one date where we agreed to go out and I asked if it was for dinner. He said ‘yes’, but when I arrived he said he’d eaten already. I hadn’t eaten all day, so I ordered myself something. It was a little awkward! Most guys simply invited themselves over to my house and refused to consider going anywhere that might cost money. Most of them also wanted to discuss favourite sex positions etc., which I eventually realised was their shorthand for ‘when we meet up we’re gonna have sex’. I’d never agree to have sex with someone I’ve never met.
It seems like they’re just after quick, easy, free sex and don’t even want to spend time/money on themselves going out to meet women. Maybe if they proposition hundreds of women like this they eventually get what they’re after but it never seems to occur to them that spending time getting to know someone is ultimately more likely to succeed. I guess this comes from seeing women as ‘warm, moist, cavity holes’, not as people. Or they just hate women. I wonder if any of them wish they could just turn their libidos off.
It’s strange that most male animals only pursue females when they’re in season. Maybe they get a testosterone surge or something from the pheromones? Although I recently read that testosterone isn’t responsible for sex drive as was always believed previously.
I’m so desperate for the women in these stories come forward, the stories where he admits to raping them in his own words in print. How can you defend against a rape charge when you’ve publicly admitted raping someone? I suppose he could argue that she wasn’t the girl in the story, but a printed confession alongside reams of confessions about other assaults would go a long way towards putting this fucknut away.
I am having trouble understanding why certain guys feel that they need physical contact with women to make them feel whole. When it comes to women we say ‘you don’t need no man’ so to speak so why does the manosphere prefer pushing men to be more confident if they have sexual physical contact with a woman? Can’t they be strong, confident, independent men who don’t have this dependency on female sexuality? Can’t say Roosh V is doing much for masculinity but as a comfortable man who isn’t a slave to his private parts and is okay wearing make-up and having long hair, I don’t think he’ll want to hear my judgement. Not man enough. Not a feminist either but he is not looking out for men to feel better about themselves, not looking to fight for equality because not everything is kind to men (mental health stigma, father’s rights, stigma of men being bullied by women). Just exploiting the insecure.
@Ash — Without getting too psychoanalytical, I’d argue that it’s about feeling like they can control and own women. When women argue empowerment by saying they don’t need a man, often what they’re expressing is that they don’t need a man’s help, they don’t need to feel that someone is “taking care” of them, because as adults they can take care of themselves.
The flip side of this is men arguing that they *do* need to care for and control a woman. Which is really the whole thought process behind the game — how can you *make* a woman go home with you, like you, talk to you, etc. For example, negging is straight-forward manipulation.
But there are guys that think along the lines of your argument. They’re called MGTOWs, but a lot of the MGTOW stuff out there is still all about calling women bitches and whores, so who knows.
@Bob — the segment of his book that Reggie read out stated that while in the United States having sex with a woman who was inebriated would be considered rape, in the country he was currently in he was legally in the right. So even if the woman came forward, it seems her own country’s laws wouldn’t protect her. As for the women who repeatedly said no…
I mean, the other issue here is whether or not you believe that Roosh has genuinely slept with all of these women. Given that he looks, acts, and sounds physically repulsive, I have such a hard time buying it.