Dean Esmay is really kind of amazing. The Men’s Rights Twitter “activist” and former A Voice for Men Number Two Boy has finally managed to position himself on the right side of an issue — the issue being whether or not the repugnant Roosh V is repugnant. But many of his reasons for hating Roosh are frankly pretty bizarre.
Last week, you may recall, Esmay penned an impassioned attack on those media outlets that has misidentified Roosh as an MRA. “[E]very MRA I know,” Esmay insisted,
views him as a crackpot, a loon, a con artist and snake oil salesman, and a self-serving liar and weasel who likely lies about most of the rapeantasy sexcapade books he sells … .
Apparently, Esmay had somehow managed to forget that a year ago AVFM ran a puffball interview with Roosh, by a friend of Esmay’s, describing the wayward PUA as
a layered, tempered and earnest guy, who truly wants to help other men in their most basic and primal of life goals; a deep thinker, a powerful communicator and, … a gracious host.
Best to forget about that. AVFM has always been at war with Roosh.
Anyhoo, so Esmay has now penned a second attack on Roosh, this one even wilder and more Esmay-esque than the first, setting forth in some detail his case against the widely hated PUA asshat.
You might think that there would be no way even someone as addled as Esmay could screw up a critique of Roosh. But somehow he manages to, attacking Roosh for an assortment of oddball reasons and ratcheting up his often ridiculous rhetoric to eleven.
Esmay starts off by informing his fellow men that Roosh “wants you dead even more than feminists do.”
Er, who wants what now?
Whether it’s chemical or ideological poison they want to sell you, following RooshV and Return of Kings advice can land you in jail or dead. If you’re lucky, you may just wind up with multiple Sexually Transmitted Diseases, a dick that no longer works, womanly breasts, and a lonely broken life.
Womanly breasts, you say?
Even worse than the womanly man boobs, Esmay warns, are the womanly women that Roosh will bring into your life.
[F]ollowing Rooshly advice might get you jailed for false (or real!!) allegations. It may also get you physically attacked by those damaged, dysfunctional women they stupidly advise you to share a bed with.
After all, psychotic women are the only type you’ll ever meet if you follow the “NeoMasculinity” path … .
Esmay claims he’s got proof of the allegedly life-ruining actions of these allegedly “damaged, dysfunctional women.”
People should know that I have spoken to unfortunate Return of Kings fans who told me their secret stories of being beaten and abused and even jailed by the type of women the RoK cultists encouraged them to seek out. …
Indeed, Esmay suggests, some of these men “were stabbed in their sleep, set on fire, or arrested after a false accusation.”
Set on fire?
Sadly, Esmay continues, some of these poor fellows have also suffered from the terrible indignity of getting arrested for rapes they actually did commit after “they stupidly got drunk and followed Roosh’s advice and raped a drunk girl who then legitimately had them jailed.”
Esmay of course provides no actual evidence of any Roosh followers getting stabbed or set on fire or jailed for rape. I don’t know about the set-on-fire stuff, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Roosh fans were raping women on a regular basis. But we have no evidence here beyond Esmay’s word. And that, frankly, is not worth much.
Esmay wants us to feel bad for these poor fellows — apparently, even the men he considers to be Roosh-inspired rapists.
All I can do when talking to the poor fools who took Return of Kings/RooshV advice was shake my head and give them the same advice I give to so many other abused men facing physical and emotional scars and legal trouble.
I used to try to refrain from bluntly telling these poor unfortunates that they were fools to follow the bizarre Return Of Kings cult, that they got suckered and swindled by a cult leader named Roosh, but it seemed rude …
But I was wrong. Someone needs to tell them. So listen up, you fools in the RooshV circle: there is nothing but misery and death down the Return of Kings path.
Wait, so now Roosh’s fans are dying as well?
Esmay then explains at length why he and other AVFMers somehow never managed to get around to pointing out that Roosh was the terrible person he really is. As Esmay explains it, they were just being “trying to be charitable” towards someone who dislikes feminism as much as they do.
Only now, apparently, has Esmay realized that maybe he shouldn’t have been quite so nice to a dude he now sees as a “sociopath” and a “serial rapist.”
“So here’s the truth,” Esmay writes.
In many of his books, you find what are undeniably confessions of Roosh raping multiple women. In fact, the words “serial rapist” are not too harsh to describe Roosh, at least if his own published, public writings are to be believed.
Esmay, repeating claims he made in an earlier post, also describes longtime Roosh pal Matt Forney as “a confessed rapist by any sane standard.”
None of these apparent confessions of Roosh’s are particularly new; I started writing about them in 2013, and I was hardly the first to notice them. So why is Esmay, so long silent on all of this, speaking up now?
[R]ecent evidence has come to my attention on the matter to leave me convinced that there’s no reason to believe any of this is fiction, that all of it is real. You’ll probably be reading about it in the coming weeks if certain things I hope come to pass, including my hope that a few of their victims will step forward and we can get some of these sleazebags put away by legal authorities.
If Esmay actually has evidence of any of this, and can get it into the hands of the appropriate authorities, more power to him. But Esmay’s track record of providing evidence for his claims is not exactly great.
After this relatively brief discussion of Roosh’s alleged rapes, Esmay devotes most of the rest of his sprawling screed to arguing that
following Return of Kings advice isn’t just a good way to put lethal women in your life. It’s a good way to put lethal chemicals in your body.
Esmay seems particularly obsessed with a couple possible side effects of these “lethal chemicals.” I think you’ll see what I mean.
[I]f you want your dick to shrink and your mantits to grow to a shapely C-cup, and to become an opiate addict who lands in a hospital from liver failure and intestinal rupture from bowel obstruction, keep following the Return of Kings advice on “nutritional” supplements and “testosterone.” …
Seriously man, did you want your dick to fall off and massive tits to sprout on your chest while you lie in a hospital bed shuddering from withdrawal symptoms and liver and kidney damage that you may never be able to undo while your dick rots off? …
Return of Kings-recommended supplements are frequently sold in forms where purity is in no way guaranteed and thus may also contain additional chemicals they don’t even have to tell you about. Have fun with that while both your biceps and your juicy new tits get bigger.
So far, it’s a tie: four mentions of man tits and four mentions of dicks getting smaller and/or falling off.
Esmay then remembers that whole rape thing:
I am not accusing Roosh of “advocating” rape. I am accusing him of confessing to rape, rape that is rape by any sane person’s standards.
And then it’s back to the tits and the dicks:
I am accusing him of selling chemical poisons that’ll help you grow tits, have a smaller dick, and die of liver failure while you shudder from opiate withdrawals and the AIDS symptoms you got from the crazy bitch who stuck a knife in your ribs before she falsely accused you of rape.
Final score: five pairs of man tits, five smaller/detachable penises, three liver failures, two stabbings by “crazy bitches,” and one partridge in a pear tree (that’s been set on fire).
Only Dean Esmay could take a perfectly legitimate critique of Roosh and Esmay it up this badly.
He only feels bad for guys who may been jailed for raping women? Smh.
Wow. Here I wasted all this time going to see a therapist and having her write me a letter saying that I was trans and that I could start hormone replacement therapy. Who knew that I could have actually grown tits the whole time if I had just taken Roosh V’s testosterone supplements!
@welp
Laughing Witch seems to be laying low. She doesn’t make videos anymore but i’ve seen her post comments on Youtube.
I think I remember learning in school that Venus was associated with copper because she was a vain goddess, and hand mirrors were generally made of polished copper back then. And that the symbol for Venus (which later became the symbol for female) represented a hand mirror.
How could following Roosh’s advice put you at greater risk of false allegations? Shouldn’t they, by nature of being false, be a risk regardless of what you do? (Unless Dean is just talking about “being in the presence of women at all ever”)
This seems like a really strong tell that MRAs know that the “false” allegations they harp over are in fact real allegations; they just don’t want the circumstances of those allegations to apply to them.
Watching Esmay attack Roosh is rather like watching a sack of dog poop come to life and attack a bag of garbage.
Imaginary Petal – I hope your head feels better!
dlouwe – My hypothesis on this is that Deano is straight-up jealous of all the attention Rooshie is getting. I think that Deano is also saying (most likely without meaning to) that he believes Rooshie’s pickup advice works because more women = more accusations.
Mars is definitely burnt sienna in color. (100% of interior desecrators agree!)
Esmay sure is obsessed with dicks falling off (after rotting or otherwise). And boobs. Maybe he’s wishing someone would let him touch theirs, I don’t know, but its’ weird and icky.
@ hambeast
I think there’s definitely something in your hypothesis. We’ve seen Roosh have a dig at Milo out of jealously for the greater exposure he’s been getting; and now this.
It does seem a craving for attention is at least as important to these chaps as all the hate.
This is possibly(?) the kind of thing Esmay might be distantly referring to:
http://www.vice.com/read/roosh-mens-rights-activists-white-men-false-oppression
The bit about George Sodini’s failed skills after having paid so much money following the PUA handbooks.
I’m……not even touching any of that. Wow.
On an unrelated note, I’ve seen this here and there on my FB feed, and it consistently makes me roll my eyes. ?oh=6df657186f1a72d431a99df105427201&oe=572D628D
@Welp,
Laughing Witch is fine, she’s just keeping a low profile these days. Her business pulled through despite the efforts of some of Thunderf00t’s followers, but she still gets fake bad reviews.
Re Esmay,
I’m wondering if this is a clumsy attempt to attack AVFM’s main rival Return of Kings while they’re weak?
Umm.. I am confused. Is RoK now suggesting all men become body builders? Some body builders do take steroids and painkillers to get bigger faster. That is the only way I can make that part of Esmay’s rant make sense.
Then again, maybe trying to make it make sense is my first problem.
Well, good on Dean at least for calling Roosh out as a rapist and denouncing steroids? I think?
I have no idea how to feel about this. Parts of this are good, but most of this is bad.
Look, there’s lots of things I’m not above doing for money. But I won’t do that.
Sorry no one got to this sooner, your first comment on the site goes into moderation automagically, so we most likely didn’t see it. Apologies.
She does comment here on occasion, but we haven’t heard from her in a while either. I think she’s just laying low for a good while, and it’s most likely for the best.
I’m glad to hear her business pulled through though. No one deserves to have their livelihoods taken away simply because you work for someone an asshole like TF hates.
Oh, bloody hell. I think the link hates me. Trying again. http://i.imgur.com/B2FlvVP.jpg
ETA: OK, now that it works, this is the image that’s popped up on my FB and used as some ‘feminists wouldn’t cry for her to be charged!’ nonsense.
@Paradoxical
What happened to Laughing Witch?
@Dreadnought:
She and a few other feminist YouTubers got together and sent letters to Thunderf00t’s employers, detailing the kind of person he was online in an attempt to get him fired from his university job (and we all agreed here that that was going too far on her part, and she did apologize for her actions). He stated that he and his co-workers had a little chuckle over it, then he published her and her husband’s business information and their Yelp page on a video in a fit of pettiness and said something about how people can “post their opinions online”, and then his followers went on a massive false-review spree, leading to their business almost being shut down.
Laughing Witch apologized for her actions (actions that didn’t even affect him negatively in the slightest) and shut down her YT channel, but TF said it wasn’t good enough because she wasn’t begging for his forgiveness more or less so he wasn’t going to call off his fans, so she did eventually bring the channel back up and went to the rest of the internet for assistance.
Of course, TF’s followers like to phrase this as “Karma!” (And TF went so far as to title his “retribution” video “Karma is a BITCH!”), and we had several of them attempt to come in here and try to say that he was in the right to do what he did, and what he did wasn’t incitement to harassment because he didn’t “explicitly say” his followers should harass them, even though he could have gone to the police about the letters in the first place, and he knows the kind of people who subscribe to him, and he knows how to rile them up.
@Dreadnought
Paradoxical’s referring to this
Dammit
I love this part. Yeah, Dean, it’s not like you’ve allowed decency and courtesy stop you from sending threatening and abusive messages to people in the past, so what was stopping you from doing that to Roosh?
Don’t you just love these assholes? Once shit hits the fan they all start backstabbing each other.
@ paradoxy
Whilst I have every sympathy with Laughing Witch (not just cos I like witches) I’m not sure this is a point to put too much emphasis on. I know there’s the intent isn’t magic thing, but the flip side is that lack of consequences doesn’t negate intent. There’s a danger of establishing a precedent that, say, the failure of an MRA attempt to silence a woman who dares stick her head above the parapet can be dismissed or mitigated because it didn’t work. I don’t want to see peoples resilience being used against them. I’d hate a scenario where trolls can turn round after a campaign of harassment and say “why the fuss; she’s still in business?”
@Paradoxical
Did this occur after Mason got kicked off Free Thought Blogs or was this the cause of his dismissal?
So…RoK will leave you vulnerable to becoming a feminized stab victim suffering from organ failure because of the diseased women you’ll shack up with. Unlike AVFM, which teaches you that all women are hysterical sociopaths who’ll destroy your life. Pots and kettles sure do have lots to say about each other’s color.
Loved the 1984 reference, Futrelle. I was also reminded of, “We will never recognize Tanganyika!”
http://statici.behindthevoiceactors.com/behindthevoiceactors/_img/chars/char_41563.jpg
@Becca
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but the obsessive, repetitive focus on “womanly breasts” and either the shrinking or “failing” dicks seems in part transphobic. Because, of course, the scariest consequence of following advice at Return of Kings is that you’ll become feminized or emasculated. Not, you know, becoming a rapist facing “real!!” allegations of rape, the confused logic, projected self-loathing, or dedicating your life to hating all women and to hating men who aren’t exactly like you.
Esmay seems to be obsessed with things that will “get men killed.” Not so long ago, he chided MGTOWers for saying that men going their own way should do just that. Not so! according to Professor Esmay. And advocating such a thing could GET MEN KILLED!!! ‘Cause if a MGTOWer divorced his wife, then he might not get visitation and then he’d kill himself.
@Cerulean: OMFG.
I’ve spoken of this before, but I’ve had pretty much that exact thing happen to me (but next to a parking garage, after a college football championship, with no one around).
Was it objectifying and discomforting? Sure. Was I scared for my personal safety? Absolutely not. Was I scared that the girls who did it would ignore a guy’s “no” and proceed to rape him? Um, not really, no.
Men just don’t have to deal with the same level of fear that their right to control sexual access to their bodies will be ignored. I’m sorry if that irritates MRAs, but it’s reality.
Mr. Frank Meza is also being disingenuous for another reason, I feel: of the people who take the attitude, “c’mon, you know he liked it” — how many are feminists?
Okay, I just looked up kratom. It’s illegal because it’s used as a no-show-on-drug-tests substitute for opiates like morphine and heroin (ironic, as it used to be used to help addicts come down from the awful withdrawal symptoms of opiates!), and because it has some nasty toxic side effects of its very own. Nothing in there about steroid-like effects, though, much less gynecomastia (“womanly breasts”, as Deano puts it). I’m going to assume he means that the juicebros use it in conjunction with anabolic steroids to work out through the otherwise very useful pain which tells you to stop what the hell you’re doing, ditch the barbell, and go take a rest.
If he could only get his medical info straight, that would be a good start on his journey to rationality. But no, he just has to stir a whole ‘nother cauldron of hysteria with it. He’s worse than useless as a source of information.
And yeah, he’s probably also jealous of all the attention Roosh got, even though it’s practically all negative and filled with revulsion.