By David Futrelle
It’s not uncommon for aging libertines to have second thoughts about the casual hedonism of their youth. Neil Strauss followed up his 2005 book The Game, which brought the “pickup artist” subculture into the mainstream, with The Truth, in which he confessed that his celebrity as one of the world’s most famous PUAs had in many ways ruined his life and the lives of those around him. (Still, he didn’t return the royalties from his earlier book, as far as I know, or take it out of print.)
Roosh V, who had his own brief time in the spotlight as the world’s most hated PUA, has taken a similar turn in recent years, albeit with much less self-awareness than Strauss. Roosh once made his living with a series of self-published books offering country-specific tips on how to effectively manipulate women in Europe and South America into bed without getting arrested on rape charges.
Now he’s become a far-right moral scold, railing against the sexual “degeneracy” he once so enthusiastically promoted. (He still sells his Bang books though, and recently came out with his latest tome, imaginatively titled Game.)
In a recent post on his self-titled blog — which remains active even though he abandoned his more popular Return of Kings site a few months back — Roosh takes aim at contraception, blaming it not only for helping evil elites depopulate the world but also for destroying love itself, at least for the women using it.
Roosh begins by assailing contraception as a tool of conspirotorial elites bent on reducing the world population — something he thinks they also do by promoting such other alleged social evils as “homosexuality … feminism, transgenderism, and divorce laws.”
But he thinks that the effect contraception has on the female psyche is much more insidious.
Contraceptives allow virtually risk-free casual sex, an act that used to be the most intimate of intimates, reserved for only a husband or wife. Sex used to be a huge practical and emotional decision, on the level of buying a house.
Seriously! Just filling out the forms for a sex mortgage used to take hours!
Now, it is more like choosing which restaurant to eat dinner at, but even the latter takes more care as you check reviews and ask around to assess the restaurant’s quality. Now, men are ready and able to put their penises in any woman, no reviews needed, and it’s even worse that women have become just like men in having sex for the most fleeting of reasons based on their primal desires.
If the idea of women being able to have sex when and with whom they desire does not immediately cause you to run screaming in horror, Roosh helpfully spells out the terrible and irreversible damage that casual consensual sex can do to a woman’s “bonding glue.”
Her what, you may ask? Let’s let Roosh explain:
Before you think I’ve turned into some kind of sex puritan, it’s important to understand that we are all born with a set amount of bonding glue. This glue is required to connect with a member of the opposite sex for love that is practical or romantic for the goal of creating a family. Each episode of casual sex, which contraceptives enable (along with other medical advances like antibiotics that treat sexually transmitted diseases), permanently reduces the amount of bonding glue you possess.
Still unconvinced? Roosh tries another metaphor:
The best way to explain how bonding glue works is to use the old analogy of adhesive tape on a box. When you want to ship a package, you seal it with tape. The recipient can open the package by peeling off the tape, which will retain some stickiness, perhaps enough to ship a new package, but far less than when it was fresh off the roll. If you keep applying and removing tape from a box, it will soon not stick at all. Each time you have casual sex, you’re applying tape to a box and then removing it.
Uh, dude, I think you might be doing sex wrong. Are you sure you’re watching porn and not YouTube unboxing videos?
In any case, the bonding glue on the sex packing tape is a very particular sort of glue, in that it’s apparently much longer-lasting when a man handles it, at least in Roosh’s view.
Women lose far more bonding glue than men with each sexual encounter. I believe that most women will only retain enough adhesive to sleep with between one to five men in their lives before irreparably damaging their ability to love any man. This is why contraceptives are disproportionately targeted to them—if you can get women to have casual sex with only a handful of men, your depopulation agenda will be a guaranteed success.
Men, meanwhile, can pack and unpack their sex box with hardly any effect on their sex packing tape, “barely los[ing] any bonding glue with a casual sex encounter. “
Indeed, Roosh is convinced that the 15 years he spent roaming the world in search of women to “bang” had virtually no lasting effect on his ability to love because, he explains,
I was self-aware enough to slow down fornication when I felt it was beginning to damage me, with sufficient bonding glue remaining. I’ve also met many men with notch counts higher than mine who can still bond with women in a reasonably healthy way (as much as modernity allows), but a woman with the same notch count is likely to develop a severe mental illness. Any child she makes will be accidental and raised in a broken home. …
[T]he best chance of creating a successful family is when the woman had all of her bonding glue intact.
I should note that at no point in his post does Roosh bother to provide any actual scientific evidence that might even remotely back up his claims, nor does he even explain what, biologically, he means by “bonding glue.” Presumably he’s referring to oxytocin, a hormone involved in bonding and childbirth. But who knows? Maybe he really thinks cis women are full of glue and that some of this glue gets stuck on each new condom-clad penis that enters them.
In any case, Roosh is convinced that the solution to this glue-depletion problem is for men to raw dog it every time they have sex.
The healthiest approach to sex for men is sleeping with women without the option to use contraceptives or other forms of modern medical assistance. If you couldn’t use a condom, she couldn’t use birth control, there was no option of abortion, and there were no antibiotics to treat the gonorrhea she could give you, would you still sleep with her? If the answer is no then you shouldn’t sleep with her, because you will lose bonding glue for a purely hedonistic experience.
Still, he insists, this is much more of an issue for women and their bonding glue than for men and their glue sticks.
It’s more important for a woman to imagine this scenario than a man, because she can only make a few mistakes before forever saying goodbye to the possibility of love and family. I went on an international bang tour for fifteen years and found love in a hopeless place, but can you imagine a girl doing that? The only thing she’ll find is a bottle of wine to chase down her antidepressant pills.
Dude, just because every woman you’ve ever had sex with felt like shit afterwards doesn’t mean that all straight-sex-having woman feel this way, whether they’ve had sex with one man, or five, or a hundred, over the course of their lives.
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He thinks he can bond with a woman?
I already think that. Because you have. But do go on:
Oh, right. That makes sense, thanks for clarif—
Gee, a lack of anxiety about an unplanned pregnancy “destroys” love? Um kay, I guess making deeper connections to a guy has nothing to do with it? Nothing can happen unless you get preggo from the deal? This dude’s comical.
Q: What’s brown and sticky?
A: Roosh’s sex tape
The bonding glue is called oxytocin, and no, we’re not born with a set amount of it that diminishes with each sexual encounter. It also has fuck all to do with contraception. But thanks for playing, Roosh!
@Mish: Confused Bill Bailey (I guess “confused” is actually redundant) makes me all warm and happy.
R-V. is impressive in his own way. Impressively stupid, of course.
@Moggie – Sex tape. 😛
This just gives me the bizarre image of a woman covered in something like fly tape, trying to get men to stick to her.
And I thought Roosh was a bread scientist, not a glue scientist.
@(A)utonomous Escapist
I just love him so much. “warm and happy” is exactly right 🙂
I first encountered him in Black Books. Anyone who can out-funny Dylan Moran is pretty special.
I can’t believe it’s 2019 and the idea that women get “damaged” by sex still exists – and the hypocrisy of men who think this while sleeping around themselves. They want to sleep around and “damage” women – and then complain about all the damaged women! Women can’t win – if we don’t have casual sex men complain we’re “withholding” sex and trying to trick men into marriage using sex. If we do have casual sex we’re damaged and unmarriageable. Somehow men want to sleep around as much as possible but want women to stay chaste and virginal until marriage – but guess what geniuses the math doesn’t work.
Roosh is an idiot – “bonding glue” is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
I’ve noticed that nearly all misogynies include “women should have sex with the fewest possible partners before sleeping with [the man making the statement/members of his in-group].”
Its almost as if misogynists suspect they’re inadequate as lovers…
After sex, am I supposed to rip my bondage tape off the package quickly, or slowwwwly peel it off?
Oh sorry…bondING tape. My bad.
Also, should I be shipping my sex via UPS or Fed Ex?
So no woman Roosh ever had sex with felt like bonding with him? That’s not surprising.
This sounds like the same crap they shovel in “abstinence only” classes.
Unlike Rooshes I-IV, the Roosh V has never known love.
@victorious
You are correct. I was given the glue argument in my fucking 30s. It is popular rhetoric in christian circles.
I got told about my glue going bad bc my husband died and i was lonely and needed sexual comfort. How dare i hookup with compassionate friends, my gluuuue! No man will ever want me now.
@cornychips
Sounds like those particular Christians would rather shame you than help you.
I hope you’re doing better now than you were then.
Obviously, women lose more bonding glue with each sexual encounter because they use it to produce the “copulins” that zombify their male partners.
It’s all connected!
What an idiot.
I pray to God he never marries or reproduces.
Once more we see Roosh playing footsie with far right ideas. But if those kind of folks ever took power Roosh would be treated as a foreign deviant and suppressed.
His talking about promoting families doesn’t ring true either. I hope there isn’t one, but if some woman turns up with a Roosh Jr. we can all guess how he’ll react. He’ll whip out the usual manosphere talking points about how the mom is trying to exploit him, that it’s not his fault she got pregnant, so she shouldn’t expect anything from him etc.
Ah the sex = tape analogy. A classic from abstinence only sex education!
This isn’t even an original concept.
I do wonder where this stuff comes from sometimes. Since there is no scientific basis for any of this, I feel like there has to be some motivated reasoning in play here.
From that perspective, it’s clear why Roosh doesn’t think that men lose much “glue”: he has a history of bragging about having a lot of casual sex, but he doesn’t want to present himself as an irredeemably broken human being, and he has also presented himself as some kind of exemplar of effective manliness. Given all that, “casual sex doesn’t hurt man (too much)” is a predictable conclusion.
The theory about women losing “glue” is less clear. Is this just something he has heard from the manosphere enough that he thinks it’s true? Or is this motivated by him trying to explain his personal life? Is he trying to understand why mature women don’t want to have a long-term relationship with him? Is he trying to rationalize a preference for younger/less-experienced women by labelling all other women as damaged goods? Is he trying to justify the way he treated women in the past by painting everyone he slept with as damaged sluts, so that he doesn’t have to feel guilty about what he did? All of the above?
I mean, his ideas are stupid and from that perspective it doesn’t really matter, but I still wonder where this psychology comes from.
It ideals like this that were the reason why I was so ashamed after my rape. Felt like my value had been taken from me. There is only one person that makes my blood boil worse then Roosh and it’s Peterson. The only one that makes my blood boil more then Peterson is trump.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants,
Send it Fed-UPS.
@calmdown (& cornychips & Victorious Parasol) – Huh. And I thought it couldn’t get worse than the sex = wrapped gift comparison. See, you need to save yourself for marriage, because your husband won’t want a gift that’s already been unwrapped!
Line of thought about that one… So not only is sex before marriage bad, but recycling is bad? (Most of my non-underwear clothing is bought secondhand. Do I get mad that the clothes lost their being-worn virginity on other people? I somehow do not.)
So, Roosh has gone from “bread scientist” (probably very mediocre white bread, at that) to bad woman-juices scientist? I’m guessing that he never did well at his day job when he was a chemist, either.
Also: If he really wants to know what fucks up our ability to bond with men, he should look in the mirror. And at his loyal fan base, too, while he’s at it. Those guys are the reason women have a shit-ton of trust issues. They’re exactly the type to try to use pregnancy (unwanted, of course) to “bond” an unwilling woman to them.
THEY are why they can’t get laid, in other words.
And the saddest part is, they will never develop the self-awareness they need to realize that if everyone else is somehow against them, it’s not everyone else who’s the problem…it’s THEM. The one common denominator in all the fuckery.