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.
We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
The “elites” (the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the UN, (((whoever))) ) are trying to depopulate the world by allowing women bodily autonomy. America, God’s chosen country, is valiantly fighting the (((elites))) by forbidding abortion &c.
@ Karen
As far as I remember, sexually enslaving a man through ‘full involvement with orgasm’ was USP of the Honored Matres faction, something the Bene Gesseret didn’t approve of (never fully understood why as they could be pretty manipulative themselves.) Don’t think it has application IRL beyond MGTOW/Incel nonsense about ‘zombifying vaginal goo.’ The last time I remember having an ‘eyes roll back in the head’ climax myself was in the 1980’s, and I certainly didn’t turn into the willing slave of the woman in whose company it happened.
I can’t believe no one has brought up the rose petal analogy, speaking of tired puritanical sex analogies. It’s my favourite self own because the kids are instructed to feel the petals and rub the leaves, and generally manhandle the poor flower. After it’s passed around it is predictably battered.
They think the lesson is “the more people touch you, the more broken you are.”
But damn if the lesson isn’t “if we didn’t teach people to be abusive, more people could enjoy the beauty in the world.”
@Nequam
I have never seen that movie, and given the context in which you’ve brought it up, I don’t think I will! But I am sorry for bringing something unpleasant to mind.
If it makes you feel at all better, I will have to reckon with the fact that it appears that I really am the only one who had that thought. Now I have to think about what that says about me.
@Weirdwood
When he says “depopulate” he is only thinking of white people. White peole aren’t having enough babies to match the population growth of “those people.”
@Viscaria: oh, it’s not a movie, it’s a set of short stories collected as a novel. It’s online, interestingly enough, should you care/dare to read it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
I normally like what I’ve read of Stross (admittedly, older works with ties to the Cthulhu Mythos) but the superglue scene in this book– and in the first of the stories, yet– would’ve made me throw the book across the room were I not reading it online.
How about the women who, after dating assholes, finally find a man with a conscience — and who, knowing what men can be like (I’m looking at you, Roosh), are thrilled with their new guy?
Yeah, I speak from experience.
Okay, so having too much casual sex uses up your “bonding glue”… which might just explain why former Casanovas tend to be miserable, friendless bastards[1] in later life. Presumably they’re feeling a certain amount of regret for the whole business of having done so.
Oh, hang on, of course men are able to treat sex with a more cavalier attitude and “retain” some of their “bonding glue” until later. By which point every woman in their orbit already knows they’re a wombat[2] and treats this sort of toxic waste with appropriate due care and attention. Including appropriate exclusion zones.
(Also, the reason most contraceptives are offered to women is because while there are a few male contraceptive options out there, most of the time the blokes don’t seem to want to be using them. Oh, and the work on a male hormonal contraceptive got stopped because of side effects. As in “any”. Which, after having had a look at the average list of side-effects for the contraceptive pill, which includes possible death even in the commercially available formulas, seems a bit of an … interesting reaction).
[1] In the Australian sense of the term – “random male person” (as per the classic query: “Right, which of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?”)
[2] Eats roots[3] and leaves
[3] Again, Australian usage. Let’s just say it’s Aussie slang which shares a similar meaning to “shags” in the UK (and no, that doesn’t mean it refers to cormorants).
@Megpie71
That’s not quite a fair statement to make. According to an NHS write up of the trial, the proposed method had several shortcomings, some of which were:
Inconvenient method of administration
High rates of side effects
Inconsistent results
Worse failure rates than condoms
Gah, I made a mistake in the previous post. The actual failure rate for condoms is 18%, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Female hormonal methods combined have a 6% failure rate, which is still lower than the trial’s hormone injection regimen. Mea culpa.
Love and connecting with someone being an psychological thing and limited only by your own individual hangups? No no no, that can’t be. The real answer is magic glue! Time for this guy to retire from interacting with the rest of humanity.
@Ariblester
Women get bad side effects, including blood clots (which could kill you) from hormonal birth control but they didn’t stop those trials and instead pushed them out to the market. So the side effect issues are only a serious problem for male hormonal birth control and not for female.
Ick. Sorry Roosh, there isn’t molly in the world to artificially make you seem loveable.
I may be jaded from an abundance of experience, but I see that as a good thing. Chemically induced infatuation shouldn’t be confused with love of substance. The way I see it, there’s no point in being irrationally attached to someone who hasn’t earned love and trust through demonstrated merit. Pragmatism and objectivity is what weeds out people who might be a great lay, but are not life partner material (or in Roosh’s case, neither)
I also beg to differ, contraceptives are great for building solid relationships. Unplanned pregnancies throw a monkeywrench into the honeymoon period, and parenting is an enormous hit on personal resources, including happiness.
That being said, I am having a bitch of a time obtaining a diaphragm and I am this close to losing my shit on a pharmacist.
@Ariblester
Following your link, I see this:
So 13%.
I’ve never been very happy with these sort of results; they say so little, and so much of what they don’t say is important. This has popped up in threads gone past, so I won’t rehash it all here.
Looking at their numbers though… condoms in 1995 were almost as unreliable as withdrawal is now? that sounds pretty surprising right there (and looking at the figures from their paper, for co-habiting people it appears that withdrawal was more reliable than condoms, if you can believe that). There’s so much not explained and glossed over, etc etc.
@Pie:
I suspect a lot of the high number for condoms stems from the gap between ‘reliability of properly-used condoms’ and ‘reliability of condoms as actually used by people in the field’. But as you say, there’s a lot not explained about how they came up with those numbers.
(Any reader of ‘Not Always Right’ knows that there is no way to make something so easy to use that nobody can screw it up. Word choice very much intended.)
Honestly, I also suspect that the condom numbers (and probably some of the others) would go down significantly if we actually had good sex education that includes proper education on how to use various contraception devices, rather than people finding out by word of mouth.
Joke’s on Rooshite, I won’t date any man that has less than 4.5 stars on Yelp, has at least 20 detailed reviews, and runs a clean asstablishment.
Even if BC for sperm-havers is less reliable than BC for egg-havers, I still think it’d overall be a good thing. It would be used as a supplement to existing BC, not a replacement. If both partners are using BC and a condom, the chance of unwanted pregnancy has got to pretty close to zero.
This is, again, not a fair statement to make. All drugs will have side effects. The question is how common these side effects are. The standard scale used by the NHS goes
According to the Patient Information Leaflet provided with a combined oral contraceptive pill, the incidences of venous blood clots in women taking combined oral contraceptives is 30-40 per 100,000. That’s considered “Very rare”. The other side effects listed go up to “Common” (up to 1 in 10 people affected), but not “Very common” (more than 1 in 10 people affected)
Meanwhile, the most reported side effects of the male injection regimen had an incidence of more than 1 in 10, which means that they are “Very common”.
It is tempting to take a story which goes “male birth control method has 92.5% success rate, but trial terminated due to side effects” and extrapolate that into men being scared of pain and suffering, but I don’t believe that the facts bear this out. 80% of the men in the trial still considered the method to be “acceptable” at the end of it. The decision to terminate the trial was entirely on the researchers.
At the risk of belaboring the point, here’s a 2016 article from Mosaic on the subject of male chemical contraception:
Why are we still waiting for the male pill?
I don’t think anyone is saying that though. More that the medical establishment and the culture at large is fine with women suffering side effects but not men. Because male bodies are more valued than female bodies. Because women are supposed to be the sexual gatekeepers, therefore it is women’s responsibility to prevent pregnancy. Because Eve took the apple and cursed womankind with suffering related to reproduction. A huge aspect of patriarchy is that for women, beauty and sex go hand in hand with pain.
@wwth
Fair point, and women’s suffering has indeed been constantly downplayed and minimized in medical practice.
I suppose that I took @megpie71’s original post as blaming the men involved in the trial for its termination, and not the researchers, and interpreted all subsequent comments in the same light, which is entirely my mistake*.
Apologies to all.
*and I probably should go back and have a good think about why I interpreted it as such.
Part of me thinks roosh is trying to get out there that he’s scared he hasn’t found someone yet and he’s getting older. All this talk about women saying goodbye to family (because women adopting or going through alternative methods to have a baby is bad to him I guess) sounds like a projection coming from him. Like he doesn’t want to say goodbye to that future despite him never really striving for it until now
But that’s karma for advocating for rape to legal and dehumanizing women to hundreds of listeners: to be alone and bitter
WHO THE FUCK is Roosh to talk about LOVE?!
injection site pain (23%)
So the problem was that the male “Pill” was LITERALLY a pain in the ass?
He’s not wrong about the bonding bit. Women release oxytocin during sex which creates a bond. The first time is the strongest. Once that bond is broken the subsequent times become easier to as well. After the fourth sexual partner women are no longer able to create a bond anymore. The body becomes accustomed to the the bond breaking so the oxytocin is no longer effective. Men bond through vasopressin which is released on orgasm unlike oxytocin in women which is released throughout. Unlike women, however, men are capable of creating bonds that only become stronger through more sex. If that bond is broken by whichever party the man can make another bond, Albeit it’ll probably take a bit longer. But the vasopressin is like repeatedly applying an adhesive.