Do Not Bang: Pickup Artist Roosh V embraces Jesus, bans talk of “fornication” from his web forums

By David Futrelle

A couple of months back, you may recall, the infamous pickup artist and ironic rape legalization proponent Roosh V announced that he had taken “the God pill,” embracing Jesus and Orthodox Christianity, after getting really, really high on mushrooms. (No, really.)

Turns out he was serious, and now he’s making efforts to bring his career, such as it is, in line with his new beliefs.

To some extent, he’s been preparing for this for years. He long ago gave up his quest for endless one-night stands and has instead been, at least theoretically, looking for a wife. Meanwhile, he had more or less abandoned pickup advice in favor of fulminating endlessly about the alleged cultural “decadence” of the Western world on his blog and on his now-shuttered site Return of Kings.

But now he’s actually stopped selling his “Bang” guidebooks, which many saw as little more than country-specific date=rape how-to manual.

And yesterday he took the radical — for him — step of banning talk of “fornication or pre-marital sexual activity” from his web forums, as well as all “pornographic or vulgar language.”

“Due to my recent turn to faith, my sense of morality is becoming based on the Bible,” he wrote in a forum post explaining the new rules.

I’ve stopped a lot of behaviors that I’ve used to do and am in the process of making other changes. I’ve also realized that the majority of my published materials and online platforms lead men into sin or enable them to partake in sin.

No, he hasn’t come to the realization that going ahead and “banging” a woman after she’s literally told you “no” thirty times is not what most people would consider consensual sex. He just thinks that if you do this without getting married first Jesus will be mad at you.

In any case, he’s decided to fight sin with two new rules for his forum, both of which will go into effect at the start of June.

1 .You can no longer discuss fornication or pre-marital sexual activity

Things you can discuss:

-Meeting women with the intention of entering a relationship with them
-Attracting women
-Going on dates
-How to enter relationships
-Using technology to meet women
-How to maintain relationships
-Sexual activity while married

Things you can no longer discuss:

-Meeting women with the intention of fornicating with them
-How to bang
-Physical intimacy with women you’re not married to beyond the act of kissing
-Maintaining relationships with multiple women (i.e. spinning plates)
-Cheating on significant others (adultery)
-Using technology to fornicate
-Discussion of travel destinations which are best for fornication
-Stories of sexual activity while not married
-Promoting masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, etc.

It’s all just a tad ironic, given that most of the things he’s banned people from talking about are exactly the things he wrote about and talked about for a decade in the self-published books, the blog posts, the public talks and the YouTube videos that put him in the spotlight and put money in his bank account.

Rule 2 is only slightly less sweeping:

2. You can no longer use pornographic or vulgar language

-Refrain from using terms like “I fucked her” or “I want to fuck her.” Do not describe sexual encounters or situations that are beyond the act of kissing unless you are married.
-Refrain from using profanity if a cleaner word would suffice.

Roosh is well aware that these new rules, and his new approach generally, could alienate a good chunk of his audience.

I know that I may lose some of you because of these rules, but I can no longer help men lead a life of sin, because doing so is weighing on my conscious. [sic]

I created this forum in 2008 to help men fornicate, so I don’t know if it’s possible to “retrofit” it for another purpose, but it’s worth a try.

So far, it doesn’t look like Roosh’s fans are exactly thrilled with the new direction. While some of his forum regulars are rallying around him, others are pretty far from fucking ok with it, a point they have reiterated in literally hundreds of comments they’ve posted in response to his announcement.

“Is this a hoax?” asked one commenter. (It sure doesn’t seem to be.)

“Your house, your rules,” wrote another. “But this makes Rooshforum kind of like non-alcoholic beer. Or a sex-free brothel.”

Still another commenter offered his own awkward metaphor.

As much as I love roosh, this is the male equivalent of a woman riding the cock carousel and then turning into a nun. censoring everything because she feels her new outlook is the best.

Others were a bit harsher:

I think Roosh has gone off the deep end with this religious BS. Religion once again has destroyed something good in this world (this forum). I’m out. In the end we all will die, rot and maggots will consume us. Enjoy church fellas. Feel free to ban my account.

I can’t say I’m convinced that Roosh is going to be a huge success in his new career as a sort of freelance fundamentalist fulminator.

But as radical as his new direction might seem at first glance, the New Roosh has a lot in common with the Old Roosh. Both versions of Roosh are misogynists through and through.

As a pickup artist, Roosh made clear that he had no respect for the opinions — or the objections — of the women he pursued. He encouraged men to lie and manipulate — and even to hide in bushes — in order to more effectively prey on women, and in one of his “field reports” he talked about using physical force to restrain one of his “conquests” when she withdrew consent during sex. His biggest complaint as a pickup artist in recent years was that women were getting wise to his PUA bullshit — getting harder to trick, and harder to control.

Roosh’s new “morality” is all about controlling women. Even as a pickup artist, he resented the fact that the women he spent his life pursuing were “sluts” with sex lives of their own; now he rails against society for “allowing” women to have this kind of sexual agency, hoping to go back to a world in which men like him are guaranteed young, virginal, “traditional” wives.

So I guess the question now is whether or not Roosh’s fans will appreciate his continuing misogyny — not to mention his homophobia, his anti-Semitism and his other assorted alt-rightish bigotries — more than they’ll miss his always rather rudimentary “dating” advice. We’ll see. However things play out, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be both weird and ugly.

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