Roosh V, now an Orthodox Christian, stops selling his pickup guides because they promote “bodily pleasure through casual sex”

By David Futrelle

Roosh V is feeling guilty about the pickup advice he used to give.

The former PUA, who recently embraced the stern God of Orthodox Christianity after getting really high on ‘shrooms (true story), is feeling so guilty about it he’s now stopped selling all of his old pickup guides — but not because they contained advice that seemed to many, myself included, to encourage date rape.

No, he’s feeling guilty that his pickup guides, intended to help men in their quest for casual sex, might have actually helped men in their quest for casual sex.

Last Spring, Roosh stopped selling nearly a dozen of his “Bang” books, which offered both general pickup advice as well as brief guides on bedding women in particular countries in Europe and South America. Now he’s taken down his most recent (self) published pickup manual, called Game, as well as several other books, including the unfortunately titled memoir Poosy Paradise, because he claims to have just now discovered that they, too, are full of fornication.

In a blog post yesterday announcing his decision to stop selling “Game,” Roosh outlined the deep moral struggle he underwent before making his recent decision. While as a newly minted Orthodox Christian he was bothered by all the sin contained in the book (and the other books he just stopped selling), he also wanted to make as much money as possible selling them.

Oh, the moral dilemmas you’ll face!

“The prospect of banning Game last May was too difficult, even though my conscience was bothered by the content,” he explained.

I wrestled with the issue for a week … It made sense to ban all my Bang books, which explicitly instructed men how to have casual sex, and it wasn’t that hard on my wallet since they were older books that had passed their sales peak, but if I were to ban Game as well, my income would be wiped out. I prayed on the issue, asking God to help me make the right decision.

Apparently God told him to make the wrong decision and to keep selling the better-performing book.

I received two comments in one day from men stating that Game had helped them with married life. I also did a poll showing not all men were using Game to become accomplished fornicators. My conscience felt more clear; Game could remain.

Yep, that’s right: He thinks his fornication-hating God wanted him to keep selling his fornication guide because some men were using its techniques to manipulate their wives rather than the young hotties they want to bang.

Then God apparently changed his mind and sent Roosh some signs suggesting that selling Game was indeed a sin.

During my lecture tour, dozens of men asked me to sign their copies of Game. They said it helped them with women, though not necessarily within the confines of marriage.

Roosh was shocked — shocked! — to discover that men were using his pickup guide as a pickup guide.

But outside of the ticket sales from the tour, which was soon to end, Game was my main source of income.

Ethics are hard.

Then I received a message from a fellow Orthodox Christian .. saying he had just read Game, and noticed that it contained the same type of sexual content I had aggressively banned on the forum last year. I walked to my bookshelf, pulled out a copy of Game, and randomly flipped through it … but I could not find a page where sin was not. The book … trained and steered men for the main purpose of achieving bodily pleasure through casual sex.

He was stunned to find all of this in … a book he himself had authored only a year earlier. And that he had marketed on his own site as a book that “can aid men who want to engage in sinful fornication with lots of women … .” (Yes, his web page devoted to the book really did — and does — say that.)

Roosh also discovered — another stunning reveletion — that the book objectified women.

In some ways, it even wired men’s brains to view women as objects to be won purely through knowledge, effort, and physical attractiveness. Even my book Day Bang, which has no sexual content, trained men to see women as objects to be won for pleasurable ends through the mathematics of approaching a lot of women in the hopes of finding one who was horny and loose.

So the newly chastened Roosh decided it was time not only to stop selling his game book but to also tale down the sections of his forum that deal with “game,” and to delete

countless articles … YouTube videos, and podcasts that aimed to teach a man how to participate in a behavior that could sacrifice his salvation. By taking these actions, I want to impede or halt the spiritual damage that my work was doing.

He declared that he was “happy to announce my retirement as a peddler of sex” even though it would drastically reduce his income and force him to rely on savings. “I will have to learn how not to be a consumer,” he added, “and to only consume that which is spiritually profitable.”

But the real problem with Roosh’s books and other, er, teachings weren’t that they promoted “fornication.” It’s that they, for all intents and purposes, taught men how to date rape. His books are full of stories of his own sexual experiences — which often read outright like descriptions of rape.

As I noted in a previous post on Roosh’s toxic advice,

Again and again in these stories, presented as true, Roosh literally won’t take no for an answer, pressuring reluctant and resistant women into giving him what he wants, in one case using outright physical force in order to continue intercourse with a woman who had changed her mind.

In many of these cases Roosh tells us or at least implies that the woman in question consented to sex, but it is worth asking what kind of “consent” is preceded by literally hours of struggle against a physically imposing man who refuses to believe that no means no. It’s also worth asking what the woman’s own account of the experience would look like.

In one notorious passage, Roosh told how he “banged” a woman he knew was too drunk to consent.

While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent. It didn’t help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can’t say I cared or even hesitated.

Read my entire post for more similarly horrifying examples of Roosh’s “game” in action.

If Roosh is truly interested in repenting for his sins he needs to get down on his knees and beg his God for forgiveness for his behavior as well as his books. I doubt the women he has — by his own accounts — violated will be quite so ready to forgive him.

Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.

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