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.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
He’s 40? Not middle age then. Middle age is 45 to 65.
Well this is certainly something. I’m happy to hear he’s bleeding cash and hopefully will continue to fade into obscurity.
Of course, despite that he’s taking a step towards being less harmful, that’s by partially neutralizing his own influence, not by being a better person. If anything, he’s probably become a worse person, or at least an equally-bad person in a different way.
Time will tell. I mean, he was formerly an international sex pest. That’s a pretty deep gutter to crawl out of.
The road to not being a non-shitty human being can be long and full of detours. Hopefully this is just one stage of a personal evolution.
Perhaps the monks of Mount Athos could do something with him? Would feel sorry for them having to put up with his presence though.
Well, at least, he already has the beard of a Patriarch…
I see i am not the only one to think he just went religious by opportunism (mushroom or not). Does someone know if he has a job, currently ?
I personally think this is him trying to score a underage, virgin bride. Probably figured out that this is where a lot of conservative women hang out instead of the night clubs he normally went to. Instead of complaining that there were no virgins in college night clubs and bars he decided to go to youth bible study instead and see if he could sleaze his way on someone naive, young and probably really sheltered. I’ve seen this move before and try to warn many young teenage girls at my church that if a older man is being nice to them, maybe he even told you he loves you and would marry you, he doesn’t love you. He’s a creep who wants to make you a willing slave basically with a thinly define lines of that being something jesus wants so you should to.
@occasional reader:
I have to ask, is you ‘nym an intentional allusion to Dorothy Parker? I kind of think it is, but I do suppose it’s possible that I’m wrong so I wanted to check.
@occasional reader
I can’t say for sure, but I would guess not.
Not all men? That’s okay, then.
Actually, I’m sure that guys don’t become accomplished fornicators by reading a book. They might become bumbling, fumbling wannabe fornicators — but certainly not accomplished fornicators.
To become a good lover (what Roosh calls a fornicator), a guy has to pay attention to what his partner likes in bed. Also, he has to pay attention to what his partner likes before they get into bed and after they get out of bed.
If I understand Roosh’s story correctly, I’ve had sex with many more men than he has, so I believe I can speak with confidence on this subject.
Wow, this is a very convenient, in-stages conversion story. It might even cause the more cynical among us to doubt his sincerity.
[You can’t see me, but the side eye I am giving Mr. V is tremendous.]
So, the PUA grifter has figured out the “penitent sinner” con? I assume he’ll soon try to monetize it in various ways.
I can’t help noticing that he’s not penitent about the harm that he’s done to women – just how he led men down the path of sin, etc. Ugh.
Nope, can’t be surprised by this in the least. If there was a subtext to all of Roosh’s PUA nonsense, it was how soul-crushing it all was. It really did come off as just one big sunk-cost fallacy exercise: he got a brief kick from dominating women with self-esteem issues and monetizing it successfully, but the sheer effort required just wore away at his psyche and he got to 40 saying “Holy shit, is this what I’ve done with my life? Huh, well, can’t admit I’ve wasted half my lifespan being a monster, so hardcore Christianity baby! Forgiveness is divine!”
The only think that does surprise me is that he didn’t go born-again evangelical or fire-and-brimstone Catholic. Those are the typical paths.
@Katamount
I think the reason he picked Orthodox Christianity is because his mother is Armenian. Consequently, he picked the Armenian Apostolic Church because of that familial connection. I wonder if he knows that Anita Sarkeesian grew up in that church (though I don’t think she’s involved now)…
I guess selling Jesus has higher profit margins than selling misogyny. Of course, he gets to sell both, so win/win for him.
Too bad about his sole source of income drying up… I sure hope he has a mother with a basement he can move into. /snark
To those of us who’ll actually miss hearing of his horrible single-minded goal of forcing women into bed, there is still his racism, bigotry, misogyny, and general monsterhood we can seethe over. He’s still a giant trumpkin, still believes that only a man, preferably white donchaknow, should be president, and still believes that the only valid rapes are the ones where the perp is Black, Brown, or Muslim.
So, he hasn’t dropped *all* of the things we hate-read about, just the rape and rape-adjacent shit.
(And to all the above who point out that his Come 2 Jeebus moment smells a lot more like “Why Can’t I Get Laid for the Life of Me”, I agree. Smelled like it the very first time he came out with his anti-Bang posts. It really goes to show how stupid he KNOWS his base is if he expects any of them to believe his conversion.)
Does anyone else remember Roosh going off on a kick where he was trying to find a hot, young, submissive wife by converting to really, uh … intense … religions like fundamentalist Mormonism? And he explicitly wasn’t doing it out of any desire to fill some spiritual void in his life but because he was under the impression that, with his past on full display all across the internet, some fundy dad would throw his 18-year-old daughter under a Roosh-shaped bus to get her married off? I seem to recall there being a post here and an extended discussion about that.
@CarrieV
The irony, of course, is that most of the white supremacists he wants to be friends with wouldn’t see him as white because he’s half Iranian and half Armenian.
@Dust Kitty
Oh yeah, that thing. This sounds a bit similar to that incident.
Yep, that’s what I was thinking of.
I agree with Lainy. Good thing his past is all over the internet. Makes it less likely he’ll be successful, I think.
On the extremely unlikely chance he’s sincere, maybe it’s a start towards becoming a halfway decent human.
@Dormousing_it : if he is sincere (*express doubt*), then he is changing the way he is an asshole more than improving. I don’t see “radical religious fanatic hating sex” as much of an improvement.
@Ohlmann
I agree. He’s just going to be a different kind of misogynist, not a good person. Few people start their journey to being a good person with becoming a fundamentalist.
I’m still confused as to how he flip-flopped from one radicalized position to another so quickly. Sure they’re not all that different in what concerns Roosh the most (rampant misogyny and such), but there’re still massive philosophical differences.
@Kevin:
Only if they need a snowball target — the picture links don’t seem to work when i post them here but search “Mt Athos snowball fight” and you should find them…
@Jackson Ayres
He’s a grifter, grifters are very good at switching positions. They are only attached to the underlying points, not to the fine details, so they can pivot quickly to make a profit.
Plus, this wasn’t all that quick. He started showing signs years ago when he began looking for a virginal wife to start a family.