Roosh V wishes he were still a virgin. A lot of women wish he were as well.

By David Futrelle

We’ve reached the point in Roosh V’s redemption arc in which we have to hear him complain about all the sex he had back in the day. Roosh, you may recall, used to be a professional “pickup artist” who made his living teaching his extraordinarily problematic, er, techniques; now he’s a newly minted religious fanatic of the Orthodox Christian variety who is trying, in his own terrible way, to make amends for his sinful former life. Trouble is, he’s feeling remorse for the wrong things.

In a recent post on his blog, Roosh declares that he wishes he’d remained a virgin instead of wasting nearly two decades of his life relentlessly pursuing women, sometimes literally. Now he’s given up on sex, including the self-serve variety.

Upon receiving the grace of God, I ceased all sexual activity. I don’t look at porn, or even sexy lingerie images. I don’t masturbate and definitely don’t fornicate. If sexual thoughts attack my mind, I pray to Jesus Christ to take them away, and He does.

His new abstinence applies even during his dreams. When some comely dream lady hits on him during his slumbers, he says, he stays pure (mostly), “usually say[ing] no to the flesh that is offered me.”

How very impressive.

The primary villain in Roosh’s story is lust — a powerful inner force that, he thinks, can transform male virgins and sex-havers alike into angry, bitter misogynists who hate women as much as they desire them. As he puts it:

If you are a virgin in lust, and fail to gain physical pleasure, you will experience tremendous anguish. You will be angry at all the men who are getting laid, and you will also be angry at all the women for not choosing you for sex. You will masturbate to experience the pleasure of the orgasm, and then experience an immediate emotional hangover of having had to masturbate. This is an unbearable state that most men “solve” through prostitution, yet since a prostitute is not what any man truly wants, the pain and anguish intensify.

Actually, only a small minority of men ever turn to sex workers to alleviate their lusts — with only about 1.5 percent of American men visiting a sex worker in any given year.

Even for the sexually active man, the accomplished player, the pain of his lust is transmutated into other forms, such as the simultaneous addiction and hatred of “sluts.”

Most sexually active men don’t turn into raging misogynists. Some of them rather enjoy the sex and have actual warm feelings towards even their casual partners.

Roosh concludes his attack on non-marital sex with a theatrical lament:;

I truly wish I were a virgin. I wish I didn’t learn game and become good at it. I wish I didn’t sleep with all those women, and I’ve prayed to God to not only forgive me for those encounters but to help me forget them. The intimacy I’ve had in the past does not at all serve me in the present. It doesn’t make me feel happier or more masculine. Instead, I feel regret and shame. I can’t stress how the sex I had in my life was in no way an addition. Instead, it was a subtraction, one that occupied most of my free time and intellect while taking my eyes off God.

I feel precisely zero sympathy for poor Roosh and his overwrought laments. Because in his attempt to frame himself as a sort of victim of the sex he willingly engaged in he has somehow overlooked the real victims — the women he pressured and manipulated into bed.

I’m not being facetious here. If you have read any of Roosh’s “fielf reports” in his assorted books and booklets you will notice at once that none of them are descriptions of hot sex and enthusiastic consent. Roosh instead details the assorted tricks he used to navigate often quite drunk women into bed. He treated their “nos” as little more than temporary hurdles to push past. In the case of one woman, Roosh wrote,

It took four hours of foreplay and at least thirty repetitions of “No, Roosh, no” until she allowed my penis to enter her vagina. No means no—until it means yes.

In another case, he reported, his, er, partner was so drunk that

[i]n 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.

In one case when a woman revoked her consent part way through, “I had to use some muscle to prevent her from escaping.”

While not all of Roosh’s “field reports” are direct (if sometimes unintentional) confessions of rape, they all seem to involve trickery, manipulation and in some cases intimidation — and his writings about these, er, conquests never involve even the tiniest smidgen of remorse. (For more details, see here.)

If Roosh wants absolution for his sins, he needs to reckon with what he did to all these women — and do penance for it, preferably by turning himself over to the authorities. A thoroughgoing apology would be a good first step, if only the first step. Somehow I doubt we’ll ever get one.

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