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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Congrats on the new job VP.
@Ariblester
Make sure your link has an image file extension. The second one worked.
Second try, excuse the mess:
Ah, it works, even if the file extension is technically wrong (I used PNG instead of JPG).
@Naglfar: aha! Thanks!
@Ariblester: post as many pics of them as you want, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m already petting and playing with them, I’d look at pictures of them all day.
More pics coming later!
@Vicki: yay!!!! Fraggles! I was actually considering getting a third and naming him/her Marjorie but I didn’t have enough space for them.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Off-topic, but I see the Q-Anon people have now decided that the Wayfair furniture company is selling children online under the guise of furniture:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wayfair-trafficking-children/
On Twitter I see that even a few of the Q-Anon believers who think this is just too absurd to be a real conspiracy still suggest it could be a false flag to hurt the credibility of conspiracy-theorists.
@Moon Custafer
Frankly conspiracy-theorists already shoot their own credibility in the foot by virtue of being conspiracy-theorists; why do they think they need any help in that department?
@Moon Custafer
Like with incels, I don’t think they need any false flags to ruin their credibility, they do a fine job of that on their own. They can rest assured that their credibility with the majority of people outside their cult remains zero, and is unlikely to fall further because it can’t.
Maybe this can become a schism among Trump fans between those who think Wayfair is trafficking children and those who think they’re not. As with every conservative conspiracy theory, this does make me wonder whether any Republican companies are trafficking children, since most conspiracy theories seem to be projection. Hobby Lobby?
Way off topic, sorry, but I really need some feedback and this is a groups whose opinions I respect.
As I understand it, COVID-19 is now known to be a blood clotting disorder. The commonest way for it to kill you is for your lungs fill up with millions of tiny blot clots until the oxygen can’t get in and the CO2 can’t get out. But those blood clots can go anywhere and cause a stroke, kidney damage, digestive problems, eye-problems etc. etc.
Could they also give a man erectile problems? I mean, poor circulation means that the – er- hydraulic lift doesn’t work too well. From my half-educated point of view this sounds logical. Is there anyone with medical expertise who could confirm or deny it?
The thing is, some men would be less worried by a 3% chance of death than a 0.01% chance of impotence. My gut feeling is that those men skew pro-trump and anti-mask. Is there a hope in hell that this would be more effective way to get them to behave responsibly?
@Sheila Crosby
I have heard multiple reports of COVID causing male fertility issues, but I don’t think it was because of blood clots. Instead, it can (as a rare effect) damage the testicles and reduce testosterone levels which causes low sperm count and possibly erectile dysfunction and shrinkage. And yes, I do think many men would be very worried about that, but I do worry that these men probably wouldn’t listen to anyone who mentions this risk. Or they’d hyper react and accuse anyone who mentions it of threatening their masculinity.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, I am just repeating what I have seen elsewhere and an added opinion.
The list of side effect of COVID-19 is long, and a lot of it isn’t blood clot related, so maybe it can ?
I do think the idea they would react more to threat to their dick more than threat to their health is too far fetched to work. I mean I have seen some men put their dick on an inactive chainsaw on a dare. That don’t scream “will pay attention to threat to their virility” to me.
I saw this thing the other day of someone trying to convince and anti vaccination jerk that if you hold up a raw potato to the wounded where they gave your child a vaccination it will draw out all of the bad stuff and leave only the good stuff and honestly I think that might be a good way to trick those assholes into vaccinating their kids so we might have to do kind of the same tactic for other people to start carrying about their health with covid.
Other note. The brought new Marines to my husband’s base and guess what those Marines brought with them. A second wave of covid that is hitting specifically the base hard. Their are up to over a hundred cases now.
@Lainy
I would recommend washing the potato thoroughly first, but if it can make vaccinate this seems like a worthwhile thing to do.
Now I’m just curious where they got this strange idea.
Speaking of which, has your husband recovered? IIRC you mentioned that he got sick a while ago.
@Victorious Parasol, Alan Robertshaw:
I think the first I heard about the NAAFI (Navy/Army/Air Force Institutes) was from the Goon Show routine ‘The Jet-Propelled Guided NAAFI’, which of course was playing a joke on the average wait time to actually get anything from the NAAFI. Considering all the members of the Goon Show were ex-military, that’s not surprising. (Spike Milligan is at least as well known in many places for his WWII memoirs as for his comedy work, though there’s a non-zero overlap there.)
@Moon Custafer, TacticalProgressive, Naglfar:
Well, people have seriously accused Alex Jones of being a false-flag operation to make their conspiracy theories look stupid, so it’s not a new thing.
But as a number of people have pointed out, people often seem to believe multiple incompatible conspiracy theories. (‘Crank magnetism’.) Mostly because it’s not necessarily about believing the conspiracy theory is actually true so much as it’s about disbelieving the ‘official’ story. And if you have multiple ways of arguing against the official story, to many of these people it doesn’t matter if the ways contradict each other. It’s all about the negative space of ideas, not the positive space. About being ‘right’ simply by making everybody else wrong.
@ jenora
When I did the court martial work I was supposed to eat in the officers’ mess. For ‘equality or arms’ reasons we used to get a ‘simulated’ rank the same as the the prosecutor. I did however sneak into the NAAFI. You could get things like pie, chips, and beans for 70p.
@naglfar
He is young and in good health like many marines. Most of the time they will not let you join many branches of the military if you have any conditions that can’t be handle without medication. So most of our soldiers have a really good chance of fighting it off. He fought it off, I also have a suspicion that he might have had a light case, I don’t know if that is possible. I can’t tell you how actually bad it was for him, and I don’t think he can too because he kept trying to smoke cigarettes while recovering from it.
It has been a very stressful time.
@Jenora Feuer
I am reminded of the title text of XKCD 966:
The ‘controlled demolition’ theory was concocted by the government to distract us. ‘9/11 was an inside job’ was an inside job!
By the time one gets deep enough into conspiracy theories to start making meta-theories about which theorists are false flags, I think the vast majority of non-conspiracy theorists can dismiss them easily.
@Lainy
That is possible, if he is young and of sound health he could have had a mild case.
I had one family member get COVID in April and we were very worried because she is older, but she survived and is fine now. My 102-year-old great-grandmother was the oldest resident of her nursing home to survive the infection out of dozens of people who got sick that month. As a result, she is one of a (probably) very small number of people to survive both the 1918 Influenza pandemic* and COVID-19.
*As far as I know, she did not get sick during the 1918 pandemic, but she was alive during it as she was born in 1917.
That Wayfair thing is true. I bought a crib on Wayfair, and a week later my wife had a baby. Coincidence? I think not.
Roosh’s narcissism runs through his musings like ink through toilet paper. His faith is as phony as the rest of him. If there is a God and an afterlife, well, he still doesn’t get it. So maybe he’ll still have a chance to see how other people have been affected by his immoral and illegal acts instead of dwelling on how guilty he feels about misusing his hands on himself, fer cripessakes.
Regarding Sheila’s question, there does seem to be a suggestion that COVID-19 could affect male fertility.
The money quote:
Am I too cynical when I wonder if some members of the manosphere would see this loss of fertility as a good thing?
@Victorious Parasol
Well, some do brag about getting vasectomies to own teh womenz (something to do with supposed spermjacking). So some might see it as a plus, but I imagine they wouldn’t like the resultant drop in testosterone levels and muscle loss.
@Naglfar
The possibilities for manospheric weirdness continue to multiply.
Thanks for the feedback.
I knew one man who gave up smoking because he was worried about erectile problems, so it does jhappen at least sometimes.