Roosh is a Whiner

I just read Roosh's latest, "If I Was Born An American Girl."  I won't reproduce it here.  Jezebel readers were shredding it the other day, much to his delight.  He loves to play the naughty boy, get all the girls riled up, then wank about it on Twitter.

But even a riled up girl like me is getting pretty bored with being outraged over Roosh.

Anyway, the theme of this "essay" is how damn easy Roosh's life would have been if he had only been born a woman.  It's one of those New Misogynists' heavy, ham-headed attempts to be satirical.  (I have come to the sad conclusion that The New Misogynists, with the exception of Delicious Tacos, are tone deaf to humor and nuance.)  

Roosh's piece takes the form of a very long and very arbitrary list. (Roosh loves compiling lists, graphs, tables, and pie charts -- so scientifical!)  Although not in any apparent order of importance, Roosh methodically numbers the privileges that young American women enjoy compared to their male peers.  Allegedly.

Note that most of this privilege is attributed to women's sexual power over men.  Obviously, he is only thinking about the tiny fraction of American women whom he considers sexually attractive.  The rest of us ugly fatties, who make on average $6000/year less than everyone else, well, we belong in forced labor camps anyway.

So basically, if Roosh had been born a conventionally beautiful young woman, he wouldn't have had to study for his organic chemistry exams; he could have aced the course by simply fucking his instructor.  This fantasy is such a standard of "school girl" porno and B movies, where Roosh and his fans get most of their sex education, that naturally Roosh serves it forth as irrefutable "evidence."  Hey, a cliche wouldn't be a cliche if it weren't a fact, right?  And resentful boners are the best!

As a college student, I never had to choose between either failing a class or exchanging sexual favors with an instructor, but had the dilemma presented itself, in most cases, I believe I would have opted to withdraw.  (Mainly because, although I used to be kind of a slut, I've always been a really lazy slut, and as any sex worker can attest, it's called sex "work" for a reason.) 

Please don't assume that the fact that my undergraduate transcripts are riddled with "Ws" is because I turned down the option of blowing my profs on a regular basis.  Honest, it never came up for negotiation (no pun intended).

OK, full disclosure:  Once a film history instructor asked me to give him a massage in his office.  Although I had no reason to believe that my grade hinged on fulfilling this rather surprising request, I dropped the class immediately out of sheer embarrassment.  And because I had no idea how to give anyone a massage.

Ah, the good ole days, before anyone had ever heard of "sexual harassment!"

God, Roosh is boring.  And whiny?  Jesu Maria!  What a tiresome child he must have been, the kind of kid who would complain for hours because his sister got the red popsicle, while he had to settle for the blue one, and who would keep repeating his grievance in a tedious, unrelenting whine, until his mother longed to toss both child and popsicle onto the shoulder of the road from a moving vehicle (and then back up, a la Dzhokhar Tsarnaev).

The fact that Roosh's mother did not succumb to the temptation represents an amazing feat of maternal self-restraint for which -- unsurprisingly -- Roosh is not in the least bit grateful.

Oh, and as long as we're talking about frozen treats here, let me share this treat of a one minute video "I'm A Nice Guy" by Scott Benson. 

MGTOW Mark "Minty" Minter Slides Off His Barstool

Poor Mark Minter!  He bumped up on Manbooz last night, where he was roundly razzed, and then apparently had a few more shots before churning out this strange missive to his guru, Roosh.  Is it too much cheap tequila?  Or has he truly lost his mind?  The comments that follow are equally bizarre... Yet there is a strange poetic beauty in all this incoherence.  Kinda like reading The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, y'know?  Although hardly a ringing endorsement of the expat MGTOW lifestyle... 

(Note:  Go to manboobz to read David Futrelle's analysis and some really funny commentary.)

Mark Minter • a day ago

Ah, but when you are there, this American life is a million miles away, and far, far from your thoughts. When you are there and on the streets, those unfamiliar streets in that strange world and culture, you live more in 5 minutes than you do here in one day. It starts at the jetway when you arrive, it builds when you see the foreign immigrations officers and it smacks you in the face when you step outside the front door or the airport. All airports are the same, little pieces of America, no matter where you are in the world. But that ends at the front door.And when you go alone, when you have very little to anchor you, when you get into that taxi and ride through the city, when you end up in some strange room, and you drop your luggage, and then in the following days as you find your way, find yourself, then all you were, and all that was, is so so far away. And it can ruin you forever. I have been back 3 years and I do not seek to engage America in any way. I stay home, on the internet. I shop in the middle of the night for food. When I must be out in the day, I move quickly, efficiently. I interact little with this society that I am no longer a part of. Some of that is age but a lot of is that I have killed my American self and I feel no affection for it, no loyalty to it, and I shall discard it forever, soon. The only connection is feel to it is you, you band of renegade rebels to whom I feel a kindred spirit.Listen closely to expats. Perhaps it is a self limiting situation. I would assume no lover of America, no person that celebrates it as a place, is an expat. So on one hand, they are a group disposed to dissent. They may have issues over the laws, the bureaucracy of the new place they now live, but rarely do they ever ever long for America.

• Despite the claims of feminists, America is the Matriarchy, the land owned and dominated by women and their mangina menservants, their guards, their infrastructure that so caters to them, their laws.You see it when upon landing in America. In other places, immigration is almost a "lip service", a gang of sorts to get money from you when you arrive and when you leave. The security you must pass, when entering. is almost a joke compared to what you encounter when you arrive in America. And it is far greater when you leave, those airlines and airport security forces have a procedure that is not so much that the idea of the country you are leaving, but rather the dictates of America, and its women.And here you are not a man, but a functionary, a manservant, a slave to women. You see it when you arrive, you feel it, you know it, that stripping of your masculine dignity that begins the moment you leave the plane and enter an American terminal, that herding, that loss of the you that is you. And you see it as you come out on these clean, lit streets, this great giant boring shopping mall, all designed for women, all policed for women, all at the behest of women and those manginas that have bought in, that know no different, that do not understand what they are, what they do, and what they have done.  So, yes, you leave because you have the idea that something here is wrong, some other place must be better, NAPALT, Not All Places Are Like This. Perhaps, if you are only gone for a short while, you won't quite be a able to put your finger on what the difference is, just that it is different. But when you spend a good deal of time away, you know there is a difference, and if you must come back, then you yearn not to be here.
  It is not the adventure of the place or the exotic.  What you miss is the experience of being a man in a way that this society will never allow. It is too late for here. It is more than merely cultural, more than social, it is even biological. This matriarchy has dominated even nature here, controlled every last aspect, even the dirt, even the germs, all of the animals, and certainly, all of the men. If you stay, you will remain in angst, a slave to women. When I close my eyes the image I see is elsewhere. And when I die, the fact I got to live elsewhere for a time, will dwarf what I feel about here. It is the basis of my rants about marriage and this American life as a married man being insipid, stupid, and a waste of the life of man. Because it ties you to here, it chains you, it removes your option, your hope, that you might leave, and seals your fate as a slave.

  
  

Roosh: Coming Soon to a Second Tier City Near You

I note that I have a few readers from other countries, most notably Romania and Russia.  Perhaps some of you are Roosh fans; perhaps, some of you not so much.  Roosh posted the following a couple of years ago, when he was getting a lot of flack from writing about his exploits in various Latin American countries.  Roosh's words are in bold; my annotations are italicized.  

9 Things I Want To Say To My International Critics
By Roosh

I have nine things I would like to say to all those who are angry about my travel writing:

Stop right there, did you say "travel" writing?  You mean I can find these guides in my local Rick Steves store?  If by "travel" you mean "how to prowl foreign discoteques, malls, clubs, and locate cheap sublets," maybe.
 
1. Sex is a normal biological process that occurs whether it’s written about by me in a book or not. I’ve yet to see any evidence that a noticeable “Roosh Boost” occurs in countries I write about.

No one is going to argue with that.  I'm mildly curious what a "Roosh Boost" involves (is this somehow related to Roosh's boast that he "explodes" in women's vaginas?) but I can live without knowing...

2.It may be hard to believe, but your women like fucking men who are from different countries. Attacking me won’t change that...

Note the use of "your women."  This is a powerful taunt in cultures with patriarchal tribal traditions, in which women are seen not only as the property of their male relatives, but also as the receptacles of family honor.  Roosh, one generation away from a rural Iranian village, betrays his own tribal origins here.  

Note to my non-American readers:  This is NOT how most American men under the age of, say, 120, refer to women!

Procreating with a different race or background is an evolutionary [sic]  advantageous behavior that lowers the rate of genetic disease.

While it's well established that the offspring of first cousins who marry -- especially over successive generations -- are more likely to suffer from certain congenital diseases carried by recessive genes, I challenge you to show me any credible scientific evidence that "procreating with a different race... is an evolutionarily advantageous behavior."
 
3. Consensual sex with girls of legal age is not predation and is not rape, no matter how many times you say it is.

Agreed -- if and when it is indeed consensual and the girl is of legal age.  Having sex with extremely intoxicated girls who are incapable of consent IS rape in the U.S. -- no matter how many times you say it isn't.  Coercing women by deceiving them or simply wearing them down, or by deliberately targeting very young or naive girls with promises of a "relationship," while not rape, is "predatory" and morally repugnant.
 
4. You should be more concerned about turning on your women instead of trying to stop foreign men from successfully providing them with [sic] their emotional and physical needs. One path yields more sex, while the other gets you nothing.

Again with the "your women" taunt.  Basically, he is telling his critics "I can take your women because I am more of a man than you are, so nyeah, nyeah, nyeah!"  As for more successfully fulfilling their emotional and physical needs, that's pretty rich coming from a guy who dismisses the female orgasm as "trivial," doesn't care if his partner comes or not, and admits his own most satisfying sexual encounters have been with women he "hate-fucked."
 
5. By the time my book about your country has been published, thousands upon thousands of men have already had sex with your women. Nothing you do can stop this from proceeding unless you completely ban tourism.

"Nothing you can do to stop me from having sex with your women."  Wanna bet?  In fact, countries CAN do a lot to discourage sex tourism without banning legitimate tourism.  Roosh has already been declared "persona non grata" in a number of countries.  Keeping undesirable elements out is one of the reasons countries demand visas.
 
6. You can’t pick and choose what effects of globalization impact your country. You must take the good (increase in trade and technology) versus the bad (competition from hairy foreign men).

Is Roosh seriously suggesting that the only way to build a globally competitive economy is to allow sex tourists through their borders? What a dilemma!  (At least Roosh admits he's "the bad" vs. "the good" here.)

7. Censorship doesn’t work in the internet age. Go ahead and ask the Brazilian government how easy it is to take sites off the internet. If you look hard, you’ll probably find hundreds of sex-themed articles about your country. My work is just a drop in the bucket.

Probably true.  However, has it occurred to Roosh that it is not "sex-themed articles" in general they object to, but his in particular?

8. Criticizing the use of game as “manipulation” shows that you’re stuck in the wrong century. Science now backs up game concepts such as touching, pre-selection, and being alpha as ways to be more attractive to the opposite sex. Your argument is essentially “Be unattractive on purpose because it’s natural and right.” Good luck with that. Instead, American men want the best game to get penis inside vagina. You will not dampen the demand for this crucial knowledge.

Actually, I don't have much against PUA and "game" if it helps a few socially inept fellows muster enough self-confidence to climb out of their mom's basement on a Saturday night.  It's pretty silly stuff, but so is most of the relationship advice out there, whether it's for girls or boys.

By "science," Roosh and his ilk mean "evolutionary psychology," which is a highly controversial field riddled with pot-holes of fallacy, inadequate data, and overgeneralization.  Its status as a discipline is further compromised by yo-yos like Roosh who embrace half-baked theories as gospel and then apply them willy-nilly to justify the most heinous and socially maladaptive behavior.

Whether Roosh's brand of "game" constitutes "crucial knowledge" is also highly debatable.  

9. You should thank me and my compatriots for spending money in your country. Your hotels, restaurants, tour agencies, and nightlife venues get paid. Your people will suffer more if we go elsewhere.

Personally, I find this final point the most distasteful, and if I were a national of Romania, Russia, Colombia, or any other country, I'd be infuriated by the notion that I should be grateful or beholden to some Ugly American who believes he is doing me a favor by throwing a few dollars into the local coffers.  Who the hell does he think he is, the Sultan of Brunei?

Boston Bombing, or Don't Bite the Hand

To live in the United States is a gift.  U.S. citizenship confers great privilege.  The evidence is that people from all over the world still strive to immigrate here. 

I don't acknowledge this with pride;  I did nothing to earn the right to be an American.  In my case, it was an accident of birth.  I did nothing to deserve the fortunate circumstances of being a white, middle class American and enjoying all the advantages of that.  My nationality in no way makes me better than anyone on this planet; it just makes me luckier.

And I don't say this with complacency.  As a country, we are facing huge problems:  democracy is compromised by the disproportionate power held by corporations, for example.  Our leaders' penchant for military adventures ("nation building") has degraded all of us.  We have earned the wrath and contempt of the world.

In fact, America was probably never what we were taught it was.   

And yet the recent Boston bombings by two disaffected youth is not only tragic (for the victims and their families, for the perpetrators and their families), it is god damn infuriating.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been living in the U.S. for ten years, most of their young lives.  America had taken them in, and had provided them with opportunities, such as a top notch high school education, beyond anything they would have enjoyed in Chechnye, Dagestan, or Russia.  They had friends and family, health and good looks, religious and intellectual freedom here.  And they spat in the face of all these unearned gifts.

Similarly, Roosh's family came to the U.S. as refugees in the late seventies.  Roosh writes that his father had been one of many children born of a fourth wife in a poor, rural village.  This is pure speculation on my part, but I am guessing Roosh's dad had sought upward mobility through a military career under the Shah.  When the Shah's regime fell, the Valizadehs were taken in by the U.S.  Roosh went on to enjoy all the advantages of being a middle-class American, not least of which was an education at a state-supported university.  And now he spits in its face.

I'm in no way anti-immigration.  I've devoted much of my teaching career to helping immigrants assimilate culturally and linguistically.  I've done my share lobbying state legislators to maintain funds for English language and other programs that support immigrants.  And freedom of speech, the freedom to criticize the government or society, is just about my most favorite thing.

I've seen up close how the children of immigrants struggle.  In my trade, we call them the Generation 1.5.  They are dumped into American classrooms with little preparation or support:  sink or swim.  Depending on their parents' educational level, they may find themselves on the threshold of adulthood with huge academic deficits.  They are torn between two worlds: their parents' traditional values and and the values of their modern American peers.  Their parents immigrate -- often at great sacrifice to themselves -- in order to give them the gifts of opportunity and freedom, but with those gifts come cultural loss and great inner conflict.

Immigration is not for wimps. 

I'm just saying, it's the lack of appreciation, the pissing away of the gifts, that jacks my jaw.

Sex in America

I looked at my stats page today.  I'm mainly curious where readers are coming from. 

I'm old enough to get a thrill from seeing that someone from South Korea or Romania has read a few of my words.  I'm so old that the global nature of internet communication still excites me.  When I was a kid, having a foreign pen pal was a big deal (and significant investment of time and effort).  But I digress...

I'm also curious how people manage to find personal blogs, the search terms they use to get there.

One intrepid soul had come to me via "sex in america."  Holy-moly, the mind reels at how many sites he had hit with that entry!

Although I hope he found what he was looking for, I kind of doubt it...

Another Response to Matt Forney's Rape "Satires"

Dear Matt,

This post is in response to your recent attempts to write humorously about a topic we can all agree is loaded.  Yeah, I mean both of your rape "satires", not just the one you quickly took down and "apologized" for.

I can see you're struggling with the genre, so I thought I'd helpfully link you up to a writer you'll recognize, Lindy West, who wrote a brilliant piece about How To Tell A Rape Joke.

Oops, my bad!  I know how much you dislike feedback from women females on any subject whatsoever (especially if the subject is women females themselves), so let me link you instead to a male masculine comic you might relate too.  Like you, Louis CK is bald, pale, pudgy, and has built a stellar career on charting his trouble with girls.
   
Louis CK has done several bits concerning rape but this one is my personal favorite.  (In case you don't "get it," the "butt" of the joke here is the girl and / or rape culture itself -- yet women find it as funny as men do.)

Enjoy! 

La Strega

MGTOW, or My Uncle, the Misogynist

I don't usually think of putting a trigger warning on one of my posts, but I will alert anyone who is reading that this post involves incest and sexual abuse (not of a child).

This year my mother's younger brother died.  Aside from my sisters, he was the last remaining member of my immediate family. 

Although my sisters and I were not indifferent to his passing, no one shed a tear.

He died alone, in his late seventies, in a nursing home.  He had been failing for several months.  A social worker handled his final arrangements.  There was no funeral; no one would have attended, anyway.

How did this happen?

Once I adored my only uncle.  Every other Christmas, he swept into our lives from exotic locales: Korea, Iran, Thailand, Turkey.  He worked as a technician for military contractors like Litton.  He seemed to me to be larger than life (and at 6'4" 300#, was an indisputably powerful presence).  When I was a child, he was the only male who showed me physical affection.  "Don't pick her up Ken!" my mother would cry.  "She's heavier than she looks!"  But clinging to my uncle's thick neck, fragrant with aftershave, I was as light as a baby monkey.  He bought me Lincoln Logs; he laughed at my antics.  My sisters and I vied for his attention, but I was always secretly convinced that he loved me the best of all.  I had every reason to believe that my uncle would always be the #1 Guy in My Life.

Time passed.  My sisters and I entered adolescence.  Suddenly our uncle didn't love us so much.  He had a way of scrutinizing my developing body with a hypercritical eye.  He warned me darkly of the dangers of becoming so fat that no man would ever want me.  He no longer had any interest in what I was studying or reading or doing.  When we did engage in conversation, he steered it toward sexuality: his own and mine.  He regaled me with stories of his adventures in third world brothels, of the sexual peccadilloes of his many girlfriends, his own sexual preferences, and all the perils and pleasures of being a randy globe-trotting bachelor. 

Of course, a part of me was fascinated and flattered that an adult would make me such a confidante, but part of me was increasingly uncomfortable with him.  As a 14 year old in the 1970s, I knew nothing about "appropriate boundaries."  That concept had not yet been coined.  I dealt with my internal conflict by mostly avoiding him.  From a safe distance, I could still "love" and admire him

While I was teaching in Tehran, my uncle popped in unexpectedly from Amman.  While using the toilet, he glimpsed my diaphragm drying on the edge of sink, and let me know in no uncertain terms how "disgusting" he had found the sight.  Deeply shamed, I explained that, had I known he was visiting, I certainly would have hidden it from view.  My apology hardly mollified him.  Apparently, it wasn't the sight of a diaphragm per se that upset him, but the fact that it was my diaphragm.  I was perplexed by this.   

Clearly, my uncle enjoyed sharing the details of his own sexual adventures with me.  Why was he distressed by evidence that I was sexually active myself?  Did I not at least get credit for being sexually responsible?

While I was doing a Fulbright in Italy in my twenties, my uncle visited me from Germany.  He offered to take me to the Riviera for three days.  As we checked into the hotel our first night, I found he had reserved a "matrimoniale".  He was visibly annoyed when I balked at this arrangement.  When he complained that I was taking advantage of his generosity by insisting on separate beds, I paid for a separate room.

Later, I met my uncle at the pool, where he coolly appraised my swimsuit-clad body.  "You're one of those fat women who actually looks better without her clothes on,"  he opined.  I dived into the water to escape my embarrassment.  Later, he came over to the pool where I was idly dangling my legs.  He sat down beside me, laid a ham-sized hand on my knee, and invited me to give him a massage before dinner.  As he insinuated his hand between my thighs, it was clear that "massage" was code for something more intimate.

I stammered something along the lines that what he was proposing sounded a lot like "incest."  The very word stuck in my mouth like a clod of filth, but my uncle was unfazed.

Indeed, he proceeded to instruct me that incest was nothing new, nor anything necessarily immoral.  After all, the Pope had routinely given 17th century Spanish kings dispensation to marry their nieces.  (I didn't think at the time of pointing out that our family had been neither ruling class nor Catholic for at least 300 years. All I could think of was Sex with Uncle Kenny = eeewwww.)

The weekend went down hill from there.  Needless to say, I couldn't wait to get home.  Bidding my uncle arrivederci at the train station, I urged him to get psychological help to deal with his issues.  I mean, that's actually how I put it, and I said it with great kindness because I mostly wasn't angry; I mostly felt sorry for him; I mostly thought he was just a very, very lonely man with "issues" (possibly stemming from abuse my his mother / my grandmother).  I suppose I thought that my familial duty was to steer him into therapy so that he could learn to have intimate relationships with women who weren't prostitutes (or nieces).

My uncle looked me in the eye rather tenderly for a moment while i was earnestly imploring him.  "You know, you remind me so much of your mother..."  The implication was that it was not me he lusted for, but instead his sister / my mother. 

"Anyway," he suddenly turned away dismissively, his face hardening, "You're too old for me now."  (I was 25.)

I never shared these experiences with my mother.  I didn't trust she would believe me, and I didn't want to poison his relationship with the only person he really loved.

Fast forward ten years later: I accidentally saw my uncle while visiting my mother.  We got into a heated dinner table conversation about domestic violence.  When I declared, "There's no excuse for a man to hit a woman," my uncle flew into a rage.  He reared up, chair clattering across the floor, and raised his huge, clenched fists.  Towering over me, eyes bulging with fury, he bellowed, "Some women NEED beating!  Because SOME women just don't know when --  to -- SHUT UP!"  And then -- and this is the worst part -- he opened his mouth and began flapping his tongue in a grotesque caricature of a nagging woman.

My jaw tingled in apprehension of the shattering blow it was about to receive.  

I fled, barricading myself into my mother's bedroom, and refused to emerge until my uncle had left. Weeks later, I sent him a note, telling him our relationship was "over" until he had gotten "help" for his "anger management."

That was the last time I ever spoke to my uncle in person.  We occasionally exchanged words when I picked up the phone at my mother's house. I was cold but civil, while he nattered on, seemingly oblivious to the chill.

When I heard Uncle Kenny was undergoing a triple bypass, I wondered if I shouldn't patch things up between us; let bygones be bygones.  I didn't want to be left holding the grudge if he died.

However, while I was mulling thusly, my mother mentioned casually-in-passing that my uncle had long been disparaging my character to anyone who listened, i.e., had accused me of being "a slut" who had actually come on to him, and, apparently, had slept with half the Iranian Air Force as well.  Aside from the obvious disturbing question of What kind of mother allows her daughter to be so slandered?, I was mortified to realize that extended family members, many of whom hadn't seen me since I was a child, had been hearing this vile stuff about me for years.  

In the end, I did call my uncle a few weeks before he died.  I wanted to remind him that he had been loved once, if only by a little girl that no longer existed.  He wasn't moved by this gesture.  "I'm not leaving you a dime," he croaked faintly in a voice I could hardly recognize.  "I know, I know," I assured him. "It doesn't matter."  

His will left his entire estate (or at least what could be traced and pieced together) to a Korean bar girl who'd had the misfortune of suffering a debilitating aneurysm in his apartment twenty years before. The social worker did the legwork of locating the girl's family in Seoul; I'm sure they were happy for the windfall.  I was just grateful it hadn't gone to the NRA.

My partner might admonish me for speaking ill of the dead here, but my rejoinder is this:  My uncle cannot read these words, and even if he could, he wouldn't suffer because he would not feel a jot of remorse.  

Anyway, he had an entire lifetime to try to understand and be understood, to love and be loved.  It was his choice to live, and to hate, and to die alone, the same choice being made right now by all those MGTOW.