The Other McCain

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Check Me Here, @RooshV: Is Your Sexuality ‘Ugly … Dangerous … Brutal’?

Posted on | November 27, 2017 | 3 Comments

 

Readers may or may not be familiar with Daryush Valizadeh, the notorious pickup artist (PUA) known as @RooshV. He became the World’s Most Famous Misogynist in the wake of the Isla Vista Massacre because The Creepy Little Weirdo who committed that atrocity had frequented some PUA forums. This was a dishonest guilt-by-association smear. Maybe you would call Roosh a lady killer, but he’s not that kind of lady killer. At any rate, I name-checked Roosh in the headline because I’d like to get his reaction to a New York Times column by Stephen Marche:

After weeks of continuously unfolding abuse scandals, men have become, quite literally, unbelievable. What any given man might say about gender politics and how he treats women are separate and unrelated phenomena. Liberal or conservative, feminist or chauvinist, woke or benighted, young or old, found on Fox News or in The New Republic, a man’s stated opinions have next to no relationship to behavior.
Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about most: the nature of men in general. This time the accusations aren’t against some freak geography teacher, some frat running amok in a Southern college town. They’re against men of all different varieties, in different industries, with different sensibilities, bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of their sexuality.
Men arrive at this moment of reckoning woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience. Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.
For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. . . .

 

(Via Memeorandum.) Is this masochistic self-flagellation necessary? Is it really true that, because of what we’ve learned about Weinstein, et al., men are now “forced” to admit that their sexuality is “ugly and dangerous”? Are all men perpetrators of “implicit brutality”?

Certainly, I disagree, and I think Roosh’s opinion is relevant here. As a conservative Christian, I cannot be accused of condoning PUA activity, but if you’re willing to set aside your moral disapproval of promiscuity, PUA discourse offers valuable insight for understanding sexual behavior in the age of casual hookups, “friends with benefits,” etc.

If a young man is an amoral hedonist, how can he maximize his opportunities for sexual pleasure? This is what PUA discourse is about. As a researcher, it is interesting to take a break from my deep exploration of radical feminism and see what “Red Pill” guys are saying. Radical feminists are man-haters whose doctrine is anti-heterosexual, per se. Thus PUA discourse — the point of which is, “How can guys get laid?” — is 180-degrees opposite of feminism, the point of which is that it wrong for men to get laid. (“PIV is always rape, OK?”)

What is impossible for me to understand is how someone like Stephen Marche — married, a father of two, and presumably heterosexual — can describe his own sexuality as one of “implicit brutality,” except that he has internalized the anti-male worldview of radical feminism. It is true that some men are bad all the time (Harvey Weinstein) and perhaps every man has his bad moments. However, it is not true that all men are bad all the time, which is what feminists believe. One notices that feminists usually insert qualifiers or disclaimers into their anti-male rhetoric, so as to give themselves plausible deniability when someone accuses them of being the man-hating monsters they actually are. Yet anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that Jessica Valenti (to use one prominent example) is profoundly convinced that all men are inferior to her. Valenti takes delight in scornfully mocking men. The whole point of Valenti’s book Sex Object was to humiliate her Beta male husband by publicly boasting about her premarital sex life with various Alphas.

 

If all women were as wicked as Jessica Valenti, it would be difficult to disagree with the misogynistic attitudes typically expressed by PUAs. Feminists take a perverse pride in treating men badly. They deride men as “clueless” and brag about their ability to reduce men to tears, and take especial pleasure in describing the “unwanted advances” of men they don’t find attractive. Of course, it is very difficult for a man to know whether his sexual interest in a woman is reciprocated until he expresses this interest in some overt way. Yet feminists enjoy calling men “creeps” for daring to indicate interest in them, and even claim to be “victimized” by the most innocent gestures of flirtation. In an earlier era, a college boy had to be able to cope with rejection if a girl turned him down, but that emotional pain was a minor consideration compared to what boys face now that feminists have taken over universities. Nowadays, many boys are afraid even to speak to a girl on campus, lest they be accused of “harassment” and subjected to punishment in a Title IX kangaroo court.

Feminism presents men with two options:

  1. Damned if you do;
    and
  2. Damned if you don’t.

Everything men say or do is wrong, according to feminists, who never met a man they couldn’t find a reason to hate. This is why my advice to young men is, “Never talk to a feminist.” But I digress . . .

Daryush Valizadeh would never denounce himself for being a heterosexual male the way Stephen Marche did. Say what you will about PUAs, but from Roosh’s perspective, there is no shame in his game, i.e., figuring out what it takes to “score,” and then doing it successfully.

One of my favorite moments of last year was when “genderqueer” feminist Laurie Penny went to an event at the RNC and found herself in the same room with the notorious PUA. Penny was forced to admit that “Roosh is tall and well-built and actually rather good-looking.”

This ought to tell us something about why Stephen Marche is wrong to denounce the “implicit brutality” of male sexuality. Why do women invariably prefer tall, muscular guys? That even a Third-Wave genderqueer like Penny was unable to deny Valizadeh’s attractiveness (you know he could have had her, if he had really wanted her) is evidence that there is something in women’s nature that likes such “brutality.”

Oh, sure, feminists say they want “sensitive” guys, but you don’t see them chasing after 5-foot-4 nerds, do you? Of course not. They want the tall, swarthy guy with broad shoulders and thick biceps — physically overpowering — and maybe some “brutality” isn’t necessarily bad.

Roosh knows there is a huge difference between what women actually want and what feminists say women want. This was what was revealed, after all, in reading between the lines of Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object. There was Jack, the 20-year-old bodybuilder she slept with when she was 16: “the most beautiful guy I had seen up close . . . all muscles and smiles . . . six foot three and chiseled.” And there was well-hung Kyle, her abusive boyfriend at Tulane. Tall guys with big muscles and big penises — even a feminist enjoys that kind of “brutality.”

None of those guys wanted to marry her, of course, and so she eventually married a Harvard nerd five years younger than her, and hates him:

Every time I see a dirty cup on the kitchen counter, my face gets red. The level of disrespect feels . . . as if Andrew has hopped on the counter, pulled down his pants, and taken a sh– there for me to clean up. My husband is lovely. He is a feminist. . . .
He tells me to leave the cups on the counter and the socks on the floor. He’ll get to them eventually. But I can’t. I don’t believe him. And I can’t write in a house where something is wrong.?. . .
Andrew and I have been going to couple’s therapy, both for my anxiety and because Andrew is so mad at the space the anxiety takes up in our relationship. Our default mood is low-level annoyance toward each other with a propensity to turn into full-blown rage at the smallest thing. . . .
I feel like I might hate him and I suspect he feels the same.

You see? There’s no winning this game. Valenti praises her husband as “lovely . . . a feminist,” even while admitting she hates him. No man’s behavior is ever acceptable by feminist standards. Whatever the feminist is unhappy about, it is never her fault. Always, men are to blame, either generally (“the patriarchy”) or specifically (Jessica Valenti’s husband).

What does Roosh think of this? It would be interesting to see his take on Stephen Marche’s column, and I hope to see his reaction soon.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

3 Responses to “Check Me Here, @RooshV: Is Your Sexuality ‘Ugly … Dangerous … Brutal’?”

  1. Pickup Artistry | Rotten Chestnuts
    November 28th, 2017 @ 8:59 am

    […] The Other McCain, a New York Times soyboy discussing “the implicit brutality of male […]

  2. The unexamined repressive brutality of male feminists. | Welcome to my Playpen
    November 29th, 2017 @ 10:57 am

    […] McCain writes about a column in The New York Times that is chock full of male feminist angst. All of these […]

  3. From whence the anger? | White Sun of the Desert
    December 7th, 2017 @ 4:05 am

    […] to say all third-wave feminists are single, but a lot of them seem to despise their partners (e.g. Jessica Valenti) or show signs (e.g. Laurie Penny, and the woman in the tweet above) of being such unpleasant […]