The Red Pill

The Bitter Files episode 3: Sexual fascism from Roosh V to Andrew Tate

This is the third episode of a monthly feature for paid subscribers titled The Bitter Files - excerpts from a book I wrote but never finished.

Read here for more information

Episode 1 - What Is a Geek?
Episode 2 - The Masculine Medicine Show
👉Episode 3 - The Red Pill
Episode 4 - Reactionaries and Apostates

I don’t often put trigger warnings on my work but this one does contain frank discussion and description of sexual abuse, violence, and rape, so please be warned.

As misogynistic as the so-called seduction community surely is (see Bitter Files episode 2), it was, at least in its outset, not a strongly ideological movement. As the name they gave to it suggests, it’s just a Game. At least that’s how they saw it.
            But behind the flamboyant exterior with the big goofy hats and feather boas there is a viscerally much darker, more purposeful, insidious, and malicious underbelly. A militantly ideological offshoot of the seduction industry that resembles something like sexual fascism. That is to say, where fascism is ordinarily properly defined as racial supremacy, propagated and united by a charismatic leader, imposed and enforced by racial violence, this version of it swaps race (mostly) for male supremacy and sexual violence.
            Men who participate in Game and similar—I hesitate to say hobbies—tend to choose and encircle a particular guru or mentor who appeals to them the most, rather than treat it as a broad form of education from an entire discipline. And for every Neil Strauss or Mystery out there hocking their own brand of masculinity snake oil there is someone like Daryush Valizadeh.
            Valizadeh, who goes by the pseudonyms Roosh V or Roosh Vörek, has led one of the most odious and harmful careers in seduction, and the only thing keeping him off the top of that list is his lack of outright criminality—or, at least, lack of indictment.
            His male supremacist ideology extends beyond personal belief into the sphere of the political, earnestly endorsing and campaigning for the most potent imaginable patriarchal systems that would force women by law into slavery, idolising theocratic Islamist regimes that attempt to institute something similar.

Women have had personal freedoms for less than a century. For the bulk of human history, their behavior was significantly controlled or subject to approval through mechanisms of tribe, family, church, law, or stiff cultural precepts. It was correctly assumed that a woman was unable to make moral, ethical, and wise decisions concerning her life and those around her. She was not allowed to study any trivial topic she wanted, sleep with any man who caught her fancy, or uproot herself and travel the world because she wanted to “find herself.”

You can see this level of control today in many Muslim countries, where expectations are placed on women from a young age to submit to men, reproduce (if biologically able), follow God’s word, and serve the good of society by employing her feminine nature instead of competing directly against men on the labor market due to penis envy or feelings of personal inferiority.¹

At the height of his success, Roosh ran at least three websites dedicated to the seduction of women and blogging on his philosophies regarding their subjugation. It’s as uncompromising and explicit as anything you will find anywhere.
            Not much is known of Roosh’s early life that he doesn’t willingly share, and in so far as he can be regarded a reliable narrator at all, you can’t really point to anything that would help explain the frightening level of hatred he feels toward women. An early travel memoir, 2009’s A Dead Bat in Paraguay, is actually quite a readable book—at times tender and sympathetic, and although the offhand way in which he objectifies women throughout makes him an offputting character, it says nothing of prescriptive sexual politics.²
            Roosh, according to Roosh, had a good and mutually respectable relationship with his mother and sister. His household may have been Muslim (his mother is Turkish Armenian, his father Iranian) but it doesn’t appear to have been strict and may not even have been practicing (a later memoir from 2016 contains details about how he used to deliberately lie to the media about having been raised Muslim as he imagined it would create some kind of cognitive dissonance in journalists who were afraid to criticise Islam).³
            In his early life he was directionless in ambition but took to science only in so far as working as a microbiologist’s lab assistant. He strongly hated working and had no ethic for it. In the beginning he was a desperate introvert who couldn’t speak to women, and stumbled into Pick Up Artistry by chance while dicking around on the internet. According to Roosh, it appealed to him in the same way that science did:

My new strategy was the opposite of what I used to do, and after two years and a couple hundred approaches, I was getting laid. I no longer saw meeting a girl as this magical, chance-driven act. Instead it was a mechanical process that could be explained on the molecular level. I know I overcompensated, but I didn’t mind because I was finally getting what I wanted.[2]

As a memoir, A Dead Bat in Paraguay doesn’t even reach the levels of noxiousness you would find in the public accounts of more mainstream “dudebro” career womanisers like Tucker Max. It’s closer in tone even to Richard Feynman’s dabbling in seduction than it is to Roosh’s own work from several years later. Roosh weaves a travel adventure that isn’t too out of place in the mainstream genre, though punctuated by experiences with trying and not always succeeding to seduce women—at one point going under the wing of a Canadian seducer who he and his travel buddies ominously nicknamed Predator.
            There is even a through-line plot that involves Roosh, apparently sincerely, falling in love.
            In any case, something appears to have happened in Roosh’s life or maybe just his brain alone sometime between 2009’s tender travel memoir and sometime around 2012 when he became the wretch that the world knows as Roosh V. Something that he and others like him would repeatedly refer to as “swallowing the red pill.”

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After the jump: Dark Enlightenment, the Black Pill, and the pipeline to violence. Upgrade to a paid subscription to read the rest of this and all the other episodes of The Bitter Files.