The Washington Post keeps getting more interesting. This article is pretty fair:
According to his website, Valizadeh grew up in Maryland and attended the state’s flagship university, where he struggled with women. “I was completely incapable of talking to women and creating a sexual vibe that made them want to sleep with me,” he wrote.
After graduation, he took a job as an “industrial microbiologist” in the District, where he “stumbled on an underground ‘game’ community” that taught him to approach women like a math problem, trying out pickup lines and strategies like formulas until one worked.
“Like a kid in a candy store I read everything I could get my hands on and started communicating with guys who had problems with women like I did,” he wrote. “The first thing I read was that skill with women can be learned, a concept that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me at the time. I thought you were either born with the ability to sleep with beautiful women or doomed to having an unhappy sex life until your last days.”
Valizadeh eventually quit his job to write a book called “Bang,” an aptly titled “textbook for picking up girls and getting laid.” He then spent six months traveling South America and trying out his theories, memorialized in another book. Since then, he has written more than a dozen books, often about how to have sex with women in various countries.
Many of Valizadeh’s tips to readers, however, strike his critics as sexist, offensive, outdated and homophobic.
“A woman’s value significantly depends on her fertility and beauty,” he lists as a tenet of neo-masculinism. “A man’s value significantly depends on his resources, intellect, and character.”
The name of one of his websites, “Return of Kings,” sums up much of the neo-masculinist philosophy.
“Men will opt out of monogamy and reproduction if there are no incentives to engage in them,” he argues. “Past traditions and rituals that evolved alongside humanity served a net benefit to the family unit.”
Valizadeh is simultaneously arch-conservative (“Socialism, feminism, cultural Marxism, and social justice warriorism aim to destroy the family unit, decrease the fertility rate, and impoverish the state through large welfare entitlements”) and aggressively promiscuous, bragging about being in the “top one percent” of men in terms of the number of women he has bedded.
Bizarrely, he blames this behavior on women and women’s liberation.
“Elimination of traditional sex roles and the promotion of unlimited mating choice in women unleashes their promiscuity and other negative behaviors that block family formation,” he wrote.
Many of these arguments make Valizadeh unpopular, but it is a specific piece of his that has spurred several countries to try to consider banning him altogether.
That piece, an article titled “How To Stop Rape,” was published online a year ago. It begins by suggesting that the cause of most rapes is not men — “I don’t know of a single man entering adulthood who thought that rape was good and had to be manually taught it was bad” — but rather women.
“I saw women wholly unconcerned with their own safety and the character of men they developed intimate relationships with,” Valizadeh wrote. “I saw women who voluntarily numbed themselves with alcohol and other drugs in social settings before letting the direction of the night’s wind determine who they would follow into a private room. I saw women who, once feeling awkward, sad, or guilty for a sexual encounter they didn’t fully remember, call upon an authority figure to resolve the problem by locking up her previous night’s lover in prison or ejecting him from school.
“By attempting to teach men not to rape, what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions,” he continued. “It was obvious to me that the advice of our esteemed establishment writers and critics wasn’t stopping the problem, and since rape was already on the law books with severe penalties, additional laws or flyers posted on dormitory doors won’t stop this rape culture either.
“I thought about this problem and am sure I have the solution: make rape legal if done on private property,” Valizadeh wrote. “I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds.
“… If rape becomes legal under my proposal, a girl will protect her body in the same manner that she protects her purse and smartphone,” he continued. “If rape becomes legal, a girl will not enter an impaired state of mind where she can’t resist being dragged off to a bedroom with a man who she is unsure of — she’ll scream, yell, or kick at his attempt while bystanders are still around. If rape becomes legal, she will never be unchaperoned with a man she doesn’t want to sleep with. After several months of advertising this law throughout the land, rape would be virtually eliminated on the first day it is applied.”
Over the past year, Valizadeh has said several times that his make-rape-legal argument was “satire.” And he has accused media organizations that quote the blog of lying.
Whatever his intention, the blog post has proved bitterly divisive.
“Funny how hate speech becomes satire once you are called out on it,” tweeted an account claiming to be linked to the hacker group Anonymous.
When Valizadeh announced last month that he was organizing a series of “tribal meetings” for his followers in 165 cities around the globe, his critics immediately began mobilizing opposition to the idea. As word spread of the controversial “heterosexual men only” gatherings, petitions popped up in several countries calling for the pickup artist to be banned. So far, a petition in Scotland has gathered more than 57,000 signatures. A similar petition for the United States and Canada has been signed by more than 8,000 people.
As with his most controversial blog post, it is often hard to tell when Valizadeh is being sincere in his radical views and when he is simply trolling those who disagree with him.
He originally said he would attend the meetup in the District, for instance. But when Australians began planning protests against him, he tweeted a photo of a flight itinerary with stops in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. “I just booked a flight to Australia,” he wrote. “See you somewhere there on 2/6. I’ll stay a while, see some sights.”
And when Australian officials announced they were considering banning Valizadeh, he tweeted a map of the island country with red arrows pointing to its “multiple vulnerabilities” and “weak border” and claimed he was “coming in by boat.”
Melbourne’s mayor, Robert Doyle, told local radio Wednesday that the city would charge anyone planning to attend one of Valizadeh’s meetups on city property with trespassing.
The strongest reaction, however, came from police in Des Moines, who wrote on Facebook that the meetup “may be a ruse to commit rape.”
