Southern Poverty Law Center Lists 'Roosh V' On Misogyny Report

D.C. Blogger Makes Misogyny Watch List

WASHINGTON -- When Washington City Paper caught up with Roosh Vörek -- Roosh V on the Internet -- in 2008, he was 29 years old, living in his dad's basement in Silver Spring. The local blogger once better known as DC Bachelor claimed to be having a lot of sex with women who eat hummus.

Roosh V had self-published one guide to getting laid, called "Bang" -- a book for men who needed help, a lot of help, getting women to sleep with them. He was about to move to Brazil, where, he told City Paper, the girls are "warmer. They're more sensual. They don't expect you to do anything but show up."

In the years since, Roosh self-published a slew of other "Bang Guides," which seem like the sorts of books Barney Stinson would write if he weren't a fictional character. Many of the books relay advice on how to get women of various nationalities to sleep with men lacking in natural charisma. They are decently reviewed on Amazon.com.

According to his website, Roosh is currently abroad again, living in "the Soviet Union," where he appears to be teaching English -- and liking it! -- while learning Russian faster than he expected he would.

Roosh V is also now under the watch of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a long-established civil rights organization that monitors and litigates against hate groups and extremists in the United States.

SPLC issues a quarterly "Intelligence Report" -- a magazine detailing its latest research. Its spring 2012 issue is titled "The Year in Hate and Extremism 2011" and includes information on the explosive growth of the radical right, an animal rights activist's call for violence, and Roosh V.

"Misogyny: The Sites" lists Roosh V as a member of the "manosphere," described as in the piece as "websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general."

Here's SPLC's description of who Roosh V is and what he does (WARNING: quote contains offensive language):

Roosh Vörek is a Maryland-raised PUA ("pick up artist") whose specialty is sex with foreign women; his blog is a sales vehicle for his books like Bang: The Pick Up Bible and Bang Iceland: How to Sleep With Icelandic Women in Iceland, which one Icelandic feminist group described as a "rape guide." Vörek likes to talk about his many "notches" (seductions) and such things as "American cunts who I want to hate fuck." He adds: "I'll be the first to admit that many of my bangs in the United States were hate fucks. The masculine attitude and lack of care these women put into their style or hair irritated me, so I made it a point to fuck them and never call again."

Left out of the SPLC's write-up: Roosh also maintains a very active forum, on which his many acolytes talk about how to choke a woman, how great it would be if Roosh started a book club and "logical reasons" not to get married.

Does Roosh V belong in a publication chronicling the activities of hate groups and extremists? On Twitter, some objected to Roosh's inclusion not because the SPLC shouldn't be monitoring the "manosphere" or because Roosh shouldn't be monitored, but because he'd been involved with far more hateful adventures than the ones SPLC chose to describe, like a website devoted to keeping track of women who have purportedly made false rape claims.

Reason's Mike Riggs has a very different take. On the magazine's Hit & Run blog, Riggs writes, sarcastically, that it is "truly sublime" that the SPLC is now reporting on pick-up artists -- PUAs -- like Roosh V.

On Twitter, Riggs writes that he has "zero interest in supporting the SPLC's shoddy work, which extends beyond PUA." He also writes that he is troubled by the potential damage to the PUA's reputation: "I challenged the inclusion of Roosh, who's now needlessly on the radar of every cop who reads that report."

Writing about his inclusion in the SPLC's manosphere report on his site's forum, Roosh V sounds like an end-of-times preacher witnessing the apocalypse:

Game has been lumped in with hate groups.

Something I wrote a few months ago:

"Anything you do that increases your ability to be sexually successful while decreasing your dependence on dating American women will result in them trying to isolate and disparage you."

On Twitter, Mr. Game himself sounds less like a prophet, and not much like an extremist. He hasn't mentioned being concerned about law enforcement taking an interest him, either -- though, on his forum, he does say that if he'd known that a civil rights group would one day put him on a hate list, "I would have stayed anonymous. Too late now. I will be sacrificed.."

Mostly, Roosh V just sounds like one of his own would-be customers -- one who's not looking forward to his next call home.

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