The other day Roosh posted one of the high-pitched wails that periodically rend the manosphere. In “You Did This To Me” he addresses “you” – women in general – and lays out his case. “You made me a selfish asshole.” “You made me emotionally cold.” “You made me leave America.” Roosh provides a seemingly endless list of reasons why he no longer likes himself, laying each one at the door of all women.
I’m not sure exactly which women he imagines lecturing, but I see him scolding Margaret Thatcher, Ruth Buzzi, and that girl from Glee with Down Syndrome. Weird.
Anyway, the point is that Roosh has found power in his powerlessness and self-loathing. So have others, since these sorts of posts are a regular feature on other manosphere blogs. The comments are usually a series of amens. Amen! We have become horrible people! Because women are all the same!
But is it all because of women? Look at Roosh’s book Day Bang, where he describes his day game. One part, on openers, says:
The style of opener you’re going to use is what I call the elderly opener. I learned it from frequenting a coffee shop that was located a block away from a senior citizen community. I went to this “old people’s” coffee shop every day for a year, always picking a spot near the door where everyone had to walk by. Without fail, I was approached at least twice a day by men and women in their 70s, 80, and a handful in their 90s.
The amazing thing wasn’t that these old people approached me, but that they all used the exact same line.
The line was “Excuse me, is that a good laptop?” And Roosh is genuinely amazed at how these elderly people somehow know how to “open on a prop,” then drop comments that lead the chat the way they want it to go. He wonders: “Was there a bulletin posted in their senior clubhouse on how to have conversations with young people?” Where were these elderly people getting their game?
People outside the Game community have a word for this sort of interaction. They call it a conversation.
Let that sink in.
Roosh is trying to teach people scripts for performing basic human conversations.
Game is full of scripts, of course (see: Mystery Method). But it turns out that Game is not the only context in which people learn such scripts. Here’s a description from one approach:
While language is central to all socially-based communication, it is often ineffective if the first three steps are not in place. For example, if a student comes up to tell you all the details about the Titanic and talks endlessly without considering what you are thinking and approaches with awkward physical presence and without establishing eye contact, the listener cannot help but experience a weird thought about the communicator even if his information may be interesting to listen to, In fact, the lack of the speaker’s adjustment based on the perceived needs of the listener makes this a failed attempt at conversing. When communicating, language users must consider and possibly adjust their message based on the thoughts, feelings, prior knowledge, experiences, intentions, and needs of their communicative partner. Each partner has to work to regulate his or her language to meet the needs of the listener while also conveying the message that helps to add his or her own thoughts to the interaction. Effective social communication requires students to ask questions about other people, produce supportive responses, and add their own thoughts by connecting their experiences or thoughts to what other people are saying. Thus, students must have a strong language system to be able to carry out this complex dialogue.
This is from an approach to teaching basic communication and social skills to children with Asperger’s and autism spectrum disorders. Because these children, unfortunately, have a hard time carrying on the conversations that seem to come so naturally to their peers. They have to be scaffolded – really, scripted – in order to carry on such conversations. Without this scaffolding, such conversations are a mystery – which, I suppose, makes this training their very own Mystery Method.
In fact, this training handles issues similar to Game. Here’s how you approach. Here’s how you establish eye contact and body language. Here’s how you perceive the listener’s needs and adjust to match. Here’s how you lead a conversation. Here’s how you drop comments that lead the chat the way you want it to go, like one of Roosh’s elderly people do, even without a secret bulletin tacked to the wall of their senior clubhouse.
The thing is that people with social learning deficits don’t know that they’re missing social cues. They seem normal to themselves. So they draw the obvious conclusion:
Children with high functioning autism or Asperger’s Syndrome develop a tendency of distrust towards others, because of social failures and negative social experiences over time, which can lead to self-isolation and social phobia. This behavioral reaction can be viewed as “rude” by others, and often people on the spectrum struggle to understand why they are not liked or frequently feel rejected.
Hey, that’s interesting. In “You Did This to Me,” Roosh talks about developing distrust towards others (women) because of his social failures and negative social experiences over time. He talks about struggling to understand why he was not liked and how he frequently felt rejected. Eerie.
One other thing. His solution involves a complete lack of perspective-taking: all women think the same way, act the same way, respond to the same stimuli. Even Maggie Thatcher, Ruth Buzzi, and the girl from Glee.
Game sounds a hell of a lot like do-it-yourself speech therapy, minus the perspective-taking.
malachi 