http://www.the-spearhead.com/2013/05/15/...-volume-1/
90 Essays from a Black Knight: A Review of The Best of Roosh, Volume 1
by Featured Guest on May 15, 2013
By The Theorist
Why Washington, D.C. produced three of the greatest game theorists in the English-speaking world is something of a mystery. Certainly the US capital has more than its fair share of crime, corruption, and careerist women. Rocky soil may make for hardy plants. Then again, there are no game bloggers of note hailing from the Bakken oilfields. Though establishing a conclusive explanation may be impossible, it is, however, an undeniable fact that out of the primordial slime of the DC dating scene came three lions of the manosphere: Virgle Kent, Roissy, and Roosh Vorek.
Roissy is the heart of the manosphere. VK is one of its funniest storytellers. But Roosh Vorek is the man who wrote Bang, a book released six years ago that still occupies the upper rungs of its Amazon category, ahead of the Karma Sutra. Roosh is the guy who quit his job, ground his way through South America, barnstormed his way through Europe, and incited the hatred of right-“thinking” people on three continents. His plain, matte-black, self-published pickup tomes are lying around male dorm rooms across America. Like him or not, he is the public face of game 2.0.
From 2006-2013, Roosh wrote 1,793 blog posts, most of them around 500 words each. That’s 900,000 words, or around eleven standard-length novels. He’s distilled that down to a single collection: The Best of Roosh: Vol 1. It’s a comprehensive look inside the head of Roosh, and by proxy, the minds of the first generation of men to come of age in the context of a mature manosphere.
The collection covers 10 topics: Pre-Game, Approaching, Game, Dating, Sex, Life, America, Culture, Travel, and the author himself. But this is not a book about game per se. It’s a book about how and why one man developed his own code for navigating the mendacity and misandry of the male role in today’s declining West.
There’s a sense of rage and loss in Roosh’s writing; a kind of social irredentism. Western Man built a civilization which provides more prosperity for more human beings than any method of social organization in the history of the world, but now that man is derided as “boring,” “colorless,” his achievements meaningless in an age where the highest ability a man can possess is the ability to entertain others. The most important commodity in the world, sexual access, is now governed solely by the societally-irrelevant capacity for clever wordplay. It’s clear from the text that much of Roosh’s disillusionment stems from this simple fact.
To read Roosh’s essays can be depressing. The man is a realist. There is no masculinized version of “having it all.” The men who can live in the public eye and receive society’s respect while exercising their sexuality are limited to a tiny proportion of apex alpha males: sports stars, actors, comedians, artists. Roosh does not pretend to offer that. To even have a coin-flip chance of achieving the bourgeois respectability that was the birthright of our grandfathers involves sacrifice beyond what my generation is willing to bear. Roosh understands this, and regrets it in equal measure. “You did this to me,” he writes. “You are a corrupted and damaged female, and have tried your damnedest to bring me down to your level.”
While I can’t quibble with Roosh’s philosophy, his prose style could use some work. These are blog posts, and though classics like “You Did This To Me,” “Everything I Know About Women,” “What It Feels Like to Be a Hot Girl,” and “I’m Ready to Man Up,” are undeniably worth reading, the blog style wears on you after a while. There isn’t much in the way of humor, either, but that’s okay — I didn’t read it for comedy purposes, or snazzy prose. I read the collection because I wanted to partake in the wisdom of one very cold player indeed.
Ultimately, Roosh, like everyone in the manosphere, is concerned with finding the right path for his own masculine reaction. In another era, Roosh’s enormous productive energy would have been marshaled in the service of something a little more important than getting girls, but alas, our age is our age, and the behavior of women and their minions shows no sign of changing. Perhaps the finest essay in the collection, “What is Your Project,” gets at the heart of the fundamental question of manhood. A French-Venezuelan rancher in the Andes Mountains asks Roosh what his project is. Roosh says, “To write a book.” Eighteen months later, he dropped Bang. If the old mission of marriage-family-children is dead, dead, dead, it doesn’t mean there is nothing else for us. Roosh, for all his (justified) anger and his nihilism, is living proof of that.
90 Essays from a Black Knight: A Review of The Best of Roosh, Volume 1
by Featured Guest on May 15, 2013
By The Theorist
Why Washington, D.C. produced three of the greatest game theorists in the English-speaking world is something of a mystery. Certainly the US capital has more than its fair share of crime, corruption, and careerist women. Rocky soil may make for hardy plants. Then again, there are no game bloggers of note hailing from the Bakken oilfields. Though establishing a conclusive explanation may be impossible, it is, however, an undeniable fact that out of the primordial slime of the DC dating scene came three lions of the manosphere: Virgle Kent, Roissy, and Roosh Vorek.
Roissy is the heart of the manosphere. VK is one of its funniest storytellers. But Roosh Vorek is the man who wrote Bang, a book released six years ago that still occupies the upper rungs of its Amazon category, ahead of the Karma Sutra. Roosh is the guy who quit his job, ground his way through South America, barnstormed his way through Europe, and incited the hatred of right-“thinking” people on three continents. His plain, matte-black, self-published pickup tomes are lying around male dorm rooms across America. Like him or not, he is the public face of game 2.0.
From 2006-2013, Roosh wrote 1,793 blog posts, most of them around 500 words each. That’s 900,000 words, or around eleven standard-length novels. He’s distilled that down to a single collection: The Best of Roosh: Vol 1. It’s a comprehensive look inside the head of Roosh, and by proxy, the minds of the first generation of men to come of age in the context of a mature manosphere.
The collection covers 10 topics: Pre-Game, Approaching, Game, Dating, Sex, Life, America, Culture, Travel, and the author himself. But this is not a book about game per se. It’s a book about how and why one man developed his own code for navigating the mendacity and misandry of the male role in today’s declining West.
There’s a sense of rage and loss in Roosh’s writing; a kind of social irredentism. Western Man built a civilization which provides more prosperity for more human beings than any method of social organization in the history of the world, but now that man is derided as “boring,” “colorless,” his achievements meaningless in an age where the highest ability a man can possess is the ability to entertain others. The most important commodity in the world, sexual access, is now governed solely by the societally-irrelevant capacity for clever wordplay. It’s clear from the text that much of Roosh’s disillusionment stems from this simple fact.
To read Roosh’s essays can be depressing. The man is a realist. There is no masculinized version of “having it all.” The men who can live in the public eye and receive society’s respect while exercising their sexuality are limited to a tiny proportion of apex alpha males: sports stars, actors, comedians, artists. Roosh does not pretend to offer that. To even have a coin-flip chance of achieving the bourgeois respectability that was the birthright of our grandfathers involves sacrifice beyond what my generation is willing to bear. Roosh understands this, and regrets it in equal measure. “You did this to me,” he writes. “You are a corrupted and damaged female, and have tried your damnedest to bring me down to your level.”
While I can’t quibble with Roosh’s philosophy, his prose style could use some work. These are blog posts, and though classics like “You Did This To Me,” “Everything I Know About Women,” “What It Feels Like to Be a Hot Girl,” and “I’m Ready to Man Up,” are undeniably worth reading, the blog style wears on you after a while. There isn’t much in the way of humor, either, but that’s okay — I didn’t read it for comedy purposes, or snazzy prose. I read the collection because I wanted to partake in the wisdom of one very cold player indeed.
Ultimately, Roosh, like everyone in the manosphere, is concerned with finding the right path for his own masculine reaction. In another era, Roosh’s enormous productive energy would have been marshaled in the service of something a little more important than getting girls, but alas, our age is our age, and the behavior of women and their minions shows no sign of changing. Perhaps the finest essay in the collection, “What is Your Project,” gets at the heart of the fundamental question of manhood. A French-Venezuelan rancher in the Andes Mountains asks Roosh what his project is. Roosh says, “To write a book.” Eighteen months later, he dropped Bang. If the old mission of marriage-family-children is dead, dead, dead, it doesn’t mean there is nothing else for us. Roosh, for all his (justified) anger and his nihilism, is living proof of that.
"Feminism is a trade union for ugly women"- Peregrine