S1E9: American Pilgrim by Roosh V
The manosphere is getting mainstream attention right now. Louis Theroux did a recent expose on it, as did the New York Times. Clavicular keeps jestermaxing, and Sneako is taking his rizz to meta levels by path-mapping the entire social hierarchy in real-time. Or something. I don’t know. I feel old.
And what better way to feel even older, and even more worried about the male youth of today, than by turning to one of the founding thinkers of the manosphere, Roosh V; a man who wrote blogs when blogs mattered. A man who wrote shitty books when books mattered. A man who decoded men by pretending to decode women.
Yes, this week the PSBC takes on the man-ocentric male-ocracy by tackling Roosh V’s book “American Pilgrim.”
As a typical pick-up-artist (PUA), Roosh V. peaked in first-term Obama. We have a long history with this guy; we reviewed his 2011 book “Day Bang,” (how to pick up women during the day) and his 2014 book “Poosy Paradise” (yes, that is how he spells it), more than 10 years ago. Between those two books, he wrote around a dozen more about sex tourism and other depressing ways to have sex.
Roosh has never given good advice. If you bought his delisted PUA books, you might find tips like hiding in a bush until a woman walks past, seating yourself closest to the toilet at a café so women are guaranteed to walk past when they need to shit, or trying to get into a woman’s house by asking to use her bathroom, and if she says no, asking which alley you should piss in (again; he actually recommends this).
But Roosh has seen the error of his ways, and he has converted to Christianity. In this book, he recounts his journey, preaching the gospel to his few remaining fans, alienating them in the process. He doesn’t discuss religion in any serious way, but certainly does use it as a reason to hate just about everyone, while still bragging about the sexual conquests of the past, as he tries to have his poosy and… Well, you get the idea.
It’s hard to take Roosh at his word about anything. Not because he’s a master manipulator, but because he’s both insincere and bad with words. In American Pilgrim, he adopts a persona and goes town-to-town like a 12-year-old at Halloween; tiresomely edgy, a bit old for it, and unwelcome.
There’s very little about religion in the book. Roosh instead uses religion to reinforce more-or-less the same view he had on the world as a PUA, except now he doesn’t have sex. Think about that for a minute – all the lonely, lashing, awkward viewpoints of a pick-up-artist, except he doesn’t even have bad sex anymore.
It is honestly pretty sad. At 400+ pages, you can sense Roosh’s focus on writing something long. By the 15th time he’s complained about “gay flags” or homeless in libraries in each town, you can really feel his focus on the page count. We cover some of the funniest passages in the podcast, but the read itself is mostly an exercise in repetition. Shockingly, Roosh has little interest in writing about the character of any town he meets, and rather prefers to fix it into a dull, bigoted framework for understanding.
Roosh is both deeply unwell and insincere. It’s hard to believe his new discoveries like birds bathing and grass coming from hay are serious, but at the same time so many of the book’s revelations are naïve enough that you wonder if he is just dumb.
But he was big enough for a while - pre algorithm - and the online economy has changed significantly since Roosh's hay-day. Distinct blogs, independent forums, and obscure gurus have been replaced with platform content and hypervisibility. Aging, Roosh was already slow and outcompeted by the time he started American Pilgrim, so the book in part feels like an attempt at a noble exit.
One thing for certain is that when people pick apart the manosphere today, Roosh is absent. He has unpublished most of his books and lives a “normal life.” American Pilgrim serves as his goodbye (or goodbye-for-now) that excuses anything he did while simultaneously reinforcing the same strange, disgusting worldview he had from the beginning. So you begin to wonder, was there any growth at all? Or was this just an old veteran lacing up his skates when he couldn’t keep up with the faster, more dynamic kids?
