Thursday, November 06, 2014

Speed Posting, 11/6/14: On Pickup Artists, the Gamergate and Street Harassment


1.  Julien Blanc, a PUA (pickup artist) is giving heterosexual men expensive seminars on how to talk to women, with the pu**y as the goal.  The way you get a woman's interest is by grabbing her head and sticking it to your dick, to quote the speaker's own words.  I'm not sure if you are supposed to say "hi" first or just attack the first woman that walks by you in the street.  This guy crawled from under some weird rock, all slimy and tentacled (apologies to all the slimy and tentacled creatures for that comparison) and equipped with something like the Rapist's Bible, based on the messages he has left in social media.  More about this charming individual:

Mr. Blanc, who describes himself as the executive coach for Real Social Dynamics, makes a living selling men the “important investment” of his advice in the fine art of picking up women. It’s a course he calls PIMP, that includes techniques in “How to destroy her Bitch Shield,” by among other things, commanding women to “Get down on your knees, call me Master, and BEG ME to kiss you…”  
His views on Japanese women are a bit like someone's views on sushi.  If you get my meaning.  Women are prey, and different types of prey animals are either easier or harder to catch.  But the Great White Hunter does really well in Tokio!  Head to dick, you know.  (I watched the video).

Blanc is now facing opposition online,  and one hotel in Australia has dumped his planned series of academic lectures on the fine art of seducing a woman (head to dick, head to dick).  That's because the students would probably want to practice what they learn with the hotel guests, like how to break through her Bitch Shield, how to make her kneel and call him the master etc.

2.  The Gamergate continues.  I found this post by a man pretty interesting.  He cannot take the harassment he is getting, and he's on the Gamergate side (the side which worries about ethics in game journalism and only harasses women sorta accidentally).  Not surprisingly, he gets most harassment from his own side. 

This YouTube spoof based on the Hitler movie which has been used for many, many similar spoofs is very funny if you have followed the Gamergate.

3.  Finally, more on the street harassment video. People in New Zealand redid the experiment and the woman in that video didn't get any cat calls whatsoever.  As I wrote in my earlier post on this, the phenomenon is cultural and shows great local variations.  Some countries are worse than others (Italy has a long history of street harassment as men's entitlement, Cairo is very bad, based on what I have read), and even in the US cities vary in this culture.

That is good news, because cultures can be changed.

And here's Collie Myerson on the first NYC video and the question of the harassers' race and ethnicity.   We need similar videos taken in different parts of cities, in different countries (I've seen one from Egypt) and with women of different race and ethnicity before there's anything like a full picture on street harassment of women.