Ex-pickup artist Roosh Valizadeh used to make a living selling dubious and at times straight-up rapey pickup advice to men desperate to get laid. Now that he’s found God he seems to make his living by loudly and publicly renouncing the weirdly driven hedonism of his old lifestyle.
His newest target of his wrath is that modern saturnalia that is … the gym.
In a post on his blog last month, Roosh, a former gym rat himself, denounced gyms as veritable temples of narcissism and lust. Back in the day, he explained, he went to the gym to lift several times a week But he was less interested in getting fit than he was in sculpting his body into something allegedly attractive to women. “I want to claim that I went to the gym to be ‘healthy,'” he wrote in his post, “but my true intention was to be attractive to the opposite sex for the purpose of fornication.”
Fitness? More like fittin’ dis dick in … oh never mind.
So now he feels obligated to warn other men of the dangers of the gym. As he sees it, there are four of them. The first danger is the “vehemently secular music” they play at gyms to combat the tedium of the stairmaster.
I don’t want to hear songs about sex, seduction, getting rich, dancing all night in the club, driving expensive cars, and becoming a big boss. Thankfully, I can hardly understand the “English” being sung in most modern songs, especially hip hop, but even then, the Satanically-engineered melody will find a way to worm its way into my brain and remain there for at least a day, distracting my spiritual life with the potential to insert sinful and pornographic ideas.
Oh, but Satan isn’t just writing catchy tunes to ensnare Roosh’s brain. He’s also making sure that women at the gym wear as little clothing as possible. “There seems to be a competition among gym-going women to see who can display the most skin without technically being naked according to local ordinances,” he snorted.
Roosh is especially angry about sports bras.
The arrival of “sports bras,” which are still bras (just because you put the word sports in front of them and remove the lace doesn’t mean they should be displayed publicly), confirmed to me that the gym has become like an antechamber to the brothel bedroom.
Yes, it’s the sports bra that used to put so many nasty ideas into Roosh’s head. Well, that and all the yoga-ing that goes on at the gym.
I like to think that I can maintain custody of my eye, but inside the gym, half-naked women cavort all around me, and then enter into compromising positions on their yoga mats which immediately sends my mind into the gutter without conscious effort.
And then there’s all that bending over.
Yes, I am admitting that I’m too weak to not glance at these women in bras with gigantic bulbous rear-ends when they bend right in front of me.
The horror!
Before I turned to Christ, I actually saw this as a benefit of any gym, for why not be sexually entertained by women to lustfully prepare for an act of fornication? But now, I run away from it.
Another danger: mirrors, which encourage narcissism and body worship.
The mirrors were my teachers. Over many years, they taught me that my look is the most important part of me, that I had to cherish it if I wanted to continue receiving sexual benefits, and I could maybe consider getting botox injections when I became older to still be sexually attractive to young European women.
Sorry, Roosh. You’re an old dude now. Live with it.
The last major stumbling block at the gym? Gyms encourage men to “get bigger and bigger muscles for no practical reason” other than trying to look good for all those half-naked ladies.
There’s always someone who lifts more than you, or who has a better steroid supplier than you, so you will constantly aim to compare yourself to other men to subliminally attract the half-naked women that aggregate around the butt machines.
Curse those half-naked ladies for existing in Roosh’s general vicinity!
Your body is fine as it is, you’re healthy, but pride ignites within you to be even bigger and stronger, not to lift heavy things outside of the gym, but solely to lift heavier things within the construct of the gym itself to make you think that your body, given to you by God, is an achievement of your own. This temptation makes you a slave to the gym.
It always strikes me just how much people who aren’t black like to compare themselves to slaves.
But Satan won’t be able to get Roosh back to the gym; he’s now content doing calisthenics at a nearby park. “For me to go into a gym today” he explained, “I would need to cover my eyes and ears to not fall back into the world of the material.”
Roosh blindfolded, with noise-canceling headphones, wandering around the gym bumping into shit? I would pay to see that, actually.
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So this is his elaborate justification for becoming an old, out of shape couch potato.
Duly noted.
(ObFlipWilson: “The Devil made me do it!”)
Didn’t MRA and MGTOW guys WANT ladies to go to the gym so they could be fit and trim and not “landwhales”? Not to mention encouraging fitness as a personal goal for men as well?
What are we women to wear now so that we don’t attract the lustful eyes of Roosh?
If he’d said Sports Bars I’d be all on board with him. You sell nice beer; why do we have to have the bloody football on!
Well that’s good to hear. Callisthenics is useful as we age. Tai Chi is also nice. And a lot of parks have trim trails now.
But he shouldn’t dismiss the gym though. Strength training as we age prevents loss of muscle mass and bone density; as well as mitigating against osteoporosis, heart disease, arthritis, and type 2 diabetes.
It also seems to have an effect on depression; which he sounds like he could do with.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14552938/
My brother received for his high school graduation present, after I had been observed in roller blades and had testified to a love of dancing, a book from a neighbor which may clear up this mysterious subject for Roosh. It’s the hypothalamus that gets you, see; Satan enters the soul through the hypothalamus when you listen to rock music. I reckon if he just gets rid of that, he’ll be fine! No more problems! Satan can’t get him anymore if he just hasn’t got one. I’m sure there will be no side effects as it’s probably a vestigial organ.
I’m waiting for him to go full Skoptsy. Heck, I’ll even arrange for him to get a proper burdizzo.
@GSS ex-noob: That’s all it is. He’s tired of the gym and feels inferior to all the musclebound dudes. (In my area, at least, there are definitely a lot of young guys with muscles who show up at the gyms to lift). He is making up excuses as to why he isn’t going any more. (Now, I myself, being of middle age and a busy woman with a career, am certainly not as toned and fit as the young ladies in their 20s.). However, I’m not making up ridiculous excuses as to why I don’t make it to the gym like I used to!
I see that finding Jesus has not made Roosh any less racist, either.
He went to the gym, saw in shape young men. Maybe a beautiful young woman looked at one of those in shape young man. He then realized that he isn’t a young man now and beautiful young women don’t want anything to do with him. There for the gym made him feel bad and it’s the devil’s work.
Look I’m a Catholic and I may not be the best Catholic in the word. But there is a lot of shit on the bible about treating your body like a temple of god and there for keeping it healthy. Roosh sounds like he’s letting his own vanity keep him from doing that which is two sins already he’s commiting.
Hold on a minute — Doosh has a brain?
A lot of parks have whats now?
@ surplus
Basically a sort of outdoor public assault course. Invented by a French bloke apparently. The same guy who came up with parkour. Very popular in Scandinavia I believe; and also really taking off over here. And a lot of them now have outdoor versions of all the machines you get in a gym.
There’s a nice one by me that runs along the side of a river. So there’s a machine station every few hundred yards or so. I like to work out and watch the ducks.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/17/outdoor-gyms-a-how-to-guide
Hmmmm… Sounds like I should hit the gym. Joke’s on you Roosh, I’ve always been the skinny guy, I don’t have to worry about anybody ij particular being bigger than me because they all are.
Well, at least we know the devil isn’t a woman, because women aren’t good at STEM stuff /s
This just reminds me how “fast and bulbous” keeps appearing in the weird avant-garde rock album Trout Mask Replica.
(It’s possible that I was trying to make up & sing a review of that album to the tune of Pachelbel’s Canon on Saturday instead of grading papers. I can’t entirely blame ADHD on that one.)
Okay, that made me laugh. Thanks, David!
*Ahem* and some of us would pay to experience a sensory deprivation themed gym.
If nothing else, his style of description has brutally murdered any erotic thoughts I might have had about the gym.
Or women.
Or men.
The fellow is a master of making it all sound insanely unappealing…
Doosh is such a hypocrite. He wants to “bang” (and/or rape) all the hot babes he wants in the prime of his youth. Then he realizes he’s getting old and unattractive (hint: it’s not age that’s making him unattractive) and goes full Born Again Jebus Freak and preaches against everything he did in the past (except, you know, apologizing for the rapey stuff) so he can blame the devil for all his ills and look for a nice
Stepford“trad wife” to brainwash.So he’s decided to work out at the park now? How long before he starts screeching about the evil
Slutty McButtsfemale joggers tempting him with their bouncing boobies? They might just purse their nipples as they pass him and it’ll be too much for him to take.Roosh should think of resistance to temptation as another muscle to be strengthened at the gym. If he doesn’t want to be attracted by women’s bodies, the best place to train himself out of this is where he gets to experience those bodies’ half-naked bulbosity in concentrated form, at the gym.
I used to have a bad tendency for believing passing thoughts could will things into existence and should be controlled (like a sub-clinical pure OCD). Something I found useful and that I feel Roosh would benefit from is to realise that his mind descending into the gutter needn’t affect his behaviour and what actually happens in the real world. And the more he tries to run away from or control these thoughts the more dominating they become.
He’s better off seeing lustful thoughts like planes passing overhead – acknowledging their existence without the need to engage with them in inappropriate settings, such as a gym where young women just want to work out. That way, he can be a normal man with normal feelings and desires instead of a self-flagellating old perve. Just my two cents!
Ok, Roosh, the mirrors at gyms suck. I agree. But not because of satanism, but because the omnipresence of mirrors feeds into whatever body insecurities one already has.
Anyway, I prefer to work out at home. I have some equipment I bought from a friend who also gave me some personal training lessons (as that is his job and we agreed on a friendly price for both the equipment and the training). Partly to avoid mirrors and gymbros, but mostly because the traveling to a gym was more of a deterrent for me. And I can choose my own music. Which also falls outside most of Roosh’s criteria, but I doubt he would approve of those more (more about nihilism, politics, criticism of religion etc).
Suffice to say covid lockdowns didn’t change much for my workout habits. Anyway, I’d suggest Roosh work out at home if it was such a big deal for him. Him staying out of the public eye is a bonus.
I am a little disappointed Roosh isn’t going with the commandment “if thine eye offends thee pluck it out”, problem solved everywhere.
He should try being trapped in a house during quarantine with a ten year old who won’t stop singing “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”.
@Jazzlet
I’m actually ever-so-slightly impressed that his reasoning wasn’t “seeing women offends me –> women must cover themselves up / be removed from sight”. Maybe he would’ve gone with that if it wasn’t for the Satanic music.
@GSS ex-noob
I don’t know if that’s a fair conclusion to make when he says he’s still exercising. Not that one needs to be fair to Roosh, but still.
I’ve only ever been to a gym a handful of times, and I kind of hated it. Just repeating the same thing over and over. Back when I was unemployed and could easily find the time for it, I could cycle outside for hours, but I’m pretty sure I’d get fed up with on an exercise bike in about ten minutes.