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A Dead Bat In Paraguay: One Man's Peculiar Journey Through South America
A Dead Bat In Paraguay is a true adventure story about a 28-year-old man who decided that the best way he could deal with his existential crisis was to sell his possessions, quit his professional career as a scientist, and hop on a one-way flight to Quito, Ecuador in order to visit every country in South America. He sincerely believed the trip would put him on a track towards a more fulfilling life of excitement, intrigue, and exotic women, away from his soulless corporate job in a Washington D.C. suburb. Instead, he humorously falls from one country to the next, striking out repeatedly with the local women, getting robbed, having dreams that became reality, self-diagnosing himself with a host of diseases, and suffering repeated bouts of stomach illness that made marathon bus rides superhuman feats of bodily strength. Along the journey he chronicles the friendships, the women, and the struggles, including one fateful night in Paraguay that he thought would lead to his end. If you're a woman you will hate this book.
290 pages, Paperback
First published July 12, 2009
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121 people want to read
About the author
Roosh V.
28 books91 followersDaryush Valizadeh, also known as Roosh V, Roosh Valizadeh, and Roosh Vorek, is an American pick-up artist of Iranian and Armenian descent, known for his writings on seduction and antifeminism. He writes on his personal blog and also owns the Return of Kings website where he publishes articles by others on related subjects. Additionally, Roosh has self-published multiple books, most of which offer advice to men on how to talk to, pick up, and ultimately sleep with women in general, as well as in specific countries.
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January 10, 2024
If you take "A Dead Bat in Paraguay" without worrying about Roosh’s subsequent career it’s an enjoyable read - a sort of anti-travel book written by an observant and honest young man. The writing is uneven but has real potential. It’s a shame that Roosh couldn’t have written more along these lines, but books like this don’t sell, and he was determined not to go back to his career as a microbiologist. To make money he wrote the “Bang” series about how to pick up girls in different countries, and so became a controversial figure banned from some countries for his misogynist views. His reputation was the victim, and his publicity machine benefactor, of the easily triggered outrage of our PC times.
There is a lot about how to bed girls in Dead Bat. In hostels and nightclubs from Ecuador to Brazil, Roosh and other young Western males scheme to score local women, with the less exotic but more accessible gringas as a backup. Having experienced this hostel scene myself, it’s hardly controversial or uncommon for guys and girls to have casual hookups as they travel the world, sometimes their free and easy Western values may clash with the more conservative local cultures. In South America, the people are often more sexually conservative than their highly social manner would indicate. What is unusual about Roosh is how much he analyses and obsesses over how to pick up girls. He wants the algorithm that will get him as many girls as fast as possible. However, his first few months in South America are a total failure in this respect.
Dead Bat is not only about trying to score, Roosh is really good at describing things that most will experience along the gringo trail between Lonely Planet attractions. His humourous descriptions of long-distance bus travel are a highlight:
“When you ask the fare catcher how long it takes to get to the next city, the time he gives you is based on maniacal driving. Regular driving takes twice as long to arrive and just isn’t as fun for the adrenaline junkies that compose the bus driver corps. It didn’t matter that the road to Tena was this gravel and dirt thing that days of rain had turned into thick mud. I could feel the back of the bus sliding as the driver hurried anyway like he was rushing the President of France to an important diplomatic meeting.”
The first half of the book, when Roosh is in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia is the stronger half. There is more social commentary focusing on transport, the poor and food as well as unsuccessful pickup attempts. Roosh is not afraid to say that he is completely underwhelmed by the continent's number one tourist attraction: Machu Picchu. Other gringos are shocked by his attitude. He is disparaging of the lack of hygiene in Bolivia, but sympathetic to the fate of the miners in the Potosi mines. The mines are another “must do” attraction, Roosh is not breaking any ground, but his description of the appalling conditions of the miners is quite good. Here are two examples of him sharing his raw thoughts:
"Bolivia has no redeeming qualities besides what nature bestowed on it, not to the credit of the people or culture. I hate Bolivia. I was on the road to health but Bolivia destroyed it, and now I was sick again. I should have rode the bus right through the country."
"I felt small for complaining about my relatively easy job at home that paid me a salary the miners could only dream of. How did I come to the conclusion that a professional job with fair pay in a modern building was actually torture?"
Many have had the emotions in the first quote on a long bus ride but wouldn't write them down. We'd certainly like to express the sentiments in the second quote - whether we felt them or not.
It is in Mendoza, Argentina that young Jedi Roosh turns in the Dark Vader pickup artist. Sitting on a bench, he is overwhelmed by the beauty of Argentine women passing by. Up until this point Roosh has failed to get laid, but here he hopes to make up for that. He and his crew of hostel friends hit the clubs hunting. But Argentine culture has some surprises in store for Roosh. He gets into conversations with girls and they’ll show great interest in him only to disappear if he takes a toilet break. They’ll touch him on the forearm, a real sign of interest in the USA, but again just disappear. They are toying with him and he is offended. When he gets close and goes for the kiss he finds another hurdle as girls turn their heads at the last moment. Why does it have to be this way? Roosh is very upset. He is discovering what many have about the Argentine social scene: it promises a lot to the outsider but delivers little. Here are beautiful girls who draw you in, but it is only their endless need for attention that motivates them, they are not interested in you at all. Argentines of the class that the beautiful girls of Mendoza come from are actually quite cliquey and conservative - and arrogant to boot. Wanting something from them will damage your self-esteem, and this is a tipping point for the bold and cold, yet sensitive, Roosh.
“I was so mad I wanted to throw my drink into the crowd. I wanted it to smash on some girl’s head and I wanted her to bleed and cry. How much worse would I feel if I bought them another drink! God I was so stupid. Every night these girls disrespected me and played me like a cheap toy, and I kept going back for more. I leaned against a column, stewing in anger.”
There is an explanation for the Argentine women's behaviour and that would be Argentinian men. The men are aggressive in trying to pick up, in a way that in America may be considered harassment. I recently talked to a Kiwi woman traumatised by travelling in Argentina saying that the Argentine men touched her all the time. So the women have natural defences against the men chatting them up - they can calm them by showing interest - but then disappear at the first opportunity. Often they are actually interested in the conversation with gringos, Argentines are quite intellectual if not particularly broad in their outlook. Roosh sees the situation as chicken and egg: what came first the hard-to-get women or the aggressive men? In English-speaking countries it’s not easy to get into conversation with an unknown woman at a bar - it's often seen as creepy to try in New Zealand - but if you do hit it off with someone, it can very often lead to something physical. Would you rather go out and talk to beautiful women but get no action? Or go out and talk to nobody new - apart from once in a blue moon? After a lot of suffering, Roosh gets the low down on the behaviour of the girls from a local:
“The first: “There hasn’t been a sexual revolution in Argentina.” The second: “Girls have been trained that they aren’t worth anything if they are easy.” That would explain their unrevealing dress, lack of sexual suggestive dancing, and maddening head turns. His information helped me connect the dots, but the boat had already sailed.”
Just on a (probably unnecessary) personal note, I experienced the scene in Mendoza in 2004 and 2005, several years before Roosh’s trip. I remember the exhausting schedule of going out at 2 am that is the norm there. Roosh and his buddies start drinking at 9 pm, giving them a full 5 hours before time to go out. I started at 6, the time I would start drinking in NZ or Asia, and this often had me too intoxicated to hit the clubs - that I was never much a fan of anyway. Another feature of Roosh's trip is the deterioration of his health both physical and mental, and this punishing nightlife schedule hardly helped. His guts give him a lot of trouble. He realises some of his other health worries are in his head but can't help it. Sigmund Freud may have enjoyed psychoanalysing Roosh, a man with hypochondriac neurosis stemming from frustrated sexual desires. He is the sort of person who needs a project otherwise his racing mind starts attacking:
"South America is not kind to even the mildest of hypochondriacs, which I had to accept I was. In the past I easily diagnosed a slight rash as scabies and odd headaches as brain tumors. When I got tested for HIV I’d browse through AIDS forums on the internet and calculate the odds I actually did have HIV before the results came in. A little twitch in the leg and I might as well be in the advanced stages of multiple sclerosis, a pain in the chest and it was a serious heart problem."
Roosh makes a lot of male friends, often Irish or Aussie guys, hard drinkers, who are committed to going out at night. Roosh realises these friendships will be short-term and doesn’t get too attached. He befriends locals where he can too but never makes much effort to move beyond gringo hangouts, despite the fact he studies Spanish diligently. He details a nice episode with a friend, Max, where they walk out to an offshore island at low tide to see some sea lions. There is nobody else out there, and for a moment feel happy because they have had a unique adventure:
“It was just me and a big piece of plastic in the ocean, away from the gringos and crazy Argentine girls, waiting for the water to lift me up. After riding a wave I’d turn around to face the ocean and feel the same as when on the rock with Max, when we watched the lobos sleep as the sun set in the background. My spirits were coming back. I was tired of moping and feeling sorry for my stomach and my luck.”
Finally, Roosh has sex with an Argentine woman in Cordoba, getting his flag as he says. He also comes across a couple of characters he admires, the shameless 'predator', who goes for the kill with girls without hesitating, and a high-energy Italian with a joyous demeanour impossible to replicate. Before leaving Argentina, Roosh gives us some interesting positive cultural insight, largely absent from his blow-by-blow accounts of nights out, which have begun to get tedious:
“Along with the huge bottles of beer that one person can’t possibly finish on their own before it gets warm, the Argentines have a culture of sharing and community that is only dependent on your luck of getting an invitation. My Quilmes beer is your beer, my mate is your mate, like weed smoking almost, but sip-sip-give instead of puff-puff-give. The best way to get to know an Argentine is through beer or mate (they smoke weed, too).”
An Argentine friend told me that when she was in a club in Florianopolis, Southern Brazil, Argentine men on holiday would come up to her and ask "mina or menina? " meaning 'Argentine or Brazilian?' If the answer was mina the men would walk away, it being too much effort to pick up an Argentine girl compared to a Brazilian. So Roosh's last stop is Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a place that he has been told is the promised land for the pickup artist. Before getting there, Roosh moves through Uruguay and Paraguay, where he wakes up with a dead bat in his bed, hence the title of the book, which I think was well chosen.
In Rio, the girls are friendly and Roosh starts to enjoy himself, despite lingering problems with his stomach. He enjoys the fresh juices, especially the acai, and makes friends with Marcelo, who runs a juice stall. Roosh is quite taken by Marcelo's upbeat attitude despite his six-day-a-week work schedule. As a natural introvert brought up in an Anglo culture, Roosh realises his life can never be as immediate and social as the average Brazilian. On one of his many pickup stints in a crowded club, he approaches a girl who actually finds him interesting. So begins the great romance of this book - Roosh can’t quite believe luck - she is beautiful, passionate and caring. He also meets up with some Brazilian girls he met earlier in his trip, forms solid friendships with them, and gets insights into how Brazil ticks.
Roosh misses his family and wants to fix his stomach. He buys a plane ticket and leaves his girl. This is sad, what he sought did not seem to mean much to him in the end - surely he could have given the relationship a go? But to this point, the story is not too tragic. It’s the epilogue that spooked me because of its near-nihilistic tone. Two years later Roosh, now thirty, returns to Rio. By this stage, he has already begun publishing his bang books. One of his local friends has discovered his writing and is obviously shocked. This must have been a constant danger for Roosh. Amazingly, he meets up with his old flame and she is willing to take him back. Such things don’t happen! But again he can’t commit and their dates are increasingly hard to read about. Despite this downer, there was some stuff I could really relate to in his Rio vignettes. For example, I got robbed by knife-wielding favela kids outside the Help disco at Copacabana Beach in 2005. My friend and I didn't have much money on us so that was OK - but after the robbery, we had nothing for a taxi and so had a spooky 2 am walk back to our hostel. This was made worse because my friend was legless drunk and I virtually had to carry him. Roosh also leaves Help Club late at night and on foot, but has an interesting tactic not to get robbed - he takes his shirt off - reasoning that a shirtless man will be a less likely target for potential muggers.
Dead Bat is an interesting book about the gringo trail in South America by a man looking to self-actualise while fighting his own demons...Don't read it as a how-to guide, but also don't let it get your moral hackles up without due reason.
There is a lot about how to bed girls in Dead Bat. In hostels and nightclubs from Ecuador to Brazil, Roosh and other young Western males scheme to score local women, with the less exotic but more accessible gringas as a backup. Having experienced this hostel scene myself, it’s hardly controversial or uncommon for guys and girls to have casual hookups as they travel the world, sometimes their free and easy Western values may clash with the more conservative local cultures. In South America, the people are often more sexually conservative than their highly social manner would indicate. What is unusual about Roosh is how much he analyses and obsesses over how to pick up girls. He wants the algorithm that will get him as many girls as fast as possible. However, his first few months in South America are a total failure in this respect.
Dead Bat is not only about trying to score, Roosh is really good at describing things that most will experience along the gringo trail between Lonely Planet attractions. His humourous descriptions of long-distance bus travel are a highlight:
“When you ask the fare catcher how long it takes to get to the next city, the time he gives you is based on maniacal driving. Regular driving takes twice as long to arrive and just isn’t as fun for the adrenaline junkies that compose the bus driver corps. It didn’t matter that the road to Tena was this gravel and dirt thing that days of rain had turned into thick mud. I could feel the back of the bus sliding as the driver hurried anyway like he was rushing the President of France to an important diplomatic meeting.”
The first half of the book, when Roosh is in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia is the stronger half. There is more social commentary focusing on transport, the poor and food as well as unsuccessful pickup attempts. Roosh is not afraid to say that he is completely underwhelmed by the continent's number one tourist attraction: Machu Picchu. Other gringos are shocked by his attitude. He is disparaging of the lack of hygiene in Bolivia, but sympathetic to the fate of the miners in the Potosi mines. The mines are another “must do” attraction, Roosh is not breaking any ground, but his description of the appalling conditions of the miners is quite good. Here are two examples of him sharing his raw thoughts:
"Bolivia has no redeeming qualities besides what nature bestowed on it, not to the credit of the people or culture. I hate Bolivia. I was on the road to health but Bolivia destroyed it, and now I was sick again. I should have rode the bus right through the country."
"I felt small for complaining about my relatively easy job at home that paid me a salary the miners could only dream of. How did I come to the conclusion that a professional job with fair pay in a modern building was actually torture?"
Many have had the emotions in the first quote on a long bus ride but wouldn't write them down. We'd certainly like to express the sentiments in the second quote - whether we felt them or not.
It is in Mendoza, Argentina that young Jedi Roosh turns in the Dark Vader pickup artist. Sitting on a bench, he is overwhelmed by the beauty of Argentine women passing by. Up until this point Roosh has failed to get laid, but here he hopes to make up for that. He and his crew of hostel friends hit the clubs hunting. But Argentine culture has some surprises in store for Roosh. He gets into conversations with girls and they’ll show great interest in him only to disappear if he takes a toilet break. They’ll touch him on the forearm, a real sign of interest in the USA, but again just disappear. They are toying with him and he is offended. When he gets close and goes for the kiss he finds another hurdle as girls turn their heads at the last moment. Why does it have to be this way? Roosh is very upset. He is discovering what many have about the Argentine social scene: it promises a lot to the outsider but delivers little. Here are beautiful girls who draw you in, but it is only their endless need for attention that motivates them, they are not interested in you at all. Argentines of the class that the beautiful girls of Mendoza come from are actually quite cliquey and conservative - and arrogant to boot. Wanting something from them will damage your self-esteem, and this is a tipping point for the bold and cold, yet sensitive, Roosh.
“I was so mad I wanted to throw my drink into the crowd. I wanted it to smash on some girl’s head and I wanted her to bleed and cry. How much worse would I feel if I bought them another drink! God I was so stupid. Every night these girls disrespected me and played me like a cheap toy, and I kept going back for more. I leaned against a column, stewing in anger.”
There is an explanation for the Argentine women's behaviour and that would be Argentinian men. The men are aggressive in trying to pick up, in a way that in America may be considered harassment. I recently talked to a Kiwi woman traumatised by travelling in Argentina saying that the Argentine men touched her all the time. So the women have natural defences against the men chatting them up - they can calm them by showing interest - but then disappear at the first opportunity. Often they are actually interested in the conversation with gringos, Argentines are quite intellectual if not particularly broad in their outlook. Roosh sees the situation as chicken and egg: what came first the hard-to-get women or the aggressive men? In English-speaking countries it’s not easy to get into conversation with an unknown woman at a bar - it's often seen as creepy to try in New Zealand - but if you do hit it off with someone, it can very often lead to something physical. Would you rather go out and talk to beautiful women but get no action? Or go out and talk to nobody new - apart from once in a blue moon? After a lot of suffering, Roosh gets the low down on the behaviour of the girls from a local:
“The first: “There hasn’t been a sexual revolution in Argentina.” The second: “Girls have been trained that they aren’t worth anything if they are easy.” That would explain their unrevealing dress, lack of sexual suggestive dancing, and maddening head turns. His information helped me connect the dots, but the boat had already sailed.”
Just on a (probably unnecessary) personal note, I experienced the scene in Mendoza in 2004 and 2005, several years before Roosh’s trip. I remember the exhausting schedule of going out at 2 am that is the norm there. Roosh and his buddies start drinking at 9 pm, giving them a full 5 hours before time to go out. I started at 6, the time I would start drinking in NZ or Asia, and this often had me too intoxicated to hit the clubs - that I was never much a fan of anyway. Another feature of Roosh's trip is the deterioration of his health both physical and mental, and this punishing nightlife schedule hardly helped. His guts give him a lot of trouble. He realises some of his other health worries are in his head but can't help it. Sigmund Freud may have enjoyed psychoanalysing Roosh, a man with hypochondriac neurosis stemming from frustrated sexual desires. He is the sort of person who needs a project otherwise his racing mind starts attacking:
"South America is not kind to even the mildest of hypochondriacs, which I had to accept I was. In the past I easily diagnosed a slight rash as scabies and odd headaches as brain tumors. When I got tested for HIV I’d browse through AIDS forums on the internet and calculate the odds I actually did have HIV before the results came in. A little twitch in the leg and I might as well be in the advanced stages of multiple sclerosis, a pain in the chest and it was a serious heart problem."
Roosh makes a lot of male friends, often Irish or Aussie guys, hard drinkers, who are committed to going out at night. Roosh realises these friendships will be short-term and doesn’t get too attached. He befriends locals where he can too but never makes much effort to move beyond gringo hangouts, despite the fact he studies Spanish diligently. He details a nice episode with a friend, Max, where they walk out to an offshore island at low tide to see some sea lions. There is nobody else out there, and for a moment feel happy because they have had a unique adventure:
“It was just me and a big piece of plastic in the ocean, away from the gringos and crazy Argentine girls, waiting for the water to lift me up. After riding a wave I’d turn around to face the ocean and feel the same as when on the rock with Max, when we watched the lobos sleep as the sun set in the background. My spirits were coming back. I was tired of moping and feeling sorry for my stomach and my luck.”
Finally, Roosh has sex with an Argentine woman in Cordoba, getting his flag as he says. He also comes across a couple of characters he admires, the shameless 'predator', who goes for the kill with girls without hesitating, and a high-energy Italian with a joyous demeanour impossible to replicate. Before leaving Argentina, Roosh gives us some interesting positive cultural insight, largely absent from his blow-by-blow accounts of nights out, which have begun to get tedious:
“Along with the huge bottles of beer that one person can’t possibly finish on their own before it gets warm, the Argentines have a culture of sharing and community that is only dependent on your luck of getting an invitation. My Quilmes beer is your beer, my mate is your mate, like weed smoking almost, but sip-sip-give instead of puff-puff-give. The best way to get to know an Argentine is through beer or mate (they smoke weed, too).”
An Argentine friend told me that when she was in a club in Florianopolis, Southern Brazil, Argentine men on holiday would come up to her and ask "mina or menina? " meaning 'Argentine or Brazilian?' If the answer was mina the men would walk away, it being too much effort to pick up an Argentine girl compared to a Brazilian. So Roosh's last stop is Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a place that he has been told is the promised land for the pickup artist. Before getting there, Roosh moves through Uruguay and Paraguay, where he wakes up with a dead bat in his bed, hence the title of the book, which I think was well chosen.
In Rio, the girls are friendly and Roosh starts to enjoy himself, despite lingering problems with his stomach. He enjoys the fresh juices, especially the acai, and makes friends with Marcelo, who runs a juice stall. Roosh is quite taken by Marcelo's upbeat attitude despite his six-day-a-week work schedule. As a natural introvert brought up in an Anglo culture, Roosh realises his life can never be as immediate and social as the average Brazilian. On one of his many pickup stints in a crowded club, he approaches a girl who actually finds him interesting. So begins the great romance of this book - Roosh can’t quite believe luck - she is beautiful, passionate and caring. He also meets up with some Brazilian girls he met earlier in his trip, forms solid friendships with them, and gets insights into how Brazil ticks.
Roosh misses his family and wants to fix his stomach. He buys a plane ticket and leaves his girl. This is sad, what he sought did not seem to mean much to him in the end - surely he could have given the relationship a go? But to this point, the story is not too tragic. It’s the epilogue that spooked me because of its near-nihilistic tone. Two years later Roosh, now thirty, returns to Rio. By this stage, he has already begun publishing his bang books. One of his local friends has discovered his writing and is obviously shocked. This must have been a constant danger for Roosh. Amazingly, he meets up with his old flame and she is willing to take him back. Such things don’t happen! But again he can’t commit and their dates are increasingly hard to read about. Despite this downer, there was some stuff I could really relate to in his Rio vignettes. For example, I got robbed by knife-wielding favela kids outside the Help disco at Copacabana Beach in 2005. My friend and I didn't have much money on us so that was OK - but after the robbery, we had nothing for a taxi and so had a spooky 2 am walk back to our hostel. This was made worse because my friend was legless drunk and I virtually had to carry him. Roosh also leaves Help Club late at night and on foot, but has an interesting tactic not to get robbed - he takes his shirt off - reasoning that a shirtless man will be a less likely target for potential muggers.
Dead Bat is an interesting book about the gringo trail in South America by a man looking to self-actualise while fighting his own demons...Don't read it as a how-to guide, but also don't let it get your moral hackles up without due reason.
June 8, 2012
Mental American guy (of Persian descent) gets fed up with his job making tantamount A-rab money hosing off test tubes in a laboratory, decides to drop everything and travel to every country in South America, Motorcycle Diaries-style, via bus, sleeping in nasty youth hostels, trying to get it on with chicks in night clubs. It's like Eat, Pray, Love for that guy who shot up that health club in Pennsylvania a few years ago - specifically for that guy.
There's an insistence on trying to score with chicks that's just silly. It's like that's all he's there to do. He goes to visit a few tourist attractions, ancient ruins and what have you, takes one look and turns right back around. Back to the club. It's particularly frustrating, because he has very little success in da club. It's obvious (though he dances around this point) that the girls don't want to get it on with him because he's too swarthy-looking and they're saving themselves for according to Hoyle white dudes. He puts in all this effort for naught, then dudes from Europe show up and have their pick of stank. He should have just fapped and gone about his business, or god forbid, figured out how to pay for it. He's got all that money.
The many other reasons this trip was miserable (but often quite enjoyable to read about) have to do with the fact that people in SA apparently do nothing but try to steal from you the entire time you're there, the accommodations are shit, and you'll have the shits from the moment you set foot on the continent until weeks after you get home.
There's an insistence on trying to score with chicks that's just silly. It's like that's all he's there to do. He goes to visit a few tourist attractions, ancient ruins and what have you, takes one look and turns right back around. Back to the club. It's particularly frustrating, because he has very little success in da club. It's obvious (though he dances around this point) that the girls don't want to get it on with him because he's too swarthy-looking and they're saving themselves for according to Hoyle white dudes. He puts in all this effort for naught, then dudes from Europe show up and have their pick of stank. He should have just fapped and gone about his business, or god forbid, figured out how to pay for it. He's got all that money.
The many other reasons this trip was miserable (but often quite enjoyable to read about) have to do with the fact that people in SA apparently do nothing but try to steal from you the entire time you're there, the accommodations are shit, and you'll have the shits from the moment you set foot on the continent until weeks after you get home.
August 4, 2013
Roosh Vörek, a.k.a. Roosh V or Daryush Valizadeh (his real name) is something of a sex tourist who writes books about how to pick up girls in various parts of the world. He is violently against feminism:
If there were nothing else to the man, I would give him no more than one star. It just so happens that his book A Dead Bat In Paraguay: One Man's Peculiar Journey Through South America shows him to be something more than just a sex tourist: He is also a pretty decent travel writer. Although he undertook a trip to South America to win his "flag" by sleeping with a local woman in every country on the continent. Whatever his intent, for a good part of his journey, we learn more about Roosh's execrable eating habits (he seems to be constantly suffering from dysentery and other intestinal ills) and staying at dubious youth hostels with other horny young males. Interestingly, he is rejected by scores of girls until he arrives in Argentina and, even better for him, Brazil.
Now I have stayed at youth hostels once or twice on recent vacations, but I have always been the oldest person in the hostels where I stayed; and I tended not to share in the hostel scuttlebutt or hang out with fellow travelers, being of a later generation. Now, reading this book, I am glad I kept mostly to myself.
Roosh's method is to hang out in clubs where he will tend to meet young women who are unsure of themselves and susceptible to his carefully-thought-out array of lures and ploys. And once he has won his "flag," the woman is pretty much flushed down the loo.
The exception in A Dead Bat in Paraguay is a young Brazilian woman from Rio whom he calls Mariana, with whom he seems to fall in love. He gets his flag a number of times over, but it still doesn't work out because he is not enough of a mature person to build a life on something as undesirable as a real relationship.
Young men around the English-speaking world flock to buy Roosh's books just so they can learn to be shitheads. And, God knows, the world needs a lot more of those.
A woman will only behave in a way that allows her to continue receiving what she wants in life. So far, being a feminist has not hurt her chances at “sexual discovery” when hitting the town on Saturday night, or filtering through hundreds of messages from men on dating sites. A man at a bar will roll his eyes at feminist talking points, but he will nonetheless persist in his pursuit of the notch. This must end. For the same reason you pass on fat women, resigning them to an underclass of low-quality men who will fuck anything, you must now sexually discriminate against women for their man-hating belief system.Now this is pretty offensive stuff, and women are dealt with strictly as objects until such time as someone picks up his "flag" by sleeping with them.
If there were nothing else to the man, I would give him no more than one star. It just so happens that his book A Dead Bat In Paraguay: One Man's Peculiar Journey Through South America shows him to be something more than just a sex tourist: He is also a pretty decent travel writer. Although he undertook a trip to South America to win his "flag" by sleeping with a local woman in every country on the continent. Whatever his intent, for a good part of his journey, we learn more about Roosh's execrable eating habits (he seems to be constantly suffering from dysentery and other intestinal ills) and staying at dubious youth hostels with other horny young males. Interestingly, he is rejected by scores of girls until he arrives in Argentina and, even better for him, Brazil.
Now I have stayed at youth hostels once or twice on recent vacations, but I have always been the oldest person in the hostels where I stayed; and I tended not to share in the hostel scuttlebutt or hang out with fellow travelers, being of a later generation. Now, reading this book, I am glad I kept mostly to myself.
Roosh's method is to hang out in clubs where he will tend to meet young women who are unsure of themselves and susceptible to his carefully-thought-out array of lures and ploys. And once he has won his "flag," the woman is pretty much flushed down the loo.
The exception in A Dead Bat in Paraguay is a young Brazilian woman from Rio whom he calls Mariana, with whom he seems to fall in love. He gets his flag a number of times over, but it still doesn't work out because he is not enough of a mature person to build a life on something as undesirable as a real relationship.
Young men around the English-speaking world flock to buy Roosh's books just so they can learn to be shitheads. And, God knows, the world needs a lot more of those.
December 28, 2012
Peculiar is right. This book is a often hilarious dystopian travelogue of an Arab American biologist who decides to travel through all the nations of South America without anything resembling a plan. The results are usually bad. His attempts to meet local ladies end almost universally in failure, and he catches all sorts of weird stomach ailments and tropical diseases. Though he seems to have found little meaning or fulfillment from his journey, his story is a completely entertaining, and a welcome diversion from the usual hip hip hooray boosterism we hear for world travel.
July 10, 2011
As a single traveler who has been to all of the same countries as the author, I found myself chuckling at his experiences. They were so very similar to my own. For anyone who wants the REAL scoop about South America or single travel, they should read this book.
September 23, 2010
I enjoyed the story, but it seemed like he was living the same day over. Wake up, feel ill and try to eat, go to a club or bar, try to pick up women, repeat. It seems with the illnesses he experienced, he had a difficult time enjoying himself. I would have liked to see more description of the countries and sites. After reading this, I would never want to set foot anywhere in South America. Ever. I don't think it's an accurate depiction, but the intention of the book wasn't to write a travel guide. The book is "one man's peculiar journey."
May 30, 2019
I bought this before I realized who the author was, but it is pretty apparent a few pages in, and I gave up. Even if you didn't know this guy's history, it becomes very apparent very quickly that this book was written by a piece of shit. Don't give him any money, and don't waste your time. There are far better travel books out there.
September 8, 2024
(this "review" is longer than the justified the importance of the book - but it's on a subject in which I am at serious risk of rambling without end)
“It was remotely possible they weren’t prostitutes and I missed out on my chance for a flag, a concept introduced to me by an Australian guy I met in Spain. It goes like this: if you have sex with a girl from a different country, you collect that country’s flag. It’s a more worldly way to brag about your conquests, instead of simply stating how many girls you’ve slept with. Before my plane touched down, I dreamed of all the flags I would score in South America. In the poorest countries—Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru—the girls would find out I was American, from the richest country in the world, and throw themselves at me. -Roosh V, A Dead Bat in Paraguay
Women hardly believe me when I say it’s normal for men to have sex with women solely to rack up numbers, compete with others, and for bragging rights. The quote above is the result of many years of involvement in the pickup community.
As for the “collecting flags” thing, you could assume it’s only a joke, but I recently read BANG - Colombia, part of the BANG series, which teaches you how to get laid in each specific country. The tips were serious and heavily focused on how quickly and cheaply you can get laid before getting out of the country with the local stamp of approval. Thus, it seems like there’s a serious pursuit of gathering flags.
The appeal of gathering flags, and pickup in general, is that it pushes men out of their comfort zones, out of their parents’ basements, and into the world. I suppose a way to motivate a man to do good things for himself is to dangle the promise of sex in front of him. However, the pleasurable feelings of sex aren’t enough to sustain an ongoing pursuit of ever more variety. Ultimately, it’s about male validation: the stories to tell your buddies over beer, to make them envy you, listen to you, and replicate you. In BANG - Colombia, he gives sound advice on how to learn Spanish and encourages learning to dance. It’s not always easy to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and learn a foreign language, learn salsa, learn an instrument, travel the world, get in shape, eat healthily, and develop a social character. However, all of these things suddenly become somewhat effortless once they’re conceptualized as degenerate and for ill means. A parallel to this is how Jordan Peterson taps into the male psyche by encouraging learning reading and writing, not to get good grades or be a good person, but to become “dangerous.”
The pick up artist’s primary concern is validation from his male buddies of his game, and the aesthetic elements of the pursuit. Regardless if he’s also searching for “the one,” in terms of quality of sex, he cares about an emotional connection, albeit his ultimately flawed mindset, unwittingly, limits his success in this, keeping him a Sysiphusean hamster wheel of emptiness and dissatisfaction.
Which brings me to how deceptive a lot of this is. When you’re far enough into the game, you don’t even recognize your own deception since you’re submerged in it. Roosh recommends directly lying about where you’re staying because he fears she’ll think less of you if you’re in a hostel. And all “opening lines” are essentially lies. I remember him writing that you should bring a Spanish book to a university and pretend to need help, asking women how to pronounce things. Mystery called this “indirect openers,” which is just another word for pretending to be someone you’re not (Spanish student, not pickup artist). Whether that means artificially asking for the time of day or advice on Spanish, you’re embedded in an inauthentic reality. No matter what you say, it will be inauthentic, even if it’s as plain and direct as, “Hi, I just wanted to meet you because I thought you were cute,” because in reality, The real undertone is something like a desire to have sex for ego gratification, to have sex in some sort of weird travel gamification, for bragging rights and a field report post to get kudos from other pickup artists on the online message board, or, in the best-case scenario, to facilitate an addiction to validation and conquest.
You may rightly accuse me of being awfully melodramatic of what is merely social lubricant to get something authentic going eventually, since ultimately, our motivations are ambiguous and mostly unknown even to ourselves, and we have no way to be completely frank with someone even if we wanted to. I think bullshit is harmless so long as you don’t dig your feet into it. If you take bullshit seriously, as in something necessary to maintain and defend, it’s harmful.
All of his tips for slight manipulations and deceptions are completely unnecessary and even counterproductive, and he’s unnecessarily complicating things for himself. The results pickup artists get from deception are the same effect as a placebo. Further, to the degree he’s able to deceive is to the degree his ego is fed due to the overcomplication of it all. Again, what makes sex rewarding for the pickup artist is the journey, the struggle, etc. If you can make it more complicated, as if you had to pull off a hundred and one lies—pretending you’re learning Spanish, actually learning Spanish, etc.—you’re getting exactly what you’re after to a stronger degree: a great story, a brilliant conquest, and a stronger sense of PUA identity. However, if you just want to get laid and have good sex, deception is not only unnecessary but counterproductive, as inauthenticity puts a cap on the vibe. I’d also add that, in other areas of life too, it’s amazing how normal it is for people to overcomplicate their lives with unnecessary lies about trivial details that eventually become severely consequential, creating giant webs of deception. On the bright side, this idiotic flaw of humanity makes for great cosmic comedy.
Anyway, in the book he'd occasionally pull a line that made me chuckle. Other times, it was interesting due to a lesson or some useful information from a traveling standpoint. But the problem is that he’s probably too used to writing field reports, where he just states that this happened, then that happened, and this happened, mainly due to the inherently interesting topic of interactions with women. The bulk of the episodes occurred in nightclubs or hostels, in a party environment, where he and others are trying to get laid. There was a lack of a red thread of meaning, reflections, lessons, or any sort of artistic touch to the writing. I suppose the tedious detail of each social interaction with a woman was warranted to some degree, as it gave a more realistic picture of how much work he put into getting laid, but the book would have been more digestible if he had moved away from the disconnected “field report writing mode.”
Some parts made my eyes glued to the page. We meet a Canadian guy who checks in the hostel in Argentina, who brags of sleeping with twenty Brazilian women in thirty days, who acts like a complete mad man, who lives with no hesitation and approaches women immediately upon seeing them, getting laid his first night in Cordoba seemingly by sheer confidence and attitude, given his mediocre looks and thinning hair. A man with unlimited energy and always in the mood talking to girls. “His game was simple, touch a lot and constantly talked about sex.”. He asked one of the hostel maids to show him her “big ass,” and she took him to a room upstairs and did it. He was crowned “Predator” by the other hostel guests and shared his power-moves: “hand around waist pull her close, firm eye contact, smile, build up tension before loosening the grip.” Just before leaving the city, Predator brought seven girls from a local park to the hostel during the day. Roosh asked him why he did it if he was leaving anyway. “I just couldn’t help it.” was his answer.
It’s people like this who remind us that if we could change our attitude and behavior, we could do these things too. Moreover, if these things are possible, what are the other things we don’t know about? What are the limits? Simply put, we don’t know the limits of personality or what is possible in the world with enough confidence and will. The alluring thing about all this is that while everything else seems rather predictable and stable, this personality thing, especially in terms of women, seems to have mysteries around every corner, yearning to be revealed. What could be more exciting than breaking through the invisible boundaries and rules within our minds, shaped by the behavior of (almost) everyone around us?
In Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, in The Seducer’s Diary, where the protagonist, a seducer, insisted on the “aesthetic” elements of the seduction. I didn’t really understand why and how aesthetics were of any importance to this character, and it seemed alien to me until I made the connection that it’s called pickup *artistry*. Kierkegaard’s character had his primary motive in the aesthetic and prioritized it over actually getting the girl. He prioritized, to the utmost degree, the manner in which he went about the seduction, far more than the results and effectiveness of the seduction itself. He spent enormous energy making each and every step extremely deliberate and premeditated, as if conducting a carefully planned drama. At first, I thought the character was unrealistic since he was entirely uninterested in sex, but I realized he is the ultimate caricature of the pick-up artist.
The pick-up artist is someone who finds aesthetic pleasure (or sexual arousal), like an artist or a poet, of creating a scenario from the fantasy of his head, and making women live, and fall in love, inside of his fabricated reality. Additionally, in pushing the boundaries of society, feeling into the darkness of the unknown for something to hold on to. He wants to reveal to himself, and the world, new modes of being—something that, deep inside, he intuits the culture needs—to view the world in a new perspective, primarily through the most ancient and deep-rooted concerns in the world: the intersexual one. You might accuse “Predator” of simply being a horny guy for demanding a maid to “show her fat ass,” but to me, this is a result of an aesthetic pursuit. In a way, this is the masterful practice of an art form.
Despite Predator’s success, our traveling protagonist meets a man who outshined him, who, to this day, was the best he’d ever seen, with Argentine girls screaming his name and fighting over him. Instead of the hypersexual, aggressive style, this Italian charm-machine was simply carefree, energetic, smiling, making jokes, and just having fun. It did not seem to dawn on Roosh that this man (in all likelihood) did not fabricate realities, did not manipulate or have to do any pretending. However, Roosh did reflect on the fact that he could never replicate his “game” because his charm came from his essence, not any specific tactic, and unfortunately, believing the only way to compensate for this is his conception of game. I believe 2009, around the time this was written, was the transitory stage from technique-game to the pursuit of aligning one’s “essence” or core personality to a natural charmer like our Italian or Canadian tigers.
Roosh reflected on the female brain being merely a puzzle to be figured out on how to deactivate it so he can sleep with women. And that’s why he enjoyed spending so much time in drinking environments, and preferred girls who drink, since it impairs their judgment, making it easier, reflecting on the fact that it’s always possible to make out with a girl with a boyfriend so long she’s got alcohol in her blood.
In any case, Roosh realizes the futility of replicating Predator and Italian by doing what they do, asking for tips, since it’s their core personality that does the heavy lifting. In a sense, “game” is split into two aspects, what you can do, figure out and learn, and the permanent fact of your essential personality. When someone storms into a hostel with their unlimited extroverted energy, we assume, by default, this is simply who they are. A couple reasons that reinforce this is the permanence of personality, seeing around us, people don’t change, and secondly, some kids in school were popular and cool, where others were not, making it seem as if personality, charm, extroversion, and coolness is deterministic, and while our moods might alter, our essence was set, apparently already in childhood. Moreover, we’re encouraged to chase our childhood dreams with the implication that some permanent facet of our being has already developed by that time.
Even though the evidence favors the opposite, the next “phase” of pick up artists put a new emphasis on the plasticity of character, of “being,” instead of “doing.” This was done in the emphasis that there is a bi-directional relationship between what you do and who you are, they are not as separate as what is normally thought.
One way to think of this is imagine a man playing the piano in front of an audience, and he’s under the impression that if you hit all the notes in the perfect sequence without making any mistakes, from sheer studying, repetition and effort, much like aligning a key lock in the perfect order, you unlock the gates to sexual gratification and admiration. After many years locked up in his basement studying the piano keys, he proceeds to play, technically perfect, hunched over the keys, making no mistakes, looking over the women, but to his dismay, they aren’t impressed. Then imagine another man, who, instead of locking himself up practicing piano day and night, has lived, loved, grieved and experienced life to the fullest. He’s full of emotion and while using the piano to express it, and while his execution isn’t technically perfect, there’s an overall harmony, beauty, human resonance that sheer technical skill of pressing keys in the right order cannot replicate, because of the subtleness that cannot be memorized or mimicked. Ironically, however, and this is the point of my analogy, is that if the second man went up to the piano having no technical training, no beauty could have been expressed anyway, and the analogy to game, while not perfect, is intuitively relevant to the point that what can seen as suboptimal, or even immoral, can be a necessary step toward the more ideal. This is the best explanation I could muster of my more-than-ideal ambiguous attitude to the ethics of “gathering flags.”
The problem-solving fanaticism shifted from trying to solve the rubik's cube of the female brain to make her have sex with you, to trying to figure out your own brain to make you naturally more attractive. Ironically, part of the puzzle was learning how to let go of the addiction to figuring out puzzles. And then pick up artists became more interested in general self development, especially spiritual pursuits which ultimately undermine their original pursuit, perhaps due to seeing the futility of casual sex, or because they don’t feel a need to be validated in the same way anymore.
While part of the reason why pickup material is hard to come by is the tendency toward spiritual growth or the guru finding the dream girl and wanting to hide his past, a very real reason is the political, economic, and ideological forces against it. Most pickup material I know of has been removed clean from the internet and can only be accessed by knowing exactly what you’re looking for on illegal torrent websites.
Aside from being drawn upward into spiritual growth from the inherently consciousness-expanding activity of facing fears, getting your ego blasted to pieces, etc., there is also the friction of real life consequences that grind the smooth sailing toward epic pickup artistdom to a halt. These are human attachment systems, toxic relationships, unexpected pregnancies, or a combination of all of the above. These account for many of the sudden disappearance from the pickup scene, and the gradual disillusionment of the original pursuit on the whole.
My fear is that while there seems to be a natural progression from trying to get laid to turning toward God, the process seems to be shoved under the carpet, and the link is broken, as if you stretch something too far apart you end up breaking it, thus it seems inevitable that the progression has to be continually rediscovered.
The best part of the book was toward the end, from the time he left Argentina, as most of it was worth reading then. He meets a woman who’s everything he has ever wanted in Brazil and decides to book a flight ticket home abruptly after that, escaping her fangs of love—the love of the perfect woman he’s been longing for, escaping dreadful happiness. In the epilogue, he talks about his return after two years and his utter failure to replicate the experience in Rio de Janeiro. The place feels vacant of meaning and excitement, and he spends months trying to find an equal to her, which seemed so effortless the previous time. His comments on nostalgia and the utter failure to repeat it by “going back in time” were touching. He concludes that what gives a place its character is all about the people you meet there.
I’d suggest that the journey throughout all of South America—his parasites, possible rabies, stomach problems, rejections, bats—was part of the buildup to how he experienced Rio de Janeiro. His experience was all in the context of his traveling. He sought, after two years of absence, to simply go back to that “place.” But that “place” only existed in that context and has now vanished. Maybe his failure to stumble on another dream woman so fast and effortlessly was because he was living detached from a rich and meaningful context—drama, story.
The ending was good because it invites the reader to reflect on the emptiness of atomized freedom and the tragic elements of the human predicament. A redeeming quality is that Roosh has serious balls to publicly write about things most men would be ashamed of revealing. He’s radically, and seemingly uncalculated, honest, despite being, at least at the time of his fame, embedded in early-manosphere ideology that’s based on ideas that aren’t true nor useful.
“It was remotely possible they weren’t prostitutes and I missed out on my chance for a flag, a concept introduced to me by an Australian guy I met in Spain. It goes like this: if you have sex with a girl from a different country, you collect that country’s flag. It’s a more worldly way to brag about your conquests, instead of simply stating how many girls you’ve slept with. Before my plane touched down, I dreamed of all the flags I would score in South America. In the poorest countries—Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru—the girls would find out I was American, from the richest country in the world, and throw themselves at me. -Roosh V, A Dead Bat in Paraguay
Women hardly believe me when I say it’s normal for men to have sex with women solely to rack up numbers, compete with others, and for bragging rights. The quote above is the result of many years of involvement in the pickup community.
As for the “collecting flags” thing, you could assume it’s only a joke, but I recently read BANG - Colombia, part of the BANG series, which teaches you how to get laid in each specific country. The tips were serious and heavily focused on how quickly and cheaply you can get laid before getting out of the country with the local stamp of approval. Thus, it seems like there’s a serious pursuit of gathering flags.
The appeal of gathering flags, and pickup in general, is that it pushes men out of their comfort zones, out of their parents’ basements, and into the world. I suppose a way to motivate a man to do good things for himself is to dangle the promise of sex in front of him. However, the pleasurable feelings of sex aren’t enough to sustain an ongoing pursuit of ever more variety. Ultimately, it’s about male validation: the stories to tell your buddies over beer, to make them envy you, listen to you, and replicate you. In BANG - Colombia, he gives sound advice on how to learn Spanish and encourages learning to dance. It’s not always easy to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and learn a foreign language, learn salsa, learn an instrument, travel the world, get in shape, eat healthily, and develop a social character. However, all of these things suddenly become somewhat effortless once they’re conceptualized as degenerate and for ill means. A parallel to this is how Jordan Peterson taps into the male psyche by encouraging learning reading and writing, not to get good grades or be a good person, but to become “dangerous.”
The pick up artist’s primary concern is validation from his male buddies of his game, and the aesthetic elements of the pursuit. Regardless if he’s also searching for “the one,” in terms of quality of sex, he cares about an emotional connection, albeit his ultimately flawed mindset, unwittingly, limits his success in this, keeping him a Sysiphusean hamster wheel of emptiness and dissatisfaction.
Which brings me to how deceptive a lot of this is. When you’re far enough into the game, you don’t even recognize your own deception since you’re submerged in it. Roosh recommends directly lying about where you’re staying because he fears she’ll think less of you if you’re in a hostel. And all “opening lines” are essentially lies. I remember him writing that you should bring a Spanish book to a university and pretend to need help, asking women how to pronounce things. Mystery called this “indirect openers,” which is just another word for pretending to be someone you’re not (Spanish student, not pickup artist). Whether that means artificially asking for the time of day or advice on Spanish, you’re embedded in an inauthentic reality. No matter what you say, it will be inauthentic, even if it’s as plain and direct as, “Hi, I just wanted to meet you because I thought you were cute,” because in reality, The real undertone is something like a desire to have sex for ego gratification, to have sex in some sort of weird travel gamification, for bragging rights and a field report post to get kudos from other pickup artists on the online message board, or, in the best-case scenario, to facilitate an addiction to validation and conquest.
You may rightly accuse me of being awfully melodramatic of what is merely social lubricant to get something authentic going eventually, since ultimately, our motivations are ambiguous and mostly unknown even to ourselves, and we have no way to be completely frank with someone even if we wanted to. I think bullshit is harmless so long as you don’t dig your feet into it. If you take bullshit seriously, as in something necessary to maintain and defend, it’s harmful.
All of his tips for slight manipulations and deceptions are completely unnecessary and even counterproductive, and he’s unnecessarily complicating things for himself. The results pickup artists get from deception are the same effect as a placebo. Further, to the degree he’s able to deceive is to the degree his ego is fed due to the overcomplication of it all. Again, what makes sex rewarding for the pickup artist is the journey, the struggle, etc. If you can make it more complicated, as if you had to pull off a hundred and one lies—pretending you’re learning Spanish, actually learning Spanish, etc.—you’re getting exactly what you’re after to a stronger degree: a great story, a brilliant conquest, and a stronger sense of PUA identity. However, if you just want to get laid and have good sex, deception is not only unnecessary but counterproductive, as inauthenticity puts a cap on the vibe. I’d also add that, in other areas of life too, it’s amazing how normal it is for people to overcomplicate their lives with unnecessary lies about trivial details that eventually become severely consequential, creating giant webs of deception. On the bright side, this idiotic flaw of humanity makes for great cosmic comedy.
Anyway, in the book he'd occasionally pull a line that made me chuckle. Other times, it was interesting due to a lesson or some useful information from a traveling standpoint. But the problem is that he’s probably too used to writing field reports, where he just states that this happened, then that happened, and this happened, mainly due to the inherently interesting topic of interactions with women. The bulk of the episodes occurred in nightclubs or hostels, in a party environment, where he and others are trying to get laid. There was a lack of a red thread of meaning, reflections, lessons, or any sort of artistic touch to the writing. I suppose the tedious detail of each social interaction with a woman was warranted to some degree, as it gave a more realistic picture of how much work he put into getting laid, but the book would have been more digestible if he had moved away from the disconnected “field report writing mode.”
Some parts made my eyes glued to the page. We meet a Canadian guy who checks in the hostel in Argentina, who brags of sleeping with twenty Brazilian women in thirty days, who acts like a complete mad man, who lives with no hesitation and approaches women immediately upon seeing them, getting laid his first night in Cordoba seemingly by sheer confidence and attitude, given his mediocre looks and thinning hair. A man with unlimited energy and always in the mood talking to girls. “His game was simple, touch a lot and constantly talked about sex.”. He asked one of the hostel maids to show him her “big ass,” and she took him to a room upstairs and did it. He was crowned “Predator” by the other hostel guests and shared his power-moves: “hand around waist pull her close, firm eye contact, smile, build up tension before loosening the grip.” Just before leaving the city, Predator brought seven girls from a local park to the hostel during the day. Roosh asked him why he did it if he was leaving anyway. “I just couldn’t help it.” was his answer.
It’s people like this who remind us that if we could change our attitude and behavior, we could do these things too. Moreover, if these things are possible, what are the other things we don’t know about? What are the limits? Simply put, we don’t know the limits of personality or what is possible in the world with enough confidence and will. The alluring thing about all this is that while everything else seems rather predictable and stable, this personality thing, especially in terms of women, seems to have mysteries around every corner, yearning to be revealed. What could be more exciting than breaking through the invisible boundaries and rules within our minds, shaped by the behavior of (almost) everyone around us?
In Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, in The Seducer’s Diary, where the protagonist, a seducer, insisted on the “aesthetic” elements of the seduction. I didn’t really understand why and how aesthetics were of any importance to this character, and it seemed alien to me until I made the connection that it’s called pickup *artistry*. Kierkegaard’s character had his primary motive in the aesthetic and prioritized it over actually getting the girl. He prioritized, to the utmost degree, the manner in which he went about the seduction, far more than the results and effectiveness of the seduction itself. He spent enormous energy making each and every step extremely deliberate and premeditated, as if conducting a carefully planned drama. At first, I thought the character was unrealistic since he was entirely uninterested in sex, but I realized he is the ultimate caricature of the pick-up artist.
The pick-up artist is someone who finds aesthetic pleasure (or sexual arousal), like an artist or a poet, of creating a scenario from the fantasy of his head, and making women live, and fall in love, inside of his fabricated reality. Additionally, in pushing the boundaries of society, feeling into the darkness of the unknown for something to hold on to. He wants to reveal to himself, and the world, new modes of being—something that, deep inside, he intuits the culture needs—to view the world in a new perspective, primarily through the most ancient and deep-rooted concerns in the world: the intersexual one. You might accuse “Predator” of simply being a horny guy for demanding a maid to “show her fat ass,” but to me, this is a result of an aesthetic pursuit. In a way, this is the masterful practice of an art form.
Despite Predator’s success, our traveling protagonist meets a man who outshined him, who, to this day, was the best he’d ever seen, with Argentine girls screaming his name and fighting over him. Instead of the hypersexual, aggressive style, this Italian charm-machine was simply carefree, energetic, smiling, making jokes, and just having fun. It did not seem to dawn on Roosh that this man (in all likelihood) did not fabricate realities, did not manipulate or have to do any pretending. However, Roosh did reflect on the fact that he could never replicate his “game” because his charm came from his essence, not any specific tactic, and unfortunately, believing the only way to compensate for this is his conception of game. I believe 2009, around the time this was written, was the transitory stage from technique-game to the pursuit of aligning one’s “essence” or core personality to a natural charmer like our Italian or Canadian tigers.
Roosh reflected on the female brain being merely a puzzle to be figured out on how to deactivate it so he can sleep with women. And that’s why he enjoyed spending so much time in drinking environments, and preferred girls who drink, since it impairs their judgment, making it easier, reflecting on the fact that it’s always possible to make out with a girl with a boyfriend so long she’s got alcohol in her blood.
In any case, Roosh realizes the futility of replicating Predator and Italian by doing what they do, asking for tips, since it’s their core personality that does the heavy lifting. In a sense, “game” is split into two aspects, what you can do, figure out and learn, and the permanent fact of your essential personality. When someone storms into a hostel with their unlimited extroverted energy, we assume, by default, this is simply who they are. A couple reasons that reinforce this is the permanence of personality, seeing around us, people don’t change, and secondly, some kids in school were popular and cool, where others were not, making it seem as if personality, charm, extroversion, and coolness is deterministic, and while our moods might alter, our essence was set, apparently already in childhood. Moreover, we’re encouraged to chase our childhood dreams with the implication that some permanent facet of our being has already developed by that time.
Even though the evidence favors the opposite, the next “phase” of pick up artists put a new emphasis on the plasticity of character, of “being,” instead of “doing.” This was done in the emphasis that there is a bi-directional relationship between what you do and who you are, they are not as separate as what is normally thought.
One way to think of this is imagine a man playing the piano in front of an audience, and he’s under the impression that if you hit all the notes in the perfect sequence without making any mistakes, from sheer studying, repetition and effort, much like aligning a key lock in the perfect order, you unlock the gates to sexual gratification and admiration. After many years locked up in his basement studying the piano keys, he proceeds to play, technically perfect, hunched over the keys, making no mistakes, looking over the women, but to his dismay, they aren’t impressed. Then imagine another man, who, instead of locking himself up practicing piano day and night, has lived, loved, grieved and experienced life to the fullest. He’s full of emotion and while using the piano to express it, and while his execution isn’t technically perfect, there’s an overall harmony, beauty, human resonance that sheer technical skill of pressing keys in the right order cannot replicate, because of the subtleness that cannot be memorized or mimicked. Ironically, however, and this is the point of my analogy, is that if the second man went up to the piano having no technical training, no beauty could have been expressed anyway, and the analogy to game, while not perfect, is intuitively relevant to the point that what can seen as suboptimal, or even immoral, can be a necessary step toward the more ideal. This is the best explanation I could muster of my more-than-ideal ambiguous attitude to the ethics of “gathering flags.”
The problem-solving fanaticism shifted from trying to solve the rubik's cube of the female brain to make her have sex with you, to trying to figure out your own brain to make you naturally more attractive. Ironically, part of the puzzle was learning how to let go of the addiction to figuring out puzzles. And then pick up artists became more interested in general self development, especially spiritual pursuits which ultimately undermine their original pursuit, perhaps due to seeing the futility of casual sex, or because they don’t feel a need to be validated in the same way anymore.
While part of the reason why pickup material is hard to come by is the tendency toward spiritual growth or the guru finding the dream girl and wanting to hide his past, a very real reason is the political, economic, and ideological forces against it. Most pickup material I know of has been removed clean from the internet and can only be accessed by knowing exactly what you’re looking for on illegal torrent websites.
Aside from being drawn upward into spiritual growth from the inherently consciousness-expanding activity of facing fears, getting your ego blasted to pieces, etc., there is also the friction of real life consequences that grind the smooth sailing toward epic pickup artistdom to a halt. These are human attachment systems, toxic relationships, unexpected pregnancies, or a combination of all of the above. These account for many of the sudden disappearance from the pickup scene, and the gradual disillusionment of the original pursuit on the whole.
My fear is that while there seems to be a natural progression from trying to get laid to turning toward God, the process seems to be shoved under the carpet, and the link is broken, as if you stretch something too far apart you end up breaking it, thus it seems inevitable that the progression has to be continually rediscovered.
The best part of the book was toward the end, from the time he left Argentina, as most of it was worth reading then. He meets a woman who’s everything he has ever wanted in Brazil and decides to book a flight ticket home abruptly after that, escaping her fangs of love—the love of the perfect woman he’s been longing for, escaping dreadful happiness. In the epilogue, he talks about his return after two years and his utter failure to replicate the experience in Rio de Janeiro. The place feels vacant of meaning and excitement, and he spends months trying to find an equal to her, which seemed so effortless the previous time. His comments on nostalgia and the utter failure to repeat it by “going back in time” were touching. He concludes that what gives a place its character is all about the people you meet there.
I’d suggest that the journey throughout all of South America—his parasites, possible rabies, stomach problems, rejections, bats—was part of the buildup to how he experienced Rio de Janeiro. His experience was all in the context of his traveling. He sought, after two years of absence, to simply go back to that “place.” But that “place” only existed in that context and has now vanished. Maybe his failure to stumble on another dream woman so fast and effortlessly was because he was living detached from a rich and meaningful context—drama, story.
The ending was good because it invites the reader to reflect on the emptiness of atomized freedom and the tragic elements of the human predicament. A redeeming quality is that Roosh has serious balls to publicly write about things most men would be ashamed of revealing. He’s radically, and seemingly uncalculated, honest, despite being, at least at the time of his fame, embedded in early-manosphere ideology that’s based on ideas that aren’t true nor useful.
March 9, 2018
Throughout most of this book, the author is focused on how he can get laid in the South American city he's currently in. It struck me as peculiar that all the other experiences he had - be it getting a feel of the culture, learning a foreign language, appreciating nature, or experiences with other male travelers - were so secondary to his focus on hooking up that they are basically just footnotes. I appreciated how honest the narrator seemed in his retelling of the events, but perhaps I disliked the book because I can't really understand why someone would think that hopping around a whole continent would be worth it just to try to get in bed with locals.
April 11, 2013
written from the angle of a PUA going to different countries in an attempt to have sex with foreign women ends up becoming so much more: a book that makes you realize the humanity and extreme diversity in other countries; a book that makes you realize that you are not your job and if you aren't pushing yourself and going to sleep with the satisfaction of fulfillment every night, then what the fuck is the point of waking up?
May 1, 2023
Misogyny and xenofobia sold as a travel book. Daryush Valizadeh is an American microbiologist and the son of two immigrants, who one day leaves his job to embark on a self-discovery journey to South America. At least, his account deviates from conventionality and is honest with itself. What interests Daryush is not really understanding himself, uncovering deep truths, or anything of that nature, but simply getting laid with as many women as possible. Based on his life before the trip, we understand that he is one of those dissatisfied young men who places all their value as men on their sexual life, leading to a more general dissatisfaction with society and current gender roles. Added to this, in Daryush's case, are what appear to be narcissistic personality traits and a marked lack of empathy, especially towards women. The only person he expresses genuine affection for is his seven-year-younger sister, with whom he used to have a somewhat problematic relationship (Daryush recalls: "I'd make her give me weeks of "beverage service" at a time, treating her like my own personal servant. (...) We farted on each other's faces. We put dirty socks in each other's mouths."). Daryush's desire to travel arises from his concern for sex and money. He despises his job, feels that he is meant for great things, or at least to laze around all day. He chooses South America instead of Europe because it is cheaper, and he believes he can spend more time doing nothing, but above all, because he suspects that in this scenario casual sex will be easier for him. Although he is the son of immigrants, Daryush also has the sense of entitlement characteristic of the country where he was born. From the moment he lands in Quito, the first of his destinations, he complains about poverty, dirtiness, and how ugly and uncomfortable South America is to him. This man in search of his masculinity has a low tolerance for life's difficulties. The book reads, for the most part, as a long rant about how hard it is to be in South America and how hard it is to get women to sleep with him. In both cases, there are racist undertones to his account, and he shows little interest in understanding the places and cultures he visits, despite considering himself a keen observer and increasing his sense of personal importance. It is like a version for our times of the famous journey of Ernesto Guevara northwards; in reverse, southwards, Daryush ends up becoming Roosh V., pick-up artist, and guru of the manosphere. He is such an unpleasant character that it gave me an absurd feeling of national pride to discover that Argentine girls were the ones who best frustrated Daryush's plans. Among other things, this is due to his limited understanding of Argentine dating culture, which reflects his generally poor understanding. Upon arriving in Buenos Aires, Daryush fails to see that he is in the best city in the world and refers to it as "Malas Aires." A very basic grammatical error (the word "aire" is masculine, not feminine), which remains there despite this book being edited, and despite Daryush bragging several times about his fluency in Spanish. This fact alone is quite revealing of his personality.
April 12, 2021
I see this book gets 3.5 in the reviews.
I actually also gave it 3.5 in my own review on my blog, 3 years ago.
But looking back, it deserves 5 stars.
I still remember parts of Roosh V's story of traveling through Latin America.
The book made a positive impression, in the long run.
Maybe someday this will be pre-scribed reading in schools.
Kidding, probably won't, but very entertaining read.
I actually also gave it 3.5 in my own review on my blog, 3 years ago.
But looking back, it deserves 5 stars.
I still remember parts of Roosh V's story of traveling through Latin America.
The book made a positive impression, in the long run.
Maybe someday this will be pre-scribed reading in schools.
Kidding, probably won't, but very entertaining read.
July 27, 2016
I appreciated brutal honesty of this book with regards to living conditions in South America. Most travellers never mention exhaustion, stomach issues, bugbites and hygiene compromises you need to make to get by. Roosh openly puts it in front of you, making you think twice. I expect my personal experience could be similar, as I am sensitive to hygiene related matters.
With all that being your most faithful companion to your trip, I admire Roosh's strength of will that pushed him forward despite multiple obstacles and complications. I believe this is similar mindset he used to push through dating issues he once had.
I greatly enjoyed this book, although this is not the typical "travel memoir", but rather a look into the mind of a man on a long journey.
With all that being your most faithful companion to your trip, I admire Roosh's strength of will that pushed him forward despite multiple obstacles and complications. I believe this is similar mindset he used to push through dating issues he once had.
I greatly enjoyed this book, although this is not the typical "travel memoir", but rather a look into the mind of a man on a long journey.
May 10, 2016
This book was just strange. He obsesses over this one girl but does not want to commit to her, and obsesses just as much over sleeping with as many women as he can (while secretly feeling guilty about the one girl). The title has to do with one tiny insignificant moment in the story that he aggrandizes so that we can ponder over its meaning.
It means nothing. He just saw a dead bat in his room in Paraguay.
I find Roosh V to be an interesting character and intriguing to follow, and I agree with some of his opinions. But I couldn't get into this "book." If this is all it takes to make a book these days, there's going to be a lot of trash to sift through.
It means nothing. He just saw a dead bat in his room in Paraguay.
I find Roosh V to be an interesting character and intriguing to follow, and I agree with some of his opinions. But I couldn't get into this "book." If this is all it takes to make a book these days, there's going to be a lot of trash to sift through.
June 14, 2015
Не особено интересна книга за приключенията на известния сваляч на жени в Латинска Америка. Поне е дълга, за разлика от повечето му, но голяма част от нея е отделена на отделителната му система и проблемите му с нея резултат от местната храна, а друга голяма част - на неуспехите му с жените и депресията му.
Все пак е полезно да се види как свалянето на жени не е магия, а зависи от много неща и понякога дори най-опитния остава на сухо с месеци, защото не влага достатъчно усилия, не излиза с подходящите хора, не е в подходящото настроение и душевно състояние и т.н.
Все пак е полезно да се види как свалянето на жени не е магия, а зависи от много неща и понякога дори най-опитния остава на сухо с месеци, защото не влага достатъчно усилия, не излиза с подходящите хора, не е в подходящото настроение и душевно състояние и т.н.
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