This article originally appeared in VICE Canada
It didn’t take long for the internet-at-large to learn about Julien Blanc, a self-proclaimed pick-up artist (PUA) who was filmed telling a room of his PUA pupils that in Tokyo, all you need to do to get lucky with a woman is grab her head and pull it to your crotch. In his words: “Head on dick, head on dick.”
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As a result of this video surfacing, Blanc had his immigration visa to Australia revoked during a recent visit; he has also inspired the wrath of citizens the world over. A petition, addressed to the immigration minister of Canada to have Blanc banned from the country, has over 7,500 signatures at the time this article was written. A similar petition to ban him from Japan where he was filmed physically harassing women, has over 36,000 signatures.
One of Blanc’s business partners, however, has his own set of disturbing videos that are worthy of scrutiny. His name is Owen Cook and he was born in Ottawa, Ontario, but he goes by the (edgy!) alias “Tyler Durden.” Cook is one of the subjects of Neil Strauss’s now-famous PUA expose, The Game, and in it he’s painted as a veritable pick-up artist antagonist, a disrupter who misinterpreted the tenants of seduction and took them to an uncomfortable new low.
In Strauss’s words: “Tyler Durden advocated a new mission. He called it Project Mayhem, in honor of Fight Club. And the directive was to run up to an attractive woman and—before even uttering a word—lightly body-check her, whack her on the head with something soft, or physically accost her in some other playful manner.”
Clearly this elementary school-style, inappropriately physical tactic has been expanded upon by Cook and his pick-up artist disciples, who run a PUA company called Real Social Dynamics. RSD travels the world to hold “boot camps” where they teach men for $2,500-$3,000 a piece how they can seduce women.
With the help of a group of activists who want to “take down Real Social Dynamics,” three videos have come to my attention that detail Cook’s physically aggressive style of meeting women, his bizarre strategies to teach men about seduction through an allegory about raping an animal, and a personal encounter Cook describes willingly where he says he forced sex on a woman he was dating.
The first video, posted to Cook’s own YouTube channel, is entitled “Tyler’s Most Gangster Exercise for Entitlement.” In it, he describes a new “exercise” that he thinks is “very cool.”
Basically, this tactic involves grabbing strange women, pulling them towards you, and yelling “You! What’s Up? Come!” Cook describes this as a “sloppy” move to “rip her in.” In the video, Cook advises his audience to test this out on an unattractive woman first, in order to “get the exact feel for doing that.” He then advises his pupils that after they have gotten accustomed to physically grabbing strange women in a nightclub they should approach and grab a woman they find attractive instead.
Cook tells his students to “not even focus on your emotions” and to “divorce your emotions” from the action of grabbing a strange woman without her permission. He tells his students to recognize the “blocker” in their mind that is preventing them from grabbing a strange woman at a nightclub and to ignore it. He insists that anyone who tries this sloppy tactic will receive a “very interesting result.”
Yes, I’m sure they will.
Cook wraps up the video by letting his students know that practicing on unattractive women will help them get over their “entitlement block” or their “this-is-not-the-behavior-I’m-supposed-to-be-doing block.” According to Owen Cook, “divorcing your emotions” and going against one’s natural instincts to not grab strange women in public will help men get laid, because women are obviously looking for men to grab them without asking every time they leave the house.
There’s another particularly off-putting video, filmed inside one of Owen Cook’s boot camps, in which Cook talks about raping a metaphorical lion. He sets this bizarre allegory up by telling his students that “attraction is not a choice,” that “women are attracted to status,” and “looks aren’t that important” for men to attract women.
The video, which is marked with a trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault, is disturbing and confusing. And, it’s one of the more graphic and creepy things I’ve ever had to put in an article. So, be warned:
Say you’ve got a tribe, and there’s this fucking lion that’s come and eaten five or six members of your tribe… Everyone’s scared of the scary cat. So you come along, and that scary cat comes out, and you grab that thing by the fucking neck. [Cook begins to growl] And you fucking choke it to death. And you take it, you take its dead body. And you buttfuck it as you stare at the tribe. So you’re the guy that killed and buttfucked the scary cat… Now you’ve got a poopy dick. This is where the “attraction is not a choice” thing comes in… If you buttfucked the scary cat, those girls are going to line up to suck that poopy dick.
Cook’s gleeful description of raping an imaginary dead lion in order to attract hypothetical women in a hypothetical tribe, in all of its gory detail, is clearly disturbing. But it’s not even the worst instance of Cook’s aggressive “seduction” philosophy that has been caught on video (the quote begins at 1:27 in the video).
In another clip that was again filmed in one of RDS’s boot camps, Cook describes a forcible encounter he had with a woman who he was apparently dating. This is a video that could absolutely trigger victims of sexual assault, and the quote I’ve pasted below is highly troubling. So please tread lightly:
She was a stripper… I fucking hated that fucking bitch. Fucking bitch. She even had the tramp stamp. You know what I’m saying? The full tramp stamp. She’s just a full, slut whore slut. I fucked the shit out of her, dude…
The last way I fucked her too, it was in the morning, she was taking a shower, and I didn’t think she wanted to have sex again, but I just threw her on the bed and I put it in her, and I could barely even get it in because she was just totally not in the mood. And I was like, “Fuck it, I’m never seeing this bitch again. I don’t care.” So I just like, jam it in, and it’s all tight and dry and I fuck her, and I’m like “I’ll just make this quick because she doesn’t even want it.” But then she starts to get into it, and once she gets into it I came prematurely.
Clearly, Julien Blanc is not acting alone when it comes to disseminating hurtful and abusive language to men who are trying to gain the confidence to approach women and find companions. Or, worse, they are enabling the misconceptions that men have about objectifying and taking advantage of women they want to sleep with. Either way, the information RDS is spreading is dangerous to say the least.
Cook’s description of forcing sex on a woman he was dating is incredibly disturbing. It’s a detailed encounter that he offers up voluntarily, and it is nauseating. In light of all this, the fact that Cook is touring around the world and passing off his violent and disturbing behavior as a method to pick up women is alarming. While Julien Blanc has received a lot of negative attention for the awful video that shows him bragging about physically grabbing strange women in Tokyo, these “lessons” from Owen Cook deserve scrutiny as well.
In The Game Strauss describes Cook as not even recognizing the humanity of the male pick-up artists he associates with: “He didn’t seem to see the humanity in us. He didn’t care about what we did for work; where we were from; or what our thoughts on culture, politics, and the world were. There was a distinction he didn’t seem to understand: We weren’t just PUAs. We were people.”
If that’s how these pick-up artists feel about Cook, then how has he impacted the women who he clearly treats horribly?
Owen Cook did not respond to multiple requests for comment from VICE.
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