My impression of Roosh has always been that he is a remarkably slavish man. I first read him when he was still a PUA. What stood out about his writings is that he didn't seem to take any joy in what he did. He seemed like a miserable, joyless man who based his whole life around having sex just because he had to, like a lifelong medical condition or something. His other writings (there was some "own the feminists" and "rediscover masculinity" stuff mixed in) also seemed like a lazy compulsive behavior (he believed that stuff because he was supposed to). Apart from his tone, his content was very generic: The kind of humor that some "manosphere" writers had (like Roissy from DC/Heartiste), the aspirational lifestyle aspects of some (Mike Cernovich), the speculative psychology of some (The Rational Male/Rolo Tomassi), the attempts to help the hopeless and downtrodden (RSDTyler) and just the sense of fun that some had (Mystery and Neil Strauss) were all absent from him. He was like the Patrick Bateman of of the manosphere, but whinier and without the basic sense to keep his identity a secret.
A few years ago, he became an Orthodox Christian. As far as I can tell, he is just as slavish as before. His new articles read like he is trying to spew out as many religious-sounding words and phrases as possible without any real substance. For example, in
this article about why the gym is a bad thing, he says this:
"The vehemently secular music that all gyms play is painful to my hymn-loving ears. 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."
It's just a bunch of corny word salad.
"Vehemently secular...hymn-loving ears...Satanically-engineered melody..." He sound sanctimonious about...something.
The example I remember most clearly was from a little earlier in his career as a Christian writer, recounting his experience trying psychedelic drugs:
"Albert unscrewed one of the jars and handed it to me. The liquid looked like water mixed with dirt. Even though I was about to take a new drug, my understanding of what it could do was quite limited. I knew far more about Ayahuasca and DMT, drugs that could purportedly give you access to other dimensions containing monsters and elves (i.e. demons)."
By his own admission, he is relatively new to Christianity at this point, and brand new to psychedelics. Yet, the idea that a person even imagines something unusual automatically = demons. It is such a comically ignorant position that it is remarkable, but it sounds like something a televangelist would say.
Roosh, as always, is just imitating the kind of people he that he should be.
I have not seen any reason not to think he is completely empty on the inside, whether he fashions himself as a casanova or a priest.
