Dunno. I actually respect poor Winston much more than Roosh. Both of them have relatively skewed and biased world views, dictated by their experiences (or lack thereof) as travellers and writers as well as the constant resonance of a dedicated online audience (HA and RoK/RVF). Both of them suffer from Narcissus complex to some extent. Both of them consider themselves, in more or less naive terms, intellectuals and fighters with a mission. Both of them are trying what they can to hold on to their (Warholian) 15 minutes of Internet fame and make a half-decent passive income out of it.Jester wrote:Public, I thought the interview that PandaBear linked to, Roosh was pretty fair. The only lie I saw was when he implied that he HAD NO CHOICE but to keep pursuing easy sex, because NOONE WOULD MARRY HIM. The guy has admitted that over the years he has met some fine woman he really liked, who wanted him. So he has grown addicted to novelty, or is childishly proving a point.
Other than that, though, he describes the world the way that many of us see it.
He does have guts to do so in the public arena.
(I am now wrestling with how public I am going to be in my webcasts, blogging, etc. It's not easy.)
What Winston has, that Roosh and his PUA-ish crew will never have is one, very important point: honesty. Winston is one of us. He tried and failed, had some success and failed again. Like him, he is always keen to put much of his stream of consciousness and talk about how he feels about his life and the world around him. Only, with Winston you know he's not bullshitting you. Mock him and diss him as you like, you know he's a total "what you see is what you get" kind of guy. Such a degree of honesty, however naive and childish and bordering masochism, has become a very rare stock in the Internet community. All of us see it, many of us appreciate it, and perhaps that is why a lot of us respect him, even when they won't admit it.
With Roosh and his crew, there's always the pompous prose, the overarching sense of superiority and self-righteousness, the faux-nostalgic tirades on how much more virtuous America was 5/10/50/100 years ago, and the little stories of college-grade drama, always ending up with sex and Yours Truly walking away wiser and stronger. And it's funny, because these latter always seem to be thrown in as the "true life experience" component, to prove the final thesis/statement, when they are usually the more bombastic and least believable part of the story.
It might be entertaining to read it for a while, good for a laugh, and some of the "wisdom" and conclusions might resonate with what is discussed in here on the subject of AW/FW, feminism, gender dynamics and society at large etc. In the end though, if it's genuine life experience you're looking for, something you can relate to and possibly learn or be inspired from, whether positively or negatively, you really don't know what to make of it. A bit like joining a buffet meal where 50% of the food is made of shit and piss and you can't tell exactly which 50%, so you end up just walking away hungry and disappointed.
If it's the guts to expose oneself, for who they really are, in the public arena, I would say Winston's guts are ten times bigger than Roosh's.
