Yesterday’s TBT looked back at Roosh V’s remarkable conversion to Christianity, and how he sacrificed real income by unpublishing many of his pickup books.  He also banned discussions of casual sex and seduction from his popular forum. In my preamble to yesterday’s post, I noted that Roosh has take another step:  unpublishing the remainder of his “game” books, including his best-seller, Game.

At nearly the same time Roosh announced the unpublishing of most of the remainder of his books (these are all that remain), Christian manosphere blogger Dalrock announced “that it is time to shut down the blog.”  That came as a huge blow, as Dalrock was the major authority on the crisis of masculinity in churches today.  He was one of the only voices to identify the source of this problem—the perverted notion of “chivalry,” for one—and the squishy pastors who urge men to “man up” by making foolish decisions regarding marriage, without any regard for the follow-through.

Rollo Tomassi, one of the triumvirate of manosphere bloggers who dominated that niche along with Roosh and the deplatformed Roissy/Heartiste, wrote a thoughtful, melancholy reflection on Dalrock’s departure, along with an analysis-cum-condemnation of blogging today.  He decried the push toward creating “content” for content’s sake (I’m guilty of that, with my drive for daily posts), and the reduction of once-heavy thinkers to mere “brands” or promoters.

Rollo laments—rightly—the potential loss of Dalrock’s blog, especially the decade’s worth of diligent spadework.  He also chastises Roosh’s turn to Christianity, and the conviction-driven removal of his salacious works.

I agree with Rollo on the former point, but not the latter.  Roosh himself kept Game, for example, in publication after his conversion last year because he reasoned it was an “agnostic tool”:  men could use it to help them obtain and maintain a healthy marriage, or they could use it for evil.  But just as a hammer can be used to drive in a nail or to bash in a man’s skull, the use of Game‘s tenants were up to the user.

It’s not an unreasonable comparison—if the book is, as Roosh believed, an “agnostic tool.”  However, some discernment led to a change of heart:

One month after the tour finished, I bought a used truck and was getting ready to rent a house in the mountains. I wasn’t too worried about money, since Game was still selling well without any active promotion on my part. Then I received a message from a fellow Orthodox Christian that I had met in California saying he had just read Game, and noticed that it contained the same type of sexual content I had aggressively banned on the forum last year. I walked to my bookshelf, pulled out a copy of Game, and randomly flipped through it, expecting an “agnostic” tool, but I could not find a page where sin was not. The book wasn’t agnostic at all—it trained and steered men for the main purpose of achieving bodily pleasure through casual sex. In some ways, it even wired men’s brains to view women as objects to be won purely through knowledge, effort, and physical attractiveness. Even my book Day Bang, which has no sexual content, trained men to see women as objects to be won for pleasurable ends through the mathematics of approaching a lot of women in the hopes of finding one who was horny and loose. When faced with a hard life decision, I would pray for guidance, but this decision was easy: the books had to go.

I do think men today need useful tools for understanding and approaching women (and on that note, I would disagree with Roosh’s unpublishing of Day Game, which really is just how to meet girls the old-fashioned way).  That was the primary source of Rollo’s frustration:  what are men supposed to do in our increasingly dangerous dating environment without the tools Roosh, Dalrock, et. al., developed?

But otherwise, I agree wholeheartedly with Roosh’s decision.  As Roosh wrote last year, shortly after his conversion:  “If you’re not a believer, it is unlikely you will understand the nature of these decisions and similar ones that will come in the future.”

Such is the way for Christians.  Christ promised us persecution for following Him.  Roosh has made a real financial sacrifice by unpublishing his most popular books.  As I wrote last year, I don’t see any ulterior motive at play here.  At best, he can write a book or two about his experience, but that’s not going to sell as effectively as lurid tales of pick-up artistry and how-to guides to picking up babes in Denmark.

In a better age, men would just know how to do these things.  But we’re in the long decline of Western Civilization (probably).  That said, it’s heartening to see a sexual sophist trade in his libertine lifestyle for the ascetic life Christian faithfulness.

Godspeed, Roosh.  Dalrock, you will be missed.