Plans for an international meet up day organised by “pick-up” artist Roosh V have been cancelled over safety fears.
The ‘neomasculine’ group Return of Kings had planned to gather in eight major UK cities on 6th February to mark their first ‘International Meet Up Day’, with meet ups organised in 42 countries.
However, Roosh V has since called off the events, citing “the safety of privacy” of the men due to attend and that “While I can’t stop men who want to continue meeting in private groups, there will be no official Return Of Kings meetups.”
Organiser Roosh V, who founded the Return of Kings website in October last year, has been widely criticised for his sexist and homophobic views in the last decade.
He had already moved a number of the meet ups to secret locations, stating “This meet-up was never intended as a confrontation with unattractive women and their enablers, I’m moving to save as many of these meetups as I can before Saturday so that men can still meet in private away from a loud, obnoxious, dishonest, and potentially violent mob.”
Protests had been organised at several of the organised meet up points, and over 40,000 people signed a petition, created by Katie Pruszynski, to lobby the police and Home Office to ban the events.
As a pro-rape self-styled ‘pick up artist’, Roosh V, full name Daryush Valizadeh, published his first book, ‘Bang’ in 2007, describing it as a ‘textbook for picking up girls and getting laid’. He has since been slammed for his continued misogynistic and homophobic comments, including when he once commented that a woman’s value should be judged based on her ‘fertility’ and ‘beauty’, and that “male homosexuals have become a public health threat”.
More recently, in a 2015 blog post, he wrote that rape of women should be legal if carried out on private property, saying “less women will be raped because they won’t voluntarily drug themselves with booze and follow a strange man into a bedroom, and less men will be unfairly jailed for what was anything but a maniacal alley rape”.
Emma Healey, a Politics student at the University of Leeds, wrote an article about the meet ups for The Tab and has since found out that her details have been published in what has been described as ‘Operation Bullhorn’, Roosh V’s first ‘counter-operation against the enemy’.
Speaking the The Gryphon, Miss Healey stated “I think the whole thing is pathetic.
“They have awful views and I didn’t even criticise them, I just stated facts and they have gone and leaked all my details; it’s scary that they can find out that much -but it just makes me more determined to show how pathetic they are.”
Elli Pugh