There are infinite varieties of misogyny on the Internet. Arguably the most visible type of digital woman-hating emanates from the pick-up artist movement, something between a sociopathic self-help theory and an ersatz philosophy. Among the most visible leaders of this revanchist style of gender politics is Daryush Valizadeh, a pick-up artist who operates under the pseudonym “Roosh V.”

Roosh V writes on a variety of platforms, and maintains a catalog of erotic travelogues that purport to offer tips on seducing local women. He became known more broadly beyond his online audience for an angrily written screed against Denmark, which reporter Katie J. M. Baker analyzed in a 2013 essay for Dissent. What, by Roosh’s account, was the matter with the state of Denmark?

According to Baker, Roosh found it difficult to score with women who had no pressing financial need to affix themselves to men. All the methods engineered by enterprising pick-up artists to make themselves appear confident and wealthy were of little interest to Danish women, who can rely upon a robust social insurance regime for financial support rather than the vicissitudes of male sexual taste. As Baker writes,

Marginalized women who need male spouses to flourish might, indeed, find pick-up artists alluring. But women in countries that have gender-equalizing policies supported by an anti-individualist culture may not.

In a recent essay for Vox, Emmett Rensin interviewed Roosh on the subject of gender and sex. For all of Roosh’s frustration at not drowning in no-strings-attached intercourse in Denmark, Rensin reports the pick-up artist found what he does to be merely pragmatic, but not optimal. “In Roosh V's ideal world,” Rensin writes, “there would be no need for men like Roosh. He claims no deep biological imperative beneath his seduction tactics. Only a culture falling apart in the West, marriages dying as women are no longer beholden to the pillars of its stability.”

The pillars of marital stability are, for Roosh, primarily financial. Feminist artist Angela Washko asked Roosh about his ideal world during a lengthy video interview with him in January. In Roosh’s utopia, he explained,