It hasn’t been a good week for Amazon so far. It’s never a good week for Amazon when it’s revealed that, as the “Everything Store,” some of the “everything” they sell is morally reprehensible.
The content currently being protested is the bibliography of Daryush Valizadeh/Roosh V, the controversial “pickup artist” whose “dating advice” consists of advocating predatory behavior and in at least one case, this: "In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she couldn’t legally give her consent." Roosh’s antics during his tour of Canada have inspired fierce resistance and protest, calling attention to his long career of monetizing misogyny.
But Amazon isn’t just dealing with facing the fact that in their obsessive desire to catalog and make available every book in the world they’ve ended up peddling what are, at best, beginner’s guides to sleazy manipulation and are, at worst, potential date rape manuals.
They’re also dealing with the massive backlash over the New York Times’ exposé demonstrating how Amazon manages to be so successful at selling everything--everything from Tupperware to electronics to books describing how to ignore a drunk girl when she says “No.”
The way to become the Everything Store is, apparently, to push your employees to the limits of human tolerance, reducing them to tears at their desks, and throwing them into a “data-driven” lion’s den where they must endure constant criticism, constant judgment, constant debates until only the fittest ideas--and the fittest personnel--survive.
It’s unsurprising that a “company culture” that’s laser-focused on getting the customer exactly what they want exactly when they want it with no delay and no waste probably wouldn’t stop to ask the bigger questions. Questions like “Do people really need the things we sell?” and “What effect does this instant-gratification consumer culture we’re creating have on society?” and “What will the future PR consequences be of us selling a book instructing men to pressure women into sex by any means necessary?”
Probably no one at Amazon gave any thought to the content of Roosh’s charmingly named "Bang" series shelved in their “Love & Romance” section; probably no one at Amazon was aware of those particular books at all. You certainly couldn’t say that Amazon consciously decided to support Roosh’s worldview by carrying those books.
And yet that’s the thing. Roosh’s world and Amazon’s aren’t all that different. They’re really two versions of the same thing.
Now, I’m not making the obvious incendiary accusation that Amazon is some kind of hotbed of sexual harassment--that was one allegation that was never made in the New York Times piece. But I am saying that both Amazon and Roosh envision and embrace a world of cutthroat “purposeful Darwinism,” as a former Amazon HR manager puts it.
Roosh and his pickup-artist colleagues describe dating and sex with the telling term “game”; they rank the “sexual market value” of women they pursue on a 1-10 scale; they categorize men as “alpha” or “beta” or “omega” based on their success with women. They treat the world of sex and dating as fundamentally competitive, as part marketplace and part battlefield, to the point where Roosh tracks the price index of sex as a commodity and escalates the hoary old “battle of the sexes” metaphor to nuclear levels.
The dark world of pickup artistry is one where genuine love in a sexual relationship is a fairytale and where true friendship between men and women is impossible--and, indeed, one where friendship among men is likewise impossible, since life is a game where all men are competitors and women are the ball.
That, after all, is the thought process behind Roosh’s most disturbing troll post, his call to legalize rape that occurs on private property. In the public sphere, he reasons, we can have global standards of behavior that apply to everyone, but in our private homes, it’s up to individual women to protect their “virtue”--or find a man who will do it for them, by taking ownership of them.
It’s just the logic of the free market, after all--men want women based on their “sexual market value,” and if they’re allowed to freely compete for women with all the means at their disposal, the strongest and fittest men are the ones who will succeed in life and pass on their DNA. Roosh’s ideology isn’t all that far from the actual Social Darwinism of days past, with the same pseudoscientific invocation of evolution to justify his behavior, but with a lot less emphasis on money and a lot more emphasis on sex.
That’s really why Roosh is so offensive. He takes the logic you’re supposed to apply to economics and instead applies it to sex and intimacy.
We see the concept of a “sexual marketplace” is grotesque in a way that the regular marketplace is not because sex is personal in a way the abstract buying of goods and services is not, and therefore sexual violation one of the deepest possible violations. I don’t disagree with any of that. But the fact that treating sex as a cutthroat competition is especially screwed up doesn’t make others forms of cutthroat competition okay just because they’re happening in the workplace or the marketplace, where they’re “supposed to.”
If we lived in a utopia where everyone started from a baseline level of financial stability maybe it’d be different. But as it is, workplaces like Amazon’s are filled with personal violations, if of a less serious nature. When your pregnancy miscarries and you have to head straight back into working 80-hour weeks or lose your livelihood, that’s a personal violation. When your marriage and your family suffer because your boss is emailing you and texting you in the middle of the night demanding your attention, that’s a personal violation. When you live in a state of constant anxiety because you know your co-workers have been incentivized to throw you under the bus with negative evaluations to keep their own jobs thanks to “stack ranking,” that’s a personal violation.
And, because we indeed do not start out on a level playing field in life, these no-holds-barred no-man’s-land environments violate women far more than they do men.
In a society where we’d truly escaped the shackles of the gender roles thrust on us, maybe the free market really would be egalitarian. But as it is, when you demand employees work 80-hour weeks to keep their jobs, it’s women who get pushed to take on that work along with the burden of childcare and household chores, not men. When you refuse to make allowances for reproductive health for your employees, it’s the women who get punished for pregnancy, not the men.
And when you demand that everyone fight and fight hard to keep their jobs at all times, and argue and argue hard to defend their ideas at all times, that puts women in a difficult double-bind, since we retain the social programming that causes us to perceive behavior as insubordinate or rude in women that we see as assertive and confident in men.
This is what happens when you go no-holds-barred, when you decide there shouldn’t be any boundaries stopping you from going after your goals with all your might--when either as a scheming pickup artist or as a visionary CEO you decide to toss aside all scruples and conventions because it’s just that important that you maximize your profits and/or your chance of getting laid. When you don’t put any checks on power, the powerful oppress the powerless. When you don’t do anything to “disrupt” how power is distributed, it ends up distributed in the old, familiar ways--the wealthy vs. the poor, whites vs. people of color, and, I would argue most of all, men vs. women.
Amazon can claim to be surprised that it turned out that when they were building their product catalog that Roosh's types of books were in there. They can claim that it’s unfair to claim that their ongoing struggles with their gender balance in the office have anything to do with the misogynistic dreck among their products.
But the two problems are just facets of the one big problem. Roosh’s product line is in Amazon’s catalog because Amazon, generally, does not care what they sell as long as they can make money off of it. Amazon’s gender balance suffers because Amazon, generally, does not care what’s going on with their employees on a personal level as long as they’re hitting “data-driven” targets.
And when you decide you don’t care--that you’re going to work the system as it exists now with no concern for whom the system puts in a position of strength vs. a position of weakness--you end up perpetuating the strong oppressing the weak, regardless of what your intentions were.
The recent publicity around Roosh is causing the world at large to condemn him, and I’m glad for that. Roosh’s philosophy and his actions hurt everyone, but they especially hurt women. And it’s a mistake to describe Roosh purely as driven by “hatred” or “rage,” though he does display both of those emotions at times; what makes Roosh so damaging is his callousness, the fact that he’s already decided he’s going to get what he wants from the women he targets and is coldly unaffected by how his actions affect them.
Read his shoulder-shrugging description of how he feels about the incapacitated woman in "Bang Iceland": “I won’t rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do.”
Then reread the New York Times exposé on Amazon’s workplace culture, and the defenses of it put forward by various denizens of Silicon Valley. Most of them only halfheartedly gesture at trying to deny the abuses took place; instead they claim they’re justified by Amazon’s success. “Making money is what they do.” “Shipping products cheaply is what they do.” “Cutting margins to the bone is what they do.”
Amazon apologists will complain--with some justification--that attacking Amazon for selling Roosh’s books as a way to protest Roosh’s public behavior, when plenty of other outlets also sell Roosh’s books, is a way to make Amazon a target of opportunity, just like singling out Apple in particular for making hardware in China.
But I think the connection goes deeper than that. The rise of pickup artist culture coincided with the rapid growth of the tech sector and the “disruptive” influence of companies like Amazon on our economy. Much of the language of pickup artists—”going for the close” and the like--is directly taken from the business world.
It seems like if you have a culture that celebrates the genius of people who are really really good at making lots of money by acting recklessly and ruthlessly without regard for human consequences, that’s going to bleed over into sex and dating somewhere. If you tell one group of young men that anything they do in the pursuit of profit is ultimately justified because the free market ensures everyone gets what their competence and diligence earns them… well, another group will apply that lesson to getting laid.
In a very direct way Roosh benefited from the “anything-goes” culture of the Internet, the reluctance of anyone nowadays to be a “gatekeeper,” of Amazon and their colleagues’ implicit message that as long as he could find a paying audience for his books describing how to victimize and manipulate and assault, it wasn’t anyone’s business what effect his writing had on other people. As long as the customers were happy and he was happy and Amazon got their cut, the collateral damage on women unlucky enough to meet Roosh’s students at parties and in bars was nobody’s concern.
It’s not just Roosh. And it’s not just Amazon. But these two stories breaking in the same week show where this culture of callousness has gotten us, this culture insistent on believing our world is a neutral playing field where unbridled, individual competition leads to excellence, as opposed to a fucked-up hierarchy of power where unbridled, individual competition just leads to the powerful victimizing the powerless even harder.
So yes, tell Amazon to think about coming up with a policy about carrying how-to guides by Roosh V and other sexual predators. But don’t stop there. Tell everyone in the world to look at how Amazon does business and whom they choose to do business with. And ask if the world that attitude is building is the world we want to leave to our kids.
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