“Pick-Up Artist” Event Canceled Due To Widespread Protest

A planned “neo-masculinist” meeting organised by confessed rapist Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh has been canceled due to widespread protest.

The Guardian reports that the meetings, which were scheduled in 43 countries around the world, have been canceled by Roosh because he “can no longer guarantee the safety or privacy of the men who want to attend”. He added, in a statement on his website, that he apologises to those “let down by my decision”, but said he “could not stop men meeting in private groups”.

As reported, the Icelandic location of the meeting was to be held at the statue of Leifur Eiríksson in front of Hallgrímskirkja this Saturday at 20:00.

In response, a protest was being organised.

“As I see it, all kinds of creeps could spread across the country if people stand back and do nothing,” one of the protest organisers, Brynhildur Yrsa Guðmundsdóttir, told reporters. “If you don’t like something, it accomplishes nothing to do nothing.”

Roosh, who has made a career out of instructing men how to manipulate women into sex, has visited Iceland before. Reporting after his visit in 2011, he described his encounter with one woman that even he admits “would have been rape” in the US, “since she legally couldn’t give her consent” on account of how drunk she was. Roosh is apparently unaware that this is how Icelandic law defines rape as well.

Protests against these meetings have been organised in other countries as well. These protests were planned in the UK, Australia and, most notably, Canada, where a women’s boxing club promised to greet neo-masculinists personally.