The Pussy
by Delicious Tacos
(Self-published, July 2016)

Game
by Roosh Valizadeh
(Self-published, September 2018)

It seemed dead obvious when I began writing this article, a double feature on two books about sleeping with women, that I should talk about one of my past relationships. Lord knows I have plenty of lunatic stories about crazy exes that would be a great way to frame this review. However, as I made my way through Tacos’ book, a better idea slowly materialized, my patience rewarded like a sex tourist waiting for a hotter go-go dancer to walk down the line.

Delicious Tacos hails from Los Angeles, a city I’ve only visited once but has left an indelible mark on my mind. One bizarre incident from that trip sticks out. I had gone to the premiere of The Red Pill in North Hollywood two years ago and was returning home on the Red Line at two in the morning when a morbidly obese black woman waddled on the train with her ass literally hanging out, too big for her green sweatpants. And she was fat: her butt was larger than my chest.

This scene went on for a good three minutes, as the black lady wobbled her ass in front of us like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs before she finally got her pants back up. More surprising was that nobody around me seemed to care. A homeless guy across the way yelled out to me, “Hey, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yeah, and I don’t want to see it,” I sighed.

“Nice view!” he exclaimed as he mustered up a grin that was half-horny and half-revolted. I’m guessing he had to take what he could get.

It was a sight that was impossible to imagine in either New York (where I grew up) or Chicago (where I was living at the time). I’ve seen plenty of wacky idiocy on the NYC Subway and the Chicago L, from masturbating old men to crazy homeless preachers, but a random fatty presenting—and the blasé reaction of the people around her—was inconceivable.

Part of this is due to the comparative egalitarianism of the East Coast. New York City’s cramped geography makes car ownership impractical for even the rich, so the subway is patronized by everyone, from celebrities to schizophrenic bums. L.A.’s strip-mall-from-Hell geography makes owning a car mandatory, with public transportation relegated to the rat race’s losers, as I’d found out earlier that day while taking a Metro ride from LAX that detoured through…Compton. And of course, there were all the people staring at me for wearing a suit on the Metro, thinking I was some kind of government agent.

The Pussy, a literary joy ride through Delicious Tacos’ oversexed psyche, is a book steeped in L.A. A collection of stories about his travails with women, work, and life, The Pussy is an ode to the sorry state of modern man, deprived of meaning and fulfillment, mainlining the methadone of dopamine and cum as a weak substitute. And as Tacos’ book wears on, it’s clear that our overlords don’t even want us to have the latter.

This becomes clear when The Pussy is contrasted with Game, the recent release from player-turned-patriarch Roosh Valizadeh. While Game ordinarily isn’t the kind of book Terror House would look at—it’s a manual advising men on how to meet women and build relationships with them—its sobering analysis of gender relations pairs well with The Pussy’s debauched narrative.

The Pussy is presented as a series of disconnected stories primarily revolving around Delicious Tacos’ relationships with women, the drudgery of work, and the drudgery of life in L.A. Tacos’ groaty realism hits you from the get go with delightful chapter titles such as “God Damn Do I Want to Fuck My Intern,” “I Just Want to Eat Asian Ass Forever,” and “Fuck the Future, Burn Your Money” (which closes out the book):

I would like you to stop talking and come into my bedroom and have unprotected sex with me immediately, every girl I have ever known. I have jerked off to the thought of date raping you many times and making you pregnant against your will, girl who thinks of me as a close and trusted friend. Any detail you have ever confidentially revealed to me that is related to sex, masturbation, or certain parts of your anatomy, I have incorporated into my fuck fantasies, even if you thought you were being gross or joking. When you talk about a gross shit you took, it makes me think about your asshole, and when I think about your asshole, I think about fucking you in your asshole. If I could date rape you and get away with it—if some genie said go ahead, I guarantee you won’t get in trouble—I’m not saying it’s a “yes,” but it’s not quite a one hundred percent “no,” girl who thinks nothing of being alone around me while drunk. When the bombs fall and we all turn into Mad Max, don’t think you’re gonna get my clean drinking water for free.

Tacos’ prose is just as groaty as his titles, lurching forward in hilarious exclamations of grotesque detail. One interesting stylistic affectation of his is that he never uses question marks, explaining in one chapter that he believes that they convey weakness. The Pussy has all the downsides of a self-published book, with lackluster editing and organization, but Tacos’ talent as a writer enables his prose to rise above these issues. If Bronze Age Mindset roars at the reader, The Pussy moans, a moan of existential pain mixed with the occasional dollop of satisfaction.

The first thing I took away from The Pussy was how little regard Tacos has for his own life. His sexcapades are depicted without the slightest hint of sentiment, as fleeting satiations of an unquenchable thirst. Moreover, he has a penchant for engaging in reckless and stupid behavior in search of the next high, completely oblivious to the potential consequences. One early example comes in “This is All Your Fault, Megan,” in which he deadpans his journey to the ghetto to buy smack after trying and failing to masturbate to his next-door neighbor and her huge tits:

The walk home was too long, so I stopped to smoke my first balloon with a homeless guy, using foil from a discarded Philly cheesesteak. Who else does this, I thought. Finds a down-on-his-luck junkie and gives him free heroin. Dude better name his first child after me. I don’t remember feeling too high, but it was three miles to get back in dress shoes and I couldn’t feel my feet hit the sidewalk. When I got home, I called for the cat, I reached out to pick him up, and I fell over into my neighbor’s rosemary patch. I fell pretty hard and it didn’t hurt. Now I smell like rosemary.

While the later chapters narrate his efforts to fight alcoholism and sex addiction, his self-destructive tendencies continue to leak out, such as when he admits to “hit[ting] it raw with hookers in the Philippines.” At no point does Tacos attempt to wring bathos from his life or make you feel sorry for him; he relays his experiences with matter-of-fact clarity. The emptiness of his life is not that of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, the manufactured drama of trust-funders who’ve never had to sweat for a living, but the very real emptiness of the middle-class striver, the atomized cog with nothing to live for but the next dopamine hit.

Indeed, one of the initially annoying aspects of The Pussy—its seemingly slipshod organization—slowly ties the book together, like a Gordian knot strangling the reader. Early chapters focus on the ease with which Tacos can find young women for a nightly nut, but as the book wears on and he grows older, he finds himself working harder and harder for less and less snatch. The final chapters flare up like a herpes outbreak as Tacos realizes his life is going nowhere:

If I have a Tinder match, I know it’s fake. OKCupid: zero visitors, zero likes, zero messages. Unless it’s a message from a fucking man. Give me advice on women, they ask. Here it is: get famous or die trying. Get famous a way women understand: music, money, or murder. James Holmes does better than you. Hot young girls will move mountains to get at him in prison. I’m human garbage; I pay taxes and work.

Our fathers lived in the age of free love: we live in the age of the incel. Ideology, technology, and worsening sex ratios have created a hellscape where a small handful of men drink freely from the pussy fountain while the rest barely get drops. The Wall no longer exists, as Tacos himself has remarked; even elderly cat ladies get more attention than young men who have their shit together. The arc of the sexual universe is long, but it bends towards Elliot Rodger.

The decline of Tacos’ sex life as observed in The Pussy neatly dovetails with the 500 mg rectal horse pill that is Roosh’s Game. Far removed from the lobotomized cheeriness of self-help literature and the grandiose claims of pick-up artists, Roosh opens his book by acknowledging that it’s bad out there for men and it’s only going to get worse:

A low level of game used to get you dates with attractive women, but advances in technology—particularly the invention of the smartphone—have turned game into an arms race, where every year the level of game that women expect rises in tandem with their options. I experienced this directly in Toronto when I visited in 2013. From the girls I talked to, I noticed that I was being evaluated on every joke I told. They would actually complain if a joke wasn’t great, and suggest that I was “losing” them because of it. Instead of wanting to connect with men, the girls acted like they were attending a comedy show, eggs in hand, ready to throw them at the comedian if he didn’t make them laugh hard enough. It’s no surprise that a substantial percentage of my readers come from the Toronto area.

This is something I’ve observed myself. While I’m considerably younger than Roosh, I clearly remember that it was much easier to meet women in the oughts, back before Steve Jobs cockblocked the entirety of America with his handheld twit machines. As recently as 2009, it was possible to charm a girl without being super-buff or super-witty: you just had to have basic social skills and enough balls to say hi. There was no conga line of thirsty Tinder betas to shower them with compliments, so they actually sought to form real connections with men, whether through dating or hooking up.

No more. Women view attention in the same way that men view sex: as an overriding obsession. The Internet as it exists overloads women with unearned attention, short-circuiting their brains, gassing up their egos, and closing them off to actual men in their lives. Their ideal man has become what Roosh calls the “sexy clown”: someone to entertain them between Netflix marathons, easily discarded when their Adderall-addled minds move on to the next momentary pleasure. No love, not even lust: just a life support system for a penis.

The men aren’t innocent, either. The pornography pipeline enabled by smartphones has also turned men into slavering cucks, pledging to suck farts out of the asses of every Insta-thot getting pooped on by Arab oil barons for a living. When even a chubby, crater-faced octoroon like Brittany Venti thinks she’s a perfect 10, it’s clear we’re living in Coochie Oceania. Roosh relays this reality with quiet resignation, urging men not to rail against things that are out of their control, but to adapt in order to achieve their goals:

The globalization of male-female bonding has transformed it from traditional monogamy to a free-for-all sexual marketplace. As with any other marketplace, the Pareto principle is at play where the top 20% of goods (men) attract the top 80% of shoppers (women). In the past, women had fewer choices and were constrained from acting on their desire to secure a top-tier man. Today, they are encouraged to spend years finding high-status men (and to get fat and tatted up while they’re at it). The end result is fewer monogamous relationships, families, and children.

Roosh’s prose retains its usual crispness and solemnity, augmented with a maturity absent from his braggadocios Bang and his analytical Day Bang, the dating books that made him famous. In contrast to those books, which were laser-focused on racking up notches, Game is a full-spectrum approach to the mating dance, covering everything from hygiene to how to text a girl to “love tourism,” his euphemism for men seeking romance with women abroad. It’s an effective book for any man who is tired of rolling snake eyes in the game of love, but at points I felt that it should have come with a free pack of razors.

In particular, Roosh is bearish on traditionalism due to the fact that women’s bad behavior is primarily driven by technology, not feminism. The smartphone not only isn’t going away, it’s spreading, Cthulhu-like, into the dark corners of the map, the places we men thought we could harvest suppliant women when we got sick of dealing with our own. Even in so-called “traditionalist” Eastern Europe, girls are blimping up, getting tattoos, and collecting Instagram orbiters. The pussy market can stay irrational longer than your dick can remain solvent.

As The Pussy makes clear, easy sex was part of the covenant our managerial elites made with us when they upended society decades ago. In a world of declining wages and increased labor competition, dopamine and cum were the opiates designed to keep us from noticing how miserable our lives were. By taking away the cum, they’re reneging on the social contract, as Tacos points out in chapters about the pointlessness of work, such as his description of working at McDonald’s as a teenager:

You get a rhythm. Lunch rush comes and you are anticipating the buzzes and beeps and chimes and lights; you are ahead of the game and the heat lamp rack is not wanting for fresh Quarter Pounders for even one second. No shrill “WHERE ARE MY QUARTERS??!?” from the cashier girl and no quick huddles from the manager on how you have to up your game. I can’t have guys keeping us behind on this team, okay? “Grill orders,” which is the bespoke no onions type of stuff: most grill crew hated those. I loved them. You knew you were preparing a sandwich for one particular person just the way they liked it. A machine spat out instructions on receipt tape in purple ink and you had to run over and grab them and hustle to make the sandwich. When you fucked one up, the manager would walk back with the tape and point out to you what it said and ask you: how did this happen? You forget that it’s McDonald’s; it’s literally the least prestigious job in the world, people laugh at you for having it, and your net income is two dollars and fifty cents an hour. You are terrified and you feel bad about yourself. The value of work.

The obvious, cheap comparison to make here is to Charles Bukowski. Like Tacos, Bukowski was an L.A.-based writer who wrote about his relationships with women and the monotonous nature of work. However, the thin red line connecting Bukowski and Tacos isn’t merely the surface elements of their writing, but the longing that boils beneath it. Both Women and The Pussy depict protagonists in search of genuine connection and failing, due to both circumstances both within and beyond their control. Bukowski didn’t write about his sex life to brag, but to lament, to depict the consequences of his actions as mercilessly as possible.

One of the most moving chapters of Women involves Henry Chinaski (Bukowski’s literary surrogate) having a tryst with Dee Dee, a fortyish woman who had not only been in love with him for years, but was more stable than the groupies he ordinarily fucked around with. After Chinaski makes plans to go back to Lydia, the younger, psycho girl he’d been banging before, a distraught Dee Dee attempts to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Chinaski forces her to vomit up the pills, knocking her false teeth out in the process and further accentuating her age compared to the sprightly Lydia. He indicts himself with the following reflection: “Valentino would have kept both Lydia and Dee Dee. That’s why he died so young.”

Bukowski’s and Tacos’ books can be seen as bookends of the managerial era, portraits of its human wreckage. Bukowski was a priest of its ascendancy, living in an era where grungy old men could have their pick of pretty young things for the price of a few good poems; Tacos is a prophet of its end times, when men are made into coochie buzzards circling the garbage truck of society.

L.A. is the ideal setting for this genre of work. The first post-American city, it embodies every loathsome trend of the future, from atomizing car-centric urban planning to Tower of Babel-esque language confusion to Brazil-level class stratification to casual narcissism. One weekend in L.A. and I finally understood why Philip K. Dick lived every moment of his life in sheer terror.

The Pussy is a comedic encapsulation of that terror: the terror of the rat race, the terror of your libido, the terror of your life’s irrelevance. While uneven in spots—some of the entries feel like filler, and the book could really have used an editor—Tacos’ uncompromising prose had me cracking up over and over, whether he was writing about his struggles with a cyst in his ass or narrating a traffic jam.

Similarly, Roosh’s vision of gender relations in Game is bleak, but his thoroughness in dissecting sexual attraction and coaching men to become their best selves makes the book a must-read. The fact that the book has been banned from Amazon and other booksellers is further evidence of its value. Read The Pussy if you want to journey through the ruins of modern love; read Game if you want a light to get you out of the mining shaft.

Click here to buy The Pussy.

Click here to buy Game.