Game over: The sad demise of the pickup artist

JARED Rutledge rated women on looks and sexual performance online and shared troubling misogynistic views. Then he was exposed.

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JARED Rutledge came to fame in September, when a young woman he had slept with stumbled across an entry from his blog.

In a post entitled “A breakdown of all my lays”, he had written: “Frisky little redhead, early twenties. Not very hot and talked too much ... I bailed on her because I wasn’t that into it. I see her from time to time, and she’s letting herself go a little.”

The post was about her. It also listed the 46 other women who Jared had had sex with since he “learned game”, with meticulous analysis of their looks, personality flaws and sexual performance.

The coffee shop owner from Asheville, North Carolina, was a paid-up member of the “manosphere”, the movement that swept the world after Neil Strauss wrote his disturbing dating manual The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists a decade ago.

Strauss became infamous for popularising techniques including “negging” — making a woman feel vulnerable by making a mildly negative comment about her, then seizing the opportunity to get her into bed. It inspired followers across the world.

Jared was one of them. On his Twitter account Holistic Game he shared his thoughts on women: “Beginning to find female submissiveness almost as important as beauty. Almost.”

Jared Rutledge. Picture: Facebook

His feelings about sex on the first date: “I hate girls ‘I do everything but f*** on the 1st date’ rules. Hard to hide my disdain. My c*** was in your month, why not the p**** bitch.”

And what he thought about women growing older: “There are few things that give me more sadistic pleasure than witnessing the ever-increasing neuroses of a woman hitting the wall.”

His blog, Holistic Game, boasted the tagline: “Putting the sweet D in the tender V since 2013” and featured podcasts starring himself and his co-owner at Waking Life Espresso, Jacob Owens. They were to be his downfall. While Jared’s accounts were anonymous, another blogger traced them back to him, and began sharing his most offensive posts and tweets. They went viral.

Women protesting against owners of the High Five coffee bar, Jared Rutledge and Jacob Owens, in Asheville, North Carolina. Picture: Ashevilleblog.com

Jared and Jacob shut their coffee shop in October, after women began protesting outside Waking Life and a petition to boycott his coffee made headlines across the world.

That very same month, Strauss made a public exit from the manosphere of his own creation. In The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, he explores how his behaviour toward women was shaped by a troubled childhood, his sex addiction therapy after cheating on a girlfriend and his failed attempts at a four-way live-in relationship.

He described the book as “a painfully honest account of a life crisis that was forced on me by the consequences of my own behaviour.”

Author Neil Strauss admitted that life as a “pickup artist” was lonely.

Has the manosphere lost its sheen? In a recent interview with New York Magazine, publicly shamed Jared admitted: “I thought I had the answer — but the answers I thought I had hurt a lot of people and hurt me.”

But has he changed? He told the magazine he still hopes to marry a 25-year-old when he’s 38, because of “hotness”. He added: “I’m not going to throw away the good parts of game. I’m not going to throw away the fact that now I know how to flirt, I know how to teach, I know how to have fun.”

Across the internet, communities remain determined to keep The Game going. After Jared issued a public apology, forums dismissed him as an “obvious Beta” and “sell-out”, observing that the protesters would “enthusiastically participate in a violent throat f***ing if it’s delivered by an appropriate alpha c***.”

In Reddit’s Red Pill community dedicated to The Game — the pill is a reference to a scene in The Matrix in which the red pill allows you to see hidden truths about the world — users are determined to keep the manosphere flag flying.

This week, a post appeared in response to Jared’s interview with New York Magazine.

It read: “The thing Jared Rutledge did wrong was apologise.”