Editors at Men's Fitness are hopefully doing some serious soul-searching after publishing, then deleting, a very bad, very rape-y article by self-proclaimed pick-up artist Nick Savoy called "How to Turn a 'No' Into a 'Yes.'" (The article appears to be based on this blog post on LoveSystems, a dating coach company Savoy founded). Savoy's advice for what to do when you approach a woman and "she wasn't having it"? "Plow ahead anyway." If you view women as objects and not as human beings, this article has some stellar advice on how to take what you want from vaginas without once having to acknowledge that they are attached to living humans.
Critics rightly protested the article on Twitter for perpetuating rape culture, a pervasive attitude of entitlement toward women and their bodies that enables aggressive behaviors like catcalling, stalking, and sexual assault. Sexual assault and harassment are major problems pretty much everywhere, from college campuses to our national parks to Silicon Valley to academia, fostered by the exact attitudes Savoy is propagating — that women don't know what they want, and that no really could be a yes in disguise.
After the outcry, Men's Fitness deleted only a single paragraph:
That such a garbage article would appear in a mainstream magazine without raising any red flags demonstrates that, clearly, a lot of people don't see such manipulative, predatory behavior as problematic. The magazine ultimately took down the article, posting a rather ironic note:
But as writer Imran Siddiquee has pointed out, the article doesn't exist in a vacuum:
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Prachi Gupta is an award-winning journalist and former senior reporter at Jezebel. She won a Writers Guild Award for her investigative essay “Stories About My Brother.” Her work was featured in The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 and has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, Marie Claire, Salon, Elle, and elsewhere. PrachiGupta lives in New York City.
