OSU Basically Chases Creepy 'Pickup Artist' Off Campus

Ohio State University campus denizens are about to be down one creepy as hell — albeit entertainingly delusional — self-proclaimed pickup artist after a diverse cross-section of the student body banded together to call him out on his predatory antics. Here’s the story of how he got taken down, and how he vowed to creep again.

First, a little background in case you’re among the lucky few uninitiated: a “pick up artist” is like a sandwich artist, except much more embarrassing to sleep with and much, much less likely to have a footlong. As Jaclyn Friedman details in her great piece for the American Prospect this week, PUA’s are part of a larger “men’s rights” movement that actually boils down to a bunch of dudes who are feel like their own shitty lives are the fault of a system that favors women. Cool theory, bro.

Ohio State’s most reviled PUA goes by the pseudonym “Sean Larson” because he’s a big strong, masculine man and if there’s anything big strong men love more, it’s anonymity and novelty sunglasses. Sean is the guy behind a site called The Underground Player, on which he frequently posts grainy videos of himself doing things with women that appear as though they may have been taken without the women’s consent. Here’s “Players On Da Street.”

While Sean was posting creepy videos to the internet, he was doing a lot of stuff IRL that made a lot of people uncomfortable. And over the last couple of weeks or so, the ill will he’d built with the OSU community came to a head, and it looks like poor Sean will now have to practice his rapey art elsewhere.

Sean’s downfall is chronicled in this exhaustive BroBible (Bros! Bibles! I love it!) piece by Andy Moore. It started with a simple question on Reddit:

Have any other girls out there ever been stopped by a short Indian guy named Shane or something? This guy has literally tried to stop me a grand total of six times, and every time he tries to ask me if I’m from LA or something cheesy. Does anyone know who this guy is? Does he even go to school here?

Three hundred and eighty-nine comments later, it was clear not only did “Shane” NOT EVEN GO HERE, he also was a habitually predatory louse who did stuff like walk up to strange women and try to stroke their hair, corner them outside of bathrooms, grab women on dance floors, and use poorly employed “seduction” techniques in a way that made everyone terribly uncomfortable.

Then, as BroBible’s Andy Moore reports, “things got wild.” Sean took to his Facebook page to say ridiculous chest pounding stuff like “You can’t stop a player” and brag about how no matter how people tried to keep him down, girls would still chase him down and “climb on [his] cock.” He’s got 48 lays, guys. A lay is a sex. He’s done a sex 48 times.

This was met with an incredibly satisfying deluge of negative comments from all sorts of OSU community members — bros making fun of him, ladies he hit on telling him what an asshole he was, and everyone in between basically telling him to fuck right off.

But Sean isn’t done; according to Moore, the “artist” responded to his inquiry with the following charming email,

here’s the deal: feminist cunts decided that they wanted to try and defame me by using such labels as “creep” and “weird”. well then bitches, if I’m gonna be notorious, I’m gonna be notorious for being a player whose track record is 48 lays so far. It wasn’t my decision to be exposed. I was happy playing it covertly. But since I’ve been exposed, so be it. Let the hilarity and the exposing ensue, n***a.

Just in case you were confused about the sort of classy gentleman with which we’re dealing, the final word in the barely literate email message does not contain stars. Also Sean’s Indian, not black. Finally, Sean doesn’t seem to understand that being called a “cunt” by a guy like him isn’t actually an insult. It’s a compliment.

Sean’s fate shows the importance of actually speaking up if a guy does something like corner you in a fire escape or refuse your requests to back away, especially if it’s a person who has acted predatory more than once. You might not be the only one he’s creeped out; he may, like Sean, be making life worse for an entire community. Fuck being polite. You have a right to exist without being harassed.

Anyway, great job, to the fantastic OSU bitchcunts who teamed up to make their campus a better place. Be liberal with the high fives and kind to each other this Sean-free Halloween.