Last week, our cover package took a brief look at the growing “seduction community” of men who take advice from various self-proclaimed gurus on how to score with women. The main feature was a “Portrait of a pickup artist,” a profile of one of the gurus of manly prowess, a guy calling himself Dimitri the Lover, who has been attracting attention with seemingly ridiculous posters and handbills around the city.

When we saw his ads offering advice on how to “approach romantically shell shocked sluts,” and take advantage of “psychologically weak women,” we thought — who the fuck is this guy? And can he possibly be for real with this crap?

Enter EYE WEEKLY writer Alex Molotkow, a woman who had been hit on by Dimitri himself. She went to find out what he was all about, hung out with him, talked to others about him, and came back with the resulting story.

Following the ages-old journalism adage that it is better to show than to tell, she resisted the impulse to climb on her soapbox and instead let her notebook do the talking. In the story, we learn that he’s a former medical doctor who lost his licence for sexual impropriety with patients. He doesn’t deny the offence, instead attempting to justify his abuse of his position by saying that he was “horned up” and his wife was frigid.

We see that he’s a man who calls the good-natured people at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (TWB) “femi-nazi cunts.” That his naturally eloquent speeches “spin off their axes” as he descends into “offensive tirades.” That his seminars have names like “Women Worship You,” and “Worship the Cock.” That they are so offensive that Rancho Relaxo has stopped allowing him to book their space. We see other pickup artists trying to distance themselves from Dimitri, calling him “misogynistic” and accusing him of promoting “the idea of violence.” And we hear from the staff at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, who say he’s offensive and then basically make fun of him. In the story’s last words, two TWB staffers suggest he should read up on sex-positive feminism.

Since the story was published, we’ve been subjected to an email letter campaign (apparently organized from a listserv of some sort) objecting to our “promotion” of Dimitri the Lover and demanding that we “explain ourselves” and our position on him.

Now, in an attempt to provide some kind of full picture and let the facts speak for themselves, we admit we didn’t title the story “Dimitri the Lover is a Misogynist Perv!” There was no need. Dimitri himself showed everyone exactly what he was through Molotkow’s reporting, and the other sources quoted agreed.

Really: if the women and men who have written us in high dudgeon have actually read the story and come away with the impression that it promotes or endorses this misogynist perv, they require remedial reading classes more than they require an explanation from us.

They point out that a visit to his website shows that he has crazy theories about men embracing their inner rapists and murderers and advising women to behave like dogs, among other wildly offensive things, and that our story should have pointed that out. Fair enough. But that’s about what we’d expect after reading the story we ran.

Molotkow decided to let the facts speak for her, as most of the best reporters do. We stand by her right to do that. But for those who require EYE WEEKLY’s explicit official opinion on the subject to work out how they feel: he’s a ridiculous, woman-hating idiot deserving of scorn and mockery. Which is the conclusion any reasonable person would draw from reading our story about him last week. 

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