Julien Blanc may be known as “the most hated man in the world,” but there’s a new pickup artist in town. His methods are so depraved that even Blanc’s company rejected them, and he's been in trouble with the law over allegations of molestation and lewd behavior.
John Mulvehill (pickup handle JMULV) is the 31-year-old founder and senior executive coach of Efficient Pickup, a company that claims to cut through the all the self-help gibberish prevailing in the pickup industry to get its customers “real results” with the ladies. Mulvehill says his methods differ from the rest of the pickup community’s, which came under intense scrutiny this year when Julien Blanc’s misogynistic teachings got him and his employer, Real Social Dynamics (RSD), banned from several countries.
“You don’t need to be rude, annoying, harassing, or degrading to women in any way” in order to bed one every night of the week, Mulvehill says in one of Efficient Pickup’s promotional videos.
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According to the profile on his website, Mulvehill was an unpopular, introverted teen, but after finding success within the pickup community and specifically with RSD, he quit his day job (or got fired, depending on whom you ask) and moved into a mansion in Las Vegas to live and work as a pickup artist.
Among his fellow PUAs, Mulvehill was known for making T-shirts to celebrate his lay count, specifically the milestones of bedding 150 women in 2012. He now claims to have had sex with over 350 women.
And his tactics aren’t subtle. Unlike the downright strange strategies used by Blanc, like choking women, shoving their heads in his crotch, and calling them dogs, Mulvehill uses a tried-and-true “no means yes” style.
According to a number of posts since deleted from RSD’s forum but available via The Wayback Machine, Mulvehill was working as an assistant for RSD instructors in 2013. On one night in May, as part of his routine, Mulvehill walked a reluctant young woman from Caesar’s Palace to his car, according to an arrest report. Once there, according to the report, the Casanova pulled her into the back seat of his black Pontiac, then locked the doors so she couldn’t escape and tossed away her phone so she couldn’t continue to text her friends.
“She kept telling him she wanted to leave,” the arrest report says. Mulvehill somehow took that as a sign to pull down his pants, and tell her to watch as he masturbated, while trying to grope her breasts and kiss her, according to the alleged victim. When the girl’s friends found her, they banged on Mulvehill’s car window and she got out.
In Mulvehill’s telling, according to an interview with his attorney, Warren Geller, the woman was a willing participant and only protested once her friends arrived. Geller provided a few stills from security camera footage, which show that Mulvehill wasn’t dragging the woman kicking and screaming. However, several of the stills also seem to show him tightly gripping her arm. Geller could not provide the full footage of the video in time for publication.
Mulvehill’s case was slated for a jury trial, but in January of this year he pleaded to lesser charges of conspiracy to commit coercion and received a one-year suspended sentence, contingent upon the successful completion of impulse control counseling and a promise to stay off the Vegas Strip. Goodbye, mansion.
A lesser pickup artist, or a more self-aware human being, might take this sentence as a wake-up call, a time for reflection on the nature of sexual consent. But the only thing Mulvehill seems ready to change is his name—exchanging the “e” for an “i" or deleting it altogether, ostensibly so he and his company won’t be linked to his Vegas troubles.
In another post since deleted from the RSD forum by available via The Wayback Machine, Mulvehill makes it clear that sexual intimidation isn’t an anomaly. In a creepily detailed example of his MO—separate women from their friends and don’t take no for an answer—he writes about trying to kiss a woman as “she kept resisting.” They go into the bathroom, and he asks her to sit by him in the shower. He tries to kiss her again, he writes, but “she didn't comply.” Mulvehill tells his fans on the other side of the screen that she was “hesitant” but they start kissing. And then he writes, “she still is being somewhat non-compliant so i tell her that it's a huge turn on for girls to watch me jerk off. i take my dick out and tell her that if she watches we can go watch the sunrise and party. she is reluctant to watch but eventually starts looking.”
“I know that sounds sort of rapey,” Mulvehill said in a phone interview with The Daily Beast, but he said “compliance” and “resistance” don’t mean the same thing to pickup artists as they do to laypeople. “It’s not about convincing girls to do something they don’t want to do,” he said.
Further, Mulvehill explained that his old RSD posts were just attention-seeking locker room talk that got out of hand. “Honestly, I got carried away with it, but I’m not posting stuff like that anymore,” he said. “And with the new company, we’re not advocating for any misogyny or disrespect towards women.”
Mulvehill’s entire profile was removed from the RSD forum the day after his arrest and moderators warned users that that JMULV was not to be mentioned again.
But JMULV won’t be silenced, not when he’s still got so much wisdom to impart.
In a number of promotional videos posted to Efficient Pickup’s website and YouTube channel, Mulvehill mumbles through the conquests that supposedly qualify him as the scene’s most successful pickup artist. He also makes a number of promises to notchless bedpost sufferers, and for an extra $2,500, offers them a weekend of live training.
For a one-time payment of $67 to Efficient Pickup, wannabe womanizers are invited to escape the nightmarish future of “occasional relationships with an average-looking woman” by purchasing “The Holy Grail Of Game,” basically access to members-only forums and materials like hidden camera “in-field” videos of instructors picking up women at bars.
Efficient Pickup has also just unveiled a new product, “Seduction Mindhacks,” which seemingly helps wanting men gain unauthorized access to a woman’s mainframe. (Mulvehill is an ex-computer programmer, the Jonny Lee Miller to our Angelina Jolie, if you will). According to Mulvehill’s videos, a man needn’t be smart, or good looking, or even employed, to have sex with any woman he chooses. One only need learn how to override a woman’s troublesome brain. “Being a man is enough for a woman to be attracted to you,” Mulvehill says.
But women will often “come up with a certain number of objections,” he says, that can be knocked down by overwhelming the rational brain with stimuli. For the woman who just doesn’t know when to say yes, Mulvehill’s new product offers additional ways to “diffuse her objections one by one” and a “rejection-proof kiss technique.”
This pseudo-scientific marketing speak obviously makes no sense, but it does manage to hit on a recurring and disquieting theme. In fact, within this sense of entitlement lies the entire problem with Mulvehill and his counterparts in the pickup community: Their consistent position is that there is no reason why a woman would say no to sex with a man other than social conditioning. So pushing, prodding, tricking, or what the Nevada courts in Mulvehill’s case have termed coercing, are all acceptable schemes to break down a woman’s resistance.
But it’s a lie. Believe it or not, plenty of soberish women might fail to swoon at the marble-mouthed compliments of a bloated, sweaty, deep-V-necked JMULV at the club, or the prospect of Fireball shots and mutual masturbation in his apartment bathroom. To Mulvehill and his “Vegas Pussy Massacre Crew” that now make up Efficient Pickup, these women—the “non-compliant” ones—apparently aren’t to be heard, or respected; they’re to be silenced and conquered. This isn’t only disgusting, it’s potentially dangerous—for both the women these guys prey on and for the lonely, desperate men who pay real money to learn the tricks of their trade.
For the strong-stomached, the whole 40-minute promotional video for their online product can be seen below. In it, Mulvehill and his partner Josh Lewis warn: “Due to the extreme nature of this footage and the attention it is already getting from mainstream media, we are under the attack of feminist groups and conservative institutions, so it’s impossible to guarantee how long this video will be up for.”
One can only hope.
