A Dead Bat in Paraguay: One Man’s Peculiar Journey Through South America by Roosh V

I’m going to drop a bit of truth here that will likely piss some of you off:

There is very little in the manosphere that is original.

A collective of men who’ve shucked off mainstream society to fuck girls, quaff beer and do obscene amounts of illegal drugs? No really, it’s been done before, going all the way back to the days of Rome. Hemingway, Bukowski, Miller; this path was worn deep long before we took our first baby steps.

I’m also going to drop some more truth:

The fact that the manosphere isn’t very original DOESN’T MATTER.

The manosphere’s detractors (read: cranky old men who think having an AARP membership makes them wise and intelligent) think that pointing out its unoriginality is somehow an effective counterargument. Unfortunately for them, I’ve read all the same books they have, but my brain cells aren’t rotting out due to dementia.

Way back in high school, I had an English teacher who told us that all of human literature and art can be distilled down to one of two themes: sex or death. That’s it. The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Thompson; it’s either sex, death or the two combined. Originality was an impossible goal for the greats of the Western canon, and it’s an impossible goal for us.

It is not originality, but EXECUTION, that matters.

I’ve had more than one person, from my family to my friends, tell me that the hitchhiking trip I took last year has been done before. It doesn’t matter. It’s my execution of the trip—the specific things I saw and did, my particular worldview and writing style—that is important.

Roosh’s first memoir, A Dead Bat in Paraguay, is not an original work. It’s about how Roosh, tiring of the corporate grind in Washington, D.C., quit his job to sojourn across South America, starting in Ecuador and ending in Brazil. Along the way, he contends with frigid girls, dweeby backpackers, and a litany of foodborne illnesses that end with him having exceedingly painful bowel movements:

The next morning I emitted a constant flow of noxious gas so foul that the air trapped under my blanket was more offensive than a Port-O-Potty on the Fourth of July. I dirtied the bowl once more after waking up to the worst dream I’ve ever had in my life.

This story’s been done before. So why bother doing it again?

The answer lies in the execution. Roosh’s narrative successfully blends the low and high, taking you from his comic toilet escapades to his repeated attempts to seduce the local women in the cities he visits. He successfully gets the reader invested in his tale, whether he’s talking about his relationship with his younger sister or his explorations of exotic locales like Machu Picchu:

The first night of our tour we had a fried beef meal. As a result, for the next day I continually passed gas that smelled like the beef. My nickname in the Jeep became “Beefy Gas.” Mary decided this would be a great time to bring it up.

“Oh it’s extra beefy now, thanks,” I said. I wanted to jump across the salt table and strangle her, but I knew if I got defensive it would just confirm to everyone that I did in fact have beefy gas. I had to play cool.

I have yet to meet Roosh in real life due to our conflicting schedules, but I’ve talked to and worked with him behind the scenes online for several years now. He’s as close to a friend of mine as you can get from an online association. When I was preparing for my own pilgrimage into danger, I could have picked any number of books to read to prepare myself for the journey.

The book I ultimately settled on was Paraguay.

Plenty of other writers have had far wilder adventures than Roosh, yet I chose Paraguay because it was written for my generation. Roosh is considerably older than me, but his experiences in America—his ennui, his feelings of hopelessness, his desire to break out of his pointless life—mirror mine.

A Dead Bat in Paraguay is the lodestone of Generation Y men, the first generation of men in America deliberately raised to be as unmanly as possible. We were shunted into an educational system catering to girls and retards, then doped up with Ritalin and Adderall to turn us into little obedient drones. Television and movies depict us as doddering simpletons unable to perform the most basic household tasks without women—our wives, mothers or girlfriends—to lead us. When we got to college, we were accused of having “privilege,” of being racist and sexist, of being the cause of every ill in the world going back to the fall of Ur. And when we graduated into the workforce, we found that all the high-paying careers we were promised didn’t exist, leaving us to either flip burgers or work demeaning cubicle jobs with fascist HR ladies ready to censure us at the drop of a hat for creating an “unsafe environment.”

And people are whining about “the end of men?” No shit! And I hear that if you shoot someone in the head with a Desert Eagle, they’ll die!

That’s the most insulting part. Our Baby Boomer parents, teachers and bosses have literally been trying to ruin us since we fell out of the crib, yet now that their handiwork is starting to bear fruit, they’re acting indignant and pretending like they had nothing to do with it. It’s like they had no idea that their Marxist social engineering would have any repercussions down the road.

Hey mom? Hey dad? If you wanted your sons to grow up to be men, maybe you shouldn’t have raised them like they were women!

That’s why A Dead Bat in Paraguay, and why Roosh, and why the manosphere in general is so important. It’s the first wide-scale attempt by Generation Y men to reclaim their balls and their birthright. It doesn’t matter that this road has been traveled before. If it wasn’t an important road, it wouldn’t be so traveled to begin with.

If you’re looking for one of the best tales of masculine self-discovery in the modern world written today, read Paraguay. You’re not walking this road alone; men like Roosh and I have braved the horrors of hell, and we’re here to help.

Click here to buy A Dead Bat in Paraguay.

Read Next: Don’t Bang Latvia, Bang Estonia, and Bang Lithuania by Roosh V