A cult for women, run by... a man?
May 11, 2016 11:54 AM   Subscribe

Superstar Machine is cleverly disguised as an exclusive, powerful and earth-shatteringly transformative group of like-minded, successful, up-and-coming women in their 20s and 30s. Jezebel takes a look Inside Superstar Machine, Which Ex-Members Say Is a Cult Preying on New York’s Creative Women.
In all its incarnations, Superstar Machine has fundamentally been about teaching women how to be successful in life and love. The path for these women is twofold: tapping into the Divine's plan for their lives, and learning to be subservient to their male romantic partners. In time, [International] Scherick [née Greg Scherick] would also create International Hot School, a weekly phone call where former members say he lectured women on how to tame their "inner crazy bitch," as he put it, and create a "good experience" for their husbands and boyfriends.
posted by bologna on wry (60 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
Christ [figure], what an asshole.
posted by Etrigan at 11:55 AM on May 11, 2016 [10 favorites]


Photos of Scherick show a man with white hair touching his collar and blue eyes. He was an unlikely-looking guru, the women who left the group say, favoring a slightly dorky uniform of jeans, blazers, sneakers and oversized belt buckles.

Post-startup professional culture is so super-saturated with Human Potential movement-like jargon and thinking that I've been wondering when it was going to make the leap to producing actual cults. I guess I have my answer.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:01 PM on May 11, 2016 [32 favorites]


dude should be forced to legally change his name to "Well, actually..."
posted by thelonius at 12:02 PM on May 11, 2016 [31 favorites]


Christ [figure], what an asshole.

Jesus Christ, Superstar Machine?
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:12 PM on May 11, 2016 [9 favorites]


I liked the original Superstar Machine better.
posted by demonic winged headgear at 12:12 PM on May 11, 2016 [7 favorites]


The best part of the article for me was Princess Superstar, semi-famous for her"Bad Babysitters" song, showing up to defend Scherick in the comments.
posted by gyc at 12:17 PM on May 11, 2016 [7 favorites]


Post-startup professional culture is so super-saturated with Human Potential movement-like jargon and thinking that I've been wondering when it was going to make the leap to producing actual cults.

The Landmark Forum has been filling that void for a long time.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:37 PM on May 11, 2016 [11 favorites]


Like a ninja, he cuts through destructive unconscious sabotaging patterns with skill and precision never witnessed before on this planet.
If only he'd tamed his own inner twelve-year-old.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:38 PM on May 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


DO read the comments on this one. Superstar Machine members/sockpuppets immediately rush in and it's...tremendous.

Some of them seem to be buried now, but here's my absolute favorite line from one of the comments defending the pyramid scheme/cult: "I can say that this is definitely a CULT which is the root word of CULTURE! HELLO PEOPLE?!?!"
posted by greenland at 12:41 PM on May 11, 2016 [12 favorites]


The further I read, the more intensely I go "nope." Like... Nope. Nope. Nope nope nope. Nope nope nope nope nope nope.

He never actually directed members to go into detail about their sex lives, she says: “It’s all, ‘She looks like she wants to tell me about it. Does everyone else in the room feel that energy?’”

Scherick had specific ideas about what type of sex was best, Poppy adds.

“Having anal sex was a marker of being a true, fierce powerful woman. The length of your orgasms were also markers of how intense your feminine power was.” In the higher levels, she said, “We had phone calls having to share how long our orgasms were, the positions we masturbated in. People were claiming to have like 30-minute orgasms.”


KILL IT WITH FIRE. HE JUST GETS CREEPIER THE FARTHER YOU GO.
posted by sciatrix at 12:43 PM on May 11, 2016 [40 favorites]


"Why Do We Keep Doing This To Ourselves? Replacing One Stupid Male Authority Figure With Another? Like Days Of Our Lives Replaces Roman Bradys." - Kimberley Schmidt
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:44 PM on May 11, 2016 [38 favorites]


Lordy. This is like a Portlandia sketch of a cult.
posted by selfnoise at 12:44 PM on May 11, 2016 [18 favorites]


Poppy says Scherick would also stress that the women couldn’t do anything without his help: “The way he sold everything is that women are the leaders of the world, but, like, ‘They don’t know how powerful they are, that’s my job. The Divine speaks through me. No one connects with the Divine like I do.’”

I don't even know what to say to this. It's benevolent sexism, distilled.
posted by supermassive at 12:45 PM on May 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


The Landmark Forum has been filling that void for a long time.

Landmark is a direct descendant of est, which was one of the primary vectors by which counterculture-derived cult-like thinking spread into - and eventually came to define - a lot of modern management theory.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:50 PM on May 11, 2016 [9 favorites]


The Divine speaks through me. No one connects with the Divine like I do.

I wish Divine were still with us. She would give him such a pinch.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:58 PM on May 11, 2016 [49 favorites]


Yeah, I'm a former participant of the Landmark Forum. This was some 12 years or so ago now. Parts of the content was genuinely worthwhile, but holy crap, the pressurized tactics they used to get the participants to recruit their friends & family was... fucking insane. I still feel bad for anyone I tried to recruit back then. /shudder
posted by bologna on wry at 1:00 PM on May 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


eerily similar to this article on xojane...
posted by thirteenthletter at 1:03 PM on May 11, 2016


eerily similar to this article on xojane...

The article explicitly mentions that one of their sources wrote that article.
posted by sciatrix at 1:05 PM on May 11, 2016 [6 favorites]


attending SSM events requires signing a waiver stipulating you’re there of your own volition

Always a good sign!
posted by RogerB at 1:07 PM on May 11, 2016 [13 favorites]


Landmark derailers can browse this previously.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:11 PM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


wow thirteenthletter, that's too similar to be coincidence. Is this some kind of cult franchise?
posted by adept256 at 1:12 PM on May 11, 2016


I always see these ads on the NYC subway for the 'School of Practical Philosophy.' I've always wondered if that was a cult, partly because it seemed, well, like a pretty compelling pitch for a person like me - but the lack of specific detail skeeved me out. (I do not know whether it is a cult!)

I think people like to imagine a very specific thing when they hear the word 'cult,' which can make it really hard to figure out if you're in one. Almost nobody thinks they are. I once read an article by a male model who lived in a big communal living house - like a ton of young people in NYC do - which gradually morphed into an abusive and cult-like atmosphere so slowly that he never even realized it.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:19 PM on May 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


Aha, here's the article (previously on MeFi!): Fabio Helped Me Escape From a Cult
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:24 PM on May 11, 2016 [8 favorites]


Every time EST and Landmark come up in conversation, it just makes me wonder... when will David Gerrold's next Chtorr book come out?
posted by antimony at 1:34 PM on May 11, 2016 [9 favorites]


Gag!

Asshole.
posted by BlueHorse at 1:41 PM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh yeah and he went to harvard
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:43 PM on May 11, 2016 [10 favorites]


how dare he use his experience working on Melrose Place for evil
posted by roger ackroyd at 1:45 PM on May 11, 2016 [13 favorites]


Can we get Fabio to dump this asshole headfirst into a giant tub of vegetable oil based spread please
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:55 PM on May 11, 2016 [8 favorites]


On a hard drive somewhere there's a treatment for the movie that makes Fabio an international action star. The bad guy, a psychopathic wellness guru, ends up falling into a giant fat of vegetable spread.

"I can't believe you're not breathing."
posted by selfnoise at 2:13 PM on May 11, 2016 [21 favorites]


Oh, man, I find this stuff fascinating — I think because madness and dementia are things that truly do terrify me, but at the same time, that promise of secret transcendental knowledge, whether in ancient mystery cults or psychedelics, is so enticing. I just wonder about the subjective experience of everyone involved, from the followers to the cult leader — like, how do you not recognize that what you're doing is evil? What other evil systems might I be buying into without recognizing them for what they are?

And that this — or a lot of spiritualist self-improvement cults, including some sects of Christianity — use relatively soft methods of persuasion (compared to cults like Aum Shinrikyo, who dosed people with acid and put them in sensory deprivation rooms as an initiation) consistently makes me really aware of the limits of free will — people have a crisis, get love-bombed, then slowly manipulated into ever more externally, objectively harmful behavior… It's classically tragic.

Also, similar to con games, there's such stigma about admitting that you've been duped — the women who spoke out about this deserve some applause for bucking one of the mechanisms of control baked into the group. The only way that cults like this can carry on is to keep people from talking about their experiences, getting outside perspectives and reevaluating what they've been told from a critical perspective. There's nothing wrong with them for falling for it — it's a deeply human behavior. And honestly, it's so common that I wonder about the International Schmendrick — like, is he conscious of how he's using psychological manipulation to build this cult, or is he someone whose ego (or narcissism) leads him to techniques that have worked again and again? Like, usually a thief or a murderer will know that what they're doing is broadly wrong, but have a reason for why this is an exception to that rule — does the cult leader think that EST and Synanon were successes?
posted by klangklangston at 2:31 PM on May 11, 2016 [16 favorites]


From a pro-Superstar post in the Jezebel comments:

I always hated groups because I felt like I had to act like everyone in the group and that made me want to vom.

I'd like to imagine Mr.International sitting at a keyboard and channeling his inner 20-30 something to write that, because the entire comment is almost a work of art in its cluelessness.
posted by redsparkler at 2:32 PM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


A cult for women, run by... a man?

This is clearly a cult for men.

Run by a man.

To turn women into what other asshole men like him want--the perfect object.

This makes me incredibly angry. Like, violently angry.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:34 PM on May 11, 2016 [38 favorites]


I'm probably more fond of a good night of buggery than most, but overselling it as spiritual enlightenment is downright creepy.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 3:23 PM on May 11, 2016 [7 favorites]


We could probably have an entire thread about how anal sex with a woman has been turned into a symbol of her complete sexual conquest by a culture that sees "getting" women to do something sexual for you a kind of win for you and loss for her.

More than just creepy.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 3:26 PM on May 11, 2016 [34 favorites]


Part of the broader emphasis, they say, was on “serving the masculine.”

I think that I worked at it, really committed myself, I could come up with a phrase that screams "OH GOD NO, RUN, RUN, RUN" more than "serving the masculine", but it would take some doing.

That's impressive.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 3:40 PM on May 11, 2016 [29 favorites]


Yes, there's that power-play going on there. I was more focused on the appropriative aspect of New Age sexuality that getting your rocks off in diverse ways is an easy shortcut through a life of meditation, clean living, and devotion (the latter a huge missing piece in American mindfulness, yoga, and tantra.) While a night with the toybox is generally a safer and easier high than drugs, I'm really skeptical that it gets me any "closer to god" as the song goes.

In fact, it's not if you actually look at the context of the stuff New Agers like to plagiarize. But many kinksters have this thing about wrapping their personal fun up in religious rhetoric. And I'll admit, I've been there and done that, and hopefully grown up a little.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 3:56 PM on May 11, 2016


In time, Scherick would also create International Hot School, a weekly phone call where former members say he lectured women on how to tame their “inner crazy bitch,” as he put it, and create a “good experience” for their husbands and boyfriends. (Records show International Scherick, LLC, Scherick’s company, has applied for a trademark on the term “crazy bitch.”)

what
posted by louche mustachio at 3:58 PM on May 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


My skin crawled all the way off and swam to Crone Island.
posted by louche mustachio at 4:00 PM on May 11, 2016 [51 favorites]


Am I the only one getting a The Invitation vibe?
posted by gottabefunky at 4:09 PM on May 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


“You’re letting me in, which shows me how powerful you are as a woman.”

Whoa.
posted by gottabefunky at 4:10 PM on May 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


A dude proclaiming that a woman performing anal is super-empowering is gross, but I'm not sure why the site that posted this article thinks that they're somehow less problematic.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 4:30 PM on May 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm not sure why the site that posted this article thinks that they're somehow less problematic.

If there's one thing that can be said in defense of Jezebel, it's that they've never been that coherent on feminist issues. They don't have tight editorial control, and I don't think they claim to.

I have problems with them too, but I'm not going to complain about them posting this article. Maybe some of the women who might be victimized by this narcissistic asshole will see it.

Also, thanks for reminding me Hugo Schwyzer exists and wrote that mess right before I eat dinner. :(
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 4:41 PM on May 11, 2016 [5 favorites]


Oh my god. It's like: how much worse can this get? And each new paragraph answers the question in a new and terrible way.
posted by naju at 4:52 PM on May 11, 2016 [5 favorites]


Notes on Brainwashing & 'Cults'
posted by bukvich at 5:06 PM on May 11, 2016


Man, this is awful. You have a system where a single man is able to extract material wealth (while also elevating himself emotionally) from a group of women that then enables abusive behavior in their other relationships with men. I have to note that the asshole in charge of this (who I refuse to call by his invented name) seems to come from a bubble of privilege and wealth. In that personal statement it's like he's describing a Greek God, come down to Earth to give succor to his mortal supplicants. He seems to (at least be pretending) believe that a Harvard diploma really does give you a mandate to abuse other people.

As with many instances of cult-like behavior, I have to wonder how much of this system he actually believes, and how conscious he is that this is really just a scaled form of emotional abuse and exploitation. It's sort of like in the most recent Mad Max movie. You have a toxic male figurehead who preaches their own divinity... but how much of that is knowing manipulation, and how much of that is true self delusion? If anyone knows of studies about this with other cults, I'd be interested to read them.

Either way, I hope that the people involved can get out from underneath this man. I think that a large-scale expose like the FPP article is a good step in that direction.
posted by codacorolla at 5:24 PM on May 11, 2016 [8 favorites]


Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen.
You can't stake your lives on a superstar machine.
posted by Anne Neville at 5:32 PM on May 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


when will David Gerrold's next Chtorr book come out?

Glad to know I'm not the only one.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:16 PM on May 11, 2016


"Notes on Brainwashing & 'Cults'"

Tl;dr: Classic mind-controlled zombie or sleeper agent is fiction; sociologists say cults not a big deal, most people want to be there or leave (footnote points out that most have had their research funded by e.g. Scientology); psychologists say behavioral programming through environmental manipulation actually is a thing; most of the problem is that there's no clear definition of "brainwashing" or "cult."

Not sure it's totally relevant here, since it's mostly based on refuting the idea that deprogramming is necessary or effective in dealing with cult members, and makes a handful of arguments that in that context are fairly relevant: like that the retention rate on cults is really low, that people are more likely to leave on their own than leave after "deprogramming," that passing laws that allow the violation of other laws in "deprogramming" exceptions are dangerous on civil liberty grounds.

I tend to think that it's moderately easy to construct a definition of "cult" that most people would recognize, that assuming behavior is entirely voluntary to exculpate cults is begging the question, and that cults make more sense when viewed through lenses we find fairly uncontroversial when talking about things like extremist or fanatical ideologies in general, e.g. suicide bombers. I think that suicide bombers are being manipulated through social pressure, totalizing ideologies and self-serving leaders who apply high-pressure "used car salesman" tactics to get people to commit acts that are harmful to themselves and others. My guess as for why "cult" isn't thrown around more in describing terrorists is that for a significant portion of people on the right, demonizing Islam is more effective, and for a significant portion of the left, the orientalist and colonialist use of the term to subjugate populations gives it too much baggage (cf. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).

But for this instance, "cult" is entirely appropriate, "brainwashing" is used in a popular way to describe manipulative group psychology techniques, and while that post is pretty interesting on its own, it's at best tangential to what seems to be going on with Superstar Machine, and arguments built from a classically liberal/libertarian perspective (i.e. Less Wrong) miss important, implicit structuralist claims within the framing of the article.

(Sorry, that was still probably tl.)
posted by klangklangston at 7:46 PM on May 11, 2016 [14 favorites]


" If anyone knows of studies about this with other cults, I'd be interested to read them."

Knowing when someone is lying about entirely subjective claims is really hard; getting decent quantitative studies of cult members or ex-members is really hard — it's also why studies about religious belief are really hard to conduct. (I'd also say it's a decent reason for why people are so attuned to hypocrisy — because interior beliefs and consistency thereof is really hard to prove, we're primed to look for behavioral cues that someone isn't worth cooperating with.)
posted by klangklangston at 7:52 PM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


One of my (by now "ex-") friends is in the T. Harv Ecker cult, which also seems to attract a lot of professional women. Maybe he's just not creepy enough...
posted by sneebler at 7:58 PM on May 11, 2016


The BITE model is a definition of cults and high control groups used by many experts and mental health professionals.
posted by chrchr at 8:16 PM on May 11, 2016 [7 favorites]


I miss the days when you could just go to the park and engage with Zorp.
posted by greenland at 9:17 PM on May 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


@bukvich, @klangklangston: Yeah, given that LessWrong IS a cult, i don't think taking Yudkowsky's word on anything having to do with cults is a particularly good idea.
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:44 PM on May 11, 2016 [5 favorites]


I remember all the stories from the 80s about cults, like Ticket to Heaven. The reality here is far more mundane, but so much more infuriating.
posted by happyroach at 10:44 PM on May 11, 2016


There's actually something to be said for teaching both genders how to be awesome to and for one another. Really. Being a quality "genderfriend" is a skill, one for which you can be good at or atrocious.

This, however. The only good thing I can say here is it brought us "I can't believe you're not breathing.", which is early Simpsons grade writing.
posted by effugas at 5:00 AM on May 12, 2016 [1 favorite]


Many of the women involved in Superstar Machine are aspiring actresses, or else deeply involved in New York’s yoga and wellness communities.

The iiiirony. I love yoga but I always have my critical antenna up when interacting in 'wellness' communities. One of the core realities is that there is a disproportionate number of people actively 'working on their stuff,' and that can mean a propensity toward experimentation and trying things out and feeling maybe a little too open and desperate for solutions, which makes them fabulous targets for exploitive people.

I agree the definition of 'cult' can be tied up with pop-culture afterschool movies about, like, bunker reverends and gurus, but often it's much more insidiously lifestyle-focused. And there are a lot of these groups. Sometime within the last three months I read an essay by a woman talking about her experience of making this wonderful new older woman friend who was so smart and intellectual, and they would discuss philosophy, and she was so excited about the new relationship, but then got weirded out when the woman continued to call her and insist that she they must go to her 'philosophy discussion group' together and that she should not talk to anyone about it because it was so exclusive. The author's mother said 'sounds like a cult,' so the author started googling, and sure enough. I've tried to find this essay again - it had to have been in either the New York Times or Times Magazine or Oprah because I think those are about the only non-school-related things I've been able to read in the last six months. Maybe it'll ring a bell for someone else.

I've had a handful of experiences with super-outgoing, overfriendly people trying to hook me into stuff like that (Forum being one) and as a woman of middleish age I don't think I'm exceptional. I think women are especially targeted across the board. The earliest I remember was being about 13 years old and looking at some astrology books or something in a bookstore, and a culty person approached me to say "I see you're searching for answers" or some shit like that. I had no idea what was going on, but my mom was there and came to the rescue, read him the riot act and then reported him to the bookstore owner (I was so embarrassed at the time but now I think it was badass). The most recent example happened in my last city, where I used to go to this place that had yoga by donation, to do yoga. And different teachers would teach there whenever they felt like it, so it was kind of a mixed bag of offerings, but it was mostly just normal yoga. One week I tried a new class that was called something like 'insight yoga' and when I walked in, it sort of started like yoga with gentle stretching but then became this guided meditation experience, which was weird but by then I didn't want to get up and make a fuss and leave, and then they passed around prasad and I was like get me TFO. As I was packing up at the end I got the hard sell on coming back...there's much more to learn...opportunities to travel, yadda yadda. When I got home I searched online, and it turned out to be a recruitment strategy used by this group. Here's a link, here's another, here's my original ramblings about it on Metachat at the time. I also have a close family member who was actually raised in a cult that her parents joined in the 60s. She left at a young age due to her own self-preservation instinct, but again, because she tracks news of this sort of BS with a certain personal interest, it helps me realize how ridiculously widespread it is. These behavioral-control groups, call them what you will, are sadly common as dirt.

Long story short, never take off your critical thinking hat.
posted by Miko at 7:14 AM on May 12, 2016 [14 favorites]


when will David Gerrold's next Chtorr book come out?

About the time people stop falling for cults.

(I want to believe that when Gerrold dies we will discover that, in fact, he has been continuing the story, that he has thousands and thousands of unpublished pages lying around, and that it is all completely insane.)
posted by octobersurprise at 7:21 AM on May 12, 2016


I've been keeping tabs on the CREEP factor of "healing communities", new wage, guru's- there's some great blogs and websites- I kind of want to do an FPP about it at somepoint, I think the way group think works is that "anti-cult" groups have their own version of REALITY that also gets tilted and peer pressured, so it's an interesting phenomena all around.

My conclusion is that ideas should be exposed to large groups, examined, criticized... even though it's painful.

And the princess bride taught be all I need to know- life is pain, anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or trying to sell you something. (Be it for money, fame, status, securing their own world view etC).

In general people who charge for "motivational speaking" or like Byron Katie say suffering is optional, just ask four simple questions and all the worlds suffering can be fixed, is trying to get your money or worse, really really lost in the vortex of nonsense and self delusion, often at the expense of people who are NOT cured by four simple questions or whatever bullshit they're selling. I'm still extremely pissed about having a counsellor ask me to "turn around" abandonment issues and blame myself for my mother leaving when I was a baby. I'm not even angry at her because I KNOW she was going through a lot-- that doesn't fix the pain involved and no suffering is not "optional" when painful situations can't be fixed despite the people who make a lot of money claiming it is and convincing people to view those who suffer as "choosing" it.

I'm like...what is this shit? FUCK YOU. Actually I think I told her that. Hah! Looking into Byron Katie brought me to learning a lot more about these creeps and their prey and how it spreads and anyone who questions gets told "You just don't undersand, you're not advanced enough to understand"

It really was eye opening seeing how willingly people would invite her and other sinister characters to speaking events in "healing communities" where everyone nods along with what happens onstage, or watches an child abuse survivor told to "turn around" her anger at the abuser to herself and "take responsibility" and then even people who question the methods say "just take what you like and leave the rest" like it's so easy for someone who was just mocked on stage until submitting to the new worldview to just let the pain of what was done to them while everyone went along with it.

I have my guard up with people who are in these communities, doing a lot of yoga and "workshops" and trainings, because while there are those who stand up for what's right and ask questions, I know too many don't and won't take a stand when it matters. They'll feed any self identified "leader" or "spiritual guide" or whatever without asking challenging questions or refusing to feed these beasts. I don't think anyone should be selling spirituality. If there is a spirit realm we can all connect, within, without.

There's also an aspect of blocking out low income people from all this feel good "healing" that only the wealthy are worthy of that grosses me out. If you are serving actual divine beings your heart will be with the suffering and you will find a way to be with good hearts in need rather than with those whose pockets are large.
posted by xarnop at 8:13 AM on May 12, 2016 [7 favorites]




I would never join any group which said to 'tame your inner crazy bitch' my 'inner crazy bitch' saved my life several times! :)
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 8:08 PM on May 12, 2016 [7 favorites]


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