So there’s this concept which seems to have been independently invented by poly people and the red pill, which is fascinating to me whenever it happens. In More Than Two, abundance mindset is described this way:
In the starvation model, opportunities for love seem scarce. Potential partners are thin on the ground, and finding them is difficult. Because most people you meet expect monogamy, finding poly partners is particularly difficult. Every additional requirement you have narrows the pool still more. Since relationship opportunities are so rare, you’d better seize whatever opportunity comes by and hang on with both hands—after all, who knows when another chance will come along?
The abundance model says that relationship opportunities are all around us. Sure, only a small percentage of the population might meet our criteria, but in a world of more than seven billion people, opportunities abound. Even if we exclude everyone who isn’t open to polyamory, and everyone of the “wrong” sex or orientation, and everyone who doesn’t have whatever other traits we want, we’re still left with tens of thousands of potential partners, which is surely enough to keep even the most ambitious person busy.
The redpillers describe it this way:
Abundance thinking is the root of Plate Theory [casually dating multiple people]. A lot has been written about approaching women (and really life in general) from a position of Abundance. People often make the mistake of assuming that having a wide variety of choices tends to cheapen the commodity, and to a degree this is accurate, but it also allows for a better, learned awareness of which choice amongst the pool is common and which is of higher quality.
,…but Rollo, I’m so busy that I have no choice but to ignore and postpone. They sense it and seek me out. I worry that I’ll create crazies. My weekends are jammed. At what point do we stop?
This is a the best problem you can have. You’ve successfully flipped the script; you’ve gotten to a point where it becomes instinctive and your plates actively seek out your attention. By default, you’re creating value by scarcity. At what point do you stop? How old are you? If you’re under 30 stay in the game. If you’re over 30, stay in the game, but cool things off occasionally – the only time a man should even contemplate monogamy is after experiencing abundance. If you’re inundated with women occupying your weekends, consider hooking up with a proven plate on a Thursday evening and reserve your weekends for your other pursuits.
Weirdly objectifying terminology aside (…plates?), they seem to me to be essentially describing the same thing.
Which makes sense. Abundance mindset is incredibly useful. You can take rejection easily, because you know that you can find someone else you like just as much as that person. You can relax and let flirtation just be flirtation instead of your one last desperate attempt not to be alone forever. Because asking people out is less terrifying, you do it more often. Other people don’t feel guilty for rejecting you, which means they’re a lot more comfortable around you. You seem like a confident person that lots of people want to date, which is generally attractive. In relationships, you don’t become controlling and distrustful, making your partner miserable by trying to keep them from slipping away.
There are subtle differences, however. In general, polyamorists seem to take more of a “you are a unique person who is utterly unlike any other person I could date. However, if you’re not into me, I can find another unique person who is utterly unlike any person I could date” stance. (There’s a reason we all think this song is super-romantic.) Conversely, redpillers seem to take more of a “all women are like that, no woman is special and unique, they are all basically interchangeable and easily replaced.”
The redpillers’ philosophy is quite misogynistic, and therefore I have obvious objections to it. But more than that, it doesn’t seem particularly conducive to the happiness of the person who believes it. In general, when you love someone, you love their individuality: you love the look of their hair, the way they laugh at their own puns, their passion for sex work decriminalization, their habit of spending weekends building GURPS characters for campaigns they never play. To reduce all that down to HB6 is to lose a lot.
However, a problem with the polyamorist abundance mindset is that it is really easy when you’re already sexually successful… and mind-bogglingly difficult when you aren’t. Telling a forever alone or involuntarily celibate person “rejection will be less painful, you’ll get more dates, and your relationships will be way happier if you believe that there are lots of potential partners available for you to love!” is sort of like informing a poor person about all the great investment opportunities you have available– starting as cheaply as $10,000! It’s honestly just sort of taunting them.
The solutions I’ve seen to this conundrum are “just take a leap of faith and believe it even though it doesn’t seem true!”– effective, but probably not psychologically possible for many or even most people– and “become sexually successful!”– gee, thanks, that’s so much help. I suspect that sexually unsuccessful women who are open to casual sex can acquire an abundance mindset through putting an ad on Craigslist Casual Encounters; however, this option does not work nearly as well for heterosexual men.
However, you don’t need to currently be sexually successful to adopt the viewpoint that women are basically interchangeable. And it seems to me it would have a lot of the same beneficial effects: if Interchangeable Woman #1 rejected you, that’s mildly annoying because it means you’ll need to put in more effort before you get one, but Interchangeable Woman #3554 is just as good. If Interchangeable Woman #2666 rejected you, that’s not a personal insult, it’s just a sign you need better game. So in that sense the Red Pill is doing something genuinely good by giving sexually unsuccessful men an abundance mindset they can actually reach.
Ideally, men could bootstrap themselves to sexual success by believing that women are interchangeable, then switch to the “gosh! There are so many beautiful and unique snowflakes!” abundance mindset once they were getting laid more. However, it looks like the red pill doesn’t really offer strategies to do this, and the knowledge that women aren’t actually interchangeable seems like it would make it a very difficult act of doublethink to believe they are.
Thing of Things 
There’s also a third option, where you are sexually successful and yet have never had a primary, so you think the issue lies squarely with you and not how many potential partners exist. 😛
LikeLiked by 2 people
but in a world of more than seven billion people, opportunities abound
That annoys me in every context I see it (not just in “so you want to date?”) because yes, sure, if I was zipping round the globe meeting more or less every single one of the seven billion, naturally there are huge possibilities!
But given that your “tens of thousands of potential partners” are spread out everywhere from Alberta to Zimbabwe and all points inbetween, it’s not as if you can just line ’em up and work down that queue until you find the seventeen people who are ready, willing and able to have a time-share relationship.
If you’re stuck in a small town of five thousand or so, there are going to be a limit on the number of partners of your age/preferred gender presentation/preferred sexual orientation.
Even in a very large city like New York or where you will, not every single person is going to meet every other single person – I doubt if someone who inhabits the kind of “works for a huge investment bank” circles is going to go “Ah yes, that person working on the till in that Wal-Mart in Hoboken is a definite possibility!” because it’s highly unlikely they’ll ever meet (not impossible, but not so likely unless we’re writing a bloody rom-com movie or something).
So yeah, it annoys me to hear the blithe “There are seven billion people in the world!” thing, because it skips over “A huge amount of those opportunities we’re talking about are, by the facts of the matter, going to be on the other side of the world from you and realistically you are never going to meet them”.
I very much do NOT believe in the whole notion of soulmates, but even if you have That One Special Person Just For You out of seven billion, there’s nothing to say they’re not living in Patagonia while you’re living in Irkutsk, so you’d better make up your mind to make do with what is at hand if you want anything.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Agree. I don’t remember the source of this estimate, but I remember seeing something that did a Fermi estimate and found that most people can expect to speak to about 10,000 people in their life, total. (Couldn’t find the original source, but estimates I did find ranged from 10k to 18k.)
Which makes it pretty hard to believe in abundance mindset if you have somewhat specific filters. It’s likely I’ll meet a few dozen people who could be long-term compatible with me, ever, so every missed opportunity, whether it’s a rejection or a breakup or just someone who’s poly-saturated and unlikely to be free later, is a serious loss.
(How I get that number: Being generous and assuming I can bihack somewhat, about 45% of people are likely to be incompatible due to gender. About 20% of people do BDSM at all, leaving 11%. 24/7 D/s is another ~5% of that, which knocks it down to a half percent or less, maybe 50 people. I can assume self-selection will push that up, but not by a ton; Bringing it to 40% of my lifetime acquaintances into BDSM and 10% of those doing serious D/s seems optimistic but reasonable, but that still only pushes it up to 2%, so the best I can expect is the low hundreds of people, more likely. And that’s before the normal personal compatibility/life outlook filters, this is just the entirety of my dating pool.)
LikeLike
Source: https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/
LikeLiked by 1 person
The 10000 people you’ll speak to in your life are already somewhat pre-selected for being compatible with you, though.
LikeLike
Redpill philosophy is only misogynistic to the extent that we assume there are major, stable differences between men’s and women’s desires. If women were generally capable of (or interested in) treating men the way redpillers advocate treating women, they could simply reverse all the pronouns and do exactly as Rollo recommends.
Now, I agree that redpillers are misogynists, but I also believe in the major stable differences. Feminism’s basic hypocrisy about this is what drove me away from it, long ago.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think there’s a lot easier explanation for the repulsiveness of red pill thinking, albeit still one that movement feminism has trouble articulating due to movement feminism’s complete abdication of it’s one job- articulating livable sexual ethics for Homo sapiens.
Most people view relationships as a progressive chain of escalation. First you find someone who wants to hang out with you and vice versa, then you see if they want to flirt with you and vice versa, then you see etc, etc. And this is effectively a winnowing process.
The number of people who might enjoy coffee with you is probably substantially larger than the number who might find you sexually attractive, and that’s probably substantially larger than the number who might make functional life partners for you.
But you don’t make this explicit up front. No one invites a girl to coffee by adding, “and just to be clear, my purposes are to feel out whether you’d be interested in a future sexual encounter, and if so, marrying me, bearing my children, and growing old together. This is the beginning of a filtering process. Just so we’re clear.”
Instead, it’s treated lightly at first, with steadily escalating levels of unstated commitment. If you’re getting coffee with three or four appropriately sexed potential romantic partners, no big deal. If you’re going to dinner with them, seeing movies, etc, it gets to be a bigger and bigger deal. And this is the normal cultural expectation.
To be clear- it is normal in our culture to expect that if someone indicates an interest in a sexual relationship with you, they also consider you a potential long term romantic partner. They might not be certain, they might change their mind, but they’re at least open to the possibility depending on how things go.
Red pillers and pick up artists advance a view of the works that rejects this. Their attitude tends to be that as long as they don’t promise you anything, you can’t claim they did anything wrong.
But that’s a rejection of, and free ride upon, a social contract. They are taking actions which effectively signal, when interpreted in the social context on which they exist, an interest in their partners they don’t truly have.
TLDR to keep this on point- red pillers treat woken as interchangeable because dating is a filtering process in which we start with a wide variety of potential partners, and winnow them down. The criteria for selection in the early stages tends to be broad, and the later stages narrow. But they only seem to care about manipulating the early stages in order to maximize gain. And those are the stages where people are actually pretty darn interchangeable. The whole point (per standard social norms) is to then learn about them and escalate, or not, to a relationship where this isn’t the case, but they don’t bother.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I broadly agree with this, but I think a key point is that redpill methods are specifically designed to take advantage of women, to “hack” women’s needs and expectations in a way that wouldn’t work against men. A book about how to get ahead in the office via Machiavellian social engineering might be seen as unethical, but it wouldn’t be seen as misogynist. The misogyny springs from asymmetry — an asymmetry which redpillers’ willingness to acknowledge is their main appeal.
LikeLike
Uh, I would say that the misogynist side of redpill is their insistence that women, unlike men, are inherently dishonorable, untrustworthy and incapable of love.
Calling women “plates” and “the commodity”, as in Ozy’s quote, is really on the milder side of things, but it’s part of the same strategy for managing men’s own feelings — don’t worry, bro, they’re not really people, they’re treacherous creatures, valuable things, amusing pets, but definitely not real people like you and me, so you can relax and feel more confident around them.
LikeLike
Nita- I should admit that my connection to red pill stuff comes almost 100% from feminist critique of it, and the result of that small and erratic sampling may mean that either I’ve mixed them up with pick up artists more than I know, or, I’ve mostly read stuff about red pillers and hook up techniques and have a non representative mental image of their overall focus.
LikeLike
Maybe I’m being dumb – but didn’t the sexual revolution decouple long term relationships and sex?
I mean, Tracy Clarke-Flory wrote a long-running series of articles on Salon about sleeping with men she had no interest in as long term partners.
And I believe there’s a Sandberg line from Lean In about dating non-relationship-material guys.
So… are they equally guilty of breaking the social contract?
LikeLike
@ roe0 – In theory, but in practice, some of us don’t want non-relationship sex. I can see the appeal in the abstract sense, but why bother when there’s porn? To me, the relationship is infinitely more valuable than the sex; decoupling them is like saying “You can buy a cupholder without a car now!” while I’m thinking “But I want the car so I can drive around; the cupholder is nice but not the main objective.”
LikeLike
I think the fundamental redpill message is
1. Accepting that men and women both have short and long term mating strategies (mom/whore and cad/dad paradigm)
2. Women are hypergamous (preferring to mate with a man who is equal or higher status than them)
3. Patriarchy and monogamy were created to control women’s natural hypergamy. Feminism is the upending of patriarchy (and thus monogamy).
4. If you want a happy marriage, you have to accept 1, 2, and 3. If you don’t think you can manage, then don’t get married
5. If you don’t think you can get married, spend your life treating women as fungible (i.e. learn “game”)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Cerastes – I’m that-way inclined myself, but the point is there’s a choice, and that makes intentions in the system inherently illegible.
LikeLike
I think that it is objectionable to treat men as if they are interchangeable too. “Dick is abundant and low value” is an awful attitude, both for you and for the men you’re hooking up with– and it is sexist.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’ve been repulsed by red pill material, not just because of the attitude(s) about women, but because it seemed to be describing a world without friendship.
Well, I said that enough times that eventually a man told me that there was friendship in the red pill world– between men.
LikeLiked by 1 person
what differences though? Signalling high status through strategic low-key rejections is a tactic that also works on men. In fact given that women have historically had much higher stakes in acquiring a partner, it was women who invented the strategy. There are basically three components to Red Pill:
– “play hard to get” /”no thanks, I’m washing my hair” only regendered and with a boatload of contempt for the target gender added in.
-“be more physically attractive and confident”– amazingly, this strategy also works when women use it on men
-fictional revenge fantasies that you can almost smell the angry spunk off.
LikeLike
I’d say the relevant differences to this discussion are:
The active/passive gender roles for dating are still very much in force (“Men propose, women dispose”)
The dominant factor for getting dates (not relationships – just dates) seems to be confidence for men, and physical attractiveness for women.
Women rate men’s physical attractiveness on a skewed distribution (ie. you have to be more attractive to be considered “average”)
Generally, women’s strongest filter is placed at the beginning stages of courtship, men’s strongest filter is at the final stage (ie. a marriage proposal)
I think “Confidence” unpacks into a slightly different skill-set for men – in particular, the ability to initiate (which, generally, is optional, not required, for women – conditioned on physical attractiveness) and accept rejection with an air of aloofness.
Lastly, your analysis, IMO, displays a serious underestimation of how difficult it is to acquire the trait “confidence” if one doesn’t possess it innately.
Also, to anticipate a counter-point, mating is compensatory, and people make trade-offs. But if we’re going to consider gender-specific dating advice, these are important factors IMO.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The dominant factor for getting dates (not relationships – just dates) seems to be confidence for men, and physical attractiveness for women.
I’d be interested in seeing numbers on this. My intuition says (and to avoid a bunch of confounds and complications, let’s assume our population is a population of single people looking for dates, and we’re counting over a relatively short time period) that it would come out the other way round: confident women go on more dates, hot men go on more dates.
Though I wouldn’t be at all shocked if it was: confident women go on more dates, confident men go on more dates.
I’d be really very surprised if it turned out like you’re saying.
LikeLike
There was a piece on reddit (I’ve never been able to find it again) by a woman who was unusually good-looking. She’d tell her less spectacular friends that they just needed to be more confident.
Time passed. Her looks faded a little. She found out it wasn’t about confidence.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Sorry, my first paragraph above was a quote. I can’t edit to make the post less confusing.
LikeLike
Consider that saying “Men propose, women dispose” kind of papers over what it is like to be the sexual target class.
One thing this misses is, I cannot control who hits on me, when they hit on my, how relentlessly they hit on me, whether they ignore signals, cues, attempts to “let them down gently,” nor can I control if they get hostile when I am blunt. Likewise, it can be really hard to signal to some shy dude that, welp, actually I like you. Furthermore, I am shy, weird, and marginally autistic, so I send all the wrong signals to the men who do hit on me, which means those who persevere are those who don’t care about my signals.
Most people I date end up having boundary issues, since those are the people who will plow through my awkwardness. I accept this cuz I don’t want to be alone. My relationships are torrid and weird and come to crashing halts. Yay!
But tell me how easy it is for gals. I love hearing that.
Being shy sucks.
LikeLike
Also, I think it would be lovely if people would stop citing a concept from a single OKCupid blogpost based on statistics that were dramatically biased by the very specific way the rating system was set up, as if it were an eternal biotruth that is valid across space, time and culture. It’s probably not even valid on OKCupid any more; I imagine they’ve changed how their rating system works in the past couple of years.
This seems to be a thing that happens with biotruths. The waist-to-hip ratio biotruth with the magic number of 0.7 was derived in a similarly ridiculous way, and WHR occupies even more sacred space within the STEMlord mythos.
ah well. it would be lovely but it ain’t gonna happen.
LikeLike
Daisy, that’s interesting! Do you know of a good critique of the OKCupid methodology I could read?
Veronica: It’s genuinely bizarre how resistant some people are to the idea that some women also have trouble getting dates. “I’m a shy girl nerd, and I have trouble–” “NO YOU DON’T!”
LikeLike
a) I’m quite willing to change my mind.
b) If you have *better* advice to offer, or better axioms to assume when giving advice, I’d love to consider that as well!
c) My point, is, *emphatically not* that one gender has it generally easier. I think both genders face challenges, but the challenges are in someway different.
LikeLike
(My assertions about confidence are based on the fact that non-red pill dating coaches (like, say, Mark Manson or Nick Sparks or The Mating Grounds) focus strongly on confidence-building. Dating coaches for females seem to focus on other things [although my knowledge of female dating coaching is admittedly scant])
(My assertion about skewed female attraction is based partly on the OKcupid study, partly on seeing anecdotes about good-looking guys who have a hard time getting dates, and about anecdotes about not-so-good-looking guys who have confidence and get dates)
LikeLiked by 1 person
As an aside, I read Mark Manson’s book. I have a few minor objections, as a feminist, but on the whole I think it is pretty good. It is definitely a healthy approach. He has a good attitude about life.
It’s a bit heteronormative, but whatever. Most people are heterosexual.
I have no idea if it helps, but I hope that it does.
LikeLike
Nancy, are you saying the beautiful woman was unable to get dates once she aged a bit? Seems unlikely. And if that’s not what you mean, that’s not really relevant to the discussion at hand.
But taking your tangent: spectacular good looks certainly influence people to be nicer to you. But that effect is stronger in men than in women, if you measure it by the effect of attractiveness on salary (not sure how else could it be measured, but that measurement has been done.)
Ampersand, the thing with the OKCupid ratings is that if you rate someone 4 or 5 stars they get a notification and an invitation to message you. So if you’re a heterosexual woman with a mailbox full of spam you’re disincentivised from rating someone high, unless their hotness massively overshadows the risk they’ll turn out to be a dick, or clingy. Rating someone high was effectively *initiating* under that setup. Given how those guys go on about the horrors of being expected to initiate, you would think they wouldn’t be surprised at the skewed distribution of ratings.
(Don’t have link, sorry, but hopefully I gave you enough info to google sources!)
RoeO: pretty sure female “dating coaches” do in fact emphasise confidence. Anyway, think about it logically. A woman doesn’t have to be unusually attractive to get asked out. However going on a date is a risk. Confident people take more risks. Confident women will go on more dates.
And as far as I’ve seen, physical appearance is the FIRST thing that PUAs and TRPs work on improving. Although of course confidence is extremely important for men too.
I don’t see how your anecdotes about observations about a skewed attractiveness distribution even back up the point in question, so am ignoring them.
LikeLike
Sure – I’ll just point out that what it takes to accept an offer for a date, and what it takes for someone else to accept your offer, are two different things.
LikeLike
Perhaps if the objectifying redpill method helps men meet women initially, the objectification will dissipate through exposure. Some guys, if they work in certain fields, come in contact with a surprisingly small number of women who aren’t family. Pre-abundance mindset, one would imagine that when these guys make female friends or acquaintances, oneitis or starvation mindset scare them off. Don’t treat every woman like she’s the last one you’ll see for a year and you might just get to talking…
LikeLiked by 1 person
The problem with seeking out advice on dark epistemology is that you’re going to get that advice from practitioners of dark epistemology, or people who fancy themselves such.
LikeLike
Pretty sure that’s a reference to plate spinning. It’s a more apt (though no less terribly objectifying) metaphor for the sort of behavior they’re describing than the more common circus-arts metaphor for dividing one’s attention (“juggling”), since a plate-spinning performer moves between a bunch of plates that they’re keeping spinning and suspended, and a spinning plate will stay suspended for a while while the performer is interacting with other plates.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t see why it should be easier for a kind-hearted but lonely man to adopt a view based on misogyny than it is for him to adopt some other fake-it-till-you-make-it view. The men I know who struggle with this — those men are deeply repulsed by “the redpill.” Instead, they want love, romance, and connection. Asking them to turn off their moral center is just as preposterous as asking them to become instant “playas.”
I don’t have an answer for them, but I wish them nothing but success.
LikeLike
The misogynists are among the few who are willing to: a) offer practical, effective solutions based on a realistic assessment of sexual psychology, and b) not dismiss lonely men as repulsive, entitled pigs who probably deserve to be miserable. People often are willing to turn off our moral centers when we feel hard done by. (That absolutely isn’t an attempt to excuse them, by the way. Our culture created the opportunity for the red pill, just like our government and financial institutions created the opportunity for unscrupulous lenders to kick off the subprime crisis. In both cases, the perps knew what they were doing.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Look, the “feminists are so mean to nice guys” thing is getting kinda old and dull. Yeah I don’t like “neckbeard” jokes either. Nor do I think feminist dating advice actually works all that well, at least not for shy, lonely men. But still, you gotta make your own romantic life work. That’s on you. Not us.
We can’t help you, but that ain’t our fault. I’ve read enough diatribes from lonely guys turned to bitter sexist creeps to last a lifetime. Feminists are not alone in driving this conflict.
Regarding the redpill helping men, I’m all for guys dabbling in PUA space to see if they can find tools to help them. The thing is, most decent men can read some of that stuff, realize what is sensible, and cast aside the hateful garbage.
This seems obvious to me, at least if you accept the notion that most people are basically good. (Including most feminists, even if you cannot quite believe that.)
It might be a good idea for the man to read Thorne’s Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser first, which maybe will give him some tools to engage with the material in a more healthy way. (Her notion of how “negging” can be positive is quite insightful, for example, at least when both the woman and man have a good attitude about the “teasing” aspect.) In any case, it can work. It need not reflexively lead to “darth-vader-ville” (or whatever).
This, however, is rather separate from that sub-sub-culture we call the “redpill.” That’s another step beyond, to an awful place filled with loathsome, toxic people. I expect any man with a basic moral center, if he encounters that material, will back away shaking his head.
Myself, I’d rather be lonely than a festering piece of shit. Choose your poison.
LikeLike
So is “women are being oppressed”. In both cases, we’ll stop saying it when it stops being true.
#notallfeminists
If you don’t want to help, that’s fine. You’re not obligated to spend your energy being an ally to every worthy cause. But please do try to stop being actively harmful.
True but irrelevant. You don’t have to be the whole of the problem in order to be a part of the problem; likewise, you don’t have to be capable of singlehandedly solving the problem in order to be a part of the solution. Pull your own weight, and let the rest take care of itself.
I get where you’re coming from. But I’m not convinced that the best way to move forward is to heap moral condemnation on people who are pushed into a bad position by a society full of perverse incentives. Yes, they chose to benefit themselves at the expense of others — but at some point, I want to place the blame on the situation that forced them to make such a choice.
There’s a spectrum between moustache-twirling villainy and Jean Valjean stealing bread, and I don’t think that desperate lonely men who succumb to the lure of the Dark Side of the Force are particularly close to either extreme. I don’t think that offering either sympathy or condemnation without the other is just.
By failing to acknowledge this nuance, I feel that the mainstream feminist discourse has created a “with us or against us” black-and-white dichotomy, such that anyone who finds themselves on the wrong side of the fence has little or no support in the attempt to climb back up the slippery slope.
LikeLiked by 8 people
I can link you to at least 3940230948023984023984 words written by terrible men who hate women due to their own romantic failure. I can show men who have murdered women because of this. On the other hand, the very first (that I can find) “Nice Guy” article was an entirely sensible bit of advice given to men, in response to letters the author received from men, complaining about their failure.
And since then this conversation has become deeply ugly. It’s unfortunate. But even the ugliest feminist rhetoric seems rather minor to me, compared to the habit of the men on “sluthate.com” to talk about “going ER.”
That means “going Eliot Rogers,” in case you don’t figure this out yourself.
Whatever. Blah blah blah. It’s not my fault if some guy is lonely.
Personally I think it is a mistake for women to give lonely men advice (unless specifically requested, of course, and only if the women knows the man and understands his circumstances). At the same time, I think it is entirely legitimate for women to respond to the murderous misogyny that arises in these spaces.
At its worst, feminist rhetoric on this topic tends to be dismissive and mocking. The most common desire I hear from feminist, however, is to operate free of harassment, cheap come-ons, and toxic, passive-aggressive meltdowns from lonely men. In other words, what we want most is to fully participate in cultural spaces, but still have “breathing room” — in other words, for our participation not be predicated on being “available” to the lovelorn.
At its worse, the “manosphere” rhetoric tends to be focused on violent revenge fantasies. This is really out of bounds and beyond unacceptable. Women are correct to notice this, talk about it, engage with it, and to reject it as literally terrible.
And for the lonely but kind-hearted men — I’m so sorry you’re caught up in the social clusterfuck. You are good and you deserve love, but I cannot fix your shyness or awkwardness. I don’t know how to help, but good luck.
What more can you ask for? Stop blaming women.
LikeLike
I would note that the worst end of the feminist responses here is not just general meanness, it is often specifically accompanied by raging ableism.
It gets *considerably* worse than “neckbeard”.
LikeLike
@multi — Examples?
Eliot Rogers murdered people.
Which is to say, some of the “male tears” type humor can get quite snide, but have you every actually been on sluthate.com?
(What freaks me out about that site is, they don’t only slag women, they also relentlessly slag each other. It’s terrible.)
LikeLike
Elliot Rodgers murdered his roommates and one of their friends (all men) because he felt that they were, and this is a direct quote from his manifesto, “the biggest nerds that I have ever seen, and they were very ugly with annoying voices.” It makes about as much sense to hold him up as an example of anti-nerd bigotry as it does to hold him up as an example of anti-feminism or a man badly reacting to being romantically rejected (actually a lot more sense, seeing how his manifesto never once mentions feminism and makes it clear that he was never rejected by a woman because he never once even attempted to ask a woman out).
The guy was screwed up in all sorts of ways, and I’m sick of him being used as a political bludgeon. I’m sure that you would find it ridiculous and offensive if people kept bringing up this woman as an example of “toxic femininity” and “female entitlement” in our culture (or even Kuwaiti/Midlde Eastern culture), so why is this any different?
—-
Furthermore, I find the whole “the other side is worse” game really tiresome. Two wrongs don’t make a right, so who cares if the other side is worse? The KKK was far worse than the Nation of Islam, but that doesn’t mean it was a good thing for Malcolm X to preach that white people were a race of devils.
LikeLiked by 3 people
@NN — Eliot Rogers is an extreme example of the kind of male resentment I am talking about. Yes, he hated men too. He hated nearly everyone, including himself. Have you ever spent time on sluthate.com (formerly puahate.com, his little nest)? Did you read his “manifesto”? He complained bitterly about sluts who fuck the popular guys and leave the lonely “betas” (or “omegas” or whatever) in the dust. This is classic “manosphere” stew — the same misogynistic shit sandwich.
Have you been on /r9k? Have you heard the term “beta uprising,” or the way they celebrate angry, bitter men who go on killing sprees? You get that Rogers was not the only example of this? There have been a number. There will be more.
The forums he hung out on are relentlessly abusive. I didn’t live Eliot Roger’s life, but I am nearly certainly that he experienced more direct abuse from men than from women. When I was young and bullied, it was the same. Men hurt me. I blamed women.
Eliot Rogers certainly hated women and blamed them for his problems. He went to a sorority house intending to kill as many women as he could. Fortunately he failed. On the other hand, it is not a good thing that he killed more men. Each life lost was a tragedy — even his, although he is to blame for that.
I mean, did you watch the fucking video? That is the hate I am talking about, in crystal clear form. But the thing is, nothing he said is particularly unusual coming from his subculture.
I have been there. I have seen.
Yet you find an event from 2009 on the other side of the world and think it compares? You may as well bring up The Scum Manifesto.
Anyway, nothing I say should suggest that only women are victimized by men like this. They victimize each other relentlessly.
LikeLike
Yes, I read his manifesto. Because I read it, I am confused by your statement that Elliot hated himself. It is extremely clear from his writings that he did not hate himself. Quite the opposite, in fact. At one point, he describes himself as “Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent… Divine! I am the closest thing there is to a living god.”
If you read that thing and came away with the idea that Elliot Rodger hated himself, I honestly don’t know what to say.
I just spent the last half-hour looking through Wikipedia’s list of rampage killings,, list of school massacres, and list of workplace killings. Of the nearly 100 incidents since 1990 that I looked at, I found only two (one in 2009 and one in 1991) besides the Isla Verde killings where the perpetrator at all matched the profile of “bitter lonely man angry at women.” I found more incidents than that where the perpetrator claimed to be motivated by anti-racism.
Considering the Chinese Robber fallacy and how many lonely men there are in the world, I’m not seeing much evidence here that bitter lonely men are especially likely to go on killing sprees.
Why, exactly, is it that a mass murder of 6 people by a man is extremely important, but a mass murder of 57 people by a woman doesn’t matter? Since you brought her up, why does Valerie Solanas also not matter?
LikeLiked by 4 people
Ozy writes:
The redpillers’ philosophy is quite misogynistic, and therefore I have obvious objections to it. But more than that, it doesn’t seem particularly conducive to the happiness of the person who believes it.
This reminded me of something I read in this article:
By the end of The Game, Strauss has a revelation: The systematic, quantified pursuit of women tends to make men bitter and resentful. (Of course, Strauss apparently didn’t internalize his own revelation either. Earlier this year, he published a new memoir, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, detailing his reimmersion in sexual conquest and shallow relationships, which also ends with redemption and lessons learned.) And so, even as Jared was getting what he purportedly wanted — plenty of sex with plenty of women — he became increasingly bitter and judgmental. Over time, his anger became directed not at a particular woman who flaked on him but at women as a group: “The hardest thing in game,” he tweeted, “is not hating women for how fucking stupid they can be.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
If you’re going to call me to the carpet at least do your readership the courtesy of reading the Plate Theory series in context:
http://therationalmale.com/category/plate-theory/
Straw Men arguments are what I’ve come to expect, but at least be in possession of the entire message.
LikeLike
Overall, I think what rubs the wrong way about the varied articles offered in the posted link, is the assertion that the objectively best thing for men is to sleep with as many women as possible.
If I understand the collected body of writing correctly, this assertion is either derived from or supported by some amalgamation of assertions about the ability and capacity to have fulfilling relationships with women. That is, a fulfilling relationship is either so rare – or so impossible – that it shouldn’t even be attempted. In turn, notions about womens’ relational capacity generally seem to rely on evolutionary psychology or simply strict axiomatic acceptance.
All of this holds together OK, but it ends up implying a black and white world. All men should do some things, all women will do others in response. As if human interaction/emotion is a strictly engineered Rube-Goldberg machine.
I know for a fact I would not be happy in the type of relationships espoused by the articles. Am I a broken man? Aberrant? Really a woman? Self-deluded? Are any of these answers verifiable empirically? Reliably? The same from practitioner to practitioner?
Heck, can “plate theory” distinguish itself from any other dogma by being entirely and exactly derived from the beginning? Math can. Physics can. Even the good parts of psychology can. Can one, using a series of meaningful experiments rebuild plate theory from the ground up? Has it even been built like that now? Note that the plural of anecdote isn’t data.
If all you see are strawmen arguments, what I’ve outlined above may well be part of the reason. Plate theory may only make sense to you because of your own personal history, likes, and preferences with each new experience reinforcing the theory not through transferable notions but cherry-picked and selective memory.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That was kind of my reaction reading this as well.
Its like…
If you tell a Christian writer that you’re lonely and unhappy and in your twenties and no matter what you do women seem to find you repulsive and you’ve only just once kissed a girl and that shows just how poorly relating to the opposite sex is going for you and you’d like advice…
They’ll interrogate you on why you asked the question, and how you phrased it. They’ll make assumptions about what you’re really like on the inside, and what you really want, based on their brown colored glasses view of other people. And they’ll tell you that you should stop wanting those things, because those are bad things to want, and make you a bad person. And they’ll tell you that you should start wanting the things they want, and find someone who wants someone like the person they’re telling you to be. If you object because you don’t want to be that person, they’ll tell you that the fact that you think that way is exactly what’s wrong with you. And if you tell them that you aren’t convinced that wanting the things they described and behaving in the ways they’re telling you to behave will actually, you know, WORK, they’ll tell you that even if it doesn’t, well, its the right thing to do so go do it.
That precisely describes what will happen if you have the same conversation with a feminist writer. I can’t count how many times I’ve read feminist dating advice, and it opened with something like, “Don’t walk up to women on a train and tell them you want to fuck, you bastards! Let me tell you why you do that and what’s wrong with your head and how you should stop being like that!” And I just sat there like… ok, I get that this may be a thing that happened to you and that’s bad, but come on. Either you’re indulging in morality play here by positioning yourself as righteously opposed to obvious wrongdoing, or you genuinely think this is a message that your audience, at large, requires. And its not, which means that you’re not even capable of interacting with me as one human being to another because you can’t even see me.
And apparently it describes what will happen if you have the same conversation with a red piller, if that link is any indication.
There might be subtle differences, of course. Differences in exactly what sort of failure you’re told you presently are, and in what sort of person you’re advised to remake yourself into being. But ultimately… if you actually have a strong sense of who you are already and aren’t willing to convince yourself to want different things and be a different person…
They’re all useless. They’re all too interested in having a conversation about their own pet issues to address yours in any meaningful way.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I can think of a number of men who, if they approached me on the train and commanded that I fuck them, I would immediately and franticly fuck them.
In other words, don’t read feminist dating advice. We suck at it. I mean, I think it works for certain people in certain spaces, who figure out which parts to ignore. But all the same.
I think feminists often give good life advice, such as notions of (for lack of a better term) self actualization. But raw dating advice? Particularly for men? Oh god no. We suck at that.
I have no fucking clue how to make dating work. My technique is mostly “be as pretty as possible and be openly DTF.”
That works in some contexts. YMMV.
LikeLike
@veronica don’t sell yourself that short, some feminist advice like, well, hanging out with women a lot as genuine friends, is quite helpful.
LikeLike
@multi — Feminists are humans and we often have human friends. I give my friends advice, when I think it will be welcome. Sometimes (I hope) it is helpful.
You know some of the guys I’m friends with on Tumblr. A few are in the “lonely socially awkward nerd” category. They pine for love and connection.
Those guys are so fucking sweet. (Actually one of them is literally too cute for his cuteness to be contained in this universe and I would fuck him stupid, except 1) he’s not into frumpy middle-aged trans women and 2) I don’t sleep with people, even lovely and wonderful people, who are half my age.)
But anyway, yeah, I’ve given those guys advice. I hope it was helpful. It was well-meaning. But more than that, It was based on my knowing them, liking them, respecting them — in other words, it was not the kind of empty, dismissive advice you find on feminist blogs.
Yes, dismissive. Look, there is text and subtext. On a forum, when some sadsack comes in crying for his lonely heart — well no one wants to listen to that. At the same time, no one wants to be totally blunt. (Well, most of the time.) So instead they give empty gestures of sympathy followed by dismissive advice. That advice is not meant to help. It is meant to get the person complaining to shut up.
It is reasonable to want people like this to shut up. Honestly, they are there to gripe, to complain, and so on. They can quickly suck up the oxygen. Honestly, in my experience they are not looking for sympathy — at least not exactly sympathy as I understand it. (I recall one time I was in super-empathy mode and got totes sympathetic to this one guy. In response, he got mad at me and said I was “emasculating” him. No seriously. That happened. Like, OMG. He was upset that the gals weren’t falling down to his manly-masculine energy, and my being caring-girl was just the opposite of what he wanted. Blah.) Anyway, they are looking for targets who are willing to absorb their frustration.
That is a heavy load to bear. I’m not willing to bear it for total strangers.
Anyway, this is the dynamic from which bad feminist dating advice arises. I think feminists make a mistake here. These guys pick up the subtext. They know that advice is garbage. They don’t stop complaining. Instead they “critically engage” with the bad advice.
Remember, they are there to unleash their frustration. A woman (or anyone) willing to argue is a great target. I’ve seen this get really bad.
But let us stop and remember this is a person in genuine pain.
Okay look, if the person in question is my friend, then they are my friend. I’ll step up. (If you ain’t loyal you ain’t shit.) But for randoms, I think the best strategy is to bluntly say, “That sounds terrible but I cannot help you. Good luck.” Don’t engage. Don’t be a sponge.
Honestly, I mean the “good luck.” I want these guys to succeed. I often think they are on a bad path, but life is a journey and all of that. (I’ve been a terrible bitter lonely chucklefuck myself on more than one occasion. I escaped that mental trap. Perhaps they will.)
Really, good luck.
Anyway, whatever. I’m single now and feeling terribly lonely myself. So yeah.
Note, it seems like @theunitofcaring can break through this dynamic and find ways to reach these guys. She is amazing and admirable, a font of deep human empathy that we should all look up to. I, however, am not like her. I don’t have that thing. Few of us do.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Kelsey is so lovely. It’s amazing how both guys and lesbian women of a certain shared experience love her life advice. It eases my own heart to read it as well.
LikeLike
Tomassi, you aren’t being called to the carpet, you are the carpet many of us roll around and laugh at. I tell you this myself, but you are also a bit cowardly and ban anyone who tries to speak to you.
LikeLike
There’s something about the whole discussion that kind of creeps me out. In my moral universe, people are to be respected and appreciated just for being who they are, irrespective of what they may do for you. To be thinking of other people primarily (exclusively?) in terms of how many relationship manna points you can get from them is just — eew! It’s like treating people like cards in a Magic the Gathering game.
One of my joys is having a bunch of friends and acquaintances who I’ve gotten to know well enough to appreciate just for their being who they are. So that I have this “the world is a nicer place” feeling because they exist.
LikeLiked by 2 people
You’re not wrong. But on the other hand…
LikeLiked by 3 people
Sonata, which comment was this in response to? Or was it a response to the OP? (In which case, I’m not sure I understand what point you’re making.)
LikeLike
Wait, my bad; I refreshed and I can now see that you were responding to AMM. For some reason, it wasn’t showing it that way before.
I guess your point is, some feminists are mean? Such as the unnamed feminist that Scott Alexander is parodying in that passage?
Okay, that’s true – some feminists use their ideologies as excuses to be mean, when being compassionate, or just not commenting, would be better.
The same is true of some anti-feminists, and some anti-SJWs. People on all sides include some people who sometimes act like assholes. So?
(I’m not denying that there are cases where being mean or angry is justified under the circumstances. But there are also cases where it’s not justified.)
LikeLike
It’s a quote from “Radicalizing the Romanceless,” where Scott tries to draw some strained analogy between the right to participate in the economy and the right of lonely men to access my body.
Yeah, I find it pretty preposterous as well. I dunno.
LikeLike
The problem with the comparison, in part, is that there are real policy solutions to mitigating the problems of unemployment and poverty.
I’m not sure what the policy response to loneliness is supposed to be. Full legalization (or is it decriminalization? I always mix them up) of prostitution, with grants available so that those who can’t afford prostitution – or professional cuddlers, if that’s what they’d prefer – can still benefit? That might help, but it would take decades of moving the Overton window to make it politically plausible.
Plus, it would do be an incomplete solution for the large number of lonely people who don’t just want sex or touch, but an affectionate romantic relationship.
I think it’s possible that part of the problem isn’t just lack of sex or touch, but lack of companionship and friendship. Maybe we could talk about what social institutions could make it more likely that people would continue making new friends into adulthood.
All of which is a little off-topic, I know. But loneliness can be a terrible form of suffering, and I think we should be seriously discussing if there are viable things society could do to reduce or mitigate loneliness.
********************************
Scott’s made-up quote was, in part, how he imagined a feminist would respond to a complaint I made in a post on my blog. But no actual feminists did respond to my post that way; all of the responses I got from feminists were sympathetic.
Which sort of disproves Scott’s claim that whenever a shy male nerd complains about not being able to get a date, “a feeding frenzy of feminists” shows up to say that the nerd is “a terrible person and deserves to die,” and this is “a universal part of the shy awkward male experience.”
I’m not denying that some feminists are mean when they shouldn’t be. But I also think the problem is greatly exaggerated by anti-feminists.
LikeLike
Leah Libresco and Eve Tushnet have written some interesting stuff about making society better for lifelong singles (although they’re coming from a LGB Catholic perspective). But the loneliness problem is annoyingly difficult. It is simultaneously true that no one is entitled to anybody else’s body, and also true that for many people not having a primary and/or romantic relationship is miserable. :I
LikeLiked by 1 person
New Zealand pretty much did completely decriminalize prostitution in 2003. Actually, most first world countries have at least partial legalization or decriminalization of prostitution. But currently the overton window is moving in the other direction, towards banning it under the Nordic Model (which bans the purchase but not the sale of sex). So the situation is a bit more complicated than you make it out to be.
I’m pretty sure that no one has proposed the grants thing, though.
LikeLiked by 2 people
[rant]
Oh God that article, where Scott blames us for the “manosphere,” based on a hasty Google search of terms like “Roosh.”
This is big-careful-let-us-pick-apart-every-bad-bit-of-statistics guy.
[cw: rape]
Anecdote time. The year is 1985. The place, some lost stretch of the South Florida suburbs, with spanning green lawns and inflated property values. There is a young woman, quite sexy, punk as fuck. In fact, she is the prettiest of the (very few) punker girls in her posh suburban high school (even though she lives in a rough, working-class home with an abusive dad). One night she goes to a cool party with cool people, where she gets raped by five skinheads from Miami. One of those skinheads was her boyfriend. He gets her drunk, fucks her, and then invites his four chums to fuck her as well. In the following days she remembers bits and pieces.
Needless to say she was traumatized. She retreated from most of her social circles, with only one friend who really stuck with her. (Fortunately I am not the girl who was raped. Sadly, neither was I the one loyal friend.)
Word got out. Folks at school heard the story. These kids — most were young doofy suburban skater punks, who were “emo,” but the word didn’t exist yet. (Rites of Spring was not yet on our horizon, but when it arrived we flocked to it like good little skater emos with dyed bangs that hung over our eyes).
Anyway, these kids, at least a few of them — they blamed the girl. They blamed her for dating “bad boys,” but really they blamed her for not dating them. In fact, one of them said quite specifically, “I cannot feel sorry for her. It’s her fault. I loved her. I wanted her so badly, would have treated her like an angel. But she went out with that scumbag. She fucking deserves it.”
I understand what this asshole was thinking. I understand it perfectly. I have a clear view into their fucked up, corrupt mind.
I understand them so well because that person was me.
Years later I became deeply ashamed of this. At this point in my life, well, it was so long ago. It seems like a different person. That girl I was — she was a lost soul, broken and stupid. I am so glad I’ve become who I now am.
The victim — now she’s super wealthy and married to some republican guy. She posts pictures on Facebook of her weekends on their yacht.
Life is a pretty crazy thing. She’s a rich-bitch republican. I’m a tranny.
I have no idea what happened to the rapists. Prolly dead or in jail. Let us hope.
#####
Scott acts like “the manosphere” is new, and the “nice guy” articles from feminists generated this conversation. He is ignorant as fuck. This stuff is not new. Men (and at least one woman) have been spewing this shit forever, toxic resentment from love denied. In fact, had Scott taken the time to trawl through the comments to that HBI article he links to, he would have found these ideas there. Women are crap cuz they date “bad boys,” and the only way to get yours is to become a bad boy yourself. Thus it is the fault of women that they get assaulted, and abused, and treated bad. It’s what they want.
This shit is not new. I’ve heard it my whole life. At one point (and how old was Scott in 1985?) I said it myself.
I didn’t invent these ideas. I’m not that clever. I picked this shit up from the conversations among my friends, as we gazed blankly at the pretty girls who chose people who were not us. It was so fucking unfair. It was so obvious they should like us, even if we were afraid to even tell them.
Blah.
I needed to fucking grow up and figure shit out. Eventually I did.
Fuck “the manosphere” and fuck Scott for blaming it on women. Good grief.
LikeLike
@veronica d: Scott is not claiming a “right of lonely men to access [your] body”. He’s not even asking for women to sleep with “nice guys”. He’s asking for the romantically unsuccessful to be treated with sympathy.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Also, the graph is used to provide evidence that the concept of “nice guys” comes not from the manosphere, but from feminism. The next section accuses feminists (specifically the nasty, insulting kind) of driving people towards the manosphere, which is bad precisely because the manosphere is bad.
None of this has anything to do with your story, which is definitely a case of too little feminism, not too much.
LikeLike
I can see where you’re coming from with “So I think it’s fair to attribute low to minimal influence for Manosphere-type stuff before about 2005 at the earliest”, but I think that’s referring to the specifically named movement and not misogyny in general. The next line, “But feminists were complaining about “nice guys” for much longer”, also indicates that the “influence” in question relates specifically to the topic of “nice guys”.
LikeLike
The point is that toxic, misogynistic “nice guy” types predate “the manosphere” by a long stretch. This is a particularly unpleasant little exchange about this topic. It doesn’t have a date, but that post was from around 2002.
Which is to say, women have long experience with bitter men who blame us for their own flaws. It didn’t begin with Roosh, nor with /r9k, nor with Eliot Rogers, nor with any of that. It already existed, and with the rise of the Internet women began talking about it in a very blunt way.
In short, we didn’t invent these guys. They were there. We just gave them a name.
I very much agree that lonely men should receive compassion, and Scott is certainly correct to say so. However, he said more than that, specifically that we generated the “manosphere.” But feminists did not create the guy who wrote that letter I just linked to. The ideas now labeled “the manosphere” have been around for a very long time.
Furthermore, if Scott got into some unpleasant conversations with feminists, well, I’ve talked to Scott about difficult topics. Over time I’ve come to find him insufferable. In other words, I’m not sure if he is so perfectly blameless in how those conversations unravelled.
I dunno. I wasn’t there. I’ve seen feminists behave unreasonably. I’ve also seen them try to keep their dignity as they weather storms of toxic hate that would leave most people quivering beneath a rock.
In any case, my big point is this: “the manosphere” is by men, for men, based on toxic attitudes with a long history. You cannot blame it on us.
Stop blaming us for your shit. We got plenty of our own.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oooo! I cannot resist posting this one I just found. Last post here. Datestamp 2003.
Obviously feminists bullied this poor, kindhearted chap into this attitude.
Anyway, whatever. Most men are not like this. Even most lonely men are not like this. They are just lonely and trying to figure shit out. I wish them luck.
But it’s not my fault.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My interpretation, and I’m pretty sure Scott’s intent, was that feminism didn’t create the manosphere or act as the driving force behind its growth, but that the nastier feminists drove some men who might otherwise be decent into the manosphere.
LikeLiked by 1 person
veronica d –
Sucks to be blamed for the way society is based on something you have nothing to do with, doesn’t it?
Welcome to .1% of what it feels like being a white male in our society. Which should give you an idea of exactly why they’re as angry as they are.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Zakharov — Yeah, I think Scott means well — or at least he wants to mean well. There are two problems. The first is, this happens inside a bigger conversation, and while the SCC crowd may believe they can engage is strict, targeted analysis, it doesn’t quite work that way. For example, it is obvious that plenty of terrible, resentful men read that and take all the wrong messages.
And yes, Scott should see what this does to his community. I think he is correct about a lot of the “anti-nerd” sentiment in feminism. But “the gender wars” are a big topic, and Scott has built a big following of anti-feminists who use his material for their nonsense.
Let me lay this out. It is hard to summarize.
Okay, Scott says the “nice guy” stuff encouraged the misogyny. Perhaps. Maybe for a few. The thing is, I agree the “nice guy” stuff sucked. It sucked a lot. It was deeply unhelpful.
HOWEVER! —
— the “nice guy” stuff did not create Richard-fucking-Dawkins nor his army of dipshit followers. It did not create “elevatorgate.”
It is reasonable for women to want some say in our social environment. For example, many of us don’t like to be cornered by horny men in small spaces. Rebecca Watson made reasonable complaints.
She seemed honestly stunned by the shitstorm.
I wasn’t. Read my history above. I knew that this misogyny existed in nerd-space.
I guess we were all surprised by the amplifying effect of social media. That was new. But the attitudes — they’ve been around forever.
It really is about bitterness from sexual rejection — much of it, maybe not Dawkins specifically. But still, it really is that. That is the core. It is deeply unhealthy and women are not at fault.
But fucking Dawkins — look, I’m a nerd. I like to argue. I like to be right. (Obviously.) But the Dawkins set takes that from charming quirk to a deep character flaw.
And I don’t care if that crowd is maybe a bit autistic. So am I. So fucking what! This is not “socially awkward” — These are rabid, stubborn, argumentative attack dogs with literally zero fucking empathy for the comfort of women.
He is a human turd and and his army of dipshits are just so smugly sure they are right.
They are loud and they are legion. Women had two choices: cede the social space, or fight back.
And don’t give me any shit about “entryism.” Fuck off. This is my space too. I’ve paid my dues, as has Watson.
Okay my point, Scott cannot avoid his essays being tools in this big dumb fight. Sorry. I cannot avoid it either. None of us can. If I write a rant about “nice guys,” even if every word is true, it does not help.
Scott thinks he is helping, but he is just a bit shy of the mark, and maelstrom sucks him to the wrong place.
Which leads me to Scott’s second problem: he cannot actually empathize with women. He can intellectually. He can read our words, understand them, and then feed them back. We’ve all seen him do it.
But I don’t believe he feels them.
In other words, he struggles to be fair, but he isn’t. He is still holding a lot of anger, and it comes out.
In one of his old essays, he used elevatorgate as an example of how hard it is for men and the potential consequences of a bad come-on.
LIKE OMFG THE MAN IN THE ELEVATOR PAID ZERO FUCKING CONSEQUENCES WATSON PAID ALL OF THEM TO AN UNBELIEVABLE DEGREE.
That is a failure of empathy that is literally preposterous.
He claims that it is hard for men to know when to hit on women. Okay. So it’s hard. We’re still going to feel super awkward in elevators. Can we talk about that, without rape threats? Without evo-psych? Without Dawkins? OMFG!
Here is the point: I’ve never seen Scott seriously engage with the problem of bitter, angry men. He mentions them in passing, but always to set that fact aside and get to what interests him: what women do wrong.
Fuck that. Yeah we fuck up. So do men. But here is the thing: feminists largely don’t listen to Scott. Lonely men do. So when he rants about how bad we are, who is reading that? How is it helping?
Read my other posts, where I talk about how useless feminist dating advice is. The is the mirror image. It isn’t actually helping.
Note, I am not saying Scott should totally shut up about “nerd hate.” Let me be clear: it is reasonable to defend yourself. Scott is absolutely right to talk about nerd hate. I support that. Feminists are wrong when that attack “neckbeards.” I fucking hate that. It is awful.
(And yes, I do engage with other feminists on this. When I can. I’m small potatoes. I have little effect. But where I can, I do.)
(Barry does more. He is an angel. I’ve seen anti-feminists smugly dismiss him. Fuck that shit.)
But back to my point, Scott should understand the role he can play, what is socially available. (It is not rational to wilfully misjudge your social position and its potential effects.) If he wants to help men, help them where he can. Sure, talk some about how unfair shit can be, but talk more about how unhealthy bitterness is. (Which, I suspect he could use this advice himself.) Instead of focusing on how terribly unfair feminists are, talk to the men who follow him about how bad the fucking redpill is and how they shouldn’t give in to that garbage it will fuck them up.
Some will listen. Some won’t. The Dawkins crowd won’t, since they are literally Voldermort. Whatever. The world doesn’t need an anti-Marcotte.
And to those of you who are committed anti-feminists who support Scott — your existence is my fucking point. Assholes.
#####
Yes I am aware of the irony of this post, that I am giving advice about not giving advice to people who do not listen to a person who will not listen. Whatever. It was fun to write. Maybe it will help somehow.
LikeLike
@Veronica The irony goes deeper. Your post seems extremely bitter and combative. You know that this blog is frequented by “anti-feminist” Scott supporters and yet you still wrote “And to those of you who are committed anti-feminists who support Scott — your existence is my fucking point. Assholes.” Regardless of your reasons the main effect of these posts is to increase the hostility and polarization in the community. You always say you want understanding but increasing the polarization is not likely to lead to increased understanding.
I actually think you, not Scott, is the one with an unusual lack of empathy. and you, not Scott, who is especially bitter (Though Scott is definitely somewhat bitter). Scott is no angel but you don’t even seem to try to be fair and understand the other side. Scott at least tries (so does Ozy btw).
LikeLiked by 5 people
stargirl –
I wouldn’t be even vaguely anti-feminist if there were fewer feminists like veronica and more feminists like ozy or unitofcaring. Or maybe if veronica d’s brand of feminism felt less like the dominant, status-quo ideology of this country – I don’t feel the need to be anti-things that I don’t regard as a threat.
My original response is… inadequate now. This kind of thing is exactly why people go to the manosphere, particularly when this is the kind of response (as it almost always is) to somebody’s genuinely-felt pain and suffering. This is exactly the kind of response I got, over and over again, searching through feminism for anything like what it claims to be, at the lowest point of my life.
I found compassion and empathy – and sanity – in the MRA movement. Had my standards been lower, or my propensity for Reddit higher, I might have chosen /r/redpill instead of AVoiceForMen.
Veronica d – I get it. You’re angry. You’re angry at an unjust world. What you fail completely and totally to grasp, however, is that the people you direct your anger at – they’re also angry at the injustice that’s been heaped upon them. But nobody told you, your entire life, that the anti-feminist movement stood up for you. What you feel towards the anti-feminist movement? Imagine if you had believed your entire life that they were the good guys, who stood up against injustices, only to find them heaping insult upon your injuries when you came to them for help.
You’re not helping, and these people aren’t the correct targets for your anger. They’re responding to institutional sexism not merely in society, but in the thing that claimed to fight institution sexism in society. They should have been your allies. Fight the thing that makes them enemies.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Veronica: Awww! Your praise of me is undeserved – I’m no angel – but very much appreciated. Also, thank you very much for sharing that story from your youth. That can’t have been easy to share.
@Ozy: I can’t decide if Eve Tushnet’s advice – which is to basically build non-romantic, close, committed friendship relationships – is much more widely applicable than people realize, or if it’s something that will only work for a small percentage of people.
I can say that I think that approach has been really good for me. I don’t often have romances, but you’ve seen what my house is like – it would be hard to find anyone in less danger of loneliness than me. And I suspect that accounts for my lack of misery vs the romanceless people who are made miserable by their lack of a relationship.
But of course, that’s completely anecdotal.
(BTW, I’m selfishly sorry you no longer have a reason to visit here!)
LikeLike
@stargirl — I don’t think I’m particularly bitter. I mean, I have contempt for the Dawkins-esque sort, never mind the rape-threat guy, but that’s not the same thing. I certainly have my own baggage, but I’ve dealt with most of that. Anyway, take what you will. I’m mostly happy with my life, bumps and all.
Which is to say, who here is unhappy? Who is suffering? It isn’t me.
On the topic, I’m not interested in finding a banal neutrality. The “gender wars” are ugly and horrible, but there is a core issue, that some people are really lonely and awkward and don’t know how to do the relationship game, and that others do okay. Now, this isn’t necessarily gendered. Not every woman lives in some romantic paradise. But all the same, it is the lonely men who engage in violent, angry outbursts.
Okay, not always and only women all the time — nothing is that one-sided, but OMG it’s pretty fucking imbalanced. Like, gamergate fucking happened. All of that happened. Remember “the fappening” — where really guys were saying “well she wouldn’t fuck me anyhow.”
No they really said that. During the height of gamergate guys really said, “We don’t want girls cuz they don’t like us they just bring alphas.”
Look, if you want a safe space, fine, but it won’t be all of gaming or all of nerd-dom. The pretty cosplay girls have a right to exist. I don’t care if they know a ton of trivia. Get over it.
My theory is that this is driven, at its core, by lonely men who can’t handle their resentment.
Which means it is not driven by my imagined “bitterness.”
######
@orphan — The problem is, no matter how much empathy I can muster, I cannot fix your problem. I just cannot. I don’t know what to do.
You don’t know me. You don’t know my past. But seriously, I’ve been there. I spent ten years with zero human intimacy. I’ve been a lonely fat pornography addict sitting at home every night crying. In high school I actually dated this girl, cute punker chick, who one night went to bed with me. Sounds great, right? Except I’m transgender and, like, at the time I hadn’t figured out my issues, so — let us just say my parts didn’t work that night.
That sucks, right. Okay, I told a trusted friend. Who was a singer for a band. Who then wrote a lovely song called “Can’t Get It Up,” which he publicly dedicated to me and played at all his shows.
Great friend. People found it hilarious.
He wasn’t a feminist.
I don’t claim to be the most empathetic person around, but I don’t have a heart of stone. I understand that shit sucks. I’ve been there.
BTW, the people who humiliated me most were not women, they were not feminists. They were just average dudes who found a limpdick emofag to be hilarious.
I figured my own shit out. It involved wearing skirts and growing tits. That probably won’t work for you.
I don’t know what to do for lonely men. I’m pro sex work. I don’t slag on “sugar daddy” culture. I mean, it’s weird, but you gotta figure out how to make your life work. I don’t like when other feminists do shit that makes it worse, but they’re responding to their own bullshit. And they cannot help either. But there is a shitton of sexism in the world and a shitton of people with problems and men who are furious at women cuz they blame us for their own bullshit. I don’t think it works the same in reverse.
Loneliness sucks. But if I’m at a conference and you just can’t help but hit on me — when I’m trying to engage in my professional life — and if I complain I get rape threats. But even more I get tons of “foreveralone” guys explaining how I’m full of shit and I’d “fuck Adonis” (and maybe I would, but so what) and just dropping their huge bitter pill.
I know it hurts, but I cannot help you. It’s not my fault.
The redpill is a toxic stew full of hatred for women. Not every inch. Some guys go in, and their own moral fibre keeps them afloat. Good. But still, the other side is sluthate.com.
As a contrast, I really don’t mind people like Mark Manson and Hugh Ristik. They seem to be a really positive force. This isn’t to say I agree with everything they say, but if some dude reads Manson, follows his stuff, and then gives me a winning smile and wants to chat — that sounds really nice actually. I can pretend to be totally hetero-norm for one day —
— as long as he’s honest with me. But yeah, Mark Manson is all about being totally honest, open, and good. He’s really is a mensch.
But all the same, stop blaming feminists. Stop blaming women. It’s not our fault. We want to date who we want to date. We have our own hearts, our own dreams. We’re struggling against depression and emptiness, just like you.
I’ve been to roleplaying shops, back in the day, and watched a cool young woman enter, curious, wanting to play. I’ve seen this with my eyes. I’ve seen some guy, fat, weird, unpopular, unhappy, totally slag that girl, say the worse rapey awful shit to tear her down.
(Sorry about the fatphobia there, but I’m painting a picture of what I’ve seen. Obviously it’s not about fat guys.)
The social and psychological forces at work here are really obvious.
So what is the answer? Get that guy laid? Get him a girlfriend? Solve his problem?
It’s obvious that won’t work, right? I don’t know what to do for that guy, but I don’t want to be near him. Instead, I’ll hang out at the other gaming shop that doesn’t allow that shit. That guy has gotta change or he’s gotta go.
If you suggest that these days you get rape threats — cuz “nerd hate” or something.
I don’t hate nerds cuz I want to roleplay without abuse or sexual harassment. Duh.
And yes, tons of people are terrible to that guy, but I’m a woman and a nerd and I cannot fix his problem. But I’m gonna work to make spaces that are cool for women. I want to laugh and twirl and let me heart open up. I’m actually really nice to people.
Now, what did I just say that you think is unfair? How am I a “bad feminist”?
Maybe it’s you.
LikeLike
@veronica when you go around calling people “human turd”, you sound pretty bitter to me.
LikeLike
Well, there’s the fact that the problem I went to feminism about was trying to decide how I felt and should feel about being raped, something I had nothing in my toolkit for dealing with, and your reaction borderline-implied that I should be grateful for any level of female attention?
Which is quite uncharitable, before you take that too close to heart. But so was your response, in treating me as a stereotype rather than a person, which is where you failed there as a feminist, or rather as what feminists say feminism is.
I’m not, incidentally, in need of anything right now. My life is, more or less, in order. I’m not asking you to fix anything for me. And I suspect if you’d ask, you’d discover that most of the men you deliver such tirades to are more interested in a moment of compassion than in you fixing their problems – and if they seem ungrateful, well, try to forgive the miserable their miseries.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@lawrence — I hold a number of people in contempt. If you want to call that bitterness, so be it. I don’t play bullshit games of false charm. Some people are awful. I say so.
@Orphan — I am not a good source of compassion, at least the kind that you want. I can give it sometimes, in some spaces to some people. But no, I am not a boundless font of patience and empathy. Sorry.
That said, you’re simply wrong about how these conversations play out. I have met plenty of men who indeed want something other than compassion. In fact, I have encountered some of the most awful passive aggressive and childish nonsense in this “discourse.” Most feminists have. (I think I can say “most.” I believe it is most.) So, I’m just sorry. You are not describing reality.
Please understand, I am well aware that men come to this conversation from a place of deep pain. I get that. However, when you take a man who is angry at women, and put him among women to seek support — I mean, what do you think will happen? He wants an outlet for his frustration, but his ideas are dismissive of our experience. How can I help him? At what cost to myself?
Why are women expected to have a boundless capacity for love and understanding, but not the man? We struggle also.
(Personally I think there is some sexism baked into this, but never mind. We can discuss emotional labor some other time.)
LikeLike
Oh, and this: “your reaction borderline-implied that I should be grateful for any level of female attention?” — that is completely detached from reality. I said nothing remotely like that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@veronica, call it what you want. When you hold people in contempt, say they are awful, spew insults at them, you force bystanders to choose a side. You’re saying “you have to choose, either I’m awful and feminism is awful, or Richard Dawkins is awful”. Well if I have to make that choice I’m on Richard’s side. It’s very hard for people to take a deep breath and reject that choice.
And you’re doing this over what? I had to look it up. Some snark over elevatorgate? Some goofy meta twitter controversy that you have to read connotational tea leaves to even parse?
Be a little more charitable would you? Lest you be judged for every piece of angry snark you’ve ever written.
LikeLiked by 5 people
veronica d –
I have a fairly simply approach, when somebody requests help, and I don’t feel sufficient to provide it:
I don’t.
I also don’t spend my time writing reasons why it is oppressive for a class of people, who happen to be strongly socially discouraged from asking for help, to ask for help. The list of things I don’t do in that situation is pretty comprehensive.
Thank you for your assistance, however. You’ve been very helpful, although probably not to a purpose you would desire.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Lawrence — Uh … if you are unaware of why feminists are upset with Dawkins — I mean I don’t know what to tell you. Elevatorgate was kind of a big deal at the time. Really in some ways it was the first big social-media maelstrom that later grew into the whole Sarkeesian thing and gamergate thing, in the sense that many of the same people are involved on both sides.
If you’re not part of that, then you are not. Good for you. I am. My friends are.
I never asked you to take a side. If you do not want to take a side, then do not take a side. When did I suggest you should?
No seriously, show me where I said that. I did not. You are not actually reading me.
I expressed my contempt for Dawkins. I issues no demands that you share my opinion.
If you want to stay out of it, then feel free to do so. If you want to wade in, then come on in. Make your choice. Choose your stakes.
I actually don’t require that people “choose sides.” Some people ask for that. I do not. I find it counterproductive. There are many “sides” and many contours that one can occupy. I am certainly not a typical online social justice feminist. Whatever.
It turns out, my social spaces contain many angry, misogynistic men who are bitter toward women. They pop up in all kinds of places I occupy, both online and face to face. Often they are quiet, sullen, and withdrawn. That sucks. I hope they figure shit out. Sometimes they are actively hostile. That sucks more. In some cases I can ignore them. Sometimes I cannot. Sometimes I choose not to, as I see fit, case by case. I don’t need your permission to choose my fights.
For lonely but kind hearted men — I am so sorry. I cannot help them. In the past I’ve tried. It hasn’t helped. I hope they find a way to be happy.
But when that loneliness turns to anger and rage — that is a different situation. I am a nerd. I live in nerd-space. I rub shoulders with those men. I’m gonna stick up for myself and other women.
And then there are men like Dawkins, and Milo, and well I could go on and on — I mean I’m not even counting Roosh cuz he’s just comically awful and no one takes him seriously. But the others, yep, literally Voldermort. I hate them.
If you don’t like that? Too bad. Don’t assume that, because I’m willing to type this, that I am particularly invested in what you think, insofar as you don’t seem to understand the contours of my life or the way this issue effects me. In short, you will think as you will. I hope it works out for the best.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Orphan — I don’t think you are reading what I said.
LikeLike
@veronica
That’s your response? That you didn’t literally say the words “choose a side”? You deny that expressions of hatred and contempt cause people to polarize and choose sides?
You really think the gender wars are an epic struggle of good versus evil, and not a farce caused by autocatalytic amplification of fear, anger and recriminations?
I’d say “I hope you find the horcruxes that you’re looking for”, but you won’t.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Lawrence — Well I hope you are, on the whole, against sexism. But yeah, these debates are complicated. I differ from Ozy on many particulars. Are we on the same side? I’m friends with radical anti-capitalists, whereas I’m a liberal who advocates a market economy with strong safety nets. Are we on the same side?
I fucking hate Dawkins. He’s awful, a big puffed-up bag of pretension, and sexist as fuck. What? It surprises you to meet people who find others contemptuous.
I cuss a lot. I use strong language. I cannot be the first person to do this in your presence.
An “epic struggle of good versus evil” — what the fuck? Where did you get that?
Okay, I said “literally Voldermort” — but like — I mean — you understand I’m quoting Scott there? It’s something he once said about feminists, and I thought it would be amusing to reference that, but to apply it to more worthy targets. I don’t believe in magic or wizards.
I’m more the “error theory” type, in the sense there is no mind-independent moral reality. (I suck at meta-ethics, but I think I’m using the right terms.) Anyway, I would be pretty surprised to find myself in an “epic struggle of good versus evil.”
(God I hope I’m not the “chosen one.” That would suck.)
Anyway, I’m more into small bitter struggles between messed up people. No shining swords. Lotsa bloody knuckles.
You don’t understand me. That’s okay. You are not obligated to.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This conversation is becoming hostile. I deleted one of Orphan’s comments for insulting another commenter, and everyone needs to calm down a bit.
LikeLike
Orphan — Uh, I didn’t ask you to engage with me, but since you have, you’re full of shit. I’ve had a rough past, but I’m not asking anyone to cry for me. I only reference my past to clarify what I think now, to provide perspective on why I might know what I am talking about.
Regarding my “having little regard” for lonely men — you are precisely wrong. But here is the point: I’ve done nothing to hurt them. Nothing at all. Not the slightest thing. All I have said, repeatedly, is I cannot help them. Few of us can. Their situation is really hard.
But some men go another step and become bitter and hostile. They dislike women and blame us for their failures, when it is clear this is pure resentment and sour grapes. Sometimes you can ignore these men, but not always.
Which is to say, it is trivially easy to find angry men who scream from the rooftops their misogyny. Those guys fucking suck, taken one by one. But worse, they’ve built a really awful subculture around themselves. I get that they are dealing with pain, but they have found the most unhealthy possible way to deal with it. After all, anger and violence go hand in hand.
I’m gonna call that out. Don’t like it. Too fucking bad. Seriously.
LikeLike
@ozy — sorry. you should probably delete what I just wrote also, which you probably will do anyhow.
LikeLike
Trying to “Re-rail” by going all the way back to the Scott Alexander quote, I find it a bit annoying that so many here missed the point, which Scott clearly and explicitly lays out in the text, though in my opinion, he does so better with the other example, the domestic abuser with a string of marriages.
Namely, that the oft-stereotyped complaint of “I’m a nice guy, why don’t women want to date me?”, while it can be twisted by those poisoned by misogyny, in *most* guys expresses a general confusion about mismatched expectations and action and general dating failure. They have (or claim to have) trait A, which is explicitly stated as desirable, yet fail again and again. They’re not saying any particular woman *must* date them, but rather a perplexity that a trait can simultaneously be so widely claimed as good and yet so utterly ineffectual even at large sample sizes. How can it be so lauded yet so demonstrably unwanted?
And, before I get jumped on, yes, this is from my experience as someone who has made that complaint and had others make it. I’ve even seen someone morph from one of the people making it in the sense above to a Nice Guy (TM). And, IME, a lot of that degeneration is the inability to resolve that dilemma and utterly useless advice about it. Some turn the blame outwards and become toxic, while others, like myself, turn the blame inwards and develop crippling self esteem problems for a few decades.
And I actually think this links up to scarcity vs abundance and their reality (as opposed to a mindset). Someone operating in an environment of romantic scarcity will have few opportunities, and the rejections have greater consequences in terms of time alone. It makes it more imperative to come up with an answer, while those in abundance can just shrug and try over and over on a daily basis until they find a relationship by sheer dumb luck.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I think a lot of this goes back to the whole madonna/whore thing. That is, “good” women aren’t interested in sex, therefore they’re only interested in Twue Wove, therefore they’ll like men who are personally virtuous and disregard all other factors. This is, of course, ridiculous if you actually think about it for 5 seconds. Taylor Lautner was not cast in the Twilight movies for his acting skills, nor were the 10 or so actors who were also cast as werewolves, have no lines, and their only role in the movie is to stand around in the background with their shirt off. But people still believe it anyway.
No one ever wonders why a lot of women who are physically attractive but are generally terrible people have no trouble finding men who are willing to date them, but women are supposed to be better than that.
LikeLike
NN: This seems like it’s getting back into the old media representation argument. Not a lot of people do stop and think for five seconds about any given topic, and even the ones that do need to contend with the fact that the answer they may reach will still feel wrong and contrary.
When the vast majority of the media portrays Heroic Underdog guys winning the hearts of their romantic partners via heart, goodness, or dramatic deeds, and no media show said HUs instead changing their lifestyle to go to the gym four days a week for six months, it’s hard to get your head around the fact that this is a thing that you can do, just as it’s hard to get your head around the fact that you can go to Harvard as a low-income student.
The difference there, of course, is that while in one case the Ivy League is doing all they can to advertise their extensive financial aid and scholarships, very few of the people answering “How can I be more datable?” are doing so with “Get a sexier body.” And most of the people who are doing so are Red-Pill or Red-Pill-adjacent.
LikeLiked by 1 person
NN & Robert – I guess there’s also the mismatch between those just seeking sex and those seeking eventual life partners. In the former case, people clearly chose based only on appearance, but in the latter, it seems silly – you’re eventually going to both be old and ugly (assuming you look both ways crossing the street). Then again, the whole dating world seems entirely irrational, and I’m damned glad to be rid of it (monogamously married), though I feel deeply sorry for those who aren’t.
Still, niceness aside, it does illustrate the broader point, that there’s a huge mismatch between stated preferences and actual preferences, which means anyone who can give insight into actual preferences (shallow though they may be on both sides) will wind up giving the most useful advice.
Something that just popped into my head is a quote from George Carlin: “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.” Perhaps that has something to do with it? Lonely guys who want more than sex, but a relationship, finding that all their positive traits don’t matter without great abs – I can see how that would make anyone bitter. Hell, that’s like something right out of the Twilight Zone, so much so that I’m mentally replaying episodes to see if there are any which match.
LikeLike
Romantic failure is part of it, and it also goes deeper (as a case study, I fell in with the manosphere/red pill thing and I was in a long term monogamous marriage)…
…it goes to failure of an identity. For me (and I think this is representative) – we thought of ourselves as “good men” (in the Jack Donovan sense) – and realized that being “good at being a man” was the determining factor.
The Red PIll talks a lot about traditional masculine ideals – and that’s not just about romantic success, that’s about rebuilding yourself around a new identity.
(For the confused about the distinction between “good man” and “good at being a man”:
http://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/freedom/on-being-a-good-man-2/ )
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is this redpill in particular? I’m really not very familiar with redpill and related ideas, but I was under the impression that this is for instance also a part of PUA (predating redpill).
LikeLike
That is very plausible, but I don’t know a huge amount about PUA. 🙂
LikeLike
“But more than that, it doesn’t seem particularly conducive to the happiness of the person who believes it. In general, when you love someone, you love their individuality”
I suspect much of red-pill theory is – maybe less a *moral* justification to do what they’re doing – as it is a defence against vulnerability, which is also a defense against connection. You follow the subreddit for a while, you see a bunch of stories of past psychological pain, you see see the field reports of holding women at an emotional arm’s length, dots get connected about what’s going on.
LikeLiked by 1 person
…okay, apparently nobody here knows what “red-pill” means. It doesn’t mean misogyny. It doesn’t mean having sex with ten thousand women.
It means realizing that, specifically contrary to what you’ve been told your entire life and felt guilty about (or at least told you should feel guilty about), society is not in fact set up for the benefit of men, and indeed is extremely hostile to them. It’s noticing – generally at the worst possible time – that men get near to no empathy or support, and indeed are discouraged from even having empathy for themselves.
All the rest of the stuff associated with “red-pill” is the result of the entirely natural and predictable anger that arises as a reaction to learning you’ve been in an extremely emotionally manipulative and abusive relationship with society.
The “red pill” analogy is used because making this connection is like waking up into reality.
PUA sometimes is included as part of the “red pill” stuff because one of the things you notice is how sexist the dating scene is, and how sexist dating expectations are. A lot of anger spills over into dating, as well, but by and large PUA is about “rebuilding” a model of dating which doesn’t revolve around buying endless streams of women drinks and food. One individual I used to read calculated his annual expenses, prior to his realization of what was happening, at around $10,000. PUA is flawed in other ways, granted, but the fact that people recoil at PUA’s treatment of women but not at how men are treated in the “normal” dating scene pretty much sums the red pill issue up.
LikeLiked by 3 people
When I am critiquing a group’s beliefs I try very hard to make sure my criticisms are of Representative beliefs. However it does seem to me that the redpill movement does genuinely encourage misogyny. For example this article is in the “theory” section of the sidebar on r/redpill: http://no-maam.blogspot.fr/2012/06/woman-most-responsible-teenager-in.html.
Do you actually believe this article is fair to women and paints an accurate picture? In general its very hard to argue about whether a movement promotes toxic things becuase it is hard to pin down what ideas a group promotes! But I do think its fair to look at the sidebar of r/redpill. Are you ok with the stuff in the sidebar or do you think it does promote unfair views about women?
LikeLiked by 2 people
The “Red Pill” is less a group, and more an idea. Where it goes from there varies considerably; given the anger that the central insight inspires, it often goes into some pretty scary-from-the-outside territory. A lot of the early founders have stated that they’re terrified of the movement; but they’ve moved past their anger into more constructive ways of dealing with the problems they see, whereas the “movement”, such as it is, is comprised of an ever-churning group of fresh faces, who eventually burn out on anger and move on.
At this point it’s a stable burn, acting as a safety valve on a problem which otherwise would explode in a much uglier fashion a little further down the line. People are angry, and I think understandably so, and people don’t always react to anger in the most sane or rational fashion. Personally, I talk to those I encounter, trying to get them into a healthier place faster, but mostly it just has to burn out, much like the early phases of feminism pretty much had to burn through the rage that came of realizing that women had a raw deal and and had been told they had it nice.
Which isn’t to say I endorse anything anybody says except myself, and even that not even 100% of the time. But I do try to start from a position of compassion, and if I still have a lot of resentment towards feminism, it is something I’m working on getting past.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Orphan- I get that you can think of things like what “red pill” seems to be both in terms of the real world beliefs of a group of people engaged in a collective movement, and in terms of idealized ideological commitments. But that’s presumably true of feminism as well, and you seem to be quite willing to discuss it’s toxicity. By any standards via which it’s reasonable in principle to call out feminism on that way, it’s certainly reasonable to do the same for red pill.
You’re certainly not the only person in this thread talking about group toxicity in inconsistent terms between feminism and red pill, but still.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Patrick –
Not… quite? I mean what I said about it not being a group. Not in the “feminist isn’t a group because there are sex-positive and sex-negative feminists” sense, but in the “this is specific terminology for a specific insight about society” sense. It would be a bit like calling feminists “patriarchalists”; Red Pill people with ideologies self-identify as the ideology they hold. Some become gender conservatives, other become meninists or masculinists or men’s rights activists or pick up artists or any number of other loosely-affiliated movements.
So it’s not that there isn’t toxicity, it’s that the terminology is wrong.
Granted, it’s been a year or two since I dropped the last blog that went “Red Pill” on me, so it’s entirely possible some group or subgroup has adopted the moniker for their own ideology. But I suspect that, given who I’m talking to, there’s just confusion about the name of a specific Reddit and the absence of the name of a specific movement associated with it.
I’m not arguing there’s not toxicity there; that’s what I was referring to with the anger, but in a way intended to remind the local, context-specific audience that the people they’re talking about are still human. I’m arguing that there’s not a movement there, or any kind of specific ideology; if the entire red pill community was killed by a meteor strike today, the same kind of community would begin to arise tomorrow, because it’s a reaction to society as it exists, and society won’t have changed overnight.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@stargirlprincess
A’int that always the problem? It’s so hard to unbundle things. Part of wants to just swear off ever using words like “Islam”, or “feminism”, or “socialism”, or “communism”, because as soon as you try to generalize to something that’s a movement and a social group and a set of ideas, you get bogged down in this horrible tarpit of what’s representative, and what isn’t, and who needs to answer for what offenses, and “not all X are like Y”, and it’s just this horrible quagmire of defensiveness and plausible denials and equivocation that goes nowhere.
But go to far down that road it and leaks to relativism and nihilism. Words mean thing’s right? No, the religions aren’t all really the same. Ideas do matter, even in vague and nebulous pattern. And when the sinner identifies with the sin, can you really only hate the sin?
I have no answers, only frustration.
LikeLiked by 1 person
To clarify a small point: my problem with TRP is it’s sub-optimal. There’s no reason not to decouple the general tone of contempt from the skillset and enjoy emotional *and* physical intimacy. I see it as an accident of history that TRP turned out the way it did.
i think we agree on that?
LikeLike
@orphan
I think either you are making red pill ideology more broad than it deserves, or it’s very much changed since you left. I have never identified as being red pill, i did used to identify as being an MRA, and based on your definition of what red pill is i did at one point ‘swallow the red pill’ without ever identifying with the movement.At the time that i got into all of this, me and plenty of MRAs i read and talked to all very much disliked the redpill. It was always a very specific thing,
i can’t nail down exactly the details but it was always more than just the realisation that, paraphrasing, ‘the stuff you’ve been told all your life that men had it awesome is a lie and men had problems due to sexism too, examples including reactions to violence against men, support for men, and yes the dating scene’. (this is closer to what my own epiphany was, which to me seems close enough to what you define as the defining part of red pill stuff although i disagree. And maybe it’s far enough away and you wouldn’t classify me as having had the right idea back then to count either)
I would say that of the ‘manosphere’, you have things like PUA and redpill being a close cluster, and MRAs, meninsts and masculinists being another close cluster, with a much larger gap between the two clusters than feminists (or people who talk about the manosphere a lot) realise.
You seem to be applying the red pill to more or less the whole ‘manosphere’, which may have been what was intended by the phrase by whoever came up with applying it to all of this stuff, but IMO it became a much more specific thing very quickly.
LikeLike
The unpleasantness of rejection is its own cost, for most people. That limits the usefulness of “abundancy by large numbers” in practice.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This kind of advice works best for the sort of person who latches onto exactly one other person and pursues them doggedly forever.
Sort of like how Atlas Shrugged works best for the sort of person who feels guilty about everything.
LikeLiked by 2 people
One thing I will disagree with here is the word “mindset”. From my POV, abundance vs scarcity is a statistical reality, not just a matter of perspective.
Even aside from how the global population is a strawman (as others have said), the problem is with multiplying large numbers, and being, well, normal vs weird.
Image Bob and Bill. Bob is a typical guy who has two major requirements for a relationship: being a Catholic and sharing his love of boats. The former is about 20% of the populace, and we’ll say 5% for the latter, so he matches to 1% of people, which is a lot in the grand scheme. But Bill’s requirements target smaller groups: he needs a fellow Wiccan who shares his passion for tropical fish aquaria. If we peg both at 1% of the populace, Bill is only compatible with 1 in 10,000 people. Add in another unusual requirement at 1%, and Bill literally is looking for 1 in 1,000,000.
Maybe you could say Bill’s “too picky”, but sometimes it’s not that easy. Maybe instead, Bill is an arachnologist who is extraordinarily passionate about spiders, including having a house full of them, and would be miserable with a significant other who was repulsed by them. Pretending that there’s an abundance won’t help Bill a damn bit – best possible case, he hides a huge part of who he is, only to have people literally run screaming from his apartment when faced with his prized Goliath Birdeater.
IMHO, it’s best to start with scarcity and abundance, but realize that, for many, they’re reality, and don’t assume that advice for one works in the other. Acknowledge that someone’s reactions to the dating world may be very different from yours if they live in scarcity; Bill will inevitably take rejection harder than Bob, because his odds of finding someone new are so much lower.
LikeLiked by 1 person
For what it’s worth, while it might be difficult for unsuccessful people to hold what you regard as the good version of abundance mindset, I can report that it isn’t impossible; I manage to keep my mind there most of the time, even though there aren’t many people quite as unsuccessful as myself in this regard.
LikeLike
Pingback: Plan B |
Not that anybody cares, but I have absolutely no back up plan should my marriage go awry. I would be devastated, broken, crushed, but such is the nature of love. People are individuals, they are not monkeys on a tree. You can not just replace one with another. Now obsessing, messing with your own head, believing there is only one person in the whole world who can ever make you happy, is probably another extreme one should avoid. Abundance however, perceiving people as nothing more than sexual commodities, these are the ugly sides of the red pills.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Book Post for February, Part One: Books Not About Parenting | Thing of Things