In 1971, writer Esther Vilar banged out what she later called a “pamphlet written in great anger against the women’s movement’s worldwide monopoly of opinion.” This pamphlet became a small book called The Manipulated Man. Largely forgotten today, the book has nonetheless been hailed as an underground classic by many in the Men’s Rights Movement.
It’s not hard to see why. It’s an entertaining rant, written with style and verve, an interesting reminder of the passions (pro and con) that the women’s movement inspired in women in its early-70s heyday. What really endears it to Men’s Rightsers, though, is that it’s full of catty, often quite vicious, attacks on women and enthusiastic paeans to the glories of men. None of these are supported in any way by actual evidence, of course, but that’s rarely a drawback to MRAs. (You can buy the book on Amazon, though I bet that if you look around a bit you might be able to find a pdf of it for free, wink wink.)
Vilar pulls no punches:
Women let men work for them, think for them and take on their responsibilities – in fact, they exploit them. Yet, since men are strong, intelligent and imaginative, while women are weak, unimaginative, and stupid, why isn’t it men who exploit women?
Zing!
Why do women not make use of their intellectual potential? For the simple reason that they do not need to. It is not essential for their survival. Theoretically it is possible for a beautiful woman to have less intelligence than a chimpanzee and still be considered an acceptable member of society.
Oh, snap!
By the age of twelve at the latest, most women have decided to become prostitutes. Or, to put it another way they have planned a future for themselves which consists of choosing a man and letting him do all the work.
Oh no she didn’t!
As zingy as these zingers are, they don’t actually describe any human females I know. (Well, ok, they describe a tiny handful of women I’ve known.) But as I read the book I realized that they described a non-human someone I know very well:
My cat.
Yep, by simply replacing the word “women” in the book with the words “cats,” and making a few other minor adjustments, I discovered that Vilar’s angry, anachronistic rant is actually a detailed and unflinchingly accurate description of life with my cat. Consider these altered passages:
It is true that cats get progressively more elegant, more well-groomed … but their demands on life will always be material, never intellectual.
The sort of independence men have means nothing to cats, because cats don’t feel dependent. They are not even embarrassed by the intellectual superiority of men because they have no ambition in that direction.
There is one great advantage which cats have over men: they have a choice – a choice between the life of an alley cat and the life of a dimwitted, parasitic luxury item. There are … few cats who would not select the latter
A cat will always be pleased if a man turns to look at her … . Her pleasure may be compared to that of a shareholder who finds that his stocks have risen. It will be a matter of complete indifference to a cat if he is attractive or looks intelligent. A shareholder is hardly likely to notice the color of his dividend checks.
A cat’s greatest ideal is a life without work or responsibility – yet who leads such a life but a child? A child with appealing eyes, a funny little body … that darling miniature of an adult. It is a child that a cat imitates … its helplessness, its need for protection. A cat must be cared for; it cannot look after itself. And what species does not, by natural instinct, look after its offspring?
A cat takes interest only in subjects that have an immediate personal usefulness to her.
True, true, true, true, true, and true.
It’s too bad Vilar chose to market her book as an attack on women. She could have had a long and happy career as a cat whisperer.
More on Vilar in a bit.
Hi Troy!
Thanks for necro’ing a thread from 2010!
Your timeliness is so impressive!
What part of
do you find particularly unworthy of attack?
Thanks!
~cloudiah
Women are me? All women? Wow!
Pretty sure this is 3 necrotrolls today, but I might be missing one.
Troy has far more contact with with 2010 than David apparently.
I don’t know who you are, so you may be simpatico with useless crackpots like Farell and Vilar, but leave a real writer like Bukowski out of this. I’m not a fan of his, but he deserves more respect than being lumped with dated curiosities and literary detritus.
Four if you count the late last night (in my time zone) troll who necro’d a thread to helpfully inform us that Muslims invented the term homophobia to distract people from their evilness.
Having read both Farrell and Vilar and a tiny bit of Bukowski, I’m going to reply in the most literate, articulate and eloquent fashion I can envision in order to properly express my sentiment towards your statements:
“Blrllrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrrlrrlrrl”
It’s the sound of someone sticking their tongue out at you.
I read Bukowski for a while in an attempt to see why so many of the men I knew found him so amazing. Those are some hours I wish I could get back, but on the plus side I learned that a love of Bukowski is a pretty solid indicator that you should get as far away from the man professing it as possible.
Heheh.
I guess I share the sentiment, along with the idea that anyone who really, truly, entirely likes The Sorrows of Young Werther, Catcher In The Rye or a few choice danish and norwegian works I don’t know if translations are available of. Especially if they ever mention any sentence along the lines of “The main character just gets me, man”
It’s not really that I mind any of those books, or that Bukowski was bad, it was just… An overwhelming sensation of “Eh?”. Ham On Rye. Eh? Post Office. Eh? That book about the antisocial hunter living in the north with the picturesque descriptions of wonderful nature, joyous hunting, and a constant aggravating on and off relationship with the engaged woman who didn’t know what she wanted. Eh?
Come to think of it, a astounding amount of the Scandinavian books I’ve read rotates around the theme of a wild, antisocial male brooding hero too good for a materialist society who falls in love with a woman who is flighty and unpredictable and which ends in tears because of their mutual complete inability to communicate like human fucking beings.
Denmark! Danish design, bacon, football, happiness and fucking miserable litterature
I had to look him up, and this bit in Wikipedia sounds like just the sort of thing MRAs and MGTOW would love: ‘One critic has described Bukowski’s fiction as a “detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free”, an image he tried to live up to with sometimes riotous public poetry readings and boorish party behaviour.’
Man-child, maybe? Sounds like it.
If the main character in Catcher in the Rye just speaks to your mental state, man, then you should be concerned. Like, um, maybe talk to someone about that? Because that’s not a healthy place to be.
Pretty much everything Bukowski ever wrote about sex or women made me seriously contemplate saying “sure, I’m bi, but why not just stick to women?”. Henry Miller too.
Scandinavia! If you were to ask me my overall impression of that part of the world, “cheerful” definitely wouldn’t be the first word I’d think of.
(Though, hey, dark sense of humor works for me, and some of my favorite writers are Russian, if we’re going to talk books with a fundamentally depressing outlook towards life and not so positive outlook on human nature.)
Troy the male supremacist doesn’t know much, but he’s pretty sure he knows women are awful and that men who disagree must have somehow managed to have no life experiences. His friends, it needs to be said 4 yrs after this was posted, have experienced other vague “evidences” that 12 yr old’s usually choose to be prostitutes and that women are lacking in every way but also control all men with our butts.
Wow, that definitely needed to be said in a thread from 2010.
Thanks, Troy.
We’ve all learned so much from your comment.
David must feel especially enlightened to know so much more about himself and his life.
Troy,
One little suggestion for the next time you drop in to tell David of your superior knowledge of women: Don’t call experiences with women “contact”, like we’re aliens from another planet. It sort of makes me doubt your estimation of how much of an expert on women you are.
Before encountering the manosphere I thought that my butt was just a thing that’s useful for sitting on and pooping. Little did I know that butts were actually the secret to world domination.
Every episode of Wallander I managed to sit through, I wanted to shout at him “QUIT YOUR JOB AND GET THERAPY YOU DISMAL SPECIMEN. And get a less fucking annoying ringtone on your phone.”
They are, but it’s not women’s butts.
Did the keychain really need all that puckering?
I would say no.
Speaking of writers who speak to men, did anybody see Chuck Palahniuk’s screed the other day about how he hopes writers will start catering to men soon?
It was one of the most epically clueless things I ever saw. Ever.
Howard, the mind boggles.
@Howard: that explains why male literacy rates are so low compared to female literacy rates. The mystery is solved.
I hated Catcher In The Rye. It was one of those books where I hated it fast, but read it to the end hoping it would improve.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time using online dating in the past year, and been on probably 30 first dates by this point. I’ve had some great relationships with a couple people.
But here is the truth. Looking back on my experiences, I’d say around a full half of of the women I met with in real life from OKCupid and Plenty of Fish in the late 20s/early 30s age bracket were either serial daters, or prostitutes in all but name.
It’s obvious to anyone with even the smallest degree of emotional intelligence the difference between a date with a person which simply doesn’t go well, and the other person just isn’t into you once they meet you in real life, and a date where the other party has no intention whatsoever of being open to building any type of emotional “connection” right from the beginning, and is simply there because they wish to be entertained, or to evaluate what you’re good for. I’m glad to be found wanting in that regard, and have gotten pretty good at the art of sussing out serial daters within the first half hour of a date, and rapidly ejecting before they’ve finished their first drink.
Deny what you wish, but Esther Vilar’s criticism rings true, and myself and many other men have the “boots on the ground” experience in the current dating arena to confirm it. Hopefully, in time, more men will come to realize what the reality of the situation is, and ignore the endless, histrionic protestations of modern feminists to the contrary.