Is it love — or do they both just like spaghetti?
The charming Man Going His Own Way who calls himself Rex Patriarch has written up a short treatise entitled “Women Are Incapable of Love.” (He’s also posted a video by another MGTOWer making the same point, but we’ll just ignore that for now, because I didn’t bother to watch it.)
Anyway, here’s Rex’s argument, such as it is:
Look guys, women are like pets.
Do pets love you?
No, of course not but they do feel the warmth which is the love you may have for them. At a minimum you are their meal ticket. That in of itself is why they stick around.
Same same with women. As long as you are their meal ticket they “love” you but the very moment you can’t provide for them. The very moment they find a better deal, find some higher status.
Watch how fast that “love” goes out the window.
The reason being is it never was there to begin with. It was just something they were telling you to keep the goodies coming. Up until they could find something better. If they can.
The thing is men can love women all they want or none at all but don’t expect them to love you back in the same measure. They simply do not have the ability.
What’s interesting about this argument, insofar as anything about it is interesting, is that he’s not just, you know, wrong about women. He’s also wrong about pets.
Now, anyone who’s bonded with a pet certainly feels that their pet loves them back. (Or at least some pets do; I’m pretty sure the turtle my brother had as a kid didn’t really love anything other than worms.) Still, some skeptics insist that we’re just anthropomorphizing when we look at our pets and see love in their eyes.
But researchers are increasingly seeing harder-to-dismiss signs that animals may have emotions remarkably like our own — and that they can indeed feel love. By scanning the brains of dogs, Emory University neuroeconomics professor Gregory Berns has found that dogs and humans are alike in some key ways:
All in all, dogs and humans show striking similarities in the activity of an important brain region called the caudate nucleus. So, do dogs love us and miss us when we’re gone? The data strongly suggest they do. And, those data can further move humanity away from simplistic, reductionist, behaviorist explanations of animal behavior and animal emotions and also be used to protect dogs and other animals from being abused.
You can read more about his research, and what he sees as its implications, here.
More on animal emotions here and here.
You can also learn a lot about how animals — including the animals called humans — think and feel by just fucking paying attention to them and having a tiny bit of empathy. This is apparently a bit too much for some people to manage.
Sorry, I have a lot of feelings about this. Would a being incapable of love risk her life to save her owner??
My wife started going out with me when I was unemployed. Before that, she was with a guy for ten years who was an anchor around her neck, financially. Throughout our relationship, she was the one who held down a steady (part-time) job while I freelanced, and she was totally cool with me taking on jobs that didn’t pay much, but were creatively rewarding. I’d like to take a figurative 2 by 4 to this guy’s head, but the idea of registering on his site even for one comment is too repulsive.
@Wordsp1nner: OMG, Beasts of Burden. Gorgeous art and some good scares, but also, yeah, some of the storylines are heartbreaking.
Reblogged this on FEMBORG.
emilygoddess – I have very strong feelings about this too; not dumbass Wrecks Patriarch’s crap, but the whole thing about animals not having feelings in general. I don’t want to start ranting about it either.
Rex is right. I’m secretly a dog. My name is Martha and I once ate a bowl of alphabet soup.
@ kittehserf,
Pan’s usual method for getting Jade to play is a lot more straightforward than just stretching out the paws: he likes to jump on her.
Yes, there is a reason their family nickname is the stackable cats.
Emilygoddess–I agree, most of the stuff I can laugh off….I don’t know why this just seems scarier and more dehumanizing then most…..
Also holy crap I just found this on his site http://rexpatriarch.blogspot.com/2013/11/why-prostitution-is-illegal.html
Women hate other women and men love women cuz they want sex with them!!!! ERRRRRRRRRRRR so basically men are incapable of loving women unless sex is involved…..uh yeah sure bub. Maybe it is YOU not women or dogs and cats that is incapable of love
*serious* Oh yeah, and fuck that guy for saying that women and animals don’t have feelings.
Money quote:
Yes, yes they probably do. You, on the other hand, seem to be confused about it.
I have a similar story.
About a year ago I was on chemotherapy. Chemotherapy makes you smell very odd and most of the people I spoke to about it found it quite noticeable and unpleasant because of it’s strangeness. I wore a lot of perfume.
My cats (obviously) have a much stronger sense of smell than a human and I must have smelled bizarre and rather frightening to them but they never left me alone. There was always a cat curled up with me and for the first two days after treatment they were both with me and only left to use their litter trays. They even insisted that my husband bring their food to them so that they wouldn’t have to leave me in order to eat.
One thing I’ve noticed about cats is that they’re 1. Very independent and are difficult to control and 2. They will do exactly as they like on all occasions. I really can’t think of any other reason for their behaviour during my chemotherapy than that they loved me and were providing me with much needed love and companionship.
Rex Patriarch knows nothing about animals and even less about women. If he had any sense he’d stop displaying his ignorance in this absurd fashion.
I think the real danger in anthropomorphizing pets comes not from assuming they have emotions like ours (because they obviously do) but from forgetting that many of their motivations are vastly different than us. The show My Cat From Hell really makes this clear. No, your cat isn’t “being naughty” and “disobeying you.” It’s probably just full of excess energy because it’s a hunter with nothing to hunt. I have one cat that comes up and sort of nips my hands sometimes. I think in the past I would have squirted a bitey cat with a squirt bottle, but now I get it: she’s bored and wants to chase something and bite *that*.
Particularly since it’s a common dog name.
“Why prostitution is illegal”?
Lemme guess, Wrecks is another “US = the world” dumbass. (I’m not clicking that link, I won’t go to these sites.)
wordsp1nner – the stackable cats! 😀
It’s a good thing Mads doesn’t jump on Fribs. There’s a lot of her and very little of Fribbie these days.
David – yes, exactly! It always seems to tip into the idea that animals are furry humans with identical motivations, OR that they’re not much more than machines responding to stimuli. Either way, the animals lose. Colour me surprised.
Did you see the latest A Voice for Pierre, btw?
yeah…as for anomorphazising a common one that I hear is my dog is trying to spite me they peed on the rug….when no…the dog is not trying to spite you! Stop spanking them!
It was a trafficking doesn’t exist anywhere ever, the only reason a woman would be against prostitution is because she hates women and doesn’t want her to succeed! Men built strip clubs and bordellos because they love women even though women are idiots and will blow the money on stupid stuff.
If this dropkick thinks “watching someone strip/having sex with someone you’ve never met, whether zie enjoys it or not, because zie needs the money” is love, then that could explain a great deal of his confusion. ‘Cos if that’s love, then no, I don’t feel it at all.
Rex is just jealous because the furrinati are on to him!
Misogynist dudes, when you can’t convince a puppy to like you, you IS the evil! Hell even Blofeld had a cat!
Funnily enough, I just started reading this:
The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy – and Why They Matter.
By Marc Bekoff PH.D
Think I’m gonna avoid the elephant bits, elephant stories are always sad.
@worsp1nner, lovely, lovely kitties. 🙂
@Kitteh, urgh Descartes! Am I the only one who cried when they read ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Descartes’?
And I’d like to hear Rex tell Magnus animals can’t feel love. 😉
“If cats don’t feel affection, why was Fribbie so lonely after Katie, Hadji and Magnus all went Home within six months?”
I’m so sorry, so close together?
Also, I LOVE seeing you’re kitties in video format, aw Maddie and Fribs.
@Seranvali, so sorry about the chemo, hope you’re feeling better now. Of course you’re kitties love you, Rex is an arse.
Your, your! Really have to go to bed! See, didn’t read it 15 times, get it wrong. Poo!
Of course dogs don’t like him. That proves that they’re intelligent.
Notice how this line of thought erases the women who are also prostitutes. I mean, yeah, originally prostitution was illegal for puritanical reasons (and we can argue over which gender led that charge), but it remains illegal, in part, because we’ve finally started listening to sex workers and what they’re saying is like 99% horrific.
Yeah, that’s the problem with all “I’m not *ist, I’d totally fuck one of them!” lines of reasoning: “I love fucking them” is not the same as “I love them”. If [hetero] men’s desire to fuck women indicated love and respect for us, we wouldn’t have had to fight so hard for basic rights.
Talk about a woman, this guy is the biggest girl ever. Stop your whining, knock that gigantic chip off your shoulder and come out of the closet already. Its hard enough to find a partner with out people buying into this load of shit.
In fact with misogynists it seems like wanting to fuck someone makes it impossible for them to love or respect that person, or see them as a person at all. Which is why they get so pissy about the concept of objectification – I don’t think they can imagine having sex with another person rather than an ambulatory fuck toy.
I never read anything about Descartes except the Britannica article about animal welfare that mentioned he might have been animals’ worst enemy, philosophically (Bentham got a major thumbs-up). Descartes is one of those I struggle to recall will surely have changed after all this time; he was a prize piece of shit back then.
Heheh I’d like to hear Rex try to tell Magnus he wants him to get off his chest … now please … nowAAAAAARRGH
Yes, 2009 was an awful year – Katie in January, Magnus and Hadji in July. I am SO glad I was in contact with Louis by then, because he brought Katie round two days after she passed, and it was so comforting to see her again, and with her tail restored to its whiplash length (she’d had about a third amputated years before). Wish I had videos of her, but
” rel=”nofollow”>here’s a pic of her and Fribs as youngsters. Katie had done all that damage to the carton in the space of thirty minutes or so.
These people must have blinders on and incredibly selective memories. If women were nothing more than greedy robots, why do women bother going out with men who are unemployed/ paid minimum wage? Why would women want to be independent at all if they actually *were* only interested in leeching off some dude’s income? Is the entirety of popular culture–not to mention the rest of human history–depicting women falling in love merely a conspiracy designed to convince men that women are actually capable of emotion? It’s such a ridiculous concept if you think about it for even five seconds.
Requisite cat story: Years ago my mom got a cat for my brother. Said brother would ignore him or toss him out the room whenever the cat started meowing too much. Mom is not a cat person. I had a cat of my own (who sadly disappeared a couple years later) so I didn’t really try to bond with my brother’s cat, but I still played with him a lot.
I recently moved back to my mom’s after grad school, and this cat is absurdly clingy with me. He is in my room most of the time, sleeps in my bed, pesters me when he wants to sit on me. Through all of the years I was off at college he never cuddled like this with anyone else. Even if I’m working and not petting him he has got to be all up in my business. So yeah, I have to say he definitely feels some kind of affection, even if it’s not exactly the same as “love” per se.
*sigh* This seems oddly appropriate, since I was just thinking of ol’ Harry Harlow. You know, that dude who did experiments on infant attachment in monkeys? This was back in the goddamned FIFTIES, and he systematically, scientifically proved that infants need way more than just a food dispenser to be healthy. So yeah, where’s your evidence, Rex Patriarch? Oh, that’s right, you just pulled shit out of the Institute Of Your Ass.
RE: wordsp1nner
I also just found (and am in the middle of reading) Beasts of Burden
YES GOOD. I love Beasts of Burden so much, and am happy to see other people reading it! I’d prefer THAT Rex to OP dude any day of the week. (Though my favorites are still Ace and Jack.)
@Kitteh, I really wish I hadn’t read about Descartes, if I were you I wouldn’t, it’s just all blargh! The trouble is, even when the academics try and sanitise it, he’s still just the Mengele of animals.
Lovely pic of Katie. Mine have just destroyed the box off my ‘Complete Calvin and Hobbes’. £50 Birthday pressie, good job they’re cute. 🙂
So sorry about 2009, it sounds awful, yay Louis. Also, still haven’t heard how she lost her tail, poor Katie.
OCD is really making it hard to comment tonight so I’m going to go to bed and hope it leaves me alone. (Not gonna read this back, so hope it makes sense, bloody sodding 15! Bloody sodding OCD!)
Nighty, night everyone.
Niters, Ophelia! I’ll tell you about Katie in email sometime.
Totally agree about Descartes, what little I know of him says Mengele of animals is correct. Even if I were into philosophy, I would not be reading about him, or his work.
@Sandy, Can you please not misgender people and question their sexual orientation? There are lots of legitimate reasons to criticize this asshat, but those aren’t legitimate reasons.
Because women and girls are the worst, amirite?
Sandy, mind NOT implying that being a woman is a terrible thing? That’s extremely misogynistic, and it doesn’t make you any better than the MRAs.
Those stories about dogs staying at their people’s graves must be because the gravestones dispense treats!
Wow, intentional misgendering, misogyny, and a “joke” about how he must be gay. Trifecta! Do I get a prize? (Can it be Ally making her post about “jokes” into a series? [I broke it again earlier, it is fixed, I apologize to anyone who saw that mess!])
“Women are like dogs, not humans.”
Do these people seriously not understand how absurd they sound?
If animals do not have feelings of love then how come my big cat Anne keeps coming on my shoulder or chest seeking reassurance I love her while showing she loves me by sticking her nose in my ear?
I also come across people now and then who are like “people used to believe that animals didn’t have emotions, just look at Descartes yada yada”, although pretty much every philosopher except for him in the entire history of philosophy believed that animals differ from people by lacking reason, not by lacking emotions (with a few exceptions, like David Hume, who believed animals were pretty similar to us reasons-wise as well).
I really have no idea why Descartes in the minds of many people have come to represent how “we” used to think about animals before we became more enlightened in modern days.
More Descartes trivia: Descartes had a long philosophical correspondence with princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. Descartes laid out his theory of mind-body dualism, and how mind and body are completely different things because mind is immaterial.
Elisabeth: Okay, but if mind is completely immaterial, how can it have any effect on the body? How could something immaterial set the fluids of the brain in motion?
Descartes: Well…. these fluids, they’re like, really really light and very easy to move.
Well, if women are like dogs, then straight men are like cats. In that many of them enjoy laying on boobs.
In general it’s not a very good idea to judge a writer without actually reading zir writing and you tend to lose all kinds of good ideas if you write off a philosopher as a whole based on zir having one really bad idea, so I’ll give Descartes the benefit of the doubt until I actually read his book where he talks about animals.
Tigger gave me a nice 30-lb-cat punch to the boob once. So that’s similar to lying on them I guess.
But seriously, I hope this guy doesn’t have any pets because I don’t at all trust him to treat them with the care and kindness that they deserve.
I’ll be working on a post about bigoted jokes very soon.
@opheliamonarch
Cassandra’s earlier post, (“So the guy who doesn’t think women are people can’t accept that animals have emotions? What a shocker.”), reminded me of Bekoff’s The Emotional Lives of Animals even though I read it years ago. Excellent book.
I went to a wildlife preserve this summer and chatted with someone who worked with elephants. With their long lifespans, complex social relationships and high intelligence, elephants have an astonishing emotional inner life. But as Cassandra points outs, if Rex hasn’t picked up on the fact that women are human, he’s probably not interested in how scientists have observed animals experiencing grief, joy, empathy, altruism and other emotions.
In fact I’d wager Rex only cares about himself and getting men to agree with his endless blather.
@ Viscaria
Ouch.
The worst my cats do is try to sit on them when they are tender. (Like, say, tonight.)
“Mommy, what does “in of itself” mean?”
“Don’t worry, honey, that’s just something bad people say, he doesn’t mean it.”
*wraps self tightly in blanket* “I want to stay in school forever, mommy.”
*hugs kid* “I know, baby. I know.”
Oh no :-[ I hope they settle down on your stomach instead. Tigger’s a very gentle kitty really, he just doesn’t seem to be totally aware of a) what a giant bruiser he is and b) how squishy humans can be.
Hi Discordia! Haven’t seen you in a long time. Hope you’re doing well!
Just another dudebro trying to tell other people (including other animals now!) how they feel, because he can’t possibly think of any other reason why no one would love his charming self. So goes the ever blameless philosophy of the misogynist.
Same ol’ same ol’.
I love it how the Hatosphere accuses women of being solipsistic and then turns around and does it themselves. See, in his experience, women only stick around for the couple of minutes he’s offering to buy them drinks and then they disappear!
@Athywren said
The great primatologist Frans de Waal calls the insistence on the uniqueness of our species and the refusal to admit that non-human animals experience emotions and motivations “anthropodenial.”
http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/OurInnerApe/pdfs/anthropodenial.html
I strongly recommend reading de Waal’s books; he’s been working on this stuff for 30 or 40 years. My favorites are “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Human and Other Animals” and “The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist.” “The Age of Empathy” is also good; it’s a shorter book with less scientific detail that provides a good brief overview of his work.
katz, if you’re wondering if Descartes is that bad, he is. He was a vivisector.
TW: this is horrific.
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/01/scientists-can-be-cruel.html
As for dismissing someone’s ideas because of one – I don’t give a flying fuck what his other ideas were, knowing this.
Lady Mondegreen – anthropodenial, love it!
Oh dear, I checked out his page and he’s even stupider than I thought–
Major reading comprehension fail there, sugar balls. Erm, no, she didn’t say prostitution is illogical; she clearly said punishing the sex workers and not the johns is illogical.
(Of course, leaving aside the lack of evidence for his assfact that married men visit prostitutes because their wives withhold sex–it’s a human right to be able to “withhold sex,” from husbands or from anyone else. Implying that the right to withhold sex is “immoral” is pretty damn creepy, akin to arguing a moral right to rape. But leaving that aside, the glaring misreading of the DA’s quite clear and easily-comprehended statement is idiocy enough all by itself.)