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.
all that wharrgarbl you posted about how men and women (supposedly) behave in love and relationships was ripped from sitcoms and movies, NOT from reality.
No it wasn’t. It was taken from observation, experience, listening and reading. Others agree with this point. Read the last two sentences of the paragraph linked:
http://madamenoire.com/26329/real-talk-9-things-you-should-know-about-men-marriage/3/
I’d say it is the writer of that tripe that isn’t capable of love. So sad that it hasn’t occurred to this lonely loser that both women and man’s best friend just can’t find anything lovable about him. It’s easy enough to see why, too. He’s decided that he isn’t making enough money, but there isn’t any amount of money that could make up for his deplorable personality and lack of intelligence. I think the saying, “I wouldn’t touch his dick if it was diamonds” applies here.
I wonder how he reconciles his beliefs with the reality that in many homes women are the main or only bread winners? How does he explain lesbians? How does he explain familial love from sisters, mothers and daughters? How does he explain life long friendships? I assume he just pretends those don’t exist.
As for dogs and love, I disagree there too. They mourn. Their joy at being reunited with a loved one is so sweet to see. If I am away for too long one of my dogs will stop eating. Some dogs will refuse food when they are left in shelters and actively try to find the families that abandoned them there if they get loose. Even tiny dogs have been known to attack intruders to protect their families. That’s selflessness. That’s love.
Correction to alpha? MISANDRY!
Aren’t claims of human emotional primacy just attempts to put Descartes before the horse?
Also, Good has a history here, of dropping links that are either from ridiculous sources, or that don’t support his assertions — or often both!
And you have a history of telling this lie. And yes, most of you act like 12 year olds.
I once saw a shirt in T-Shirt Hell that I think sums up every post like this perfectly:
“Women are like parking spaces. They’re whores and liars”.
I’d kinda like to see this become a tag :3
@Good
At least use good sources, Cosmo is a general press publication without peer review and with years of criticism leveled against it for being sexist towards men and women. -5 points for bad citation choice.
…You win the thread.
Oh and another personal tale of loving critters:
I used to foster dogs. My eldest was little and we had two cats. The new dogs could go where they liked, so long as they never stepped a paw in my daughter’s room. It didn’t matter the size of the dog, the cats would come growling and bottle-brushy at them like razor taloned monsters if they did. They protected each other with the same fervor. Every night one of them curled up with my daughter to sleep. When she spent the night elsewhere, he’d roam the house crying at bedtime.
It’s a lie! I don’t drop random links, as this daily mail article clearly proves!
@Katz: Good point (your response to me further up the thread).
But whatever, I’ve read Descartes, can dislike his arguments all I want to. 😀
Peculiar said…
So you admit that was a bullshit argument.
If you are referencing your own argument, yes.
{has switched to Comic Sans as default typeface]
Everything looks kinda weird.
David, I propose another level of moderation; to switch somebody posts to to Comic Sans to give them the correct gravitas. (Like my old one’s)
Still pondering to order to print the program to my funeral in Comic Sans, it will at least piss off some people (who gets the last laugh??)
katz, you’re coming across as really patronising here and I’d like you to knock it off. I haven’t read Descartes’ work in general, no. I’ve read enough about him and enough quotations on the subject in question to know what I’m talking about. I’ve read enough about what he did to animals – how he tortured them – to know what I’m talking about.
I’m really side-eyeing this whole dismissive “but keep an open mind about the rest of his stuff!” line you’re taking, when you know what we’re talking about. Like Dvarg said, there are some things that are a bright line for saying “Fuck this person”. Descartes and his followers not only tortured animals, they mocked those who pitied them. How much brighter a line does one need?
Katz, if the discussion was about the craze for cold-pressed juice, the article would be relevant. All articles I present relate to the topic. You just don’t like how said articles counter your world view.
@kitteserf and @Lady Mondegreen:
Speaking of English literature, this Rex guy is a bit like the rather buffoonish Duke Orsino, but without the gift for poetry:
Good, anyone can see for themselves that I am not lying about your history. Don’t you think it’s a little bit immature to make claims you can’t back up?
Akk. Just heard back from my gf in LA about the kitty adoptions. No go, alas. She refers anyone looking for a cat to the head tech at the vet clinic she works at, and they’ve 20 cats awaiting homes. Damn. I’m sorry we couldn’t help. 🙁
Dana: Robin Simon doesn’t work for Cosmo. Isn’t it a bit stupid to ignore a study and criticize the publication that cites the study? Some of you are immature.
Thanks for that bit of smarmy wisdom.
But the issue is, in part, that Cosmo is terrible at reporting science. Even is Robin Simon were top notch at researching the question, and had flawless methods, significant sample size, and meticulous data, what Cosmo says about it would be suspect.
However, if you would like some analysis of the paper, we see Simon admits to some problems, Despite some data limitations — which future research should strive to overcome… (Simon and Nath, Gender and Emotion in the U.S.: Do Men and Women Differ in Self-Reports of Feelings and Expressive Behavior: 2004, p. 40)
Moreover, the conclusions that disclaimer relate to are ambgiuous (which may be part of the reason more data is needed).
They were also using a modelling tool which is problematic:
Ah… blockquote monster
Dana: Robin Simon doesn’t work for Cosmo. Isn’t it a bit stupid to ignore a study and criticize the publication that cites the study? Some of you are immature.
Thanks for that bit of smarmy wisdom.
But the issue is, in part, that Cosmo is terrible at reporting science. Even is Robin Simon were top notch at researching the question, and had flawless methods, significant sample size, and meticulous data, what Cosmo says about it would be suspect.
However, if you would like some analysis of the paper, we see Simon admits to some problems, Despite some data limitations — which future research should strive to overcome… (Simon and Nath, Gender and Emotion in the U.S.: Do Men and Women Differ in Self-Reports of Feelings and Expressive Behavior: 2004, p. 40)
Moreover, the conclusions that disclaimer relate to are ambgious (which may be part of the reason more data is needed).
They were also using a modelling tool which is problematic:
So it was unclear, and based on self-reports. It incorporated a model based on somewhat out of date living/social arrangements.
To their credit this was not a study of college students, but rather a random sample. I would say there is a methodology issue unresolved, which is that we don’t know how many of the respondents of the overall survey refrained from answering the emotions module of the 1996 survey set used to obtain this data.
It’s also interesting, on two fronts, that Good used this piece from Cosmo: 1: it’s going on four years ago it was written (since Cosmo has about a 6 month publication schedule), and 2: Cosmo was writing about a paper almost 6 years older than that, based on data almost 15 years old.
One wonders if there is any of future research which overcame the limitations which made it impossible for Simon, and Nath, to be more conclusive.
In general, though, I think people who don’t want to believe that animals have emotions tend to argue their case by building in propositional thought in their definition of “emotion”, so that it becomes more or less trivially true that only humans (or at least very, very few species) have emotions. Love, for instance. In my experience, someone who wants to argue that dogs, cats and so on can’t love will often say things like “but if you love someone you actually think about what it’s like to be that person and what would make that person happy, and you think about what that person is doing when zie isn’t near, and clearly animals can’t do that”. Stuff like that. And sure, if that’s what you mean by love, no, dogs and cats can’t love, because AFAWK they don’t have that level of propositional and representational thought. BUUUUT I don’t think that’s really what we ordinarily mean by “love”. We mean something simpler and more primitive, which there’s no reason to suppose is unique to us.
An alternative strategy I sometimes see is to give an evolutionary explanation of loving behaviour in animals, and then go “so it isn’t really love, you see, it’s just a behaviour that historically maximized the spreading of their genes”, as if “giving an explanation of where something comes from”=”proving that it doesn’t exist”. (This might also move on to “so really, love is an illusion, humans can’t feel love either”, but it still hinges on the ridiculous mistake of thinking a causal explanation of a phenomenon somehow makes said phenomenon non-existent.)
Sorry. I’ll drop it.
j-bird – LOL! He is indeed. Never could stand Orsino, whiny stalker creep that he is.
Have you had your Welcome Package? I don’t think I’ve seen your name before.
http://artistryforfeminismandkittens.wordpress.com/the-official-man-boobz-complimentary-welcome-package/
katz – thanks! 🙂
Good, give it up, you got nothing. You have yet to prove that women are incapable of love.
Dana, no, see, Cosmo and Marie Claire are not reputable sources. I don’t care who’s writing the article. Fashion magazines are not peer-reviewed journals. Before accusing others of being immature, maybe you should educate yourself about how science works.