>
Scott Adams: Sometimes dumber than Dilbert’s boss. |
So Scott Adams — the Dilbert guy — has a blog. About a week and a half ago he made the mistake of asking his readers to give him a topic to write about. Well, some MRAs heard about this, and, being MRAs, decided that they would flood his site with comments urging him to write about Men’s Rights. And so he did.
What they got from him wasn’t quite what they hoped. Really, though, it wasn’t what anyone would have hoped. So much so that Adams decided to take his post down, saying that it had gotten “a bit too much attention from outside my normal reading circle.”
Luckily, through the voodoo of Google, we can still see the original post. Adams started out, depressingly enough, by more-or-less agreeing with MRAs on a wide assortment of their pet issues big and small — from men paying more for car insurance to the alleged anti-male bias of the legal system. Much of what he wrote made as little sense as many real MRA rants; even his little jokey asides fell completely flat.
We take for granted that men should hold doors for women, and women should be served first in restaurants. Can you even imagine that situation in reverse?
Generally speaking, society discourages male behavior whereas female behavior is celebrated. Exceptions are the fields of sports, humor, and war. Men are allowed to do what they want in those areas.
Add to our list of inequities the fact that women have overtaken men in college attendance. If the situation were reversed it would be considered a national emergency.
After more or less agreeing that men are getting a raw deal, Adams dismissed the complaints of women upset that women earn less than men; to Adams, this is because they are naturally timid souls who don’t know how to ask for raises.
So far, so not-so-good. But then Adams pulled the old switcheroo on his MRA readers, who up until this point were presumably giddy with excitement.
Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights:
Get over it, you bunch of pussies.
Uh oh! Shaming tactic! MRAs love directing vagina-based insults at others — mangina anyone? — but they hate hate hate it when anyone directs a vagina-based insult at them. To be fair, calling someone a pussy is not much of an argument.
But here’s where Adams pulled a sort of double switcheroo. After insulting Men’s Rights activists, he did them one better with a bizarre, brazen misogynistic argument that seemed to have been cribbed from some of the more idiotic comments on the various MGTOW message boards. It turned out that the reason Adams thinks men should “get over it” is that … well, read it for yourself.
The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
What what what?? This is the sort of shit you expect from some low-grade misogynist loser on The Spearhead. But no, this is Scott Adams, internationally famous cartoonist and bestselling author. Instead of trying to explain just what the fuck he means by all this, Adams continued on with a very strange, and strangely sexual, chess metaphor:
How many times do we men suppress our natural instincts for sex and aggression just to get something better in the long run? It’s called a strategy. Sometimes you sacrifice a pawn to nail the queen. If you’re still crying about your pawn when you’re having your way with the queen, there’s something wrong with you and it isn’t men’s rights.
Apparently In Scott Adams’ world, chess players don’t get all their kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
After a few more paragraphs that, frankly, don’t make any more sense than what I’ve quoted so far, Adams seemed to realize that maybe he shouldn’t have really suggested that women were a bunch of retarded children. But instead of going back and removing that from his post, he dug himself further in with a weird and completely unconvincing denial:
I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he’s smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people.
As far as I can figure out his weird and convoluted argument, it is this: The world really is unfair to men. But you’ll never win this argument with a women — you know how they are. So keep quiet and maybe … you’ll get to fuck the queen?
No wonder he deleted the post.
Completely off-topic observation: Every time I hear the name Dilbert, the song Dilbar Dil Se Pyare, from the 1971 Bollywood hit Caravan, gets stuck in my head. So let’s see if I can get it stuck in your head:
—
If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the “Share This” or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.
*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
“You’ll never win” is not what he said at the end. He basically did exactly what he prescribed and went down the path of less resistance, all the while still being clear about it between the lines. That’s his obvious pawn sacrifice. Presumably, he’s going after the proverbial queen in some other venue.
…
Did this thread seriously get necroed after THREE AND A HALF YEARS?
On the bright side, it’s a nice chance to scroll up and read some truly top-notch ‘splaining. I particularly like the one about door-holding being like driving on the correct side of the street.
It’s always fun when a thread gets necro’d that’s so old that there’s no avatars.
I love holding the door for men. They’re always nice about it. And since I started about 10 years ago, a lot less of them look confused, so maybe more women are doing that!
(Of course I do hold the door open for other women as well. Why not!)
I hold the door open for everyone. That’s what I was taught, and that’s what I always did and still do, and I never expect anyone to hold a door open for me, but it’s nice when it happens.
It’s just common curtesy.