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>Guys, you’re not helping: The Dear Woman video

The video above, which has been making the rounds of the manosphere, is one of the creepiest and most off-putting things I’ve seen since watching Dogtooth a couple of weeks ago. Actually, I take that back: Dogtooth was much less creepy and off-putting. I was so repelled by what I saw in this video that it literally took me several tries to get through the whole thing. And no, it’s not some weird misogynistic rant by the likes of Bernard Chapin. Oh, no no no. The misogynists of the world are as repelled by the video as I am, though for radically different reasons. Titled “Dear Woman,” the video was actually put together by a couple of self-described “conscious men” who think they’re doing a great favor to the women of the world.

To which I can only say: Guys, stop it, you’re not helping.

If you can stomach it, the video is worth watching in its entirety. If not, here’s what you’re missing: The video is the work of a couple of New Age gurus — Arjuna Ardagh and Gay Hendricks, Ph.D – who, with the help of a little gaggle of guys, have written a little manifesto “apologizing” to the women of the world for all the bad shit done by men to women over the centuries. Or, as they put it:

I feel deep love, great respect and a growing sense of worship for the gifts of the feminine. I also feel deep sorrow about the destructive actions of the unconscious masculine in the past and present. I want to apologize to you and make amends for those actions, in order to bring forth a new era of co-creation with you.

The first step in “making amends,” evidently, was to gather together a group of men – some of whom seem to have been roped into it in the middle of a garden party — and to somehow convince them to read out loud the entire text of this manifesto. (The full text is here, but it’s much creepier when it’s read out loud.)

There is something about this manifesto, and the men reading it, that is so “off” that it may well make your skin crawl, and make you wonder how many of the men in the video have dead bodies secreted away in the crawl spaces under their homes. A female friend I showed the video to could only make it through the first couple of minutes before switching it off in horror; one commenter on Metafilter reported that it “made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and not in a good way. Eeew.”

The creepyist, skin-crawliest part of the video has to be the section in which the assembled men talk about women’s bodies:

I honor the beauty and integrity of your body. When we worship each other through our bodies with awareness and devotion, there are no boundaries to the love that we can generate. I feel sorrow that men have used your beauty as a form of commerce in prostitution and pornography. In the grip of lust we have often lacked the skills to ask gracefully for intimacy or to take ‘No’ for an answer. I take a stand against any form of enforced or soulless commercialization of woman’s beauty, and I respect that your body belongs to you.

I honor your capacity to listen to your body and its needs for food, rest and playtime.

I feel confident that I speak for many when I say “ewww.” Somehow I’m reminded of Saturday Night Live’s hot-tub-loving “lovers.”

It’s worth pointing out that the written manifesto refers to men and women “nurture[ing]” one another’s body; apparently no one noticed that the dude reading this passage in the video had turned nurturing into “worship.”

As one commenter on Metafilter put it:

“We worship women” sounds like something Buffalo Bill would have said if he had a PR agent. My guess is that they’re sickos who seem really earnest at first but it turns out that they’re actually trying to collect used tampons for onanistic purposes or something.

So what is it, aside from all this worshiping, that makes the video so creepy? Part of the problem is that these “conscious men” are, in their own way, as patronizing and sexist as any manosphere dudes “mansplaining” about how all women only want to fuck alpha guys. Women, in their view, are inherently peaceful earth-mother types. “I commit now to … honoring the spirituality of the divine feminine,” the guys tell us. “I honor your deep connection to the earth.” 

The manifesto is overflowing with this kind of shit. No matter how “New Age” these guys think they are, these are some truly ancient, and quite thoroughly retrograde, notions.
But that’s just what makes them wrong and misguided. What is it that causes viewers to pick up that whole serial-killer vibe?
I think the answer to this can be found in a book called The Gif tof Fear by security expert Gavin de Becker. The book attempts to explain why our intuitions about creepy people are so often correct. There’s a good reason you feel uneasy around certain people; that’s your unconscious picking up on real, if hard to pin down, signals of danger.
De Becker also lays out some of the techniques predators use in an attempt to allay the suspicions of those they’re trying to victimize. One of the sneakiest? The unsolicited promise, which often means the very opposite of what is said. When someone tells you, out of the blue, that they “aren’t going to hurt you,” it’s often a very good sign that that’s exactly what they’re going to do. When someone feels the need to tell you, apropos of nothing, that he “honor[s] the beauty and integrity of your body” and “respect[s] that your body belongs to you,” you may well want to run screaming. 
Even more than the unsolicited promises, I think it’s the unsolicited apologies in the Dear Woman video – so similar in intent to unsolicited promises — are a large part of what is setting off alarm bells in so many viewers. When a young guy in the video takes personal responsibility “for dragging you into … wars, and for the rape, murder, broken hearts and damaged families that resulted from them,” that’s just plain … weird, given that (unless he’s some young despot I’ve never heard of) he’s not actually responsible for any of this.
The “unsolicited promise” is similar to what de Becker calls “loan sharking” – offering unsolicited “help” in order to make victims feel obligated in some way to their unwanted helpers. In the manifesto/video, this “help” is abstract, but the strategy seems to be the same:
From this day, moving forward, I vow to treat your heart as the sacred temple it is, and I commit to honoring the feminine in you and me and in my relationship to all life.
 
Uh, who the fuck asked you to treat anyone’s heart as a “sacred temple?”
The manifesto/video is also filled with examples of “forced teaming,” another strategy favored by predators who want to convince their victims that they are in fact working together to do the very same thing:
I know that by leaving the past behind and joining hands in the present, we can create a synergy of our strengths. Together, there is nothing we cannot do.
(For a fuller explanation of some of de Becker’s ideas, take a look at this post on saying “no” on Captain Awkward’s excellent blog, which I’ve drawn on heavily here.)
But there’s something else about the video that adds to the sense that something is not right here: no matter how earnest all the men in the video are trying to sound, none of them (except perhaps the two ringleaders) seem to really believe the ridiculous things they’re saying. Instead, they seem to be, with varying degrees of insincerity, mouthing a series of essentially meaningless New Age platitudes – in short, simply saying what they think women want to hear.
No one is buying this bullshit, guys. Give it up.

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.

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triplanetary
13 years ago

>Time to break out the tinfoil hats!I know, it's so ludicrous to claim that a person's job prospects might be limited because of a group they belong to…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_United_StatesOh, right.

triplanetary
13 years ago

>Or would it be… Ludacris?

DarkSideCat
13 years ago

>@Discount, you seriously think that women in warzones and conflicts are spared terrible violence? STFU and GTFO.

triplanetary
13 years ago

>@Discount, you seriously think that women in warzones and conflicts are spared terrible violence? STFU and GTFO. In MRAs' imagination, wars seem to be fought in closed-off arenas where they never ever affect civilians.

Rachel Swirsky
13 years ago

>Am I the only one who knows plenty of creepy, attractive men? And plenty of non-creepy, non-attractive men?Somehow I doubt it.

Avicenna
13 years ago

>Yeah but we call each other dickheads too. And the word cunt actually has different perspectives in different societies. In the UK it's often used a lot more than it is in the US.You daft cunt is something you would tell a friend who just did something stupid. It's like how british people tend to not use "mother fucker" as an insult as much. These guys are "rather weird". Divinity? The Feminine Energy? Dude! Women just need to be treated as equals to us. I am half tempted to insult them but I think they mean well. Wrong out inexperience rather than malice.

Rachel Swirsky
13 years ago

>The creepiest guys I can think of that I've known were anywhere from decent looking to really good-looking. They just also didn't know what the word "consent" meant.

Avicenna
13 years ago

>I take it back, I watched the whole video. It's not just the things they are saying are creepy, its the way they stare at you.Do you remember all those books on "how to hypnotise women". It's like they read something like that.

glpiggy.net
13 years ago

>David,As to your "women don't want to get yelled at onstage argument", I also did a post about how female audience members are generally the hecklers. Bill Hicks has a classic confrontation with a female heckler. But male comedians seem pretty good at handling these hecklers; if women stay away from the profession because they can't handle being heckled and can't respond in a funny way to the heckling, then doesn't that speak to their overall "funniness"? The thing that makes men funnier than women is that we are more competitive. We want to show off. We want attention for our wit. Being the more aggressive sex, men have had an interest, through history, to defuse situations that could have otherwise turned violent. Humor is part of that, and it has become ingrained in our psychology.

triplanetary
13 years ago

>The thing that makes men funnier than women is that we are more competitive. We want to show off. We want attention for our wit. Being the more aggressive sex, men have had an interest, through history, to defuse situations that could have otherwise turned violent. Humor is part of that, and it has become ingrained in our psychology. Oh, awesome, more gender essentialist evo psych bullshit.nb4 Chuck or one of the other MRAs says I'm "ignoring basic biological realities," even though the above claims didn't come from a biologist so much as Chuck's ass.

Sartorial Nerd
13 years ago

>I got 56 seconds into it before I got too creeped out to continue. My sense of self-preservation was screaming at me to run away before the creepy guy with his creepy creepiness and his creepy eyes crawled through my computer screen to kill me softly with the strength of his "worship."

David Futrelle
13 years ago

>Chuck, I really don't think that willingness to put up with harassment is correlated with the robustness of someone's sense of humor. And I'm sorry, there's no question that female comedians put up with worse shit than male comedians. It's still very much a boy's club.

The Jerk Store
13 years ago

>"And if you disagree with me that women are just as funny as men, you'll have to cite evidence to support your case."and then:"The thing that makes men funnier than women is that we [blah blah blah utterly evidence-free pop evolutionary psychology tl;dr]"Uh huh.

Discount
13 years ago

>"I thought your thing on women not being funny was misogynistic."Hate to break it to you David but men are the primary purveyors of comedy, romance, poetry, song, magic etc. Call it plumage of whatever the f**k you want but these things are overwhelmingly male. In fact I'd venture to say that rather than love, women dream of being loved…two drastically different things. Can you point out a single song a woman wrote that elevates and romanticizes the masculine???…how about a poem..??? It's not because of some sort of oppressive patriarchy either. Women don't do anything because they don't have to. Their inherent value makes their ego eclipse that of men's by many magnitudes. It also leads to a gynocentric narcissism that is intolerable at times. How's that brutal truth for a misogynistic rant aye….

Discount
13 years ago

>Patriarchy simply means that men are part of the family and have the God given natural right to fatherhood which they do not…so give up your blatant lies. Feminism is about the creation of matriarchy.http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_IU3iQnIt6Nc/TQndY7MWVKI/AAAAAAAAAfY/SpRFZAl1C88/s1600/ScreenShot028.jpgWomen have their own families. Men have no obligation to women, women's children or women's families. Men have no civic or social duties to look out for anyone but ourselves. Women are now a separate socio-political and socio-economic class that men are in competition with. Common felicity between genders was killed off by women some 45 years ago you misandrist bigots. Men are waking the fu*k up….

francoistremblay
13 years ago

>On one level, I have to sympathize with this video. I am not a Wiccan, but I admire Wiccan ideas and their stance against sexism and racism resonates with my own social values.On the other hand, as people pointed out, this video is majorly, grossly sexist. It seems to be extremely difficult for people to accept each other as they are. I wonder why that is?

The Jerk Store
13 years ago

>Ha ha, how do you even argue with the kind of sad goofery wafting off people like Discount? These people are so wrong they're not even wrong; there's literally nothing to even get a handle on in terms of having an argument. It's like yelling at a cloud.Also, if you consistently find yourself needing to invoke "God given rights" and "deals" and legality and appeals to "natural law" in your relationships with others, women OR men, I'd say you have bigger personal problems than feminism.

triplanetary
13 years ago

>How's that brutal truth for a misogynistic rant aye…. Pretty toothless tbqh

Discount
13 years ago

>"But when women call men "dickheads" it's a social norm." Or call men pigs, dogs, horses asses, jack ass donkeys and throw men into garbage cans. Women have to understand that this means war. This is not my subjective interpretation either. Men are waking up to what women have done and are fighting back. We will win and if you insist on taking the entire society and common felicity between men and women down with it so be it. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IU3iQnIt6Nc/Sl-A3_KNn6I/AAAAAAAAALc/c3G33qdYiOE/s1600-h/ScreenShot008.jpghttp://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IU3iQnIt6Nc/Sl-TVobivrI/AAAAAAAAALk/nGJFwEKb3bg/s1600-h/ScreenShot010.jpghttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/_IU3iQnIt6Nc/Sl-UGWieQ0I/AAAAAAAAALs/2CjtwoZRNyQ/s1600-h/ScreenShot011.jpghttp://2.bp.blogspot.com/_IU3iQnIt6Nc/Sl-VDVXjzBI/AAAAAAAAAL0/p1IYJf-iWCc/s1600-h/ScreenShot012.jpg

Discount
13 years ago

>It may not take the form of an organized gender class offensive as women have done but men in our personal lives will simply MGTOW…we are simply walking away. Women want men pushed to the fringes of society and the family and you will get the men and society you are creating.

Discount
13 years ago

>"@Discount, you seriously think that women in warzones and conflicts are spared terrible violence? STFU and GTFO." Yes…there is not question. Now…shave your heads, sign up for the draft and get your ass to the front line to secure your own territory and resources like men have had to do for you since the beginning of time. I don't blame you for using your vaginas as currency and prostitution..even female fiddler crabs do it. Explains the Raw Wage Gap and why women have not lifted a finger and then claim discrimination. Fiddler crabs exchange sex for survivalhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33624850/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Discount
13 years ago

>"Also, if you consistently find yourself needing to invoke "God given rights" and "deals" and legality and appeals to "natural law" in your relationships with others, women OR men, I'd say you have bigger personal problems than feminism." Men have the God given natural right to be a part of their childrens lives. The goal of feminism was to create marriage 2.0 laws to absolve women of any liability, responsibility, commitment or reciprocal obligation to men and the sanctity of marriage. Feminists also seek to remove men's rights to our own bodies and the fruits of our labor and transfer such things to women by force. Again, men know damn well what women's "liberation" is all about.

Discount
13 years ago

>Again, men owe women, women's children and women's families nothing.

David Futrelle
13 years ago

>I'm just trying to keep up here. So fiddler crabs explain the wage gap?

Discount
13 years ago

>Deny the purpose of the gynocentric ideology of "women's liberation" all you want. Men don't have to win by restoring our collective relationship and common felicity with women. We will win by everyone losing both men, women, children, family, marriage and society. You will increasingly see it manifest. In all elements of societal dysfunction and even violence. About 90% of ALL prison inmates come from fatherless families. Boys without fathers do poorly in education, have higher rates of depression and higher rates of violent crime. Women are getting the men they seek to create by removing men from the family and pushing men to margins of society, the family and the lives of our children.