Recently, in the comments to my Secret Life as a Group of Women post, our old friend evilwhitemaleempire offered this intriguing theory as to why I started this blog:
Your just a runt.
You put up that picture of Charles Altas so folks will think your not.
Your entire adult life has been about coping with the aggressive sexual displays of bigger, taller, more attractive men by throwing anti-male grenades at them. That’s why your a feminist. … you support the false rape/harassment industry because it acts to jail all those better men you can’t compete with.
You and your mangina ilk are what you have always been since high school. Nerds who think they can win the cheerleader if they can get the football captain jailed as a rapist.
I can’t fault his logic here, though evil here is making several incorrect assumptions that call into question his conclusion. One, I don’t actually support sending innocent men to jail on false rape charges, even if they were the captain of the football team in high school. Two, even in high school, I was never interested in the cheerleader type; as a nerdy alternative-music-loving slacker guy, I was much more interested in the girls who listened to The Jam rather than Journey. Also, the high school I went to was basically a high school for nerds; even the cheerleaders were a little nerdy. We didn’t have a football team; our basketball team was legendary for the length of its losing streak, while our chess team, meanwhile, racked up victory after victory.
But enough about my high school. The key point here is that manosphere dudes have somehow managed to convince themselves, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that sexual attraction is a very simple and straightforward thing: men want cheerleaders and Hooters waitresses; women want jocks and thugs. These are iron-clad rules, and apply to everyone, including the nerdiest of nerds and the feministest of feminists. (By everyone, of course, I mean cis heteros; manosphere dudes have no real theories about lgbt sexuality, and tend to forget it exists.)
So evil assumes that I (and presumably the rest of the feminist guys out there) have adopted feminism as a way to get into the pants of the cheerleaders who wouldn’t date us in high school. On the flip side, manosphere dudes often assume, bizarrely, that feminist women are all secretly obsessed with boning thuggish jocks.
In reality, of course, people tend to be interested in and attracted to people basically like them: gym rats go for gym rats, nerds for nerds, goths for goths, lawyers for lawyers, and so on, and so on, and scooby dooby doo.
To illustrate this point, I’d like to present some relevant anthropological data, in the form of video footage of the “aggressive sexual display” of one “alpha male” of a certain subspecies of homo sapiens. You will notes that this mating dance has attracted the attention of a female of the same type — and not a feminist. Unfortunately, as far as well can tell from the video itself, the dance did not result in successful copulation. In the end, our subject finds himself competing against the aggressive display of another male of the same type.
Oh, I think you can fault his logic. There isn’t any.
It’s fascinating from a psychological POV: the animosity and admiration for big,tall,attractive men who make aggressive sexual displays directed at smaller,shorter,less attractive men.
The MRA obsession with footballers and cheerleaders is making me fear that “Glee” is for real. Tell me it isn’t so, America.
The links are working now.
Two, even in high school, I was never interested in the cheerleader type; as a nerdy alternative-music-loving slacker guy, I was much more interested in the girls who listened to The Jam rather than Journey.
Wait wait wait.
Are you seriously saying there was a time when Journey was… cool?
That might be your most outrageous assertion yet.
I just lost all interest in sex for the next 100 years. My future husband blames EWME.
I’m so glad you’re back up and running. I used those links you had on the left side of your page frequently. Will you be maintaining those link lists here? I’m completely unfamiliar with this format.
Oh, never mind, David. I realized that I was on Mobile view. I can see you have them here. Still love your blog and check it daily!
I’ve noticed that EWME lends itself to the pronunciation “Ewwww, me.” I think this may have unconsciously influenced EWME’s choice of a pseudonym.
You take that back Aydan! Journey is really cool!
I never really understood the whole “I am a jock/nerd/preppie” thing the USA seems to have. Do people really think that brains and physical ability are mutually exclusive? Just because you play D&D doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go out and kick a football around.
And no… I never had any cheerleaders. I feel like I missed out.
It’s not a matter of ability so much as self-identifying with a particular subculture. Self-identifying as a nerd doesn’t mean you aren’t athletic, it just means that you tend to socialize with other self-identifying nerds, as opposed to the self-identifying jocks.
So, wait, why would Dave want to date a cheerleader who just had her former boyfriend (presumably the quarterback) put in jail after falsely accusing him of rape?
I think EWME saw Revenge of the Nerds and decided that it was a cautionary tale about the dangers of refusing to defer to one’s social betters.
The jock/nerd/cheerleader stereotypes never really fit my school, either. There were “popular” kids, but the rest of us weren’t dying to be them or be friends with them–we didn’t even dislike them particularly. We just had our own friends that we liked better.
No one cared about cheer (except the kids in cheer). And the real star kids weren’t athletes: they were the concert choir. Nor was there a stigma attached to pretty much any activity: sports, drama, band, and choir were all big things.
(This is cboye, BTW, now restored to my preferred handle and gravatar. I realize this move is immensely more convenient for me than for Blogger users, though.)
We had the house system I suppose…
What? I went to a Harry Potteresque school! (I was from the house with the green house colours making us slytherin… Red/Yellow/Blue/Green are the traditional house colours in most schools that have them. But in the modern era competition is “not encouraged” so the system is dying out.)
I think the only stigma we had was the kid who was scared of needles and turned out to be scared of spiders and earthworms. We even tolerated the kid who fainted during a dissection because he fainted in a manly way (No bending of the knees. It’s a Terry Pratchett joke).
IMHO any damn fool can throw a rugby ball (and by extension do any sport) but real talent is rarely rewarded in high school society. No one was interested in my violin skills in school. Uni changed that!
Glad to see you’re spending your time fighting your fellow feminists, Futrelle.
I have the same shoes as the dancing bandana guido…
And a very similar build…
I find the whole jocks/nerds dichotomy rather strange to begin with. A lot of times, people aren’t 100% that particular identity, nor do they always keep the same identity. The only place where it really fits is high school; identities there tend to be more black and white due to the developing brains of teenagers.
I’ve known “nerds” that like to play football and “jocks” that love science fiction. When a person becomes an adult, usually they expand their experiences. I just find it odd that someone would keep thinking that everything is like high school, and think that everyone else thinks the same way.
Hey, we were going over this exact topic in Sociology of Gender last week!
Part of the common definition of masculinity is “macho”: toughness, violence, risktaking, willingness to get in fights. EWME is doing a classic patriarchal move by insulting David’s gender performance instead of his arguments. This is despite the fact that “whether David is manly” is completely unrelated to “whether David is a good person” or even “whether David is right.”
I thought the jocks vs. nerds thing was just on TV or in movies. My high school never had that division. Our football team captain was also in the drama club and liked to do musicals. The three captains of the cheer-leading squad were all in National Honors Society.
Are there really schools where the TV stereotypes come to life? Because that would explain a LOT about MRAs…if I grew up in a TV-high school I’d probably be a twisted, bitter husk of a human being too.
Evil’s comment made no sense. Your just a runt what? Have I been spending too much time around English majors, that I can no longer communicate with the internet masses?
The strangest part of this whole assertion (and there are many strange parts, such as the implication that if you’re a scrawny nerd, then the misogynist things you quote from MRA sites… aren’t real quotes any more? ) is the idea that the mythical false rape accusation industry selectively targets stronger and more attractive men.
If I were going to false-rape-accuse a guy (and I’m really, REALLY not inclined to, because that’s horrible and makes no sense and would gain me nothing and stands an excellent chance of ruining my life), I’d go for a weak, meek one with few friends. That seems like a much easier target. Everyone’s already biased against wimpy nerds and they don’t fight back much. False-rape-accusing a popular, strong, attractive guy seems much more difficult.
So really, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot, Futrelle, when you advocate for… um, for rape to be treated like a violent crime that deserves investigation upon accusation and carries a punishment upon conviction.
Yeah, the thing about the jocks I knew: I might have thought they were attractive, but I sure didn’t want a relationship with them. My ‘type’ is creative, intellectual, and nerdy, because that’s how I like to see myself. Oh, and wearing a fedora. Fedoras are hot.
Has anyone’s school anywhere matched the stereotype?
Mine not only had a really bad football team, they tended to have scars from being shot.
You think if women were running a grand conspiracy to use false rape accusations to remove men from the dating pool, they would not target the attractive ones…
Moving on to high schools, my high school did bullying, though I was not a target. It was a very, very small school (think less than 30 graduates a year-and it was the public school) and I hit puberty early and had anger problems as an adolescent. So, I had a reputation pretty set in by the time I was in my late teens and people did not touch me.
Sports was considered a marker of social status for boys, and academics was seen as girly. We did not have football (American football, for the rest of you, we had soccer), because the equipment is too expensive. Cheerleaders were not popular as they tended to be the leftovers from the girls who could not make the field hockey or basketball team and were not bright or good at art. Generally, pretty or weak boys who were genuinely nice tended to be sheltered by the more academic groups of girls (the girls who took art, the yearbook club, the honor society-yes, that last was virutally all girls). One particular basketball player picked on the boy who was the favorite of all of the girls and ended up so unpopular with the girls that he had to go out of county to find a date for prom. The boys who got hit hardest by bullying were generally those who were not good at sports and were not sweet to girls. Oh, and the stoners/weed dealers tended to defend their own buddies too. The stoners and sweet boys who were bad at sports tended to date the academic girls, and the sports boys mostly dated the girls who did sports (one of the stoners infamously joined art class to get more girls and ended up going to art school on full scholarship despite being a C student). For girls, bullying tended to be more verbal abuse and also tended to rest on one’s being unpopular amoung the girls.
Hey, maybe the guidette is a closet feminist! With incredibly dancing skillz! O_o
Anyways, hilarious post.
Congrats (?) on your move, David. It’ll take some getting used to… might you be changing the color of the page and tinkering and stuff? The white is kinda harsh… there’s my input. Love your blog, read it almost daily. I Facebook the shit out of the really heinous posts. Keep being you, Charles Atlas! 😉 xoxo
I went to one of those schools that pretty much matched the stereotype. Then again, it was in a monied Chicago suburb, and we were all still kind of basking in a John Hughesian afterglow. Did art mirror life or did life mirror art? Dunno.
Anyway, after having a long chat with my boyfriend last night about the various ways that most commenters on MRA/MGTOW sites try to dehumanize and other women, and basically prove that women are all like each other and in no way like or even understandable to men (the STD thing, the obsession with thugboys and women’s imaginary obsession with such, and the “hamster” trope), I may have to eat my words. Somewhat, anyway. It appears that when they’re not trying to make women seem like some completely alien species, MRA/MGTOW enthusiasts are busily trying to fit everyone, man and woman, into the box that holds them and their sexual desires. Everyone must be like me and want more or less the same things I do! Because … my imagination is just that bad!
I mean, I guess I understand why a guy who is unsuccessful sexually would want to bolster his self-esteem by telling himself that it’s nothing he does, it’s just that these crazy, hot babes who he is designed to be attracted to (Darwinism explains it! No man has ever been attracted to any woman over age 26 or over 120 pounds!) are crazy and only want thugboys. I mean, none of that’s true, but I can definitely understand the appeal of justifying your failures in that way, at least for a time.
(I guess I don’t understand it that well, though, because I still don’t understand the default-hatred-of-women bit, but whatever.)
Hey, at least you’re not a group of women anymore! Phew! Damn women.
Oh no… did my comment get eaten…? Doy. Oh well…