You’ve all seen the famous quote attributed to German religious leader Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Now one embittered “Nice Guy” on Tumblr who goes by the name joetomcollins has written his own version, with feminists as the Nazis, rapists as the communists, and, well, just read it yourself:
When the Feminists came for the Rapists,
I remained silent;
I was not a Rapist.
When they locked up the stalkers,
I remained silent;
I was not a stalker.
When they came for the Players,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Player.
When they came for the men who they got bored of,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t some one they were bored of yet.
When they came for me, the nice guy,
there was no one left to speak out.
So, yeah. Let’s think this through a little bit. When Niemöller made his now famous remarks, he was expressing his own sorrow for not standing up to Hitler when he started arresting Communists. So is joetomcollins suggesting that he – and we – should have stopped “the feminists” from going after rapists and stalkers?
Joetomcollins doesn’t say, but he does have a lot more to say on the evilness of feminists and stuck-up women in general:
[I]f I’m going to be the bad guy no matter what I do… might as well get it the fuck out the way right up front.
I might as well ENJOY being the villain.
The FemeNazi messsage is LOUD AND CLEAR!
I am an average normal guy. I am never going to be good enough.
Especially in NYC where you only personalities you get are native “rats” who have learned to survive to being ruthless, and Type “A” psychopaths who come here to conquer everything.
Dude, if you don’t like the people in New York, then maybe, just maybe, you should move out of New York. It’s a high-pressure place and, well, you don’t seem to respond well to pressure, let’s put it that way.
He continues on with a refrain that I suspect will sound awfully familiar to a lot of you:
Man hasn’t had the ability to choose his woman for at least the last 150 years. The woman chooses the man. ALWAYS.
Now even showing interest is offensive to the FemeNAZI.
We aren’t talking about DOING anything but telling someone you think they are attractive. If a guy YOU liked rejected you, he would be Satan incarnate, but when a woman rejects a guy…
“HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER!!!”
“HOW DARE HE THINK HE WAS GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME!!!!!”
… and we’re supposed to nod sheepishly and apologize for bothering you as we leave with a smile.
When I read shit like this I have to wonder: who exactly are you approaching, and what exactly are you saying to them? I’ve made some awkward passes in my day, but I’ve never gotten this response from anyone.
Could it be that you’re a dick? Your post seems to suggest that you are — an angry, self-obsessed dick almost completely lacking in self-awareness and empathy.
I mean, seriously, comparing your inability to get laid to the fucking Holocaust? Your bad luck with women to the murder of millions? Douche move, my man.
If you embrace your dickhood, as you seem to want to do, and become much more straightforward about your sexual desires, instead of trying to hide behind a nice-guy facade, you might actually get laid more often than you’re getting now. But you’re not likely to get a lot of repeat customers. And for good reason: no woman wants (or deserves) to be saddled with all your bullshit.
So let’s assume, for the purpose of argument, that you’re not a full-blown dick; you’re just a horny young guy on a sexual losing streak lashing out at women for your own failures. Let’s assume you are willing to work on actually reducing your dickishness. (Readers: All I ask is a little temporary suspension of disbelief.)
Reading your account of your romantic failures, and bearing in mind that most straight men don’t get this sort of response from the women they approach, there are several possibilities:
- either you are exaggerating the alleged awfulness of the rejections you’ve gotten, or
- there is something desperately wrong with your approach — perhaps you’re cornering women in elevators at 4 AM, or otherwise transgressing their boundaries in inappropriate ways — or
- the women you are approaching are, you know, bitches.
You really only have two choices here: you can spend the rest of your life wallowing in bitterness at women, or you can reconsider your approach. Find some woman you are friendly with – one you are not obsessed with fucking – and explain to her what’s going on, and ask her where you think you’re going wrong. If it’s your approach, learn to better respect people’s boundaries and read their body language; some women don’t want to be bugged by anyone when they are, you know, on the way to work. If it’s your selection of women, select different women.
And stop posting tirades on the internet about how women are a bunch of evil Nazis out to oppress you and your poor lonely penis. You know how, when you jump into cold water, your genitals shrink in horror from the cold? Something similar happens to the vaginas of most women when they read shit like you just wrote.
That advice didn’t work out for elevatorguy, now did it 😀 Poor fella, I bet his head explodes with all the conflicting messages.
Someone never bothered to notice the word “might” which in no dictionary has ever appeared as “might means shall.”
Oh, ok so you might get laid, but you also might be demonized and declared a rapist and publically humiliated. Gotcha. Great advice “this straightforward about sexual desires” thing!
Ooh yeah, like maybe it would work if elevatorguy hadn’t been trying to pick up a woman on a hotel elevator in a country she was unfamiliar with at 4 in the morning, and if they had previously spoken at some point in the evening, and if he hadn’t overheard her saying moments earlier that she was tired and wanted to go to sleep, and if he hadn’t overheard her saying previously in the day (repeatedly) that she personally was sick of guys trying to pick her up. HOW WAS HE SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT WOULDN’T WORK? WHY DO WOMEN HAVE TO BE SO CONFUSING?
Who declared this nameless fellow a rapist? Ms Watson? Noooo…she did not. How was he publicly humiliated? Did she name the aforementioned nameless fellow? No.
Was he straightforward in his intentions? No actually he was not. He said “have coffee in my room.” Now how is that being straightforward about wanting sex? It is not.
She also was giving ANY guy some sensible advice-do not ask a woman you do not know (or well) to your hotel room at 4 AM while in an elevator. It seems to me that this is just common sense.
If you are honest with a person like this: “I found your talking very interesting and would like to speak more on the topic” the best way to follow that statement up is with “can I have your email address or other safe means of contact to arrange a further discussion? Like at a coffee shop?”
The only people who said Elevatormoron was a rapist were, secondhandedly, men whining about Ms. Watson’s excellent handling of the whole thing, who said we were saying he was a rapist (What? No. We said cornering a woman on the elevator is not a good way to come off as a non-rapist).
AlekNovy: You might get more action. I recall a study done when I was in high school. Men were asked to stand on a street corner and straight up proposition the women passing by.
1 in 10 said yes.
8 in 10 said some form of no.
1 in 10 slapped him.
Times have changed; I suspect the odds of slapping are down. The odds of someone making a blog post about it are up. Elevator guy wasn’t all that straightforward in his approach. He didn’t attempt to establish the least level of actual interaction prior to his, oblique, proposition.
He didn’t say, “I know yo said you were tired, but I think you are wicked hot, and wondered if you might not be be up for a shag.” No, he asked to his room for, “Coffee”. At which point he might have put the moves on her, he might have decided to let her make the first move (on the assumption that she must be interested, or she’d not have come to his room).
What he didn’t do was pay attention to her as a person; not in terms of the boundaries she’d set in her talk, nor in terms of being up front about what he wanted.
And the flip side of being blunt, is people tend to be blunt in return, so getting called a creep (or slapped for being, “fresh”) is what one risks by being sexually aggressive.
Happens to men, and women.
Yep, happens to me all the time.
Oh wait… no it doesn’t! Because I’m not an asshole! (to women, or even men, in general)
Here’s my secret; I actually pay attention to what women say when they’re talking!
Alec, did you not notice what I wrote immediately following the sentence you quoted:
So, no, I’m not suggesting that the best possible solution is for him to continue being a dick, and just being more straightforward about it. I’m saying that he *might* get laid more often this way, but also that this is sort of a dead end for everyone.
My actual advice to him comes after all this.
Did you not read the whole post?
Ok now I get it 🙂
So the advice is don’t be straightforward about your sexual intentions? Or is it have no sexual intentions and be a eunuch? I’m confused?
I’ve picked up 2 women in elevators out of 3 attempts, and the third one happens to be my friend to this day. I guess these girls never heard of this “common sense” thing. I guess it just hasn’t reached my country yet 🙂 Good to know.
I’m not sure what’s so difficult to understand about what David wrote, Alek Novy. Angry, self-obsessed guy trying to masquerade as a nice guy is probably less successful with women than angry self-obsessed guy who is honest about his abhorrent personality is probably less successful with women than guy who is neither angry nor self-obsessed. Seems pretty logical to me.
As to your elevator prowess, let’s be clear about this: You’re saying that you picked up two out of three women in a hotel elevator at four a.m. by asking them into your room for coffee, after they had repeatedly said that they were sick of men trying to pick them up, and had excused themselves to go back to their own rooms for the purpose of sleeping, because they were tired?
Nope, but neither did Watson 😉 That was never claimed by watson, some of her followers made that part up entirely.
Someone actually reviewed all the videos minute-by-minute of Watson speaking at that conference, and “tired of being picked up”, “picking up”, “men approaching women”, “approaching”, “asking out” were never mentioned, not a single time.
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David, this is a duplicate post, I’m reposting the comment because the last one got screwed up on the formatting. Mind deleting the previous one?
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Hey Pecunium, I like you. Your comments are well informed, and I feel like I can get in a discussion with you. So here goes.
Not really from my opinion. I believe and perceive women to enjoy a massive female privilege whereas men are taught to never respond badly to a woman’s advances, no matter how aggressive or blunt she may be.
I have male model friends, they get their butts pinched, women coming up and just grinding on them, they get their hats and eye-glasses just taken off without question, random drunken women just come up and start stroking these guys’ chest out of nowhere. And these guys always respond nicely no matter how bothered they are by it.
This seems to be true in every culture I’ve seen. There’s far more leeway for women to be blunt and aggressive. I never see men being blunt in return. They take in stride. They’re taught to never hurt a woman’s feelings.
To quote hugh-ristik who wrote the best piece on this ever:
In other words, some women prefer you approach them in private, some women prefer you approach them with 50 on-lookers. Each of them will become uncomfortable at the exact opposite approach. I have dozens of female friends who have the opposite preference on this. One will call you a creep for approaching her in private, the other for approaching her with 50 onlookers.
And that’s fine, it’s great that women are individuals with individual preferences. What’s kind of interesting is if each of these two example women then project their preference onto the entire world as being “common sense”, when it’s really just her individual personal preference.
Well, but no, AlekNovy. I didn’t read the whole thing, but she’s definitely talking about being sick of men hitting on her whether she uses the exact words “sick of men hitting on me” or not.
Unless you think that’s … not a description of someone trying to pick her up, and her using it to describe things she’s uninterested in.
It’s also worth remembering that, according to what she said in the original video, anyway, she was talking unofficially, to various people (of which elevatorguy was one), for several hours that night, on generally the same topic. What she said, in the video, was: “Um. Just a word to the wise here, guys: Uhhhh, don’t do that. Um, you know. [laughs] Uh, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4am, in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and—don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I’ve finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.”
It’s just not true that I’m making up this part of the narrative: It’s a central part of the story.
Don’t forget the patronising wink, Bee. That part’s essential. 😉
Anyway, I’ve noticed the debate tactic AlekNovy uses here:
Someone actually reviewed all the videos minute-by-minute of Watson speaking at that conference, and “tired of being picked up”, “picking up”, “men approaching women”, “approaching”, “asking out” were never mentioned, not a single time.
in a lot of people who argue like assholes. When you’re talking about things people said, implied, or felt like, or if the thing you’re trying to prove involves any sort of attention to context, there they come, saying “But these exact words that you paraphrased an hour-long speech with were never used, therefore Your Ideas Don’t Matter!” Like, is that seriously supposed to prove your point? This isn’t ‘Nam: words have synonyms.
EDIT: “We all know words have synonyms.”
No synonyms were used either 😉 In fact, watson never mentioned dating, mating, courtship, men hitting on women in the conference etc… The topic of dating or courtship wasn’t breached.
Ok, I get it. 🙂 Men should be required to telepathically know how any one individual woman implies things. In other words, if a woman says AB, but she’s implying xy – then men are required to know this telepathically about her, even though other women mean something completely different when they say AB. They just should just know this about her, without her spelling it out. Gotcha 🙂
This stuff might fly with the hermit-type anti-feminist who ussually has no female friends, has never left the house, and is a celibate hermit. Won’t fly with me. Some of us have like y’know female friends and massive expereince with women y’know.
When I see my friend ana gets hit on by men I see how she implies the exact same thing differently than does my friend vesna. In fact, sometimes women imply the exact opposite thing using the same subtle action. They both communicate (imply) things to their suitors in differing and sometimes opposite ways.
But I get it now! Men should just know even if it’s never spoken, spelled out or said.
Alec, do you actually read before you respond? Did you not see Bee’s comment?
You’re right David. It comes out that way. But that’s because I was responding to VOiP, not Bee. I never saw that Bee posted again too.
Bee – I owe you an apology
Guess I was lied to. The people who claimed they reviewed every single video were never questioned, and this was by feminists. They were accused of being idiots, they were accused of being assholes for daring to review the videos, they were called names.
But no one until now has posted evidence to the opposite. I assumed that since a 100 feminists never posted evidence to the contrary to the video-claims (just ad-hominems) that the video claims must be true.
We’re all relieved that it still gets to be, somehow, the fault of feminists. 😉
Let me see if I got this. You present a scenario in which Vesna and Ana imply things through subtle social cues, you figure out what they are getting at, then you use this as proof that you can’t possibly be expected to figure out what people imply…through subtle social cues.
…
Have you swallowed your own brain?
Maybe he meant that he can read their cues because they’re his friends and he knows them, whereas strangers might have different social cues which he can’t interpret, or might interpret wrong? At least that’s the way I read it.
Alek: You are perfectly free to try and dress your opinion as fact, and/or universal.
But that’s not relevant. Generalising from a limited sample, and a non-random one at that, isn’t relevant. The plural of anecdote is data, but a singular datum isn’t enough.
As to hughristik, If some women want X, and other women want not-X, and men can’t predict which group a woman falls into, It’s simply impossible for those requirements to reliably be fulfilled by non-telepathic men.
That’s true for everyone.
My experience contradicts yours, which is relevant, because it only takes one contradictory datum to negate an hypothesis.
As to your friends, and your skills with women. Dude…. I’m impressed, really. I mean that someone who has skills with women would be willing to come in here and share them with miserable little me… wow. I mean now I can get all the action I could possibly want.
Or not. Because what you say contradicts itself. You can see what social clues your friend are giving. I can see the social cues women I don’t know are giving.
Watson complained, in her video; the one that got all the airplay, and the follow-up comments, that she’d done more than give social clues, she had been talking about that very subject. If I can do it with women, if you can do it with women; and if women are saying the behavior Elevatorguy engaged in is problematic (even without the clear discussion on the topic) then I’m willing to take them at their word.
Because it’s easier. Because it’s more polite. Because it’s more likely to lead to everyone having a better time.
But if you want to think the evil feminists are jerking you around, and trying to establish a set of rules where you can never win; knock yourself out. I’ll be over here having a good time.
Regarding Hugh Ristik’s complaint that not all women want the same thing… Dude, decide what kind of behavior is appropriate and ethical to you. Not all women will agree, but you’ll get women who have similar values to your own. Which is a plus. I initiate, which bothers lots of guys. But that’s a feature not a bug for me. I wouldn’t want to be with those traditional guys anyway.
I wish MRAs would try to date individual women rather than demanding some magic recipe that would allow them to attract ALL women.