The contest for the Most Ironic Use of the Term “Nice Guy,” When Applied to Yourself –otherwise known as the MIUTNGWAY Award – is heating up. The previous front runner – the Tumblr guy who compared his inability to get laid to the Holocaust – now faces a serious challenge from a Redditor calling himself DogmaDog.
The other day Mr. Dog wandered into a discussion of the SlutWalks in the Feminisms and offered his two cents: he declared them “stupid,” and suggested that they won’t really help victims.
And then he started in on his own tale of woe.
I know I’m going to be shit on for saying what I’m about to say, but please hear me out.
Not a promising start, Dog.
I’ve never raped a woman, and I’m the ‘nice guy’ who never took advantage of a woman.
Do you want an award for this?
But a girl I was infatuated with in high school blew me off and treated me disrespectfully. She ended up being raped one night, while intoxicated. I do not know how I am supposed to feel about it.
As Don Draper would say, “what?”
How do you think you’re “supposed” to feel? Did you accidentally dislodge the part of your brain responsible for basic human empathy?
Apparently, the answer to that is “yes.”
[H]ow do you suppose I am supposed to feel about this woman I knew who got raped? I mean, I’ve never taken advantage of a woman, but I don’t understand how my ‘friend’, this girl I went to high school with, could go out and party all the time, and in turn treat me, her classmate, as though I were an inferior person for not enjoying the atmosphere of drunkenness at high school parties.
As it turns out, you’re an inferior person for an entirely different reason.
That girl was a mean girl, no? And by being disrespectful toward men, and prejudiced toward men, wasn’t she asking men to behave badly toward her? The only men she gave attention and physical affection to were the ones who hurt her back.
So let me see if I get this: she didn’t go out with you, a “nice guy,” so she was therefore “asking” to be raped?
Naturally, this being the Feminisms subreddit, and not The Spearhead, some of the regular commenters took exception to Mr. Dog’s victim-blaming and his complete lack of empathy for the victim – especially strange, since Dog, who says he is suffering from an (unspecified) mental illness, considers himself “a victim, in my own way,” of prejudice towards those with mental health issues. This experience, alas, has not given him any sympathy towards other vicitms.
Indeed, it seems that DogmaDog didn’t misplace his sense of empathy after all; rather, he threw it out of the house and got a restraining order against it. Responding to someone who suggested he show a little empathy, Dog lashed out:
Your empathy can go suck a dick. Empathy does nothing to help my situation. I suppose that is just the excuse people give themselves so that they can feel like they are actually doing something.
You basically called me an inferior human being because I can’t or won’t empathize for my friend who was raped. Well, ask yourself this, smart-ass, have you ever really wondered what good your empathy does? It does nothing. …
In reality, you are doing nothing but attacking me, and I may or may not have a ‘complex’, even though I don’t know what that is, but I can guarantee you, I HAVE NEVER RAPED ANYONE!!!
The sound you hear is me banging my head, ever so softly, on my desk. Empathy is what connects human beings to one another, what allows them to understand one another on a deep level.
When people are suffering – as you are, Dog, in dealing with your mental illness – a little bit of empathy from someone else can make all the difference in the world.
If you can’t feel even a little bit of sympathy for this woman you were once “infatuated” with, you’re not a nice guy at all; you’re an even bigger asshole than those drunken high school partiers you disdain. You may never have raped anyone — as you’ve repeatedly insisted, as if this should win you a prize – but “in your own way” you’re thinking like an abuser. Your lack of empathy for the victim, your continued bitterness towards her for turning you down, your sense of wounded narcissism; none of this is healthy, for you or for anyone who comes into contact with you.
You need help, dude. Please, please get it.
“I’ve meant both, at various times. <– I'M SO HELPFUL :p"
Yeah, you are 😛
Like I said though, I've gotten pretty good at reading them. If they don't show a lot of actual interest in hanging out and/or initiating something after the friendship declaration, I just assume I got hit with the "polite blow-off" and it's time to move on.
I did hear an interesting story from a female friend once, apparently she gave some guy the "let's just be friends" line, to which he replied "I have enough friends; if you want a man, let me know." And she actually felt more attracted to him after that! I should try it next time. 🙂
Sorry for the double post, but is there a way to disable smileys when posting? I don’t like the look of the ones here, if there’s no option to disable them I’ll just stop using them.
The best interest of the child is equal contact with both parents, period.
thank god we have a super-genius inventor like owlslave to boil complex topics like familial relations into simple declarative statements.
owlslave you get that people are more difficult than milking machines, right?
I’m politically liberal but I see feminism for the whiny worthless shit that it is. I don’t see the disconnect.
I think a lot of MRAs are liberal.
Liberals are generally for equality, after all.
That’s liberal as in Liberal Party of Australia, I take it?
No.
OK, MRAL, I’ll bite: Give us a few examples of issues on which you are liberal.
NWO, I’m a lurker, so I probably should know better than to engage with you, but it’s definitely not true that in every case equal visitation from both parents is best for the children.
My dad was an abusive alcoholic who’d threaten to kill my mom or himself when he was drunk. He also took limited interest in parenting after the divorce; he sees my siblings maybe monthly, due to his own choice–my mother never tried to prevent him from seeing us. (I live across the country and am Facebook friends with him, but only see him in person once or twice a year.) I don’t think my dad is a bad guy; he definitely has some mental health issues, but he’s not cut out to have primary custody and he never wanted it anyway.
Why is this so difficult? You guys are aware a huge number of liberals were misogynistic trolls in defense of Julian Assange against the rape charges, right? Misogynistic asshats the second Palin or Bachmann is mentioned? Transphobic asshats whenever Coulter is mentioned? Really, why the shock that MRAL is a liberal?
“I’m politically liberal but I see feminism for the whiny worthless shit that it is. I don’t see the disconnect.”
The disconnect is that pushing for equality means helping women substantially more than men (and helping black people, hispanics, more than white people, etc), because men have more. Insisting the contrary doesn’t make it true, no matter how much you assert you’re for ‘equality’, MRAL. You’re for the status quo.
Basically, you don’t get equality by helping the advantaged the same as the disadvantaged. Uplifting the uplifted is not how you gain equality. You uplift the downtrodden. It’s basically taking what you likely agree with as you identify as liberal, having the rich pay more because the poor have less, and applying the theory elsewhere. People who don’t have as much are supposed to benefit more as individuals from a system than people who have more.
Rutee, I think those are a mite different. Those are more blinders pointed at specific people, their like (or dislike) of one aspect blowing up into refusal to believe anything bad (or good) about that person ever, or into a sexist or prejudiced expression of their like/dislike. I’ve never heard anyone extrapolate hating Palin into hating all women or supporting Assange into discrediting all rape accusations.
None of which is to say that liberals can’t be prejudiced, narcissistic asshats, but they tend to be a different type of prejudiced, narcissistic asshat.
(That was responding to the first of those three comments, btw)
owlslave you get that people are more difficult than milking machines, right?
Of course he knows that “people” are more difficult than that!
Now women on the other hand…
@Rutee
“Why is this so difficult? You guys are aware a huge number of liberals were misogynistic trolls in defense of Julian Assange against the rape charges, right? ”
Don’t you mean charges of alleged rape? Or is guilt assumed on a womans word? Do “victims” of rape normally cook their rapist breakfast, text their friends about the “good time” they had, then pay for their assailants transportation? Men are so evil, aren’t they?
Eh, the way I see it, if you let loose a torrent of misogynistic bile just because someone isn’t on your side, you’ve decided reducing the status of women is okay for political purposes. It’s not the same as deciding all women are inferior, but it doesn’t seem the biggest leap in the world either.
Oh, but don’t you see, Rutee? Men like him are oppressed because they can’t get laid.
NWO, his statement of what happened didn’t disagree with the victim’s. He agreed with their statement of what happened, he just thought he’d done nothing wrong.
Spearhafoc, I like to think that one day it will dawn on MRAL that having a girlfried is not compulsory, and the world will suddenly become a much bigger place for him.
“Don’t you mean charges of alleged rape?”
No, that’s not actually how you describe any crime when you discuss the charges. Assange is not charged with an alleged rape. He is charged with rape, period. The plaintiff has made allegations, and Assange allegedly did it, and the media has discussed the alleged rape. The charges levelled against him in court are for rape, though. That’s how you *ALWAYS* talk about a crime, except in MRA Land about rape.
“Or is guilt assumed on a womans word? Do “victims” of rape normally cook their rapist breakfast, text their friends about the “good time” they had, then pay for their assailants transportation? Men are so evil, aren’t they?”
When your initial defense is “Yes, I did it, but it wasn’t rape because…”, you instantly lose any chance of me believing your future version of events. And considering Assange has substantial status in that set of individuals, the only remotely surprising part of that is the cooking for him.
Even the cooking is not so surprising, when you cook, you automatically cook for everyone in the house.
I have, however, heard liberal people very cheerfully bash Palin/support Assange by repeating the rhetoric used to hate women and discredit rape accusations. I think that there are plenty of otherwise perfectly decent liberals who just don’t put all that much thought into their own biases and internalized misogyny — it’s easy to roll your eyes and say “surprise surprise, the rape victim might have been a plant!” and treat that like a normal occurrence, without examining that the assumption underlying that oh-so-typical! attitude is that many/most rape accusations are false. Assange’s liberal dude defenders accepted the premise that the female accuser is lying-until-proven-virtuous in cases of rape, even if said liberal dudes would never agree with that exact phrasing. I wouldn’t say they extrapolated; if anything they interpolated “rape accusations are usually/always false” –> “Assange must not have raped her/the women are lying” without even being aware of their support for that nasty starting point.
@Rutee
“When your initial defense is “Yes, I did it, but it wasn’t rape because…”,
Here let me finish that statement for you, “Yes, I did it, but it wasn’t rape because it was enthusiastically consented to.”
The ONLY reason it’s a rape charge is because those two women found out about each other.