There needs to be a Manboobz Addendum to Godwin’s Law to cover those who compare their lack of dating success to, you know, genocide. You may recall the charming Tumblr dude who equated dateless “nice guys” with persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany.
And now we have “white and nerdy,” the blogger behind Omega Virgin Revolt taking the datelessness=genocide thing a step or two further. As you might guess from the title of his blog, WAN doesn’t exactly have women beating a path to his door. Not even golddiggers, even though he is, he says, “a widly successful owner of my own business.” Women don’t even want to use him for his money? Why is that? Because he is not a — wait for it – “alpha” man.
Yep, it’s the same old dopey logic we’ve seen so, so many times before: Women won’t date me => therefore I’m not an alpha => therefore women won’t date anyone but alphas. WAN has added one more step to this illogical logic chaim: this makes them the equivalent of genocidal monstere:
The ideology that women act on is the ideology of Pol Pot, of the Killing Fields. Women want non-alpha men purged and intelligence is considered by women to be a lack of alphaness in a man. This is similar to the ideology that led to the killing fields. Many of the millions who were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the Killing Fields were murdered for showing signs of intelligence. That included everything from education to the possesion of wristwatches and/or glasses. If modern geeky hobbies had existed in Cambodia in the 70s, I’m sure that would have been included along with wristwatches and glasses as evidence of intelligence, and anyone interested in geeky hobbies would have been murdered too.
He’s making a could-not-possibly-be-more-strained reference to the whole Alyssa Bereznak/Jon Finkel kerfuffle. Bereznak, as most of you probably already know, wrote a sort of snarky, sort of stupid piece for Gizmodo about her date with Finkel, a champion Magic the Gathering player, and said some mean things about him and his geeky hobby. Pol Pot engineered the deaths of roughly 2 million people, many of them urban dwellers and intellectuals forced to relocate to collective farms in the countryside. Many died of starvation; others were shot – or beaten to death, in order to save on bullets.
So, yeah, Bereznak and Pol Pot are pretty much identical.
WAN continues:
[T] ideology of what women are doing now and what Pol Pot did are very similar. The Killing Fields needed to be opposed for both moral and practical reasons and so must what women are doing now. Rebel at The Spearhead said that women are engaged in a “holy crusade” against men. … The Khmer Rouge was also on a “holy crusade”. As Rebel also said what is at stake is nothing less than civilization itself and your existence and freedom just as it was with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
In an earlier post pretty much making the identical, er, “argument,” WAN takes aim at comedian Julie Klausner, who recently published a memoir called I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others. In her book, and in some interviews about the book, Klausner made some unflattering comments about “beta males” and “immature” men. This sends WAN into a rage:
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot would be proud of this cunt. She all but calls for concentration camps for her “useless beta inferior men” who secretly run the world. …
Ah, classic weasel words: “All but calls for.” In other words, she doesn’t actually call for concentration camps, or even rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camps, for men in any way shape or form. Never mind. WAN continues:
Somehow these “straight angry nerds” who are “useless and inferior” took over the world when no one was looking and this cunt says “something needs to be done” about this “epidemic”.
This type of thinking is widespread among women. …
[I]t’s no surprise that a lot of men are saying they think they would be better off with the Taliban running things. While I’m not sure that isn’t just trading one set of problems for another … I understand what these men are thinking. Anything has got to be better than this.
So: Nerdy men are “oppressed” by women who won’t date them. The solution to this imaginary oppression: oppress women for real.
I couldn’t make this shit up.
I think I get it. Somebody’s gotta be oppressing somebody or else how do people relate to each other? Women are oppressing men right now, and men don’t want that, therefore they must choose the only alternative, which would be men oppressing women. Nobody oppressing anybody . . . . that’s a pipe dream. What are you, on dope?
Besides, women don’t play fair. Daddy Warcraft Bucks over here understands the social contract; men are achievers and accumulators, and women are gold-diggers (well, at least the attractive ones, amirite?) But now, after he has accepted the natural order of things and gone out and started a business and made a bunch of money so he could lay hot gold-diggers, it turns out they’ve decided to change the rules!
It’s JUST NOT FAIR.
Seriously, I don’t know any men who want to put the Taliban in charge, but are we so certain that Hitler would not have gone on a couple of dates with a Magic champion and then blogged mean things about her? I’m not saying either way, I just think he was capable of it, that’s all. The Goebbels Diaries were fascinating reading when I was younger; I bet the Hitler Livejournal would be riveting.
I’ve heard it’s better for the academic ones, but I’m not particularly close to believing this given the state of STEM education. Either way, ti’s not just gamers.
[quote]In the example you give those guys aren’t not getting dates because they’re nerds or even gamers. They’re not getting dates because they’re creepy, immature, and not really all that bight.
Actually I have no idea whether those individuals are dateless. But I have friends who are interesting, good folks, who *are* alone, because the circles they run in are ones not friendly to women. I don’t know if a few bad apples can ruin the bunch, but when a good majority of the bunch is bad, it’s already ruined, sorta deal.
If you want to follow the wild leaps of logic of that guy, here’s a few assumptions he’s likely working with:
1) Intelligence is 100% genetic.
2) Being a nerd or socially inept automatically means you’re intelligent (Being an RPG nerd, I call that the Point Buy Fallacy: if you have low Charisma, Strenght, Constitution and Dexterity, you MUST have put those points somewhere else… ;)). There belief in the converse is also why this species of geek have some sort of brainfail if confronted with a smart jock, extroverted geek or an intelligent but attractive woman).
3) Women dating choice are purely constrained by evo psych and a conscious or unconscious (I believe this bozo assumes it’s conscious) eugenist drive.
Therefore not dating geeks = eugenistically weeding out intelligence from the species = nerd genocide.
Interesting. My experience is pretty much the opposite of yours. In my rather large circle of very nerdy friends I don’t know many who are dateless or alone.
it would be interesting to break this all down into real data. But then you would have to define and control for type of nerd. Gamer, IT, academic, science, what have you. And as my GF has taught me over the last couple of years that gets way complex very quickly.
Of course most if not all of my friends would not run in circles that aren’t friendly to women because that would be … less than optimal and is also wrong. Being unfriendly to women, that is. I think we are using a very big meta term that covers a LOT of ground these days and that likely accounts for our differing points of view.
Of course most if not all of the women in my circle of friends would fall under the nerd label themselves. So it is certainly possible that I just know a lot of outliers.
BlackBloc,
Consider point buy fallacy stolen. With thanks.
Being a nerd is cool. Being a hyperbolic misogynist who thinks that teasing is on par with genocide is not.
Remember kids, if a woman shows anything but fawning adoration for a man, she’s on par with a tyrannical dictator. And the solution to this is to treat women as they would be treated by tyrannical dictators.
Gain some perspective, WAN.
Breaking down variations of nerd into the amazingly specific will probably start getting difficult, yes. But academic work on fandoms is beginning to be written. I know for a fact that research has been published on the furry fandom, strictly academically (And not because The Furries Were Weird either). I’ve seen a non-published piece on racism in WoW as well. It gets pretty interesting. And weird.
Kinda off topic, but I’ve always enjoyed the word nerd. I’m always a little sad, though, that the earlier alternative spelling didn’t win out.
@Rutee: Actually, there has been academic scholarship on fandom since the mid-1980s, with a growth in recent years (and it exists in multiple disciplines, computer science, to literature, and everything in between), and that’s on top of the fan scholarship!
I’ve seen a non-published piece on racism in WoW as well. I’m now wondering if this is the same piece that will be appearing in a special issue I’m editing, or ANOTHER piece on race and WoW. There are several bibliographies of fan studies out there that friends of mine have compiled if anyone is interested.
waitwaitwait… racism in WoW? Do you mean, like, figuring out that the guy behind THAT troll there is black, and racisting at him? Or, like, racisting at trolls as a general thing? And, if it’s the second thing, do you mean being racist against the people who play trolls, or against troll characters, or roleplaying a character who is racist against trolls?
I’ve actually done something like that last one… member of a guild whose entire purpose was to be racist against “baseline” humans. It was really, really strange, for everybody involved.
“I couldn’t make this shit up”
No doubt there, ive yet to see anything original here
Since you all are treating men like W&N who were unlucky enough to have women dislike him as a pariah that needs to be shunned, you are really proving his point for him.
Yeah. Being shunned is exactly like genocide.
not sure how making fun of him for blowing things way out of proportion is treating him like a pariah but w/e
Wow, Bill. I’m impressed that someone who apparently can’t read English was nonetheless able to construct a sentence in English that ALMOST makes sense.
Holy crap, that’s it. I had not put my finger on that.
20-sided thinking. One-cornered thinkers are educated stupid!
Yeah, well there’s that too… But, you know, as much as it would suck to be treated like a pariah (if in fact anyone were doing that) I’d probably still prefer it to being killed.
That’s just me though; I’m funny that way.
Thinking that someone is ridiculous for comparing a woman’s rejection to genocide = proving that all women want to commit genocide.
The more you know.
Rutee,
I went to a couple of panels at PAX about game research. Very interesting stuff, yes. The thing that is really neat to me is that these are gamers/nerds/academics. People who “get” it doing research on it makes me pretty happy since it gets rid of a lot of prejudices.
It was also encouraging to me that the D and D stuff all had women characters in sensible realistic armor. Things they are a changing. Slowly but changing.
To be clear on WoW racism:
It’s how the narratives of race were setting themselves up *Completely independently* of the real world. It’s pretty trivial to find racism in the culturally appropriated parts, but to my knowledge, it’s kind of novel to examine Horde vs. Alliance as itself following patterns of racial tensions and strife. True, no RL oppression comes from it,b ut there’s a lot of jackassery.
True, I was thinking of what I’m familiar with in passing, sociology. I’m positive there isn’t much there, because my friend was telling me how hard a time he was having finding sources for *his* work on the furry fandom. My girlfriend is considering her master’s thesis for a particular variety of history degree on Trekkie Fandom, additionally, specifically because fandom is underresearched in her field.
@Bill:
No, I’m pretty sure we have to actually murder them to be like Pol Pot, Hitler, and Stalin. Murder them in droves. But good job at letting us know you’re an entitled dude.
I guess the fact that I married a nerd (and am a nerd myself, as evidenced by my multiple Doctor Who references) doesn’t factor into any of this, does it? Me being a castrating, man-hating she-demon feminist harpy and all.
As much as I hate sexism in art, I’ve actually never cared about realistic armor. Realism in general just isn’t a thing to me. I wouldn’t complain if it were realistic and cool, and I’d just be bored by realistic and uncool, but my primary problem is that most armor on women is objectifying, not that it is unrealistic.
I would really love, David, if you are so inclined, to see the sheer number of references by MRAs to a fantasy of female-led genocide against men. It seems to be a trend. I first noticed it right here in comments, but then I’m not out there in the trenches like you are.
MRAs fantasize that the oppressed class is actually their oppressor and is out to kill them. Just like the Nazis did. Haha, see what I did there?
I fuck nerds! I just don’t fuck douchebags. Surprisingly, not all nerds are douchebags. In fact, I was cuddling with a cute and gender egalitarian Magic player just last night.
I’m just saying that if you stopped treating men who can’t get laid easily as subhumans then maybe you wouldn’t have growing numbers of men who think you want them dead.