What do women want? Freud never found a definitive answer to his famous question, but the blogger who calls himself Delusion Damage thinks he’s got it figured out: women want men who can kill people with their bare hands.
DD is a sort of compound MRA-PUA who argues for “Men’s Liberation Through ‘Game,’” as he put it in a Spearhead post some months ago. Apparently, if dudes learn how to get the hot babes to give them strings-free sexy times, through the magic of “game,” this will help to “reduce the unilateral enslavement of men through marriage.”
And what attracts the ladies more than the ability to kill? Not much, apparently. If you’ve got that magic killing touch, everyone around you will sense your manly power:
You are a man. A man is a survivor, a hunter, a protector of loved ones. The essence of manliness is controlled power. … That is what women love and what other men respect. Women, most of them anyway, are unable to use force and must rely on men where force is required. … If you lack the ability to kill other people with your bare hands, you will be perceived as if something is missing from your manliness. …
If you can kill, the ladies will pick up on this instantly:
[H]aving the ability substantially raises the value she instinctively perceives you to have. Which, as we know, leads to all manner of good things.
I believe he’s referring to blowjobs.
Oh, and other dudes will be impressed, too:
The respect of other men is also greatly influenced by your killing ability. Up until graduation from high school, the male social hierarchy has a great deal to do with “who can beat up whom”, and although the hierarchy among adult men is more dependent on social and professional status signals, men never stop instinctively evaluating you by what they perceive your killing ability to be, and respecting or disrespecting you accordingly.
And this will set you apart from all the wimpy emo hipsters of the world, who couldn’t even fight a girl:
If there is a “defining” degree of killing ability that makes you “manly”, it is defined by comparison with the female of the species. …
In these dismal times, men who fall short of this line are not terribly rare. Many of the emaciated hipsters and cubicle-dwellers of our generation would have trouble against a Juanita from a rougher neighborhood. These men, due to their lack of killing ability, are seen as unmanly by both men and women.
Meanwhile, your ability to kill will make others sit up and take notice:
The ability to kill makes your feelings relevant. If you lose your temper, someone dies.
This of course implies good things about you – the fact that you aren’t in jail right now means that you are a man in control of his emotions. A man who never loses his temper. Everyone around you subconsciously understands this and respects you for it. It lets people know they can trust you.
Yeah, nothing screams “trustworthy” more than a guy going on and on about how he could kill you with his bare hands.
Also, the ability to kill can help to prevent the ladies from blabbing endlessly about their stupid lady crap to you:
A woman who knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she will have less than three seconds to live from the second she makes you lose your temper is not going to set out to intentionally poke and prod you past your breaking point.
Aw, yeah, it’s good to be a potential bare-hands killer:
[Y]ou will be afforded a completely unprecedented kind of respect. …
When you are The Man, everyone around takes note. It is a form of celebrity. Women gravitate to you, pulled by the invisible streams of attention, respect and deference which we all subconsciously sense in any social situation.
Given the sort of adoring attention DD must get from the ladies, it’s sort of amazing that he finds time to even keep up a blog at all.
In other words no, no, you cannot.
Will the zombie teddy bears have zombie picnics?
If you go down to the woods today be ready to face the pain
If you go down to the woods today you’d better not take your brain
Cos every bear that ever was dead
Will rise again and snack on your head
Today the zombie teddybears have their picnic!
@chuckeedee: Sorry, was off hanging out with a couple of my “sewer rats”.
Well, I do like talking about myself…
My type is nerdy, chubby, dark-haired, funny, liberal, atheist engineers who like rock music and video games and know a minimum of two programming languages and make fun of me a lot. (I think there’s also a bias toward Asians in my dating history, although I feel awkward about that since I’m white and anti-racist and hope there isn’t some gross race fetish thing lurking in my subconscious.)
I suppose this could be partially due to proximity, because I’m also a liberal atheist engineer who likes rock music and video games and knows more than two programming languages. But then you’re just saying that people tend to make friends with and date people they have things in common with, which is not exactly a shocking new hypothesis.
I don’t date people because I think they’ll have good jobs and take care of me. I date them because I meet them and joke around with them and think they’re cute and then go home and think about them some more and see them again and then I’m really excited for the next time I see them and I start thinking about how they would look naked and maybe I have a few drinks and hit on them in a joking-but-not-really sort of way, and finally we both realize we’re into each other and we have sex and it’s a little awkward but also amazing.
…why do you date people? Because of their earning potential?
Never marry for money. You can borrow it cheaper.
Seriously? Amanda Marcotte? Are you a lacross player? Because there’s a lot more going on in the feminist movement than a hipster that got hounded out of a media position.
Well since we’re in tit-for-tattle tale mode, how about you call out Dan Savage on some of his posts?
Besides, you don’t “talk” you just post some misogynist non-sequitor, get call on it for being unsupported then flounce off.
Dan Savage? Are you sure you’re thinking of the right guy? He may not always get it right, but he’s pretty far from an MRA.
Fatman:
When you put it that way you make it sound like she has agency and the ability to make decisions.
(I note, incidentally, that my girlfriend’s ex-husband is taller and stronger than I am.)
CB:
Oh, is that what his problem is?
MissPrism:
That’s pretty good Joyce right there, actually.
Thing about Savage, when he’s good, he’s very, very good, but when he’s bad, he’s horrid. He’s backed off, I think, from biphobia recently, and I (privigedly) see his trans-bashing as more ignorance than hostility. On the other hand, he always has the option of simply not answering letters from people he doesn’t like.
Dan Savage has also been known to say awful things about asexuals, women, fat people, the disabled, and well…anyone who isn’t a white gay male with a high libido just like he is.
But what does he have to do with Magdelyn?
Or is that the point?
@ ozymandias42
I think the woman you describe is quite stupid and very attracted to potential for violence. But according to you, obvious pathological jealousy and being a control-freak is “romantic” and “sweet”.
I’ve read countless accounts of women who were involved with psychopaths. These women are flawed and don’t deserve any sympathy. They would fuck the devil if they could, without thinking twice.
So a woman who is deceived by a man is evil? Are men who are deceived by women evil? Or do they get a special pass?
Flawed people don’t deserve sympathy? That would kinda exclude the whole fucking human race from any kind of sympathy, and that seems like a sad way to live one’s life.
I think the woman you describe is quite stupid and very attracted to potential for violence. But according to you, obvious pathological jealousy and being a control-freak is “romantic” and “sweet”.
My, it’s a great thing for you that you are incapable of being deceived. Good luck with that.
Well, you see, when MEN do that it’s because it just makes sense to meet people who share your interests, so you can have someone to talk to, and it also makes sense that the people you meet would work where you work or drink at the same bar or visit the same web-forums, because that’s where you, you know, are. When WOMEN do that it’s because they actually have no agency and are incapable of rational choice, instead bumping into proximate objects and reacting to them like amoebae.
panorpia: The culture says the man is supposed to be a little jealous, and controlling.
So, to go to one of my favorite poets, ‘first a little, thence to more” and so someone who knows how to play on the surrounding ideas, the soup in which we swim can actually take advantage of knowing just how far to push, and what can be pushed a little further, and so on.
But you… you are above all that. No one can fool you, and since you can’t be fooled anyone who is fooled must have wanted it.
Victim blaming? Yep.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Yes, I am above spending a significant time with an abuser. I know it from experience.
Good people know when the time has come to stop indulging the abuse of a person.
paniorpa: Because no one is ever threatened when trying to leave an abusive situation, right? No one is ever told that the abuse it their fault, that is they only did things right, they wouldn’t get abused. Not a single person has ever been killed or beaten after leaving an abusive situation.
No one ever tries to fix anyone. No one ever loves their abuser. No one ever relies on an abuser for food and shelter. No one ever has children. No one ever has their thoughts warped such that abuse seems like the new normal.
Sure, there were red flags in my story. But no one deserves to be abused just because they’re bad at recognizing red flags.
A good woman should never get involved with a jerk in the first place.
Good women are good at judging people. Their moral compass is sharp and they won’t get confused long by the lies or the victim-blaming of a psychopath.
If your moral compass is perverted (ie. if you are attracted to jerks/bad boys/psychopaths) you will stay much longer than a person with a healthy moral compass. Maybe you will stay your whole life and breed a new generation of jerks.
But psychopaths can hide their deviousness a long time only if they face a person whose moral compass is weak or perverted.
Sooner or later, good persons are able to detect red flags and to act on them.
I would add the culture also says that women are flighty and leave “good men” at the first sign of trouble. Look around: women are constantly bashed for supposedly not having a good enough reason to dump a man. MRA’s and their sympathizers routinely act insulted that some women have the temerity to enter into and leave relationships in pursuit of their own happiness. So women are actually under tremendous social pressure not to leave even when they know they should. But of course, when women don’t leave until such time as they suffer the right amount of abuse to be considered justified in leaving — at this point people like paniorpa say that such women deserve to be abused because why the hell didn’t they leave sooner? It’s a common MRA trope that women who get abused deserve it because they are abused.
Not to mention the fact that physical abuse is preceded by years, and later accompanied by, systematically breaking down the victim’s self esteem and isolating her/him from family and friends. Plus, female victims who haven’t proven with hospital admissions and broken bones that they are indeed facing abuse have to cope with ostracism from said family and friends, who are, sadly, likely to side with the abuser.
So bad women get what’s coming to them?
The question is–if you have no problem with bad things happening to “bad” people… can you possibly be a good person?
I would add another question to Paniorpa: Are you willing to apply those principles to your own sex? Like, men who get screwed by wives and girlfriends, or even abused by them — by your logic, they don’t deserve any sympathy either, because if they had a good moral compass, they wouldn’t get involved with those women in the first place. Right?
Bad people want to be abused! I know when children are beaten , that means they are evil! (Please note, not really)
So if a man gets involved with an abusive woman, it is his own fault and no one else is to blame, least of all the abusive woman of course. Good men are good at judging people. Their moral compass is sharp and they won’t get confused by the lies or the victim-blaming of a psychopath.
Yes, both assertions are as asinine.