Found on Wedded Abyss, linked to by some MRA dude on Reddit. I believe the thing on the right is a high-heeled shoe, which like most high-heel shoes has a woman’s mouth on it with a chain coming from out of the mouth, with a little silhouetto of a man in handcuffs attached to it. Because that totally is what marriage is all about these days, amirite fellas? We’re just tiny silhouettes of men chained to the giant mouth-having shoe of feminazi injustice!!
Pterygorus: I can count the number of times in a given week I talk to someone who is not a sex partner, an Internet person, or a family member on one hand.
Hershele: OH GOD I am going to die alone and get eaten by CATS
I have a customer service related job-I talk with too many people who are having one of, if not the worst day(s) of their lives.
mral has several variations on his name for no discernible reason. earlier in the thread he was posting as ‘mralieutenant’ and when he made his confession it was ‘men’s rights activist lieutenant’. i don’t think it signifies anything.
I think MRAL has the different accounts so that he can (sort of; it never works for long) dodge when David puts him on moderation.
Hershele Ostropoler:
I think it’s even narrower — it is a model of the behavior of some teenage girls who have the looks or nerve to play the game. Those of us who weren’t Scarlett O’Hara trying to score points by hooking the most popular boys just tried to muddle along hoping to find friendship and love.
Thanks Holly and Sharculese for the explanation. I was just concerned that it was someone pretending to be MRAL to, in essence, troll a suspected troll.
Hey MRAL.
My life isn’t very easy. My limbs are heavy, I have no energy to get up earlier than two in the afternoon. In winter this means that I spend my day mostly in the dark, like I live on some night-planet where all the buildings are empty. I can’t pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes, which sucks because I’m in grad school, and a number of my projects are late. I’m supposed to be thinking of a dissertation topic right now, and I realized that I’m barely interested in anything. Not one thing. Here I am, wandering around on the night planet without a desire in my head. How the fuck do I tell that to my advisor?
But when I was in undergrad, it was a lot worse.
I was desperately lonely then. Oh, I had friends, but I was convinced — flat convinced — that they didn’t really care about me, or that they didn’t care about me with the same intensity that I cared about them. So I pushed them away with hostile behavior that was half-deliberate, half-panicked: if they really cared, I reasoned, they would follow me down the hole in my mind. Some did, some didn’t. One guy tried to fix me and when it didn’t work he gave up his career plans of becoming a therapist. Even so, it was like I was separated from everyone else in my group by a pane of glass that only I could see. I drank hard.
I was such an asshole. I held these two ideas in my mind simultaneously: the first being that I had to make those around me prove that they cared for me by putting up with my shit and the second that their hostility was no more than I deserved.
It’s possible that this is what’s motivating you as well.
Only later I learned that the antidepressant I was on at the time has emotional volatility as a side effect. Nobody had told me.
After college I moved in with my boyfriend, where I repeated the pattern, picking fights with him to make him prove he loved me. See, since I have Asperger’s I actually have no idea what he, or anyone, is thinking. I just assumed that everything he was thinking about me was negative. Picking loud, drag-out fights with him, every weekend for years, was like a clumsy form of sonar: bounce myself off him, see what comes back. It soothed me. He tried to break up with me, he came back, he broke up with me again. Sometimes I dragged him back, sometimes he came back on his own. The thought of living without him made me more frantic than the thought of living with him. Eventually, I started to think of my behavior toward him as abusive. I stopped.
I’m on new medication now. I’m anxious less often, and when I am anxious it isn’t the same frenzy of panic that I take out on others.
I’m not going to tell you that life gets easier, because in my experience, it doesn’t. My point is, you learn how to deal. Just like in any other scenario, you learn how to manage a complex series of interactions through experience, modifying your behavior based on the results you get. This process takes time.
ozy:
That’s why I decided to start counting Internet people as people.
I really want to go back and tell college!Hershele that people (first year, at least) are open to making friends, really. Also that you can ask someone out even if they’re not in love with you, and they might even say yes if they’re not in love with you.
And better, to tell high-school!Hershele not to go to a college with minimal campus life.
VoiP,
“I held these two ideas in my mind simultaneously: the first being that I had to make those around me prove that they cared for me by putting up with my shit and the second that their hostility was no more than I deserved.”
OH GOD THAT WAS ME TOO
It’s a terrible place to be in, and I’m glad you’re apparently no longer in it. That was part of my own abusive behavior pattern, and it’s very, very hard to break. Because in a twisted way, it makes sense. When you love someone, you help them through the hard times. And because you hate yourself and know you’re hurting people, you have basically “proven” to yourself that no one can love you, so this is what SHOULD happen.
I can see from these comments and the comments on MRA sites that this is rapidly becoming a full blown gender war with mounting hatred on both sides.
Thank you for stoking the flames.