Is Christian J., the blogger behind What Men Are Saying About Women and the inventor of the infamous MRA two-dot ellipses, the worst writer in the manosphere?
I submit to you this sentence from a recent post of his:
One cannot falter to flatter, condone and encourage women more than by recommending and suggesting that the recommended path they have to follow will eventually, somehow, within a particular length of time, will meet with their euphoric predictions.
It’s hard to even know where to start with this hot mess of a sentence. Strunk and White famously exhorted writers to “omit needless words.” Christian J’s writing seems to consist almost entirely of needless words, some merely redundant, others simply wrong: they don’t actually mean what he thinks they mean. Meanwhile, Christian J. manages to confuse even himself with his pointlessly convoluted sentence structure – hence that second “will” towards the end.
Does Christian J’s sentence make more sense in context? A tiny bit. Here’s the whole paragraph:
Feeding the endless lies to women is ofcourse a main passion for feminists, as they believe that they are the epicenter of all wisdom and sage advice. One cannot falter to flatter, condone and encourage women more than by recommending and suggesting that the recommended path they have to follow will eventually, somehow, within a particular length of time, will meet with their euphoric predictions. Meanwhile they have waited in vain for decades for it to eventuate but it never appears to arrive. Feminists and women generally, will ofcourse never admit that they are on the wrong road in trying to fulfill their “mommy track with the picket fence”, dream. They are of the opinion that regardless of what they do, how they behave or what they promote, everything will eventually come their way automatically..
As far as I can tell, the point of his post is merely this: feminists have been telling women they can “have it all” – a career and a family – but really most women want to have kids and work part-time at best. Also, dudes don’t like feminists:
What the feminasties do not tell, is that there is actually a preferential scale that men generally follow to find a partner of choice. One would hazard a guess that being attached to a feminist would be missing on that list altogether or be down amongst the crippled and lame as they suffer from the same..
That’s almost poetic at the end there, with the “lame” and the “same.”
This bit is simply baffling.
[F]eminists want women out in the workforce so they can continually keep changing the rules, knowing that they have a lot of women out there who would in most situations, condone their actions. They can also guarantee that some level of that income will come their way and also ensure that funding and privileges will keep flowing while they have politicians by the balls.
So feminists want women to work so that they can get money from the government?
In the end, Christian J. “argues,” more traditional-minded women suffer:
Meanwhile, and as we have seen time and time again, it’s those women who want to make a different life for themselves who are still marginalised and berated. They have to be seen to be doing the feminist’s bidding, even if it is at their own expense and that is what this is all about. As we have witnessed right from the beginning, the feminists have a standard FU response aimed at anyone who dares to think or act differently to their demands and it’s this girlthink that is basically causing all the problems. So the ball is in the girls court but they fail to pick it up and run with it, meanwhile feminists are screwing their lives even further into the ground..
What on earth does that last sentence even mean? Christian J., mixing metaphors with impunity, has substituted clichés for thought.
Does it really matter that Christian J. can’t write his way out of a paper bag? Well, yeah, it sort of does. The incoherence of his prose reflects the incoherence of his ideas. Christian rails against the allegedly evil influences of feminists, but he never makes clear what exactly they are doing that he finds so objectionable. Nor does he ever explain exactly how feminists are harming “those women who want to make a different life for themselves” by, apparently, being stay-at-home moms. And of course he provides no real evidence to back up any of his points.
In short, Christian J. merely repeats a number of MRA talking points, stitching them together with overblown, incoherent prose heavy on clichés. A lot of MRA writing is like this: long on rhetoric, short on specifics, covering up its lack of substance with with obfuscatory rhetoric. Is this a deliberate strategy to conceal the MRM’s lack of real grievances? In most cases, I don’t think so. MRAs, for the most part, don’t know that they’re saying nothing. They think they are making arguments, when in reality they are having tantrums.
Translation: Duuude, I’m really baked and I can’t get any chicks on craigslist to e-mail me back and give me a blowjob! But duude, I’m so baked.
I think it’s a hostile Dr. Bronner’s bottle.
“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”
Yeah, maybe this guy is over-compensating for not having gone to Berkeley (as I did), or the Ivies, or college at all. Maybe this is as good as he can do, trying to make himself sound smarter than he is. Maybe he is ashamed of his social station. Maybe he grew up in a slum. Maybe his mother was an alcoholic. Maybe he grew up in a single parent household. Myabe he never thought it possible to get an education. So what. Those of you with the fancy educations who feign not understanding his argument (whatever the merits) are disingenuous at best.
Since when did we use psychology to argue against him. Our argument against him is that his overblown and pretentious prose is the reflection of an arrogant scatterbrain.
Thank you for being disingenuous Mags.
“…Studies and real life has already clearly demonstrated that females want to have kids, want to work part time and be a wife. mother and everything that that entails. But feminists demand the opposite, feminists want women out in the workforce so they can continually keep changing the rules…”
That’s his argument. If you couldn’t figure it out, that says more about you than it does about him. Do I agree with it, no.
Only after you laboriously pull it out of the complete mess that is the rest of his article. A good writer with a well-thought, coherent argument, should be able to clearly and concisely make zir’s point without any bombastic hieroglyphics.
Your linked video is not impressive. At the first minute alone it is littered with so much bias a child could see through it. It’s like a cartoon of someone rather than the person zirself.
Poe’s Law yet again.
Mags, maybe maybe maybe…and maybe he is an asshole who hates women and is trying to hide it?
Simplest explanation usually works.
@Mags
It’s not that the meaning can’t be found, it’s that one has to painstakingly parse his argument and apply some context guesswork to even begin to find his meaning. When one is trying to make a point, that person should be clear and straightforward about it.
Consider these two examples.
1. “I think Christian J is a pretentious and crappy writer.”
2. “I believe it to be the case that this person named Christian J has a very poor grasp on lexical and orthographic skills. Furthermore, he seems to use them to obfuscate and inhibit understanding of what is meant to be his general point of focus.”
Since you aren’t slavey, I don’t feel the need to point out the obvious and say which one is the easier read.
Who said anything about not being able to figure out the general argument. The fact that it appeared on this site and was by a known MRA blogger talking about feminists was a pretty big clue. However, the fact that I had to rely on this sort of context to even know where to begin is a bad sign about his obviously inferior writing ability. What I can’t figure out is what possible gain this pretentious and convoluted style of prose could possibly have in convincing his audience anything.
I cannot help but read “Christian J.” as “Christian Jew.”
That is all.
I don’t think I’ve read that post criticizing Elam before. Absolutely withering take-down. And the fact that he stumbles in and embarrasses himself makes it even better!
The terrifying thing is, I’ve read worse fanfic. Much, much worse – worse to a degree that was traumatizing. I still hold that My Immortal should come with a trigger warning for the cold blooded murder of the English tongue.
In terms of comprehensibility, 19th century newspapers are a close second – especially the small town ones. When I did my indexing project, I was scolded for not knowing that in some articles ‘So and so welcomed a guest’ means that So and So had someone over, and in others ‘Thus and Such had an unexpected guest’ means that Thus and Such had an earlier than expected kid. With no fucking context clues, these were often just single lines in a column about what was happening around town. I have nightmares sometimes of being surrounded by incomprehensible articles full of DKM level language hyperbole.
I’m and English major, and this guy’s writing makes me cringe. RIP English language.
*an
@Polliwog: Feminists with canes unite!
I figure, by this “logic,” I ought to have a free pass to be a feminist, yes? Seeing as how my cripplehood and/or lameness* have already made me completely unloveable by any TROO MAYUNZ(TM).
(Meanwhile, Feminist Fiance is snorting into his coffee, now that I’ve informed him the MRAs say he picked a total loser. “I’m not the one who lost there,” he says. I <3 this man.)
*I mean in the "has difficulty walking" sense, not the "is hopelessly uncool" sense, though I'm probably both, lol
@Magdelyn: We need a term comparable to “Godwining” for white people who try to use the centuries long oppression of African Americans in the United States as a cheap analogy for their own oppression (or another white person’s).
in fact, white America has denigrated African American Vernacular English for centuries as not a language, as not proper English, as evidence of the animal-like nature of African Americans (the fact that a number of syntactical and grammatical forms in AAVE are not unlike the features can drive a number of Southern white dialects can drive some to frothng rage). That denigration has not changed (although it’s not as overtly expressed these days).
Simply Google “Ebonics controversy” (a very problematic term), to see some fairly recent examples. Or, the response to the scholarship arguing that Mark Twain based Huck Finn on a young African American boy, especially Huck’s dialect. For more substantive work, I’d recommend Shirley Brice Heath’s Way With Words, or any of a number of works by By Geneva Smitherman.
I recommend reading because clueless white people stomping up to African Americans and demanding to be educated on their linguistic oppression and (in the case of American Indians) linguistic genocide attempted by the racist culture of “Amerika” is rude.
There are a number of marginalized dialects in the US (and everywhere else!), but what you don’t seem to realize is that the marginalization is not truly based on the grammar, syntax, and morphology of the language (old linguistics joke: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”) but on the identity of the social group being marginalized by the dominant group.
J. is just a shitty bad writer.
Been reading and enjoying site for a few weeks and have just taken the plunge in commenting. Question for site veterans – are most the comments by MRAs et al written by teenage boys?
“Meanwhile they have waited in vain for decades for it to eventuate but it never appears to arrive.”
I can’t think of any sentence I have ever read that screams “Look! I own a thesaurus!” quite so loadly.
Of the most persistent trolls, MRAL is 19 or thereabouts. Brandon is in his thirties, and NWOSlave and David K Meller are rather older.
But I agree that it’s hard to tell at times.
There are plenty of divorced men among MRAs apparently, so the teenage boy writing can belong to a grown, even very well educated man.
If you’re gonna be incoherent, at least make it fun:
http://youtu.be/FklUAoZ6KxY
So, magdelyn, you don’t want to defend CJ’s points, you just want to defend his writing style:
Here’s an exercise. Compare these two things:
1) Christian J’s original text (let’s take the first paragraph mentioned in this post) (135 words)
2) Feminists today think they know everything, and like to lie to women. They can’t lose by flattering women and telling them that they can have everything they want. They’ve been saying this for decades, but women still don’t have it all. Feminists and other women won’t admit that life doesn’t work that way. They think that their actions have nothing to do with it, and that they’ll get what they want anyway. (72 words)
Questions:
a) What did his additional 63 words add?
b) Which is easier to read?
c) Which would you rather sound like? (admittedly subjective)
I will admit that CJ’s text has a couple of phrases which are more vivid than anything in the revised paragraph (not 63 words of vividness, though). I didn’t want to be accused of putting words in his mouth by adding my own metaphors/images. And, what David is saying, it’s hard to write well when the subject is so nebulous.
@Cendare: Full points for excellent editing job — and I’m not joking.
Magdelyn, however, doesn’t want to defend CJ — she just wants to troll the manboobz regulars somehow, no matter how clumsily, trying to claim that we oppress those poor innocent white men who are oppressed by the feminists/women.
While many of us here agree that SOME groups of men definitely suffer oppression alone the axes of race/ethnicity (white MRAs never care about how many innocent men of color are imprisoned in this country), socio-economic class, sexuality, or ability status), that’s not sufficient for Magdelyn, et. al.
They apparently want us to forswear our evil feministic ways and go out and sleep with all the poor betas whose end all and be all of oppression is that every woman they approach does not immediately suck their cock.
It’s clearly very tragic how resistant we are to these arguments.
@ithiliana: Well hell! If we’re supposed to be the audience for these arguments, you’d think they’d be constructed quite differently. I don’t know any audience who is convinced to change their behavior by being told how evil, wrong, awful they are.
(forestalling the inevitable: Manboobz isn’t about arguments, it’s about mocking. You are too late for jellied eels sir, here there is only pie.)
@Cendare: Well, I never said they were good arguments!
Not all our trolls want to persuade–many just want to insult (NWO), or drop vaguely bizarre dada-istic dribbles (Explore Nature), but at least some seem to be trying to persuade (the ones who come in with “I lurk here, and only read, and I’m not really an MRA, but don’t you think they have some reasonable points” or “Feminists are just like MRAs because Solanis” aren’t really arguing, truly), but Magdelyn is one who seems to try to engage.
She sucks at it, but at least at times she seems to be trying to get us to somehow realize, well, whatever.
What, am I too late for the jellied eel pie?
While many of us here agree that SOME groups of men definitely suffer oppression alone the axes of race/ethnicity (white MRAs never care about how many innocent men of color are imprisoned in this country), socio-economic class, sexuality, or ability status), that’s not sufficient for Magdelyn, et. al.
Aww, poor white people!
http://americandigest.org/sidelines/jillg.jpg
Secret to a happy life: When someone tells you something about themselves, believe them. What this guy’s telling me, with his little ramble, is that he’s one of those tiresome asses who thinks “long-winded” means “smart.” Also, he hates women.
Do I care whether he has a secret tragic Dickensian reason for being a tiresome ass who hates women? Nope. Not my problem.
Also, Mags, have you read ANYTHING by Ami Angelwings on here? You might learn something from our reactions to that. >.>
It’s 2012, and not only are there concerted attacks on abortion services across the country, but contraception itself has become “controversial.” Oh yeah, we really have politicians by the balls, don’t we?