Over on Patriactionary, a proudly reactionary and patriarchal Christian blog, the blogger who calls himself electricangel is angry at himself – for not being an even bigger douchebag than he already is.
You see, he’s just heard from his wife that one of her friends isn’t happy about hitting the big 4-0. Apparently, his wife’s friend
broke down in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. What had hit her was the realization that she was 40, with no husband, no children, no prospects of either, and she was staring at a future of loneliness.
His reaction to this news?
I wish I could tell you that an evil smile of vengeance crept across my face, and the children this woman discarded were getting their revenge upon her. That this was payback for riding the cock carousel for years, always aiming at the guys she wanted, not the guys she could get.
But alas, hidden deep inside in his tiny misogynistic heart there remains a tiny fragment of sympathy.
But I cannot tell you anything other than how saddened I was at her tale, and how this sadness will rip out the hearts of so many women who did not set out to become lonely, childless spinsters, but whose families and societies removed the strictures on their behavior so that their own lack of self-control was left unbounded. This will be the ongoing social disaster of coming years.
I did say it was a tiny fragment.
But he still wants to use this woman’s story for his own ends.
In discussing this woman, I am insistent upon her becoming an object lesson to my wife, and especially for my wife to tell the beautiful, smart, virgin young women close to her about what happens to carousel riders. Life is a coin you may spend any way you like, but you may only spend it once. This woman spent it on an amusement park ride. Now the park is closing, she has been thrown off the ride, and faces 45 years of solitude.
Yeah, because no woman over the age of 40 is capable of ever finding a date or a mate.
Yeah, because her sadness at hitting 40 is going to last for the rest of her life.
Oh, and the bit about “the children this woman discarded?” She didn’t “discard” any children. She simply didn’t have any. She’s not “discarding children” any more than those with penises instead of vaginas are “discarding children” each and every time they masturbate to orgasm.
In the comments, not everyone is quite so restrained as electricangel.
“I don’t even know this woman and I’m pissing myself laughing at her,” writes one commenter going by the name Friendzone. “Fuck her.”
Take The Red Pill is equally unsympathetic:
I have NO sympathy for this woman whatsoever. Just like most Modern Women, she bought into the feminist deception with eyes wide open with never a thought about the future. Well the future has arrived and it looks a lot like a cold, lonely one for her – just like the cold, lonely youth and young adulthood that MOST men have had and continue to have.
Karma has come due, and the bicycles have realized that they don’t need fish, either.
When women like her are young, they treat decent men abominably – being as cruel and sadistic as they can be when rejecting an ‘unwanted’ man’s advances – simultaneously, they enjoy being ‘free whores’ for every player, dirtbag, and Alpha thug who crosses their path; then when they reach their thirties and are little more than ugly, repellent, diseased trollops (often with some thug’s illegitimate spawn or two in tow), they complain about ‘the lack of good men’.
Others adopt Electricangel’s more, er, mature approach. Will S. decides to be a pompous dick about it, while patting himself on the back for his enlightened attitude:
Indeed, it is proper to not gloat, but rather mourn what we have lost, as a society, and feel sorry for those who have made poor decisions – and try to help others not make such poor decisions, by pointing to unfortunate examples, that at least others might learn something from them.
Sometimes, schadenfreude is tempting, but we Christians do generally know better than that.
Because patronizingly exploiting someone’s (probably temporary) sadness to make other people feel shitty about their own lives is such a moral thing to do. Is faux sympathy better than no sympathy at all?
Our friend Sunshinemary jumps on the “let this be a lesson to the rest of you sluts” bandwagon:
We need not mock such women, but we need to hold up their tales as cautionary examples to other young women. The older women themselves cannot face that their lives should serve as an example of what not to do, and they will rationalize it forever.
Electricangel expounds on his plan to use this woman’s apparent misfortune for his own ends:
I am using her as a vector to drop comments to my wife about the dangers of the carousel. Next is the overt suggestion that she talk to some young women about this friend specifically.
Uh, I guess you don’t let your wife read this blog, huh? Because if I discovered that someone close to me was talking about me in such a creepily manipulative and patronizing way, that person would no longer be a part of my life.
Electricangel replies to Sunshinemary:
Yes, those who did not prioritize children will have their genetic tendencies to that behavior removed from the gene pool. Women do not have the sexual options that men do, and not letting them know this early and often is crushing.
But they must be pointed to, and shown as examples. I understand people who will laugh at and mock them; I thought I would. It’s just the enormity of a waste of a life, and the lives she threw away, and the realization that this is just the tip of huge iceberg that has gripped me.
Yes, EA, you’re such a deeply moral person. Posting an “I told you so, you whores!” post on your blog is no doubt exactly the way The Lord would like you to handle this.
In a later comment, he reiterates his plan to use this woman’s story to increase the insecurities of his wife:
I do not feel guilty at all about using this woman’s example to drop pellets of manosphere logic on my wife. It has the side benefit of my wife starting to ask me (because she’s asking herself) “What do I do to bring value to the relatinship?” It is a good thing.
First it was a sad thing, now it’s a “good thing.”
How exactly is this better than gloating? No, scratch that. How is this different than gloating?
Durn blockquotes!
@Jarrod
Yes, I agree with that, but several people took a different meaning that you apparently intended from your words. And in my opinion that happened because you are a poor communicator*.
Your initial post was very convoluted and when you were confronted with what you said you doubled down on it instead of clarifying what you meant, and it took several comments from you to even get to a somewhat clear position. The problem is that you didn’t express yourself correctly to begin with.
*or that you’re dishonest, but I’m assuming the best here.
I think this is my first or second post here, so go easy on me.
I love being alone, and so do — very possibly — the other 27 million single-person-household Americans.
Having lived over a decade as a married person and now over a decade divorced, I think it’s all in your personality. I love being single. I have far more intimate friends; I’m more involved in charitable work; and I travel more. I raised great children, and I’m set for my retirement. I love my men friends, and they love me. They always ask, “Why aren’t you married?!?” But I already have it all. I get to make all my own decisions. I control my money and my time. I don’t have to cook or clean for anyone. I’ve built my dream house. Life is good.
So…I’m supposed to be lonely and depressed? Oh no, wait, that was when I was married!
@Myoo
Fortunately, I have better sources than three random people on the internet to judge the quality of my writing! As for your other claims, they are extremely vague. What exactly made my post convoluted? How do you think I failed to answer the questions presented to me? At this stage, you are basically doing what Snowy was and blindly asserting that my post contained a particular message while failing to provide any evidence for that claim!
Dude, numerous people telling you that they did not read your post the way you had intended to write it means that your writing wasn’t clear.
Also, consuming porn and consuming other mass produced products is not the same. Just about everything a western person purchases is based on exploitation. However, I made need warm clothing or food to survive. I do not need porn to live.
I fight the exploitation of porn by not consuming it. I fight the exploitation of other forms of labour by only buying what is absolutley necessarry, by buying things that are second hand, by making things myself and by using and repurposing what I have until it has no further use.
Dani, try Decades of Style. They have vintage patterns redone in modern sizes (admittedly small selection). Also there’s Lanetz Living with a fairly large selection of vintage patterns, and the Vintage Pattern Lending Library which lends patterns for a small fee and also sells them.
@pillow
Do you seriously think that three random people on the internet misreading a post constitutes evidence that it isn’t clear? Am I mistaken, or is this entire blog devoted to the mocking of people who misread feminist works and then spew piles of shit based on that misunderstanding? If 4000 MRA’s misread bell hooks does that make her writing unclear? Fortunately, this is now how we judge the clarity of a work!
I agree that this disanalogy exists between porn and produce! As I have repeated several times though, my claim was simply that one could fight against exploitative porn while also consuming porn (descriptive claim!). In that case, that porn is not necessary to survive has little bearing on the strength of my analogy.
The problem stems from the fact that you aren’t qualifying that the porn you would be consuming is porn that is NOT exploitive, that you have researched and determined that the workers are being humanely treated, their rights respected and are being fairly paid.
The problem here is that no porn producer is going to admit the exploit people (largely because they don’t care), the actors aren’t going to speak out because they need to make a living AND the fact that the industry is so exploitive, any tidbit thrown the actors way would be a huge improvement and may lull people into thinking its all good. In short, the producers of porn will whitewash their products to mislead the consumer.
@pillow
The post I was responding to originally, as I have repeated, said there was no way to make a distinction between “porn” and “exploitative porn”. I accepted that premise (even though I do not think it is true) and as such, I did not make the distinction myself. Assume then, that “porn” refers to a random video on pornhub or whatever. Do you think it is possible for someone to fight exploitative porn if they consume porn on pornhub? This, I think, is a very modest claim, and perhaps the confusion is that people think I must be saying something much more extreme and stupider. But the person I was responding to originally claimed that it was impossible to consume ANY porn and still fight exploitative porn. The reason my claim is so modest is because this is a really fucking stupid thing to say.
Honestly, I am not sure what you are trying to say in the second paragraph. I am aware of these issues (as I have said, I DO NOT CONSUME PORN FOR THESE REASONS).
*raises all the appendages*
God, yes. My life would be so different–and not really in a good way– I can barely imagine it.
The person in the OP is a poe. That being said, there are those who do belive that all porn is rape on camera.
So I suppose my question is..how does one fight exploitive porn even while consuming it? Do they have feminist or explotation free porn sites on porn hub?
@Jarrod: As someone who is considering academia as a profession, I can say that one of the most terrible things that can happen is having your words being misinterpreted (I always cry when I think of Nietzsche’s sad and prophetic “Have I been understood” at the end of Ecce Homo). I am just babbling now, but I hope you understand why I would not apologize when people incompetently tromp over my words like this. I understand the suspicion (descriptive!), but I do not accept the incompetence (prescriptive!).
Oh. No. Oh, no no no no no.
Jarrod, as someone who has an academic career (PhD in 92, working full time job ever since, a lot of years before that being a professional students when it was easier/fairly cheap to keep amassing master’s degrees because I couldn’t get a job), and, to top it all off, a faculty brat, if you think that “your words being misinterpreted” is one of the most terrible things that can happen, you need to find another career, stat.
Plus, I’m in English. I teach and have taught first year comp, creative writing (undergrad and grad), technical writing (including grant writing), and incorporate writing as a process in all my literature and theory courses. I write, and submit, and have had rejected articles, books, and grant proposals.
There are lots of terrible things that can happen to a person in academia–much much worse than people not immediately being struck by the brilliance and rightness of some crap you wrote and didn’t revise sufficiently (you tearing up over poor ole misunderstood Nietzsche is, well, it just makes me think “bless your heart” in the U.S. Southern meaning of the word).
Beginning writers always KNOW the reason their brilliant, inspired verbiage is not understood by all is that it’s all the fault of the readers.
Protip: it’s not.
Now, there’s no way (as I tell them) that a writer can guarantee that she will be understood by ALL the readers — reading is an incredibly complex process. But shoving out some first draft slop that’s only barely been edited for surface errors and that has had no global revision and no work through based on the assumption that not everybody thinks like you, the writer, or has your assumptions, or world-views, or experiences, is a pretty good guarantee of a lot of people pointing out that they do not understand what you’re saying.
And if you think the critique you got here on your writing stings–hoo, boy, wait until you get a good graduate faculty OR more experience peers OR (the REAL STINGS OF DEATH) editors or grant reviewers’ comments on your work.
If your response to critique is to complain and flounce off in a huff, then save yourself a whole shitload of money and go into another field.
Sem-Steele may think this is proof of misandry (female teacher telling presumably male? not sure if Jarrod has identified amidst all the handwaving and backpedaling), but if J. can in fact be discouraged by an expert telling them the realities of the career they’re planning to go into, then they will be better off (and oh lord so will academia).
I spent my WORKING LUNCH (making my lunch work ahahaha, boy did I whip that toasted bagel and cream cheese into shape!) with a colleague (linguist) going over the reader reports for our rejected digital humanties start-up grant and planning the revisions for the resubmisison we’ll be turning in next month. Some of the comments were downright nasty; others were useful critique, and some were encouraging–taken as a whole, the result is a MUCH STRONGER and better grant proposal than we had before (which was prepared too quickly, but it’s often worth getting one out for feedback–the main change we made was dumping the computer science dude who didn’t carry his weight in the grant writing, and has shown himself to be unable to carry through with doing what he says he will do since).
Revision–and revision–and dealing with rejection by revising and resubmitting if necessary–is how academia works.
Frak: sorry, ” html fail.
The first paragraph is Jarrod, the rest me.
*headdesk* **opens another coke zero**
I too would have been dreadfully unhappy had I married the first person I dated.
I have to say that BlackBlocs equation seeems to be working quite well for me, though I am not married (nor likely to be any time soon).
@Jarrod: i would seriously encourage you not to point to your real life work from this blog–there are a lot of lurker and readers and trolls and while I am sure the regulars would not use that information to harm you, there’s no guarantee about what’s on the internet. If I were you, I’d ask David to delete that info.
Second: I assume since this blog is a class blog that you were assigned to post in it.
That doesn’t….mean very much about you except that you were in a class and you did an assignment.
Here’s the deal: you come in here, you post, you are judged on your words, not on who you are. If you inadvertently repeat some discourse that has been used, ad nauseam, by identified trolls here (as C. said, there are lots of trolls who post here, some overt, and some who come in being all “neutral” and “not MRA” (just anti feminist in the case of a recent on), etc., then you will get pushback based on those turns of phrase.
But mostly, if you are clumsy in your phrasing, and then get all defensive, then the experience will not be fun for you: it’s much better to say, ok, I screwed up, meant to write X, and try to explain, and accept that there will still be people who think your writing is shit. It’s life; it happens.
But don’t keep digging the hole you’re in deeper, dude!
So let me get this straight. MRAs believe there are two kinds of men: Sullen misogynists who are no fun at all, but will condescend to marry a woman because they need someone to clean their toilets, give them “heirs”, and suck their dick once in awhile. And “alpha males”, who are fun in and out of the sack, but will never settle down because they don’t “have” to.
In other words, MRAs are the ones who believe there’s no such thing as a good man. Not feminists. Frankly, if these are actually the only categories of men, then not being with a man is a *good* thing for women.
Of course, I actually happen to know that there are a lot of good men that are both fun to be around and not users or players. Of course, I’d be accused of being delusional by MRAs, who hate men far, far more than even the strawfeminists that haunt their imaginations.
The person I was responding to was not the original poster, it was skeptifem (page 7). Ironically, she was defending Mis Andist, whom everyone rightly attacked for her “all porn is rape” statements. Apparently I do not get the same accolades for attacking her hangers on ;).
Again, I have to preface this by saying that the person I was responding to did not think we could know the distinction between exploitative porn or non-exploitative porn, so a “exploitation free porn site” would have little bearing on their considerations. At any rate, the main way one would fight exploitative porn while still consuming UNKNOWNORIGINporn would be to advocate for the rights of porn workers. Join a protest, make a donation, or simply be aware of the attitude of your local politicians position towards law-and-pornography. Taking a political stance against exploitative porn, in my view, does a whole hell lot more than deciding to not masturbate to porn anymore and being done with it.
@Ithiliana
Actually, it was suggested to me several times that I should apologize simply because I was not a regular here. Then it was suggested that I may be a troll and undeserving of consideration. In other words, I was explicitly being judged on who I was rather than what I said. The only reason I posted the blog was, hopefully, to show that I am not an anti-feminist troll.
Again, I do not feel that my writing was clumsy. Nor has anyone provided any coherent reasons as to why I should believe it was. I do not believe claims simply because they are shouted at me ad nauseum.
re marrying the first person dating: I remember having a long anguished emo discussion with my new bff (I met her in the registration lines for our first semester first year; we had three classes together, Anthropology, English, and Classical Mythology) soon after we became roomies (second semester). We’d both been raised to believe NO SEX before marriage.
This was in 1974, btw.
BUT and here was the problem: we didn’t want to get married.
OH NOES! What to do.
We decided to have sex (we were both virgins at the time).
The fact that at the same time we were in school, both our fathers decamped with younger women and dumped our mums (and that we were both Daddy’s Girls, shudder) led to a semester of drinking, dancing in cowboy bars often in Montana (we were in northern Idaho!) where we could legally drink, and having drunken sex with um band members, loggers, and a few college dudes we knew (which ultimately resulted in dropping out before flunking out, and plans to work as barmaids in Montana).
In any case, the two or so years I spent screwing around like that were not driven by narcissism or hedonism; I was damn FUCKING lucky not go get STDs or pregnant (trying to get any sort of birth control or condoms at the time was damn near impossible); I realized I wasn’t happy drinking and having sex (with men) (as my BFF realized some years later, well after I did, if she just wasn’t so damn straight, she and I would have been perfect together, sigh), and got out of it (went back to school, finally got my depression diagnosed, realized I *HEART* women, gave up sex with men, etc.). But I learned a lot then–and don’t regret it (ended up at a much better school for me, and could be an english major which my father wouldn’t allow when he was paying the bills–I had to be in a MAN’s PROGRAM), and, well, life always interferes with plans!
I never actully ‘dated” anybody (heh), but I am heartily glad that I didn’t marry any of the guys I had sex with (not that it was ever an option–they were so damn afraid of “getting trapped into marriage” that it was a hoot!). NOTHING I thought in my 20s came true by my 40s, and that worked out fine for me.
And I have never and will never regret not having children. *shudder*
@Jarrod: You are not the best person to judge the impact of your writing (and your feelings are not the best method). You don’t have to agree with every responder or criticism: that’s why it’s good to get feedback from multiple people. But hunching down and claiming “it’s all their fault for being so mean to me” will not get you anywhere here, if you wish to keep posting.
I reiterate: for your own protection, ask David to take the post with a link to your offline identity down.
I went through the Sex Wars debates in the 80s, btw, which is why I’m not touching your badly thought out and clumsily written stuff about pornography.
@ithilana
It is not the case that I am not taking the criticisms of my writing well, it is the case that the criticisms of my writing have been entirely without content. The reason I have hunched down is because the three other people who have critiqued my writing, like you, have provided absolutely no reasons that I should doubt my writing (except asserting that I am a child?). As I said earlier, I have plenty of writing feedback aside from internet tirades though, so it is all good!
I have no reason to care if an MRA knows my last name. Frankly, they probably think I am trolling for them at this point.
*washes hand of entitled young man*
*goes off to set up new home office*
Spent Friday assembling desk and chair (BACK HURTZ), and now have to unpack new computer.
Long dramatic story behind decision to work at home more involving our latest rescue adoption, but the fun part: while I was getting desk and chair at staples, I suddenly realized a key component of home office was…..KINDLE FIRE!
yes, i haz a new shiny toy!
Off to the home office set up!
Apparently this entire community is under the impression that appeals to authority, where authority is somehow related to how entrenched you are in the community, is the most accurate way to determine truth. I would have expected better than insults and bald assertions from someone who calls themselves an academic!
Clearly my presence here is neither desired nor doing any good, so I will go. Ciao!
@Jarrod
http://i1074.photobucket.com/albums/w408/myoomyoo/Jarrod_critique.png