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?
Jarrod: Fortunately, I have better sources than three random people on the internet to judge the quality of my writing!
I was sitting this one out, because I didn’t really have a dog in the fight, but now, I do.
If you are writing for the pleasure of having written, then the only judge of your writing is you. If you are writing for an audience, you have to be able to make them see what it is you are saying.
It doesn’t matter how well you write on other subjects, on this one you failed. That three people took issue with your work is one thing. That no one joined in and said, “I understand what he’s saying and…” is another.
So, on the merits, you have three people who either didn’t understand, or disagreed, and a host of others (myself included) who didn’t think they were wrong enough to join the fray.
Skill in one area of writing does not mean skill in others. I can’t write fiction, and need to have readers, and critique, and lots of rewrite to make any of my attempts at academic writing pass muster. The ideas are there, but the form is wrong, which hinders understanding.
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!
No, actually that’s not what happened. Snowy told you what he saw in the comment. You told him he was wrong. To use a term from my studies of Mass Communication (there is some benefit to having studied journalism) and lots of experience interviewing (and interrogating) people, “The meaning of the message, is the message that’s received”. Snowy told you what he understood from your statement.
That needs no evidentiary support. Others said they got the same message from it. That was evidentiary support; independent observers saw the same things. You didn’t clarify yourself well; what you did is what you just did here. You asserted the reader was wrong, full-stop, and they needed to go back to the text.
It’s never comfortable to have one’s work picked apart in public. It’s less so when, as in this case, the picking apart includes implications of moral failure (as opposed to merely not thinking the issue through). But that doesn’t change the mechanisms of communication, and you failed.
You can know you failed because the only feedback you got was people telling you they didn’t see what you said, the way you thought it should be understood.
That sucks. It has happened to everyone here. It can suck really hard. It sucks most when the responses imply, or flat out state, that one has a moral failing/blindness. It sucks most when/if you can’t see what the dispute is about. It probably sucks most of all when the dispute is a true inability of minds to meet.
But assuming that one’s expertise in some other topic means one is going to be clear (or god forbid, “right”) when writing on all topics, is a shortcut to a life of writing misery and failure.
As to the question of how much slack you got… you got the same slack anyone gets. You were challeneged on a point. Your response was brusque, and a bit dismissive. That’s going to ruffle feathers. If you want to write well, you need to know the audience.
You were near on 600 comments, and eight pages, into the topic. That’s a place where the expectations are different than they are if it’s 46 comments, and you’re still on page one. It’s also different if; to use your comments as the example, it looks as if you are saying exploiting people is something one can gloss over.
No, that isn’t what you were trying to say. I think (now) that you were trying to say the opposite. I think you have an arguable case. It’s weak. An ethicist would probably be able to shred it with nothing more than Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and objections to that would be attacked on the question of need (as was done here; porn is a luxury item, how it’s produced is central to how much one disdains it).
You could make any number of arguments about *how* one goes about fighting the exploitation, while consuming it. You could have discussed the problems of cognitive dissonance, and confirmation biases in the “enlightened consumer”, or any of a number of defenses/elaborations of your premise.
You didn’t. It was that lack of expansion, which got you called trollish. We were told you knew what you meant, and we didn’t. You implied we were stupid not to see it, and that we were wrong to question you about it.
That’s trollish behavior. Yes, were you a better known quantity it might have gone better. Depends on what was said, and who responded. Being a regular isn’t a pass. Being a regular (anywhere) means you have reputation. NWO is a regular, he has no slack at all. Meller is a regular, he has negative slack. Ruby is a regular, she seems to have acquired more anti-slack than Meller.
It really isn’t about you, it’s really about what you said, and how you dealt with the response.
(Raises hand, so quickly shoulder is strained for three days)
Thank a merciful god that didn’t happen.
What is it with white dudes that makes it impossible for some of them to take any kind of critique that is not super coddling?
Unless someone wants to turn in an official form in triplicate, we are not allowed simply say, your internet comment was not super clear, also, it kind of assumed the conclusion without really stating it.
Everyone’s posting so many long comments that the background has exploded at the bottom. 😛
(At least for me it has).
Jarrod: 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!
No, that’s not what happened. The problem (and while I am not an academic, I have taught reporters how to report [by trying to keep them from repeating my youthful follies] and spent years training people to interrogate) it that you appealed to no authority. You told people they misunderstood you, and that you were perfectly clear.
The showed you where they saw what they said was in your words. That is content-laden critique. It’s the “red pen”. You told them to look at it again, and it would be plain to them; if they were but as wise as you.
Which is the same argument you are making here.
You can’t win that way. That’s an appeal to authority, and you are not an authority. That is a place where a regular has more weight; because we have a track record to judge their good faith, and a body of work to estimate their meaning (some of which comes of familiarity with style).
Nice Guys believe that women owe them sex in return for feigned friendship. This is manipulative. It also doesn’t result in sex, because the trade is entirely within their own heads and the world doesn’t work like that.
Hugo Schwyzer manipulates people.
Therefore, Hugo Schwyzer is a Nice Guy.
Cats are furry.
Dogs are furry.
Therefore, dogs are cats.
Logic.
I’ll chime in with the people who are truly happy that they didn’t marry the first person they had a serious relationship with. In my case he was a complete douche.
BUT I don’t want to go the other way around either, and say you can’t possibly recognize a good relationship when you’re in one unless you have other serious relationships to compare with. Sure, during my first serious one I thought people were supposed to fight (I don’t mean physical fights, but really bad and evil arguments) and be miserable and then make up again, and that being in a relationship naturally involved lots of stress. But I don’t think that’s primarily because I had nothing to compare with. I think it’s more because we’re constantly told, through media, that “relationships take work”, there’s this expectation that there’s gonna be lots of conflict, there are lots of fiction where conflict-filled shitty relationships are glamourized etc.
If you have a really great first relationship, you have lots in common, are really happy together, no serious conflicts etc, I think it’s totally possible to recognize this even though you have nothing to compare with.
My husband didn’t have any serious relationship before he met me, and I’m pretty confident that he wanted to marry me because he still recognized a great relationship when he was in one, rather than because he had nothing to compare me with.
And yet once more, the vile Boobzers have proven their idiocy, more concerned with nitpicking and utilizing misandrist, vile slurs like “white dude” said in a condescending manner, and attacking people for traits of their birth, than engaging in good faith. Jarrod does, in my estimation, make a good point, which only willful obusity can obscure.
Certainly and notwithstanding the pro-porn position, I agree that, there exists exploitation within the industry; in this sense it would seem to be much like any “lower-class” or “unrespectable” profession. My issue stems from the vile, disgusting “radical feminists” who judge men who watch pornography as “misogynist” or “evil” or what have you. Certainly I believe there is good reason to boycott porn – there is good reason to boycott many things. But following Miss Andrist’s logic, anyone who fails to boycott every industry with a history of exploitation is a contemptible individual. This is, clearly, ridiculous, for a great number of reasons.
Oh good, the pathetic scum is defending me.
Regardless of my alleged personal failings (and your status as a misandrist-feminist), Jarrod, and unlike the Boobzers, I judge the words on the screen, not the individual writing them. When you post a vile screed, I will call it out as vile. This was not, so therefore I did not.
Do I write like steele? Please don’t say I write like steele.
The comment in question was kind of vague. You did come off a little like Steele when you got really huffy about the critique not being super duper specific with examples and diagrams.
No one else writes as poorly as Steele though. Seriously, find another way to say vile, you won’t sound as silly.
No Jarrod, you don’t write like Varpole. Even in the heat of passion you didn’t lie (you misunderstood, but I don’t think you were lying. Lies are intent. I don’t think you intended to mislead the audience about what was said).
Varpole: You are trying too hard. Your intentional obtution (I can coin neologic formations too) of the actual events is stupid.
First: because the actual arguments are here for all to see. Ergo your lies about what was actually said are plain.
Second: If this place is as you represent it (a vile den of filth and villiany), no blathering at us from you is going to change it.
Third: If we are the audience you are trying to persuade… you are wasting your time. Either you need to be more sublte, or you need to find a new line of attack.
Because we know what we said. We know what we meant. We will tell you (again) why you aren’t representing the debates honestly. ‘
Will will go our merry way, with another chuckle at your chortles, ponder writing vile villanelles for to our vapidly vicious Varpole, and generally fail to notice you when we aren’t here.
Because you aren’t saying anything new. It’s just how vile we are for having opinions at odds with yours. But if you think you can defend the idee of consuming porn, willy-nilly, and being in, practical, opposition to the exploitative practices of the industry… go ahead.
@MollyRen – I don’t drink so I never encountered most of the alcohol-related traditions of puking or hangovers much. My nieces and nephews did puke on me occasionally when they were babies. Fortunately they’re all older now, so I’m pretty safe. 🙂
But if you think you can defend the idee of consuming porn, willy-nilly, and being in, practical, opposition to the exploitative practices of the industry… go ahead.
Excuse me? I’ve not said anything like this.
Yes, I do believe the arguments are here for all to see – others are free to scroll back and read. I’m of the opinion that Boobzland, in characteristic vile fashion, willfully misinterpreted what Jarrod was getting at. Certainly, the industry can be exploitative. I’m unconvinced that the exploitation is as rampant as some would have me believe. I also do not believe that consuming porn makes one “misogynist”, or complicit in the mythical, legendary “patriarchy”, any more than buying a wedding ring makes one evil or willfully complicit in the horrid exploitation in that industry.
Who said that consuming porn is proof of misogyny?
That’s what I mean when I say the proof is there for all to see. You may think (I am being generous) it was said, it wasn’t.
But I don’t really think you believe it was said. I’d like to think you aren’t that stupid. This, of course, leaves me with the option that you are that dishonest, or that amoral.
I was tending toward the former, but now; with your Objectivism so proudly declared the weight is shifting toward either Amoral, or both: Dishonest, and Amoral.
Of course, the accusation of “amorality”. I have faced such many times before; like most deluded feminists and politically correct zealots, you demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of Objectivist thought. It’s not amorality; it is perfect morality.
Steele, go away with your Objectivist theory, it’s little more than a pop-philosophy that a bitter Soviet expatriate pulled out of her ass because she wanted to seem smarter than everyone else.
Also, have you played Bioshock dude?
Um, is this steele person trying to sound like a Bond villain?
Hey, if you don’t like the word dude, I could call you His Dudeness, the Duder, or el Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
Yeah, another hand raised over here. The guy I dated from 16 – 20, who desperately wanted to marry me, was depressed and emotionally manipulative. It took me over a year to break up with him because he kept threatening suicide, and I didn’t want him to die, I just wanted to break up with him. He’d attempted suicide before and I’d saved his life and sanity but the personal cost for me was too high. Actually getting out of that relationship was such a relief. Even talking about it transports me back to such a happy time, being free from that burden and able to enjoy myself as a happy healthy junior in college. Good times.
Also raises hand. My high school boyfriend is a nice guy and all, but I don’t think we have enough in common to have had a happy marriage. He ended up staying in his town of 900 people and working on his dad’s farm. That’s great for him, but it’s not right for me. The boyfriend I had in college, though, was a total nightmare and I’m very grateful to not be with him. I’m glad I dated around and had some life experience before making such big commitments as marriage and parenthood.
My grandfather remarried in his seventies. 40 is not the end of the world.