Some misogynists seem to have a really difficult time telling the difference between consensual kinkiness and domestic violence. Over on the Happier Abroad forums, our old friend Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c) – who doesn’t really seem to be all that happy, honestly – tells the fellows about a woman he recently met. (Note: the faux ellipses in the quotes to follow are all from the original.)
I am now able to look a woman in the eyes, even from some distance, and know if she is a decent woman or not. I only developed this two years or so ago and have only had it happen 4 times. I am not saying that it is ONLY these women who are decent women….I am saying that the 4 this has happened to turned out to be pretty good women…
By a “pretty good woman” he seems to mean a woman who hates women nearly as much as he does:
when asking about my view of women I have been absolutely straightforward and to the point….her response “AT LAST…..a man who really knows what we are like….that makes me feel so much better because I do not have to worry about trying to present myself as I am not…..you already really know what we are like!”
She is HAPPY that I describe women as mostly liars and manipulators who try to get men to do what they want…..it is a RELIEF for her to meet such a man…..how about that?
And, even better, she likes to be spanked!
she openly says that she felt that if we were together with her strong personality she would be likely to provoke me and try to hurt me emotionally…..to which I replied “if you are naughty I will put you over my knee and spank you”..to which she replied “and I shall be naughty to make sure I am spanked”.
I was telling this new lady I met about this and how I had spanked my daughter when she was willful and naughty as well as my fav#1……she almost SWOONED at the idea of being spanked for being naughty….It was as clear as day she was very interested in getting herself spanked for being naughty…..I noticed this and pointed it out….she tried to deny it.
Uh, if she just told you she wanted to “be naughty to make sure” she’d be spanked, why would she deny this a minute later?
Somehow I suspect that this conversation didn’t transpire exactly as Mr. Nolan says it did.
In any case, our intrepid storyteller moves on to elaborate on his perverse (and not in a good way) sexualized defense of child abuse:
I said to her “it is completely normal for a girl to want to provoke her father into needing to spank her, once he does she knows he is big and strong and will protect her and provide for her….she feel more comfortable, more secure, and she will often cuddle up to her father and feel very good towards him after being spanked….my daughter did that all the time…..I bet you did that with your father too…..
And then on to a defense of violence against women:
This need does not go away just because the girl becomes a woman…..she still needs to provoke her man and he still needs to spank her so that she feels he is strong and powerful and can protect and provide for her……that is how women are.
Apparently men can’t truly “bond” with women without hitting them:
This is why it is such a disaster to say “never hit women”…..it destroys the womans ability to bond closely with the man via a good spanking. It destroys her ability to feel the security of protector and provider….something she needs…indeed….it is so insane now they call that “domestic violence” and the man can go to jail for doing what the woman needs to be done for her.”
She just shook her head and said “you are so right”……I am wondering if we will see much more of each other.
I certainly hope not.
Happily, there’s every reason to believe that this conversation is a product of Nolan’s imagination; he seems to live in a world all his own.
NOTE: Thanks to Sandra in the comments for pointing me to this horrible comment.
EDITED TO ADD: Mr. Nolan (c) has responded in the comments here, and over on Happier Abroad in more detail. Apparently I totally misrepresented him because I wasn’t able to figure out from his badly written comment that he was talking about two different women who loved being spanked. Also, because I mentioned his name with the weird punctuation , he thinks I am “subject to the fee of 1,000 troy ounces of 99.9% pure gold should I choose to levy it.” (You see, Mr. Nolan (c) has set up his own international court system in his own head, in which mentioning his name with that little copyright symbol attached to it apparently means that you owe him lots of gold.) I haven’t read all of his comments; I’m afraid I’ll end up owing him even more gold if I do.
but still, of the people I stayed in touch with none were happy about having done it in the long term.
@Cassandra: Yikes, I’ve never heard of anyone regretting doing it long term. The worst consequence was getting super annoyed with phone calls and event invitations afterwards.
I wonder if your friends experienced it that way because of the coercion. If they worked in a place where it was integrated into the culture, then maybe the sales pitches to do more courses turn into workplace coercion to do more courses, which would be really unpleasant and something I can easily imagine regretting getting involved in. Or maybe the coercive aspect caused them to do it when they weren’t really in the right headspace? Sorry for the rambly speculation… you don’t have to answer! I’m wondering aloud because I got super curious after taking it about how it has such a strong effect on people, and I’ve never been able to answer that to my own satisfaction. You can’t really observe it working on yourself. So any chance to understand a little more about it is interesting to me.
@Unimaginative– yes, absolutely. I hope it didn’t come across like I was advocating that other people should do it. I mostly just wanted to share the context for that letter, for the benefit of nosy people, as I myself am a nosy person.
In my former workplace people who were considered potential candidates for promotion were taken aside and told very clearly that ongoing participation in Landmark seminars was a requirement for advancement. It wasn’t a matter of just aggressive sales pitches.
That’s not the only reason people regretted doing it, though. Many found the actual experience very unpleasant and harmful. A lot of them felt like they were encouraged to take responsibility for things that were not from any reasonable perspective their fault, and that the way of relating to others that Landmark suggested was very unhealthy for them. One of these people had been sexually abused as a child, and Landmark messed with her head in ways that took a long time for her to get over. She definitely didn’t find the experience empowering or liberating at all.
I’m not really enthusiastic about going into any more detail about this, since things like someone else’s reaction to being encouraged to take responsibility for relationships in which they were sexually abused is getting pretty far into the realm of this is not my stuff to talk about.
Wow, Cassandra, being required to do it? That’s creepy. I’d never heard of them until now, and just did a quick Google. Not for me, that’s for sure. Mind you I LOATHE workshops and group stuff anyway.
For those who wonder WTF we’re talking about – Landmark is the company that was formerly known as EST, based in San Francisco. They’ve been written about a lot, so you can Google them. Here’s one fairly neutral account.
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/07/landmark-42-hours-500-65-breakdowns
If you Google Landmark Forum and let the autocomplete do it’s thing, “landmark forum cult” will immediately pop up. I feel like everyone is going to think I’m being really super mean to AlexB, who’s new, but honestly, this is an organization that multiple different countries officially list as a cult. Some people who’ve done it love it, but many do not, so I feel like a counterpoint is necessary for people who’re completely unfamiliar with it, so here you go.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt/inside-the-landmark-forum_b_90028.html
Yeah, I hate New Age workshops self-help stuff in general so I’m really trying to be fair and filter my dislike to take that into account, but even putting that aside, I know a LOT of people who’ve had negative experiences, going way back to the EST days, since the company is based in my neck of the woods.
And yep, required. But only if you wanted to be promoted, you see, if you were willing to have a mediocre life then that was your choice, you could just choose not to do Landmark…it was pretty creepy, and I’m very glad I left that company.
Ah yes, “only if you wanted to be promoted.” Does the Pancake Parlour chain operate in the US? It’s out here and it’s owned by the Scientologists – and if anyone wants promotion past being a waiter, yup, it’s time to learn all about Xenu and Thetans and the rest.
I”ve heard the term est and never known what it was. I see the Sceptic’s Dictionary isn’t too keen on Landmark (no surprise there).
http://www.skepdic.com/landmark.html
Here’s another account from a former participant. There are multiple cases of people suffering psychotic breaks either during or soon after Landmark training.
http://www.rickross.com/reference/landmark/landmark26.html
Rick Ross’s site has multiple first person accounts.
I know I probably seem like I’m picking on the newbie, but for serious, folks – please be very wary of this organization.
@kittyservant
Here we have Cafe Gratitude, which is heavily associated with Landmark (employees required to take courses), and they’ve been sued multiple times. Only once did I ever go to a Cafe Gratitude, not knowing they were Landmark affiliated before I got there, but I realized as soon as the server started talking to us. You can find lots of stuff about Cafe Gratitude (would you like an a bit of self-doubt and cult recruitment wrapped in an affirmation with your coffee?) via Google. I think they have a lock-down on the MLM cult recruitment via business market in the Bay Area, since I’ve only seen Scientologists a few times (last time I called the BART main office and reported them for setting up their recruiting table in the Berkeley station, right at the time where all the freshmen arrive to start at UC).
That HuffPo article seems pretty fair, actually. Though the journalist comes off like an asshole with her idea that she’s the only person there asking questions or thinking critically– when I went, having read the “cult” claims, I was asking a lot of questions and sharing a lot of doubts with the other participants and they were right there with me, so I think this woman must have been seriously getting people’s backs up to get shut down like she did.
Thanks for the explanation about your friends. It’s definitely not for everyone, though it’s not a cult in any meaningful sense of the word (it doesn’t take your money, cut you off from people in your life or have negative consequences if you walk away– outside the situation in your workplace, where the coercion adds a genuinely horrible dimension to things.)
The Rick Ross article, OTOH, seems like utter bullshit. Millions of people have done the Landmark Forum so I suppose it’s statistically inevitable some of those have serious breakdowns shortly after, but a “skeptic” should know better than to assume causation.
(Shrugs)
You can dismiss all the accounts of people who experienced psychotic episodes after participating in the Forum if you like, but there are a whole lot of them. There’s a reason that they’re on the official cult watchlists for a number of different countries.
Another fun quote from a Landmark devotee!
“People seem to get so angry about this idea of this course because it is confronting. It surely is confronting and it is 3 days of very hard work. People who say they walked out at lunch time… simply were too confronted. They are probably the types of people who walk out on other things that confront them (relationships, jobs, etc… I’d guarantee that). ”
If you didn’t experience the results that were promised, it’s obviously because something was wrong with you. It just proves that you weren’t up to it, not that anything could possibly be wrong with the program itself! A perfect circular argument.
This is another reason why it’s perceived as a cult.
http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=3979
Also, we have a Panic sighting on this page, about 3/4 of the way down. This is clearly from before he decided to trademark himself for fun and profit.
http://www.skepdic.com/comments/estcom3.html
Eh, it’s not a question of dismissing the people, obviously. Just of dismissing the fallacious reasoning process that assumes their breakdowns wouldn’t have happened anyway. The logic doesn’t remotely hold up when you analyse it.
But you seem to have a lot of thoughts on this subject, and I don’t particularly want an argument; I originally just wanted to share what I understood of the context of the letter, and to correct the “abusive brainwashing” melodrama.
I’ll link to one more article I read about it that also struck me as being fair when I read it, and people can do their own research if anyone but us gives a crap.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/dec/14/ameliahill.theobserver?cat=uk&type=article
Yeah, the more I read about Landmark the more I get skeeved out by it. I just don’t buy that convincing people who have suffered abuse that it’s their own fault, in an extremely high-stress environment, “doesn’t look like victim-blaming in practice at all”. How could it not, really? How can you define victim-blaming, if not as telling the victim that they are responsible for their victimization?
I also can’t go back and read that letter and accept both that it is representative of the Landmark Forum and that Landmark is great and there’s nothing problematic about it at all. I mean, that letter, taken as true, is really alarming, especially given what we know about PA:N(C). I can’t see something that fosters that kind of thinking as being positive.
The thing is, what The Forum does is potentially very dangerous. It doesn’t produce really negative results in everyone, some people come out OK (annoying to those who have to listen to their sales pitches, but otherwise OK), but for the people who it does hurt them it really really hurts them. And I just don’t buy the idea that there are bound to be a few psychotic breaks any time you have X number of people doing something as being a good excuse, because the thing about self-help seminars is that, no matter what disclaimers they make you sign, by their very nature they tend to attract a lot of people who’re already psychologically vulnerable, and the organizers know that. And if you put that much pressure on people who’re already in a vulnerable state, and some of them snap, I think the organization that put them under that pressure is responsible for what happens to those people, even if they did sign up willingly.
Obviously when it’s a situation like my at former employers it’s exponentially worse, because if people do those forums with their bosses then it gives the bosses a lot of really personal, emotionally painful information about their underlings, and when you combine that with a culture that encourages people being confrontational with each other, well, you can see how that doesn’t work out very well. I’m still amazed that HR allowed that to happen.
On the victim-blaming stuff, yeah, that’s a big part of my problem with it too. If you look at the letter from Panic’s wife, there’s just nothing healthy about what she was encouraged to do, and that situation could have ended even more badly than it has. And when people like Panic do it it seems to feed their egomania in really alarming ways. I think the Landmark training is partially responsible for how delusional he is in approaching his court cases, for example.
I can totally understand how people get drawn into this stuff, and why they’re so evangelical about it afterwards. The program is designed to make people who do it evangelical – it’s not their fault, it’s how the system is designed to work. A lot of self-help stuff produces basically no effect at all, so it’s a waste of money but essentially harmless otherwise, but this particular group can actually be really dangerous to some people, which is why I felt like I needed to counteract the no-honestly-it’s-awesome stuff.
I jjust don’t buy that convincing people who have suffered abuse that it’s their own fault, in an extremely high-stress environment, “doesn’t look like victim-blaming in practice at all”. How could it not, really?
Since you’re quoting me… Because blame and responsibility are not the same thing. And taking responsibility for the actions of another person (victim blaming) is never on the cards. Responsibility for our interpretations of other people is the issue, and by looking at that on a really deep unconscious level people can often find a different way to interpret their experience that doesn’t have negative effects on their present life. Thst’s as best I can explain it. It’s not something that happens on the level of analytical thinking.
As for the letter… she obviously wanted to save her marriage, so she was trying to find ways to take responsibility. I guess three days wasn’t enough for her to see she needed to leave, but she did within a few months.
I went through a similar process with an ex, actually, who wasn’t abusive and terrible like PANIC but was wrong for me. I tried many times to take responsibility for my failures in communication that were making it not work then it just clicked for me that what I really needed to take responsibility for was staying in a relationship that I didn’t enjoy any more.
Anyway, hope that answers it for you as it’s getting uncomfortable to talk about.. I’m not sure I can explain it better than this, anyway.
Also has panic actually done the training? I get the impression he hasn’t.
More links. It’s the mental health disclaimers that are particularly interesting to me.
http://dialogueireland.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/the-landmark-forum-disclaimer-to-be-read-by-all-participants/
This one’s interesting too. I wonder if Ithiliana has access to the American Journal of Psychiatry archives?
http://www.cultnews.com/archives/000781.html
Wow….that sure is a lot of comments. 294 comments..most made by brainless morons…and most trying to refute what eastern european women have said to me.
Why do you western people hate eastern european women so much as to deny their agency and deny they have a right to live their life as they please?
Why do you hate them so much that you want to impose your hate filled world view on to them?
I have seen this new woman once since this article was published and we got along quite well…she is really nice.
As for lies like this.
“You see, Mr. Nolan (c) has set up his own international court system in his own head, in which mentioning his name with that little copyright symbol attached to it apparently means that you owe him lots of gold.”
The Mens Business Association will have its own courts because the current legal system is a satanic criminal cartel. If mangina manboobz is not willing to tell you this “news” then don’t be blaming me. I have sent a letter out to more than 800 sitting politicians including all members of the US senate and congress denouncing the current legal system as a criminal cartel. Mangina manboobz obviously used my copyrighted name and the copy right is held under uniform commercial code.
Mangina manboobz would have to argue he does not know what they copyright symbol meant….and I do not think that argument would be believe by any member of a 12 man jury.
I see mangina manboobz has also been kicked off reddit for his dishonesty. One thing about dishonest men…once identified as dishonest anyone who listens to them deserves everything they get….and in mangina manboobz case you just get lies.
Comfortable lies but lies no less.
There is a LOT going on in that head of yours.
Also, I’ve been unbanned from Reddit.
Wait lemme get this straight, Mr. Peter-Andrew:Nolan(c):
You’re going to sue David
under the copyright code of literally a TOTALLY DIFFERENT COURT SYSTEM
which will replace our existing, evil, one
which you will install, somehow, as a result of sending out 900 letters to people who almost certainly have no idea who the eff you are
And then, when you have literally overthrown the court system
You will try David, and somehow the defense of “This wasn’t illegal in the court system that existed before Spanky’s revolution” will not be seen as reasonable under the scrutiny of 12 of his peers
And then he’ll have to pay you a thousand troy ounces of gold.
…
and you don’t think this plan of yours sounds at all unrealistic?
You, sir, are truly an idea man.
Yo, Petey,
Technically David didn’t even say your name. Your name is Peter-Andrew: Nolan©, wheras David wrote Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c). Hell, even your username is wrong. You probably aren’t even the real Peter Nolan. 😛 Feel free to send me a bill, though.
Yeah, I’d really hate to live in a world where sending a letter means anything at all. Good thing we don’t live in such a world. I could spam every senator in the US with a script and it wouldn’t mean a god-dang thing.
(By the way, I remember watching your video of you “in” court. That was… spectacularly special. Funny enough, the judge has probably had to sit through much worse bull than you. He was completely unfazed.)
Also, there’s this (back to the name thing)
source
So in actual fact you cannot copywrite a name, (since it’s too short). You could add a ™ to your name, but it wouldn’t mean jack unless you actually got it registered. And knowing you, you wouldn’t ever actually go through the effort of beurocracy unless you could pretend it happens automatically.
Did PAN leave? Because if not, I was hoping he’d tell us about the time he stared down a pack of vicious, snarling dogs.