Over on Married Man Sex Life, doucheblogger Athol Kay has provided the ladies with a helpful checklist of the things they need to do, or to be, or to do be do be do, to become the ultimate “red pill” girlfriend or wife. But the women he describes sound a lot less like Trinity from The Matrix than the robotified housewives from The Stepford Wives.
Mr. Kay’s list of demands is too long to quote in its entirety, but here are a few of the choicer items:
(4) Understands that there is a sexual marketplace, and that women have an earlier peak of sexual desirability than men do.
Presumably if she forgets this, her manospherian swain will happily neg her back to a properly less-positive assessment of her rapidly decaying beauty as a woman over the age of 14.
(13) Understands that divorce sucks and is more akin to getting treatment for cancer than having cosmetic surgery.
I sort of agree with this one, actually: for women married to Athol Kay’s followers, getting divorced would be a lot like removing a malignant tumor.
(14) Likes men in a general sense for who they are and what they do, rather than detesting all men in general and making an exception for the tiny few in her nuclear family.
(Huh. Project much?)
(15) Understands the risks both men and women take in having serious relationships, and is willing to negotiate ways to verify trustworthiness in each other. Sees doing this as evidence of true commitment rather than an insulting invasion of privacy.
I have no fucking idea what he’s talking about here. Lie detector tests? Waterboarding?
(20) Doesn’t keep the Red Pill a secret from those that need it.
That’s what we need, more women lecturing women on how terrible they are.
I’ve saved the best for last:
(3) Understands that what she does with her vagina always has some sort of consequence.
Seriously. Please think twice before tattooing Homer Simpson on you hoo-hah! (This has actually been done. You’ll have to look up the pictures yourself.)
In the comments, BlackCat adds a 21st item to the list:
(21) Understands that current society/public opinion, the vast majority of churches, and almost all laws, courts and government agencies dealing with families are all biased heavily against men, and that until the incentives and disincentives return to a more balanced state, men are completely justified in being gun-shy and avoiding commitment and other entanglements as much as possible.
Corollary to (21): Appreciates the men, especially informed (red pill) men, who are willing to take the chance at a relationship despite the above, and goes out of her way to prevent them from being taken advantage of, and to publicly denounce those who do take advantage of them.
So come on, gals, start lining up for your chance to jump through endless hoops for the chance to get with a dude who thinks he’s doing you a gigantic favor by even considering dating you in the first place!
While we’re at it, here’s my favorite scene from The Stepford Wives (the original 1975 version, of course), in which [SPOILER ALERT] Joanna, the new gal in Stepford, discovers that her friend Bobbie is no longer the free-spirited Women’s Libber she thought she knew.
Men not being “real” isn’t widespread. But I remeber the reaction to young men who really got into the rap and hip hop scene when that first went main stream.
Also, metrosexuals seem to be targets for the fake lable. Or Goths. Well probably more like unreal, but its seen as putting on a show.
So for men its about, cultural appropriation, doing things in ways normally expected of women, some elements of social class and epecially the novelty and or youth.
aworldanonymous: I dunno, just everyone being drunk right now has lead me to realize how much I hate being drunk, which has led me to realize how different I am from most people, which has led me to realize how alone I really am in life.
You may be an apparent minority, but you are far from alone. Be gentle with yourself. It’s a lot to take in, and moving is a high stress thing.
It gets better.
Phil: I take it, Dave, that you’re not in a committed relationship. Yes, there are hoops to jump through. Just like there’s hoops to jump through in friendships, and when you work for someone, or when you work for yourself for that matter. Life (and if you want to get philosophical about it: all of society) is about give and take. And frankly, if you consider being considerate and empathetic in a relationship to be equivalent to “jumping through endless hoops”, then your attitude is about as bad as any MRA’s.
The list in that post, is one-sided, and not limited to empathy, but seems to require accepting a double standard. If my partner asked for those things I’d say no, which means I can’t, in good conscience, consider it a fair list.
So because Athol Kay didn’t write in a bunch of fine print about making exceptions for abusive men, that invalidates his whole point?
No, it shows that his point is to say abusive men are fine and dandy, because his list maps closely to abusive patterns.
The question then, is how did you attain that level of trustworthiness?
By extending trust. Got to give to get. Testing is a lack of trust, ergo it doesn’t generate trust.
If we’re going to be honest about the tone of a large majority of the manosphere, in sum total it almost seems to be a lament from men, sort of like, “Where have all of the good women gone?”
And this list (and others like it) are the litany of what they see as, “good women”. It doesn’t make the manosphere look good.
But that raises the question, how do you know that Kay is abusive or encouraging abuse?
I don’t know… making a list of demands which parallel the demands of abusers?
FF/Preggo: The Duke Lacrosse case sent the message that feminists thought more men belonged in prison, not fewer.
No. It showed that feminists think rape needs to be properly investigated. Ask yourself (because I expect you to lie to us), how many of the Duke lacrosse team you can name; and what they are doing now.
Now, how many of the people you ask on the street know? How many will go, “what?” if you asked them?
@ lowquacks
I think it was intended to trigger both a feminist and a hippie awakening. Which was funny since I’ve been a feminist since before the person in question was born. As to the hippie part, sorry dude, but there is nothing on this earth that will ever get me into a pair of Tevas. Buy yeah, if you’re a man and you think that the way to support feminism is by telling women what to wear, you’re officially doing it wrong.
(Also, I always notice men’s shoes and clothes too – how does that fit into what I’m charitably going to refer to as the, um, simplistic version of feminism that holds that personal adornment of any kind is unfeminist?)
Anyone who looks at a goth and says “hey, man, that person’s look isn’t real” is so stupid that it’s kind of awe inspiring. What, a look that involves that much time and effort isn’t “natural”? You don’t say. I am truly impressed by your powers of observation.
Next up – how guys in corpse-paint don’t actually get out of the shower looking like that.
(This gets even funnier when you get into the discussions within subcultures about how people who don’t wear all black/corpse-pain and studded wristbands aren’t “real”.)
Lol! Yeah fancy the guy in face paint not getting out of the shower like that! Now, if we could just apply that realization to Angelina Jolie..
Perhaps the she doesn’t look real thing will die a final painful death in the age of photoshop?
Phil: Now, there are questions of whether or not the men asking this are, themselves, good, but that’s besides the point.
Beside the point? No, it is the point. It’s the point you are denying when you pretend a list of the tactics of abuse being the all-important contract the woman must accept as if it were the same as taking turns doing the laundry, or picking up the dry-cleaning.
@pillowinhell
I could see it making things worse too, though. “Real women look gorgeous without all that make-up and fancy clothes. Real women don’t need photoshop. Take it from me, ladies, you’re all beautiful just the way you are, no need to try so hard like those fake bitches.”
The funniest thing is that guys who talk like that honestly expect it to endear them to women. They’re always so shocked when actual feminists are all “wait, would you like to explain why you feel that you’re justified in calling that complete stranger a bitch, and why you’re using a gendered slur at all?”.
FF/Preggo: Other than putting the man who wronged the victim behind bars? I would certainly report a man who assaulted me, regardless of the incentives.
Sure you would, because the people who do that get such even-minded, and fair, treatment from the rest of the world.
Get raped by someone famous (a Kobe Bryant, or a French politician, or an Italian Prime Minister) and it’s all the same as if you were raped by a guy in Central Park.
And no one ever says, “you asked for it by going to a bar”, like that Judge in Arizona, who sentenced the perpetrator (a cop) to community service; nothing more.
No one ever goes to the cops and gets told, “you can file a report, but we won’t do anything” when someone sticks his hand her in her crocth on a bus.
Yeah, because those are disincentives.
during cases such as the Duke Lacrosse and the Strauss-Kahn scandals, politically motivated individuals actually stacked the burden of evidence against the accused rather than the accusers.
Dude… share that shit, because it’s got to be a lot better than anything else. Nothing lasting happened to any of those men.
re Strauss-Khan: True, after evidence was presented that the rape did not occur.
Nope… after the DA decided the defense would be able to paint the complaintant as not-credible. Not the same as no rape occurred.
@CassandraSays
The unfortunate converse is that people can look at someone who has that post0hippie middle-clas-unthreatening-indie Zooey Deschanel/any cute scruffy Wes-Anderson-loving indie-rock dude and say “oh yeah, that’s just how those people look, no work or decisions required at all. Aren’t they so real?”
While we’re on “real”, actually, I know women having to have pubic hair and armpit hair sometimes comes in as a “real women” thing (but god forbid if it’s not perfect cute wispy pit hair), but I’ve never seen anyone in the Western world (apparently there’s some snobbery of this type among some Sikhs? Not really my field at all) say anything like “if you weren’t such a vain fake dude, you’d have a long messy beard. I don’t know why dudes feel they have to scrape a sharp blade over their face everyday or use scissors or a trimmer; that’s so weird.”
Basically the issue here is that there is no such thing as clothing or presentation that’s “neutral”. Regardless of gender, the clothes you choose, the way you wear your hair, all of it is deliberate, and chosen in part because of what you think it communicates to other people. Before some dude comes along and tries the whole “aha! short skirts really are asking for rape!” shit, that’s not what I mean. I mean that a person’s overall look is always about creating a persona, it’s just that society tends to label certain personas as “natural” and “authentic”. And that’s usually tied into class and race and ideas about gender roles in all kinds of ways.
+1 to everything Cassandra just said.
I’m feeling super lazy about blockquotes today.
I think that’s what set people off about embyrr922’s comment, actually, at least in part. There’s this pervasive cultural idea that women who wear jeans and tshirts and not much obvious makeup are “natural”, but that’s just as much a persona as heels and a skirt suit and office-appropriate make-up is, and just as deliberately chosen for what it represents, socially speaking.
(There’s also the idea that femmey looking = huge amounts of time and effort, which is also not always true, but that’s another argument.)
Obviously this isn’t a specific conversation we’re referring to, but I’d interpret this more as “this person looks like a Goth but really isn’t,” putting it in the same “you have failed to jump through all the requisite hoops to belong to my subculture” category of bullshit as the fake nerd girl.
In context I think what he meant was dudes complaining that alternative women aren’t “natural” and “real” enough for their liking, because dyeing your hair makes you a dishonest person or some shit like that.
God, I wish I could just wear clothes without having to deliberately decide what kind of message I want to send.
BUT THEN THAT WOULD BE THE MESSAGE I WAS SENDING OH NOOOOO WHERE DOES IT STOP
My favorite example of how there’s no real neutral and it’s always about a persona for men too was GWB and his hilarious attempts to present himself as a regular just-folks Texas rancher.
(And then there was the flight suit.)
I’ve heard comments that I’ve “changed” myself because I have tattoos and used to have a facial piercing and usually wears lots of make-up. Like, I must be totally insecure, and feel that my natural self isn’t enough!
I just respond with a comment about sikhs. Sikhs believe you shouldn’t change yourself, but stay the way God created you. That’s why they NEVER CUT THEIR HAIR or NEVER SHAVE. So okay, are you a sikh with hair that goes down to your heels if you don’t tie it up, or beard down to your waist (if you’re a man)? No? Then shut up.
I take it, Phil, you’ve never been involved with a “tester”. (Because what this douchebag writes obviously pressupposes that the woman will have no privacy from her significant other, but the significant other will not have to put up with HER reading his mail and tracking his movements.) Well, I have been involved with men like that once or twice, and all I can say is: fuck their so-called “trust issues”, this is abuse.
It’s abuse because a relative or a friend e-mailing to you about their difficulty in coping with cancer, or infertility, or some other intensely private issue probably isn’t counting on that message being read by some woman-hating stranger who needs to scan his girlfriend’s e-mail because he’s that “sensitive” — and it’s massively unfair both to the sender and the recipient. It’s abuse because the feeling of being constantly watched, constantly scanned, wondering whether there is a tracker on your car; having to undergo an interrogation as to why you are ten minutes late coming home from work (and hoping that the traffic jam is actually documented somewhere on the internet, otherwise the torture will continue for days); the embarrassment you endure when your significant other goes through the cell phone bill and calls every number he can’t recognize and interrogates the person on the other end; the frustration that sets in when your man questions you as to why you are looking left, or squinting, or whatever, because he’s just watched some stupid TV show that gave him a formula for how to know if she is lying to you by the direction of her gaze — at the least, it makes you an inmate and your lover the jailer, with all the expected feelings that attend such a relationship, at worst it makes you progressively more afraid, because you are involved with a crazy person who, no matter what you do, will eventually kill you anyway.
Pecunium nailed it, of course, but I would add that men who withhold their trust because they’ve got “issues” with the opposite sex never give it even if the “verification” process goes without a hitch, and the woman passes. That’s because all this testing and monitoring isn’t about “verification” at all — it’s a competition. If your significant other tests you, and you pass, he won’t feel like you deserve trust now, he will feel like you got one over on him; like it’s a game, which you won and he lost. And he’ll resent you for it. He will test you again, and again, and again, in an increasingly rigged fashion, until you finally fail and he can say “Ah-ha!! I always had this funny feeling you weren’t being truthful with me! And voila, I was right!” In other words, victory.
And who, knowing all this, would want to get involved in a relationship that is so conflictual at its core?
I despise the aforementioned bleach-blonde, orange-skin look not because it’s ‘fake’, but because it’s a godawful aesthetic, usually indicative of horrible taste in just about everything. The goth look involves just as much ‘feminine’ primping and make-up but is vastly superior in my eyes, in no small part because much of the music appeals to me along with anything falling under the ‘dark’ subcultural umbrella.
LOL that reminds me of something that happened about fifteen years ago, when I was in my Goth phase. I was on the morning train and had a great pair of boots on – black leather, big Cuban heels, needle-sharp toes and a couple of dozen narrow leather straps and buckles up the front. There were a couple of suits sitting in front of me – this is almost knee to knee on our trains – and one of them spent the whole half-hour journey smirking at my boots and nudging his mate to try to get him to look. (Mate was either oblivious or had better manners, I don’t know.)
When I moved to get out of the train my whole weight, in those heels, came down on suited douchebag’s little toe. Gosh, what an accident, so sorry.
Funny thing is, these days I look at the very high, clunky-looking platforms that are all the rage, and how awkwardly so many women seem to walk in them, and just think, “I should have been a podiatrist, because there is a FORTUNE waiting to be made there.” This is speaking from the other side of having foot and leg problems (not related to high heels, which I didn’t wear that much) catch up with me in middle age! 🙂
Not that it’s just high heels either, of course. I saw someone wearing those whatchamacallums, those running shoes that are more like thick socks, walking down the road a while back. Her ankles just twisted so much as she walked that I wondered if she had the same problem I do – a big difference in leg lengths – and whether the lack of support in those things would be doing more harm than good. Mind you every time I see anyone walking awkwardly I feel like asking them if they know about orthotics. I’ve been converted, lol!
I see the proceeds from your t-shirts go to planned parenthood. What if having you would have been inconvenient for your mom? What if you were the result of one night of indiscretion, and she didn’t want to be reminded of it every day for the rest of her life.
David that means you would not be here. Now you may say oh, my mom isn’t like that, or my mom would never do that.
Well there are lots of girls out there who are careless enough to put themselves in that situation on a regular basis. Do you think it is OK to kill a baby just so a girl can save face, and keep their freedom to continue their careless, stupid, and destructive behavior. I don’t think the 50 million aborted babies, if they had a chance to voice their opinion, would think it was such a great thing.
By the way where are all the women that have done this great thing of having rights to choose what to do with their own body. I don’t see their blogs talking about how liberating it was to exercise this power that is so sacred, important, and necessary.
I won’t post or visit here again because, after learning what you stand for, your site doesn’t deserve to have traffic.
Fly by trolling is so tedious when they bring up nothing new.
Shoo fly, you are not even as nice as the pie.
My pet issue, let me tell you about it.