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.
I feel like, if you can’t trust your partner to the point that you feel the need to track her ovulation without their knowledge or consent in case she cheats on you, you should probably leave her. That sounds like a not-fun relationship to be in, for either party.
Yeah, THAC0 was what they came up with when people got tired of cross-referencing their character’s class and level with the Armor Class on the charts in the DMG just to find out the magic number they needed to roll to hit the monster (the DM was presumed by the rules to be doing all the dice rolling).
And it was easier. Just subtract your target’s AC from your THAC0 to get the magic number, then roll the d20 and add all your bonuses to hit to see if you succeeded. The thing was, it was hung up on the whole Armor Class Goes Down thing and you needed to know that if you subtract a negative number (AC could generally go as low as you could get it) you’re actually adding its absolute value.
What they do now with the Armor Class Goes Up and Everything Adds to the Dice Roll is even simpler, but they didn’t think about it in the 80s because AD&D was closer to its miniatures roots than 3E is, despite the detailed rules for using miniatures in 3E.
Also, not everything was backwards. Saving throws and attack rolls worked on rolling high; ability checks and nonweapon proficiencies wanted you to roll under a number (so that an 18 was better than a 9, you see). Armor Class went down because Gygax was used to it, it came out of miniatures gaming, and he assumed everyone would see how simple it was (but simple and a pain in the arse are not mutually exclusive). But that minus sign in front of the number looks like a bad thing to most people, especially when the word “bonus” follows, as in “a -2 bonus to Armor Class.”
GURPS is an example of rolling under a number to accomplish a task, and it avoids confusion because all the modifiers apply to the magic number; when you roll 3 dice and add them up, you’re not adding anything but the die results.
Yeah, that is the healthy view of relationships. Those guys, however, feel entitled to owning a woman. Yet at the same time, they are incapable of trusting any woman. So by their logic and sense of entitlement, they believe that what they are doing is justified. It makes me sad for the women that end up in relationships with those guys. It’s hard to even articulate what is wrong with a relationship involving emotional abuse and head games like that, let alone overcoming the programming that the victim deserves it somehow.
@Stepford:
I don’t know about that. When you’re single and lonely it DOES suck that love works in mysterious ways. It DOES suck that there’s nothing you can do that guarantees that you find a loving partner. It DOES suck that you might end up in loneliness for years and years or maybe forever by sheer bad luck.
So it’s not like I can’t understand that people wish for love to be “logical”, that they wish it were the case that there were certain things to do and when you’ve done them you’re gonna get the love you DESERVE.
People need to understand that this isn’t the case, yes, and the MRA idea of WHAT you should do to get the love you deserve is truly horrible, but the wish for love to be logical isn’t strange.
Ovulation *is* hidden- so well-hidden that it’s usually also hidden from the very people it’s happening within…
Being a biologist and the owner of a female reproductive system means I get doubly annoyed when people who are neither try to tell me how such a system works.
I’m that person.
For the record, I’m grateful (a) that a safe, legal abortion was an option my mother had nine years before her planned and wanted pregnancy (me), and (b) to that fetus, insofar as it had any kind of person-ness about it, for not-living so that I could live instead.
…Incidentally, I often bring this up when people say that abortion “thwarts God’s plan!” O RLY? Because basically you just implied that I (who would not be here but for an abortion) am not in “God’s plan.” That’s one hell of a narrow-minded jerkface God you have there, innit?
Dani, I’m glad you got born when and where your mother wanted 🙂
The Stepford Knife: I actually get ovulation cramps. Maybe it’s part of the dysmenorrhea?
Kathleen B- that’s why I said “usually”- I’m aware some women get cramps and there are other ways some (but by no means all) women can tell (body temperature, changes in secretions), but a lot of women still have to use ovulation testing kits, or use a thermometer to detect a very slight temperature change which may not be noticeable otherwise. My point was us women don’t get a siren ringing in our ears and flashing red signs on our retinas which say “MWAHAHAHAHAHA IT’S SPERM-STEALING TIME” every time we ovulate.
I have no earthly clue when I ovulate and my periods are irregular. So yeah.
Good point Tosca, and even if you’re regular as clockwork and do get signs they can be unreliable and there’s no way of knowing for sure- even testing kits can be unreliable.
Reading the comments here I’m wondering why MRAs aren’t campaigning for awareness of the contraceptive implant- I have one in my upper arm which means I don’t get periods at all, and of course that I also don’t get PMT (though I’m very lucky here and never got it before either). My boyfriend, should he so wish, could also check it’s still in there simply by feeling my arm (but he doesn’t do this because we actually respect and trust each other). Of course they’re not suitable for all women but surely an MRA’s ideal woman would have one? Or do they tend to be against giving women control over their bodies? From what I’ve seen here and elsewhere it seems that the latter applies- what’s the official MRA position on this and does it make as little sense as everything else they say?
That, and even when I knew I was ovulating, it didn’t make me feel cheaty-er. It mostly just ached in my side and sometimes came with a migraine.
Speaking as a kid who came about at a very inconvenient time, the forced birther can go fuck off.
No child should one day come to the realization that they weren’t wanted, that their arrival forced majoir changes in life plans and major sacrifices their mother felt compelled to make simply because there was no other way. Shot gun weddings…had my best friend in highschool suffer through the suicide of her father on her thirteenth birthday, because her parents had been forced to marry and it was his only way out as far as he was concerned. I know people who’s parents have beggared themselves, because after having the kids they wanted and planned for,one more came along when menopause should have made it impossible.
I myself had to deal with resentment my mother hd when I went off to college and started doing all the things she couldn’t. That resentment was directed at me, I jus got caught in the backwash. And God help the poor kids who are stuck with parents who do not love them and deeply resent them.
You can talk about adoption all you want, but society places considerable pressure on women to keep their children as I well know from experience.
“That, and even when I knew I was ovulating, it didn’t make me feel cheaty-er.”
It’s true that a woman’s libido can go up and down at different points in her cycle, I’ve certainly experienced this but it never made me think “hmmm, I suddenly feel like sleeping with someone else today”.
There’s more MRA hypocrisy there- men are allowed to blame their actions on their hormones but women who do the same are seen as weak and considered failures for not being able to override them and be in complete control of their bodies.
@pillowinhell
Ayup.
My experience was pretty mild in comparison to yours, but there’s just something about realizing in my 20s that, no, my parents didn’t decide to have me in their late 30s–after they’d finally gotten my perfectly spaced (2 years apart) siblings into school and my mother could go back to work–because they thought I would “keep them young” as they’d always claimed. The subtle resentment and snide comments suddenly made so much more sense.
I think that my family would have been happier if my mother had aborted the pregnancy leading to me. I’m okay with the thought of never having existed. The only thing that bothers me is that I can’t understand is why they went through with it and I can’t ask.
Nepenthe and pillowinhell- I also found out I was unplanned a few years back. My parents had children late but it seems I just “came along” at a bad time- my father had just been made redundant so my parents were forced to abandon their glamorous life of travelling for his work and move to a quiet and miserable little town- and then they had the twin struggles of a baby *and* a mortgage. Two years later my planned sister “came along” and made everything alright… I always suspected that they resented me as they could be very emotionally abusive, but they were abusive towards my “precious baby sister” in other ways- infantilising her and literally almost killing her with kindness by overfeeding her until she developed serious health problems.
Looking back I suspect my parents would have been a lot happier if they hadn’t had children at all- my father never seemed very interested in us and my mother seemed to have wanted them purely because her Catholic upbringing had taught her that marriage and children was “the done thing” and seemed to find her new life as a housewife and mother boring and frustrating, though she would never have admitted it. She was also a staunch antifeminist which was a shame because she probably would have been much happier in any role other than that of mother, one of the few which was open to women before feminism.
I can’t say how I feel about the possibility of not being born but I do feel that some people just aren’t cut out to be parents and shouldn’t be pressured (or physically forced) into going along that route, or told marriage and children is some kind of ultimate goal everyone must aim for. I still have family members asking me when I’m going to get married and have kids and while it’s annoying I feel lucky in being able to tell them where to go, and that it’s not for me, thanks.
@Stepford Knife
‘I’m starting to think a minority of fans might see it as a celebration of those less enlightened times and would like to return to a world where men could get away with abusing women and minorities.’
Oh for sure, re. Mad Men. It was a pretty disturbing trend from the get-go, but an excellent litmus test. If anyone watching seriously thought the world was better back then, or that the creators were trying to portray it as better back then (I guess they went to get a beer during all those female-centered storylines?) you could rest assured that they were douches and likely quite illiterate. The same types who probably drove Dave Chappelle out of entertainment by yelling catchphrases to him on the street, missing the point of his humor entirely.
Heck, even as a WANTED pregnancy where my mother never had any abortions/miscarriages (as far as I know) I would be perfectly okay with my parents having aborted me if they didn’t think they could raise me properly.
My dad comes from an abusive home, and my parents worked so freaking hard to give me and my sister the sort of supportive, loving upbringing that he never got. Watching my parents joyfully sacrifice to be good parents makes it really clear that anybody who doesn’t feel ready to do that should have a way out of becoming a parent.
They definitely seem to want all the rights of full-grown adulthood without any of the responsibilities – like controlling your whims or accepting the consequences for not doing so.
Except I’ve yet to see any evidence that any MRAs, or at least the ones who write this sociopathic-sounding, hateful shit have any idea what love is, let alone actually wanting to love or be loved by anyone. They speak of women and children as property, things they despise yet want to fuck and own (and yes, with some of them, like dear ole Uncle Owly or Tom Martin) there’s no clear line between women and children on the ‘fucking’ part. They want women to be their slaves, always unhappy and insecure, always available for sex (but never initiating it, of course), always wiping the lord and master’s arse for him, always feeding him and the kid, never wanting money for anything, never working outside the home, never speaking. They want Stepford Wives, and I don’t think even the most twisted, debased ideas of ‘love’ come into it. Remember Roissy talking about pretending to kill the girlfriend’s cat? That’s exactly how many abusers go, and this is an abuser’s handbook.
If they ever had love in them, they’ve destroyed it. Me, I don’t believe they did.
@Kitten: Yeah, I agree with everything you say.
My only objection was with Stepford’s idea that it’s a GOOD thing that “love works in mysterious ways”. The fact that “love works in mysterious ways” means that there are also perfectly decent people who are lonely due to sheer bad luck, and that honestly sucks for them.
But I don’t argue with anything you say about MRA:s and their view on love.
Having read the referenced post, your post, and the comment guidelines, I am perhaps prepared for potential ridicule. Here goes.
I found your evaluation of the referenced post self-fulfilling and self-serving. Some items worth noting include the following.
You edited his item #4 to exclude reference to items #1 through #3, obfuscating the original meaning.
You took no note of the final remark regarding the applicability of the list to both
genders, especially the male-genital equivalent of #3.
You assert he projects hate for women upon them, but provide no basis for this assertion.
The net result is a very hateful assault upon a man for giving an opinion you are not obligated to heed, and which his supporters will doubtless disregard.
Dare you describe your red pill man as he has attempted a red pill woman? Is your ideal any more praiseworthy or desirable a goal for men as his is for women?
Well, for a start we wouldn’t have any interest in telling men how to be a “red pill man”, since we don’t base our lives or our understanding of the world on a science fiction movie.
My ideal is irrelevant to everyone except guys who want to date me. It doesn’t need to be praiseworthy or desirable for men in general.