Back in the day – way, way back in the day – dudes opposed to women’s suffrage loved to depict suffragettes as ugly spinsters (that is, when they weren’t depicting them as sexy young women using their feminine wiles to manipulate men into supporting suffrage). We looked at some examples of this yesterday and noted that, when it comes to dismissing feminists as uggos, some things never change.
But why, oh why, are feminists so (allegedly) ugly? Or, to turn the question around, why are so many (allegedly) ugly women (allegedly) drawn to feminism?
Well, we’re in luck, because some manosphere dickwads have stepped forward to provide us with possible explanations.
Over on Freedom Twenty-Five, the “red pill” Casanova who calls himself Frost offers this theory:
Feminism is the set of ideologies whose aim is to redistribute the natural allocation of access to desirable men. It is Marxism in the Sexual, rather than Economic Marketplace.
Frost is so proud of this sentence of his that he puts it in bold, as I have. He continues:
The ultimate goal of the Feminist is to create a world in which all women are as hideous and awful and dead inside as they are, so that everyone can have an equal timeshare in the alpha harems, and everyone’s fatherless offspring can be raised by the same uninspired bureaucrats in the same grey-walled, concrete and plate-glass buildings.
I can confirm that this is indeed the ultimate goal of feminism; we talk about it at all the secret meetings. The penultimate goal? To get Sleater-Kinney back together again.
Frost breaks it down:
– Feminists tend to be some combination of fat, old, ugly, abrasive, and slutty.
– Feminists want to convince men that we should be attracted to fat, old, ugly, abrasive sluts.
– Feminists want to convince women that it is OK for them to be fat, old, ugly, abrasive sluts. They want desirable women to become fat, old, ugly, abrasive sluts, so that the feminists no longer look so bad in comparison.
– Related to (1) and (2), Feminists want to convince men and women that it is immoral for men to not be attracted to fat, old, ugly, abrasive sluts.
This is why Feminism is working so passionately to ruin American women. [Who benefits] from the widespread adoption of feminist beliefs that destroy our once-slim, once-feminine, once-nurturing women? The answer, first and foremost, is the women who were already destroyed to begin with.
Feminists know that, in a monogamous world where everyone pairs up with an equally desirable mate, they could only ever earn the favour of weak, bottom-feeding men. Feminist ideology, i.e. the hysteric and childish whining about Patriarchy, Shaming Language, and Socially Constructed Gender Roles, is no more than the set of rationalizations with which they seek to drag the rest of womankind down to their level.
Over on the blog of a fellow named Anatoly Karlin, meanwhile, a commenter calling himself fcomp has a similar theory to explain why so many feminists are (allegedly) fat fatties.
If you think about it, there is a strong rationale [sic] self interest between feminism and the increase of female obesity. If feminism is to be defined as increasing the societal power of women, then it would serve them well for their to be more obese women.
Go on.
The desirability of a women to a man is far more objective then subjective. If women were to be, across the board, more attractive, if all women became, at minimum, 6s, men who ended up marrying 6s, the men who would be the lowest in male desirability in such a society, wouldn’t nearly be as unhappy as men who end up marrying 1s in our society.
I’m not quite sure that fcomp really understands how averages work. Lake Wobegon aside, you can’t actually have a world in which all women are above average in “objective” desirability.
The logical result of that, is that in such a beautiful society, ironically, the value of female beauty would become far less valuable, and beauty would be far less desired. If there isn’t a chance that one might end up with a landwhale, I suspect that most men would hardly bother with stuff like game and the like. I would imagine that such a society would experience little sexual discrimination, but at the same time, be very anti-female, in the sense that women who are competitive with men in economically productive fields would be quite successful, but at the same time, “feminine virtues”, a females capacity attracting men, the only area in which women surpass men, would be far less valued.
If all women are beautiful, then no women are beautiful?
There is a upper cap on female attractiveness, which are the feminine ideals hardwired into us by evolution, but there is no downward cap. … [F]eminism is intrinsically a downward trend because the only thing a beautiful women can do to that makes herself more desired in a society, is to reduce the amount of beauty in that society.
The blogger on whose blog this muddled comment was posted, Anatoly Karlin, is so impressed with fcomp’s theory that he highlights it in a post of his own, adding
This is why your typical Third Wave feminist or rape activist is fat, has a manjaw, or is otherwise unattractive.
If you are ugly, devaluing beauty is not bad evolutionary strategy.
On a blog called Misanthropy Today, meanwhile, Dan Y. is not only convinced that (most) feminists are ugly; he also seems bitter that anyone would dare criticize him for calling women ugly.
[M]ost women who try to guilt us out of using looks as a criterion for judgment tend to not be very attractive. It makes sense that someone lacking in a certain perceived quality would want to dissuade others from assigning value to that quality, and would want those who possessed that quality to be humble and not flaunt it. It also seems extremely self-centered and petty to try to convince others to think and feel a certain way just so we can marginalize our lesser qualities. …
Feminists’ cries of outrage at man’s obsession with physical beauty are not altruistic. They are … upset that other women are benefitting from a quality that they don’t and probably never will possess. Their own perceived value relative to better-looking women will inevitably increase if looks are dismissed as unimportant.
Apparently, suggesting there’s more to a person than conventional attractiveness = shallow and petty. But basing your judgment of a particular women largely on whether or not she gives you a boner is the height of sophistication.
As these guys show again and again, real ugliness is more than skin deep.
I may need to get to No need for a shallow grave tomorrow. Too much stimulation today.
@EJ
Perhaps less social privilege and more something like this (but where what one knows affects how one understands tangentially related things), but the privilege is certainly in there when it comes to discounting what one’s conversation partner/opponent finds most important. At the vary least a person should be able to address another persons concern in specifics as well offering one’s own.
@Lanariel
I may be able to help as well, from the point of view of someone with some experience. Scildfreja is probably better at articulating the related science, but I still need to internalize what they said. I’ve had to struggle against disordered thought patterns related to intensity issues my whole life. “Black and white thinking”, also called “polarized thinking” is something I have dealt with. It’s like when emotions become intense one’s thoughts go to the simplest category or solution or related feature and try to stay there at all costs. It’s taken some effort but I’ve learned to make altering my mental categories a priority so that even though I can be very emotionally intense I can take the diversity in a category, related solutions and less obvious related features into account. Every category contains a diversity and every concept has a connected concept.
Let me think for a bit and I may have more.
Thank you, Scildfreja. It’s fascinating to hear the science of this.
If I may pass on a book recommendation, I have been recommended Gabor Maté’s writings on human cognition and emotion. I found them amazing: almost every chapter taught me something about myself that I had struggled to put into words. Importantly, Maté comes with strong scientific and medical credentials and is (I am told) in line with research.
Maté’s also a mystic and has written about mysticism, which supports Scildfreja’s point about holding contradictory beliefs.
You don’t even have to hold contradictory beliefs. You need only withhold judgment.
If you approach every issue the way an accountant or an auditor/ tax assessor does. That’s funny, is the starting point. But you can’t know whether there’s anything worth your detailed attention until you’ve added up some columns of figures or checked out some invoices or calculated some income-expense-profit ratios. Having done that, you might finish up certain that something (or nothing) is wrong. You might finish up with some doubts that can’t be settled. You might have to stop there or pursue further avenues of enquiry.
All through this, you have to refrain from conclusions and withhold belief one way or the other. Sometimes there is no way to settle the question and it has to stay unresolved. It may resolve itself with further information from continuing business/income. it may not.
It’s even more important to do that with questions that can’t be settled with a conventional calculation or a crucial piece of paper. In these cases, people can resolve it by further reading-thinking-conversations that start, and stay, within the boundaries of no particular position to advocate or defend until some science or analysis or data moves you one way or another.
@ mildlymagnificent (& EJ cause maths)
Tangentially related: I did a forensic accountancy course once (run by the people who’d fiddled Enron’s books so presumably they knew what they we’re taking about)
We were told that a really quick way of spotting fraudulent accounts was just to put all the numbers into a spreadsheet and do a frequency anlalysis of the digits. Now one might expect the result to be a fairly even spread with each digit cropping up about 10% of the time. And indeed that’s what you get with fraudulent accounts where people have just made up the numbers. In real accounts though the frequencies cluster (i.e. some numbers appear much more or less often than you’d statistically except). Real world numbers aren’t random.
This phenomena was first spotted when someone noticed that some pages in old log table books were more worn than others.
I’ll leave it to EJ to explain why that is.
I got nothin’. Actual hard numbers would be a dream to me. Every number I work with has an enormous “plus or minus” attached to it. If we’re lucky, the number itself is larger than that “plus or minus” amount.
@ EJ
What actually got me thinking about this was that the first thing we learned on that course was that accounting is not objective (which seemed a bit counter intuitive).
But they were able too prove that to us when we went through the accountancy standards. We could make anything either an asset or a liability at will.
So that old joke about the accountant asking “what do you need the answer to be?” turns out to be completely true.
ETA: Yeah, get where you’re coming from there. “The answer is 3.284628836351574880504; +\- 10 million”
@Alan
Do you mean Benford’s Law
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXjlR2OK1kM
TLDW: the number 1 will appear more often than 2, and 2 than 3, and so on due to addtive distance. 1 is just closer. It also operates on a similar principle to how win loss percentage works. Losing reduces your percentage more than winning again raises it. But this is in reverse. The probability of a leading digital being a 1 increases during the teens way more than it decreases during the rest of the double digits. Thus the probability overall never drops below ~11% and averages out at 30%
@ Scildfreja, Brony, EJ, Alan, Midlymagnificent
Thanks a lot for the time and willingness to help. You have given me a lot to ponder already.
Today when I woke up I felt like I finally have a purpose, a plan, something to focus on. My mind feels calm and clear for the first time in a month.
This is a rare gift you have given me and I hope I can come back if/when I have more questions or if I just need somebody to talk to about this.
I hope I can someday repay the kindness and courtesy you have all given me.
If you excuse me, I have a lot of reading to get to. I’ll try to time a open thread or a derailed one for further conversations.
@ axe
Apparently I do; or something related anyway. I enjoyed the video, even though I couldn’t understand half* of it. I’ve looked at their stuff before when maths literate people have mentioned things. They’re pretty good at explaining.
(* 90% is the same as ‘half’ right? Like I say, I’m not good at maths)
@Lanariel: as a rule, when a thread reaches the third page, we’ve either managed to derail it ourselves, or are playing with a troll that David has let through for our amusement.
If you’d like even more reading on cognitive error, O recommended a few books in another thread. I think EJ had read ‘thinking fast and slow’ and agreed (or was it ‘how we decide’?).
Everyone else’s posts are completely right, I don’t disagree with anything they’ve said.
Being happy to not-decide is an important (and surprisingly difficult) skill. I’d actually claim that it’s impossible to not hold an opinion on any given topic, it’s just a question of how conscious you are of your opinion, and how concrete that opinion is.
Brony’s comments on the intensity of emotion are also super valuable (as are all of his comments really). Intense emotions implies the activation of the fight-or-flight response, which pushes the brain into problem-solving mode. This isn’t a two-trains-leave-the-station-at-the-same-time sort of a problem solving mode, though, it’s much more along the lines of a how-do-i-get-some-food-before-we-starve mode. It’s short-term, it evaluates problems by emotional values, it heavily considers in-group vs out-group (it’s tribal, though I hate that term), and it doesn’t care much about logic or long term consequences.
(In short, it’s part of the stereotype that MRA’s love to cast on women. There’s nothing gendered about the response, though; happens to everyone. It’s part of how we think)
A good lesson from that is to ensure that you’re well-fed, well-rested, and safe when you’re trying to decide on things.
<3 much love, Lanariel! I'm really happy that we were able to help, and I hope that you keep commenting (though yeah, a more recent thread would probably help the comment from getting lost). Don't worry about disrupting conversations, just hop on in whenever the mood strikes. We're happy to have you here!
No need for a shallow grave is less important than this. I’m still doing it because I think there are some valuable points to be made in the analysis. I’ll have it up by tomorrow for sure.
@Scildfreja
Interesting. One of the hypotheses I’ve had about tourette’s syndrome is that I’m in a permanent state of fight or flight, in some respects at least. There are reviews that cover how the HPA axis and stress is heavily involved in TS (with no typical stress related health effects oddly) and psychosocial stress during pregnancy is one of the risk factors. I still think this is a feature and not a bug.
Don’t worry about voice of authority mode. You do it well and aren’t the type to abuse it.
@Lanariel
I’m going to play off of what Scildfreja wrote above in terms of my experiences. Changing your mind is a process. You don’t so it all at once and you try to do it in stages.
In this kind of situation the first step involves making new “perceptual filters” for the behavior you are trying to control. You get used to feeling and understanding what is already going on in a non-judgmental way. That is important because you just want to understand that way of feeling by itself uncontaminated by other things. It can be hard to sweep away guilt or other things, but it’s justifiable to have some compassion for yourself because we don’t get to choose everything about how we end up and life can be pretty shitty. If nothing else it’s important going forward and change adds some meaning to the mistakes you may have made (though one still should make up for what one can). You may the help of other people who can let you know when you are “getting that way” so you can stop and feel it (sometimes we can’t do it without other people because these are fast acting impulses).
Another way at looking at why it’s hard to change your mind is that your past is etched into your responses, your experiences wanting to be expressed in the present. That programming does not want to go away, especially if it’s related to stress responses. Because of this I find it better to concentrate on coming up with new responses to situations that make you act in a black-and-white fashion. Over time the old ones can atrophy from neglect, but they rarely ever completely disappear as potential reactions. Emotions are among other things urges-to-action, you need to give your mind something to connect the urge to.
You will have to find your way, but maybe my way can help as an example. I basically practiced over and over. I have been arguing online for over two decades and I made it a habit to type up my response when angry, and then come back to it in a couple of hours. And then look at it again the next day. See the places where I was too simple, or intense, or just plain wrong (I was also watching other people argue with one another, reading about skepticism and fallacies and other things). Eventually it got easier to remember how I was feeling when I wrote something that I did not like and at this point I can be angry and rational and logical. One of the things I managed to install was an ability to see things they way the other person meant it even if just to disagree. Another thing was to always admit that I was wrong when wrong no matter how difficult. Still another was that thing about always assuming that a category contains a diversity, and that everything has related concepts and subjects. That makes it easier to look for them even when angry. You can still react fast, just get in the habit of adjusting those reactions to make them better and be able to justify them so that you know why you do what you do. Intensity can be controlled.
I am less inclined to be charitable, but it is a part of my range of responses. I’m not judging it, it just comes down to different strategies and in my case it is admittedly more consistent with my psychology to bash and put on a show for the audience (role-modeling, admitting you are wrong burns all the hotter however…making it even more important as a habit). More charity is a perfectly legitimate way to go and has its own shortcomings, advantages and frustrations, as does shaming and bashing and counting on the audience to want to be different. Both have their place in a diverse social conflict.
I would also disagree on there being only one right option in general, thought I trust that the things that Scildfreja has in mind as example are legitimate in only having one right option. Sometimes there are several options or a best option, and other things it’s so inherently subjective that reality dictates that there is no right option, there is only what is. For example is it funny or not? To some yes and to some no so it’s funny and not funny at the same time, especially when the humor involves intergroup conflict.
@No Need for a Shallow Grave
Comment 1
1)Shaming language and civility. Given that shaming is a natural part of what we are as a species it’s your job to show that we should not be shaming anyone, if that is your position. Your comment was quite short on detail despite the wordiness.
2) You mention a logic to the MRA arguments, yet you do not actually state it. If you are so smart and intelligent you should be able to do so. From my position they basically shove their idea of attractiveness over as an absolute with no evidence whatsoever that it is an absolute. Standards have been very different across the centuries and millennia, what is this logic you claim to see? You don’t even try to state what it is and that is in keeping with the rest of your comments,. empty assertions cloaked in pretended sophistication.
3) What is the ad hominem that you are referring to? Until you actually point it out you remain a name-caller. Things are not ad homs just because you say so.
4) You speak of truth and mental improvement, but you attach these words to nothing specific. This is still in keeping with the rest of your comments. Empty assertions and fancy talk with no substance whatsoever. Whatever neuroplasticity you are working on apparently has nothing to do with adding substance to your assertions.
5) Who cares if you value decency? WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY DECENCY? That word is floated around casually by xenophobic bigots of many kinds, how are you differentiated from them? Why should I believe that we share a definition of decency? Additionally why would you think that anyone here would have any interest in you with respect to intimacy on this issue? So many empty assumptions and assertions.
Comment 2.
6) Per your response towards Future Robot you put decency in quotes. At the minimum that means that you realize that there is a difference in meaning between us. Get with the defining or be shown to be deficient.
7) What vitriol? Again you don’t provide any detail. What is it you have a problem with? Why should I give a fuck? Why would rational folks care about what you are unable to articulate? Perhaps it’s less rationality and more settled in-group biases that you are appealing to, so you feel no need to define what you have a problem with.
Comment 3.
8) This one is a continuing issue in more solid form. you don’t give the examples you what you claim to be seeing. I want to be charitable, but for someone who claims to be so smart I have to see this as simple intellectual cowardice, and moral cowardice due to the subject matter. What “shaming language” specifically? Why is shaming language a problem? You don’t say. You just assert it and that is tired and boring.
You do know that just because emotion is present in a communication that reason and logic is not absent right? That shaming does not preclude reason and logic for shaming? That is rhetorical, I already know that you know no such thing based on the set of your communications.
You like many others are totally confused on the matter of emotion and communication. You don’t realize that emotion is in everything that our minds respond to, that we use emotion even when we use reason and logic.
9) What is this equation bullshit? I can see that you are dropping a model for how you think people are responding to you and how you see yourself as actually expressing yourself. However you have forgotten what it was like back in school when we were learning basic algebra. There is more than just a mathematical expression of a phenomena, there is also the data that goes into constructing it if it is a model of the world (or a table of X and Y values). You provide nether to go along with your assertions about yourself and others. Have the courage that your intelligence demands and give us the specific examples that you used to construct these models of reality.
10) examples of the male perspective being reduced to “boner”. I, as a male, demand that you show me what the fuck you are talking about. I’ve seen people here humorously reduce the statements of misogynists to “boner”. Without your examples, that you hate to give, I can’t tell the difference so I choose to think you are a trolling fool until shown otherwise.
11) Think what you want of how your comments have been received. The quality of your words is piss poor to say the least and I look forward to you joining the ranks of the manosphere as your deficiencies will make them less capable. And AGAIN you do not specify anything when making these statements. Bee’s nest? You got a typical reaction from human beings that don’t enjoy unevidenced assertions about their character.
Comment 4
12) Where the fuck did you get the impression that weirwoodtreehugger was responding to you personally? They even used the term “male perspective” which has to do with a group tendency, not a personal one. Are you that fucking dense? Or are as I suspect here pretending to be reasonable and interactive?
How was weirwoodtreehugger rude? You never actually get specific on any of this stuff and as a fellow male person you would be wise to start getting very specific because at the moment I’m seeing you as non-specific in a cowardly way. You want to minipulate the behavior of another without actually offering any reasons for it. Sad and pathetic.
Comment 5
13) I’m going to back up Scildfreja on the issue of shaming language by again pointing out that you do not have the personal courage to point to examples of the general problem to which you refer. Until such time that you exert the effort to outline the specifics that enabled you to construct that general pattern of behavior among the commentariat I will simply assume that you are a lazy troll. Have the courage of your convictions or remain pathetic and non-specific, forever reacting to things that make you feel funny.
Having said that, what the fuck are you on about with respect to “lizard brains and questing for justice”? Fucking seriously, you never actually tie any of that pablum to anything specific in what other people have said. Frankly that is why I gave my little speech on emotion earlier in this comment. You were that tiresome and useless. Who the fuck care what whales ponder on when the people here are interested in things that directly pertain to them?
14) What drives are you even talking about when it comes to overriding anything? You never even point out example comments? What drives are altering the reason and logic of anyone’s comments in specific terms? You are seriously the sort of commentator that tests my ability to remain polite because of the literal assertions of irrationality and illogic that lurk in your assertions. Cowardly assertions. I’ll be blunt, if this were in public I would in your face you rude, cowardly, failed primate. Be better than this, it’s not too late.
15) Who cares what you believe about human language? How do those beliefs tie into specific things in the comments or main blog post here? This is nothing more than your pissing on things like a dog, making comments for the sake of making them, they tie to nothing. If you wish for your comments to have real human value you WILL tie them to specific examples that directly pertain to the reason and logic within. Anything else is mere noise.
You don’t tie those three mathematical relationships to anything, pathetic.
I’m done at this point. You have been a distraction whose value is only contained in understanding how you are trying to sway people based on empty statements with no persuasive value beyond the emotional impact of the technical terminology. Try again.