So over on MGTOWforums, the regulars are pondering the age-old question – should these committed women-avoiders deal with their continued desire to stick their penises in the women they’re allegedly avoiding by resorting to prostitutes?
In the midst of a lively discussion on the advantages of “going pro” over trying to pick up a “bar hog,” one regular by the nom de internet Xtc sets forth some thoughts that, for a moment at least, seem to transcend the usual MGTOW crudity and bitterness.
“I don’t think it’s really about sex,” he writes. “I think what a lot of people are looking for is love, respect, and intimacy – which you can’t buy.”
Why, that almost seems like an insight!
Alas, in his very next sentence he spoils the moment by returning to the standard MGTOW narrative of female perfidy:
I think what put me off women altogether was the realisation that you’ll NEVER get [love, respect, and intimacy] for real. It’s sad and sobering, but that’s the way it is.
Thinking that the attention of women validates you as a person collapses once you realise they are attracted to the worst qualities in the worst men.
Thinking that the attention of women equals affection, intimacy, or love – collapses once you realise they will leave you in a second if they sense any weakness or if a BBD [bigger better deal] comes along. Then you’ll realise that the meter was running all the time, whether this was clear at the time or not.
Women are like a bitter medicine that you force yourself to swallow because you believe it is doing you good. Once you realise it’s a quack remedy, and the whole thing is a scam, you’re free to spit it out and never partake again.
That leaves you with sex alone, which is really rather easy to come by.
If women really and truly are “attracted to the worst qualities of the worst men,” why aren’t they lining up at these dudes’ front doors?
I have to go and shop for supper (we have houseguests, I think they are going to be home for supper). I’ll be back to deal with The Tomes o’ Bob later.
Have fun with the piñata while I’m gone. Save me some candy.
Ah, yes. Eight pages back, or as I like to call it, “the good old days.”
Oh no! I have been led on. They aren’t going to be home for supper, and are keeping my partner from coming home. WOE IS ME! My life is destroyed. Whatever shall I do?
Probably go out and eat at the local estaminet; though the best of those are closed; it being Monday.
“And you are pissed off.
That’s childish. It self-destructive. It’s stupid.”
I was treated poorly, and that makes me childish, self-destructive and stupid. Got it.
” Which is why I said you want the acceptance of the proposal to be the same as the vow; and you don’t believe in divorce.
That makes you a selfish asshole.”
Yes, I am the selfish asshole in this saga. We can agree that it was better for it to end when it did and not after we had gotten married. But I am the selfish asshole in this scenario because…I didn’t get hateful and spiteful with her? I accepted her decision and let her go? Unlike her, I am the one whose words matched his deeds. I am the one who could communicate his needs, concerns and feelings. I am the one who didn’t abandon my putative fiance in the middle of a family crisis , while she never communicated anything other than wanting to move forward. That I might not appreciate how she handled the whole thing, even though I left her alone and abided by her decision, that makes me a selfish asshole and her a courageous and brave soul, according to you? And when MRAs and PUAs and MGOTWs make the argument that society is conditioned to give women a pass for bad behavior, this argument shouldn’t resonate with me because here you are arguing that she is courageous and brave for how she handled the whole thing. Really? You could argue “Hey, she pulled the plug before she hurt you even worse,” but you want to paint her as having the heart of a Lion?
*sigh* I don’t think this one’s ever going to break. We’re gonna have to buy our own candy today.
oh my gord, Bob.
(first-timer here, hi Boobzlanders! I think you all are pretty terrific)
(maybe TW)
story for you: I fell for this guy, let’s call him Kenny! on a study tour I was on, and we got serious really quickly, I moved to a whole new city to be nearer to him, everything was really intense, we talked about marriage, he bought me a gigantic diamond, and we were engaged, and I loved him, and then I started to feel uneasy but I thought it was just nerves and maybe homesickness, so I didn’t say anything. then I saw how his dad treated his family (and me) and how Kenny thought that was perfectly normal and it freaked me out, but I figured getting married would fix that because “our family” would be different. I wanted to keep my commitment, because I still really loved Kenny, and really *wanted* to love Kenny, but the longer we were together the more I realized how incompatible we were and how much of an emotional abuser he was, but I still was sure that if we just got married then everything would be good and okay. and then I started fantasizing about driving my car off a bridge EVERY SINGLE DAY because I didn’t want to get married, didn’t want to be in my relationship anymore, and I was so scared because I didn’t know how to get out of it and I was scared of my fiance.
in a twist, Kenny was the one who broke off our engagement (a month before the wedding) and then tried to sue me for the ring and various other damages, so I don’t know what you want to do with that. but you know what? I don’t think he was faking loving me the whole time or faking wanting a future with me, any more than I was with him. for me I just found out that what I thought I wanted (a traditional marriage with man as head of house and all that) wasn’t even close to what I really did, and for him I think he was fed up with not being able to tell me what to do.
I’m not telling you this because I think you’re a Kenny. but I think you’re being really unfair in painting people as either “100% committed and enthusiastic” or “lying liars who lie”. there really are other options besides “head over heels for me” and “with me out of pity and no desire for me at all”. truly! I wanted to still love Kenny and to still be as excited as I used to be about our relationship, but nothing I did, nothing I tried, did anything except fill me with more dread and cause more and more fights between us where he told me how difficult I was to love and how I didn’t get any say in how many kids we had. it doesn’t mean either of us was faking or lying or promising things just for shits and giggles at the beginning, it just means that the more we got to know each other (and for me, the more I got to know myself) the more obvious it became that we weren’t right for each other.
OK, Bob, reign in the drama…like with this bit:
“..but you want to paint her as having the heart of a Lion?”
And you keep saying you accepted her decision. Read your own posts. You did not accept her decision…at all.
Please answer the following without dragging a horde of strawmen into the conversation: What do you want from us?
“And you keep saying you accepted her decision. Read your own posts. You did not accept her decision…at all.”
I physically accepted her decision. Did she have to deal with me putting on a full-court press trying to win her back? No, she did not. I let her go.
No, you’re the selfish asshole because you’re demanding that other people, not in your relationship, behave a certain way because you believe that you’d be better off if your lady had behaved that way. You’re the selfish asshole because you’ve taken your experience with one woman and used it to condemn most or all women. You’re the selfish asshole because you’re showing yourself capable of handling normal human behavior, like a change of heart, with scorn and bitterness. You’re the selfish asshole because you came here, and made a dishonest argument, then spun it into Bob’s Free Therapy Hour. What do you even want here?
Fuck, man. You’re a selfish asshole because you refuse to see anything you might have contributed to the end of this relationship with a woman who told you she never had long-term relationships and wanted the apocalypse to come. You’re a selfish asshole because instead of attempting to see what underlying personal issues your ex might have had that led to her choices (and, incidentally, I can see several, and I haven’t even heard her pov), you’ve decided that she left you because she’s flighty and wanted to trade up for someone better and blah blah blah Eat Pray Love and reality shows. You’re a selfish asshole because instead of grieving the loss of this relationship in anything resembling a healthy way, you’re trolling a feminist anti-misogyny board with your own deeply personal problems. You’re a selfish asshole because you started this whole conversation here with the proposition that we should go back to the good old days, when women didn’t have any choices other than starve or marry, because you think if that happened your fiancee would have had no choice but to marry you.
Trust me. You’re a selfish asshole.
Yes! Exactly, you “physically accept her decision.” But no emotionally or mentally. And I’m sorry, but you don’t get the Nobel Peace Prize for not physically forcing her to do something she didn’t want to do.
Geeze, sorry about the typos. I meant “accepted” and “not.”
Bob, you’re a selfish asshole for all of the above reasons, plus you come here and go on and on, with shifting goalposts and changing “arguments”, as if we fucking asked you to unload. Protip: we didn’t.
It’s obvious from everything you’ve written that you did not accept her decision. Instead, you decided to hold women and feminism responsible for your own hurt feelings, because having too many damned choices in life meant your fiance didn’t have to be stuck with you if she didn’t want to. So you formulated this theory that women are primarily responsible for breakups — not exactly a sign of acceptance.
You are selfish asshole because you extrapolate your relationship experience to every relationship in existence, and ignore the experiences of other people, including women. You are a selfish asshole because you characterize yourself as a paragon of virtue and do not admit the slightest possibility that you may in at least some way be responsible for the break-up.
Are you seriously saying that women are not vilified enough by society? Are you fucking kidding me? Every time there is a report of rape, the FIRST thing the general public does is question what the woman has done wrong and how she’s responsible for it. When a bunch of dudes in Texas were arrested for repeatedly gang-raping an eleven-year-old girl, the FIRST news missives out of the cannon were about what poor unfortunate “kids” these rapists are, and how hard and unfair their life is going to be because of the accusation, and how the child isn’t really a victim because she was ambitious and wore eye-liner. Every time some nutjob murders a bunch of women, the media is awash in tearful reports of what a swell guy everyone thought he was. Every time a man murders his wife or girlfriend, and children besides, the media wonders what could have driven such a nice man to do something so “desperate”, with the not-so-thin implication that the bitch made him do it. Every time a male public figure is caught with his pants down, the general consensus is that he should have our understanding because his wife isn’t 25 years-old and 20 lbs underweight anymore, and anyway, it’s all the fault of that bitch of a seductress, his mistress. (Amirite?) Women are routinely vilified for staying with their abusers, and simultaneously, for leaving their relationships “and not trying to work it out”. Women are vilified for not being sufficiently clairvoyant judges of character and, simultaneously, for not giving men who communicate the wrong vibes “a chance”. Women are vilified for aging and simultaneously, mocked for obsessively dieting or getting plastic surgery. Really, should I go on?
Women get a pass on bad behavior? Get the fuck out. Ending a relationship is not “bad behavior”. Regardless of the gender of the person who does it.
He’s STILL here? And arguing that his really rather unique experience with the woman who was awaiting the rapture is how relationships in general often go these days?
Another piece of dating advice – if you encounter a person who is awaiting the Rapture, they may not be the best choice in terms of a potential spouse, unless you’re expecting to be raptured along with them. If nothing else because someone who fully expects you to burn in the fires of judgement and who is eagerly looking forward to this event may not be as fond of you as they say they are.
Bob: Really? You could argue “Hey, she pulled the plug before she hurt you even worse,” but you want to paint her as having the heart of a Lion?
Nope. Never said that. All I said was she did the right thing.
You have been (for pages) telling us what a horrible person she was. That’s being, “spiteful”. It might even be hateful.
Which is why I am saying you are a selfish asshole; because right here, right now, you are being a selfish asshole (and a liar).
Look at yourself. You are saying, “yes it’s better we didn’t get married, but she is evil because she didn’t marry me”. Why do you say that? Because apparently you think she lied to you when she said yes.
That’s the only way your story leads to you being treated badly. The only way what she did was, “leading you on”. If she didn’t know she was later going to realise it wouldn’t work, she was completely honest; and fair with you.
And you are being petulant about that. Three year olds act like that, not adults.
I asked you a question: answer it.
Nope!
Please stop making up strawmen to yell at. I do not care about the gender of anyone in your little story, and I really doubt anyone else here does, either. I do not think guys who think they want to marry someone, realize they don’t, and break it off are “pieces of shit.” Please deal with your obvious anger at your ex and your massive projection issues. Being dumped sucks, but emotionally stable, non-horrifically-entitled adults do not believe that breaking up with a partner makes you a “piece of shit.”
Also, Rapture-Lady wasn’t able to make a commitment and therefore PUAs are right about women? Seriously, dude, do you hear yourself?
To answer the bit that Polliwog quoted – no, if you’d been the Left Behind fan who decided that actually you didn’t want to get married after all, nobody here would think you were evil or cowardly. We might think you were a bit weird, but that would be because of the Rapture part rather than the breaking up with your fiance part. I can’t think of any situation in which someone breaking off an engagement would make me call them evil, because that’s a ridiculous level of hyperbole.
“Thanks for answering my questions in that sentence there. Unfortunately, i cannot answer the questions you’ve asked that follow. I don’t know why any of those things happened between you and your GF. I recommend discussing this with a professional who can help you come to terms with this personal tragedy that you have suffered. You clearly are very hurt and wounded and you don’t know what happened. You can only move past it through careful introspection and/or help from a person good at guiding that process.”
“Please answer the following without dragging a horde of strawmen into the conversation: What do you want from us?”
Okay, you know what I want? I can’t get my ex back. Deep down I know that I shouldn’t want her back, because even if she did come back, it would be hard to have confidence in the future of our relationship knowing she could bail at any time and I wouldn’t necessarily have an inkling.
What I want is for guys to stop being the only ones that are labeled as immature and not ready to grow up. How do you think I feel that I was ready to move forward and take on the adult responsibilities of marrying somebody I loved and raise children together. I was “all in” and it ended and I don’t really know why. And then in the aftermath of this tragedy, I look in the culture and it is men that are being blamed for not being ready to take on their adult responsibilities. You have preachers like Mark Driscolll advising men to “man up” and put down the xbox controller and start getting married, and that there are hordes of great women out there waiting for men to show up when they have nothing but man-boys in adult bodies to choose from in the dating market. Well, that’s certainly not my experience. I don’t even own a video game console. Mark Driscoll needs to shut the fuck up:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/why-men-need-marriage/2012/01/11/gIQALubyqP_blog.html
Here you have the irony of a woman who by her own admission turned away a great man because “something was missing” and “she wasn’t ready to settle down” and yet she writes a sprawling essay about how there is a paucity of great men out there ready to take on roles as husbands and fathers. I think Kate Bolick needs to shut the fuck up:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/308654/
I really do detest the way PUAs only see women as objects for sexual release and not as people. I detest the way MRAs refuse to take responsibility for their happiness and think women are entirely to blame for their problems. I can’t get behind MGOTW’s admission to ignore my biological hardwiring for emotional and physical companionship with women and try to forge a life without them. But they are right about this crap that is being slung at men in the mainstream media.
Mark Driscoll writes:
“She was smart, funny, interesting, successful, attractive, kind, in her 40s, and still single.
After my wife Grace and I spent some time with the woman from our church, we could not fathom why no one had married her.”
BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T WANT TO BE MARRIED, YOU STUPID FUCK. If she’s as great as you say she is, Mark, then at some point in time she had a suitor who very much wanted to get married. And for whatever reason she decided not to accept his proposal. And yet it is men that are being blamed for smart, funny, interesting, successful, attractive, kind, yet still single Grace and I’m tired of it.
Bob: then you need to take your wants up with those authors, because we can’t do nothin’ for ya, man.
I don’t know Bolick, but Driscoll is a grade-A cretin. Why listen to him?
WHY ARE YOU HERE?
This is sounding more and more like it would be better discussed on a board full of people who lean very Christian and very fundamentalist. This is not that board. Not everyone here is an atheist, but overall we sure do lean that way, and the Christians who do comment here are very distinctly not of the Driscoll-fan variety.
Once again – most of the people here don’t care whether or not people get married. We really don’t. We are not the droids you are looking for.
Bob. This is your shit. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.
Dude, this is not a thing that happens.
Not the “men are labeled as immature” part. That happens. The “ONLY men are labeled as immature” part. You found a stupid op-ed arguing that men should be more responsible. Congrats. I’ve seen stupid op-eds arguing that women are too picky, too shallow, too generally terrible. We just had a stupid article discussed here a matter of days ago about how women ruin marriages by viciously having jobs and stuff. Breaking news: the world is full of stupid, opinionated people, eager to share pretty much every stupid opinion you can imagine with all and sundry. The only reason the particular stupid opinions that you are frothing with rage about seem so much more prevalent to you than all the other stupid opinions out there is that you are so busy stewing in your own bitterness that you are blind to everything else. For your own sake, please seriously consider dealing with said bitterness and trying to make the world a better place instead of just trying to add to the chorus of stupid opinions.
Hell, women are labelled as immature if they have orgasms the “wrong” way.
Bob, this time I’m being kind and not snarky – get away from the MRM. The ideas that they are feeding you will only hurt you in the long run. Exposure to those ideas is taking a pain that you were already feeling and ensuring that that pain will never heal. If you ever want to move on and have a happy life, you need to get away from those people, because they will take your pain and use it to manipulate you.