Hey, horny “nice guys,” you know how you’re always saying nice things to girls and sometimes telling they’re pretty in hopes they decide to sleep with you? Or just gawking at them at the gym?
Turns out that this isn’t such a good thing. Not so much because, you know, staring at women like you’re a serial killer might just creep a lot of women out. But because all this attention might well turn these women into stuck-up you-know-whats, which is a major pain for the world’s horny guys.
In a post on Roosh’s Return of Kings blog with the lovely title “How Women Become Worthless,” some dude named Edward Thatch explains the deadly consequences of people being nice to pretty ladies.
These women, he writes,
start out as decent specimens, but somehow manage to find themselves on the red pill man’s pump-and-dump list. This is a bittersweet topic for me, because while I enjoy a random romp with girls who have managed to concentrate all of their worth between their legs, I’m also well aware of the many added benefits of girlfriending up a good one.
So how do these women become worthless bitches? Well, you see, there’s this thing called the Peter Principle, which suggests that people get promoted and promoted until they end up with a job that’s beyond their capabilities. (Never mind all those people out there who are actually a good fit for their jobs.)
Anyhoo, this happens to pretty ladies too!
A pretty girl posts a sexy pic on facebook and you click like.
You just promoted her.
The same girl goes to the gym, and a dozen guys stare at her like hungry wolves.
Promoted again. …
Everything that comes out of her pretty little mouth is super relevant and interesting to the guys who want to bang her.
Promoted again.
Her beta orbiters trip over themselves trying to please her just for the satisfaction of being near her.
Promotion!
The list goes on and on, but you get the idea. From the day she’s born until the day she slams into the wall in her mid-30s, she just keeps being promoted until she reaches her level of incompetence. When the day comes that she can’t live up to the position she’s trying to fill – most awesome, sexy and unique thing everrrrr – she becomes a worthless self-centered bore who ends up in my phone as “Blonde HB7 Tiny Boobs Wrist Tattoo.”
Who knew that life for women was nothing more than an endless parade of male flattery? Or that women feel empowered whenever creepy dudes blatantly ogle their bodies at the gym.
So some women end up thinking that they’re pretty. What’s the harm here? Well, you see, men suffer enormously when women think they’re even a teensy bit hotter than they “really” are. It’s much better for everyone – if by “everyone” you mean all the guys trying to sleep with them – if women hate themselves a little. Or a lot.
Unfortunately, Thatch laments, it’s men who are to blame for women thinking too highly of themselves.
We create these monsters by promoting otherwise good women far above their grade. If you’re doing this, I respectfully ask you to stop.
As it stands now, these poor overpromoted women end up hitting the proverbial wall when they hit the age of 30, or 25, or 15, or whatever, and suddenly become transformed from young hotties into old hags. And while this is, Thatch proclaims, “a hilarious version of downsizing that sends the old, fat or ugly ones to the feminist welfare line,” he also thinks this is not economically efficient.
Far better for men to handle the “sexual marketplace” in a more rational and efficient way, he concludes, “by knocking off the beta orbiting, white knighting, and supplication that keeps promoting these women to positions they cannot handle.”
Surprisingly, Thatch’s argument provokes some dissent amongst Roosh’s Neanderthal followers. Stuki, for example, points out that Facebook likes might not amount to a damn in this crazy world.
A problem with this diagnosis, is that a single pump and dump … by a perceived alpha or “hot guy”, counts for more than a million Facebook likes, as far as perception of being “promoted” goes. …
It’s not as if women don’t feel equally “promoted” by the guy trying to feel her up at the bar, just because he throws her some neg first, instead of a compliment. IOW, the solution to women being bitches, is not men becoming assholes. If being a whore had real, serious and immediate consequences, women would largely stop being whores. But as long as the only consequence is that she will “forced” to go out alone, and get her “revenge” on her “intolerant”, “sexist” and “Stepford Wife obsessed” ex, by being banged in a toilet stall by someone ostensibly (through beer goggles, if nothing else) handsomer and more “alpha” than he was, she’ll never get it. Whether Mr. Toilet Stall Banger negs her or compliments her first, doesn’t really matter.
Note that Stuki here apparently thinks he’s somehow not already an asshole.
VargisBitch takes issue, a little bit, with the term “worthless.”
They are not worthless but … western women reach a point of uselessness. They have value in the beginning but at that time, they dont use that value for anything serious other that getting pumped left and right, attention whoring etc, you know, the sex and the city dream..after many years of this they are just beyond rescue, their self insteem is inflated beyond any reasonable level…plus they are getting rather old. So yea, at that exact moment, they become wortless. But they still have no reason to panic, there are hordes of horny bluepill men, who didnt get sex during THEIR prime , to pick the sorry remains..
When you understand the dynamics behind this, you are a redpill man.
Most commenters seem to agree, though, with the broad outlines of Thatch’s, er, analysis. Madvillain complains that there are even a few “white knights” to be found even in the manly world of the manosphere.
While there are almost no white night panderers in the manosphere, when a commenter comes along with the user name like “”just a girl”, or “SunshineMary”, guys will breath in that pussy scent wafting from the female name on their computer monitor and congregate around her, demonstrating their alpha intelligence by explaining the ways of the world to the cute little lamb.
Hammer, meanwhile, fantasizes about putting fat ladies in camps.
You can’t just haul off all the worthless ones and put them in some adjacent zone to live in. Instead you have to step into every relationship with a girl knowing she’s going to lie at some point, that she’ll try to manipulate to gain the upperhand, that she will try to contribute very little if anything and that she will start acting difficult at some point along the way, and for what? I honestly don’t know how men have tolerated the crap women throw at them for so long. …
I never thought I’d say this but maybe a benevolent dictator would be good for a while. A red pill dictator, who would put all the fatties into one zone, we’ll call it the Fat Zone, another can be called the Fem Zone for feminists, all manner of zones so that they could live among their ilk. Want join the Athletic Zone where people are in reasonable good shape? Lose weight, stop eating. Want to join the Equal Zone where men and women are treated equal where men do not give most of the social, economic and legal benefits to women? Sign a contract stating such explicitly. Want to join the Man Zone where the men make the rules and rule the roost? Sign on the dotted line gals. Everyone can get what they truly want. Maybe it won’t be perfect but I sure as hell would prefer it.
Turbo the Drycleaner, who apparently is too manly to bother with the shift key, doesn’t think that technology is the issue here.
beta males are no new invention and have existed, in large numbers, since time began. they are not going away. just because online dating and facebook have immortalized their hamfisted attempts at getting poosy dosnt mean it didnt happen before. girls would get all sorts of looks, gifts, and marrage proposals way back when that fed their egos. you could say that because they are now online, a woman can have constant access to validation but thats not a whole lot diffrent than living in a rural area, as many used to, and seeing the same orbiters every day.
Days of Broken Arrows disagrees:
White knighting was less a problem before the Internet age. You could only stare at a woman so long and most Betas didn’t just walk up to strange women and compliment them.
But nowadays, Facebook and Instagram are major ego-stroking devices for women. Someone needs to do a post called “NEVER like a woman’s Facebook photo.” The massive amount of orbiters on FB makes me ill.
One day in 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white man, and helped to usher in a civil rights revolution. Could Days of Broken Arrows’ brave refusal to “like” women’s Facebook pictures usher in a similar revolution, this time for men who are so terribly bruised and oppressed by women with self-esteem?
Like a month or so ago I said on Manboobz that I don’t have body image issues since I’m thin, so I already look like you’re “supposed to” do. Some other manboobzer pointed out correctly that this was an enormously stupid comment, since a real-world thin person hardly lives up to the altogether impossible beauty standards society sets up for us, and loads of thin people have body image issues. So yeah, I was a real idiot there, and being thin is obviously not a sufficial causal explanation for being okay with one’s body.
My new hypothesis is that it might be because all my self-hate has always focused on my brain (since I’m a mental case), so maybe I just didn’t have any self-hate left for my body? Actually, as a teen, I had a friend with eating disorders, and she even commented once that “the way you talk about and feel about your brain is the way I feel about my body”. So… maybe I should write a self-help book? “Learning to love your body by learning to hate your mind?”. Or then again, maybe not.
I’m six months “recovered” from my eating disorder. I finally sold my ‘thin jeans’ because I don’t want to fit them anymore, and only the other day I was surprised to realise that I now eat whatever I want.
I think that for some people the way they obsess over their looks comes from the same kind of place the ED does – a need to control something, to be perfect, to have control over how other people see you. And of course everything in our culture tells us we should obsess about our appearance it comes with its own carrot and stick. Do it right and the world will love you, but you can never do it right…
trollboy (trollSuz?) clearly did not read the threads on the sexbots and their magical vibrating asses. But at least zie can Google?
@Carleyblue – I know a lot of people have addressed this, but I wanted to point a couple things out:
I don’t think that, actually, and I’m about as die hard a feminist as you can get, so I wouldn’t worry about your cred 😉 I think we warp the idea of “Person I don’t find attractive may be attractive to someone else, which is okay” into “everyone is beautiful somehow.” You’re not required to “find the beauty” in every other person, because you know what? That STILL treats “beauty” as some sort of thing we all owe each other to have, and that’s fucked up.
What you do need to do is not mistreat people based on how much or how little you like how they look, because the ugliest person is still a human being. It’s fine not to find people attractive or try to find their beauty. Just treat them with decency and move on.
Have you considered telling those people that what they’re saying is cruel and unfair? Because the problem isn’t only what they’re saying, it’s that they think they’re entitled to pass judgement on other people based on their relative level of attractiveness, and that nobody will call them out on it. And being around that is clearly hurting you, at least by your own words.
It’s perfectly normal to be afraid of having something negative said about you, but I think you’re not considering where the actual problem is. Your fear isn’t the source of the problem. The culture allowing people to mistreat other human beings based on their appearance is the problem. Next time someone around you starts in on someone, say something. “For all you know this person you’re talking about is an amazing cook, or a great friend, or loving parent. Why should it matter that you don’t happen to approve of how they look?” is a good start. Or even just “I don’t want to hear comments like that about other people” and end the conversation. The more you work to get other people to stop saying those things, the better you’ll feel about yourself.
That’s fine for you, as long as you remember that what you find gross, disgusting or scary is unique. For other women ANY attention from a total stranger may qualify as all three. And that you support other women (and men) who do not want that kind of imposition into their lives.
There are some people who find a lack of obvious grooming attractive. For some people (i.e. me) a dude who spends a lot of time on his hair is a turn-off, as is long hair on a guy. But a dude who likes his long hair or likes spending time on his hair doesn’t owe me anything, and I don’t have any right to look at those guys and condemn them because they’re not pleasing me personally. For me to do that would be just as bad as these MRAs and their criteria that all women must be 14 year old virgins, etc.
Again, this is about personal preference and the qualities we look for in partners vary wildly, and a lot of them aren’t about how someone looks. Next time you encounter this emotion, ask yourself, “Why does it matter what I think of this person’s appearance? I’m not interested in dating them, so why should I bother forming an opinion at all? Why waste the energy?”
I’m gonna guess that you’re not so much angry about the lack of grooming as you’re angry that you spend a lot of energy worrying about your appearance and you resent seeing someone else who doesn’t pay that penalty. You feel like you have to struggle with this, and it results in bitterness toward people who are “escaping” doing their time in the same rituals. This is very, very common. “I have to go through all this just to feel like I’m not repulsive, how dare this person who is objectively much uglier than I am not have to do even more work, not even fucking try?!?” This attitude crops up a lot in fat positive spaces. It’s completely normal to feel that way, but you need to look for the deeper cause here too. Is the problem really that I as a fat middle aged woman don’t give a fuck if strangers find me desirable, or is the problem that we’re both living in a culture that makes us think that is the only way we can be worth anything? Cause the problem ain’t my lack of fucks, it’s the society that taught us both that giving fucks about this was compulsory. (Psst – society lied.)
This might sound like a stupid thing to say, and I don’t mean it to sound ‘holier than thou’, but more as a tip for something that helped me.
I went through about ten years of disordered eating and severe depression with a lot of it focused on my appearance until… I kind of forced myself to stop giving a fuck, for my own sanity. The main thing that helped break this cycle of self-loathing was stopping myself from reading ‘women’s’ magazines. I only used to flick through them when the other girls had left them at work and I was bored, but I’d never realised how much I internalised that shit. I mean, I’m kind of slim (size 10 UK, so 6 US?), but I’m short, I’m not toned because I hate exercise, and I’m really curvy, especially around my hips. If, when I was 19, you’d given me three wishes I’d have used them to make myself six inches taller, two sizes thinner and without weird skin on my upper arms and thighs. I mean it’s OK to wish for world peace if you already look like Miss America, but… you know.
But now… I’m not being told how I should look, and I don’t hate how I look any more. Since I stopped reading the magazines and shit I stopped thinking about how much stuff I ‘should’ be doing to make myself look ‘acceptable’, and most of it dropped off because I’ve always hated doing that rigmarole. Now I don’t use any products except soap, shampoo and conditioner, and wear light make-up about once a month (eyeliner and mascara). I don’t even shave.
The most surprising thing about it is how little of a shit everyone actually gives. Most people don’t notice that I don’t wear make-up, and I’ve not been stopped by the exfoliation police yet. The thing about humans is that we’re really quite egocentric, which is all well and good, but we think that people are paying a lot more attention to us than they are. They’re too busy worrying that everyone is staring at them!
The magazines are purely there to make you feel bad about perceived problems so that you buy products from the advertisers. The models they use have bodies that are achievable by about 2% of the population, and even then they’re airbrushed to hell. I know this. We all know this, but even if you’re reading it with the air of appropriate skepticism, some of the messages seep through.
As I said before, I’m not trying to act all enlightened or anything, my sister’s a beauty therapist and nothing makes her happier than making her nails perfect or being complimented on her eye make-up, and more power to her. I’m also not saying it’s just getting rid of the magazines that made me give the opposite of a fuck either, I finished University (exam stress always made my disordered eating flare up wildly), I left my abusive ex, I met BoyFantastic, I stopped going to clubs where people were dressed like they should be in music videos, and I’m fairly immersed in alternative scenes and have good non-conventional support networks and role models.
It’s also not to say that I don’t give a shit about my appearance, it’s just that I know that whole ‘conventional’ ‘model-hot’ thing isn’t me, and rather than stressing about the fact that my pelvic bone stubbornly insists on being the shape it is, my focus on my appearance is more ‘what would be an interesting thing to do with my hair?’ or ‘what shall I get pierced next?’, because those are the appearance-y things that I want to focus on, not what I’m being told to.
If you enjoy putting make-up on and reading about fashion, that’s awesome, and I’m not suggesting that everyone run half-way across the country to hang out with squatters and punks like I did (although it is fun), but if you want to get away from feeling bad about yourself while you’re doing the things you enjoy, ditch the magazines. Even if it’s just for six months.
RE: WeeBoy
In recovery myself for similar shit at the moment. Really not happy about how I have the devil’s time finding pants that fit me. Though apparently I’m odd; I wasn’t actually trying to change my body or my diet.
Sorry, that was probably just a pile of rambling crap. Basically don’t ever feel obliged to do something that’s making you feel bad? Yeah, that’s probably what I meant.
@Demarq
“Not true. Some women already have a means of supporting a child that may result from such. Sometimes they’re married to another man(think cuckoldry-it does happen and more frequently than you want to believe), but other times they’re single, have a job, and don’t actually need to rely on a man to support and raise a child.”
You completely missed the point. It’s a shitty strategy because the chances of getting someone pregnant via one-night stand, much less the chances of said pregnant making it to term, are pretty slim. You’d have to have a woman who is in a position where she can keep a child, who wasn’t on birth control, and who was ovulating, not to mention only about 25% of embryos actually make it to the uterus, the mass amount of pregnancy complications that could happen that either cause miscarriage or the pregnant person to change their mind. And yet again And it’s only going to get harder to get pregnant from a one-night stand the more socialized and modernized we become. So why bother exhausting yourself, jumping from woman to woman, depriving yourself of future support from a family for old age, when there’s no guarantee you even pass on your genetics? It may work once or twice, but that doesn’t make it a decent strategy. It’s still getting evolved away.
I’m guessing you’re not even touching anything else in my comment? Rather disappointing, I thought you evo psych types had a little more fight in you.
I love Greek Yogurt.
I was just wandering through Sociological images, and the newest post… Well.
It’s related to the beauty standard. Trigger warning, I think? But it’s about how models are supposed to be thin and look great.
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/01/23/too-fat-too-skinny/
Because the extreme emphasis on model thin-ness then has to cover up how extremely UNHEALTHY LOOKING that kind of thinness is.
It’s literally not possible to look like the models in magazines. The models in magazines don’t look like that.
Why would anyone date me when I don’t care to put on makeup? Well, because there are men (lots of them) who like women because of who they are and they find them attractive with or without make up. I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that most men are like this, simply because they don’t jump out of bed screaming every morning when we’re still in out night gowns, our hair looks like we’ve stuck a finger in the light socket and there’s not a lick of make up on us.
There are subcultures which for a variety of reasons, do not find it desirable to use beauty products or have a preference for light make up use.
But, but, but, expecting him to actually deal with your arguments is MISANDRY!!!
😛
Sweet Jesus! They both look like famine victims!
Because my brain is stuffed up, I am not capable of engaging with anything substantive today. Just thought I’d drop this off for the Doctor Who fans here:
Word.
Very few people are paying as close attention to you as you fear/imagine they all are.
There is nothing more beautiful to me than a woman who is comfortable in her own skin. The one time I attended a nude beach I saw a woman who’d had a mastectomy, and carried herself like a queen. That was a beautiful woman.
Sorry if I come across as an asshole with that, but I was stunned by her confidence and the way she was.
For those in the frozen north, here’s a cat so I can apologize for butting in.
This is SO true! I did life drawing classes many years ago and the best model to draw was a middle-aged, fat woman. Trying to depict her shape in sweeping curves (we drew with broken icy-pole sticks dipped in ink, an interesting method) was delightful. Ironically the “conventially acceptably thin” model we had later was the worst, though that was partly because she couldn’t sit still. 😀
Rubens’s paintings are famous (or notorious?) for the body type he loved to paint, which was a standard for the time to some extent but definitely had an element of his preferences thrown in (not to mention that so many of his later paintings were modelled by his second wife). It always makes me laugh a bit when I look at St George and the Dragon, which he painted for Charles I. Charles is recognisable in it, but Henriette Marie isn’t – she’s gone from brunette and thin to blonde and plump!
Yup. One of the most genuinely helpful compliments I ever got was when a friend passed along the fact that her art historian boyfriend had commented to her after meeting me that I was “very Renaissance.” At the time, I had no idea what that meant or if it was even supposed to be a compliment, but it was later clarified to me that what he meant was that my overall “look,” while considered more “pretty normal okay-looking person” than “hubba hubba” now, would apparently have made me a total hottie in the mid-1500s or so in Europe. Looking at art from the time and seeing that lots of women in those images who are clearly supposed to be perceived as beautiful look more like me than they do like Scarlett Johansson really helped me to see my supposed “ugliness” less as an objective truth about me than as a random reflection of the time and place in which I happen to live.
Same here, Polliwog. I look at paintings from Mr K’s earthly days and know I’d be much more their type than the skin-and-bones-with-boobs ideal now.
But I’m not doing the shiny-nose look even if it was totally the thing then. 😉
I just see my body as a husk, nothing more. I’m far from conventionally beautiful but it doesn’t bother me any. There comes a point in time where you have to make peace and come to terms with the fact you are never going to be perfect or lose your sanity. I chose the former at the age of eighteen and it was the best decision I have ever made.
Late here, but, agreed with so much that’s been said about trying not to give a fuck about looks. Carly, if you feel like a “bad feminist” for having absorbed the message that we are our looks, then I’m a really bad feminist for having “well, it’s all well and good for attractive ladies to post ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ pictures of themselves, but I’d just feed into the ugly hag feminist narrative with my picture”. Which of course is bogus because the whole point of those pictures is to prove that feminists DON’T all look the same and is pretty darn shitty of me anyway since I conform in a lot of ways to a number of beauty standards so then I’m just raking on myself because we’re taught that no one should like themselves. Whenever I have those thoughts I’m like “hey, good job, feeding into stereotypes that women have to be beautiful for their opinions on their own humanity to count!” and try to knock myself out of it.
I’ve found I care less as I’ve gotten older and grown in feminism, but I haven’t totally eradicated that inclination to just try dieting a little bit, or be just a little late to put the perfect finishing touch on that outfit, etc. I care, but I care less, and for now, at least not being in the horrible torturous world of calorie counting and exercise as punishment, where even the smallest piece of chocolate cake was life or death is SO MUCH BETTER I can’t even express it fully in words. And I figure if I can just keep going, a little bit at a time, maybe, eventually I’ll be ok with myself. Hell, I might even learn to like myself.
I’d also recommend if you think you can, standing up to people (whether it’s family or friends) who say such horrible, hurtful things about people they deem ugly. It’s been immensely helpful for me to start correcting my dad and sister who tend to be particularly nasty offenders of this. Gently, I’ll say things like “ok, really, you didn’t like the person because they were mean to you, their looks aren’t relevant” or “did you have to go there? Really?” usually that makes them step back a bit and stop harping on looks.
@ Eline
Yeah, I think the issue is taking stuff out and then having to add more stuff in to try to replicate the mouthfeel of the stuff they took out (and failing, really badly). Leftwingfox was correct – this all started when they decided that yogurt should be a diet food. Which sucks, because what you end up with is a formerly good-for-you food with a lot of the good stuff removed and replaced with bad-for-you stuff, fewer calories, and a food that tastes like vaguely gelatinous bleh. If something is going to be bad for me I feel like it should at least taste good, so fail all around there.
@ CarlyBlue
I’m not sure how old you are, but one thing to maybe bear in mind is that a lot of us here are in the late 30s through late 40s age range. Not everyone, we have some younger (and older) folks too, but I will say that for me personally the older I get the easier it is to ignore social programming and see through it to how it’s designed to manipulate people. My Dad is the one who expects everyone to be pretty in my family – it used to bother me a lot, and then at a certain point I figured out that it was anxiety about eventually losing his own looks projected outwards, and which point I started to just feel bad for him.
Also, what drst said. I don’t think everyone is beautiful. Actually I think that statement is an insult to the English language, because it makes no sense – part of how we conceptualize beauty involves it being not the norm. Even if people mean “everyone is a beautiful person” in a non-looks-focused sense, um, no, that is not correct, as anyone who reads the stuff that David quotes already knows. Some people are ugly on the inside.
So I think the whole everyone-is-beautiful thing is what happens when you take a complex idea (that beauty isn’t the only thing that matters or the thing we should judge anyone’s worth as a human being on) and dumb it down into a message suitable for a greeting card. Some people are prettier than others, just like some people are smarter than others or better at sports than others. It’s OK to notice that. What’s not OK is treating people like shit because you don’t find them sufficiently decorative.
Also also! I personally have found it very useful in terms of figuring out the ways in which beauty standards are socially constructed to become more familiar with how different the beauty standard is in different cultures. For example, I used to be really unhappy about the fact that I’m short and think that everyone would always see that as a bad thing, but then I spent some time in various parts of Asia and found that people there mostly saw me being short as a positive or neutral thing.* Thing is, it didn’t just make me feel better in the short term, it also made me go “huh, actually some of this stuff is kind of arbitrary, isn’t it?”. Which in the long run seems to help give a bit of emotional distance when people are trying to use the whole pretty/not pretty thing in hurtful ways.
* Unfortunately this would not have worked out the same way if I was a man.
It’s akin to the changes within one culture, isn’t it? What’s considered appealing in one place or another, or in the same place over years/centuries, can be totally different. The very idea of a woman having a belly, let alone a curved or drooping one, is anathema to the “thou shalt look like this to be hot” brigade in our culture now – but you look at art from earlier centuries and the beauties of the time are anything but flat-bellied. Hell, the corsets of the nineteenth century weren’t about flattening the stomach until the straight ones came in late in the century, and it was only the extremes of lacing that produced the long front line on them; it wasn’t their design.
@CarlyBlue
Everyone has already said a lot of good things, but I’d just like to add an article I’ve read recently by Miriam Mogilevsky that talks about this very same problem:
“Love Yourself”: A Beautiful But Flawed Idea
I hope it helps somewhat. You’re not a bad person for not feeling beautiful.
That’s a great article, Myoo. I’m not wild about the phrase “love yourself”, because love to me implies an active involvement: a feeling, whatever sort of love it is, of reaching out to another person (human or not). “Love yourself” always sounds a bit artificial and wanky with a touch of New Age thrown in. Being okay with yourself, as the writer says, or being able to accept yourself and not spend time agonising about your body, sounds like a lower-key and more sensible idea.