The regulars at PUAhate.com – we’ve met them before — are a strange and bitter bunch. Most seem to be self-loathing so-called “incels” who blame their lack of romantic and sexual success on their average or below-average looks. Rejecting the basic premise of the pickup artist crowd – that average guys can transform themselves into suave lotharios by mastering manipulative pickup formulas – the PUAhate regulars tend to be true believers in what they somewhat pretentiously call “looks theory,” the odd and obviously untrue notion that women only date men with “male model” looks.
As one PUAhater put it recently:
PUA makes you think that all your problems are because of your personality/behaviour – i.e. things you can control. So when you keep failing, it means that YOU are fucking up and doing things wrong
the reality is that many of us just lost the genetic lottery. we are ugly, the wrong race, the wrong height etc, and that fucked us up. there is NOTHING we can do about it
So, naturally, the PUAhaters spend a lot of their time jealous of tall, good-looking men for their supposed monopoly on the women of the world — whom they also hate.
But the strange thing is that the PUAhaters pretty much hate everyone else as well. They get angry when guys they consider ugly score “hot chicks.” They get angry when guys who are good-looking but not male models get attention from “really hot girls.” And so on, and so on, and so on.
Indeed, many of the regulars seem to walk around in a perpetual state of rage, angry at each and every man who’s managed to pair up with a woman, not to mention the women as well.
One regular recently described his “day from hell” to his comrades:
To start the day I saw a couple where it was an average White guy with an OBESE Asian girl. They were walking around acting like they were trying to prove shit. LMAO. I wanted to kick the guy in the fucking nuts for dating that landwhale. If you’re going to use the racial advantage, at least date a girl who is under 300lbs. Later I go to the gym and see the same tall guys I usually do. Even if I had a good face, how the fuck do you compete with guys who are fucking 6’4”?
Then at the gym there’s this good looking White guy there talking to this Asian dude about how Asian girls are easy and how they approach him. To make things worse after that these fucking frat douchebags come in with their girlfriends to show off . Then to cap off the day a girl I used to know from freshman year walks right past me without even saying anything. I used to fucking live next door to this bitch and now she doesn’t even say anything and acts like a pretentious cunt. She’s an Indian girl dating a White dude lmao. Days like today make you wonder why you even still try in the first place.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, most of those posting on PUAhate don’t actually seem to be ugly by anyone’s standards but their own, at least judging from the pictures of themselves they sometimes post to the site, which reveal them to be mostly average-looking guys, with some of the regulars even quite conventionally handsome.
But evidently they would rather believe that they have “lost the genetic lottery” rather than face a more obvious explanation for why the girls don’t like them: because they’re shallow, self-obsessed assholes who hate themselves and hate women and radiate their bitterness from every pore. (And some are even creepier than this, like this pedophile – sorry, ephebophile – who’s angry at me personally because unlike him I don’t chase after 15-year-olds. Link NSFW.)
The PUAhaters often talk about getting surgeries to “correct” their supposed genetic flaws. They would do far better to spend that money on therapy.
…and still going strong.
I got up nice and early today and got the call that they still aren’t ready with the redlines, so it seems that I have another partially free day on my hands. This one I don’t get paid for, though, which kinda sucks. I’m also waiting for a big bit of news that is now about a week and a half overdue and my nerves are absolutely shot.
Which is all to say that I’m hoping to be able to play whack-a-troll for at least a little while today!
@Fibinachi Your Singularity-style summary was brilliant! I’m guilty as charged, though. I lettered in debate in high school and organized a club in undergrad because we didn’t have one and I like discussing issues with people who disagree with me. It always frustrates me how strong the tendency is these days to “debate” by slinging ideologically correct slogans back and forth, rather than actually engage with ideas. One of the reasons I like it so much here is the wit, combined with sharp rhetorical knives. I’ve walked away bleeding before, too, and licked my wounds and came back and I know that being here is good for the brain.
@hellkell
I’m just gonna set up a tab for you with the folks at IT, so that they can bill you every time they have to siphon coffee out of my keyboard, mmmkay?
@Jones Stick around here, okay? Tell what happened and is happening to you, as much as you feel comfortable with. Keeping it to yourself is toxic, and trust me that I know that first hand.
I’m just gonna set up a tab for you with the folks at IT, so that they can bill you every time they have to siphon coffee out of my keyboard, mmmkay?
Frankly, all of us coffee drinkers should just invest in bibs and sippy cups.
Apropos of nothing, up in my tabs the title of this post looks like “How to Hat” and every time I see it I’m like “yes! Teach me to hat!”
For all the yoga-phobes out there, your fears are well founded, especially when it comes to the religious/spiritual aspects of the practice. However there are practices out there which are specifically body-focused, which is to say that it’s all about breathing and balance and being strong, limber and centered. You might hear some chakra talk there, but mostly in the context of focusing your attention for proper posture and breathing.
It is perfectly expected for you to ask up front what the focus of the class/teacher will be and to ask directly what role spirituality will play in the work. Anyone who won’t tell you is someone to avoid, but most will be enthusiastically up front with you, and will know who else is around and can direct you to people they know who will have the right attitude and focus for you.
Or, you know, not, if you don’t want to, but I found it very helpful for stress relief and avoiding injury while I tried to get back into running, and just this morning I was practicing some of my breathing postures to help deal with an anxiety attack that snuck into my bed at 3am and woke me up.
Howard: re bodies. Yeah. I was a soldier. We work out a fair bit; with the focus on the things we need to do the job. Mr. Universe we ain’t. There are guys who go for that, but they don’t do any better (and in some areas it hurts them, pull-ups; for one, are murder for dudes with big chests. It’s also more mass to carry).
I’m slight. I have never had a problem doing the job. I can, in fact, carry my own weight on my back (ratios are a powerful thing) and have (when I was in better shape) humped an extra 82 lbs. on my person for eight miles; in three hours of marching.
So that aspect of things is… misunderstood.
This is (btw) why I do arts like Aikido, (and play with cutlery). Punching/striking arts require body mass. Not so much to inflict damage, but because muscle mass is what protects one when being hit. I gave up boxing because I lack the mass over my ribs and abs to cushion my viscera from the guys who were slugging me. Once they got inside my reach was useless, and their density meant I couldn’t slow them down.
Re Yoga: don’t forget that Cuckles explained it to us: ALL CULTS ARE BASED ON YOGA: ALL YOGA IS CULTS!!!!!!!!!
As to coffee… At another site, years ago I learned the important lesson: Swallow all drinks before going back to the text.
It seems to me as if muscle mass also has a lot to do with genetics, whereas actual strength depends more on the way you exercise. I share office with another woman, and we have fairly similar-looking bodies. We’re both thin, but with some visible muscle, although I’ve been pumping iron at the gym twice a week for years, and she has just started going to the gym. The thing is, I can lift like ten times as much as she can (I’m not exaggerating, the difference really is that big), although we look pretty much the same.
My yoga rule is the same as my acupuncture and chiropractor rule.
If they tell me how the thing we are doing is benefiting me in concrete ways on the thing we are doing it to, maybe not totally useless.
Tell me you can fix my earache with a back adjustment? Acupuncture will restore youthful vitality, not just reduce swelling where the needles are in? Yeah, no.
Gillian: I can’t take credit for that cite, cloudiah had a very realistic one not too long ago. I haven’t had to do a formal cite since college.
Wow…I’m home sick today and this thread was an excellent thing to catch up on while I sat on the couch and wallowed in my misery (common colds make me very melodramatic, fyi).
This thread made me think of the one time I did date a male model. A few weeks in, I found it he was suffering from untreated schizophrenia. He had been diagnosed but his agent told him not to take the medication because it would make him get fat. His family had absolutely no money and he was helping support his disabled mother, so he was following his agent’s advice. It was horrible and exploitative and made me really upset.
I went back to school a few weeks later and we lost touch. Reading this morning I decided to look him up on facebook to see what happened. I couldn’t see much, but in the pictures I could see he appears to have gained quite a bit of weight, but is smiling and has a wife who posts nice comments on his pictures. That made me happy. He deserves a good life.
So basically, those who say good looks = easy life need to get to know some actual people.
It’s very difficult to make something invisible. It’s much easier to cover it with a Somebody Else’s Problem field.
@Kittehs The surgery is better than you’d think, actually. When I had mine (early 90s) I was laid up for about a month, with six months of recovery after, and I have some impressive scars. One of my colleagues had the surgery three years ago, was out for a week and back to playing tennis better than he had in years after about a month of rehab.
Woot for your walking stick, it sounds awesome! (will it get a tail too?)
@Marie Yay for no fibro or arthritis!! And woot for sisterhood!! (internet hugs for Marie and Fade)
@Yoyo Hooray for the good kind of lumpiness (the utterly benign kind, that is!)
Re chiropractors, I’ve never heard of one who claims that zie can cure anything but actual back problems, although I’m aware of the really weird original teachings of that praxis. And there is fairly good evidence that chiropracy (chiropractics? something else?) can help with various back problems. HOWEVER, I’m still scared of it and would never do it, since there are also documented cases of chiropracters actually harming people. Plus, I’ve never met anyone who was permanently cured by chiropracy. Everyone who goes to a chiropractor talks about how great it is and how they feel so much better afterwards – only in a month or two their problems are back and they have to have their spine pushed AGAIN. It makes me wonder what the long term effects of having someone messing with your spine over and over and over again might be…
@Howard Bannister Not to mention the fact that (for me at least) bodies that can do things = quite sexy, actually. Bodies that exist (and require both hours of effort and quite frequently dangerous chemicals) solely to be looked at = meh.
Maybe it’s just that all the folks I knew who were focused on their bodies for the look of things were primarily jerks.
Chiropractors scare the bejeebus out of me, but acupuncture has done wonders for my arthritis pain. I pay out of my own pocket now, but quarterly visits to the acupuncturist keep the pain to something that can be managed with nsaids and ibuprofen instead of opioids and frequent cortisone shots.
@Gillian
Yeah, this. There’s a lot of that in the bodybuilding subculture. I had some of that when I was younger. It’s not pretty. (pun intended)
@Dvärghundspossen
Yeah, there’ve been some interesting studies on chiropractors and what they do. I was reading one the other day… Maybe linked from Pharyngula? But separating woo from actual beneficial stuff is definitely new to me. So now I’m all ‘nonono, read studies! Collect data!’
I have a friend who does the chiropractor thing. But the chiropractor is always on her to strengthen her core muscles so that the spine will keep itself, with concrete stretches and exercises. That sounds healthier than ‘and just come back in three months.’
They told me I could keep the bursitis in my hip at bay with exercise. I haven’t been back to the physical therapist since. (and she was wicked good at it, too)
I’m not sure if this was addressed because this thread is so long I can’t keep up on my phone. I think that the people who argue that attraction is only based on looks don’t understand that the other side of the argument is not that looks have nothing to do with it but that attraction is a complicated set of variables which are weighted differently by different people.
Heck, I don’t even weigh the variables the same all the time, sometimes looks are more important and even if you are a great guy I won’t be interested in you romantically, and other times personality traits like “must read books” will be weighted higher.
Re acupuncture, there’s this interesting study from Linköping University in Sweden, http://www.liu.se/forskning/forskningsnyheter/1.261275?l=sv where cancer patients going through radiation therapy got either acupuncture, sham acupuncture or regular medication against nausea. Acupuncture and sham acupuncture had equally good results – amazingly, both were much better than actual medication!
Sham acupuncture in this study meant they had needles where the needle retracts into the handle rather than going into the patient’s body (I couldn’t find info on whether the needle would still stick to the patient’s body or not – one can imagine putting something slightly sticky on it, so that it still stays put), plus they didn’t put the needles at the “correct” spots on the body. So that’s the difference between sham and real acupuncture.
Ps. I’ve been lurking for over a year now, I tried to start posting earlier but then my computer stopped working :/
Also, I spend my days chasing after a little one so I’m kept pretty busy =^.^=
Oh my sweet lord this thread…
Poor fool that I am, I have read this all the way through, though it’s taken me all day in between actually doing my job.
But yay for people who do martial arts! I do Kendo, which is basically Japanese fencing and you scream at people and then hit them with a stick. It’s exhausting (you do it in some pretty heavy armour) and HARD but amazing and absolutely the best activity I’ve ever done.
On a completely different note, has anyone been watching Vikings on The History Channel? I’m three episode in and really enjoying it, I love Lagertha, and Ragnor as well and generally their whole relationship. There are some issues with how they treat Lagertha but I’m willing to let them slide.
Plus you get to hear people speaking Old English! Which for a history nerd is like Christmas come early.
Also the actor who plays Ragnor is eye-wateringly beautiful, I know they’ve probably done some post-production wizadry but holy mother those eyes…
I think it was called Fashionable Canes. It may be more of a catalog than a magazine, to be honest. Still, it had a lot of pretty stuff.
Privilege is having your biggest problem in life be an inability to get a date right when you want one. It’s like the middle class straight white dudes I knew in college who got involved in politics over a motivation to change the minimum drinking age and make pot legal. Like, yeah, those would be cool things, things that could benefit the US, but if the biggest problems you’re facing in life are minor infringements on your partying, you are lucky (which is not to say that everyone who supports ending pot restrictions is doing it out of a motivation to party, but these guys definitely were).
No one denies that loneliness sucks, but Jesus fucking Jones, you aren’t forced to worry about whether your words at work are “too forceful” or “bitchy”, you aren’t told that you can’t buy contraceptives with your own damn paycheck and you aren’t expected to be responsible for preventing other people’s (often men’s) bad behavior (sexual assault), or read people’s minds while being told that no one can read yours (but don’t be too bitchy!), your ability to do certain high paying jobs is not so questioned it’s sometimes protested against (and there’s article after article after article bemoaning your inability to do said job in news source after news source after news source because, periods!), and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Just because not every guy is Donald Fucking Trump doesn’t mean white dudes don’t have the privilege afforded to people who look like him.
Regarding pretty bodies vs efficient bodies, I’ll reiterate too that efficient does not necessarily mean pretty. When I was at my thinnest and most conventionally attractive looking, I could barely walk up two flights of steps and could only keep down a minimal amount of saltines and ginger ale every other day. Sometimes broth or V8 juice if I was lucky. IMHO the biggest problem with “genetic lotteries” isn’t that people are necessarily drawn to conventionally “hotter” people (since, as others have pointed out, there’s been massive variation in what is considered attractive in different cultures at different times throughout history) it’s the cultural idea that pretty = healthy, which is especially toxic in “health” obsessed 20th and 21st century Western culture (and a culture that props up statistically unlikely bodies as the most desirable).
Now not only is there the desire for people to be pretty, not even just a cultural imperative, but a moral imperative too because we think we can assume how motivated or organized or “together” or smart or good a person is just by looking at them. But buying into the idea that pretty people are the only people who ever get anything, therefore there’s no reason to even try, gives the pretty myth power. Not to mention, it’s a pretty (ha) miserable way to go through life. The idea that you could be a totally different person if only you were thinner or had a smaller nose or if you were taller or had more hair or whatever is bullshit and it’s an excuse to keep from living your life NOW if you assume things’ll just be so much better in a year after you’ve lost some weight or gotten a new haircut or a new wardrobe or gotten a nose job, etc, etc, etc. There will always be imperfections on your body. If you buy into the idea that you can’t date because you aren’t perfect, you will never date because no one is perfect (partly because flaws = human, and partly because again, perfection is subjective).
Let’s keep this thread going!
I saw the first episode of Vikings and have to admit I enjoyed the hell out of it. I tried watching it in the mindframe of a MRA, but had to quit because I kept spitting “male disposability” and “female privilege” at the screen and it became distracting. How do they function in their daily life?
Yay that Yoyo’s lump is just a lump.
What else did I miss by sleeping?
Cloudiah, I had the opposite, as I’m unable to turn my Feminist Culture Critique off and I kept thinking things like “Three episodes in, still not passed Bechdel test” and “Does she really only have conversations with her husband and children?”.
So I had to shout down my Feminist Critic and just try and enjoy a thoroughly good new TV show with a female joint lead who kicks all of the arse.
Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t watched it or got past the first episode.
So much love for Lagertha in the scene with the poker and the hay hook. Those Viking dresses don’t appear to have pockets so she wasn’t carrying around a single fuck to give.
I recommend it to everyone, but I’d hand out a big, big trigger warning for the second episode as there is moment where the lead characters brother (who is an arsehole of epic proportions) just suddenly rapes a slave girl and it is rather upsetting as there didn’t even seem to be any point in it as a plot point plot bar showing what an arsehole he is (and perhaps showing how slave women in early medieval scandinavia were viewed and treated) and you never even get told the slave girls name or learn anything about her. She literally exists as a character to be raped 🙁
So yeah, overall an awesome show but a few niggles and one big “OhGodWhat?NO!” moment.
So about as good as you’re going to get in any mainstream media.
Howard — “So I have some complicated thoughts about this that mostly boil down to ‘and in the land of the free, home of the brave that’s the price of survival, that’s the price to play, fuck you whitey.’”
Yeah, I’m weird about it, I’m not going to go playing that I have it anywhere near as bad as people on reservations, or easily identifiable as indigenous, because holy fuck. on the other hand, I am a bit bitter about the cost of avoiding that. And goddamned to I spend Columbus Day walking around saying “celebrate genocide day you mean”.
Re: Doctor Who — can anyone, at all, explain how the Statue of Liberty is a weeping angel? Thought they had to be stone (then again, they can convert statues to angels? Huh? But that’s at least “they reproduce, makes sense”)
Also, when they um, did the thing we hate them for, did that cancel the paradox and reset the Angela’s plan and manhattan is still full of ’em?
Daleks have human shaped bots, and Amy brought the nano-bots into the TARDIS, no?
What. The. Fuck. Is with “that dalek girl”? (Nickname curtesy of my mother)