Today, a sort of quiz. Below, you’ll find extended excerpts from a rather Man Boobzy article about young English women. Afterwards, I want you to guess where, and when, this article came from.
The girl of the period is a creature who dyes her hair, and paints her face … whose sole idea of life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such thought and intellect as she possesses. … and as she dresses to please herself she does not care it she displeases every one else. Nothing is too extraordinary and nothing too exaggerated for her vitiated taste … .
[S]he cannot be made to see that modesty of appearance and virtue ought to be inseparable, and that no good girl can afford to appear bad, under penalty of receiving the contempt awarded to the bad. …
The girl of the period envies the queens of the demi-monde far more than she abhors them. She sees them gorgeously attired and sumptuously appointed, and she knows them to be flattered, feted, and courted with a certain disdainful admiration of which she catches only the admiration while she ignores the disdain. …
No one can say of the modern English girl that she is tender, loving, retiring, or domestic. … Love indeed is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the dangers besetting her. …
The legal barter of herself for so much money — representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure — that is her idea of marriage; the only idea worth entertaining. For all seriousness of thought respecting the duties or the consequences of marriage, she has, not a trace.
If children come, they find but a stepmother’s cold welcome from her; and if her husband thinks that he has married anything that is to belong to him … the sooner he wakes from his hallucination and understands that he has simply married some one who will condescend to spend his money on herself, and who will shelter her indiscretions behind the shield of his name, the less severe will be his disappointment.
She has married his house … his balance at the banker’s, his title; and he himself is just the inevitable condition clogging the wheel of her fortune; at best an adjunct, to be tolerated with more or less patience as may chance. For it is only the old-fashioned sort … that marry for love, or put the husband before the banker.
But she does not marry easily. Men are afraid of her; and with reason. They may amuse themselves with her for an evening, but they do not take her readily for life. Besides, after all her efforts, she is only a poor copy of the real thing; and the real thing is far more amusing than the copy … Men I can get that whenever they like …
[I]t cannot be too plainly told to the modern English girl that the net result of her present manner of life is to assimilate her as nearly as possible to a class of women whom we must not call by their proper-or improper-name.
And we are willing to believe that she has still some modesty of soul left hidden under all this effrontery of fashion, and that, if she could be made to see herself as she appears to the eyes of men, she would mend her ways before too late.
It is terribly significant of the present state of things when men are free to write as they do of the women of their own nation. …
It is only when these [women] have placed themselves beyond the pale of masculine respect that such things could be written as are written now; when they become again what they were once they will gather round them the love and homage and chivalrous devotion which were then an Englishwoman’s natural inheritance. The marvel, in the present fashion of life among women, is how it holds its ground in spite of the disapprobation of men.
It used to be an old-time notion that the sexes were made for each other, and that it was only natural for them to please each other, and to set themselves out for that end.
But the girl of the period does not please men. She pleases them as little as she elevates them; and how little she does that, the class of women she has taken as her model of herself testifies.
All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties, to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects. …
[S]he will not see that though men laugh with her, they do not respect her, though men flirt with her they do not marry her; she will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards their advice and offends their taste….
[A]ll we can do is to wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the most modest, the most, essentially womanly in the world.
Ok, now comes the quiz part.
So where did I get this from?
A) The Thinking Housewife blog, in April of 2011
B) “Whore-Imitating Sluts Are Ruining England,” The Spearhead, in August of 2012
C) Margaret Thatcher, “Up From Sluttery,” Tory Press, 1972.
D) “The Girl of the Period,” The Perth Gazette and West Australian Times, 6/5/1868
Click on this link to find out the answer.
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NOTE: I cheated a teensy bit by taking out some of the more egregiously old-fashioned language. But if you ignore the old-fashioned style, the content of the piece is strikingly similar to a lot of stuff posted in the more traditionalist corners of the Manosphere today.
Thanks to Magpie for posting a link to this piece in the comments!
PS: Margaret Thatcher didn’t actually write a book entitled “Up From Sluttery,” nor did The Spearhead run a piece titled “Whore-Imitating Sluts Are Ruining England.” At least it hasn’t yet.
If one has to be around them, one should be able to gross them out. Or frighten them enough to make them wet themselves. That’d be fun. Probably not difficult, either. People Being Female or People Enjoying The Company Of The Opposite Sex give the poor little petals the willies. Hmm, I wonder if that’s why they spend all their lives tucked away in the basement?
Ugh, that video. The guy who runs Love Shy I just feel sorry for so far (only halfway through), but the PUA dude is a joke. That guy is going to teach other guys how to pick up women? Please.
I’m probably going to get flamed for this but I feel like someone has to say it. Dear love-shy/incel guys who are lurking – PUA is a scam. If you’re a guy who’s already not very appealing to women all it’s going to do is make things worse (and lighten your wallet). The reason the guys in that video have a hard time getting laid or finding girlfriends is that they’re socially awkward and not very attractive. In most cases a style makeover would help, but they’re never going to be conventionally attractive. Woman as a group do not respond well to unattractive men who are sexually and socially aggressive. If those guys try to pull PUA crap on women all that’s going to happen is that their already fragile self-esteem is going to take a nasty hit, because the women are very, very unlikely to be even vaguely tolerant of that stuff from men who they don’t find attractive.
If you’re a shy, awkward guy who looks like that then hitting on random women in clubs is just about the least effective way you could possibly approach dating. Since you can’t wow women with your looks or your charisma you’re going to have to find some other way to make a connection, and that way is…wait for it…via stuff you have in common. Some of those guys were at a convention – there are often women at conventions, and you probably share some common interests with them! So talk to them, like people who you might have something in common with rather than like a boss that needs to be beaten so you can break through to their vaginas (which is the approach that PUA is going to “teach” you). It’s a lot easier to flirt with someone who you’ve already established some sort of rapport with than a total stranger who’s wondering why the hell you just interrupted her conversation with her friends/contemplation of her martini/trip to the bathroom to bore her with obnoxious lines. Bars and clubs are not environments in which people are inclined to be forgiving of awkwardness – why would you set yourself up to fail like that?
PUAs do not want to help you, they just want your money, and the ego stroke of having you look up to them. Don’t buy the snake oil.
Who’d flame you for that, Cassandra? Do you mean trolls? Par for the course with them.
I haven’t watched the video yet but when one remembers that all these “incels” (I refuse to use that stupid word without quotes) still seem to think they’re entitled to conventionally attractive, made-up, well-dressed young women, there’s even less reason for anyone to complain about telling them they need to smarten themselves up, as well as ignoring
misogynistic con artistsPUAs.The wannabe PUA has an extended rant about how gross he thinks vaginas are, and the really creepy one with the long hair won’t shut up about “fat chicks”. Now, as I said, looks really do matter, but the idea that the looks are the only reason those guys aren’t getting laid? Nope.
Also I always wonder how they’d react if a woman started going on about how ugly she thought cocks were. Why would anyone want to fuck someone who’s disgusted by their genitalia?
The one who runs the forum seems like a decent human being so far, just really shy and awkward. He’s the only one, though.
They’re complaining about lack of sex and (?) love when they patently hate and fear women?
Duh, guys. If my eyes roll any harder they’re gonna fall out.
What on earth do they want sexually if they’re so repulsed by women? And what’s stopping ’em getting acquainted with Rosie Palm?
(Confession: I had no idea that was a joke term when I first read about Mrs Palm in Discworld.)
Oh fer cryin out aloud, wordpress is eating comments again.
They’re complaining about lack of sex and (?) love when they patently hate and fear women?
Duh, guys.
What on earth do they want sexually if they’re so repulsed by women? And what’s stopping ’em getting acquainted with Rosie Palm?
(Confession: I had no idea that was a joke term when I first read about Mrs Palm in Discworld.)
And now it’s repeating them. Stupid thing!
Yeah, I stopped when the PUA-wannabe started mocking him in a high-pitched voice.
Look on the bright side – my guess is that ginger dude will eventually meet someone. It might take a while, and she’ll need to be more assertive than he is, but he’ll be fine. PUA wannabe dude? I see a long future full of loneliness and never quite being able to understand why women just don’t like him in his future.
I watched the video with the sound off, because I wanted to see for myself if there was any validity to the “Women won’t give me a chance because I’m uggo!” whine, and I knew my opinion would be influenced if I heard what they were saying. Anyway, most of those guys were perfectly decent-looking, just in need of better grooming and clothes. The one who ran the forum was downright cute.
Oh, and I mean the “incel” guys, not the PUA guy. Yech.
OT: Have you guys heard that the Boy Scouts of America just removed its no gay scouts policy. As an Eagle Scout, this makes me very proud.
Of course, it would be better if they voted against the ban for gay leaders/non-religious scouts, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.
I just flicked through the video and none of them was what I’d call ugly. Far from it, they were perfectly nice-looking young men.
What was with the leather tricorne???
Which one was the wannabe PUA – the guy in the sunglasses near the start?
Sunglasses and fake confidence guy is the wannabe PUA.
Thought so. Joe Cool in his sunglasses while being interviewed came across as rude. Plus twitching around in the chair. õ_δ
@cassandrasays
O_o. Yeah. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to be dating someone who thought my body was gross… (I know it’s just part of it, but still :/ Not thrilled with all the ‘yucky vaginas’ stuff. Seems common-ish)
@Cthulhu’s Intern
Yay! ::quiet, nighttime party::
I know this was a documentary and they were supposed to talk about themselves, but I get the idea that that’s all they do. That is what is unattractive.
Also, what is their obsession with “the approach” and picking up women in clubs? I’ve never met a guy in a club and had sex with him that night. It would be dangerous, for one thing.
Serrana, you just reminded me of the line at the start of the doco – the text defining love-shyness (gag) as being “the inability to approach a potential romantic partner”. Is it just me, or does that imply going up to a stranger and trying to start a conversation that eventually leads to sex/LTR? Because if it does … how many people work like that anyway? Surely more people are more likely to just meet socially through friends or interests or work or whatever, and develop a romantic/sexual interest in each other (or one way if it it’s not mutual) than to go up and start a stone-cold “approach”?
If I’m not totally off the mark, no wonder these guys are failing to connect with anyone and setting themselves up as PUA suckers. Guys u r doin it rong!
The guy who runs Love-Shy.com? Sympathetic? Okay, I haven’t worked up the guts to watch the video just yet (people using words like “incel” in seriousness give me a Pavlovian feeling of dread), but I’m guessing the person you’re talking about is someone different from who I was thinking of. It’s probably the old moderator who left. Or maybe the site is once again under new management.
Because the last time I did any browsing regarding that site, it was run by an angry fella who a site like this would have a field day with. He did all the classics, spouting anger at women, berating men who did not fit the MRA agenda, and even shamelessly encouraging a user to murder his crush. When someone called him out on that last one, he simply smugly replied that if the guy did actually go out and kill a woman, he (the guy who was given the “advice”) is the idiot for listening to him.
…..
A little confession: a few years ago, I was actually pretty fascinated with Love-Shy™ guys ever since I first heard of the term somewhere on TV Tropes. I did some searches on it and as a still immature young woman, I would fantasize about meeting a shy guy (because I did and still do find shyness kind of cute, and am rather shy myself), and basically being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl™. And I hadn’t even heard of that term yet!
But now I can more clearly see the line between guys who are sweet but shy, and those who are afraid of women and have turned that fear into anger. It’s now easier for me to spot the less obvious signs of entitlement to women. And I am now wary of guys who self-identify as love-shy, and especially “involuntary celibate.”
Why is it getting so hard to read these posts? Its like I can’t handle the insanity.
*curls up in a ball*
I just read this:http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/dear-girls-please-shave-your-pubic-hair/
My tolerance for stuff has gone down to almost nothing. Its like one page of awful a day please……
@ Tulgey Logger;
Thanks for this link. I’m in the midst of watching it now so cannot comment further.
@ melody – It’s at least comforting that the vast majority of comments (and upvoted ones at that) are calling out his assholery.
@Amnesia “Women: Where the only winning move is NOT TO PLAY!”–There’s NO winning move in the male supremacist game, & you’re not allowed to politely opt out. In the male supremacist view women exist to serve men, & a woman who makes her own way through her own efforts is regarded as somehow cheating. I’m 60, & have been told at various times in my life that I was “taking a job away from a man”, “cheating a man” by declining to marry, & most memorably, that I was “for women’s convenience rather than the survival of the race” by declining to have children–& observed a few years ago, before the ’08 crash, that some frothing jerk proposed denying Social Security benefits to retiring women who’d never had children on the grounds that the women had harmed the U.S. by working during their prime years instead of churning out more workers–never mind that homelessness & unemployment has been a growing problem since the ’80s.
@Brittersweet: There’s nothing wrong PER SE with dating someone shy, or… well… being a bit of a manic pixie dream girl. I guess me and my husband do fit that trope a bit. He was depressed and fairly shy when I met him, although he was never an entitled asshole or misogynist, and he didn’t go around self-identifying as “love-shy” or talking about what a nice guy he was or anything like that… And I, well, was pretty insane. The reason we immediately hit it off like we did was kind of a combination of having lots of things in common (the same tates, liking the same pop-cultural stuff, the same political views, to a fairly large extent the same life history up to the point where we met) although we complemented each other on the point that I brought lots of energy and ideas and he brought “being in touch with reality”. So yeah… guess it was a bit of “shy guy meets manix pixie dream girl” in real life there, and a year and a half after we became a couple we got married, and we’re married still and ridiculously happy with each other twelve years later. 🙂
Sorry, the same TASTES, not tates.