I guess I’ll never quite understand this whole alpha thing.
Over on his Alpha Game blog, the reliably awful Vox Day is defending the ALPHA DOG honor of British art collector Charles Saatchi – you know, the guy recently in the news for choking his wife, TV chef Nigella Lawson, in a very public argument – sorry, a “playful tiff”– at a restaurant.
Lawson responded to Saatchi’s totally playful and not at all violent behavior by moving out following the incident; she’s reportedly been spotted without her wedding ring.
Saatchi, apparently recognizing that she was through with him, officially announced he was divorcing her with a whiny, self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing statement to The Daily Mail on Sunday. It read, in part:
I feel that I have clearly been a disappointment to Nigella during the last year or so, and I am disappointed that she was advised to make no public comment to explain that I abhor violence of any kind against women, and have never abused her physically in any way.
The row photographed at Scott’s restaurant could equally have been Nigella grasping my neck to hold my attention – as indeed she has done in the past, although not in front of Scott’s with a photographer snapping away.
I must stress again my actions were not violent. We are instinctively tactile people. Yes, my hands were around her neck, and they had been touching her arm.
Difficult as it may be to believe, for those who have seen the pictures, there was no pressure applied to her.
Having seen the pictures, I will agree that this is indeed difficult to believe.
Vox Day doesn’t seem to care if Saatchi choked Lawson in anger or just put his hands around her throat because that’s just what nice people like to do sometimes for fun when they’re eating out. He’s just blown away by what a total ALPHA DOG COOL DUDE Saatchi is for divorcing her. According to Day, the whole thing shows that
If you don’t show respect for and loyalty to an Alpha, he will wash his hands of you without thinking twice about it.
… several weeks after you move out and make clear that you want to have nothing to do with him.
Vox goes on, attributing Lawson’s refusal to publicly absolve Saatchi and back up his story about their “playful tiff” in the restaurant to … her worry about how she would appear to other women:
Lawson, instead of doing her part and presenting a united front to the media, was more concerned about how she would look to her female friends and audience if she didn’t play the poor abused victim than she was about her husband’s reputation.
In short, she made it clear her loyalties did not lie with him, but to her public image. This is the one thing a woman married to an ALPHA absolutely cannot do. The ALPHA always knows he has options, and in the absence of the one thing he absolutely demands, respect, he will not hesitate to exercise them. Once a woman shows herself to be disloyal in some manner, few Alphas are inclined to forgive or forget.
And what is true of Alphas is also true, in lesser amounts, of lower-ranking men. It appears that Lawson miscalculated and didn’t realize how important his reputation was to Saatchi. She is not the first woman to make this sort of mistake and she probably will not be the last.
I’m hard pressed to see how walking out on a narcissistic asshole who literally grabbed her by the neck during a fight in a restaurant can be seen as any kind of a mistake. But I confess I don’t fully understand how abusers, and those who make a points of defending abusers, think.
Lawson will go forward with her life and her career; Saatchi’s reputation will be stained forever by his actions at the restaurant, as it should be, and he has no one but himself to blame. I’m not sure what Vox Day’s excuse is.
“Wah, I’m so disappointed that my wife decided not to defend me after I physically abused her in public!”
He didn’t say it, but you know he must have been thinking “MISANDRY!!”
It’s his job to protect his own reputation. And he chose to ruin it by abusing his wife. I also wonder what he would do in private if he would choke her in public. Usually abusers try to hide their actions in public, so it must worse at home away from cameras.
…not that doing it in private would have been better, only the public display of assholishness makes it harder for an abusive twit to bend the story to further punish the person being abused. I love the tone of entitled weariness he uses to condemn her for not defending him, btw. Totally classy. And does anyone find the specificity of this
kinda creepy, given that it comes in the middle of a public campaign to manipulate her via public media and public opinion to obey his desire to be defended and absolved of being an asshole?
Kudos for Ms. Lawson for holding strong in the face of a public (and one imagines private as well) campaign for her to ‘forgive’ (because I am sure he is totally and completely sowwy for
getting caughtwhat he did) and ‘reconcile’ with him.URGH, do I ever hate that word ‘reconcile’ in cases like this. As if the mutuality implied in the term reconciling were somehow equivalent with the act of setting aside your own safety and allowing a privileged, entitled and abusive fuckwad to go on feeling entitled to abuse someone.
Vox Day is an asshole, and so is Saatchi. It didn’t look like they were play-acting in those pics, she looked scared.
al·pha [al-fuh]
noun
1. the first letter of the greek alphabet (A, α).
2. the vowel sound represented by this letter.
3. the first; beginning.
4. asshole.
Eh, what Abusers call a “mistake” on Lawson’s part I call self-respect. I suppose we differ on our terms.
Saatchi is a big deal in the art world, with the power to instantly lift an artist from obscurity to a world wide reputation. People defer to him regularly,* to a disgusting degree which makes it unsurprising that he considers himself and his conduct immune to the dictates of other people’s standards. He most likely fully expected that his people would continue to protect and defend him, as is his natural right.
*one of my friends worked for his office in London and she has told some appalling stories now that she is out of the art business.
Even some of Vox Day’s fans had some trouble with this one; I don’t know it it’s still up, but one commenter over there cited a bunch of previous accounts from a bio of Saatchi in which he (allegedly) attacked business associates in a rage, in several cases choking them.
I just really hope that she doesn’t go back to him now that he’s threatening with divorce. At least, if she stays put, he has no choice but to go through with it.
I don’t know her, but gosh, the situation she’s in seems like a nightmare! Abuse+media storm, that has to be horrible for her. I hope she pulls through and finds a safe place where she can find some peace.
It’s shit like this that makes one inclined to believe that ‘alpha’ is simply a glorified term for ‘abuser’.
So the argument is that Saatchi is a total alpha dog and his his wife won’t be supportive, he can kick her ungrateful ass tot he curb? For that to make any sense, she’d have to be financially dependent on him. He’s probably the richer of the two, but Lawson is a celebrity chef with a TV show and several best-selling cookbooks. I don’t think she needs him.
Highlight of the comment section over there:
“Women, like the savage races, occasionally require a bit of violence to keep them in line, as a reminder.”
-Laguna Beach Fogey
Why choose racism OR misogyny when you can have BOTH?
I also note that a comment below it, posted 4 minutes later, has been removed by the author, indicating that yes, he has seen this one, and chosen not to delete it.
“I’m not sure what Vox Day’s excuse is.”
He’s a complete shit.
The amazing part of the whole Alpha/Red Pill thing is these guys never realize just how whiny and pathetic they sound. You know what? If you react to any disappointment with a childish display of force, or fall to pieces because your girlfriend/wife didn’t back your play, you may not be the big dick after all.
Hell, Saatchi even demonstrated this in his statement:
Millions of dollars. Massive influence within his chosen field. Complaining that the woman he choked in public didn’t come to his defense. Yeah, he’s got it together.
And yet if she hadn’t immediately left him you can bet that she’d be held up as proof that women today will only stay with abusive assholes.
Puke.
@David Futrelle: Dear God, his fans have a line? I’ll have to take your word for it on that – Teddy Beale’s sites are among the few places I flat-out refuse to go. Many years ago, I went to his website because he was challenging people to prove that universal suffrage was a good idea (I succeeded only in getting him to admit that he wasn’t so keen about black men voting, either – he’s since become a bit more open with his racism). He got my email address and I actually ended up in personal correspondence with that specimen for a while. Funny part was that because of the pseudonym I was using at the time (Discordia), he may have assumed, as others did, that I was female.
Ah, memories.
So is Vox Day still mentally living in a world where an abusive husband was better than no husband, because a woman needed a husband to survive? Is he unaware that Nigella Lawson has plenty of money of her own (because of course women don’t earn their own money), and isn’t dependent on Saatchi in any way? Or does he simply believe his own bullshit: that all women want nothing more than to be with an Alpha, and having had the chance to be the lifelong property of an Alpha, Lawson will spend the rest of her days bitterly regretting her failure and hopelessly trying to fill the Alpha-shaped void with lesser men?
@grumpycat Well, she’s a woman, so OF COURSE she’d be wrong. It’s just a matter of finding out what it was she did and reverse engineering a mansplanation of why she shouldn’t have done it. The next woman who makes a choice the Totally Manly Top Dog Alfa Menz don’t approve of will still be wrong (because, you know, cooties) but there will be an entirely new opportunity for them to mansplain why based on whatever it was she did.
seraph: yes, apparently Vox Day is living in the ’50s. I’m not sure if it’s the 1850s or 1950s, but he hasn’t exactly stepped into the now and evolved his attitudes.
Hello! I’m a lurker de-lurking. I read Man Boobz fairly often. I have a houseful of pets that keep me quite occupied:) A dog, two ferrets, a bunny, and a flock of chickens. Two of the chickens are living in my spare bedroom. One is healing from a broken wing and the other keeps her company. Life is never dull and I can always count on them to put a smile on my face! Since I just gave myself some second degree burns on my thighs and am sitting with cold compresses on them, I figured I’d chime in.
In my personal experience as a DV victim in my previous relationship (as well as friends that have been in DV relationships), whatever is done in public is nothing compared to in private. Also, the abuser will only be abusive in front of others when he is confident that there will be no consequences and/or he is somehow right or justified. It still amazes me, to this day, how so many abusers claim to be against physical violence and try to lie away the abuse. For me, the physical didn’t hurt as much as the emotional abuse. Physical is just an escalation for when emotional and/or other forms of abuse do not provide the desired outcome. Of course, abusers are such morons that they don’t get that the common actual outcome is the above story. Nobody wants to be abused.
Sorry to butt in. I shall go back to tending my wounds.
50 BC maybe.
I think ideally these guys want it to be a social dependence, rather than a fiscal one, where the status of being with an “alpha” is its own reward and not being with one is its own punishment. That way they don’t even have to waste money on the shallow bitches!
“I’m not sure what Vox Day’s Excuse. is.” Breathing in too much lead based paint while living in his mom’s basement?
Raised by wild asses. Poor thing has gone feral and bitey.
It takes a special level of self-obsession to expect someone you just beat up to run to your defense when you get in trouble for beating people up, and whine when she doesn’t. Christ, what an asshole.