So the Red Pill subreddit, as you may recall, is a place for dudes to discuss the devious and possibly not altogether ethical or even consensual strategies they’ve come up with to … have sex with anyone they want. But their real goal is not just to have sex, but to control other people’s opinions and thoughts of them doing so. They want to silence all critics, and then even demand praise for their morally reprehensible or at least morally questionable actions.
Woah. It feels like my brain was just taken over for a second. Did I even write that? I don’t think I did. I swear I’ve read most of that paragraph before.
Oh wait.
Oh yeah. That’s where it came from. I must have been possessed.
The Red Pill subreddit, where lying to women to get them into bed is perfectly acceptable but a woman having consensual sex is a reprehensible, narcissistic slattern with a gymnastic hamster for a brain.
NOTE: I found this quote through the always helpful Blue Pill subreddit.
I can’t believe I read Brz’s entire story. I can overlook him writing a fake sex story, but the least he could do is make it interesting and entertaining. That was more along the lines of “It all started when the beautiful librarian ordered a pizza, but with extra sausage…”
Interesting and meaningful things? Examples or it never happened.
It sounds like your Baptists are better than most Missouri Baptists. The fundies around here are more for the double standard, with fornication being a sin for everyone, but the real pressure is on women because men just can’t help themselves. That’s why I described it as sin lite for men, but ultra mega sin for women. I like how it was with your Baptists much better, because at least it’s fair.
@Bionicmommy: Without being a baptist expert it does seem to me as if there are fairly large differences between the Swedish and the American ones. For instance, almost all baptists I’ve met here are pacifists. When I grew up there was still mandatory military service for young men. If someone felt it was morally wrong for them to use weapons they could do their service as nurses, chefs, firemen or a few other options instead, only then they’d have to do more time (I guess the “more time” was to ensure that nobody took that option just because it seemed easier to them). And pretty much every single man in that church had done non-weapon service because of pacifist beliefs. I don’t really think that’s a thing with American baptists, right? So there does seem to be some cultural differences.
Btw, that pacifism did cause them to make some funny interpretations of the Bible (i e, violence=symbolic, God created the Earth in six days=literal truth).
Yeah. You sure do take full responsibility for everything you do. Full responsibility for everything, oh yeah, but of course no one in your story did anything wrong, and no one cares who did anything wrong. The whole thing is ridicolous. It’s not important who is wrong, because that’s a side point to the story, the point you were making…
Seriously? Your response to “The assumption women trade sex for something else” was “I once met a lady, then another, then cheated on both while making no choices in that entire story, and doing things I didn’t actually want to do to appease people who were sad at the time”.
I hope you have a long, and happy life. I hope you get better than what you are at the moment. I hope everything works out for you, and you gain self awareness and joy in it.
Because what you have now is just so sad, and I weep for you.
@AllyS:
I’ve been around! But I’ve also been busy. There’s this Outside thing…
Hi, I don’t want to derail but I don’t know how active the forums are. I would like to ask those manboobzers in poly relationships some advice on behalf of my friend who is 1yr out of a 12yr marriage and now dating a guy who wants an open relationship. She’s been monogamous to date but is contemplating alternatives. Can I ask her questions here or should I take it to the forums?
The forum is fairly dead, but the last open thread might be a better thread to ask in? It’s over here of you want to post there — http://manboobz.com/2013/07/02/open-thread-for-personal-stuff-part-deux/
Thanks argenti
@ Dvarghundspossen: Yes. American Baptists are very, very different from what you’ve described. In the United States, the Baptists (in particular, the Southern Baptists) have become the driving force of the Religious Right, which means they’re some of the most chest-beating belligerent people around. Don’t ask how they square that with “Turn the Other Cheek” – they’ve become more of a political and cultural movement than a religious one. Religious beliefs are made to fit Conservatism, not the other way around.
@bigmomma my best friends are poly. They are a group of 3, but have partners outside those 3 as well. 2 of them are married to each other and the other guy is dating both of them. I can always ask them questions (they are very open about things) for you. Just FYI.
Off topic, but there’s a petition to the US Atty’s office and DoJ about the guy who leaked the Steubenville photos (he’s facing a longer sentence than the rapists) — http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/3270?l=6pJO8mzP-Kg
@BigMomma: ask away. I’ll try checking out the other thread if you decide to post there.
Catching up from the holiday weekend, here…
Even worse than the pizza box and the flower analogies was the one someone here posted about the cup of water–have everyone spit into it, then ask the kids if any of them would want to drink from the cup. No? Well, a woman who has had a lot of sex is just like that cup (meaning, of course, that she’s devalued from the first ‘spit’).
And of course, it actually doesn’t make sense as an analogy on its own merit, since the question should be asked, “So, would you want to spit in this cup?”–since, y’know, that’s what they’ve decided the analogy to sex is–spitting. If anything, spitting into a cup that’s apparently frequently used for that purpose makes a helluva lot more sense than spitting into a ‘clean’ one.
@Seraph, that really sounds very different. In the baptist church I used to hang out in my teens I think most people voted conservative, but some voted social democrat or some other leftist party, and some for middle parties, and it wasn’t really thing.
Weird how the same church could have developed in such different directions in two different countries.
I’m not saying “my” baptists were perfect or anything, there was a lot of homophobia going on for instance, but they sound one hell of a lot nicer than “your” baptists.
Generally, I think religious people in Sweden tend to be less right-wingnutty than in the US. Possibly because Swedish society in general is pretty secular and the idea of anyone else having to conform to the norms of a religious group they don’t belong to would become smacked down pretty damn quickly. Also because the society surrounding the different churches and religious groups is fairly liberal and the differences between “let’s kill all the muslims and keep the women in the home!” and “guys, war is a shitty thing and men should stay at home with their kids more” would become too big for the first standpoint to be viable.
@Dvarghundspossen: I think it’s a matter of cultural and tribal politics. The Southern Baptist Church is the official church of the American South in all but the legal sense (and if it weren’t for the First Amendment, I’m sure it would be in that sense as well in some places). This is a region that prides itself on being more chest-beating, flag-waving, gun-fired-in-the-air patriotic than any other, which includes unquestioning and enthusiastic support of all wars.
(But which,
amusinglyannoyingly enough, doesn’t prevent threatening to secede when out of political power.)That’s going to shape a denomination’s character a bit.
Anyway, the South as a region has always been pretty conservative, which meant the Baptist Church was, too. Even so, until the Sixties, our Baptists still probably had at least some similarities to yours: they had so many poor and working-class people among them, they supported social programs. Opposition to birth control and abortion was a bunch of silly Papist nonsense. Republicans were the party of Lincoln and greedy, exploitative Northern industrialists, so they voted Democrat.
The problem was segregation. Like the South as a whole at the time, they supported it. Many ministers actually preached it from the pulpit.
When the Civil Rights acts were passed, the South abandoned the Democratic party en masse, and the official church of the South of course had to follow suit. They joined the party that catered to them, and modern American conservatism took shape in the resulting toxic stew.
Dvarhundspossen, your baptists were actually probably a different denomination. In the USA, often ‘Baptists’ stands for ‘Southern Baptists,’ which are very much a US denomination and have their own conventions. Different deal, different rules.
LBT — my mother’s New England baptist conference and there’s plenty of anti-gay-marriage and “may babies again be safe in the womb”, less on the pro-war, but most of the congregation is old enough to remember WWII, and the rest remember Vietnam. Supporting sending people to risk their lives as biblical…not flying. Plenty of veteran = honorable though (I have, shall we say, a view in opposition to that, short version is that honor is earned, not granted)
Hey @melody and @blackbloc, I went to bed i posted (Aussie time) and am now about to go to work. Thanks for your replies, I am going to post in other thread when I get home as I don’t want to derail too much.
The Baptists around here are usually very homophobic and misogynistic, they picket abortion clinics, take over the school boards, and have a lot of sway over Jefferson City. I don’t know if they consider themselves Southern Baptists or American Baptists, though. That wasn’t my denomination back when I was a Christian. I went to a church that was even more pentecostal and fundamentalist. Yikes.
Check out the site Dalrock sometime — he’s got a Beware the Cougar video post going and making fun of “old” age 32 women and heaven forbid even more ancient — they actually call 40 a “geriatric hag”. I tried to get a rise out of them Friday and they slammed me all weekend to the tune of about 123 comments. Posted a rebuttal, can’t wait to see their responses. And what’s with the cat hate — post anything disagreeing with their narrow worldview and oh, you must be a alone with your 100 cats. I think I’d prefer the cats company to these clowns but of course, I’m hamstering.
KitKat – or cattering, in this case! 🙂
Maybe these cretins have Cat Envy as well as everything else. What cat (or any animal) is going to waste its time on those haters?
Bionicmommy: Jefferson City? Shit, I did Basic at Leonard Wood.
@KitKat,
I wonder if it’d be considered trolling for me to visit Dalrock’s blog and tell them that marriage should be based on equality and compromise, and that women should have more leadership positions in their churches. That would be funny to see their reactions.
And I agree that the insult of “enjoy your cats” is ridiculous. Are they kidding? Kitties make wonderful company, unlike the Christian patriarchy jerks at Dalrock.
@pecunium,
My dad did basic training at Ft Leonard Wood in the late 60’s.
I had said the conservative Baptists control Jefferson City as a way of saying they have a huge influence on the state’s legislation. I think they want a theocracy.
Interesting that there are different baptist churches in the states… And yeah, maybe “our” baptists count as a different church altogether, I’m no expert.
In addition to what Katelisa said, baptists in Sweden have always been a small minority, that’s been actively prosecuted for their beliefs in the past, so that probably also has a big impact on how the church develops.
“My” baptists were anti-abortion too (although in strictly non-violent ways) because fetuses are BABIES. But I wouldn’t say they were particularly anti-feminist in other regards. Actually, my absolutely best friend when I was five to ten was from a baptist family. She always used to point out things in our children’s books and comic books that I hadn’t thought of myself, such as how men having adventures were treated as normal but women going on an adventure was treated as a special occasion – stuff like that. In hindsight, I guess that must have come from her parents? I mean, you don’t spontaneously think up stuff like that when you’re that young, and we sure weren’t taught that much feminism in school.
Her mum also tried to explain periods to us in a no-big-deal kind of way when we accidentily found her tampons and asked her what they were, only we still ended up being pretty freaked out by the concept (what with us being six and all).
Overall I often find myself a bit defensive when people bash fundies in general due to all the time I spent hanging out with baptists as a kid and teen (although my family wasn’t baptists, and my mum was actually afraid that I’d turn into a brain-washed cult member if I spent too much time with them). They definitely had their drawbacks, such as…
1. Believing homosexuality is a sin.
2. Believing abortion is baby killing.
3. Believing the Earth was literally created in six days and sciencie is full of fail. (And I totally believed that too for a while.)
OTOH…
1. They were no more homophobic than the average secular person in the tiny town where I grew up. (The reason I had such difficulty admitting to myself that I was bi, and didn’t manage to do so until I had moved to the big city, actually had nothing to do with the baptists and everything to do with certain secular incredibly homophobic people.)
2. They were far less, um, insanophobic? (is that a word?) than the average secular person where I grew up.
My mum, who thought the baptists where weird and wished I didn’t hang out with people from that church, never understood that I would have had no friends otherwise, since I was so ostracised by the mainstream of the town due to my mental illness.
I also know a trans man who grew up in a baptist church and came out during his time there, who says he got far less transphobia from the baptists than from seculars. Sure, this might have got something to do with him being a “classic” transsexual, he said that many people in the church had pretty gender essentialist ideas, but still. That was in a general fundie-bashing internet discussion, and yeah… I GET that people bash fundies for the homophobia and anti-abortion-thing and not-believing-in-evolution-thing, but still… I have really complex feelings regarding them, as do most people who’ve experienced that in some areas they can be more open-minded than the average secular, while being so close-minded in other areas.
Hey, if Brz is just posting dumb, made-up stories about his experiences with women that are completely irrelevant to the thread, does that mean I can too?
‘Cause here it goes;
Tuesday night, not yet late enough to go home. Go home. To an empty house, the rest of my family were on vacation, crawling ‘cross goddamn Western Europe of all places. Leaving me alone with the two cats, a cold bed, a slowly emptying fridge and a list of cleaning chores to attend to.
That meant I couldn’t stay up too late in town. Don’t even really know why I go into town, though, the bars here were never my scene. If there ever was a dyed-in-the-wool loner, I was it. Not much about me had changed since I graduated from high school about five years back. Same living arrangement, same stupid style, still bored with the same tame middle class existence. I was The Last Man, living only for his own comfort in the collapsing values that he cannot muster the sand to re-evaluate.
This bar was comfortable enough, I guess. All the table and chair I sat myself in was a clean, polished wood, slightly darkened by the corner shadows. The bar counter itself was a few meters away, furnished with a slick green AstroTurf mat that advertised that mid range beer you drink when you watch televised football games. The building itself was a few stories high, the bar was just one part of its business, the rest being a few hotel rooms and a small restaurant. The bright lights shining directly down on the counter, plus the blaring tv screen, really offended my senses, I don’t how the other patrons could stand it. But stand it, they did – a few groups of folks in their early 30s had clustered around the drink servers, gossiping, gawking, gulping, grinning and generally haing themselves a time of it, like normal people. Unlike me.
I wasn’t here with anyone. I just ordered some soft drinks, relaxed in the chair against the back wall, occasionally making progress with my typing. The word document in front of me was much longer than when I started on it a few hours, but not nearly as much as I wished. That made me depressed, why couldn’t I just be better at this?
My despondent eyes again wandered away from the screen as I contemplated my lack of creative spark. The football memorabilia on the walls meant nothing to me, I had no interest in any sport. The empty glass to my side had some carbonated suds lurking in it – I didn’t feel like getting another cola to drink. The night outside was fresh and cool, despite the street just besides the bar hopping with all kinds of traffic.
Then, through that same street entrance I was watching, she came in. I saw her before she saw me, but only for a second. Then she turned and our gazes met across the room. Oddly, she didn’t immediately react at all, stared back with the same bovine expression I was wearing. Both of us, just looking at each other, passively acknowledging the others existence and existing. Objects in outer space, floating aimlessly in the void. Around us were the movements of other people’s lives, distant as the nearest star. No emotion, just looking, barely thinking. We were ice sculptures, we were spiders sitting in our webs, were stewing in our juices, slouching towards tomorrow without genuine thought or feeling.
Finally, the seconds ended. We blinked. Alive again. She came over to my seat.
She was my type, I guess. I mean, I thought she was good looking. Short chocolate brown hair, straightened rigidly and set by a cute headband. A head taller than me. Athletic build, her steps were spry and confident. Clothes were nicely plain – clean, fresh, simple red shirt and black pants, casually worn, relaxed and relaxing. Bracelets on the wrists, all of them multi-coloured beads on a string. Purse was a jet black number, thick straps and shiny zippers. Jacket was a denim piece, some rhinestones on the edges. Her caucasian skin was somewhat flush, walking on the crowded streets for a bit on a energetic night like this can do that to you. Her make-up was carefully applied, some eyeliner, rouge on the cheeks, bottle green finger nail polish and hot pink lipstick. Her eyes were green, a bit hazel. She liked the way she looked. I liked that.
“Remember me? We went to the same school. John, right?”
“Carrie?” I nodded. “How are you? Here to meet someone?”
“No…I was just passing by. Saw you in the window…”
She pointed at the wall just to the right of me, which indeed had a window facing out onto the street.
“…And I thought I’d say hi.”
I felt…numb, I guess, but still kinda excited. Like it wasn’t happening to me, but a character in a book I was reading, and I was hooked on finding out what happened next, and I just keep speed-reading the words, and turning the pages…I was no longer bored, no longer depressed. Not at all.
For the next 10 minutes, we catches up on each others lives.
She was working at a pet shop, I was working at a DVD rental place.
She was just out with some friends and going home via the bus, I was working on some creative writing – fantasy stories set in the modern day.
I said she was cute, same as high school, thought that she’d be training for the Olympics by now since she was such a great track-and-fielder. She said she remembered how smart I was back in drama, history and English classes, always making insightful notes. I let her look at my writing stuff so far, see if I was still good. We picked over some paragraphs, discussing what I needed to do with it.
I bought another round of drinks for us both. Soft drinks, I didn’t like the taste of alcohol and she already had a few at the start of the night and really wanted to stay sober.
We flirted, I made the first move, she asked me about protection, I bought condoms out of the bathroom vending machines, we caught the bus back to her place, her folks were out of town too.
We fucked. Had sex, I mean. It was friendly, easy-going. We fell asleep in each other arms, which was very pleasant. She had a very girly taste in bedroom decor, which surprised me. Next day, I cooked some breakfast. Carrie remarked she didn’t have too many home-cooked meals too often, so I offered to cook for her in the future.
We exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses, it’d be okay if we met up again.
I went home and fed the cats.