Oh, Reddit! Why must you be so Reddity? As a reminder of how deeply shitty Reddit can be even outside the confines of the Men’s Rights and Red Pill and related subreddits, consider the following comment from AskReddit, in which a RedPiller responded to another comment trying to summarize the “Red Pill Philosophy” for those unfamiliar with it.
Cyralea, a dedicated Red-Pill popper himself, took issue with the notion that Red Pillers are angry. (Gosh, why would anyone think that?) “Some are, certainly,” he wrote. “Particularly former betas who are recovering and are just discovering the nature of the world.”
But, he added,
The philosophy follows that one shouldn’t be any more angry at a women for her behaviours than one gets mad at a dog for chewing things up. We encourage self-improvement and self-respect in light of this newfound information. Some men use the knowledge to pursue sex, but others use it within their relationships/marriages. Alpha behaviours lead to healthier, stronger relationships. The women we date end up more satisfied in the long run, so both parties benefit.
I think it’s easy to get distracted by the angry people in /r/theredpill. There has been a recent influx of subscibers, so there’s been a little more angst than usual. The philosophy absolutely doesn’t hinge on anger though, though the language used may suggest such.
Emphasis added. As of this moment, this comment has a net 7 upvotes, 11 upvotes and 4 downvotes. That’s right: 11 Redditors saw this comment suggesting that women are like dogs who chew up sneakers and thought, “I’d better reward this bit of timeless wisdom! UPVOTE!”
In a followup comment, Cyralea tried to explain why the word “bitch” pops up so frequently on the Red Pill subreddit. Amongst Red Pillers, he noted, “bitches” is
literally interchangeable with “women”. It does not have the negative connotation when used there, again the same way 4Chan uses “fag”. I can understand how this seems aggressive.
Oh, “bitches” is like “fags.” Well then, no problem, use the word all you want, my dear fellow!
The mods removed this followup comment (though it’s still visible in his comment history). Apparently, in AskReddit, explicitly comparing women to female dogs is fine, and will even win you some upvotes, just so long as you don’t actually use a word meaning the same thing.
Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this very Redditty discussion.
augochlorella,
I get what you are saying in the rest of your post .
But when you think about it ? Look at the bitterness that the parents (and MRA’s blaring example) and how miserable they are “because of the divorce.” The kids hear that .My dad hates my mom because ‘she divorced him .” (vice versa) The divorce “ruined my dads life.”
Add that in to the obvious other changes .(reduced standard of living /possibly having to move (uprooted) ? Hearing WELL! If your mom hand’t divorced me then things would be different !
It imprints in the child’s mind if only they had not divorced everything would be rosy.
Even one of my sisters .No children .Her husband divorced her and 7 years later she blames half the things that go wrong in her live on ‘divorce.” I can’t even give her advice she will snap and me and say YOU have a HUSBAND!
Excuse me darlin ? They were friggen miserable .All she did was whine and complain about the marriage while married .Now its “the divorce.”
re Cohabitating couples and divorce:
This is interesting. The CDC did a study of cohabitation, marriage and divorce, and they found that the link between cohabitation and divorce has been declining in recent years:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf
Oh and I thought of a parallel saying as to the OP.
Don’t be more angry at a man for his behavior than you would a pig /hog for rolling around in filth .
I know that sounds aggressive but when you really think about it its really not .I mean men are pigs is no different than the KKK saying “bleeep.”
And if we go back further than the 50s, lots of couples didn’t get the chance to “stay together”, happy or miserable — because one of them died young. Plenty of people had two or more marriages because they were widowed.
That’s one of the statistical MRA complaints I have never been able to grasp fully the negative implications of.
“Divorce rates are up 50! If you marry someone who has had a partner before marriage, the odds of a divorce go up by orders of magnitude!”
(I paraphrase, but that’s the gist)
And the only response I can think of to that is: “Yes. Of course. If I have experience with relationships, I’m less likely to want to stay in a bad one.” I don’t get the benefit of pretending that isn’t so, unless you somehow intend to claim that happiness is, at best, a kind of garnish on a marriage, and that the most important thing is acquiring a maid for your house and hearth.
but then I realize: Oh yeah. Shit. That’s exactly what people arguing that line tends to believe.
T’is sad.
“Alpha behaviours lead to healthier, stronger relationships. The women we date end up more satisfied in the long run, so both parties benefit.” [CITATION DESPERATELY NEEDED]
And let’s not forget that in the Good Old Days™, there were abandonments galore. Many a common-law couple had to “live in sin” because the woman’s Lawfully Wedded Husband had fucked off to parts unknown, not leaving so much as a forwarding address. So she couldn’t divorce the motherfucker (even if she could afford to, which was seldom), and had to live with her next guy (and have kids together) without “benefit” of clergy. It was not exactly unusual for a woman to call herself “Mrs. So-and-So” when she was legally “Mrs. Such-and-Such”, but Mr. Such-and-Such had exited the picture long ago.
(Howdy to Chimisaur, and hugs to Ceebarks!)
Had my parents, who divorced when I was about one year old (during the 70s, so pretty much still the classic ‘wife gets house, kids’ deal that the MRAs believe is still totally the norm), stayed together, I would be a completely different person now. Specifically, I’d’ve been dead, probably in an incident involving a clock tower.
Because as deeply as I love them both, and much as I’ve always valued the traits I receieved from each, living under the same roof as those two while they bickered constantly would’ve completely driven me over the edge.
Of course, they were probably more mature about the divorce itself by the time I got old enough to appreciate things–by then, going to visit dad every other weekend was simply how life worked, and both of them were able to suppress any urge to downplay the other when they were not under the same roof; I’ve gotten hints that during the event itself, my seven-years-older brother had to put up with a lot more crap than I ever did. It was only during family events that they couldn’t keep from sniping at one another.
(Hell, by the time I was in high school, after one of dad’s heart attacks, they managed to live together for about a month while he crashed on our sofabed in order to recuperate. Seriously, they cared deeply for each other, even two decades after the divorce, but they were NOT healthy for one another.)
BTW:
“…one shouldn’t be any more angry at a women for her behaviours than one gets mad at a dog for chewing things up.”
Oh goodie. So then, I take it, none of these, er, GENTS will mind if I pee on his shoes or bite him in the ‘nads? I certainly wouldn’t want to hump any of their legs…
“Alpha behaviours lead to healthier, stronger relationships.”
Peeing on the shoes it is. Plus an extra poopy present beside the bed for him to step into barefoot at dawn, when I wake him up with loud incessant barking. I should have him trained in no time!
Being a pain in the ass is a kitty’s job. 😉
There’s a letter on Captain Awkward where someone’s worried about what will happen if zie and zir partner do fight, because they don’t, and the replies are all about conflict avoidance and how to talk about differences and not get into huge emotional fights … I can’t recall whether any actually said “Not everyone has fights. They’re not mandatory y’know.”
I kind of feel like, if it’s early in the relationship and you’re already having to put a bunch of work into things and having lots of conflict, maybe you just aren’t compatible. For couples who are compatible, constant fighting and painful compromise isn’t necessarily a thing. Again, I feel like this weird cultural narrative that all relationships suck and you’re going to be miserable regardless so you may as well try to force this one to work is playing out in the way people talk about this stuff.
God, yes.
“But why should I bother talking about this thing? If I tell I cheated, it’ll just be bothersome and awkward and my partner’ll get all upset, it’s easier if I just don’t tell and we’re relatively happy”
“Relatively?”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a bore sometimes, which is probably why I sleep with other people”
“Have you considered just breaking up?”
“I don’t want to be lonely. Besides, if I found another partner, I’d be in the same situation. I’m sure it’ll work out”
“Aaaaargh”
I don’t get it. I can’t understand this romanticist appreciation of misery. People who are together who get together with other people to snark and complain about the people they’re together with!
Whhhyyyyy.
On top of the “relationships should be hard work” line not really making sense, it’s also an oh-so-convenient way to prolong abusive relationships. Even though I had completely cut off contact from my ex I still had 3 or 4 of her friends try to get us back together over the following few months, and they all used some variation of “If you would just try to talk to her I’m sure you can work things out”. As if my exiting the relationship without “trying” (a load of BS in its own right) made me inherently guilty of something. Fuck everything about that.
Actually, that could really be “any relationship that isn’t working out”. The severity doesn’t really matter – people shouldn’t be guilted into a commitment.
Why do people feel so invested in other people’s relationships anyway? Maybe I’m weird, but my primary loyalty is always to my friend/family member, so even if I like their current partner, if they break up it’s just kind of…I assume they have their reasons, you know? If they weren’t happy, then it needed to end. So it would never occur to me to be all BUT IT COULD WORK IF YOU TRIED HARD ENOUGH. Why is this any of my business, theoretically speaking?
Same here. My reaction tends to be FUCKIN DUMP HIM NOW.
One of my dearest friends has reached the point where she’d leave her husband and kids in a minute, if she had somewhere to go (or rather, the cash to do it). Her only regret would be leaving kitties behind. Now call me nasty but I’d be with her all the way on leaving the husband and kids to fend for themselves instead of having the unpaid servant literally picking up after them. I’ve spent time in that house … never again.
As far as my experiences of my parents’ divorce – I don’t really remember much about it, certainly not any fighting that might have happened. It wasn’t the first time my scumbag father had cheated. He had the hide to leave, then come back for six weeks, by which point Mum (as she told me later) just wanted him to leave and be done with it. Whatever distress and worry it caused at the time, she’s never regretted being alone and has had zero interest in having another man in her life. One was more than enough.
For me, male parental unit had done a slap-bang job of being an absent or minimally interested parent most of the time. I didn’t miss him and had the pleasure of burning him with a letter telling him exactly what I thought of him when he had the insolence to try sliming into “getting to know me” twenty-thirty years later.
From what I’ve seen, it’s mostly selfishness masked by empathy. If there’s any sort of fallout from the breakup, this can cause issues in the friend’s life – so to resolve these issues why not fix the breakup?
One really telling thing that I’ve noticed is that the friend who tries to fix things is always working with the best interests of everyone in mind except the person who broke off the relationship. They are only interested in why it happened insofar as it helps them identify what they need to “fix”. So boiled down, the person who was not happy and took steps to fix that is being asked to make concessions in order to make other people happy.
The extra weird thing is that I’ve most recently seen this happen when my current partner tried to end a platonic friendship.
My sister and I had a falling out this September because she treated me really badly when I went to help her out when she had surgery, and my husband was trying really hard to fix it for a while. He insisted we had to go visit her asap (I said no) and seemed really relieved last week that we were talking again on Facebook.
I think he genuinely wants the best for both of us, but he’s one of those super-accommodating people who will put up with other people’s bad behavior to the point where it’s not good for his own mental health, and he just doesn’t understand that I sometimes choose to draw the line a little bit closer to me.
So that might be why some people try to fix others’ relationships – because they’ve put up with similar crap from people in the past and they’re uncomfortable seeing others make different choices.
Urgh, that brought to mind all the time and energy-he-didn’t-have-to-spare trying to patch up relations between his mother and Richelieu (necessary in his case to keep his government functioning) until he finally said ENOUGH after years of hassle.
(There should have been a “Louis spent” in that sentence!)
The only reason is I can think of they have been a part of your family for 10 or 15 years.
Typical Red Piller stupidity and dickbaggery is typical…..”women = dogs”? O RLY?
*Sigh*. No wonder why these MRAs are so fucked in the head.
Also, hugs to Ally S. and Lana, too, if you want ’em. =(
Hey, David I don’t know if you’ll see this but I think attention should be brought to it:
http://therationalmale.com/2012/01/20/borderline-personality-disorder/
This guy is ableist towards women suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder. He pulls the classic “they’re manipulative bitches” and dumps everyone with the problem under the bus. This guy shouldn’t get away with that crap.
Xen,
Not only that ?(on the women with BPD) He’s acting like people should have sympathy for guys who find themselves in a relationship with one .After making it clear they are and they stay there because shes a nine and he’s never “fucked” anyone above a 5 .And she’s wild and crazy in bed .
O.K so dude ? You get in a relationship and or stay in a relationship with a woman with severe emotional problems because you want to “fuck” a 9 who gives you hot wild sex ?
I’m not going to be crying over my beer over it . Because you are pretty fucking shallow not to mention stupid.
I’m not trying to discriminate but I for one would have to have a lot more reasons to be willing to be in a relationship with a man who had severe mental issues. Than he’s hotter and better in bed than any man I could get who’s mentally stable.