Men’s Rightsers and Pickup Artists alike are obsessed with the dilemma of the so-called “Nice Guy” who can’t get laid. MRAs see his plight as a symptom of a gynocratic society in which fickle, asshole-loving women are the gatekeepers of sex; PUAs see it as a sign that beta males need to learn how to imitate the vaguely aloof swagger of the natural alpha male.
And both MRAs and PUAs completely miss the point.
To see just how badly they do, let’s take a look at a recent post from the sadly influential PUA shitbag Heartiste, who uses an alleged Facebook screencap of uncertain provenance as a springboard for a diatribe against the “desperate male,” that is, the “desperate, clingy ünterbeta male” who pursues a woman, often in a weirdly apologetic, even abject way, long after she’s made it clear she has no interest in him.
But Heartiste’s example, as you’ll quickly notice, isn’t exactly a textbook case of so-called “friendzoning.” (I’ve blotted out the dude’s face; Heartiste didn’t bother.)
Be warned: it’s a teensy bit long.
Yeah, so I’m thinking that the problem isn’t so much that the dude here is “too beta” as that he’s “a creepy stalker with no sense of boundaries and the obsessive persistence of a serial killer.” It’s not even clear why he’s developed this fixation on her. He says nothing to suggest he knows anything about her other than that she’s a “pretty lady,” and she doesn’t remember ever even meeting him.
Heartiste, naturally, takes him to task not for his creepery but for violating “just about every Poon Commandment” — that is, Heartiste’s set of “alpha male” rules for getting, well, “poon.”
He also notes the fellow’s repeated promises to not “take advantage” of her if she comes over to his place. Generally speaking, when someone casually promises not to rape you on your first date, and presents this as if it’s somehow a generous gesture on their part, it’s pretty much the opposite of reassuring, as it sort of suggests that they were at least considering it as a possibility.
But Heartiste sees it as an example of excessive chivalry:
Any man who thinks promising a woman that he “won’t take advantage of her” is the way to her heart is a power tool. Chivalry works in the abstract (specifically that abstract where unicorns are a possibility); in practice it’s an abysmal failure. A woman, if asked, will always say she wants a man “who respects her need to take it slow”, but in reality, where her words meet the unstoppable force of her tingles, a chivalrous gentleman’s pose is the equivalent of downselling: “Sure, this smartphone looks fast and functional, but it actually has parts made from Fisher Price toys. Try this cheapskate badboy clamshell over here instead.”
No, dude, the problem isn’t that this guy is being too “nice.” The problem is that he’s creeping out a random woman because he refuses to accept that she’s not interested in him.
The trouble with a lot of so-called “Nice Guys” isn’t that they don’t understand when a woman has rejected them — our creepy Romeo in the screenshots here was aware that he was probably “bothering” her only a few messages in. It’s that they refuse to accept these clear if implicit “no’s” as real” no’s.” Because, on some level, no matter how lonely and desperate and “ünterbeta” they may feel, they still feel entitled to sex with a “pretty lady.”
I rather doubt that many “Nice Guys” show up for work at companies that have interviewed them and hired someone else. The solution isn’t for these guys to learn “game”; it’s for them to learn to respect a “pretty lady’s” no as they would anyone else’s.
Argenti, good summary. Giving pleasure to each other is the essential, as far as I’m concerned, however that happens on a given occasion. But D Fucking S manages to make it sound like you’re (especially if “you” happen to be a woman) are required to do any damn thing your partner wants, especially if it’s frightening or painful or just distasteful, because otherwise you’re a b**** with problems and the poor mistreated man should DYMFA already. (Another Savagism I don’t care for one little bit.)
Oh SHIT it’s going to be 41C here on Tuesday. I hate summer.
I was getting creeped out just by reading that.
41 on Tuesday?
Monday to Thursday we’re looking at 39, 41, 41, 43.
(I checked the BOM site for Melbourne and you’re reasonably OK. 41 on Tues, 38 on Thurs. Others in low 30s.)
That 43C is 109F for those still using old money.
Yurk!
I know you guys get hotter weather than us up in Adelaide anyway, but yuck, yuck, yuck. We very rarely get a string of days that hot. Last time I can remember was the week before Black Saturday, when it was up to the mid forties for days.
Don’t send it on when you’ve finished with it …
@pecunium, Ive used a similar line. As said, context is key.
Ad for “Good, Giving, Game” – it is pretty much due to Savage that I feel badly about it. It didn’t have to carry the “not allowed boundaries” connotation.
@Wetherby –
As for the “what’s up?” coming from a stranger, my usual reply is “It’s a two-letter English word, signifying the opposite of ‘down’. Odd that you didn’t know that.”
Wanna trade? We’re warming up a bit in the South but it was way below 0 earlier this week by the Great Lakes.
Thermodynamics of course means that you’re going to give us heat, so it’s not exactly a trade, but our toes’ll be comfy and you won’t be melting.
@katz:
Oh good, someone else noticed that too! I was wondering if I was the only one scratching my head over weirdness like this. I wonder if it’s part of that modern tendency to inject sex into everything, including places it doesn’t fit all that well…and the sometimes-valid-but-often-obnoxious modern tendency to view sex as the wellspring of all Victorian horrors, because the Victorians were “repressed” (even to the point of covering those sexy, sexy piano legs!), and repression either breeds fear or stems from it directly. So to be modern and “healthy”, you have to uncover the sex lurking behind the horror, and take it to extremes in that direction instead of the other. That’s my theory, anyhow…
@Freemage:
Ugh, of course. Because rape only ever means violence and overt physical force, and can only ever happen between some hapless naïf and a weapon-wielding stranger in a dark alley, amirite? And if you stick date or marital in front of it, the fact that dating or marriage is in the picture negates the rape part. It’s just another case of Owed Sex Being Withheld By Evil Feeeemales. Even if he beats the shit out of her in that context, it must be Because She Deserved It, That Jezebel.
PLEASE RESPOND!
To what?
I don’t think it is that so much as the modern tendency to write where “character drives the plot”. You need something for these villains to do, and you want to “reinvent” them. I don’t think it’s just the “All Victorian Villains are Symbols of Sexual Repression”. (Mind you, I’m sure some specific examples have been this.)
I have no idea. I can’t find any other comment by him.
Neither could I. He sounds way entitled, though.
Sorry, probably should have said “ze” or “them” instead of assuming M. Shouty was male.
I scanned through their blog. Posting is somewhat sparse. They appear to be a past, if not present, contributor to RationalWiki. They did mention The Boobz in one post, putting up a poster that one MRA made reading “Proud to be a white heterosexual male” and then explaining why WHMs don’t need to come out and also don’t need to feel ashamed of being WHM.
So I don’t think they’re an MRA.
Also they point out the difference between fedorae and trilbies.
While my first reaction to armondikov was a “respond to what??” as well, I think they deserve having it be considered a possibility that they are a decent person, making a joke about the original post, basically saying that the harrassing pursuer was thinking, as he wrote his messages – “PLEASE RESPOND!” which is probably what he WAS thinking. 🙂
I’ve often thought it was another product of rape culture (turning predators into romantic partners, setting this up as ‘normal’) where the promoters simply use the excuse ‘Victorians were repressed!’ to cover their actual motivations, assuming they actually were aware of their real motivations in the first place.
That said, there’s still a lot of supernatural fiction out there that I love, I just loathe the helpless human/predatory non-human match-up.
I’ve a feeling armondikov has commented here once, recently, but I’ve no idea where.
Argenti, if you’re reading this, a book you might enjoy: The Arsenic Century by James C Whorton. Goes through how pervasive arsenic was, and you didn’t need to be a murder victim to be killed by it. It also has some nice swipes at laissez faire attitudes.
Of course I’m reading this, if I haven’t just disappeared completely, I read all the current/recent threads! Sounds interesting, I know there was a trend in using it to get rid of husbands (no clue how many of those murdered husbands would be called abusive today, but I suspect the differences in how divorced women, versus widows, were treated played a role in that trend)
Arsenic is also why we have modern forensic science.
Didn’t have time to read the whole comment thread, so sorry if that has already been mentioned, but the guy in the Facebook quotes above seems to very clearly be suffering from an Autism Spectrum Disorder (look at the way that he’s constantly aware and apologetic that he might be offending her, but can’t read the social cues as to how, or the way he repeatedly uses stock, set phrases to try to get a confirmed response). And he does stop when given an explicit notification that his advances are unwanted. His behaviour may seem totally bizarre to us, but I don’t think it necessarily makes him ‘creepy’ or a ‘stalker’.
Heartiste, on the other hand, is a giant pile of steaming douche. And the man’s possibly autistic behaviour is not an example of ‘beta male chivalry’.
Would there be a way to edit the article to emphasise Heartiste’s douchery while considering the possibility that the ‘stalker’ is seriously suffering from a real difficulty in social interaction? After all, ‘Nice Guy TM’ is such a harsh label to stick on someone…
The stuff was absolutely everywhere. Green paint? Green dye in clothes or paper or anything at all? Arsenic. The stuff was so loosely applied it would come out in dust from a ballgown. It was used in wallpaper, candles, furnishings, medicines, food … there was a big scandal in Bradford when twenty-odd people died and heaps of others were made ill by sweets that had arsenic in them. All went back to food adulteration, itself a huge problem. The confectioner involved went to a druggist to get plaster of Paris, which was commonly used to adulterate sugar (about 25% worth, often enough). Druggist was ill in bed and sent his apprentice to get some … but didn’t tell him that the barrel of p of P was next to the barrel of arsenic, neither of which had any marks showing.
The laissez-faire types took the attitude that it was despotic and paternalistic to impose regulations on teh poor manufacturers, and that it was up to the public to look after themselves and check things first. Which blithely overlooked that there was no requirement for content labelling, or that huge numbers of the public were hardly educated enough to know how to check if there had been, or that when most producers were adulterating food (the price competition made it almost impossible not to if they wanted to stay in business) there was hardly any way for someone to get safe food even if they’d known about it. People even became so accustomed to adulterated food they preferred the taste when they did sample pure stuff.
On the forensic science side: be warned, there are some horrific descriptions of animals being poisoned by chemists doing research into the stuff.
Could we please stop trying to pretend that every man who ignores a woman’s boundaries is on the autism spectrum? Because there are lots of men who act like the one in this post does, far too many for all of them to be on the spectrum.
If you actually know that someone is on the spectrum that’s a different issue, but it would be really nice if we could stop automatically offering that as a way to excuse pushy sexual behavior from men in general.
Surely that “he’s on the spectrum” idea only holds good if it’s the first time a person’s ever done this? And if someone on the spectrum is reading: would no answer for months be something hard to interpret as lack of interest for you? (Absolutely not snarking here, take note, and I know people vary hugely in reading cues, spectrum or not.)
Also … even if this guy is on the spectrum, it isn’t a pass for stalkery behaviour. Yes, it’s a big job, but he has to make it his business to learn what’s acceptable and what’s not.