Hey, everybody!
So you remember that post a couple of days ago, that one in which I quoted Jason Gregory’s most peculiar dating advice for angry men? You know, the one in which he suggested that men rebuff women who are interested in them with a long and rather nasty assortment of misogynistic insults? You know, like these:
Tell her that she isn’t interesting, that her soul is dog-shit and that she has nothing to offer other than boobs and booty, that she is a piece of shit and a total failure as a human being, that you don’t find her attractive and that she isn’t even good enough to be a cum-bucket.
And he went on like that for several more sentences. You can read the whole quote in my original piece, or in his original post on A Voice for Men.
Well, it turns out I totally misinterpreted Jason Gregory’s post, according to an unbiased and neutral outside observer named Jason Gregory, no relation to the original Jason Gregory, who’s written a post about it on his blog.
Hold on, I’m being told that this second Jason Gregory is in fact also the first Jason Gregory.
Anyway, according to Jason Gregory, even though Jason Gregory did explicitly tell men to “tell her … that her soul is dog-shit” he didn’t really mean to tell men to “tell her … that her soul is dog-shit.”
No, he only hypothetically meant this. He was just trying to suggest was how mean the ladies are when they turn down men.
What he was really trying to express, he now says, was that
men need to learn self-respect and to value their selves in totality—including the importance of valuing their sexuality.
Pretty weird how that came out in the original post as
Tell her that she isn’t interesting, that her soul is dog-shit and that she has nothing to offer other than boobs and booty, that she is a piece of shit and a total failure as a human being, that you don’t find her attractive and that she isn’t even good enough to be a cum-bucket.
But, he insists, his aim was really quite noble. As he explains now, he wasn’t just trying to stand up for the dignity of men — he was trying to protect women from having their inboxes filled with dick-pics.
I wrote that men should stop giving away cock like it’s worthless. Perhaps if men valued their sexuality, they’d be less inclined to inundate women with emails, messages, and pick-up lines. Perhaps if men actually valued their sexuality, the ladies at Jezebel wouldn’t be so inclined to complain about all the free-cock oppression. Perhaps if men actually valued their sexuality, men wouldn’t degrade themselves by harassing, begging, and inundating women with dick pics and pleas for their attention and affection.
Indeed, he went on to argue, it was not he who was the real misogynist, but me. J’Accuse!
This might seem a hard case to make, what with the whole “tell her … her soul is dog-shit” bit and numerous other remarks in his original post, like, for example, his description of women who actually enjoy sex:
You may be able to find a few coked-up girls who really get into it—the kind of girls who end up with sweaty hair, mascara, and cum dripping down their cheeks, but those girls usually have emotional disorders and are simply trying to bury their emotional problems in various sorts of drug induced escapes.
And who can forget his suggestion that men make their dates “pay for a juicy sirloin to replace all the jizzed-out protein” they cause to be jizzed out?
But apparently I am the true misogynist because I ran my post making fun of him during my pledge drive. Which makes me a “misogyny pimp.”
This is where the mocking of misogyny becomes misogyny. He doesn’t care about the women who bother to read his blog. Though he may have a few days in which he invites women and other commenters to share and cry about their troubles, any good pimp knows the importance of faking like he cares. Any good pimp knows how to manipulate the emotions of “his bitches.” …
[H]e doesn’t care about why men are sending dick pics and bombarding women with emails and messages through online dating services. He’s not looking for solutions to these problems. He’s not saying that men who do such things may lack self-respect because the value of male sexuality is often viewed as less-than-worthless in our culture.
Wait, what? I don’t care enough about men who harass women so I’m a misogynist?
Exploiting women is a form of misogyny … In this way, Boobz has more in common with an abusive pimp than he has with any heroic slayer of misogyny. Boobz is the misogyny that he mocks. Boobz is a misogyny-pimp.
QED, I guess. Apparently quoting misogynists, mocking misogynists, discussing misogyny, taking notice of misogyny in any way … makes one a misogynist. At least according to a guy who apparently thinks that the only women who really “get into” sex are “coked-up girls” with “emotional disorders” and “cum dripping down their cheeks.”
You’ll notice that last line in Jason’s quote links to a video; that link is from him. It’s a clip from the film Bad Santa. As Jason makes a point of mentioning several times, that’s where he got the “your soul is dog shit” line.
But if you watch the clip you’ll notice one thing about that line, in its original context in the film — it’s not surrounded by a paragraph full of vile misogynistic abuse. Nope, that stuff is all Jason Gregory.
Anyone else think buttboy sounds like Vicky Pollard from Little Britain: “Yeah but no but yeah but no but…”
They seem to think that harassment/assault is fair play if you’ve been rejected. A comparable example would be if I sent cat poop to all the publishers who’ve ever rejected my writing. At that rate, I could only reasonably expect one thing: to go on getting rejected forever, maybe even blackballed if the grapevine gets wind of me. These guys, on the other hand, seem to think that deliberately setting themselves up for defeat will end up snatching victory from its jaws. They forget that women talk, and that if a guy (or group of guys) starts acting obnoxiously, someone is going to do some googling and blow their little game before the second round gets underway.
Poor widdle Jason is just mad that David happened to get onto him before the women of OKC did.
If you only send out a scattershot load of impersonal messages, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get rejected; in fact, you have only increased your odds of being rejected. A guy who’s only looking to get laid by as many hot chicks as possible is boring and, unless she’s equally horny and unchoosy, she will simply find him not worth bothering with.
And personally, if all I wanted was to get some relief from the hornies, I’d take care of it myself, and not bother trying to pick up random dudes. Because the health and safety risks of casual sex are so not worth it, especially since we’re not guaranteed an orgasm like men are.
Masculinity: the toughest shit in existence… until you reject it. Then it breaks like glass.
WHY are macho guys supposed to be the tough ones again?
buttboy69: You gonna show us the page, and give us access to the inbox?
(I will now pretend, again, you are willing to engage in good faith).
No, all I’m saying is that most men will get consistently rejected no matter what, and it hurts less if it following a spammy and/or crude and/or copy-pasted come-on, because it doesn’t feel like a personal rejection.
This isn’t true.
I’ve been sexually active for about 30 years. I don’t think I’m some sort of Adonis, or Cassanova, but I know I’ve “had more than my share” (based on the number of partners I’ve had, completely apart from the number of my relationships* being higher than the US average for sexual partners of men of my age: let’s hear it for being poly, since a few of them overlap).
Have I been rejected? Sure. Have I had women I was interested in whom I didn’t seem to get any reciprocation from? Sure.
Have I been, “consistently rejected”? No. I’d say my “failure” rate when I got around to expressing an interest is probably around 70 percent.
I’d wager most people, who aren’t being douchecanoes, have a similar set of experiences. By the time they get to the point of making a play for sex, they have some idea of it’s likely reception (see above re the women I didn’t make any overtures to, because I wasn’t able to get an indication of interest.
In my life I’ve also rejected people (and about an even mix of men and women). I’m going to go out on a limb here and argue there have been a number of people whom I didn’t have to reject, because they noticed there weren’t any reciprocal signals, and didn’t approach me.
Is this going to be different in an online venue? Maybe. I met a few lovers through some old-school BBS environments. We talked, etc., and met in social settings of a neutral nature, and one thing led to another: I can only think of a couple of occasions where desires for sex were communicated prior to a face to face meeting; and never by me, but I digress.
What I (nor they) did, was make a pass, before some social interaction had taken place. By not doing that, by getting a feel for the other person, the odds of rejection, qua rejection, went down a lot.
Newsflash, most people aren’t interested in having sex with most people. Of the more than 3 billion women on the planet who might be interested having sex with men, I doubt more than a couple of hundred thousand are likely to find me attractive.
So it’s stupid as all hell to open up with “hey, take a look at my dick!, don’t ya wanna jump on that!?!” Because that makes you look like an insensitive asshole (ok, looks isn’t right, it is the action of an insensitive asshole). It’s possible one can attenuate the rejection by saying, “well, she doesn’t have a sense of humor, and I can let it pass if she thinks I was being a jerk”, but make that work one has to either admit to being a jerk, or pretend that it’s not really a jerk move.
Either one is self-defeating (and it doesn’t lead to finding the sort of person one is interested in, unless what one wants is someone who likes being hit on by jerks).
So that argument fails my experience, and looks to be self-defeating; on all the levels it’s being made.
*I’m defining relationship as a romantic involvement which lasted longer than 6 months, and was seen as more than a sexual exchange between the two of us.
Molly Moon: Although I’ll probably flunk out once I start upper division because I don’t understand how anyone takes the categorical imperative seriously.
Could you expand on that? Because a lot of how I shape my personal philosophy is based on The Categorical Imperatives (though I confess when first exposed to the First Formulation, in high school, the phrasing made it seem alien). I can’t say I got there through Kant, but when I took some more formal Ethics, and we got to Kant, it was really familiar.
Nietzsche is harder, mostly because he’s building on lots of other things, and assumes you know those things. Not having an understanding of what he was saying makes it really hard.
If I had to try to sum Nietzsche up, it’s, “live the Categorical Imperatives.”
And they are also convinced that women have it easier and are priviledged. Priviledged to deal with abuse and threats.
This reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s
“Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”
Good point… and also, the point needs to be made over and over that the person who decides to initiate the contact makes a CHOICE to, this isn’t two people who just happened to be thrown together magically. I’ve been on both sides and the truth is: it’s better being the initiator, the initiator gets to decide they were ready to have that conversation and got the chance to prepare themselves for acceptance or rejection — whereas the recipient has it sprung on them and doesn’t have any control over whether the contact starts, they’re tossed into a situation that they have to navigate without hurting feelings, without giving false hope, and without arousing anger.
That doesn’t mean never talk to anyone for anything, it just means accept the reality that a) contact without any indication of interest from the other person first puts that person in an awkward position 95% of the time, and b) most people in the world just won’t be available or interested in any one person male or female no matter how hot, so accept rejection without resentment as part of the biz. If you’re doing cold sales with yourself as the product, don’t be surprised that a lot of people don’t actually like cold sales. If it’s hard to imagine the awkward position of someone being asked, remember the last time someone asked you for a sum of money you couldn’t easily part with. Or, imagine the last telemarketing company that bugged you writing you a letter about how much your rejection of their generous offer hurt their feelings.
I suppose sending shitty messages out to women becuase you expect to get rejected could be considered a male “deffense mechanism” but it’s also1) a shitty thing to do and 2) totally self-sabotaging. It’s the sort of thing petulant teenagers do, but most petulant teenagers grow out of it pretty quickly.
I’m not going to get into my own dating history, because MRAs, but as a freelance writer, especially just starting out, you have to send out a lot of queries to new editors. A lot of them get turned down.
It hurts. So there’s a certain temptation to do a half-assed job on the queries because “they’ll probably just get rejected anyway.” Sometimes half-assed queries do actually get picked up.
But if you do this consistently, guess what? YOU WON’T GET ENOUGH ASSIGNMENTS. Because half-assed queries suck.
You do much better to write carefully thought out queries that are decently researched and appropriate for the publication in question.
And if you do what buttboy is talking about, and send dick pics instead of queries you will get no assignments and will instead be reported to the authorities. (I assume; I never tried that approach.) The guys who send out dick pics are lucky that more women don’t report them.
These guys who spam every woman on OKCupid with some generic message and complain about being rejected? You SHOULD be rejected for doing that.
Hi buttboy69, also (like pecunium) going to assume you’re not a troll and are just trying to engage in some good-faith thinking (although seriously dude, if you are honestly not a troll you might want to consider picking a different nym!) (A similar thing happened to me a couple of weeks back where an ambiguity in my phrasing meant some people thought I too was an eeeeevil MRA).
If I understand what you’re saying correctly, you think that some insecure men might send out spammy and impersonal messages because it would lessen the sting of rejection, even though also making that rejection less likely? I think you might be right – that whole ‘it will hurt to fail, but it will hurt even more keenly in proportion to how hard i try, so i’m barely going to try’ is a sadly familiar psychological bear-trap to fall into.
Now, I think your next point is that if some of these insecure men are also misogynistic assbags, they might make those messages sexually harassing/threatening so that, although it decreases their chance of acceptance even further (perhaps even more than they themselves realsie) they can sort of console themselves with the thought that ‘OH WELL I WAS ONLY TROLLING THE BITCH ANYWAY’, and that they can pathetically hope the woman, too, can’t be sure they weren’t trolling and at least they haven’t ‘wasted’ any respect on someone who was going to reject them. I can actually kind of see that psychology as plausibly obtaining in some cases.
So actually I think you make a fair point – I think what many of the other commenters got annoyed about was that it sort of sounded like you thought that’s just because that’s the way these insecure men DO think means it’s an EXCUSE for harassing the ladies. If you didn’t mean to imply that, then just clear up your ‘is’es from your ‘oughts’ and all will be cool! (And someone will give you a welcome-package with kittens in it!)
Privileged to be in fear of death at the hands of your date. Yup, what a glorious thing it is to be a woman…
Ah buttboy, as always your logic is interesting. As a rule of thumb if you don’t want to get rejected out of the gate, don’t do something that will make people automatically reject you. Does rejection hurt, of course. And despite how you think the world runs everyone gets rejected. However setting yourself up for failure is never a good way to succeed.
But of course I’m just a mere woman, hold on while I send off the line of men at my door.
Hey, Feminist Borg peeps and katz in particular! Thanks for the support! You can read Esprit de Corps, AKA the adventure of the cute little BorgCritters here.
(Sorry to be spamming here, I just know katz isn’t on LJ and want to make sure she finds the story she paid for!)
I kind of hate to come to buttboy’s defense, but I can see his point to a certain degree. I can “entertain the thought without accepting it” as someone famous (who I could look up it I wasn’t feeling lazy) said.
David, you said “I suppose sending shitty messages out to women becuase you expect to get rejected could be considered a male “deffense mechanism” but it’s also1) a shitty thing to do and 2) totally self-sabotaging. It’s the sort of thing petulant teenagers do, but most petulant teenagers grow out of it pretty quickly”
I would add that many defense mechanism can be self-defeating, especially when we are not aware of them and don’t engage in much self-examination. And they can appear like shitty things to do to, especially to the folks we think we are defending ourselves against. As for being the actions of petulant teenagers, most definitely. Do we all out grown all our teen petulance? Good for anyone who has. Goodness knows at 50 I can still be pretty petulant and childish at times. I try to aware of it at self-correct
I am in no way condoning the the totally shitty behavior suggested by the OP. I personally do not feel entitled and privileged when I get a dick pix or am called a horrible name for saying no to the guy who propositioned me from across the street while I was shoveling my walk. These are all shitty, petulant, offensive, childish things and are illogical to do. AND they are probably defense mechanisms. Twisted defense mechanisms.
Honestly, auggz, I’d advise not answering dude’s calls at all. He seems to be the sort who ANY attention makes worse.
RE: bbeaty
Enh, what a useless defense mechanism. Seriously, I used to have major ED behavior, and THAT had more practical use to it than anonymous dick pics. And I’m really not okay with this, “And they can appear like shitty things to do,” thing you said here. They ARE shitty things to do. Sending pictures of my genitals to strangers who don’t want them is a shitty thing to do, regardless of my mental traumas or defenses, because it is hurting other people and dragging them into my shit.
Lots of people do shitty things as defense mechanisms. That doesn’t make them any less shitty.
Pecunium:
Well tbh I didn’t form much of an opinion until months after I took the class, so I probably only think it’s silly because I have an incomplete/incorrect understanding of exactly what the categorical imperative is. Maybe before I start criticizing it I should ask you why I’m wrong lol. My memory tells me that, basically, it’s “don’t do things that would screw everything up if everyone did them all the time.” Is that anything close to accurate?
Couple different things here:
1. buttboy appears to be conflating “generic impersonal messages” with “harassment and dick-pics.” There’s a world of difference between “Hello, my name is _______, we both seem to enjoy _____. Would you like to talk about _______?” and “I know you’re going to reject me, you snobby [expletive deleted], so here’s a picture of my genitals.” One is sort of boring and unimaginative; the other is uncalled for. Sending a generic message to lots of people on a dating site, in hopes of getting a few replies? Ok, whatever. Sending pictures of genital and messages full of slurs is just wrong. A dick-pic is not a generic message.
2. Jason Gregory was not talking about online dating, he was using that as a springboard. The whole “dogshit” tirade was about rejecting a woman who wanted to have sex with a man. The woman is already interested. Gregory is telling men to reject women in the cruelest manner possible.
auggzillary: Ugh. I’m sorry you and your roommate are dealing with that. Don’t have much more to add, except what LBT said about just not answering the calls and what Argenti said about alerting campus security if either of you thinks he might try something. If gets to bad, maybe roommate can change her phone number?
Stay safe.
I don’t see how this can be considered anything other than trolling. There is nothing attractive or positive in posting dick pics, so it’s an almost 100% guaranteed method of rejection.
Self-defeating would be more along the lines of thinking “this female won’t be interested in me, so I won’t even bother trying to contact her”. Sending dick pics is an escalation of behaviour way beyond this, demonstrating a complete lack of respect for the recipient, and a desire to upset/offend an unknown person. That’s not self-defeating dating behaviour – that’s fucking harassment.
I think in some cases it’s both. It’s a self-defeating behaviour, AND it’s fucking harassment. The fact that it’s the former doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s the latter in any way.
I imagine a lot of these guys do actually entertain some ludicrous secret hope that one of the women they proposition for sex will actually take them up on it. And if not, if they’re disgusted or upset or insulted, then hey – nothing lost except the finger-strain of typing out a few obscene messages right? Because i’ts not like womanthings have feelings that matter, or anything.
Methinks he’s only “retired” because he never had any clients.
bbeaty: Even if they are defense mechanisms… it’s not that “sending dick pics” (or other harassing behavior) appears to be a shitty thing to do it is a shitty thing to do
And I am perfectly willing to go past not condoning it, straight to condemning it. The same way I condemn ablist speech here, or creepy behavior at Arisia or thing’s like this creepy app for rating men because I’m not willing to be maligned with the idea that, “Men are like that”, and “boys will be boys”.
There is no other swathe of human behavior wes so massively, passively, condone by not condemning it. When it comes to racism, we have driven it to a more fringe position.
But this shit, we chalk it up to, “awkwardness”, or “Defense Mechanism”, and wrign our hands about the consequences to reporting it.
Basta.
Molly Moon: Maybe before I start criticizing it I should ask you why I’m wrong lol. My memory tells me that, basically, it’s “don’t do things that would screw everything up if everyone did them all the time.” Is that anything close to accurate?
Close to accurate.
The two formulations work in concert:
1: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
2:”Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”
The first means (and it’s a difficult phrase) if you want to do something, extrapolate it out to see what happens if everyone is allowed to do it. If that fucks things up, then it’s not moral.
The second means you can’t treat people as things. You can’t use them as means to your end.
The short version of the two, which are meant to be seen in concert is, “you aren’t special”.
Where it gets complicated (and where Kant gets some well-deserved grief) is that pure Kantian Ethics are reductionist, and deterministic, and remove most of our humanity from the equation.
I suspect if you tried that method and got an assignment, it’d be like Groucho Marx’s “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” 😉
With men sending women dick pics – that reads to me as a rape threat, and I’d want to see him in court for it.
I don’t give a flying fuck if this is some alleged defence mechanism. It still comes down to men treating women like fucktoys to be abused. If they’re that immature and have such a poor opinion of women anyway, they aren’t fit to be dating at all, ever.
SredniVashtar – oh, buttboil’s a troll, all right. His troll lack-of-cred is well established.