Month: April 2014

I will be giving a talk at Northwestern on Monday on the Mythology of the Friend Zone

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date April 4, 2014
368 Comments on I will be giving a talk at Northwestern on Monday on the Mythology of the Friend Zone

Hey, Chicago readers: If you can make it up to Evanston this Monday, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Escape from the Planet of the Friend Zone,” exploring some of the mythology of this dreaded place. The talk, like my talk two years ago, will be part of Northwestern’s Annual Sex Week, sponsored by the College Feminists. (The talk itself is cosponsored by NU’s Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault.)

It’s at 7 PM in Kresge Hall 4365, which is on the Southern end of campus, near “the rock.” (Here’s a map.) If you’re taking the el, get off at the Foster stop and head east; then a little ways south when you hit campus. I’ll check about parking for non-students and provide details later.

The last time I gave a talk during Northwestern’s Sex Week, some MRAs got a little overexcited and started making up things about what they assumed my talk was about. (They were wrong.) So, just to make clear: I will not be teaching impressionable college students “how to have good sex,” except insofar as I will be talking about how sexist and self-defeating the concept of the Friend Zone is, which means it’s possible that some dude could attend the lecture and decide to stop whining about getting stuck in the Friend Zone, and thus improve his romantic and sexual prospects with that one simple step.

I haven’t finished writing the talk yet, so if any of you have any thoughts on the Friend Zone — or the closely related topic of the “nice guy” — let me know in the comments below.

I’m also curious about what role the concept of the Friend Zone plays in your everyday lives, so I’m going to spit out a bunch of questions that I may address in the talk and may ask the students as well. I’d be interested in your answers.

Have you ever been put in a situation that you or other people might describe as the Friend Zone? Whose fault do you think it was? Have you ever been accused of putting someone else in the Friend Zone? Did you find this insulting? Has someone else, through their own obsequiousness, put themselves in the Friend Zone with you?

Is the Friend Zone a male thing or are there a significant number of women and girls who find themselves friendzoned as well?

Does the notion of the Friend Zone grow out of male entitlement? Is it a fundamentally manipulative to try to pressure a woman into romance and sex? Or does it grow out of male awkwardness — the inherently difficult situation of shy or perhaps socially awkward guys who are still nonetheless expected to be the ones who pursue women rather than the other way around, as MRA types might argue?

When did the term start getting used? The concept is certainly not new, but I don’t think the term is that old. When did you all first start hearing it?

How can guys (or gals) get out of the Friend Zone?

Can a Friend Zone situation — by which I mean one in which one person is romantically interested and the other isn’t — be transformed into a real friendship, or will the different feelings/expectations of the two people make this impossible?

Alternately, can a Friend Zone situation turn into a real romance?

Is the Friend Zone really a useful concept at all? There are very few relationships — platonic, romantic or purely sexual — in which each partner feels the exact same way about the other. There are mismatches all the time. Shouldn’t we just learn to roll with it? Maybe the answer to the old When Harry Met Sally question — can a man be friends with a woman he’s attracted to? — is, “why the hell not?”

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MGTOWer complains: By 18, women are "either dating 30 year old millionaires or (if less attractive) f***ing the football team."

Every Man Going His Own Way's favorite fantasy — Every Man Going His Own Way’s favorite fantasy

In case anyone was wondering, the Men Going Their Own Way movement has managed to survive the implosion of MGTOWforums.com that I wrote about a little while ago. Yep, the regulars from there have moved on to several new forums where they continue to celebrate their independence from the women of the world by happily discussing such manly hobbies as video games, model trains, taxidermy and knitting.

Oh, who am I kidding? They don’t talk about any of that stuff. Basically they continue to nurse their grudges against the women who wouldn’t date them in high school, somehow convincing themselves that the best way to be “free” of women is to obsess about them every minute of every day.

Take the charming fella who calls himself ManWithAPlan, who has managed to win himself nearly 1900 “likes” from his comrades on the MGTOW HQ message boards with comments like the following:

I hate [women] because most of them acted like stuck up cunts when they were young and hot. Then they hit 30+ and decide to settle down, and when there are no men to settle down, they start shaming men. This is where most of my hate/negativity comes from, the fact that these women feel entitled to “good” men after having spent the last 15-20 years telling guys “just because you bought me a drink/dinner doesn’t mean I owe you sex”.

And every woman acts this way. Oh you want to slut it up? Sure go ahead and be a cum rag, but I would never date a cum rag. And how would they react to that? “Oh well that’s your preference and you’re entitled to it”. Yeah right, they’d flip their shit and go into shaming language ahoy.

The reason I derive so much pleasure from this is because for the first time in their lives women are being held accountable for their actions. And they don’t fucking like it. Remember when some girl/woman got you in trouble for just crying while you weren’t in the wrong? This is fucking payback.

(Emphasis mine.)

This may sound a little harsh, but you need to remember that for most young women, life is just an endless VIP party:

Women are born with their so called value. By 15 or whatever they have the looks and power to attract most men. By 18, depending on how attractive they are, they’re either dating 30 year old millionaires or (if less attractive) fucking the football team. And they retain this value until at some point into their 30’s, sometimes 40’s. Men get nothing. We are born invisible. We have to claw, work and suffer for 2-3 decades before we get any recognition. And by that point, we no longer have the energy or fast metabolism we had in our youth. So that means double time for us.

Women are handed the world on a silver platter, men have to fight for it.

Is the MGTOW movement the least successful “independence” movement ever? They’re like someone who breaks up with you, angrily marches out the front door, slams it behind them — and then spends the next five years on your front porch peering in the window.

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Pickup artist: "If God ever created a better replacement for women, we'd exterminate them overnight."

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date April 2, 2014
224 Comments on Pickup artist: "If God ever created a better replacement for women, we'd exterminate them overnight."

The problem — well, one of the many problems — with a lot of so-called pickup artists is that they think with their dicks, and then use their relatively underpowered brains to rationalize their dickular preferences as The Way The World Should Be.

By contrast, the problems with Lance Christopher, a so-called pickup artist who hangs out in the comments section on Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog, really start when he stops thinking with his dick.

Some dudes roll over and fall asleep the moment after they come; Mr. Christopher contemplates genocide because women don’t want to hear him pontificate about Ukrainian history.

In case you’re wondering, no one else in the discussion suggests that Mr. Christopher’s opinion here might be a teensy bit extreme.

No, the commenters happily share terrible opinion after terrible opinion about the inferior creatures known as women.

Oh, it gets worse.

Cleanup in the pompous misogyny aisle!

You’ll notice that all of these comments have upvotes, by the way.

There may be some even more terrible comments in that thread, but I gave up reading them after a few screens full of this sort of garbage.

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I created Paul Elam, and now I need your help to rein him in

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date April 1, 2014
134 Comments on I created Paul Elam, and now I need your help to rein him in

The jig is up. I and my collaborators have kept it secret for a long time now, but for reasons I will explain in a moment, I feel I need to come clean about this now, before it is too late:

I created Paul Elam.

That is: “Paul Elam” is a character created and developed by me and my friend Paul Henderson, an amazing improvisatory actor who has taken on the task of playing “Elam” in YouTube Videos, radio shows, and on a few occasions in the real world as well.

I first came up with the character of “Paul Elam” — “Elam” is just “male” spelled backwards — some seven years ago after reading Warren Farrell’s Myth of Male Power and wondering what an updated version of Farrell would look like today as a YouTube ranter. I brought the idea to my friend Paul Henderson, a feminist comedian who was already doing an “angry white man” character in his comedy act.

After a bit of workshopping, we created “Paul Elam” and his “Happy Misogynist” YouTube channel. I wrote the scripts, and Henderson read them out. As time went on and as Henderson got more into his new alter ego, he began adding bits of dialogue of his own. Sometimes when he got too deep into his character of “Paul Elam” he started to scare me a little.

After some success on YouTube and at Men’s News Daily, we decided to set up A Voice for Men. Shortly afterwards I set up Man Boobz, mainly as a way to promote AVFM and generate traffic for “Elam’s” site.

Since then, things have just snowballed. Henderson put me in touch with an amazing group of Canadian improv comedians called the Pouteenagers and the characters of Girl Writes What, John The Other, Typhon Blue, and DannyBoy were born.

Not all of those at AVFM are in on the gag. Dean Esmay for example, is completely sincere, as are most of the recent additions to the AVFM roster.

Up until about a month ago, the whole “Paul Elam”/A Voice for Men project seemed to be going swimmingly, generating buzz — and even a good deal of cash, much of which we have been donating to an assortment of feminist charities.

We kept piling absurdity on absurdity — like adding “human” to “men’s rights activist” to become “men’s human rights activist” — but no one ever guessed that it was all an elaborate prank! We were prepared to let the whole thing run for at least another year, getting sillier and sillier, before fessing up in a joint press conference with me and “Elam.”

But something terrible seems to have happened to my old friend Paul Henderson. After 7 years of playing “Paul Elam,” he seems to have become lost in the character he and I have created. Paul Henderson, in other words, has become Paul Elam.

He used to joke with April Fulieu, our makeup wiz, about how horrified he was each time he looked in the mirror and saw “Elam” staring back at him. But after we shot the last video with him he refused to let April take the makeup off, and when she went to tell me about this he fled out the back door of the studio.

We haven’t heard from him since. At least not as Paul Henderson.

I’m not sure what to do. He’s changed all the passwords on the AVFM server, so I can’t shut it down from my end, and I haven’t been able to contact any of the Pouteenagers either. I worry they too may have gone over to the dark side as well.

I can only hope that by posting this I can give him the wake-up call he needs – or at least arouse enough suspicion that the “sincere” AVFMers will confront him and possibly jar him back to reality.

He’ll deny it all, of course.

But at some point his fake beard will fall off.

That’s what I’m counting on, really.

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