You know how they say “smile and the world smiles with you?” Apparently, that’s all wrong, at least according to our dear old friend Vox Day (Theodore Beale). The fantasy author and human shitstain says this old saw needs a rewrite: smile, and the world’s true Alphas laugh at you. As Mr. Day-Beale explains:
Women say they resent it when men tell them to smile. And well they should. An instinctive smile, when one is not expressing pleasure or recognition, is a submissive gesture. This is why attractive women tend to smirk in response to the big goofy submissive smiles sent their way by lower status men.
And then, presumably, those sexy ladies will quickly excuse themselves and make a beeline for the nearest ALPHA fantasy author standing grimly in the corner, quietly judging everyone and thinking unkind thoughts about John Scalzi.
But what if you’re one of those big goofy smiling submissive dudes? How do you capture some of that broody Alpha magic for yourself? It’s simple: Don’t turn that frown upside down.
One easy way to increase your perceived level of alpha is to simply not smile at strangers. Instead, just reply with a nod or a pleasant word. One can be perfectly civil without grinning at everyone like an idiot, and it’s always interesting to see the difference it makes in people’s perceptions.
Just don’t overdo it, lest the ladies think you’re, for example, some sort of weirdo misogynist so filled with fear and loathing for everything female that you’ve actually set up an entire blog devoted to telling the world what an awesome alpha you are.
I’m not talking about walking around glowering; self-conscious anger is much worse than indiscriminate smiling. But women have always been drawn to brooding men, so rather than turning them away with a gesture of preemptive submission, give them something to which they can be drawn.
To be perfectly fair, though, this does work with most Bronte sisters.
I love Wuthering Heights, but I think it’s clear that Emily Brontë intentionally wrote Heathcliff and Cathy as pretty messed up, and the reader is not at all supposed to find Heathcliff some kind of dreamboy. She rather goes out of her way to show that yeah, he’s that mean because he had a tough past, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not really mean – oh no, he totally is.
Heathcliff was extremely abusive and evil to Isabella for instance, and I got no impression from the book that we, as readers, are supposed to take this lightly or think that “oh, he just acts like this because he’s saaaaad so we shouldn’t blame him”.
I was in my thirties when I read the first two books (and never made it further). My tolerance for broody young men was really low, and I thought they were remarkably boring was well as weedy. It didn’t help that two characters I despised had the names of two men I love a whole lot. The only character I liked at all was Marius (think that was the name) – the bloke who was turned in Roman times and had actually lived since, learning and doing stuff and growing, instead of being in a perpetual state of angst.
Eternally emo, what a fuckawful thought.
I don’t think I know any brooding men anymore. All the ones I work with and associate with are damn fine people, not a scowler in sight. They also don’t wear fedoras and have excellent senses of humour.
I used to love Healthcliff in Wuthering Heights. Then, I stopped being 16.
The male fiction character I have most admired is Mandy Patinkin’s character in Chicago Hope, I always wanted to partner up with a someone with those characteristics in real life (being a doctor optional). And pretty much I did, although he looks nothing like Mandy Patinkin and isn’t a doctor. But he has those kind character traits.
Angsty male characters are better when they also have a sense of humor and can be pleasant. For example: Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. Hell, even Chandler from Friends with all his issues is preferable to some fedora clad guy sulking in the corner.
Being a teenager for eternity would be far more of a curse than the whole blood-sucking, daylight-avoidance thing.
I feel the need to… add this Cravendale video to the thread:
And, posted in the wrong thread LOL
One of the differences between fiction and reality is that in fiction, evil characters are often more interesting than good characters. Real life evil people are almost always unpleasant and dull; real life good people are almost always enjoyable and interesting. Brooding and grim can be fun when you can put the book down at will.
Theodore Beale might – MIGHT – be an interesting fictional character. Frankly, it’s a pity he’s not fictional. I would run a mile in tight shoes to avoid him in real life.
A friend of mine (not me, I’ve not that sort of wit, nor whimsy) gave a person fishing for homework an essay on how Wuthering Heights was really an SF novel about a pocket universe:
Read the whole thing, it’s fookin’ brilliant.
Pallygirl,
Exactly!
That guy is not only not attractive, he’s scary. I’d run from him like I was trying to outrun an explosion.
Bill,
Thanks for sharing that. I’m going to pass it around. That’s so funny.
pallygirl, there is no wrong thread for those ads! 😀
Bill, that cartoon’s hilarious, thanks for sharing it!
I think Anne Bronte had it right. Wuthering Heights bugged me. Heathcliff was a jerk, and Cathy was an idiot.
Jane Eyre, also, was rather problematic.
I loved that “Darkness” comic, Bill. Thanks!
@Lea – “My love will heal him!”
Gah. This is just about every “Mary-Sue” story ever written. Mary-Sue’s love can always heal the hero, either from his dark, brooding, emotional issues, or else her tears of love can heal his physical wounds. Sometimes both.
I don’t remember being that way when I was a teenager. If I ever was, I must have blocked the memory in intense shame.
My sister calls it “hurt-comfort,” and explains that when women see someone hurting, they feel the urge to comfort that person, and somehow, in our adolescent, hormone-addled brains, sex got thrown into the mix. Most women do grow out of it, and develop simple compassion, but yeah, hurt-comfort SEXAY is a thing with many adolescent girls, for some reason.
The older I get, the more I want a man who doesn’t need me that way.
@WWTH
See, those fictional things work because you’re getting them in small, controlled doses. Sort of like getting an inoculation against the flu. Small, controlled dose, and you might get a bit of a sore arm, maybe a slight fever for the evening, but then you’re better, and you don’t need to be hospitalized later, or be off work for two weeks with a full-blown case of the flu.
A “DARK” man can be interesting enough for an hour or two, at most, but beyond that, and it’s just too darned much!
But up to that age… You thought it was cool that he (heavily implied) raped his wife, abused her in every possible way, and tried to kill her dog just for the hell of it? (:-O
I thought the point of the Heathcliff-Isabella marriage was to drive home the point that you can’t heal an abusive asshole by love, btw.
The difference between me reading Wuthering Heights at a young age and me reading it again as an adult was mainly that when I was a teenager, I thought Mr Earnestshaw was nice to Heathcliff. As an adult, not so much… He kind of treats Heathcliff as a pet rather than a human being. As if Heathcliff was a little stray kittten or puppy that he found and brought home for his kids to play with. So literally everyone except for Nellie and Cathy was a total dick to Heathcliff, but I still think we’re supposed to see this as an explanation of how he became an asshole, not an excuse showing that he’s not really an asshole after all.
Cathy, btw, I think is supposed to have some kind of mental illness and/or personality disorder (yeah, I internet-diagnose now, but I think it’s okay to do that with fictional characters). She’s extremely impulsive and also self-centered in a way that seems to be, not so much plain egoism, but more like she just can’t really grasp other people’s feelings. Her one redeeming feature is that she’s not as prejudiced against Heathcliff as other people are. Which also explains why he becomes so obsessed with her. But I definitely don’t think that we’re meant to find her sympatethic overall, or their relationship an inspiring picture of true love.
@pecunium – Wuthering Heights as SF – I LOVE IT! Oh, thanks for that link. The essay was brilliant!
If I ever read it again, I’ll surely keep this in mind.
Being a big bad Alpha dog sounds like a miserable existence, doesn’t it? Imagine never having a genuine interaction with another human being because you’re too busy fine-tuning your facial expression (not smiling! but not too glowering! brooding! but not self-consciously so!) to look more alpha so you can win a game that no one else is playing.
@Dvarghundspossen – I’d love to see you teaching high school English. Instead of having the kids write essays about thematic elements, symbolism and “what the author was really trying to say here,” you could use classics to teach the teenagers to be sensible.
“Allright, people, can anyone tell me what Cathy’s big mistake was?”
“Why did Isabella bother with this jerk? Would she have been happier as a spinster?”
“Why didn’t anyone travel to the next town over to look for a prospective mate?”
“Can you ‘fix’ a person? Is it fair to try?”
I mean, there are so many ways to analyze this classic masterpiece, without even touching on the literary quality of it.
The thing is, if you look at Wuthering Heights as a sort of morality play, where the author is trying to teach a lesson, it is great. But, as story-telling, it really does leave much to be desired. That “WH as SF” essay was spot on!
Many great works of literature are so not because of the wonderful literary tricks that students study in English class, but because they make the reader really *think* about life, and about their own character development.
Have you ever played the “self-insertion” game? That’s where you re-write an old story, only you insert yourself as the hero/heroine/protagonist. I got the idea from reading a bunch of Mary-Sue fanfics. The only problem is, while the Mary-Sue self-insertion fanfics go on forever with more and more convoluted drama, mine tend to be very short. I’m too practical for high drama.
However, it’s a fun writing exercise, and could be really useful for sixteen-year-olds who love dark and brooding characters who would be really a pain in real life.
Oh, golly. It’s five in the morning. Time for bed, y’all!
@Dvärghundspossen, defending my 16 year old self here, it was an assigned text and I never – at the time – got clued into the possible rape. It was the early 1980s, DV wasn’t so talked about then, I was in a fundamentalist Christian church, and men could still legally rape their wives. I do feel that you were super-critical of me at 16. I didn’t encounter feminism as an idea until I got to university, in my mid-20s.
I had way, way more issues with Lord of the Flies, including the animal cruelty in there.
@pallygirl, I’ve found it fascinating to revisit books that I read as a child/teenager and realise how much I either misunderstood or just completely missed. I was so naive. But then, I get a lot more out of a number of books (Jane Austen springs to mind) because I’m no longer focussed on the central couple’s romance to pretty much the exclusion of all else.
We had Lord of the Flies .as a set text, too, and I loathed it.
There’s also the fact that Lockwood is a class snob and an unreliable narrator, so Heathcliff’s cruelty and feralness get magnified.
This!!
In MRAland, emotions are a weakness to be exploited. They treat human relations exactly like a game of poker in which the goal is to lie, scam, and outwit your opponent. Any smile, any window into the mind is the equivalent of revealing your hand to an adversary. Must…keep…poker…face…
Except that their hand consists of…well, whatever the worst hand in poker is. A 2, a joker, and a dogeared Uno card that accidentally got mixed into the deck by mistake.