Sometimes I hunt the misogyny, sometimes it wanders up right up to me and says hello.
Today’s post is an example of the latter. Below, a slightly edited comment that someone left for me this morning. It’s a response to a post of mine about a dreadful post on Return of Kings in which a fellow calling himself Billy Chubbs argued, with absolutely no evidence, that a recent high school shooter was driven to murder because of his “probable sexual frustration,” Chubbs went on to argue that young women are “selfish” because they don’t have sex with guys they’re not attracted to.
Anyway, my new commenter – posting under the name “whogoesthere?” – thinks that I and the other commenters here were being too hard on Chubbs’ “very good argument.” And so he deposited this giant rant, which in many ways is even scarier than Chubbs’ original.
He’s a tad verbose, so I’ve trimmed out some stuff that isn’t relevant to his general, er, thesis. And I’ve also taken the liberty of adding a few paragraph breaks and bolding a few of the best (i.e. worst) bits.
When men don’t get the women they want they turn to violence.
Not a good start here, because this just isn’t true. In this case, the phrase “not all men” is, for once, appropriate. Most men don’t get violent when they’re turned down.
This is established all over the animal kingdom and offers a good example about how it applies to humans, that snotty girls who keep their sexual treasures to all but a few males cause the remaining males to snap. …
Animals do all sorts of things that humans don’t do, and we can’t always learn from their behavior or assume that it relates to our own lives.
Or maybe the Evo Psych crew is just looking at the wrong animals. When banana slugs can’t find a partner to have sex with, they simply fertilize themselves. There’s a lesson here, I think, for the angry incels of the world: you can’t always get what you want, and when you can’t, sex with yourself is better than murder.
High school is a massively sexually charged winner take all environment. … Today’s high school is basically an ongoing audition for a porno video and the guys and girls who don’t make the cut can only sit at home and masturbate.
wat
It’s demeaning and hits a major blow to a person’s sexual identity to not be invited to frolic with the beautiful people.
Somehow most people, regardless of gender, manage to survive even if they’re not frolicking with Charlize Theron and/or Channing Tatum.
I’m sorry but almost no men go on wild shooting rampages if they have a beautiful female in their keep.
In their keep?! Also, no. Charles Manson was surrounded by beautiful young women. Yet he orchestrated multiple grisly murders.
The only guys that do so are bank robbers and thieves, generally guys at a later stage of life more fixated on money.
wat
Human beings naturally assess the amount of sex going around them and judge themselves in relationship to the amount and type of sex others are getting.
You know, you can’t actually tell how much and what kind of sex someone is having just by looking at them. Yes, there will always be people in the world having more sex with you. And some of these people are having sex with people you would probably like to have sex with. There are also people who are smarter than you, funnier than you, who can play chess or kickbox better than you, who have hundreds or thousands of times more money than you do.
That’s life. Life isn’t fair.
This makes sense because from a reproductive standpoint sex is coveted, and sex with beautiful thin, young women are the most coveted. Being the first to spoil these young women sexually is viewed reproductively as a guarantee of parentage, thus this is why males instinctively covet and burn with passion for these females.
Ah, yes, it was only a matter of time until the creepy pedo-justifying Evo Psych assfacts made their appearance. Not all men “burn with passion” in their pants for virginal high school girls.
This is why we have “morality” which is in its essence is a promise not to flaunt or indulge in sex moreso than the lowest man or woman in your tribe. This is what is meant when people say “morality went out the window.” They mean someone with more sexual prowess is openly indulging in sex and broadcasting it to stimulate the jealousy of the underclasses.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what people mean when they say “morality went out the window.”
This teen killed people cause he thought that beautiful girls were out of reach. The high school environment merely rubbed it in his face. Yes drugs to treat ADD might’ve eroded many of the impulse control functions in the teen, but the rage against the high school was still the gasoline.
[citation needed]
He might’ve had a picture or two taken with a girl next to him, but oftentimes those high school girls lie and simply eat up the male’s offerings without granting sexual access, but grant it to a random stud.
How dare young women choose who to have sex with, and who not to!
I’m not saying the girl he killed deserved it, it’s only that when you are in that frame of mind you cannot tell who is having more sex than others and you simply fill in the gaps with rage.
Wait, so if she had turned him down he would have been justified in killing her?
The beautiful girl simply represented everything that the teen couldn’t get. The steady love and wild sex of a valuable young girl.
Yeah, I think you’re confusing high school with porn again. His rampage lasted roughly a minute and a half. He shot her because she was there.
All the other theories posted on this site seem comical, self-righteous and weirdly off-point. It’s like you’re assessing the situation as an asexual senior citizen or righteous prude.
Not a lot of “prudes” here. Just people who find the “women need to have sex with ‘nice guys’ or these ‘nice gys’ will kill you all” to be a somewhat problematic argument.
Generally men want sex with young thin beauties who validate their existence.
Some men do. But most men, among those who are sexually attracted to women, aren’t as neurotically fixated on this small slice of the female demographic – women in their teens and early twenties who are somehow both virginal and sexually “wild” – as manosphere men seem to be. And most people don’t base their entire self-worth on whether or not they’re having sex with beautiful people.
Some men prefer women older than them. Some like women who are fat. Plenty of men don’t fixate on a particular physical type and are attracted to all sorts of different women. Believe it or not, whogoesthere, there are lots of men who are more interested in what’s in a woman’s head than they are in whether or not she matches up with some particular checklist of physical attributes.
If society removes all of the social pathways to attaining such a beauty, such as making prostitution illegal, increasing shame for men who seek sex, rewarding females and males called manginas who identify and mock the sex seekers and so on… this will lead to depression in men and all of the behaviors surrounding it, including shootings. Sounds pretty much like a logical line of reasoning to me.
And that’s the problem. It’s not actually a logical line of reasoning at all. It’s more like a sort of blackmail.
Men don’t kill women because they can’t have “the steady love and wild sex of a valuable young girl.” Sometimes men kill women because they feel entitled to have sex with these “valuable young girls” and become bitter and enraged when they can’t find a “valuable young girl” who agrees with them on this particular point.
It’s not the lack of “sexual access” that’s the problem. It’s the notion that your desire for “sexual access” means more than the right of that person to say “no.” It’s the notion that society has done you wrong because you can’t (at least at the moment) get laid. It’s the idea that your desire to have sex with a particular kind of woman somehow trumps the right of other people to live.
I mean, what the fucking fuck.
Oh, by the way, there’s no evidence that the shooter in question – Karl Halverson Pierson – was motivated by sexual frustration. His intended target was the school librarian, who is also the school’s debate coach. Pierson was obsessed with debate, and had some sort of grudge against the coach.
You feel relaxed after playing Civ FOUR?
JK, of course. Everyone has strong opinions about their preferred Civ version. I will say that the Civ IV menu is hella relaxing.
Kim, where have I said I think all games are like that? You’re including yourself in a comment I made about trollboy. I do play a couple of games myself, so what makes you think I’m talking about all of them, or saying skeevy wanktroll = all gamers? Seriously, I apologised for my initial comment being poorly worded because I don’t think that.
In short: Kim, please stop putting words in my mouth. I do not think GTA = all games, or that trollboy = all gamers, and I’d appreciate it if you’d knock off talking as if I’ve ever said that.
pecunium
Snap! Yesterday, daughter and SIL introduced us to Pandemic. It’s either everyone wins or everyone loses, just like real life epidemics. We lost, despite “curing” 3 of the 4 diseases involved. It’s a fantastic game for 2 to 7 people. Playing with fewer than the maximum means that you will miss out on some advantageous special skills, but you will run out of options much more quickly too. We lacked both a medic/doctor and a scientist. Lord knows if we’d have won with them rather than the specialist skills we actually drew.
This wiki description of the game isn’t quite the same as the more recent version we played. I’d recommend it to anyone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_(board_game)
Not caught up but “Having strong preferences about stuff like this seems to lead to strife.” Yeah, we just put it on our own way when we change it, so it actually sorta makes finishing the roll fun, in a “yes, I get to have the TP my way!” sense. I’m weird.
And with the loose bit at the bottom, because my mother is right, it’s easier to find the end that way.
Und — sincere flirting may result in getting laid less than lies, flattery will get you everywhere after all, but saying things you mean? More likely to result in mutual interest and discussing things you care about. For example…
Athywren, if you see this, I ended up installing a second copy of vista to play the latest VtM:B patch, WORTH IT! WESP redid the Hallowbrook and Beckett has a side quest for you. So weird walking into places with NO CLUE what to expect, in a game I’ve been playing on and off for a decade!
Pecunium — oh well, I was only off by an inch.
Onto the last page then!
There’s a pandemic app too, sorta. I prefer Plague over Infection, but they’re both the same idea.
I would say the gaming industry is considerably more sexist than the movie industry. That said, it is possible to critique the media you consume without rejecting it outright. It kind of seems like you’re denying the sexism in certain games because they are games that you like. You can still enjoy them and also recognize that they’re problematic in certain ways.
“That said, it is possible to critique the media you consume without rejecting it outright. It kind of seems like you’re denying the sexism in certain games because they are games that you like. You can still enjoy them and also recognize that they’re problematic in certain ways.”
From my own experience with comic books, I think you develop a sort of blindness to the gender or race bias. At first, I was somewhat shocked by the criticism of misogyny popping all over in recent years. I am slowly working my way through them, and definitely some of them are valid. But I will say that at times, its just easier to enjoy reading graphic novels rather than embark on an in-depth analysis of them. I would assume many woman gamers feel the same about their hobby. One of my favorite author, Alan Moore, has been the object of lots of controversy. I will admit, I did not bother reading most of it. At the end of the day, there are only so many comics that I am willing to read with the goal of “gender critique” at the forefront. What I am really hoping for is for the sexism in the industry directed female artists to be knock down so that there will be more awesome books created by women that I can enjoy.
gah…sorry for the poor English of the last post. English syntax is my nemesis.
This is the thread that doesn’t end
Yes it goes on and on, my friends
Some people started commenting, not knowing what it was!
And we’ll continue commenting forever just because…!
I’m really interested to know how Undies possibly thought his whole beautiful-women-make-me-feel-validated would go over well amongst feminists. I mean most MRA/PUA types know what they say will piss us off. This fool actually expected his sentiments would receive sympathy.
Catching up from last night. 2100 comments +, I am proud of us! 🙂
I orignally typed a long and involved response to und’s assertion that changing demographics will sort out any U.S. gerrymandering and reproductive healthcare issues. Then I deleted it because I doubt und will read it and everyone else already knows everything I said, I’m sure. Short version: sure, things might work out just dandy, but how many right will be lost while this process is playing out? By the time we achieve liberal* dominance, we might have a new normal where a six-week window is available for an elective abortion, which you can only access after you go through a battery of invasive and expensive medical procedures done in an extremely limited number of locations.
*don’t even get me started on how far to the right that the mainstream “left” has become.
TIL that snorting sparkling water through my nose is both painful and unbecoming!
I think we were supposed to give him a cookie because he didn’t dismiss feminism out of hand. In fact, he finds it “useful.” Poor guy doesn’t realize that cookies are thin on the ground here. We keep them for ourselves.
This is totally understandable. There’s a difference between deliberately reading something critically and inadvertently picking up on issues in the course of reading. I’m talking more about the latter.
In the latest Tropes vs. Women post there were a hell of lot more than 1 game in which players are rewarded for killing sex workers. There were also a ton of games that require the male main character to go into brothels or strip clubs. None of the sex workers had any personality and were not there for any purpose other than titillating the players who the game developers assume are all straight men. Then there was that game that made the news recently (I think it was Assassins Creed but am not positive) because they had planned on including female main characters but changed their minds because it would have been too hard to do.
Of course enjoying problematic games doesn’t make you make a misogynistic asshole but if someone already has those tendencies, sexist games reinforce them. It’s not a surprise that websites for video games and the social aspects of some of them of the games themselves are filled with misogynists. I read the comments section at Kotaku from time to time and it’s just appalling. It’s like a slightly more articulate version of the Yahoo news comments.
According to the video, men who play sexist games expressed more sexist sentiments after playing than men who didn’t play a sexist game. So I think it’s perfectly fair to be critical of the gaming industry and it’s also fair to suspect that a gamer who views women as two dimensional sex objects might just be playing lots of sexist games. That doesn’t mean all gamers are the same.
Finally caught up with the 2,000 + post thread!
undfreeland:
I…really? You see no other application for current events and history outside of your own head? Because there’s literally no one else in the entire world that are also interested in current events and history. Because current events aren’t, I don’t know, happening right now and are therefor relevant to everyone?
You, sir, are an idiot.
Random, but both my husband and I are interested in politics and history. Some of our best dates involved going to the local Half Price Books then either heading home and reading while curled up together on the couch or going to a bar with a decent selection of local and craft beers and trying new beers together. While bullshitting about politics and history. It’s fun. It’s fun to just enjoy another person’s company because you like them and have shared interests. My husband is not rich or supermodel-level attractive or cultured or well-traveled or a genius. But I think he’s the sexiest man who ever lived 🙂
undfreeland, you also know that you don’t have to have sex with or have relationships with women, right? I mean, the way you talk about sex and women it seems that you find both repulsive (besides the gorgeous lingerie model types, who you seem to regard as some kind of pretty piece of furniture or toy). There’s no law saying you have to have sex with women. You can just, y’know, not. And that’s completely and perfectly normal and ok to not desire and/or have sex. It really is.
This is whole, “I’m a complete cynic who thinks everyone everywhere is dishonest and manipulative and that makes me smart and super-edgy” thing is tedious.
There was a sale on ebooks and you didn’t share with the class? I’d pout, but I already have a huge romance backlog to catch up on.
Aw. <3 Is it weird if I ship you guys?
(Related: my friend wants me to stand up and yell "It's canon, b*tches!" at the end of her wedding. I'm not even sure she's joking.)
Sad, but true.
@Katz, who is Doad?
I missed this first time through:
Dude… life, yer doin’ it wrong.
Putting aside the specific subject matter:
1: You asserted no one can really live, “outside one’s own head”, so in that regard the “lack of application” is negated, per your philosophy of living.
2: You are wrong (but it’s just a variation of the same tune you’ve been singing since you got here).
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that I was a member of the Undfreeland School of Getting Hot Chicks, and so needed to have something to feign interest in, that a Level 10 Big-Boobed Babe might stop and talk to me for long enough to find out what a Masculine Man, with Feminist Sensibilities I happen to be (and so want to drag me off to her Den of Decadant Diversions) I might decide to bone up on Pottery (figuring it’s a Girly Sort of thing, and that the Target Ratio [i.e. men:women] is likely to be in my favor, and less than stellar height, but acceptable looks are less likely to be compared to lots of men, and so probably kick up a level).
So I read up on it (and I take a class or two, so I have some understanding of things like wedging, throwing, hand-building, carving details/bases when the pot is leather hard, bisquing, firing, glazing, etc.. Why yes, I’ve done pottery, why do you ask?).
Then, when spending time in an arts and crafts store (because it’s a good place to meet women who craft, and beguile them with my manly nature) I can hang out in the pottery area, looking over the glazing chemicals, fingering the carving tools, fondling the elephant ear sponges (handing for getting a rounded edge), and chatting them up.
Then I can mention that I know this cool glaze, which is a warm khaki fired at cone 3-4, but turns a vibrant purple when fired up to cone 9, and we can discuss the vagaries of the Kiln Gods, and and how much opening a cooled kiln is like the anticipatory tension of opening presents on Christmas/birthdays, because you don’t ever really know what it’s going to look liked, etc.
And that’s something I could do, even now, though I’ve not thrown a pot in 10 years. It’s proven useful in my work, (I am semi-retired, the pension isn’t enough to make things like the month in England/Ireland, this summer, or the 8,000 mile motorcycle trip of four years ago, things I can just do at the drop of a hat). Some one came in looking for things to mold clay in, and we got to talking about when/how those tools (for baking) would be best used in pottery.
But no, you probably have the best of it. No point in having fun reading on how Wellington’s use of the Rifle Regiments affected the Peninsular Campaign; and let him take on some of the best generals/marshals France had; and so gain solid experience of how to best use limited resources; which led to his being able to set up a position which was strong (if not completely unassailable) while Napoleon still had the idea that he was only really good fighting “natives” (since Wellington cut his teeth in campaigns for the E. India Company, notably against the Tippoo Sultan, most notably at the Battle of Assaye), and so made headlong assaults; against the advice of those who had fought him in, “The sideshow” of Spain and Portugal.
…or how the Siege of Troy was more like a beachead based asault with the resources on what is now the Gallipolean Peninsula as a supply base, nor how the Trojans lack of naval power made it hard for them to deny the Acheaens the ability to raid the Troad at will, and so it was a question of political maneuvering with the Hittites which kept them from being overrun; but even at that the impetuosity of putting the Greeks into a state of peril, rather than letting them wear themselves out (which they were doing) and head home because maintaining an expeditionary force was too expensive: and then applying the implicit lessons learned to the modern day, so that you can engage in conversation with people who have similar interests, or use them as examples when discussing things which they parallel (not all of which are going to be current events/politics, The Trojan War is pretty good for discussing anthropology, and economics)
Nope, money and liquor, those are probably better keys to bliss, all that other stuff is wasted effort.
I really like cooperative board games. I haven’t played Flash Point yet because our friends who were into cooperative games found that one too scary. (But they were OK with Pandemic. Go figure.)
The thing is that, even though they’re noncompetitive, they can still be incredibly stressful. Forbidden Island is the one that gets me; it totally triggers my AAAAAAAGH THE ISLAND IS SINKING THE ISLAND IS SINKING OH NO WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE response. Fun though.
My hubby 🙂
It’s tedious because it’s lazy, desperately unoriginal and too damn easy. Any buffoon can be a cynic: it just involves saying “no” at every possible opportunity.
And if you actually convince yourself that everyone everywhere is dishonest and manipulative, then you’re setting yourself up for a very sad and possibly even paranoid life – so why do it?
@Isabelle and Bunny: I think it’s nearly impossible to only consume non-sexist, non-racist, non-ableist etc culture, because, well, duh, prejudice is literally everywhere. I think most feminists have their personal bar for when sexism in a game/comic/book/TV series/movie becomes too much and makes the thing impossible to enjoy (I know I have). But there will be stuff that you recognize as having some problems with sexism although it still doesn’t reach your personal bar, so you still enjoy it. (And the same goes for racism etc). That’s perfectly okay.
But people really should acknowledge that the stuff they like do have these problems. Not just angrily defend everything they like against “accusations” from feminists, nor bang on the big feminist drum for a game/comic/book/TV series/movie just because, idk, it has one or two female characters with some kind of personality who aren’t presented as sex objects.
@Kim, nope. I mostly play grand strategy games like Civ and Crusader Kings. That and rpg’s Really only Skyrim in the past few years, but some old bioware ones and, as one poster mentioned, bloodlines. Occasionally I buy the cheap indy games. Some of them are pretty good. I actually do not enjoy online fps’s at all.
@Flying Mouse, I would have definitely read it. I don’t often interact with people that have nuanced opinions on these sorts of things. Unfortunately.
What you did say was valid. I never thought about what the state could be, by the time things came around.
And, honestly, the Supreme Court decision today has deflated my hopes a bit.
@sparky and pecunium, I’ve met women that are interested in politics and history. And video games. Women I have been attracted to. Not since moving to my current location, but I used to. They were never interested in me, anyway. It’s because interests can only build rapport after there is an initial reaction, and they are not attracted to me, as my looks are not good enough to counter-balance a persona which comes across as distinctly unsexual. (before anyone jumps on me for being a “nice guy” that’s not what I’m doing. I don’t begrudge them for wanting to have sex with people they find attractive and know what the hell is going on.)
katz: I really like cooperative board games. I haven’t played Flash Point yet because our friends who were into cooperative games found that one too scary. (But they were OK with Pandemic. Go figure.)
It was stressful. It’s funny, I had some of the same mindset fighting those fires, as I’ve had in firefights. Lots of trying to see to it that one could, “fire and move”, would have someone to lay down supporting fires as we moved deeper into the building; and then the stupid bursts of, “heroism” when there was a chance to gain some advantage.
We’ll be playing with it some more tonight, because пропытка не пытка*
*practice isn’t torture, or to try/attempt something, isn’t torture. I heard that one a lot when we were studying spanish.
I haven’t played this, but I saw a news clip about it a few years ago: http://store.toolboxfored.org/co-opoly-the-game-of-co-operatives/
Instead of playing Monopoly to learn how to be a greedy capitalist, you play Coopoly to learn how to work together and win together. Everyone on the news clip seemed to have enjoyed it.
@Dvärghundspossen, good point. As mentioned upthread, I read romance novels, which get a horrible rap in the popular press for some pretty frustrating reasons. There are HUGE numbers of romance readers who have published reams of papers that talk critically about problematic tropes and trends. There’s even an annual academic symposium. Or conference. Or some kind of gathering. I’m pretty sure it draws more than a hundred people, too. Romance has gone way, way beyond the Love’s Lusty Rash bodice-rippers of yore.
(This seems a little off-topic, but in my fuzzy brain, it refers back to the video games/ movies / comics thing. Sorry, not enough sleep last night.)
unfreeland: Yes, yes, yes; we know you’re miserable because you don’t get to fuck supermodels because you’re not rich and don’t look like a supermodel yourself and that makes your life so fucking unfair and boo-hoo-hoo, nevermind, people all just use each other and lie, oh woe is me. There’s nothing I can do to find enjoyment in life if an HB10 doesn’t just walk through my door and start worshipping me! Boo-hoo-hoo!
You’re making your own life miserable, and all this whining is getting really fucking boring.
Undfreeland doesn’t like something? Color me shocked.
Ooh, that I can definitely use, although the rhyme doesn’t work in English.