Fellas, make up your minds! Are feminist ladies wily seductresses out to entrap innocent men using the power of their sexiness? Or are they evil uggos who never get laid?
While the zeta males over at A Voice for Men lament their alleged victimization at the hands of an alleged undercover feminist honey trap, who allegedly lured them into skeezy behavior by, among other things, crossing and uncrossing her legs, our old friend Heartiste once again assures his readers that feminist ladies are icky fugs:
A powerful shiv to the bloated gut of feminism is to remind normal, attractive women of the gross, ugly, and deranged feminist women (and their effete male lackeys) who purport to speak for all women. Women are nothing if not herd followers, and if it’s made clear to the Normal Majority of women that feminists are unbangable fugs no worthwhile man would touch with a manlet’s micropeen, then the herd will change course and leave the losers in its dust.
Hate to break it to you, dude, but you’re not the first person to try to defeat feminism using the brilliant strategy of calling feminists ugly. It never works.
This joke only works in the US, but my friend used to have a pin that said “Democrats are sexy, who ever heard of getting a hot piece of elephant?” It was awesome.
Personally, I think the left* is generally more attractive. At least in the US. You look at the Republican convention, it’s a sea of old white people wearing either bland corporate clothing or tacky American flag paraphernalia. The Democratic convention has a huge variety of ages and colors and clothing styles. Much more interesting. Plus the dems have Obama and JFK. Both very handsome men.
* I wouldn’t call the Democratic party leadership the left, but the base tends to be much more progressive.
Yes, because being unattractive to men is the WORST THING THERE IS. Surely worth giving up any right or power to avoid. Wait, no it’s not.
And then there’s the fact that we have not just powers of observation, but our own lived experience to tell us that men do, in fact, seem to be attracted to us feminists! But some rando on the internet told me it’s not so, so…
Evidence that left wingers are hot: Russell Brand, Stephen Fry, Tony Benn (in his younger years), Richard Ayoade, Eddie Izzard. – all British, not sure if all are commonly known. These are my top 5 male crushes, all are coincidentally very left wing.
<3 Richard Ayoade. So much.
Once again:
http://youtu.be/N1rwkgCAVsc
(This is why the right wing is awful looking. Not the shape of their faces or bodies, but the void behind their eyes.)
I’m an ugly female feminist so I can’t vouch for myself, but in an era when the most high-profile feminists in pop culture and social media, are Beyonce and Emma Watson, considered beautiful women even for celebrity standards, how has this stereotype not died yet? Taylor Swift, Ellen Page, Tina Fey, Geena Davis…all conventionally very attractive women. And for male feminists, we have Joseph Gordon-Levitt and John Legend. Have these guys seen Chrissy Teigen? Good luck convincing people you’re more attractive to women than Legend.
Even beyond Tinseltown, the most famous feminist activist is still Gloria Steinem, who was always considered beautiful. Men weren’t exactly bashing her looks when she was working undercover as a Playboy Bunny (or marrying the father of Christian fucking Bale).
Not bringing this up to reduce women to their looks–it wouldn’t matter even if feminists were less attractive, as it says nothing about their cause–but personally, I always thought Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigerian author who gave that TED Talk “We Should All Be Feminists”, known to a lot of people from the sample on Beyonce’s “Flawless”) was really pretty and stylish http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2015-01/21/13/enhanced/webdr03/grid-cell-18643-1421863822-18.jpg (f course she’s also smart, successful, and very talented.)
You know what’s the upside of prosopagnosia, aka face blindness? (I have it; it is not exactly fun, as people have hard time grasping the difficulties and paradoxes it causes.) But…
Beauty really becomes fleeting, and it doesn’t matter as much as someone’s true personality.
All I need to do is close my eyes, and just listen to what they’re saying, breathe in their presence, and feel them. Are they beautiful inside? It will show, truly. I just close my eyes, and let visual confusion and manipulation go away.
Their definition of “Effete” appears to be “not a horrible person.”
That sounds like a very specific sex act I’m not too worried about missing out on. I guess I’ll keep on ugly feministing!
They will be shocked to learn that human females and human males are both the same animal. Seeing their propensity to mindlessly rally behind a handful of known manospherians and their need to repeat to anyone that will listen how much alpha they are, they might have a point.
It’s a side-effect of the Echo Chamber. They spend a considerable amount of time in their protective bubble–something greatly facilitated by the internet. In addition to drowning out competing ideas, this also has the effect of making it seem like the whole world pretty much agrees with you. This, of course, feeds into the conspiracy theory mindset so many of them display–if everyone agrees with you, then clearly the fact that the world is in any way not to your liking suggests that there’s an Evil Cabal working against you and subverting the Will of the People!
One of the (many) reasons that Gloria Steinem became prominent in the women’s movement was that she is so conventionally attractive that nobody could get away with dismissing her with the old “bitter ’cause she can’t attract a man” meme.
Your first mistake was to assume that stereotype is based on reality. It’s basically just another product of the echo chamber, one where they can share pictures only of women they find unattractive and feed their anger on the same exact thing over and over. (There’s a certain gif of a woman on a kiss cam looking weirded out by a guy kissing his beer… It’s always the same picture and always fuels a massive amount of hate)
There’s probably an element of the dress-color thing going on as well. Looking at the same picture of the same person, but thinking it is a picture of a feminist, probably makes it look perceptively uglier to them than otherwise. Confidence starts to look like haughtiness, small details suddenly look like blemishes, and they start imagining a screeching harpy voice from just a photograph.
They just live in a different world.
*gif of kiss cam is shared on Reddit
*mistake is to assume MRAs base the stereotype on reality
Please let this become a permanent cultural touchstone. It can be like po-tay-to, po-tah-to, except easier to say in writing.
@katz:
If it’s going to be, we should think of a better name for it than “the dress-color thing”. 😛
This isn’t much different from threats of eternal damnation and hellfire to keep the congregation in line. It’s “don’t rock the boat, ladies, I’ve got a sweet deal going here”.
It sounds like he’s trying to flush out the shrinking population of women who would actually fall for this BS. Feminists are light years beyond his reach, “normal” women want nothing to do with him, but he figures if he can find a young girl who bases her self-worth on his approval and is scared of the Dark Wastelands of Spinsterhood, she’s likely to be more compliant and easy to manipulate into bed.
@kirbywarp Confirmation bias?
“There’s probably an element of the dress-color thing going on as well. Looking at the same picture of the same person, but thinking it is a picture of a feminist, probably makes it look perceptively uglier to them than otherwise. Confidence starts to look like haughtiness, small details suddenly look like blemishes, and they start imagining a screeching harpy voice from just a photograph.”
Think I get a similar thing any time I see a picture of Roosh, he looks more repulsive than when I knew nothing about him, even though the picture hasn’t changed. I guess what we know/think about a person can affect how we judge their appearance.
I don’t know if Heartiste would consider me worthy of his all-important dick, but I know that my ability to support myself shouldn’t be dependent on it. I don’t know if I’m thin enough for his tastes, but I know that I should be allowed to make my own medical and dietary decisions. I don’t know if I preen as much as he wants all women to do, but I know the expectation that I spend significant amounts of money and time on my face and hair and nails puts me, and other women, at a disadvantage.
If a woman somehow manages to meet our incredibly rigid beauty standards, Heartiste thinks she is a sex toy. If she doesn’t, Heartiste thinks she’s trash. In either case, feminism thinks she is a person.
Well said, Viscaria!
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
Confirmation bias is more about selectively remembering evidence that fits your worldview. This is more about your perceptions being essentially altered by your worldview, like colors looking notably different or faces looking like they have different emotions.
At least that’s what my point was supposed to be… could be that the dress color thing isn’t even quite the right example. I’d assume it was a real and studied psychological effect though.
It’s pretty common knowledge that memories are basically just super rough sketches that we fill in with details when we want to remember them, and that can lead to fabricated details or even entire memories. It’s also pretty well known that our vision does something similar; the actual in-focus area of our vision is about the size of a thumbnail held out at arms-length, and our color vision only extends out so far. The image looks focused and colorful because of eye saccades and our brain filling in details.
Maybe the eyes take in less detail than we think when looking at a complex scene, and our beliefs make us fill in the details differently, even beyond interpreting things differently.
Brains are fun…
To add to kirbywarp’s list of brain-fun: We usually have a gut reaction to something, then justify it afterwards, as opposed to considering the subject first and then making up our minds. This is true of both ideas and people/objects.
What was it Umberto Eco called it? “Continually shifting rhetorical focus”?
The idea is that fascists(let’s set aside that these guys aren’t strictly fascists) need to portray their enemies as weak, so they can present themselves as strong and capable, and able to beat them, while simultaneously representing them as powerful, all over, and a danger that needs to be beaten.
You can see this attitude manifest in how they address feminists. Feminists are all evil, ugly whores trying to manipulate. Unless they’re undeniably attractive, then they’re manipulative honeypots.
It’s impossible to win, because they’re not coming from a position where they have any intention of honestly discussing anything.