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.
Sooooo…would it have been better for them to publish an article in favor of MRAs?
If what Professor B uses is an ad hominem I´d even say it is sometimes justified. How else could one detect double standards?
It makes the MRAs look like the angry, deceptive, rape-apologizing, non-men-helping creeps that they are. That’s one thing for women and feminism.
I think street harassment is basically intended to humiliate women in return for the humiliation many working-class men feel at not being able to live up to the unachievable goals society sets for them. Working-class males have taken a major economic hit over the last few decades due to the shipping of their jobs to low-wage countries and the resulting depressing effect on the wages of those that still have jobs. They can’t (or don’t have the courage to) go after the Man, so they settle for harassing what they perceive as His women.
The Man, of course, has only one indispensable role for working-class men — cannon fodder — and it suits the purposes of the economic powers to encourage men to blame their plight on the nasty feminists rather than the plutocrats who ship their jobs overseas. Feminism is still largely a movement of more intelligent, well-educated women and men who tend to have fairly good career prospects. Blue collar men have fairly poor prospects and are, to some extent, barely hanging on in today’s economy. That makes it difficult for them to hold on to their self-respect. I am not defending street harassers — I’m just suggesting that they have real reason to feel bitter but they are taking it out on the wrong people (the softest target?).
As to GQ, I really don’t know its demographic, but I suspect it has similarities to the demographic of Playboy when I was young. Everybody focused on the centerfolds, but in fact they were just bait to trap insecure young guys who thought they wanted to grow up to be that suave, sophisticated Playboy image. They were then given all sorts of instructions on things like food, wine, cars, cologne, watches etc.etc. (including, unfortunately, women as a consumer good) — things that a real Playboy would already know — and then exposed to pages and pages of ads. Playboy in its heyday was a FAT magazine. So I would guess that GQ is read more by aspiring young gentlemen than by established older gentlemen. Assuming that is the case, it is worthwhile to nudge any of them that might be vulnerable to the MRA propaganda in another direction.
By a curious coincidence, I had my sister in law over for cocktails just last night. She’s in her late forties, never married, and adopted her daughter around thirteen years ago. She’s a successful professional who owns her own home, volunteers at her daughter’s school, and enjoys recreational ballroom dancing. We had, as she would put it, a whee of a time catching up. Then her daughter texted her that dinner was ready, and off she went.
What a miserable, man-deprived life she must be living. /sarc
@samantha Masses of young, bitter MRAs are out there brigading comment sections, implementing “black ops”, and harassing whoever the target du jour is. And women are the herd animals??
weirwoodtreehugger | February 28, 2015 at 8:40 am
Quoting that first paragraph for truth, but the second one I have to disagree with. Manosperhians know ALL ABOUT “catching more flies with honey than with vinegar”. If they didn’t, why would they come in here or in other feminist spaces and whine about how mean we are and how we’d win more people over if we were nicer to men (i.e. feminists need to shut the fuck up unless they’re talking about what they can do for men).
They just choose to pull the “do as I say, not as I do” bullshit card.
GrumpyOldMangina – I only agree that it is related to class to a small extent. Yes, when the people involved are of similar age perhaps, in social/ work situations, but when I think of how much I hated the continual attention it is the much older men on their own who were the worst. If I had taken all the offers of money for sex I would have made a fortune in my teens!
They were much creepier than the verbal abuse from the building sites etc (though I admit I did learn to dread them as the response was SO predictable and standing up for yourself just wasn’t an option), and I don’t think those men would have been assessing me on the basis of which socio economic group I belonged to anyway.
If I opened my mouth, yes, it was obvious I was middle class, but as I said I just tried to ignore it. Middle aged men on the other hand are fairly confident and clearly the kind that approached me had a huge sense of entitlement, and also I think often it was part of the thrill for them to humiliate and intimidate a young woman/ girl.
I certainly agree that a lot of it is done to humiliate, but that is not just coming from working class men to middle class girls/ women. There is definitely a strong sense in most societies that children and young women are people who do not deserve respect, and when they feel like it some men will do their best to make you feel uncomfortable, at best.
@Ellesar Obviously and unfortunately you have a lot more experience in this than I do. I have probably lived a sheltered life, but I can’t imagine walking up to a random teenage girl, offering her money for sex, and thinking that there’s a real chance that she’d say yes. I would think it would be more likely intended to insult and humiliate her.
Older men do find younger girls attractive, but they know that most young girls don’t find them attractive in the least. I remember chatting with an attractive young woman and her laughing and telling me about this old guy who had asked her for a date. The old guy was several years younger that I was. I had no intention of asking her for a date — she was clearly too young for me (though not in the legal sense), but it did sting a bit that she thought a guy my age being interested in a girl her age was funny.
I learn a bit more about the depravity of my fellow men every day. It’s really depressing.
My pointy exactly! Back in the early days of the second wave feminism, we got together in consciousness raising groups, wrote, explored our histories, our creativities and possible solutions to the problems of patriarchy. We examined the effects of patriarchal attitudes on women, children, AND on men. We opened up to embrace the ecology and civil rights movements as sister concerns, as important as feminism and as deserving of our time, attention and labor. Were and are we perfect? Nope, but feminism has NEVER tried to end ANYONE’S freedom and self-respect, unlike more than a few “nice” guys we have all come to know and…well…love is not really the right word.
There is so much more, but we get the picture. Patrarchal/corporate culture has been trying to put women back in the teeny-tiny box it has for us, and the guys walk in lockstep to achieve that goal. And WE are the herd animals???????
@samantha: If we (women or men) ARE herd animals why does society work so hard to scare us into staying with the herd?
Grumpyoldmangina – my personal belief is that humans associating like the primates we are (cf. Monkeysphere) makes it more difficult for certain people to manipulate us as if we were domesticated herd animals. Therefore, it is in the interest of those people for us to act unlike other primates. Instead of being gregarious, we are persuaded to be social. Herdlike behavior is rewarded, bandlike behavior is calumniated.
I do like the fact that, unlike chimpanzees, you can have large numbers of unrelated humans sharing a social space without bloodshed and death. Most of the time.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people (including myself in my teenage years) overlook the fact that it’s herbivores and similar prey animals that travel in herds, not predators. Humans, being the most predatory creature on the planet, are better described as pack animals than herd animals.
Another good point! To add to that, if women are, by nature, submissive and want men to dominate us, why the hell do men have to work so hard to force us to comply? I mean, if it were natural, why would we fight it? Yet we do, and we always have and always will. Seems to me that the problem is in the male patriarchal psyche.
@samantha “To add to that, if women are, by nature, submissive and want men to dominate us, why the hell do men have to work so hard to force us to comply?”
That “women are submissive and want men to control them” thing always reminds me of the racist argument that black slaves were happy and peaceful serving their white masters. Making the ones who challenged that belief the “bad” ones, just like feminist women are seen by some as the bad ones who rock the boat by “going against their nature”.
Can I just say the the comments in this thread about “coat hangar marks” are super creepy and totally uncool?
Agreed.
“women are, by nature, submissive and want men to dominate them”
Translated from Manspeak to English: “Oh, how desperately we wish women were submissive and wanted men to dominate them.”
Of course for much of recent Western history women were generally restricted to the home, denied education, and limited by an inferior legal status. Under the circumstances they had little choice but to be submissive, as the punishment for not being submissive could be quite severe.
Hey guys — the genie managed to get out of the bottle and she’s not going back.
(The real problem is that a lot of men are brought up to believe that a man who can’t dominate “his” woman is not really a man at all. That sort of belief makes it basically impossible to relate to most women today)
…thirding Orion.
Really not cool and really, really disturbing.
Oh, and congrats on truly becoming one with the ferrets in the catsuits in the David suit, so much so that MRA’s see through our ferretty disguise. It’s clever of them to realize we are all David.
Or we’re all ferrets.
Or something like that.
Um, yeah.
For the record, nobody gets a free pass by framing a comment as “I shouldn’t make a comment about X.”
…fifthing Orion.
I used to argue with people on sites like these and then I realized their only relevance is unto themselves. Everything is so twisted. I guess everyone tries to grab what they want at the expense of everyone else(Cue oppressive men comments). The depth I need I found and it isn’t here on MRA or Feminist boards. Zeta males indeed.
Good for you, over it. Good for you.
over it. | March 11, 2015 at 2:46 pm
Ah, the ol’ “I don’t really need you, but I need to tell you that or you won’t know to miss me!” comment.
We were far happier not knowing, (Not Quite) over it.