
So the fellas over on the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit are having a little debate, of sorts. What unappealing inanimate object is the best metaphor for women over the dreaded age of 30? You know, elderly women.
Someone calling himself mlpl2015 goes with an old favorite: spoiled milk.
As the old joke goes:
“The food there is terrible! And such small portions!”
Joblessguy10, mlpl2015’s main opponent in this makeshift debate, goes with a fairly shopworn metaphor himself, declaring that “older” women are like used cars, depreciating by the day. But he weirds it up with some graphic sexual details. And some racism.
I’ll get to the racism in a second, but my first question is: How exactly is joblessguy10 going to be paying for his brand-new Mercedes when he doesn’t have a job?
And on the metaphor itself: why is a car having sex with dudes (including the one it has stored inside of its own car body) instead of having sex with other cars, like normal cars do!
And just how bad does someone’s gonorrhea have to be that they are leaving visible stains on the upholstery? Have you guys accidentally mixed up “sex” with “David Cronenberg movies?”
Ok, the racism. Why are so many of these manosphere dudes so obsessed with the specter of hypersexualized black men with giant dicks having sex with “their” women? And then talking about this creepy fetishized fear online in a way that exposes their terror at their own perceived (or possibly quite real) sexual inadequacies?
Are fears of “race cuckolding’ really this widespread? Or is it just that the guys posting about “Tyrone” and his 13-inch cock on MGTOW message boards are the same guys who are yelling about “cuckservatives” on Twitter and The Daily Stormer?
I don’t know. I think I’m going to go watch an old David Cronenberg movie. Compared to these dudes, the man who’s been called “the King of Venereal Horror” has a subtle and healthy view of female sexuality.
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So I’m 29 and still unpublished and in this industry you’re always hearing about some 19-year-old prodigy who turned out a brilliant novel and it’s really easy to think I’ve missed my window. But you know what? That’s nonsense. Because I am where I am and whether or not there’s some script that says I’ve already failed, my only option is to try to be the best writer I can be from here on out.
My advice? Pretend you were born yesterday. Like imagine that you magically popped into existence with all your memories and stuff, because you might as well have, for all the control you have over those things. Maybe you completely fucked up your 20’s. So what? Where you are now is your starting point. The only sensible thing to do is look at where you are now and where you want to be and do the best you can to get from point A to point B, because that’s literally the only thing you can do.
katz:
I know, right? At 25, I was still wearing a denim jacket!
At 25, I was still virulently transphobic.
Sure, mid-20s seems to be when your brain stops developing, but you don’t stop learning. You keep having experiences and they keep influencing your behavior, hopefully for the better. Saying you don’t mature after age 25 is tantamount to saying that after 25 you don’t learn from your experiences.
I bummed around working for bands until I was 25, then I did the law school thing.
I learnt during that time that the best thing for me was to say ‘yes’ to any opportunity, regardless of whether I knew anything about the subject, and see what happened.
That got me into working for newspapers, which led to a media career and working for the military which led onto all sorts of exciting and wonderful things.
I’m in my forties now, embroiled in some other new ventures I clattered into in my usual taoist way.
That should keep me occupied for a few years.
Who knows, one day I may even decide what I want to do in my life.
Well, some of the networking seminars I’ve attended suggest keeping a spreadsheet of your business contacts, so you know what they do, who they work for, their emails and phone numbers, etc. And it seems like pretty sound advice, really.
Granted, romantic/sexual relationships are a bit different than business ones. But I could be generous and suppose that the spreadsheet was just a modem ‘little black book’ that he kept contact information in.
I doubt that was what it was for, but it’s possible.
@mockingbird-Oh, I saw his presence. I laughed and shuddered, let me tell you :/
I was unemployed, depressed, and still recovering from an eating disorder at 25. I was at my peak conventional attractiveness, but I wasn’t at my peak in any other aspect of life.
I plan to peak when I die. Experiences are cumulative, so if I’m awesome now, I can only be even more awesome when I’m old. Perceiving the latter period of my life as a decline seems like a completely unnecessary bummer.
Fuck, I’m 25 right now, and I’m suffering from depression and anxiety, I still live with my grandmother, I have no job, and I have a degree that’s almost useless, and a bunch of debt to go with it. I’m certainly not thinking of marriage right now (though I do seem to be getting marriage things in the mail from all sorts of places. I think someone with my name is getting married).
If these guys think that my age makes me useless to them, I’d like to thank everything I hold holy for that merciful and wonderful gift.
It’s such a revealing statement when the redditor asks “What does she have to offer you?”. On one hand he spurns women for using men but on the other he just cannot see past women as objects for sexual gratification.
@Paradoxical intention: I’m in a similar situation as you so I can empathise – and it sucks. Do not despair and keep fighting the good fight!
@catalpa
One of my ex-GFs told me that if I ever gave her an STD she would kill me. I sent her a collection of those plushes.
One thing I’ve read about “Lolita” – when asked about the inspiration for the novel, Nabakov told this story. A chimpanzee in a zoo was given paint, brushes and a canvas, to find out what he’d paint (if anything). He created a gridlike geometrical pattern. After studying it, the humans realized that it was the bars of his cage as seen from within.
I have not thought of Humbert Humbert since without remembering that story.
I never read lolita but Im wondering why its so popular and has gotten such great reviews .The little I know about it makes me sick and when I was reading amazon reviews, it amazed me how many people sympathize with HH character. For those of you who read it please give me a feminist perspective on it.
It is a great book.
I’m not qualified to comment from a feminist perspective but it’s pretty spot on in how HH justifies his actions. You’ve seen the identical arguments reported on this very site.
As to sympathy with HH, I personally don’t see that but he’s such a pathetic pretentious pseudo intellectual that he is very humanised. I suppose the nearest analogy I can think of is the portrayal of Hitler in Downfall. It doesn’t redeem him but it does show he’s not some monster (in the literal sense)
Amy — from what little of it I’ve read so far it is well written, and certainly gets a reaction… so by those standards I guess the reviews make sense? As for a feminist perspective, I’ll get back to when I’ve (at least mostly) finished it?
Alan — so like Dahmer in the film of the same name? You know he’s a serial killer, you know he’s a horrible person, but he’s presented as an outcast kid who grows up to be a gay man in an era when that just made him more of an outcast, loves his grandmother, and, oh yeah, is totally drugging and killing people.
I haven’t seen Downfall (yeah, I know), but it seems similar — present the hated monster as a sympathetic person, with a disturbing side.
@ Argenti
He doesn’t really have a sympathetic background, it’s more he’s so pathetic you’d mock him but then feel guilty about it. It would feel like punching down. I hope that makes sense.
He tries to justify his lusting after ‘nymphets’ with all sorts of pseudo intellectual BS, but you get the impression that really it’s just that adult women would see right through him and he knows it.
He does have some moments of lucidity when he realises what he’s done, but then he’s back to blaming Dolores.
Like I say, it’s a very accurate portrayal based on some of the real world stuff you see on blogs like this.
The only thing that worries me about the book is the theme being of 12 year old seductress and an adult man as the victim. Read the review from “A Guilty Pleasure”, “Innocence lost” at the end of the page. http://www.amazon.ca/Lolita-Vladimir-Nabokov/product-reviews/0679723161/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_6?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=five_star&sortBy=recent&reviewerType=all_reviews&formatType=all_formats&pageNumber=6
also Jay Alan Akin on the next page.
Thank you for both of your feedback
@ Amy
There is one instance in the story where Dolores is the instigator, but the point is to show that even then HH is still the guilty one.
It’s an illustration of grooming decades before we even used the word.
oh I see. Thanks Alan!
Amy, I find it hard to believe that any honest reader would accept HH’s claim that Dolores seduced him. Even though he’s the narrator, it comes across pretty clearly as a self-serving rationalisation.
Of course, an actual paedophile would probably read it differently.
Although I haven’t read it yet but I do know a little about it from what I read and its driving me crazy that so many commentators on amazon claiming it is a “story about love” and “Lolita was hardly innocent because she had sex before him”. I’m still contemplating if I should read it.
Because she had sex before him? That makes as much sense as saying he’s entitled to young girls since one let him fool around with her… when he was a young boy.
Yup there is a bunch of bullshit rationalization and some who claim the blame is 50/50. Like a commenter says “I would also like to repeat the notion that LOLITA is a love story. Critics of that idea, aghast, claim that because Lo is too young to love and because Humbert treats Dolores as mere property, it’s not a love story. Those people are ignorant of the relationships of the world, having fled into the shell of romantic daydreaming. So many of the “love affairs” of the world are full of backstabbing, bitterness, haggling, and pressure. Because LOLITA explores this idea, it deserves Vanity Fair’s title of “the only convincing love story of our century.” by Christopher Culver
http://www.amazon.ca/Lolita-Vladimir-Nabokov/product-reviews/0679723161/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_12?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=five_star&sortBy=recent&reviewerType=all_reviews&formatType=all_formats&pageNumber=12
The person who wrote that review should stay farther away from relationships than any MRA. Yikes.
@Argenti:
Downfall is a brilliant film, and it absolutely blows a lot of neo-Nazi apologetics out of the water, but I wouldn’t say that it makes Hitler sympathetic. About the only senior Nazis who are treated sympathetically are Mohnke and Schenk, both of whom were thoroughly evil people in real life, but since neither were important enough figures that anyone except historians had heard of them until they saw the movie, it sort of gets away with it.
(Heinrich Himmler is presented as a deadpan snarker, which is downright odd but somehow works quite well.)
Definitely see it.
Re Lolita: I have several friends who are far better feminists than I am, whose degrees are in literature, and who have defended Lolita as being one of the most beautiful and evocative uses of language within the western literary canon. The subject matter is, however, deeply problematic.
I haven’t read it. I was going to, but then I got recommended it by a girl I met at a party on the grounds of how great the vintage fashions in it are, and that put me off it entirely. Liking it for that reason misses the point by an amount only measurable by astronomers.
“one of the most beautiful and evocative uses of language within the western literary canon”
I’m not well read enough to judge whether it’s one of the most etc, but it’s certain got beautiful and evocative writing well covered. Problem I’m having is dealing with that applied to young girls through the eyes of a pedophile. It’s language a grown ass woman would likely love to hear from her partner, poetically so, but applied to children.
And yeah, Downfall is on my endless list.
@ej I hope the three peaks hike went well–several years ago my officemates decided to do it and I went along, figuring why not; I made it maybe 1/4 the way up pen-y-ghent and then said fuckit and went for breakfast. So I hope your trip went better.
The key thing to get about Lolita is that it is very much the archetype for the concept of the Unreliable Narrator. At points in the text, even HH admits that he’s spinning and obfuscating to make himself look better and diminish the wrongness of what he’s doing. If you trust HH’s version of events, you’re reading it wrong (and it doesn’t surprise me that there’s a lot of internet denizens who do just that–I’d be inclined to say that such a reading should automatically qualify the reader as an MRA).
Here’s one way of dealing with people like HH.
Interesting from a legal perspective as it’s a case utilising the new “loss of control” defence to murder.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/29/mother-five-sarah-sands-jailed-for-stabbing-to-death-convicted-paedophile
Hopefully, those that can’t deal with life unless every thought and action is regimented in a
society-approved way that read here has learned a few things in this thread, because a lot of good advice was given. Seriously people, rules are made by those that benefit by them. And TPTB in the corporate world and academia know that. It’s all set up to keep people on the hamster wheel of success. Even the people I know in life that have ticked off most of the boxes and on schedule on the way-its-supposed-to-be-done list fall short in some areas. Life is sometimes messy. For everyone. Relax.
I read Lolita about 5 years ago and had a hard time finishing it, but I did, and I won’t be going back for a re-read. I just don’t have the stomach for it. HH’s justifications of what he does made my skin crawl in the same way the reject MRA’s justifications do. I’m pretty much of the opinion now that they all are part of one big circle-jerk of arrested development.
I’m going to go out on a real long limb here and say that all the creeps on the “no hymen no diamond” FB page aren’t anyone that any woman would want.
What’s up with these men talking about “paying” for women? They must live in a country where slavery is still in full effect and women are on sale. Certainly not the U.S. or any other western or democratic country.
And yes, they are terrified of the mystical Black Mandingo with “their women”. That’s why they talk about “Tyrones” with big penises all the dang time.
II was at work but I thought I’d say one last thing.
Funny thing? I didn’t base my statements on “sweeping assumptions and generalizations” but rather a long track record of observation (in terms of examples that definitely run into the hundreds). And in almost all cases when someone tried coloring outside the lines life smacked them down *hard* (I’m talking “They’re not getting up” hard). Where as the “white male priveledge” (which is ironic, considering the men I know who went down this path the best weren’t white, nor for that matter were all of them men) path that was mocked?
Well, you had to try to fail at that path to fail (literally, except for me, no one failed without heavy self-destructive choices). Heck, I was actually shocked at the idea that you couldn’t go on this path and actually raise your kids because I could give you fifty examples who are doing it now (albeit, with a fair helping of total chaos involved…but that appears the case with children in any case). Its not about societal expectation but rather minimizing risk. Admittedly, this may be different in countries that aren’t America (because, thanks to having an actual safety net, the risk is not born entirely by the individual there), but in America if you take the chance and fail? You. Are. Screwed.
I’m not insulting anyone who hasn’t achieved a particular path, hell, I haven’t myself, but I am (and will continue to) acknowledging that many paths in my life are closed, those that remain are much less attractive than the lives of *any* of my contemporaries and even the successes will be that much less. You can complain about societal pressure or what not, but the percentages of life are what they are. And in America, if you go down, you ain’t getting back up.
“Are older women spoiled milk, or gonorrhea-stained used cars?”
We’re your mothers, aunties, and grandmothers… and we’re about ready to drop kick your arses into next week. We didn’t raise you in a barn.