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The Red Pill subreddit, as longtime readers of this blog know all too well, teaches a particularly backward and repugnant form of “game” — that is, pickup “artistry” — that relies heavily on manipulative techniques designed to help men get what they want from women by preying on their insecurities.
Not that Red Pillers see themselves as the villains here; in their minds, they’re just giving women what they really, if secretly, want. They’re not exploiting women. If anything, the women are exploiting — or at least trying to exploit — them.
In a post from a year ago that was recently resurrected by another Red Piller, a fella calling himself bsutansalt made the mistake of suggesting to his comrades that in a good (straight) relationship there is — or at least there could be — a certain synergy between man and woman. When they “join together to face the world, they have the potential to be so much more than the sum of their strengths.”
Suggestions that women are anything other than overgrown, narcissistic babies tend not to go over very well on the Red Pill subreddit. And so it’s no surprise that bsutansalt’s post — or at least that small portion of it that dared to suggest that women and men could cooperate to make their relationship better — inspired a vehement rebuttal from one of his Red Pill brothers.
As MattyAnon sees it, the potential for synergy is just that, potential, a lovely theory that falls apart once one takes into consideration the fact that, as that old Led Zeppelin song has it, the “soul of a woman was created below.”
Take it away, Matty:
A partnership. Two people working together. A man and a woman with complementary skills and emotions working together. It sounds so beautiful but this is not how women work.
Yes, please, anonymous dude on the internet, explain to us how women work.
Women do not partner with men. Women exploit men, while men think they are building something together. Your commitment is used against you. Your voluntary reduction in your options is used as leverage to get what she wants.
Yes, that’s right, women exploit men using a devious technique known as “being in a monogamous relationship with a guy who willingly entered into this monogamous relationship.”
It’s been said before: women are dream killers. Why? Because when you’re in a long term relationship with her, it is now your job to support her dream. And you can bet that dream is boring as fuck.
Men’s dreams are inherently so much more fascinating than women’s dreams.
There is no relationship equity. There is no gratitude. There is no partnership. There is only the man doing stuff for the woman, and the woman doing the bare minimum required to maintain the flow of commitment and resources.
What sort of resources? Coal? Iron? Guano?
“Behind every great man is a great woman”… bulllshit. Every great man achieves what he achieves despite women. We can achieve so much more if we’re not also having to support women.
So posting crap to the Red Pill subreddit is actually some kind of glorious achievement? Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some bash women on Reddit.
Women claim to be the strong, independent equal of men. I say great: let’s give them exactly what they ask for. All the equality and independence they can choke down.
Somehow I doubt that the women of the world are quaking in their boots over this oft-repeated, er, threat.
H/T — r/TheBluePill
@ scildfreja
He, my doggy clearly didn’t get that message!
It does sometimes happen, even as an adult, that dreaming about peeing can lead to actual peeing. I have had my butt peed on by a sleeping spooning partner.
Hmm, so I did used to wet the bed as a child. I’ve always been a really heavy sleeper, so I’ve always thought that was part of it. My husband snores very loudly, but that doesn’t wake me up, for example. When I was little it was worse if I was sleeping somewhere unfamiliar, but I’ve never been able to puzzle out why. Maybe the strange noises in unfamiliar houses caused me to have to sleep deeper to avoid waking up? Or maybe my routine was interrupted so I didn’t remember to go before bed? Not really sure.
My best dream ever was the one where my dog and I were swooping through the air without benefit of wings or planes, over a lovely green and hilly countryside. I like to think that’s what’s on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge, and she’s waiting for me there.
Well…she’s only waiting when there are no treats or food to be had, so she’s not actually waiting so much, but she’ll still be glad to see me.
(note to self: have the kids put really good doggie treats in my pocket before seeing me off)
Though, last night I actually did dream that we were a year into Bernie Sanders presidency.
Skiriki
Yep, all of this; plus the curveball my brain likes to throw in there: I find a private, clean toilet, but it’s generally in a large room with several doors. I start to do my thing, then someone either comes into the room or was there all along. Despite my best efforts, I can never convince them to leave me alone!
I don’t usually dream. I used to have very vivid nightmares and stress dreams. So, no loss there.
I recently had a rather mindfuck-y dream; I can’t quite recall the content of it, but the important thing is that I became lucid. While I often try to encourage lucid dreaming, it’s very rarely successful, as I tend to “buy in” quite strongly to whatever is going on in my dreams. And on the rare occasions where I have become lucid in a dream, the “awareness” I try to exert on it tends to wake me up.
So, as I tried to assert my will upon this dream, I predictably felt myself waking up. However I didn’t actually wake up – I just had myself so convinced that this would occur that I dreamed about waking up. This broke my control over the dream, but only momentarily, as I then “fell asleep” and was able to become lucid in the new “dream”. This process repeated a good 3 or 4 more times, making everything weird and backwards: in the context of the dream, I was lucid and aware while dreaming, yet dreaming and fully “bought in” while awake.
Now my question is: If I got a woman to kill my dream, what would happen? Could I lucid dream all the time? Would I fall asleep and never wake up? The risk/reward here is pretty significant.
@ Alan
What Scildfreja said.
To add, it could be a mis-match between when the chemical is released and the REM cycle. This can happen with sleep talking and sleep walking, in addition to really terrifying sleep paralysis
There’s this freaky prion disease called fatal familial insomnia where the cells in the hypothalamus start to denature and upset this balance. The first symptoms are things like moving while dreaming, and randomly falling over and going into sleep paralysis while you’re awake. Then you become delirious, go into a coma and die. Like I said, it’s a freaky disease
This is very off topic, but have you seen this?
Ontario is going to try implementing a basic income as a pilot project. They haven’t released many details yet, but I’m excited to see where this goes.
I seem to recall people talking about this in the comment section before.
@Rhuu
Yes, I had mentioned that previously, and am super excited to hear that Ontario is going to try this out! It still seems a pretty far way out as they don’t have a plan for how, when, or how much it will be, but they sound pretty certain about giving it a shot. If it works out, I hope BC isn’t too far behind; I know that it could do a tremendous amount of good here in Vancouver.
Discussion of dreams is so fascinating!
I find the similarities of ‘I have to pee’ dreams very interesting. I too have the public/dirty/otherwise unusable washrooms, often with broken doors or people staring at me. If I have to go badly enough, I’ll dream of using them anyway, but it never leads to relief (obviously). Overflowing toilets/toilets with way too much water seem to be a relatively regular feature of these awful bathrooms as well.
I’ve never talked to anyone about colour in their dreams before, it hadn’t occurred to me that some people might not have colourful dreams.
My dreams are kinda weird, I don’t remember them very often, but they’re always off the wall, bizarre, often combining elements of multiple things I was engaged with in the day, and extremely vivid.
And I can very often tell that I’m dreaming, but I still can’t control things. It’s the same way that I have issues controlling my thoughts sometimes when I’m awake, I’ll tell myself “don’t think about that” and then, of course, proceed to think of nothing but that. So if I’m dreaming about spiders (I’m arachnophobic) and I know it’s a dream, I can momentarily change the dream to something else, but the thought of spiders is so prevalent in my mind that I’ll get dragged back to whatever was happening before I changed the dream. This seems to happen when I try to change any dreams, not just the bad ones, so I can change minor things but generally not the overall theme of the dream.
I have no idea if that’s connected to my anxiety or if that’s just the way my brain works.
I also remember a few dreams that really stood out that I had probably a decade ago. I still remember my first sex dream (which I will obviously not describe here :P) and vividly remember an extremely fun, colourful dream in which I was flying a robot around a junk-yard city, not unlike the city in Wall-e, but much more colourful. If I recall correctly, something was chasing me, but I wasn’t afraid of whatever it was, and the whole thing was shockingly beautiful.
Also I had an industrial Harry Potter themed nightmare once, which was super weird.
Oh, and my worst nightmares involve being stuck in a huge city either alone or with someone I care deeply about, being chased by, well a city full of zombies.
/giant wall of text
Sorry, dreams are cool.
THIS is some excellent scientific sciencin’. /sagenod
@ thread
All this dream discussion is fascinating. Thank you ever so much to all contributors.
It’s funny that anxiety dreams have such common symbolism. Wonder why that is? Is it a Jungian thing or dictated by culture? Does anyone know whether say, hunter gatherer cultures, have anxiety dreams and, if so, what form they take?
The ‘pee dreams’ thing is really interesting. I got told that unless I have to get up in the middle of the night and am also bursting in the morning I’m not hydrating enough. As a result I drink a lot of fluids; so such dreams are quite common for me. Luckily, whatever the mechanism is that controls that, it seems to work!
@ depressedCNS
Why aren’t there any nice prion diseases? Ones that just give you a sniffle or something?
I always have dreams where I’m trying to find shelter. Usually from a tornado or nuke that’s on the way. But then my legs won’t work and I can only move very slowly. I hate those. It’s a control thing I think.
I also have the common teeth falling out dream. I’ve never had one about falling or public nudity though.
I actually sort of like it when I have bizarre nightmares. I’m always partially aware it’s a dream and as a horror fan, I find they’re scarier and more interesting than the average horror movie.
@ WWTH
The teeth one is supposedly worries about finances.
ETA: I LOVE the sensation of falling dreams. I’ve been told that’s actually a minor brain hiccup, a sort of mini but harmless seizure.
ETAA: the Terminator movie was inspired by a dream Cameron had about a steel skeleton rising from a fire, so get writing your dreams down!
@Alan Robertshaw
I’m afraid that non-freaky prion diseases only exist in the opening stages of a Plague Inc. – Evolved game. And even there it’s only a temporary stop on the way to “total organ failure” town. 🙁
So basically like every game of Plague Inc. – Evolved.
@ monzach
Prions used to feature a lot in debates with my vegan SO (before I finally succumbed). She’d go on about mad cow disease and I’d point out how prions from meat were supposedly an essential element in our evolution, allowing the trade off between smaller digestive systems in return for bigger brains.
Prion diseases are especially horrific though.
Is that ‘laughing disease’ (Kupo?) that you get from eating human brains a prion thing? That’s supposedly the most deadly disease there is.
I can’t recall ever having a “pee dream”, though that may have to be related to the fact that any urges to urinate in the morning are invariably overruled/masked by (potential TMI warning) morning wood, which as I understand it is an automatic response to needing to pee while asleep. I can be aware of how uncomfortably full my bladder is, but will feel none of the urgency that usually accompanies it until I’ve “calmed down.”
My most common recurring dream is driving a car but not having full control; the steering will be sluggish, and the brakes will be largely unresponsive. I never crash into anything (even if headed straight for a fence, I never quite reach it), but the feeling is always very stressful. The meaning behind this one is quite obvious; I haven’t run it in the last couple years, which has coincided with my making a conscious effort to be more involved in the direction and pacing of my life.
Other than that my “typical” dreams tend to be a pretty nonsensical mess; the content and context is constantly shifting as I move through it, to the point where trying to describe them tends to sound like a string of non-sequiturs. Like, I’ll be climbing up a bunk-bed, only to arrive in a hallway which has a raft that leads down a waterfall to a movie theater that is at the top of a mall, and I can’t find any seats in the lecture hall where the view of the stage isn’t obscured by the strange geometry of the room, so I exit into the passenger compartment of a gigantic plane which is also sometimes a ferry as I move through it. And so on and so forth.
@Dlouwe I wonder if most of people’s dreams are like that, mine aren’t quite as all over the place but they will still jump around quite a bit. Like, being in a military base, and then suddenly the same plot is still going on but we’re in a dining hall or convention centre now.
The ones that tend to have narratives that aren’t completely weird and out of order are the ones I have when I’m not super deeply asleep if I’ve woken up and then fallen asleep again. I tend to have a lot more control over those ones too.
@WWTH, The thing about nightmares is interesting. I don’t have them often, but I do have a lot of dreams that I think most people would consider nightmares based on the content, but if I don’t feel fear while I’m dreaming, then I don’t tend to consider them nightmares.
Aside from the zombie ones I think the worst nightmares are really mundane dreams but something terrible happens, like a best friend betrays me or something.
I had a really entertaining dream the other morning when my SO’s alarm went off 4 or 5 times (at 5am, argh!) and after I finally fell asleep again, I dreamed that we were having a yelling match (I assume I was winning), which was oddly cathartic, since being rudely awakened at 5 am puts me in a terrible mood, but taking it out on him in reality doesn’t help anyone.
dlouwe, interesting! So you dream of places with non-Euclidean geometry? Are they, perhaps, cyclopean, and also eldritch? Are you sure you’re really dreaming (or should I say fhtagn)?
I too dream of ineffective brakes: they sort of work, but they never entirely stop the car, so I’m always in danger of having very slow collisions. But I don’t have to look far for the meaning of this, since in my waking life I drive a car made in 1970.
“Kupo” is what moogles in the Final Fantasy series say. Kuru is a disease you get from eating human tissue.
For anyone now wondering what the heck a moogle is, this is they:
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/finalfantasy-crystalchronicles/images/9/9e/Ffccking_moogle.jpg
And my image search brought me some adorable brain bleach.
http://orig08.deviantart.net/6991/f/2008/253/1/8/kupo__by_swamdono.jpg
I often dream I’m driving a car, except that I fall asleep while driving it and then come to 10 minutes later and realize I’ve been sleep-driving down the highway at 65 mph and YIKES. But it doesn’t really matter, because the windshield is painted black.
Come to think of it, I dream a lot about falling asleep. I must be really tired.
@ kupo
A thousand apologies! I like the demonic cat though.
kupo:
That sounds a little odd. Wouldn’t strange noises wake you up? I can sleep in noisy environments, but even a soft sound can wake me if it represents a possible threat. One time, a major water main burst down the street from me, and my street turned into a river. I woke to the gentle sound of flowing water, since some part of my brain had registered that this was deeply wrong.
One kind of dream I don’t miss is one I suspect is familiar to anyone who lived through the cold war: the nuclear war dream. Haven’t had many of those since the 1990s.
I envy people who dream of flying. Evidently I’m an under-achiever even when I’m asleep, because the nearest I come to flying is gliding along at walking speed, a few inches above the ground. As super powers go, it’s a bit shit.