Ladies! Stop doing stuff! Doing stuff is for dudes. So quit it with all the doing and concentrate on the be-ing Because that’s all you gals are good at, really.
That, at least, is the thesis of some dude who calls himself Otis, who did a thing over in the comments for a New York Times article. Our old friend Heartiste liked that thing he did so much that he went and did a thing with it on his blog. By which I mean he quoted it.
Otis started off like he was giving a lecture at Birmingham School of Business School:
Peter Drucker, in his famous essay Managing Oneself, advised strongly the need to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and observed that you can never win by improving your weaknesses, only by improving your strengths.
Then on to that doing and being stuff.
In broader socio-economic terms, we have given women the opportunity to build on their weaknesses (ability to compete against men) and discouraged them from capitalizing on their strengths (youth and fertility).
That’s right, gals! Stop working! Stop doing research and practicing medicine and starting businesses and caring for old people and cleaning hotel rooms and writing books and running for president and, well, pretty much everything you gals do.
Well, not absolutely everything. You should be taking every fertility drug you can get your hands on, and popping out new batches of babies, three or six or ten at a time, like puppies.
Oh, and you should be moving backwards in time. Work yourself back into your teen years, if possible, because that’s what the PUAs assure us is the height of female hotness.
Otis isn’t quite done yet:
They compete through artifices of fairness and inclusion that are borne on the backs of an ever-dwindling pool of male supporters.
That’s right, gals. You’re terrible at what you do. Dudes have just been humoring you the whole time, and cleaning up all the messes you make.
We have weakened society as a whole by building on women’s weaknesses in attempts to make them the equal of men, rather than encouraging them in their natural strengths.
Seriously, gals, QUIT WORK and GET YOUNG before you destroy Western Civilization or something.
And while this charade is going on, men are encouraged to adopt feminine attitudes and lifestyles at the expense of their own natural strengths, now deemed unnecessary in the new gender-neutral economy.
Dudes, butch yourself the hell up!
Don’t be like this guy.
Seriously, women can’t do anything that a contemporary Red Pill dude could ever respect. I mean, look at the movies they make.
By “Youth and fertility,” he means 14-year-olds, doesn’t he.
I left school to have a baby. I put my family first in all things. I was the wife who bakes, makes sure you never have to miss work for a sick day or school event. Shit, I opened my husband’s beer before I brought it to him. I thought we were in love. I thought he was my friend. I was wrong.
My husband left to find himself after 20 yrs and now I have no job, no degree and three kids with past trauma and special needs I’m homeschooling until I can get them back in school. That baby I left school to have is 19 and leaving the state to live her life. I’m on my own with no child support from my ex, no degree and very little job experience. The last time I had a paying job it was to help my husband afford to start his own business. Since, I’ve volunteered in the community and been a foster parent. Guess who wants to hire me? No one. My future is bleak as fuck. He’s out having a ball. Won’t sign the divorce papers in order to keep putting off paying support. No sacrifice I ever made means anything to him. His kids struggling does not bother him. We were toys to him and he isn’t playing that game anymore. The one blessing is he still sees the kids a few days a month. We adopted them in 2013. If he abandoned them entirely, they”d be crushed.
Do not end up like me. Put off family. Get your education and make money your priority because it wont leave in the middle of dinner because midlife crisis hit them and they’d rather not have responsibilities anymore. Put yourself first. Every. Damn. Time.
Peter Drucker never said this. What he advised was aligning your strengths in such a way that your “weaknesses become irrelevant”. It’s not particularly revolutionary career advice: Choose a career where your strengths can shine, don’t choose a career where your weaknesses will hold you back.
Heartiste, of course, makes the error of assuming that all women are uniformly weak in every category compared to all men, and thus shouldn’t have careers. That’s obviously not true, and if you go by the logic that every job should be done by the most superior person and less talented people shouldn’t even bother, then there would only be one accountant in the world, one nurse, one firefighter, one teacher, one opera singer, and so on. Heartiste would be out of a job, because he’s about the 10 billionth worst blogger in the entire world. (I rounded.)
The biggest irony is that the essay he’s quoting so approvingly warns strongly against intellectual arrogance: taking pride in ignorance, and being contemptuous of other people’s knowledge and achievements. Such as those of women.
Anyway, ignoring your weaknesses is terrible advice, unless you want to never improve, develop a lousy work ethic, and give your rivals an extra edge. That sounds like exactly the sort of takeaway a lazy dudebro would get from reading that essay. “Woo hoo! Peter Drucker says I don’t have to do my social studies homework! Welp, back to playing Call of Duty…”
Heartiste sounds pretty scared here. He doesn’t sound very convinced that he can compete.
But hey, no worries. Peter Drucker says if you’re a hateful ass-yam who writes stench-filled prose and rarely interacts with humans, you don’t need to work on that at all.
Men, of course, are never young or fertile. Women have the exclusive monopoly on that. Women can 18 so much harder than men.
Gee wilikers, I have really short hair! And I’m still… wait. Oh, yeah, that hysterectomy five years ago. Oops. But I was playing to my strengths of uterine fibroids, guys!
@SFHC
But of course. As with everything these repellent turdpebbles do, it’s an elaborate excuse to use, abuse, and throw away fuckable people that are too naïve and malleable to realize what’s being done to them until too late.
@Lea
… need a hug?
Heartiste is closer to the 100 billionth worse blogger, given they were about 100 billions human since the apparition of our species, and Ouk-Ouk the Caveman is still a better thinker than him.
I like the troll touch of the matrix link.
@Arthur : I must admit your post made me a bit uneasy, partly because it’s the exact same position as Heartiste, but reversed. A man-dominated society would be able to go past stone age, and since the difference between man and woman is mostly cultural, it also mean that culture as a whole is more important than mysoginy specifically for its evolution.
It’s also tempting, but wrong, to think that raging mysogynists are alway unable to do anything worthwhile. It’s certainly a trait linked with being less social and intelligent than the average, but a lot of mysogynists, sadly, aren’t idiots or buffons.
Then again, I struggle to not wish harm to thoses assholes (no insult meant to assholes), so I guess I react strongly to anything that encourage my bad side of wishing revenge and harm instead of simply a better life, starting with people who are discrimated and/or poor.
Sing it, Lea.
My ex loved to call me selfish. If anything toward the end of the marriage my sense of self was so thoroughly eroded that I didn’t know how to be selfish. I’ve always struggled with self-advocating (long story, family of origin issues). He’d call me selfish for taking my son to play sport. He’d call me selfish for speaking up. If I asked for anything he’d say “You’re only thinking of yourself.” I finally told him “Well, I have to, because no one else will.”
I do have a career, but I’m not the stay at home type – in fact, I go frankly a little bit unbalanced if I don’t get out and have always needed work to define myself and always needed money to make me work. That’s good and bad.
Anyway – as someone else said these guys model abusive, shitty husbands so well, it’s almost like they have real life experience or sumpin’.
At any rate, I’m sure Drucker’s theories would strongly encourage me to be in the workplace.
That these losers with no discernable skills want their maleness to mean something so much tells me so much about them.
If they can be special and better without actually doing anything, it is perfect for them. They can’t actually do anything. They were born white, straight and male. Their mamma’s pushed them out that way. They never had to work for the specialness that their ignorant bigotry tells them they have. That is convienient since they’re lazy.
Not one of these men shines in their writing or …anything they do when they actually do anything.
As self deluded as they are, I believe they know they ain’t shit. That is why they’re so angry and determined to strike out at women in that anger. They can’t be superior to anyone. They see us as defective for not being weak enough to make them feel strong. They put so much effort into denying how much it scares them to be less than even mediorce because they are too weak to face the most basic truths about themselves.
The truth is, life is scary and confusing. It seems counterintuitive to some folks, but humility and making peace with that fear and confusion is how you get past it and find some beauty in yourself and the world. Bluster and rage is just noise. There is no comfort in it. Trying to tear down women to make themselves feel more powerful won’t keep their boogeymen away.
Really, bigots are just so grim.
Lea, my father did the same thing to my mother, leaving her with 5 children, including twin boys under the age of 2, after 18 years of marriage. She was selfless, a great cook and did everything for him and us. This was in 1970. He cleaned out the bank account and we had less than $12 left. Mother, like you, had left school (college) to have a baby and marry. With help (we were on food stamps, and my grandmother helped), she went back to college, got a degree at 50, and taught 2nd grade until she was 68. She retired with a teacher’s pension.
All of her children learned the hard lesson about education, and putting oneself first. You can’t really help anyone if you can’t help yourself. Of the three girls, one is an airline pilot, two are lawyers. My brothers are fine, too, with jobs and college educations.
Things are so tough for you now, and my thoughts are with you as you struggle. Your children, however, will likely learn about the importance of education and putting oneself first. We certainly did. Good luck.
I’m fascinated by the concept that you shouldn’t work on your weaknesses. Do…do you think THAT’S why these guys are like this? “I’m not great at understanding the existence of lives beyond my own so hey, why try?” Do they…actually realise that you have to put effort into learning things?
Banananana Dakry,
Not really. Thank you though. The offer is nice. I’m at peace with it.
Rubyyogi,
Yep. I was mindfucked ten ways to Tuesday in my marriage. Gaslighting eroded big ol chunks of me. It’s a struggle to come back from it. Never again.
Thanks Tired Texan. I hope I do so well.
Lea, you are a deeply inspiring human being.
Of course not. If they didn’t already know it, it obviously wasn’t worth knowing in the first place. It’s like how every person who ever invented something was born knowing how to create it and just waited until they felt like getting up to do it.
Seriously, though, this dude’s thesis is weak. All I hear is some asshole bearing a grudge because a woman somewhere at some point got a promotion or something similar over a male candidate. Sorry you gotta put in the effort to compete against a wider group of people instead of society completely dismissing them out of hand for you.
I’m deeply sorry to hear about your situation, Lea. Wishing you all the best.
EJ, this is super obnoxious of me, but I left a little note for you on the first page of the previous thread and I just wanted to confirm that you’d seen it.
Oh, I don’t know. Personally, I’ve found that brushing up where I’m weaker helped to improve me overall. Maybe Peter (or this Otis idiot) should try it too.
Uh, youth and fertility are both transitory and finite. Moreover, you can’t improve them, because you’re pretty much stuck with whatever nature gave you, and capitalizing on them is therefore not a good long-term strategy. Any woman who’s ever tried has been pitied, laughed at, and called a bimbo. What other farts — oh sorry, pearls of wisdom — you got, bro?
http://treasure.diylol.com/uploads/post/image/403134/resized_vladimir-putin-meme-generator-please-do-go-on-i-m-enthralled-6d463a.jpg
Oh good sir, pray tell me, what are THOSE? I’ve seen a variety of different men, all with different natural abilities. Somehow, though, not one of those guys has ever been told to tone it down because ladies might be in competition with them. Maybe that’s because none of these gents of my acquaintance are babbling numbskulls like Otis here. Deep thinking and careful observation are clearly not among his natural strengths.
As careers advice go, encouraging anyone to focus solely on the two things in life which are absolutely guaranteed not to last, one of which is in no way your achievement, and the other of which is most likely to require the active involvement of another person to eventuate, is pretty much the worst advice you can give them.
My youth is long past, but my degrees and accomplishments are still working just fine. I may even have time to add to them.
@Viscaria:
That’s absolutely fine. Please don’t feel guilty at all. I really enjoyed playing with you and whether or not we ever do it again, I wish you the very best.
@Lea @Rugby re: no sense of self at the end: That was me at the end of my first marriage. The funny thing is that I didn’t realize it until well after he’d left – I finally began remembering what I liked, what I wanted, what I thought and felt and was.
I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through and for what you have to face, but I’m glad that you once again get to breathe.
Banananana dakry
and here’s me with hair to my booty, a couple of years past menopause. Should be okay as long as I don’t color the grey, right?
And I guess Tiki Barber was doin’ it rong when he worked on that whole dropping the football weakness in his game in 2003, instead of just improving on that whole running fast thing he was so good at. I mean, it’s not like those balls he fumbled ever resulted in turnovers.*
Viscaria – I hope you feel better soonest!
Lea – What a terrible story! Best wishes for your situation to improve, too.
*not the yummy kind, the kind the coach yells at you for because the other team recovers the fumble.
@Lea & TiredTexan
It’s really sad how this isn’t an uncommon story. When you make a woman’s prosperity depend on the man she marries, and give men zero consequences for just fucking off ’cause he feels like it, what do you think is going to happen??
Someone please explain to me how youth and fertility are “strengths” that you can “concentrate on”? Just what in the…what does that even mean? You mean if older/non-fertile women just concentrate hard enough, they can focus on their “strengths” as a woman and be eternally young/fertile? As if it is a simple matter of wishing away your age/infertility? Then will you finally be womaning properly?
@Lea
I just wanted to say that you are amazing and that I hope this situation gets better for you soon.
I like the name Otis. I have a friend named Otis. Stop giving Otises a bad reputation, Otis!
@Lea – you will be okay, you really will, and so will your kids. I know the anxiety is overwhelming at times but it really is going to be all right over time. Many of us have been then and come through it and you will, too.
For everyone else, is there a post/discussion/article anywhere that discusses or speculates on WHY these folks constantly purple up the prose so badly? I’ve noticed that the FeMRAs tend to write in more of a vulgar sort of style – lots of swearing and epithets – and many MRAs of the “manly” stripe seem to just go to excessively floral and florid lengths to turn a phrase.
WHY???? Is it so they won’t realize their arguments’ many logical failures? To dance around something they know isn’t valid? I’m just curious, I have no idea why but so much of their writing is just so BAD.