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.
Oh noes! I’m never going to have children and I’m focusing on my career of graphic design for a living!
But, as a chubby pansexual girlflux feminist person over the age of fourteen, I don’t exist to these fuckers anyway because I’m not a “real woman”, so I think I’ll just happily exist as a figment of their fevered nightmares.
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e6/df/24/e6df24ab94fb8a282eea97f4d5986890.jpg
@dreemr
This is just a theory, but they’re probably trying to make themselves seem much smarter/more philosophical than they really are. It’s not working.
@Lea
I’m so sorry to hear about your troubles. 🙁 Hopefully everything will get better. I’m wishing peace for you.
@Lea
And for your kids, of course.
@dreemr
I think the tl;dr version is they think “more words means more smarts.” Possibly with a helping of the Dunning–Kruger effect. They feel that lots of words shows off intellectual prowess, yet they are so bad at it that they don’t know how bad they are at it.
@SJA and dlouwe thank you for the feedback, I agree they must think it makes them sound very sophisticated and smart, deep thinkers.
I don’t watch many of their videos, but Aurini often attempts to talk in the same way.
@Lea,
stories like yours make me so angry. I hope you have a support network to help you through this.
@dreemr
Another consideration is that there’s only so many ways to succinctly say “I hate women and also myself but particularly women” without having to pad it out a bit.
@Lea @TiredTexan Your stories are heartbreaking and rage-inducing. It must drive you up the wall when MRAs proclaim with the kind of confidence that only accompanies baseless bullshit that divorce/separation is basically a free pass for women to commit highway robbery.
The feminist economist in me is especially furious. Domestic labour is labour. Don’t ever let some asshole tell you that a home-based partner’s work does not deserve compensation in the event of a separation just because we don’t usually put a monetary value on it in a capitalist economy. It’s fucking work. Especially care work. You just go ahead and try handing a cash stipend to your 3-year-old and see how well they raise themselves.
And the fact that the working partner gets to move on to a comparable job while the home partner is just SOL resume-wise…
Oh, but all the courts are totally biased against men, right? Something something Big Daddy Government, something something Welfare Queens, something something bon bons.
@ dreemr and dlouwe
Remember the “translation” of an Edwardian MRA that added hundreds more words to the original statement?
It’s interesting that while they deride the humanities, and put STEM fields on a pedestal, they also try to sound like a humanities professor. Or the straw version of one. The statement, “They compete through artifices of fairness and inclusion” is almost worthy of the late Antonin Scalia.
“And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I took the red pill that I wrote lifeless blogs and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” – George Orwell (maybe)
Thanks y’all, for all the encouragement.
No, Snork Maiden, I don’t. My only family are my kids and a grandmother in another state. I have a few good friends to talk to. None live in town.
I lost many friends this year after a strong disagreement over trans and intersex rights. Michfesters are a goddamn bigoted cult and I finally said as much. We are done with each other.
So, I’m trying to make that enough.
Otis’s and Heartiste’s heads will explode once they see the latest Google Doodle (“My Afrocentric Life” by high school sophomore Akilah Johnson):
https://www.google.com/
@Lea
This is the same advice I got from a domestic violence counselor. It makes a lot of sense in so many ways. For one thing, it’s easier to help others when you yourself are doing well.
I’m sorry to hear about your gaslighting ex. I hope that your situation improves very, very soon.
@EJ (The Other One)
Not only that, the guy is trying to give hearts a bad name!
What’s up with that?!
Luckily, hearts are extraordinarily resilient. So Valentine’s Day&love&crushes&such are still A Thing.
I’m groovy like gravy. No worries.
@dreemer: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” ― W.C. Fields
Mind you, I suspect these oafs are convinced they’re doing the former and not the latter.
Of course! As Martin Heidegger wrote in Being and Time: “The term ‘Being’ does not define that realm of entities which is uppermost when these are articulated conceptually according to genus and species: the ‘universality’ of Being ‘transcends’ any universality of genus… except that dudes also do things, and women are just there to look pretty and have babies and stuff.”
I’m calling “Focus on that one thing you’re good at and you’ll never have to address your glaring flaws” the Amelia Bedelia strategy.
As for Drucker…
He coined “Do what you do best and outsource the rest” – but this was meant for corporations (and governments), but at the same time he advocated creativity and the development of new products and services that are in line with what you do best.
For individuals, it’s about finding where your natural talents and strengths are and focusing most of your effort on those, but that doesn’t mean don’t get better at other things or don’t ignore weaknesses completely.
For me one obvious application is rugby. I’m slow, but strong. As is my son. Now, I can improve my speed and I should, but I will never be fast, I’m not built that way. However, it is relatively easier for me to get stronger than faster and in the position that I play that is to more advantage to me. That doesn’t mean ‘ignore running speed’, it means ‘spend more time on core strength than sprinting’. Speed matters, however, in rugby – and that is why it is a team sport and why we have backs who are (or should be) fast and nimble. Strength is to their advantage, too – but relatively speaking speed is more important. They should spend more time on speed and less on strength – but we can work together and on a team have speed and strength. But as a team we have to understand and value each other’s contributions.
I’ve applied this thinking in my career. I’m creative and good at public speaking – I’ve often asked for more training in this area. Not because I think it’s a deficit, but it’s a strength I want to invest in. I’ve sometimes had to fight managers who ‘develop by deficiency’. My project management skills are shite, but I know that and can bring in other people who are better at than I am. All the Gant chart training in the world isn’t going to make my brain a less chaotic place. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t learn some valuable lessons from the discipline.
These guys who apply this same thinking to ‘all women’ or ‘all men’ as if all women were alike and uniformly different from men are completely ignoring a lot of what Drucker had to say about talent and workforce. I’m not sure if Drucker said anything about this – but I’d assume that part of strength and talent is what gives you joy in what you do. So just because someone might have the ability to give birth to many children, doesn’t mean they ought to, because it might not give them joy. And without the joy they’re unlikely to do a bang-up job in the rearing.
@dreemr and others, re: purple prose –
As much as purple prose is very often a product of someone who thinks they’re much smarter than they actually are, I don’t think that it’s primarily an indication of intelligence. In my opinion, it’s primarily an indication of selfishness.
Purple prose is about authors who want to appear eloquent. They want to strike their audience with awe at their use of ten-dollar words. They want to receive applause. They want to pat themselves on the back for writing at an advanced level. By using obscure, archaic language, they try to project an air of, “Yes, I read great literature, can you tell?”
Of course, there’s a lot of fun to be had in crafting a fancy sentence, and it’s nice when your audience seems impressed by your work–but approaching writing with an attitude of “Tremble before the power of my thesaurus” prioritizes gaudiness over actually communicating with people. The audience becomes an afterthought. An author of purple prose doesn’t care if their readers gains anything from their work. They just want the buzz of feeling smarter than everyone else in the room.
Truly great persuasive writers take complex ideas and communicate them in a way that their audience can grasp. They’re constantly thinking about their readers: “Will people understand this? Is my writing engaging, or have I gotten boring? This point is apt to cause some controversy; how can I proactively address my readers’ concerns? I love this sentence, but ARGH, I think I need to cut it, because the paragraph flows so much better without it.” etc. This lends itself to leaner, simpler writing. It can still be beautiful, but it must above all things be clear.
Purple prose writers go, “My writing is the Best Writing, and if people have trouble with it, that’s their problem, not mine.” These authors are not necessarily inherently stupid people, but they ARE being willfully obtuse, which shatters their ability to communicate in any sort of meaningful way.
A high IQ and a strong vocabulary can be assets in writing well, but those things can’t save your article if you don’t care about your audience. Manospherians are pretty much self-obsessed by definition, so their prose can’t help but be purple.
OT Breaking news: Two explosions at the Brussels airport
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2016/mar/22/brussels-airport-explosions-live-updates
@Kootiepatra
Yes!
And your entire post is clear, persuasive, and easily grasped.
Watched a show called “Deadly Demands”, the episode is about the case of Richard Farley – a man who demonstrated many behaviors and attitudes quite close to those seen with MRAs but not all of them. Not to say that he was influenced by or involved with MRAs/MGTOWs/PUAs though.
Can’t help but think that when someone stumbles into one of those dark and hostile corners of the internet populated by hatemongers of every sort, exploiting those already close to the edge into exploding is ‘getting back at the establishment’ by proxy.
Looking at the people who are their name-recognized ‘leadership’, the blogs frequented, the behaviors encouraged, and the way these are pushed into starting a sort of internet rabid outbreak is kind of horrifying.
I just set up an open thread for discussion of the Brussels bombings. Horrible.
Just catching up on this thread.
Lea, so sorry you’ve been put in such a difficult position. But you are awesome.
Men are born old with naff sperm it seems, so why should we be seen as superior then?