Misogynists love it when they can figure out a way to blame a woman for the misdeeds of a man. And no woman is a more convenient scapegoat than a bad man’s mother — after all, if she’d raised him right, he wouldn’t be out there murdering and raping and robbing and whatever other terrible things he’s doing.
Recently, misogynists have discovered that the “blame the mother” strategy is almost infinitely expandble. You don’t have to stop with the bad man’s mother. You can blame the mother’s mother as well. And the mother’s mother’s mother — all the way back to the origins of our species or even before.
According to this updated “blame the mother” theory, the world is full of bad men because women love bad boys — so much so that their preferences have changed the course of human evolution. By having sex with (and getting pregnant by) sexy brutes, these women have passed “bad boy” genes onto their children.
Putting it slightly more crudely, as one Red Pill Redditor does in the title of a recent post, “thugs exist because women f*ck thugs.”
In his post, thelandofdreams takes issue with what he sees as the widespread perception that
men are the takers, the destructors, the ones greedily absorbing all of the gendered benefits and dispensing the depression and victimization of the fairer sex. Men have always benefited selfishly from the relationship between the sexes, the popular thinking goes, raping and pillaging because that is just in their nature.
Well, ok, he admits, maybe men are a bunch of jerks. But it’s not really their fault. It’s the fault of their mothers, and their grandmothers, and their great grandmothers and so on and so on and scooby dooby doo.
“[T’hese gender theorists balk the closer they get to examining the root cause of all this,” thelandofdreams sniffs.
The simple fact of the matter is that men are aggressive, assertive, violent, and fierce because for ages untold women have been f*cking the aggressive, assertive, violent and fierce among us.
Longtime readers of this blog may recall YouTube “philosopher”/cult leader/MRA/douchebag Stefan Molyneax making a similar argument – well, assertion — several years back.
Thelandofdreams, apparently convinced he’s onto something new and original, continues:
You know that thuggish, drug dealing cousin of yours who is constantly getting arrested and treats his family like sh*t? Yeah, that guy is swimming in fucking pussy, believe it or not.
Ah, the old Argumentum ad That-Guy-um!
[T]he popular zeitgeist of the day says that he became that way because men are just arbitrarily monstrous and not because, well, his older brother acted that way and had a new hot girlfriend every month. Contrary to what you might have been told, his gangster lean, tribal tattoos, and predilection for violence are a learned behavior, and women are the ones who taught it.
Thelandofdreams steps back, for a moment, from all this women-blaming to declare that “as men, we must not blame our shortcomings on others.”
And then he resumes blaming our shortcomings on others:
We can, however, at least realize that a lot of the ways we act have a deep root– a million years of biological evolution and female mate selection pushing us towards aggressive, assertive, dominate behavior because that, we have come to know in our dark hearts, is what drives women towards us.
A MILLION YEARS of evolution have made us dudes the jerks we are today. While beta provider cavemen were out hunting the mammoth, their cave wives were cave-cucking them behind their backs with the jerkboys from one cave over.
What are we, if not creatures made to reproduce? A monkey who is aggressive gathers more resources, and in doing so accrues more females.
You know what they say, women love men with lots of bananas!
Much of the history of warfare and bloodshed has this same subconscious motivation at its core.
The point is that no, women are not blameless when we count the piles of male corpses on which the modern world is built. They had a hand in it to.
They had “a hand in it to” … what?
Bad news, Red Pill dudes who love to fill the internet with ungrammatical, woman-blaming screeds: Most women looking for love online these days will reject a man outright if he can’t master basic grammar and spelling, at least according to a recent survey of 9000 singles by Match.com.
The only bad boys they go for, in other words, are the ones who know the difference between “to” and “too.”
The other day I ran into an extreme version of this type of guy on another site.
I logged on to find a private message from him saying he loved my pictures, thought I was gorgeous and asked if I’d ever want to fly to Las Vegas for a sensual massage. It wouldn’t lead to sex if I didn’t want it to.
I replied that I’m very happy with the partners I have (I’m openly poly) and not interested in flying halfway across the country to get a massage from a total stranger.
His response was to pull up some cooked up statistics that state 75% of women in relationships experience emotional, sexual or physical abuse (everything I’ve read puts the stat at around 25% which is still entirely too high) and that these women tend to pick the same kind of partners over and over, getting into a cycle of dating abusive a-holes (aka thugs). I was probably in the same kind of situation and didn’t know any better after having abusive relationship after abusive relationship (in other words, I loved dating thugs).
He went on to say that he was trying to help an attractive woman break that cycle, but if I wanted to support the rape and abuse of woman by violent men, then there wasn’t a thing he could do for me.
Plus there was some disconnected stuff about how women have never been taught to enjoy sex properly (followed by a diatribe on how to pleasure a woman that didn’t even acknowledge that all women are not after the same things sexually), that we’re all conditioned to settle instead of looking for our knights in shining armor (don’t need saving, thanks anyway) and other such nonsense that made me think he actually believed he was a rare white knight in a world full of evil men.
That is the first time I’ve not only be accused of being in abusive relationships (I’m not), but told I support the abuse of women because I turned a “nice guy” down in favor of a couple of “abusive” ones. Yep, even domestic abuse is the fault of women who date jerks. At least one guy’s mind.
Trigger warning: reply to IP above
@IP:
Wow. My sympathies to your Otter for growing up in such a family. It sounds horribly uncomfortable for everyone involved, and I’m glad she got out.
It sounds to me less like the father is truly frightened, and more as though he’s trying to turn this into yet another dominance gesture. (“I’m spending all this money on a hotel room and it’s your fault because you raised the kids to be violent!”) Emotional abuse is an ugly thing.
@WWTH:
That’s really cool! It’ll look awesome in ink. How large were you thinking of getting it?
I’ve seen that argument coming from misogynists a couple of times over the years. The first was in a Cracked article that went something like this “reasons why Humanity is f*cked”. The top 1 reason, according to the enlightened man who’d written the article, was because women loved bad guys and psychopaths.
The second was in a Reddit argument where one Red Pill poster kept repeating again and again that women were genetic parasites who had contributed nothing to the evolution of humanity. In order to back up his claims (which were being trashed by an actual geneticist), he kept saying “I’m a biologist, I know my shit”.
These guys seem to think that only men give the genetic material necessary for procreation and that women only receive it. It’s a ridiculous idea that sounds a lot like what Medieval and Renaissance alchemists believed about reproduction (that the man planted his seed in the woman, and that the woman was just an oven). Genetics, and even just plain old common sense and observation, have shown time and time again that the mother contributes just as much as the father to her offspring.
tl;dr: Red Pillers and Misters are the modern day equivalents of Medieval “scientists”.
@Hexum7
There are probably lots of people who disagree with me here, and certainly there exist scenarios and individuals where the following may not apply, but I don’t think they’re entirely wrong in making this connection. I don’t actually see being dominant and aggressive as positive traits at all, except for in very limited circumstances (such as a competitive sport of some kind, and even there, it can easily lead to bad things). Everywhere else they are a sign of, if not an outright abusive personality, at least a borderline bully.
‘Aggressive’ refers to someone who, at best, is militantly forward and lets no one step in their way, and at worst, someone who is quick to anger and is provoked at the slightest hint of opposition. An aggressive person goes after what they want, sure, but there is no indication that they’re taking other, less aggressive people into consideration while doing that, which is a sure sign of a bully. For the life of me, I can’t see how a person exhibiting an aggressive personality would not raise at least a few red flags. ‘Dominant’ is, in certain respects, even worse. Pretty much all evil deeds in society can be traced back to the concept of power in some way, shape or form, and a willingness to dominate implies a willingness to abuse the power one has over someone else, no matter how noble and selfless the intent. Power corrupts, after all*. So no, I see no positive side to being dominant, except maybe to counter another person trying to establish dominance over you, which, again, is only necessary if another person is trying to dominate you in the first place**.
I think ‘assertive’ may be the least loaded term of the bunch, since it can also refer to a healthy understanding of one’s personal boundaries. Sadly, in our competitive society, I’ve also seen the word used as shorthand for someone willing to assert their will over the will of others. Again, typical abuser behavior. But if I were to list all the ways I see imperialism, capitalism and other ideologies based largely on dominance and subjugation contributing to a fucked-up collective social personality, I’d be here all day, not to mention I’d probably piss off people more. So I won’t digress further.
To summarize: Not all people with aggressive, assertive and dominant personalities are physically violent jerks, but I’d fathom that all physically violent jerks have aggressive, assertive and dominant personalities. And even if they’re not physically violent, I tend to be wary of anyone who wishes to establish dominance over another human being, since I can bet my butt that they’re going to be emotionally or psychologically abusive in some way.
“Obligatory” TMI section:
I may be biased, though. All the people I’ve known in my life who’ve had an aggressive and dominant personality have abused me physically, psychologically, emotionally and, yes, sexually. It is not a coincidence that said personality traits are largely encouraged in men, and it’s mainly other men I’m having trouble trusting these days (the few exceptions I know being some of my closest friends).
/TMI
Lastly, I think it’s important to note that I’m an incredibly privileged person, looking at things from the point of view of an incredibly privileged person. Only in the most recent decade have I really come to understand the difference between the concept of pride as understood by members of privileged groups and pride as it is understood by members of oppressed groups. To the former, it means being better than the oppressed group(s); to the latter, it means not being worse than the dominant group(s).
This, I think, is a fundamental difference between a privileged person praising their privileged identity and an oppressed person praising their oppressed identity (example: why ‘white pride’ can never have a positive connotation, but ‘black pride’ can). The same could certainly apply to the personality traits listed here: a straight white man being aggressive, assertive and dominant carries a threat that isn’t quite there when the same personality traits are exhibited by, say, a gay black woman. The more privileged you are, the more probably you’ll equate being assertive with being a jerk.
Ergo: Since manospherians are usually very privileged people, they tend to look at things from the point of view of a privileged person. Which means, becoming more assertive = becoming a violent jerk. After all, if you’re already a massive jerk, the only way you can really escalate is by turning violent to boot. They don’t actually hate the concept of some people having power over others, they just wish they were the ones who had the power.
Of course, another, less tangentially related reply is that the manospherians want to justify being violent jerks themselves on the pretense of it being a valid tactic for the survival of their genes (oh my gods), or to single themselves out as “the nice guy” amongst all the bad, abusive men out there, but that’s a different ball of yarn.
*As an anarchist, though more philosophical than political, I’m very concerned with the concept of power and the various ways in which it manifests in our society. If I weren’t, I don’t think I would qualify as any kind of an ally in the first place; I think failing to draw the connection between the evils of abusing political and economic power and the evils of abusing the social power you have over someone else is what makes a brocialist (or a manarchist, whichever term one fancies).
**As for whatever kinks one may have, those are still to be based on consensuality, trust and taking another person into consideration. So, no, an aggressive and dominant personality has no place there, either.
Saphira : Ugh. I still can’t understand what can explain such an attitude. Are they truly stupid enough to believe what they say ? Or are they buying some evo-psych garbage pick-up advice ?
On topic : it’s ridiculously backward to say that women dating jerk would explain jerk, for a lot of reasons :
* it completely overvalue genetic. We are the product of our environment, which include our education, genetic makeup, and a lot of other factors , not just of an omnipotent god called “genetic”.
* there is likely no jerk genes anyway, but at best some combinations of traits who can make you more or less likely to create troubles. It’s also likely that a lot of thoses traits are also genuingly useful. Being very focused and able to channel all its energy on one thing seem to both allow to be a genius and to be a stalker depending on what you focus on
* that’s an obvious cope out to refuse to personally try to change, and refuse reeducations, etc. That’s half the way to justify eugenism and concentration camps to say the wrong guy will reproduce into more wrong guys.
Also, I don’t think there is any good reasons to think that thugs have more children than average. Other species show that their so-called “dominant male”, who are basically the real world version of the thugs they talk of aren’t *that* dominant genetically.
I’m pretty sure that thugs and jerks and assholes existed even back in the days when men had the final say over who women married. He’s arguing that women shouldn’t have agency because they make terrible choices, but then who was pairing women up with Thuggy McSchoolLockerBully during all those millennia when women didn’t have agency? (and no, cucking was not as common historically as these nitwits like to believe)
TW for mentions of aggression, violence, suicidal thoughts
Thanks, everyone who has replied to my family drama post. It’s not really an option for us to stay elsewhere, for example at a hotel, for a month. We wouldn’t be able to afford an extended hotel stay, and the entire purpose of the trip is to spend time with the family. I feel like I have to clarify that, while there’s always some tension, this kind of escalation is fairly rare. I’ve seen a few all out screaming fights before, but most of the time things are calm and relatively normal. The shut-in son usually stays in his room whenever we visit. It’s been a few years now since I last saw him. I don’t worry that my wife or myself would be intended targets of any aggressions, but of course I don’t want anyone else to get hurt either.
It’s a family with plenty of undiagnosed mental issues. I think I can say that with certainty, and I also know they would agree. (Depression, extreme anxiety, narcissism, etc.) They’re quite well off, so there’s no particular incentive for the sons to ever work or support themselves, or to move out of their parents’ house. They’re basically living in a private hotel with 24/7 free room service and unlimited junk food. Now there are three very large, adult men living there, with a lifetime of tension that has been built up between them, and they’re all unstable to some extent. I suspect that the parents have made a joint decision to not have guns in the house, since the father has been suicidal at certain times in the past.
Like I said, I’m not significantly worried that something serious will happen. Having said that, I really hope there are no guns in the house. With guns, things can escalate so fast and people can get hurt by accident or through just a split second of lapsed judgement. Fucking gun culture. It really doesn’t need to be like this. :/
To Darkstatistic,
Thank you for the recommendation; I’ve been reading and enjoying their articles.
David,
Yiannopolous is spinning up the slander machine again, this time targeting the editor of the Tempest, a 24 year old Muslim woman who’s an acquaintance of an acquaintance. She wrote about it here: http://thetempest.co/2016/06/18/life-love/this-is-what-happened-when-racist-america-made-me-enemy-1/
But is he swimming through [his] pussy vault like Scrooge Fuckin’ McDuck?
Not too big. I need the option to hide it if necessary.
That’s just so incredibly creepy. I’ll bet he’s actually the one with abusive tendencies.
Stuff like this is exactly why I never take the “women love assholes” claims remotely seriously. A lot of the men who say that just assume that any man who is partnered with a woman must be an asshole. Like when MRAs were saying Emma Watson is a hypocrite for being a feminist while dating a rugby player. Because rugby players are apparently automatically alpha assholes.
In the mean time, the Nice Guy is the one completely dehumanizing the women they desire. This old WHTM post really exemplifies it. TW for rape https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2012/04/17/the-worst-nice-guy-rage-comic-in-the-history-of-the-universe/
I agree. There are a lot of people like this who even if they don’t commit any actual violence will make life unpleasant in various smaller ways. Like cutting people off in traffic, talking during a movie, leaving a mess in the breakroom at work, etc. It’s especially bad in the US where aggression and competitiveness is highly prized. I think you’re right that people who are focused on developing these traits do not take others into consideration at all. They’re all about “me, me, me.”
Sorry if my post is word salad. The coffee is just not waking me up this morning for some reason!
@DoctorChicken
And neotony is being bandied about like the new phrenology.
@Anarchonist
While you are right that I’m going to disagree to an extent, I don’t see your view as unreasonable given your experiences and the state of the world today. Humankind has a problem with expression of aggression and dominance in general. I’m coming at this as a person who is innately aggressive and can be described as having a “social dominance orientation”, and I am a person who has spent a lifetime working to keep that part of myself under control so that when I express it it is for a good reason. These characteristics are associated with my Tourette’s Syndrome, a condition that I see as a natural part of how human beings can exist (in a similar category as things like ADHD and autism which have advantages and disadvantages).
I agree with your summary, it would be a safe bet.
My way of looking at aggression here has to do with the dispositions of people. My view of aggression and dominance is at a different resolution then that of most people. The way that I see aggression and dominance also includes its use in some of the smallest parts of communication that your comment uses. I’m pointing this out not to take away from your experience of these things but to show a proper and good application of these things so that the improper applications stand out more starkly. Aggression and dominance are general features of human psychology at many levels of interaction. At this textual level the application of aggression can be seen as a combination of anger and anticipation where one is seeking to remove an obstacle, in your case the obstacle of people that include careless and callous use of aggression and dominance as a part of their personality. This is a good obstacle to want to remove from one’s life and a good application of aggression in text.
The application of dominance is in presenting your view that these people are bad as one that should stand as a view to be accepted relative to what people who might disagree would say. I see this as a good application of dominance as your view is an important one that should be taken into account in order to improve society. Farther I see your view as a dominance display against those who have harmed you, a display I choose to support with my own aggressive instincts when such people show up here.
The above would be impossible without your willingness to be assertive with respect to your experiences and risk a boundary violation (or deliberately cause which is often necessary in changing society for the better). I see this as a good application of assertiveness and one that needs support as society is terrible at allowing women and other disadvantaged groups to be assertive in general (the same for being aggressive and dominant).
I hope that these points support rather than contradict your points and experiences and if I failed at any point I would like to hear it.
pitshade, I think I love you! Also, I’d like to dedicate the DEVO song “Shrivel Up” to all the manoshperians.
The silly theory in the OP falls apart for many reasons, some of which are outlined here. I have two more:
1. For centuries (maybe millennia?) few women* had any say in who they got paired up with. Even *if* there was cuckolding going on, odds are that the men in those pairings had bio kids that survived to reproduce themselves. The menzers all seem to forget that until they long for the days when women could be forced to marry!
2. Given our current culture’s penchant for serial monogamy,** even if a woman finds herself attracted to (and dating) a “bad boy,” it’s likely that at least some will choose differently in future relationships. I did!
*In western cultures, cuz let’s face it, these guys aren’t allowing for much else unless they have to dig around other cultures to support their arguments for horrible things.
**Even though serial monogamy has pretty much always been a thing; otherwise, no one would ever have remarried after widowhood.
Crap. Above the paragraph after the quote should have said.
…where my way of looking at it has to do with in-the-moment applications outside of general personal tendencies as a matter of personality (disposition).
Wait, women got to choose?? I though the whole reason these guys love the idea of alpha males was that back in the “good” old days, women presumably wouldn’t get a say. Or maybe I’m confusing different strains of MRAge theory with eachother.
…or in other words, what @(((Hambeast))) now, with more parentheses! said.
(Also I wish more comments sections would autodetect double posts.)
Who wants to see Hbomberguy knock Sargon’s thin skinned ego down a notch?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rc24YtUslCU
Because he does a pretty good job pf pointing out Sargon doesn’t believe in surveys, then uses a survey to prove his point, a survey in an article that has the word survey referenced 94 times. It’s wondrous to see this person flounder in the comments so hard.
@WWTH
They got UV ink now.
@OoglyBoggles
Sargon’s comment was actually the most glorious fail I’ve seen in a long time. :p
Red Pillers are more or less amoral. Their ideology is more or less “men are abusive jerks because evo psych, so get over it.” They probably realize that’s actually textbook misandry, so they need to either project it onto women or decide they simply don’t care.
re: dominance and the desirability thereof,
I have no idea if “artofmanliness.com” is a good website generally — with a name like that I doubt it — but they have a fascinating article up that combs through survey data in great depth to suggest that there are two distinct high-powered male personas, one based on “prestige” and one based on “dominance.”
When undergraduate women take one-dimensional surveys that compare a hypothetical “dominant” man who is driven, successful, and authoritative with a “nondominant” man who is content, agreeable, and conflict-averse, they tend to consider the dominant man more attractive. However, when given a short description of a man who is talented, driven, and successful, they found that more attractive than a longer description which described him also as dominating, powerful, and competitive.
When asked to rate the attractiveness of character traits, ~120 undergraduate women said that “confident” and “assertive” men were attractive, and “quiet,” “shy,” or “submissive” men were unattractive. However, they also said that “easygoing,” and “sensitive” men were appealing, while “aggressive” and “demanding” men were unappealing. “Dominant” got neutral/mixed reviews.
Other surveys have suggested that “dominance” is attractive if and only if it was paired with kindness and cooperation. The most attractive man was one who the community *turned to* for leadership because of his skills and his energy, not those who became leaders through aggressive competition.
There were a few women who preferred the description of an aggressive and self-interested man over the skilled and compassionate one, but these women tended to be misogynists and/or raised in unstable households.
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/07/07/the-myth-of-the-alpha-male/
As I have already pointed out on the Jo Cox thread, these Alt Righters are obsessed with breeding, Eugenics if you will. It makes them exactly the same as the Christian Right who see abortion, contraception, homosexuality and gender reassignment as a conspiracy to reduce the population by stopping people breeding, although, this only counts when it’s white people who are being prevented from breeding, it’s what they like to call White Genocide. If you look at the cults like Mormonism and Quiverfull, and families like the Duggars you can see this in action. They very much belive in the outdated and debunked theory of the Alpha male, typified by Jim Bob Duggar, Phil Roberson from Duck Dynasty and Donald Trump, who are aggressive and ‘sexually virile’, unfortunately for the ‘evo psyche’ disinformation agents who see these guys as the peak of fertile masculinity, thugs is what they are, unempathic, insensitive and irresponsible. Being ‘christian’ makes no difference, these people are not followers of Christ, and you may not know this, but the ‘eternal life’ they belive in is not the eternal salvation of the spirit, but their progeny and descendants forever propagating. This is because they are really Worshippers of Baal, or Nimrod, who represents the Phallus Dei, or ‘God’s Penis”, basically what they call ‘CHRISTIANITY’ is actually a Babylonian fertility cult.
@OoglyBoggles Sargon would probably prefer something like how often the police decide to seek prosecution for rape or sexual assault or sampling an entire population and doing rigorous investigation of every claim. But there are good reasons to believe that a survey based on random sampling and an estimate of how often people lie on surveys would be more accurate than investigating every single claim to determine whether it is true.
Investigating every claim introduces huge potential for error. Very large sample sizes are also not so nice computationally and can make your code or data analysis software barf out complete nonsense. A mathematical model of how often people lie on surveys is usually better than fully investigating each claim.
Carl doesn’t understand statistics. There are surveys that use untrustworthy methodology, but not every survey uses untrustworthy methodology.