So today’s object lesson in obliviousness comes, as it so often does, from the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit.
The regulars there are discussing the important topic “Women are worse than a backyard full of cackling hens,” and one of the fellas pipes up with this, er, observation.
MGTOW dudes, I don’t know if you know this, but men do sex work too. I recommend you take it up for a week and see how “easy” it is.
The degree of out of touch you need to be to feel that women doing sex work on the street are somehow getting an easy out from ‘real work’ is…impressive.
@Croosters
Yeah… But, like, there’s a difference between saying ‘there’s an issue with misogyny/entitlement among autistic folks’ (deferring to your expertise here) and ‘that guy’s an entitled misogynist? I’m thinking he might be autistic’. Ya know? I don’t think I’m being too sensitive on this…
Podkayne:
Seriously, really contradicts their talk that fucking a woman who isn’t at least a HB8 is a totally unthinkable degradation.
@ WWTH
My recent exploration into the Incel mindset has been a real eye opener; and you know how desensitised/insensitive/clueless I am.
Warning for horrible attitudes
To them sex isn’t about enjoyment, it’s about validation. No one will have sex with them so by definition they’re worthless in the eyes of ‘normie’ society.
But then you have women who not only can get sex, people will actually pay them for the privilege. It’s the ultimate in validation and the clearest demonstration of female privilege possible.
(There’s also lots of stuff about how guys have to get educated and strive in the job market to survive etc whereas even the laziest and most uneducated woman need merely drop her pants to earn more in 10 minutes than working man earns in a week etc. So yeah to them by definition all women regardless of circumstances are more privileged than any man; apart from the mythical ‘Chad’)
@Axecalibur
Given the sheer magnitude of the entitlement among autistic dudes and the fact they more often than not congregate on Reddit, I feel no remorse making the comparison on sight.
@Alan
What I always found especially interesting (for want of a better word) about incels is their absolute insistance that they are the most persecuted even when called out by other incels. I’ve seen a fair few posts on incel subreddits where someone has called out a post in the comments; often a woman, pointing out that all their ridicules fantasies about woman being bombarded with an endless stream of sexually available incredibly attractive dudes is bullshit, and that maybe if incels considered women that didn’t look like supermodels as viable sexual partners they might not be incel. Sometimes the voice of reason is a guy too. Watching the mental gymnastics they perform to avoid this (accusing the commenter of not being “true incel” is a favourite, as well as a myriad of ways it’s “different” for women) is fascinating and very sad.
It often ends with other commenters saying women shouldn’t be allowed to join the subreddit. The mind, it boggles.
It’s still in the comment policy not to internet diagnose though.
And, uh… not all autistic men? My brother is nothing like MGTOWs or incels. Not even close.
Re: the MGTOW blind spot about male prostitution…
Men don’t have sphincters; they have an old fashioned speaker grill plus amplifier for a mouth, and they leap away from their own spoor, pretending fiercely that it never happened.
Run awa-a-a-a-a-ay!!
@Croosters
I think a large part of the issue is a lot of people who claim to be autistic online are no such thing, but many edgelord arseholes have adopted it as an excuse to be arseholes with zero appreciation of what autism actually entails. For what it’s worth, I have a number of dear friends and acquaintances on the spectrum, many of them male; if any sweeping generalisations are to be made, it’s that they are if anything more conscientious than many other people. It’s only among the online arseholes who have picked up on “autism” as an excuse to be dicks that I find problems with misogyny, and that’s to be expected with the kind of people who think claiming to be neurodiverse is a funny get-out-of-jail-free card.
@Croosters
Uhm… You sure about that, pal?
@Headologist
I’ll grant that to you. I’ve met quite a lot of people on the spectrum in real life that are just as entitled and assholish as their online kin.
@Axecalibur
It’s not ableist. I’m not saying it’s because of their autism, I’m saying because it’s a noticeable (and entirely self-inflicted) character flaw.
I think this was implying that a backyard full of hens is bad.
Why is a backyard full of hens bad? I mean, sure, they poop EVERYWHERE, but that’s damn good fertilizer, and you get eggs and meat from the chickens! Besides, chickens make damn good pets. They’re fluffy and cute and are actually quite intelligent.
I guess chicken and chicken product aren’t good enough for these dudes. Once you go seagull…
MGTOW mindset, perfectly encapsulated right there. “Everything women do, no matter what it is, is bad.” Especially if it’s what these fuckers say they want women to do.
A woman supports herself? She’s a nasty feminist who thinks she’s too good for a man.
A woman is supported by her husband? She’s a leech who only stays with him for his money and is probably fucking Chad on the side.
A woman stays “pure” and doesn’t have sex? She’s a fuckin’ prude who thinks she’s too good for men like an MGTOW.
A woman has lots of (consensual) sex? She’s a whore who will cry rape the first chance she gets, or she’s still a b*tch because she won’t fuck ME.
It’s never fucking good enough for these assholes. No matter what we do, they’ll just complain that we didn’t do the opposite thing instead.
You can never woman right for a misogynist. And in a lot of cases, you can’t man right either.
Putting aside the irony of a dude complaining about his delusion that women complain all the time…
“When they have it good in my distorted worldview that never takes actual life experiences of women into account, they complain!”
Yeah, having dudes like this shithead complain constantly that EVERY WOMAN ON THE PLANET is somehow not meeting their lofty standards of how to person correctly is all I could have ever asked for in life, yessiree. [/sarcasm]
“How very dare women suck cock that isn’t mine when they’re being forced into sex work because they literally have no other options?!?!?!?”
Yeah, how very dare women do what they need to to survive and not take your opinions into account first? The shame. [/sarcasm]
Don’t you love it when Entitled White Dudebros go to “third world countries” and then try to use it to say that women in “first world countries” should shut the fuck up about their problems?
It’s like saying that Felicia down the street actually gets beaten, so I should shut up about being screamed at all the time.
Dude, both are problems. Both of them are worth attention. I can care about women being forced into sex work in the Philippines (which you obviously do not), and still care about women being sexually assaulted in my own country.
Contrary to MGTOW belief, I am a very complex organism of the human variety with a complex brain capable of caring about more than one thing at a time.
Your problem is you just want women to stop telling you to not be a fucking douchebag who hates women, and instead be sad that you’re (eventually) going to go your own way and not pay them any attention. Which, let’s face it, isn’t going to happen.
I don’t think this dude knows what the word “desperate” means.
Funny how literally everything else is “an honest day’s work” when you’re trying to shame women for doing something they literally have no choice but to do.
Can we just marvel at the bolded? This asshole not only got street food from a man in an impoverished “third world country”, but thinks he fucking overpaid for it. He thinks he “overpaid” someone who he just describes as doing “an honest day’s work”.
Someone who very likely stands outside all day (and maybe night) long, to make cheap food and who very likely doesn’t get paid nearly as much as he should for his labor.
But nah, he totally “overpaid” for his food.
You could have just stopped there and saved us all the trouble, m8.
“I’ve never seen a woman do an honest day’s work because I’ve got my head metaphorically shoved up my rectum.”
I’m actually quite sure he’s seen a woman do an “honest day’s work”. He just doesn’t think women are capable of such a feat, and so his brain has to constantly hallucinate to suit his sheltered reality in order to keep from melting out of his ears due to his own cognitive dissonance.
Can anyone remind me whether or not MGTOWs worship Golding’s Lord of the Flies? Because it sure seems to me that they’d just love that isolated island. Being a bully seems to be their wettest of dreams.
Croosters, stop digging. We just don’t talk like that here.
@RosieLa
These little pricks wouldn’t last a minute outside of cozy little civilization.
@Croosters
You’re saying that it’s reasonable, all else unknown, to assume that an entitled guy is autistic. I’m not sure how that ain’t ableist…
Again, not my experience of my friends and family at all. None of it.
Re: neurodevelopmental conditions and personality.
I’m not on the autism spectrum so the specific issue of autism and predominance of any personality types is not something I could say anything strong about.
But I do have a piece of the general issue that one fits in. It’s a thing in ADHD and Tourette’s Syndrome. I can’t easily put it into good generalized language but I’m convinced there are some personality tendencies that pop up more or less often. So I can see it being a thing in autism.
But it’s not really a useful in terms of the social fight this blog post is concerned with. Targeting specific behaviors and not groups matters. Splash damage matters. Efficiency in targeting the problem matters.
Figuring out which personality characteristics one has to control for also matters but that is best seperated from other sociopolitical concerns. Otherwise I want non-male people with autism to have all the social support they need to deal with entitled misogynists in the autism community.
It’s a neutral thing at the species level and the general shape to cognition will have many good and bad expressions. Case in point, I have socially predatory tendencies. I think it’s safest to stick with the simplest behavior isolated from groups (with the exception of groups defined by behavior like misogynists).
Just women desperate for a way out of grinding poverty.
As if touching this guy would be an easy way out!
My own experiences with autistic guys are more varied (there are some assholes and some very great guys) but I do think that there is a cultural discourse that overemphasizes their perceived “male” type of cold, unemotional logic with little regard for human complexity or petty externalities (this, of course is a stereotype often based on a strategy somewhat effective at dealing with a capitalist society). The sort of thinking that often makes you a computer programmer who, in my experience, often embody the stereotype. Luckily, the better ones can be convinced by civil discourse and pointing out glaring flaws in their logic. Some pretty much arrange for such arguments to take place and are eager to learn. Conell’s “Masculinities” also talks about this template of personality.
Still, I agree with the others: Diagnosing other people online is very touchy business, especially when you only have clues like “lacks empathy, entitled” that can easily be read as condemning autistic people.
Okay so I just want to say that insurance agents are not mentioned anywhere in the OP, but somehow on my first reading I read “insurance agents” instead of “guy selling street food” which is what I was trying to reference in my first comment. I’m really, truly not sure how I made that error. I was working with an audio file at the time that maybe had insurance stuff on it? But I don’t remember now.
Anyway, if anyone read that and was like “what is Viscaria even talking about?” now you know.
@Viscaria
I thought you were citing “insurance agent” as an example of a middle-class job that was out of reach for poor, uneducated women.
I also thought that you were making the point that not many middle-class jobs exist in the Philippines.
It all made perfect sense to me.
@Axe:
I’m afraid I’m going to have to side with Croosters here. From what they’ve said, they’re autistic; they hang around in autistic spaces on the web, getting to know other autistic people and participating in austistic community-building. It’s not up to neurotypical people like us to police what they say about autistic people. If there’s a genuine problem with misogyny among autistic men, then we should definitely let its victims talk about it.
That said, Croosters, you came on a little strong there and I think you phrased your first comment poorly.
What I think you meant was:
“I recognise this distinctive memeplex of entitlement and misogyny; it’s so similar to the one that occurs in autistic spaces that I would be surprised if there wasn’t an overlap.”
What I think Axe heard was:
“These dudes are hella misogynist, therefore they must be autistic because no neurotypical people would ever hold an opinion like this.”
Does that sound fair?
By the way, welcome to the site, Croosters! I’m the Other EJ. Don’t forget to check out our comments policy!
@Lkeke35:
Thanks for that link. It’s always very interesting to see a first-world take on the problem, because it’s so radically different from my own experience of it.
@Viscaria:
I assumed you meant “even if the women worked as insurance agents rather than being prostituted women, the MTGOWs would still find something to hate them for.”
But I‘m autistic, which means it is my place, and I say that Axe is right and Croosters is getting SpongeBob’d.
@Croosters
http://i.imgur.com/M7DgVn7.gif
Internalised ableism is still ableism.