By David Futrelle
If you’re having girl problems I feel bad for you, son. Just don’t go to the Men’s Rights subreddit for help.
Consider the case of one lonely high school student and budding MRA who recently asked his fellow Men’s rights Redditors for some advice: how can he find himself a girlfriend who isn’t one of those awful feminists?
“I have a lot of problems with feminists,” he explained,
but one of my biggest comes to dating and all of their drama. It’s amazing to me that feminists believe they’re entitled to a good man like me when they’re entitled to trash. With their false rape accusations, lack of honesty, lack of respect, lack of significant value in cultures, customs, and traditions, and just simply acting so brash and out of line, dating a feminist would be an absolutely hellish experience.
Dude, I really don’t think you have to worry much about feminists begging you to date them.
I have never had a girlfriend before and the big reason I’ve somewhat restrained my endeavors in romance is because of the feminists I always have to share classes with.
I’m sure they were equally thrilled at having to share a classroom with you.
I’m a traditional, conservative, southern, country boy … I’ve been disrespected and verbally assaulted by women before in my college and high school classes for me fighting back when they said something I disagreed with or I even just simply wanted to talk to them and strike up conversation.
Yeah, I’m sure those, er, conversations were an absolute delight for the women too.
I even made a controversial slideshow presentation about red pill dating and that got me all sorts of hateful comments and text messages. The fact I rocked that project with an A and made every single feminist’s in the class spine crawl is one of the greatest memories of my life. In total, I’ve probably asked out 30 some girls since around the age of 16 and I’ve not had luck in finding love.
Gosh, why oh why would someone who delights in making feminists’ spines crawl have trouble getting a date?
Despite how men lack so much on the rights in marriage, sex, and paternity, my heart still longs and I wish to find love but it must be with the right person. It’s fair statement that I am red pill or for more accurate definition, a dark purple piller. I want to be able to find a girlfriend who is not just only NOT a feminist but perhaps a men’s rights supporter herself.
Dude, once again I would like to reassure you that you are in no immediate danger of ending up with a feminist girlfriend. I mean, it’s kind of amazing that there are still feminist women who are willing to be in the same room as you.
I’ve been taken advantage of by women in the past and it’s made me at some points, turn cold and extremely cynical of the opposite sex but I cling on to hope I will find someone.
How can I find this person who is elusive to me? Where should I go? Where should I look? I would appreciate the help! Thanks!
Naturally, the denizens of the Men’s Rights subreddit had lots of thoughts on the matter. The advice he got was varied and often contradictory, but most of it still managed to be very bad.
“Don’t date anyone you meet online,” warned someone called Edumakashun,
and you’ll want to avoid women with odd hairstyles or hair colors, unnatural-looking make-up (especially eyes and lips), and horn-rimmed glasses. Look for a woman who dresses like a woman. You’ll have the best luck with working class women, since they have WAY bigger responsibilities than writing catch phrases on posters and shaking them at people.
In a followup comment, he practically shouted:
Divorced with kids SCREAMS daddy issues. They fight for sole custody of their children so they can continue to control the man who divorced them, and so that no one can EVER fully LEAVE them, and they also need a man that they can control in their day-to-day lives. Or they marry some guy who will control them and beat their children.
Yeah, dude, I don’t think the high school student asking the questions is going to be dating any divorced woman with kids any time soon.
Someone called Calliopenis started off with some not-terrible advice, but alas it went south before he got to the end of his first sentence:
The odds get better with age, so work on yourself and build yourself a life that you consider fulfilling, and just hang on until 30.
HANG ON UNTIL 30?
You’ll have money, you’ll have freedom, and you’ll find that the percentage of feminist haters declines with every year after university. They cannot maintain that level of hate, face to face, with brothers, male cousins, male friends, co-workers, and not ultimately drive themselves out of society, or re-imagine their stances.
Not … exactly. While it’s true that women in their mid-thirties to their late-forties are less likely to call themselves feminists than younger women are, according to a 2016 poll by the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation, women in their fifties and early sixties are much more likely to label themselves as such. The odds are good, in other words, that Calliopenis will end up a bitter old man surrounded by feminists he hates.
Furchfur had a grab-bag of suggestions. “I would go to another country. Non westernised,” he began. “Or do a sport, most feminists I have met do not do sport. Get a girl who does a job many feminists object to. Dancer, beautician.”
EricAllonde had some career-related advice as well:
Today feminism is completely entwined with victimhood culture. So if you look for a woman who isn’t a professional victim, she’s probably not a feminist either.
You can find non-victims by looking for women who are going out and achieving things in fields where there’s no benefit to being a feminist. So rule out the media, academia, acting etc.
For example, I met my very non-feminist wife when she was already an entrepreneur running her own business. She got her start by just going out and starting businesses; no “patriarchy” ever tried to stop her and her income depends on nothing except how successful her businesses are. She thinks feminists are pathetic and their “women are oppressed” narrative is stupid. Whenever I show her the sort of idiocy feminists say, she shakes her head with contempt.
Is it wrong that I hope she divorces him and moves in with a feminist?
EricAllonde also suggested that our high school student put off dating for a long, long time:
Right now I think you should be focussed on getting established in whatever career you choose and making yourself a success.
Jesus, dudes. The kid hasn’t even been to college yet.
Here’s my advice for the kid, for what it’s worth: Go to college. Let yourself learn a thing or two. Actually listen to women, in class and out of it. Stop being a dick, pull the stick out of your ass and give up your fixation on making feminists’ spines crawl. If you can do all that, you might end up an actual datable human being, and not the future incel you now seem bent on becoming.
On the victim thing:
I have sympathy for both the “I got over it and that’s what you need to do” faction and for the “I’ll never be the same and you shouldn’t pretend otherwise” faction.
As an example, my grandfather raped both me and my sister one lovely summer. I was 13, she was 12. I eventually “got over it”. My sister never did. For the rest of her life every bad thing she ever did, every manipulative piece of bullshit she pulled, was all because of that incident, and thus, not her fault. The last time I talked with her, she was still whining that she was justified in trying to bully my grandmother into giving her a large chunk of her land to my sister because she “owed it” to her for what her husband did and was still pissed that it didn’t happen. She was 60. She really was what is sometimes called a professional victim. She used her very real victimhood as an excuse.
She was also genuinely more effected by it, was the one who insisted on telling our parents (I bless her for that every time I think of it, because I would never have done so without her pushing*), and had some psychological issues I believe she was born with that would have made what happened be especially devastating to her personality. T,he contempt I feel for some of her actions during her life is mitigated somewhat by realizing that she really was more traumatized by that summer than I was. Not because she endured more, but because her personality did not survive without severe damage. Mine did. I was damaged, but the wounds scarred over nicely. Hers never really healed.
In other words, you deal with that sort of trauma the best you can, and how you deal with it will be different for everyone. I didn’t understand that when I was younger. I felt that at a certain point, you had to stop being a victim, because after that point, you were being victimized by yourself, not by the bad guy. I acknowledged that “a certain point” was varied. These days I know that while I still think that “getting past it” (not “getting over it”—you never do that) is needed, I no longer assume that everyone can do so the way I did. I was lucky. I had amazing parents(see below) and at the point in my life where the “getting over it” wasn’t working so well for me, I had a good husband who put up with a lot of shit, until I got myself back on my emotional feet.
tl;dr is that we need to not sneer at either the get over it people or the I can’t get over it people (nor at anyone in between) for the way they find to deal with it. We do, however get to say “Trying to bully a 95 year old woman with dementia into giving you a significant part of her estate, thus disinheriting all her other descendants, is a despicable thing to do.”
* My parents were in their early thirties at the time. These days we know there is nothing unusual about what happened to us, but in those days such things were kept secret, and my poor parents had to deal with it as best they could not knowing how common it was, with no community or family support. The best thing they did was believe us. They never once failed us that way. My grandfather did not go to jail because my parents decided that we would have been even more traumatized by a trial and I think they were right (plea bargains were not very common back then—there would have had to be a trial). The local DA did read him the riot act, getting graphic about what happens to child molesters in prison . The family kept their kids away from him the rest of his life. My parents did the best they could for us.
No promises
Sorry, no, we are way too fucking busy to deal with spoiled middle-class man-babies.
I don’t think people are sneering at the people who just “got over it”. They are criticizing the tendency to belittle people who do not “just get over it”. I agree that there are people who use things like this to justify their behavior forever, and in some cases the justification is doubtful at best. But…I did not just get over it…I did not use it to justify anything…I hated myself. I blamed myself. I nearly killed myself. And a lot of people were like “Can’t you just smile? Can’t you just move on? Can’t you just forget and forgive? What kind of sick person are you, anyway?” I had severe mental health issues not all related to this incident (yes, I’m a woman, so I’m sure I’m really just appropriating male depression here…not). And people just kept saying “Just be happy” “Just forget and forgive” “Just…move on, all right” And, of course, “We’ve all got problems. I don’t let them get me down.”
I cannot begin to express how unhelpful that is, especially to someone who is in intensive therapy and doing their best to “get over it” and “move on”. In fact, it is the opposite of helpful. It is harmful. It set me back further, because it assigned more blame for everything to me, and couched me as “playing the victim” when I was really just trying to get better. If I had been stabbed, no one would have thought I was “playing the victim” if I continued to have to have surgeries for years after the incident. If I had been pushed off a roof, no one would have thought I was “playing the victim” for being in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. But if you are a woman, and have been abused, it is just “get over it already”.
So, no, I don’t think we have to have sympathy for the person who goes around telling other people to “just get over it already. I did.” My answer to that now is “Good for you. Go away.”
Forgiveness is a privilege, not a right.
Someone who hurts someone else is not owed forgiveness for it, and the person they hurt sure as HELL is not obliged to “forgive and forget” all the suffering they’re going through or have gone through as a result. Sometimes the ‘forgive and forget’ tack people take seems like a lazy way to paint it all over and put the onus on the victim, not the one who hurt them in the first place.
‘Cause they’ve got 999,999 girl problems, and they complain about every one?
That “business” the non feminist “entrepreneur” has is an Etsy account, I presume.
You’re confusing “rights” with “entitlements”
@Otrame:
That’s horrible. I’m so sorry to hear that, and I’m glad you were able to recover from it.
Nthing everyone on the 50 Shades of Pilling. Also, this guy does not deserve purple. Purple is best colour – fight me.
@(((VioletBeauregarde))): Crooked Nasty Social Justice Necromancer,
heeeeellllooooo! Nice to see you here again 🙂
@Violet the Vile, Moonbat Screech Junky
TANK GIRL TANK GIRL TANK GIRL OMG
*ahem*
Sorry; just noticed your avatar and had a slight attack of the enthusiasms.
My extensive research concludes that all Violets are amazing and fabulous.
@Otrame, I’m so sorry that happened to you and your sister, and I get what you’re saying, completely.
Sorry for the double post, all; it felt wrong addressing Otrame within my previous comment, so I made it separately.
Since when are feminists known for thinking we each deserve a good man? Is ideal romantic partner now on the list of demands? Does it come before or after equal pay and appropriate societal responses to sexual violence? How does that fit with the longstanding feminist belief that no one has a right to another person’s time or attention?
I don’t think Calliopenis actually knows what feminism is, aside from that women who embrace it refuse to embrace him.
It’s such a beautiful mess, I almost expect it to be a troll-account to make MRAs look bad. Then I remember that they actually do that so well, no-one needs to make strawmen.
@JenniferAndLightning: Never met an MRA who actually engaged with any sort of feminist thought or person(s). While I’d never wish it upon anyone to have to deal with them, I do think it’s the only way to disentangle them from the Cult of Manospherian Victimhood.
I’m really trying hard to think of something to say to the OP, and to the guy with the strangely successful, totally non-patriarchally-afflicted “very non-feminist wife” handing him bogus advice, but all I can think of is the same old same old:
COOL STORY, BRO.
With maybe a side order of “who you kidding, you’re gonna die alone” thrown in for good measure.
Yeah, I don’t believe either of these guys is telling the truth. In fact, I don’t even believe they’re embroidering it. I’m certain beyond all doubt that they’re lying, and secretly curled up in whimpering balls on the floor, knowing that nobody is really fooled.
And I’m quite okay with all of that.
An entrepreneur? A what now? Why isn’t she barefoot and pregnant? These red pillers never really know what they want.
“…you’ll want to avoid women with odd hairstyles or hair colors, unnatural-looking make-up (especially eyes and lips), and horn-rimmed glasses. Look for a woman who dresses like a woman.”
I am all of these things in both these sentences, except for the glasses (and I’m actively looking for a vintage pair – hit me up with links if you’ve got ’em).
It’s like I’m messing with your mind, bro!