By David Futrelle
Manosphere misogynists seem to think that the world is basically the first three panels of that famous cartoon Charles Atlas ad writ large, in which musclebound “Bullies of the Beach” are continually kicking sand on wimpy beta males and humiliating them in front of their girlfriends.
Indeed, many manosphere dudes are convinced that that this old cartoon ad is a completely accurate description of how the world works. Forget all the women out there with skinny husbands or boyfriends; forget all the women writing fanfic about Benedict Cumberbatch. These guys honestly believe that literally the only men that women want to have sex with are big, burly jocks.
Consider this recent comment in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit that conveniently captures all the key elements of this manosphere delusion. Warning against the dangers of female “hypergamy,” by which he evidently means the innate tendency of every straight women to immediately drop whatever man she’s with if a Chadly jock looks her way, the MGTOW Redditor who calls himself GamingYourMom declares that
while rock stars and famous actors can be considered acttractive, they will get cucked by a professional athlete everytime. It’s just like high school. Nothing has changed. The jocks roll in pussy.
MGTOWs seem utterly convinced that the world works exactly like high school — or at least how they imagine high school works. In some sense, they’ve never graduated; they’re still jealous of the high school football star who dated the cheerleader they had a crush on. Literally.
If you are at the top of the pyramid in theatre or band, you can nail a hot nerdy chick, but you still don’t get the cheerleaders.
You know, I’m pretty sure the theater guy dating the “hot nerdy chick” preferred her to the cheerleaders, because, you know, people generally like dating people they have something in common with?
But never mind, because apparently the jocks are out there cucking even the world’s most famous theater guys:
Brad better keep Angelina away from NFL players if he knows what’s good for him.
Yes, he brought up Brad Pitt, every manosphere misogynist’s favorite — if perhaps a teensy bit outdated — example of the ultimate handsome dude. Never mind that Brad and Angelina split MORE THAN TWO YEARS AGO and have been fighting bitterly over the terms of their divorce ever since. Never mind that even after this split Angelina has never been spotted hitting the town with a football team.
And you can be ugly as fuck and still consistently pull if you are over six feet.
More bad news for Brad, who’s only 5′ 11″ tall!
And no one in this sub is Brad Pitt, so if you’re not 6ft., you’re fucked. Women say as much in their tinder bio. “If you’re not at least 6ft., go ahead and swipe left.”
I’ve never used Tinder, but I’ve used other dating sites and apps, and while I’ve seen women (some women) express a preference for tall guys, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman categorically ruling out all men under 6 feet.
Nature says big guys win the fight, and a woman wants to fuck a winner.
Uh, I’m pretty sure most women prefer being with men who aren’t always getting into fights, for assorted very obvious reasons.
And this isn’t even how nature — red in tooth and claw — works. If size were the only — or even the most influential — determining factor in evolutionary success, wouldn’t humans have evolved to be huge monsters? Wouldn’t every animal? Why would short men — or small animals — even exist?
Elephants are the largest land animals, and can kill people with a swing of their trunk. There are about 450,000 of them left in the world. Rabbits are small and fuzzy and scare almost nobody; though there are no reliable estimates of the rabbit population, there are probably billions of them. (At one point there were ten billion in Australia alone.) I live in a fairly dense neighborhood in a major metropolitan area, and I regularly spot wild rabbits hopping across lawns and in the alleyways. I’ve never seen an elephant wander by.
Here are some bunny videos, just for the hell of it.
But I digress. The point is that MGTOWs don’t know anything about anything and seem to think the world works like Charles Atlas ads.
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This new Watership Down sounds like it might be worth getting Netflix for, at least. (Depending on what else they’re offering right now, of course. Like, maybe the live-action Fullmetal Alchemist movie, perhaps?)
Though I have to ask if they’re including anything from the sequel WD book, which was a collection of short stories about the rabbits. Some of that was interesting, at least to me. Almost worth the total erasure of General Woundwort from rabbit memory it had. Seriously, he deserved to become a semi-legendary figure among the rabbits; the cousin of the Black Rabbit that drove all the predators before him? That should’ve been how he was remembered among them.
Though now I’m reminded of a reviewer of the second WD book who complained that the sequel betrayed the themes of the original, because the first book wasn’t really about rabbits having adventures but the US/USSR Cold War. And my reaction to that was basically ‘dude, if the only way you can enjoy a story about anthromorphic rabbits is to turn it into a political parable, go ahead. Bleah. Just don’t force that interpretation on everyone else.’
@moon_custafer:
The first time I really crushed out on a movie character (and possibly the last time?) was Mary Stuart Masterson’s Watts in Some Kind of Wonderful.
There are other characters I found attractive in either appearance or attitude or whatever, but adolescent hormones + MSM’s Watts combined to produce the only thing that I would label a true crush I’ve ever had on a fictional television or movie persona.
? CD + Watts FOREVER ?
@Redsilkphoenix
They had the live-action FMA last I looked, yes.
This Watership Down adaptation ends with Hazel-rah’s death and the warren thriving.
Oh, so we are doing bunnies today?
I do have a pet bun. He is litter trained. Maintenance similar to a cat, but food and litter _much_ easier to deal with. Mine seems to be on the less-social end of rabbits, so he is fine being alone most of the day. Other buns do better in pairs.
Thought the Netflix Watership Down was pretty good, but not good enough to make me change my avatar (though Boyega was an excellent Bigwig). Some of the changes from the book made sense for what they were doing, but there was also a fair bit of shuffling around who did what that I found confusing. And poor Pipkin is going to have to go tip one back with Tom Bombadil and Aunt Beast.
Yeah, that whole hypergamy thing the manosphereians are always whinging on about has always been a pretty transparent case of projection; they assume that women act just like they do…or would, if they could actually find a woman who either didn’t pick up on or ignored the overwhelming rage and hatred exuding from their every pore and went out with them.
In fact, it seems like it’s always projection when conservative/right-wing folks decry someone or something; look closely enough, and you’ll see them doing the exact same thing. My personal favorite example is how they lose their shit over “political correctness” almost as much as they lose it over people talking bluntly about the deep veins of racism that are shot through their entire movement. “You snowflakes just can’t handle someone speaking the truth! And stop calling us bigots for saying racist things; that’s unacceptable!”
“Rabbits are small and fuzzy and scare almost nobody.”
ALMOST nobody. Except Sir Robin.
BREAKING NEWS: Area man discovers that literally rolling in pussy less pleasant than expected. See also: “Neck Deep in Pussy”.
“He’s rolling in pussy”
*Cut to Jake Peralta or Terry, or Ben or Andy from Parks and Rec, on their back on the floor with a million cats or kittens around them, meowing and climbing on them; whichever male character it is looks overjoyed*
Please try not to roll *on* the pussy. You can easily hurt a cat that way. Best to let the pussy do all the rolling.
@M K
@Katamount
Yeah I’m noticing that too; it seems like the line between migtoe and incel is increasingly becoming a blur (I refuse to make a blurred lines joke here, fuck that song).
Also yeah, right-wingers and especially the far-right are neck-deep in hipocrisy. No surprise to me, having grown up in a far-right religious community. Hipocrisy is a fundamental component, a cornerstone, to right-wing-nuttery.
The funniest thing about that Charles Atlas ad to me is that I just read an article the other day talking about how visible muscles are in fact the least useful in everyday life, and probably wouldn’t help winning that fight as much as other things could. Like maybe the emotional maturity to not go slug someone in the face unprovoked for being an ass previously.
In fact, that article could probably be rather enlightening to big-toes if they ever pulled their heads out of their asses, but I’m certain by now they must’ve evolved into being anaerobic (how else could they live that way for so long?), so they’d probably suffocate if they did.
OT: Today in ComicsGate news: Brie Larson calls for inclusion on Captain Marvel press tour, insignificant men-dregs lose their shit
That is absolutely true; just take a look at the contestants in the Strongest Man in the World competition: they’re big and burly, sure, but very, very few of them are cut. The bodybuilder physique is for show, not for work.
Exhibit A: Hafthor Bjornsson
When it comes to muscle building, the functionality versus aesthetics dichotomy is a big thing with me. They tend to be mutually exclusive. Similarly, even when going down the functionality route; you have to choose strength or endurance; it’s nigh on impossible to have both. Cyclists and boxers both have strong muscles; but generally very different physiques. It’s at a basic level; slow twitch muscle for endurance; fast twitch muscles for power.
It’s axiomatic though that when bodybuilders are at peak competition readiness, they’re as weak as kittens.
Well, impossible once you start pushing toward the edges of performance. You can get a decent mix if you’re not striving to be a competitive athlete.
And, of course, body type also has a say; when I was in my 20s and heavily into kung fu, my sifu would customize training regimens for his students based on their body type and preferred fighting style. Much to my dismay, he tracked me into the strength/body hardening regimen…I may have a meat tank’s body, but my soul craves speed and flexibility.
@ M K
That might upset Cedric.
@Alan Robertshaw, Gaebolga
I have to wonder, where do things like freerunning or gynmnastics fit into the strength-endurance binary? Are parkour athletes weaklings compared to any other sport?
Not to come off as testy but I tend to be reflexively sceptical of absolute binary concepts.
@ gaebolga
Well that’s me. I’ve got smoking my post workout roll-up down to 5.2 seconds.
@ Jane Done
Good point. As Gaebolga points out, I’m thinking of the real pushing the envelope stuff. Athletes, and bodybuilders, at the top of their game.
Humans of course are pretty good generalists. I think it’s possibly our Jack of All Trades abilities that have served us so well in evolutionary terms. In just about every category* there’s other species much better at it than us; but overall we can at least perform adequately in just about any area. Presumably that why we can survive, and thrive, in just about any environment (sorry planet).
So, as you rightly say, for everyday purposes, and plenty of athletic activities, a bit of a mix is great adaptation, and perfectly possible.
(* I was thinking maybe our long range tracking abilities? but Komodo dragons can be pretty tenacious)
@ Jane Done
This might sound a bit daft, but one thing that brought home to me how limited binary thinking was, is astronomy.
When I was a kid there were very distinct categories for astronomical things.
So there were comets and asteroids; planets and stars, planets and everything else in the solar system.
But now we know that the distinction between comets and asteroids can be pretty nebulous; they can both it seems be dirty snowballs, and some asteroids may have comas I believe. Similarly, the planet, brown dwarf, star, thing is very much a spectrum. And don’t get me started on ‘what’s a planet?’.
(Pluto, that’s what!)
@Alan:
I’ve commented before that endurance is one of the things that humans have over pretty much all other land animals; the only one that can potentially beat a human in good shape in a marathon is the wolf. Which is why we made them our hunting partners; we both have a history of using the ‘chase things until they fall over’ method of hunting.
(I’ll admit I got into that argument for the first time with regards to furry fandom because I was annoyed at how some people kept saying that humans were so weak and couldn’t survive by themselves. Yeah, no, we had to survive long enough for intelligence to become useful, as it’s a long-run thing, and endurance was most of how we got there. Also, the bipedal walking gait is incredibly efficient. As well as being something you may have to partially unlearn in martial arts and certain sports because throwing yourself slightly off-balance forward to use that momentum to keep yourself moving as you catch yourself on the next step can be counter-productive.)
Also:
Pun intended?
@ jenora
I’m going to claim yes.
@bradmoonrising
Firstly, great handle (is there anything better than a CCR pun?). Second great pic.
But BUT BUUUUT, we don’t know how big Chad Pitt’s wrists are! He might just be an unlovable beta cuck like the rest of us.
OT: MISANDRY!!!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/13/female-human-body-blocks-weak-sperm-scientists-find
The manosphere is going to love this. Female bodies BIOLOGICALLY discriminate against beta sperm. Unfair!
But but but… This also means that once upon a time, they WERE alpha sperm. So women should bow down and worship them, because it’s biologically proven that they’re superior specimens!