Uh oh! I just discovered this, currently the top story over on the Men’s Rights subreddit:
Yes, my sisters (and honorary mangina man-sisters), Russell Brand has dealt a severe blow to Operation Alimony, which (as you well know, at least if you’ve been attending the meetings) is our dastardly Feminazi plot to destroy the patriarchy by getting pretty ladies to marry and divorce rich dudes and take all their money.
You may remember our wild revelry when we heard that comrade-ess Heather Mills had walked off (no jokes please) with £24.3 million of Paul McCartney’s man money. And the joyful tears we shed when we heard that Mel Gibson’s ex-wife had (reportedly) scored a cool $425 million in her divorce settlement.
Russell Brand has just spotted a large pile of Katy Perry's money
But today, we shed only the bitterest of tears. We have not only been thwarted, but we’ve also been exposed! Damn those Men’s Rights Redditors and their evil allies at the Daily Mail!
The comments in the r/mensrights thread show that they understand our evil plans all too well. How can we respond to Aetheralloy’s withering critique?
Feminists see the absurdity of their own pushed polices?
LOL no. No they won’t. I’d sooner expect scientologists to ask their psychiatrist if they are in a cult.
But ladies! Do not despair! Russell Brand may have set back our efforts, but he, and his Reddit allies, shall not defeat us!
Ladies, you know what to do. Get yourself all prettied up, hit the town, and snag yourself some rich dudes! Let’s see how many of these guys we can have married off by the end of the year.
Marrying (and divorcing) rich dudes: it’s the feminist way!
Manosphere dudes – MRAs, MGTOWers, PUAs and whatever other acronyms they will eventually invent – love to tell themselves little “just so” stories about women. One of their favorite stories is the story of the Bad Boy Cock Carousel.
The gist of it: Women in their twenties are at the height of their physical beauty. So they act like entitled bitches, sleeping with every Bad Boy and Alpha Asshole there is and ignoring the humble, honest, hardworking “nice guy” betas silently pining for them.
But once these mean girls hit the age of 27 or so, they suddenly become ugly monsters, and the bad boys stop returning their calls. So then the evil ladies try to glom on to the nearest beta male in an attempt to marry him and steal all of his money.
But the beta males don’t want none of that used-up pussy, and so they Go Their Own Way and everyone ends up forever alone. Or the guys learn “game” and start banging the hotties. Or they just go back to posting sammich jokes on Reddit. I think these are all supposed to be happy endings, because at least the evil bitches get their comeuppance.
Recently, someone posted a n especially creepy version of this Manosphere fairy tale in the comments here; it turned out to have been cut and pasted from a comment on Roissy/Heartiste’s “game” blog by a guy who calls himself PhillyBoy81. It’s long; I trimmed it a little for space.
“[A]lpha males” are doing all the rest of us a favor in the long run. They operate very much like short sellers in the dating market, exposing fraud and helping to discover the true prices of commodities (women).
Yep, we’re on the express train to Doucheytown.
Let’s take a 21-year old chick who’s between a 7/8 (cute to pretty. … She can pretty much get sex whenever she wants it and with whomever she wants to have it with. And that is ultimately her downfall.
Young women (and some older ones) have an overinflated sense of the value of their vaginas. I mean, they have Wharton MBAs paying for exotic trips and they’re drinking Cosmos in the VIP with the Wizards.
Apparently this is just how women in their early twenties live. Who knew?
Since they are able to get such easy access to “alpha” dick, it follows logically that they should also have access to “alpha” wealth, marriage, and the lifestyle that accompanies all of that, right?
Wrong. See, when women gain this enormous sense of pussy power, they swing for the fences. … So, the cute guy with a 3.8 GPA, but no car? Nope, not good enough. The nice-looking pre-med student? “Nah, I’ll just get back to him later. I heard Jude Law’s hotter brother is transferring here this semester.”
This had me worried for a second, but I looked it up: Jude Law does not have a “hotter brother,” or indeed a brother at all, which is good news for all straight men of equal or lesser hotness than Jude Law.
Anyway, back to the evil women:
They invariably end up overplaying their hand. They chase these players looking to get a ring, and then that ring never comes. So now they’re 27. It’s a good thing she kept that pre-med Johns Hopkins student in her back pocket just in case things didn’t work out with the player, right?
Wrong again. In a vacuum, women would have their way. Men beg for sex. Women decide whether to give it to them (and for most guys, they will not give it to you). But luckily, we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in the real world with social constraints, and there are two that work distinctly to a man’s advantage: reputation and age. …
Ladies don’t think … we won’t remember your bitchiness. And don’t think we won’t remember those guys who you ran behind like a cum bucket.
Hmm. I’m pretty sure the only place buckets are gifted with mobility is in old Disney cartoons.
We remember. And we punish.
When a man sleeps with 100 chicks, he’s a stud. When a woman sleeps with JUST ONE guy, that eliminates you as wifey material to ALL of his friends. …
Apparently penises have a sort of reverse-Midas Touch thing going on: every woman who touches one turns into a filthy, used-up slut.
The height of a woman’s value, in terms of her value as a long term partner, is around the age of 27. That is the praecipice. The older she gets, the more her singlehood gets scrutinized by men. Why the hell is she still single? Who’s cock has she been sucking all these years?
Clearly that is the first question every straight man should ask himself whenever he sees a single woman older than the age of 27. (Just make sure you don’t actually ask this question out loud; it doesn’t go over well.)
[L]et’s face it, what virile, successful bachelor wants to entertain a 29 or 30 year old as wifey potential. She’s going to want to become a baby factory right away and rip away the last vestiges of your freedom. I don’t think so. It’s now my time to swing for the fences and bang some of these 21 year olds that I couldn’t bang in college.
Hello creepy older dude lurking in the shadows at the frat party!
In conclusion, a woman’s value is really defined by the type of man who puts a ring on her finger, not the type of guy who will fuck her. It takes a lot of women a long time to understand this, and thus, they overplay their hand. If it wasn’t for the players dogging them out, these women would not get a sense of their true value and start to seek out men who fit within their price range.
So that’s the story. It’s a stupid story. It’s not a true story. But it’s the story that manosphere dudes, like young children, want to hear over and over and over.
But I haven’t even gotten to the best part. Our pal MarkyMark, an excitable and somewhat addled Man Going His Own Way, reposted PhillyBoy81’s comment on his blog. In the comments there (as Man Boobz commenter Wetherby pointed out) we find this little gem:
A man is not being respected if the woman he is with has spent her youth, beauty and fertility on someone else.
Yep, that’s right. I’m just going to repeat that, because, wow.
A man is not being respected if the woman he is with has spent her youth, beauty and fertility on someone else.
All women older than 27 or so who date or marry men are disrespecting these men because … they are older than 27. Apparently women age out of spite. Maturation is misandry!
"Kids Love it!" Another claim that is not 100% accurate.
The director of the first Human Centipede film – the one about a psychopathic doctor who sews three unwilling and unwitting captives together mouth-to-anus to make a sort of “centipede” — proudly declared that his film was “100% medically accurate.” That is, he found a doctor who was willing to say that if one were indeed to create such a centipede, the second and third segments (i.e., people) would be able to survive, provided that you supplemented their rather dismal diet with IV drips to give them the nutrition they were lacking.
This dubious claim to 100% accuracy came to mind today as I perused a post by the blogger who calls himself Dalrock, a manospherian nitwit with a penchant for pseudoscientific defenses of old-fashioned misogyny. In a post with the whimsical title “We are trapped on Slut Island and Traditional Conservatives are our Gilligan,” Dalrock argues that the best “solution” to out-of-wedlock births is some good old-fashioned slut shaming.
Here’s how he breaks down the (imaginary) numbers in a post that is “100% mathematically accurate” – which is to say, not accurate at all:
Assume we are starting off with 100 sluts and 30 alphas/players. The sluts are happily riding on the alpha carousel. Now we introduce slut shaming. It isn’t fully effective of course, but it manages to convince 15 of the would be sluts not to be sluts after all. This means an additional 15 women are again potentially suitable for marriage. This directly translates into fewer fatherless children. This also makes the next round of slut shaming easier. Instead of having 99 peers eagerly cheering her on her ride, each slut now has 15 happily married women shaming her and only 84 other sluts encouraging her. After the next round this becomes 30 happily married women shaming the sluts, and only 69 other sluts cheering them on, and so on. This process continues until all but the most die hard sluts are off the carousel. You will never discourage them all, but you can do a world better than we are doing today.
Why not shame the fathers as well, while we’re at it? Dalrock explains that this just doesn’t make good mathematical sense:
Start with the same base assumption of 100 sluts and 30 players. Now apply shame to the players. Unfortunately shame is less effective on players than it is on sluts, so instead of discouraging 15% of them (4.5) in the first round, it only discourages three of them. No problem!, says the Gilligan [the social conservative], at least there are now three fewer sluts now that three of the evil alphas have been shamed away, and all without creating any unhappy sluts! But unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. The remaining 27 players are more than happy to service the extra sluts. They are quite maddeningly actually delighted with the new situation. Even worse, the next round of player shaming is even less effective than the first. This time only 2 players are discouraged, and one of the other 3 realizes that his player peers are picking up the slack anyway and reopens for business. This means in net there are still 26 players, more than enough to handle all of the sluts you can throw at them.
Well, there’s no arguing with that!
Seriously, there’s no arguing with that, because it is an imaginary construct with only the most tenuous connection with how things work in the real world. “But … MATH!” doesn’t really work as an argument here, since human beings don’t actually behave according to simplistic mathematical formulas.
Film critic note: While the first Human Centipede film offered little more than a workmanlike treatment of a fantastical idea, the recently released sequel, which details the attempts of a deranged Human Centipede superfan to take human-centipeding to the next level, is actually sort of brilliant. If you like that sort of thing.
So a six man crew has just touched down on Earth after a nearly two-year Russian expedition to mars. Well, that’s not quite true. The five men have returned from an imaginary trip to a fake mars; in reality, they spent the entirety of the “mission” sitting in some trailers in a parking garage in Moscow. Except for a brief interlude in which several of the fake marsonauts took a brief stroll on the surface of fake mars – also inside a trailer in the parking lot.
The idea behind all this? To see if six dudes could manage to stay sane while stuck in cramped quarters together for the length of time it would take to go to mars and back.
One of the many weird details about this weird faux-mission is that it was an all-dude affair. None of the marsonauts were women. Not, evidently, because the mission planners thought that women would be less capable than men of handing the pressure of a fake (or even a real) mission to mars. But because if they sent any ladies along, the men would want to have sex with them. As one news account explains:
Controversially, the experiment did not include a woman, with researchers clearly wanting to avoid it degenerating into a scientific version of television’s sexual tension-filled “Big Brother”.
When the “returning” marsonauts stepped out of their “spaceship” at the end of the experiment, the same news account notes,
They were each presented with a flower by young female researchers in white coats as a reward for their endeavours.
It has not been confirmed if the marsonauts popped boners at the sight.
I for one support the notion of male-only spaceflights, real or phony. And not just because the ladies would turn our space capsules into deep space slutmobiles. Just imagine what would happen if a female-infested space crew had an encounter of the third kind with some really handsome space alien dudes – the interstellar equivalents of Brad Pitt. You know what would happen next: those dirty sluts would sell out our planet for a ride on the little green cock carousel.
Ah, who am I kidding, those sluts would sneer at the little green men, holding out for the tall greys.
Audiovidual supplement: Three videos. One, Rachel Maddow talking about the mission at its halfway point. Two, a brief look at everyday life on the “spaceship.” And last but definitely not least: a video of the fake-mars walk. Inside a trailer. You have to watch at least a few seconds of that one.
Oh, and they’ve also got a Facebook app that’s — get this! — only available to men! I’m not sure the women of the world are going to suffer much from being banned from playing a rudimentary flash game that involves shooting “girly things.”
I know they’re hoping to generate controversy here, but really? This is just too dumb to even get annoyed about, much less angry. It’s not misogynistic; it’s more a parody of misogyny. Is it such a parody – stereotyping guys as macho buffoons — that it’s actually more misandrist than misogynist? You could make an argument for that, but again the ad is so over the top ridiculous, so soaked in irony, it seems silly to get indignant about this either.
So what’s going to happen when the MRAs of the world hear about this ad? Will they, missing the irony, embrace its Diet Soda Going Its Own Way (DSGIOW) mentality? Or will they denounce it as an example of ad world misandry and pretend to be deeply offended?
I’m betting on the latter. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
I don’t believe I could recommend this as a strategy for most men, but it is surely educational to learn that raping and killing a woman is demonstrably more attractive to women than behaving like a gentleman. And women, before all the inevitable snowflaking commences, please note that there is absolutely nothing to argue about here. It is an established empirical fact.
From this one data point, Vox seems to have made a somewhat hasty generalization based on the notion that all women are the same person – that is, if one woman thinks or does something, all women think or do that same thing.
Yes, there are women — and men — who find themselves attracted to vile human beings. Some women idolize murderers. Some men think Ann Coulter is hot. That doesn’t mean that all women idolize murderers or that all men want to get it on with Ms. Coulter. It just means that some people have really, really, really appalling taste.
But let’s just assume for a moment that Vox’s basic premise is true: all women love violent psycopaths,. If you’ want to get with the ladies, but aren’t so hard up for a date that you’re actually willing to resort to homicide, is there some other way you convey what a violent psychopath you are to the ladies of the world? Yep, says Vox:
[I]f you are being introduced to a woman you find attractive, she will be more attracted to you if you slap her in the face without warning and walk away without explanation than if you smile and tell her that you are very pleased to meet her. Now this, being a mere hypothesis, can be argued. And tested, if you’re feeling especially scientific this weekend.
I really hope none of his readers take him up on this.
Is Vox being altogether serious about this? Yes and no. About the idea that women love killers? Absolutely serious. About actually assaulting women? He’s a bit more cagey. On his blog Alpha Game, Vox elaborates:
Women find it sexier for you to rape and kill a woman than putting them on pedestals and being a nice guy. I’m not saying that you should rape and kill anyone, but I would recommend, at the very least, dropping the nice guy routine and pushing over the pedestals.
Women have plenty of positive attributes. But they’re not angels, and when it comes to what sexually attracts them, even the nice, well-bred ones are more insanely twisted, from the male perspective, than the average serial killer.
So apparently the only truly happy couples in the world are those in which both partners think like serial killers.
DD is a sort of compound MRA-PUA who argues for “Men’s Liberation Through ‘Game,’” as he put it in a Spearhead post some months ago. Apparently, if dudes learn how to get the hot babes to give them strings-free sexy times, through the magic of “game,” this will help to “reduce the unilateral enslavement of men through marriage.”
And what attracts the ladies more than the ability to kill? Not much, apparently. If you’ve got that magic killing touch, everyone around you will sense your manly power:
You are a man. A man is a survivor, a hunter, a protector of loved ones. The essence of manliness is controlled power. … That is what women love and what other men respect. Women, most of them anyway, are unable to use force and must rely on men where force is required. … If you lack the ability to kill other people with your bare hands, you will be perceived as if something is missing from your manliness. …
If you can kill, the ladies will pick up on this instantly:
[H]aving the ability substantially raises the value she instinctively perceives you to have. Which, as we know, leads to all manner of good things.
I believe he’s referring to blowjobs.
Oh, and other dudes will be impressed, too:
The respect of other men is also greatly influenced by your killing ability. Up until graduation from high school, the male social hierarchy has a great deal to do with “who can beat up whom”, and although the hierarchy among adult men is more dependent on social and professional status signals, men never stop instinctively evaluating you by what they perceive your killing ability to be, and respecting or disrespecting you accordingly.
And this will set you apart from all the wimpy emo hipsters of the world, who couldn’t even fight a girl:
If there is a “defining” degree of killing ability that makes you “manly”, it is defined by comparison with the female of the species. …
In these dismal times, men who fall short of this line are not terribly rare. Many of the emaciated hipsters and cubicle-dwellers of our generation would have trouble against a Juanita from a rougher neighborhood. These men, due to their lack of killing ability, are seen as unmanly by both men and women.
Meanwhile, your ability to kill will make others sit up and take notice:
The ability to kill makes your feelings relevant. If you lose your temper, someone dies.
This of course implies good things about you – the fact that you aren’t in jail right now means that you are a man in control of his emotions. A man who never loses his temper. Everyone around you subconsciously understands this and respects you for it. It lets people know they can trust you.
Yeah, nothing screams “trustworthy” more than a guy going on and on about how he could kill you with his bare hands.
Also, the ability to kill can help to prevent the ladies from blabbing endlessly about their stupid lady crap to you:
A woman who knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she will have less than three seconds to live from the second she makes you lose your temper is not going to set out to intentionally poke and prod you past your breaking point.
Aw, yeah, it’s good to be a potential bare-hands killer:
[Y]ou will be afforded a completely unprecedented kind of respect. …
When you are The Man, everyone around takes note. It is a form of celebrity. Women gravitate to you, pulled by the invisible streams of attention, respect and deference which we all subconsciously sense in any social situation.
Given the sort of adoring attention DD must get from the ladies, it’s sort of amazing that he finds time to even keep up a blog at all.
Note to angry dudes: Women not wanting to date you is not the equivalent of this.
There needs to be a Manboobz Addendum to Godwin’s Law to cover those who compare their lack of dating success to, you know, genocide. You may recall the charming Tumblr dude who equated dateless “nice guys” with persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany.
And now we have “white and nerdy,” the blogger behind Omega Virgin Revolt taking the datelessness=genocide thing a step or two further. As you might guess from the title of his blog, WAN doesn’t exactly have women beating a path to his door. Not even golddiggers, even though he is, he says, “a widly successful owner of my own business.” Women don’t even want to use him for his money? Why is that? Because he is not a — wait for it – “alpha” man.
Yep, it’s the same old dopey logic we’ve seen so, so many times before: Women won’t date me => therefore I’m not an alpha => therefore women won’t date anyone but alphas. WAN has added one more step to this illogical logic chaim: this makes them the equivalent of genocidal monstere:
The ideology that women act on is the ideology of Pol Pot, of the Killing Fields. Women want non-alpha men purged and intelligence is considered by women to be a lack of alphaness in a man. This is similar to the ideology that led to the killing fields. Many of the millions who were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the Killing Fields were murdered for showing signs of intelligence. That included everything from education to the possesion of wristwatches and/or glasses. If modern geeky hobbies had existed in Cambodia in the 70s, I’m sure that would have been included along with wristwatches and glasses as evidence of intelligence, and anyone interested in geeky hobbies would have been murdered too.
He’s making a could-not-possibly-be-more-strained reference to the whole Alyssa Bereznak/Jon Finkel kerfuffle. Bereznak, as most of you probably already know, wrote a sort of snarky, sort of stupid piece for Gizmodo about her date with Finkel, a champion Magic the Gathering player, and said some mean things about him and his geeky hobby. Pol Pot engineered the deaths of roughly 2 million people, many of them urban dwellers and intellectuals forced to relocate to collective farms in the countryside. Many died of starvation; others were shot – or beaten to death, in order to save on bullets.
So, yeah, Bereznak and Pol Pot are pretty much identical.
WAN continues:
[T] ideology of what women are doing now and what Pol Pot did are very similar. The Killing Fields needed to be opposed for both moral and practical reasons and so must what women are doing now. Rebel at The Spearhead said that women are engaged in a “holy crusade” against men. … The Khmer Rouge was also on a “holy crusade”. As Rebel also said what is at stake is nothing less than civilization itself and your existence and freedom just as it was with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
In an earlier post pretty much making the identical, er, “argument,” WAN takes aim at comedian Julie Klausner, who recently published a memoir called I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others. In her book, and in some interviews about the book, Klausner made some unflattering comments about “beta males” and “immature” men. This sends WAN into a rage:
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot would be proud of this cunt. She all but calls for concentration camps for her “useless beta inferior men” who secretly run the world. …
Ah, classic weasel words: “All but calls for.” In other words, she doesn’t actually call for concentration camps, or even rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camps, for men in any way shape or form. Never mind. WAN continues:
Somehow these “straight angry nerds” who are “useless and inferior” took over the world when no one was looking and this cunt says “something needs to be done” about this “epidemic”.
This type of thinking is widespread among women. …
[I]t’s no surprise that a lot of men are saying they think they would be better off with the Taliban running things. While I’m not sure that isn’t just trading one set of problems for another … I understand what these men are thinking. Anything has got to be better than this.
So: Nerdy men are “oppressed” by women who won’t date them. The solution to this imaginary oppression: oppress women for real.
A reader alerted me to this post on a very interesting blog I haven’t written about before. Regular readers of Man Boobz may find some of these, er, arguments to be a bit familiar:
Our culture is absolutely fucked up. Girls and women hold all control of sex. … [F]rom the first interest in girls, we’re expected to pursue them, and they’re expected to reject us. …
I’m a perfectly healthy man. I’m stronger than a lot of other men, more intelligent, more competent, I think I’m reasonably good looking, and I’m very well endowed. None of that matters though. Somehow, women go for men that fail on a comparison on multiple accounts. …
There are things like rejecting a woman, or pretending to be uninterested that make her even more interested. … Women subconsciously measure a man’s performance in bed by his dancing and posturing. If only they knew how fucking stupid and wrong they are.
I don’t know what happened with me. I’ve always had a strong sex drive, but I got fucked over socially. I wasn’t even “in” in the reject crowd. All girls rejected me, and most rejects rejected me. People made fun of me, laughed at me, picked on me, and all the girls that I lusted after were either repulsed by me, or didn’t know who I was. Even the girls that were “friends” with me, wouldn’t have sex with me. Meanwhile, they went around whoring themselves out to whatever man played this fucking dumb-ass social flirting game. They [crude sexual remarks redacted —DF] like the dirty little whores they are. I’ve been available my whole life, but the only person that ever chose me as a mate were paid prostitutes, and my wife, who is emotionally and mentally fucked up beyond comprehension.
On the surface, this reads like almost every “nice guy” lament I’ve ever seen on the internet. Oh, it’s a bit more bitter than most, but this “nice guy” hits all the right notes: like the Holocuast-trivializing “nice guy” we looked at last Sunday, he complains that women get to actually choose whom to have sex with; like the “nice guy” Redditor we looked at Monday, he still holds a grudge against former crushes who chose to go out with (and have sex with) guys who weren’t him.
The difference? For one thing, this new guy is a bit more self-aware than most “nice guys,” in that he doesn’t actually describe himself as “nice.” For another, he is (or at least claims to be) a sociopath. As might have been immediately apparent had I quoted these comments, which immediately follow what I quoted from him above:
This is the reason I don’t care about people. Why the fuck should I? Everybody [wears] a mask. I want to rape and murder people, and I pretend I’m “normal.” Normal people wear a mask where they pretend they’re friendly and honest; whereas, they’re really deceptive, insecure, and emotionally hostile.
This posting comes from Sociopathworld, a fascinating blog written by a sociopath who is basically trying to explain to non-sociopaths how people like him or her think, to clear up misconceptions about them, and to help sociopaths themselves deal better with their disorder. (The author of the blog didn’t write the comments above; they were sent in by a reader.)
For those not intimately familiar with abnormal psych, “sociopathy” (often used synonymously with the term “psychopathy”) is a term commonly used to describe what is known clinically as Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). The blogger at SociopathWorld quotes a journal article that gives this useful capsule description of psychopaths as people
characterised by an absence of empathy and poor impulse control, with a total lack of conscience. … They tend to be egocentric, callous, manipulative, deceptive, superficial, irresponsible and parasitic, even predatory.
So are “nice guys” a bunch of sociopaths? Well, no. They may be egocentric – like the “nice guy” on Tumblr who compared his lack of dates to the Holocaust. They may lack empathy – like the “nice guy” Redditor who couldn’t feel sympathy for a female “friend” who had been raped. They may be manipulative – hoping that by being excessively “nice” and doing favors for women they will earn themselves some sex.
But they lack, among other things, the impulsiveness and routine deceitfulness that tend to characterize real sociopaths. Sociopaths can be deceptively charming, but very few people would ever describe them as nice. (Indeed, if anything, it’s pickup artists that act the most like real sociopaths; indeed, I’ve heard “game” described before, I think accurately, as an attempt to get guys to think and act more like charming, conscienceless sociopaths.)
So why do “nice guy” laments make them sound so much like sociopaths? I think their egocentricity and their almost total lack of empathy are key. “Nice guys” get crushes on a lot of girls and women, but these crushes often seem to have nothing to do with the objects of these intense feelings: the “nice guys” have whipped up a romantic and sexual drama in their own head, and simply projected it onto some convenient romantic object . The “nice guy” Redditor was once obsessed with his female “friend” – but when she was raped he did not react as a true friend would, with sympathy and sadness. He responded with a callous “she had it coming.”
Combine this lack of empathy with a sense of wounded entitlement – I DESERVE a cute girlfriend! – and you have a recipe for a pretty noxious stew.
“Nice guys” may not literally be sociopaths. But sometimes they think and act in some pretty sociopathic ways.
The contest for the Most Ironic Use of the Term “Nice Guy,” When Applied to Yourself –otherwise known as the MIUTNGWAY Award – is heating up. The previous front runner – the Tumblr guy who compared his inability to get laid to the Holocaust – now faces a serious challenge from a Redditor calling himself DogmaDog.
The other day Mr. Dog wandered into a discussion of the SlutWalks in the Feminisms and offered his two cents: he declared them “stupid,” and suggested that they won’t really help victims.
And then he started in on his own tale of woe.
I know I’m going to be shit on for saying what I’m about to say, but please hear me out.
Not a promising start, Dog.
I’ve never raped a woman, and I’m the ‘nice guy’ who never took advantage of a woman.
Do you want an award for this?
But a girl I was infatuated with in high school blew me off and treated me disrespectfully. She ended up being raped one night, while intoxicated. I do not know how I am supposed to feel about it.
As Don Draper would say, “what?”
How do you think you’re “supposed” to feel? Did you accidentally dislodge the part of your brain responsible for basic human empathy?
Apparently, the answer to that is “yes.”
[H]ow do you suppose I am supposed to feel about this woman I knew who got raped? I mean, I’ve never taken advantage of a woman, but I don’t understand how my ‘friend’, this girl I went to high school with, could go out and party all the time, and in turn treat me, her classmate, as though I were an inferior person for not enjoying the atmosphere of drunkenness at high school parties.
As it turns out, you’re an inferior person for an entirely different reason.
That girl was a mean girl, no? And by being disrespectful toward men, and prejudiced toward men, wasn’t she asking men to behave badly toward her? The only men she gave attention and physical affection to were the ones who hurt her back.
So let me see if I get this: she didn’t go out with you, a “nice guy,” so she was therefore “asking” to be raped?
Naturally, this being the Feminisms subreddit, and not The Spearhead, some of the regular commenters took exception to Mr. Dog’s victim-blaming and his complete lack of empathy for the victim – especially strange, since Dog, who says he is suffering from an (unspecified) mental illness, considers himself “a victim, in my own way,” of prejudice towards those with mental health issues. This experience, alas, has not given him any sympathy towards other vicitms.
Indeed, it seems that DogmaDog didn’t misplace his sense of empathy after all; rather, he threw it out of the house and got a restraining order against it. Responding to someone who suggested he show a little empathy, Dog lashed out:
Your empathy can go suck a dick. Empathy does nothing to help my situation. I suppose that is just the excuse people give themselves so that they can feel like they are actually doing something.
You basically called me an inferior human being because I can’t or won’t empathize for my friend who was raped. Well, ask yourself this, smart-ass, have you ever really wondered what good your empathy does? It does nothing. …
In reality, you are doing nothing but attacking me, and I may or may not have a ‘complex’, even though I don’t know what that is, but I can guarantee you, I HAVE NEVER RAPED ANYONE!!!
The sound you hear is me banging my head, ever so softly, on my desk. Empathy is what connects human beings to one another, what allows them to understand one another on a deep level.
When people are suffering – as you are, Dog, in dealing with your mental illness – a little bit of empathy from someone else can make all the difference in the world.
If you can’t feel even a little bit of sympathy for this woman you were once “infatuated” with, you’re not a nice guy at all; you’re an even bigger asshole than those drunken high school partiers you disdain. You may never have raped anyone — as you’ve repeatedly insisted, as if this should win you a prize – but “in your own way” you’re thinking like an abuser. Your lack of empathy for the victim, your continued bitterness towards her for turning you down, your sense of wounded narcissism; none of this is healthy, for you or for anyone who comes into contact with you.
