If it weren't for this guy, there would be no pedophiles.
Today, a trip down memory lane to revisit an until-recently lost classic of modern misogyny: Jay Hammers’ “The Age of Consent is Misandry.” The piece, originally published on Jay Hammers’Men’s Rights blog, inspired some heated discussions amongst MRAs online, with some harshly criticizing the piece as an apologia for pedophilia and others hailing it as a “politically incorrect” masterpiece. Stung by the criticism, Hammers ultimately took his blog down. But the piece has since been resurrected on the Human-Stupidity blog – another blog that seems rather unhealthily obsessed with the supposed injustice of men not being allowed to fuck underage girls.
Here are some of its highlights (that is, lowlights); the headlines are mine.
ALL ABOUT THE MENZ
The arbitrary age of consent is not about protecting women/girls. It is about valuing females and their virtue over males and their freedom. The intent of the laws is to stop older men from having sex with younger women and that is how it is enforced. It was never intended to stop younger men from having sex with older women.
MORE BETA BLUES
Age of consent laws are designed to punish beta males. A beta male in his 20s, unsuccessful with women his own age who are infused with a sense of feminist entitlement and deride all but the top alpha males who take interest in them, who seeks companionship with a younger, sexually mature female who desires him, should not go to prison for acting on that which is normal male sexuality.
FEMINISTS WHO SUPPORT AGE OF CONSENT LAWS ARE TREATING WOMEN LIKE CHILDREN
If we are to treat women as children then we should be consistent. Young women who have sex with older men are as much victims as women who have sex with a pick-up artist after meeting at a club. In both cases, feminists are angry because the woman has been “fooled” into having sex with a less than ideal mate in terms of value. …
This is what makes feminists angry and this is why age of consent exists still today, because it is assumed women are not mentally mature enough to give consent AND because older women want to limit men’s options to increase their own value in the sexual marketplace.
BUT WOMEN ARE CHILDREN, BASICALLY
Older women … are generally not of a much higher intelligence level than teenage girls. The big difference between the two is that older women are less attractive and that is what makes them so damn angry. …
Females generally do not significantly mature mentally past puberty so it should always be illegal for any woman to have sex or it should never be illegal for any woman to have sex. There is no arbitrary age where females suddenly become self-aware, realizing the consequences of their actions, and stop seeking out alpha males. Thus there must not be an arbitrary age of consent for sex.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
If anything, it should be illegal for women to have sex with men until men have been educated on the truths of women, Marriage 2.0, Game, feminism, and men’s rights.
Oh, Scott Adams! Can you write anything about that whole man-woman business without being a creepy douche about it? In a recent blog post titled “Pegs and Holes” – which refers to exactly what you think it refers to — Adams offers his take on the powerful men who have been in the news lately because, as Adams puts it, they’ve been “tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.”
After noting that the “current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior” and that this “seems right” to him – gee, ya think? – Adams decides to get all philosophical on us. (When you’re Scott Adams, this is a very very bad idea.) He writes:
The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?
I’m assuming that Adams doesn’t actually think that baby boys are born with erections, and realizes that it is biology, not society, that hands out penises and vaginas to babies in the first place. I’m just trying to understand the whole pegs and holes metaphor. Why does he think “round” penises and “square” vaginas are somehow incompatible? In the context of consensual sex, after all, penises of all shapes and sizes generally fit into vaginas quite nicely.
As far as I can figure it out, the round-vs-square analogy simply refers to the fact that men can’t simply stick their “round pegs” into any conveniently located “hole” whenever they feel like it. The fact that these “holes” aren’t accessible to any random guy thus renders them “square.” This seems to frustrate Adams, who goes on to complain that “society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness” and that “society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires.”
Looking at Hugh Hefner’s marital history – he’s been married and divorced and just got stood up at the altar – Adams concludes that:
For Hef, being single didn’t work, and getting married didn’t work, at least not in the long run. Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg. All it offered were unlimited square holes.
What does this even mean? I suspect that over the course of his lifetime, Hef has had about all the sex he could possibly want, and then some. Is it somehow unjust that he couldn’t force his latest fiancée to actually marry him? Or that some women are sexually unavailable – that is, square holes – to him?
It goes without saying that Adams’ notions of human sexuality are profoundly insulting to both men and women . On the one hand, he’s suggesting that men are basically all potential rapists walking around with, er, turgid pegs; and, on the other, he seems to regard women as little more than passive (if stubbornly recalcitrant) receptacles for these male “pegs.”
And so it’s hardly surprising that his grand solution to the conundrum he’s invented is a rather depressing one. After noting that it really wouldn’t be a good thing for men to go around willy-nilly raping women and/or, as he puts it, tweeting their meat, he suggests the real solution is for men to be chemically castrated. And no, I’m not making that up. Here’s Scotty:
I think science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it. It sounds bad, but I suspect that if a man loses his urge for sex, he also doesn’t miss it. Men and women would also need a second drug that increases oxytocin levels in couples who want to bond. Copulation will become extinct. Men who want to reproduce will stop taking the castration drug for a week, fill a few jars with sperm for artificial insemination, and go back on the castration pill.
That might sound to you like a horrible world. But the oxytocin would make us a society of huggers, and no one would be treated as a sex object. You’d have no rape, fewer divorces, stronger friendships, and a lot of other advantages. I think that’s where we’re headed in a few generations.
Is he being serious here, or is this all some satirical “social experiment?” Who the fuck knows. Though I suspect if I accused him of being serious, he’d claim he was being satirical. And vice versa. Because that’s just the way he is.
Also, while I’m at it: the idiomatic expression about pegs and holes posits a square peg and a round hole, not the other way around. Why did Adams reverse this? Why!? Why!!?? Is he trying to drive us all mad?
Holly Pervocracy's SlutWalk sign, which apparently causes false rape accusations.
If you thought the “meat market” guy from a couple of days ago – you know, the one prattling on about the “market makers of pussy” — was risibly wrongheaded, here’s an even more insidious attempt to reduce the complexities of human sexuality to a question of “supply and demand.” Over on The False Rape Society blog, Pierce Harlan has a new post with the title:
False rape claims: increasingly a tool to skew the current economies of sex, where sex is cheaper than most women prefer
As you might imagine, the post itself is based on some fairly twisty blame-the-victim logic – with some feminist-bashing thrown in for good measure. Let’s wade through the muck here.
According to Harlan, the “cultural tenets governing sexual encounters” have gone all loosey-goosey in recent years, due to birth control, a general loosening of sexual mores and “the feminist-inspired norms that pressure young women to ‘party like the guys.’”
I assume you have all read Mary Wollstonecraft’s classic A Vindication of the Rights of Women to Get Totally Wasted and Fuck Some Dudes.
But, alas, feminists totally don’t understand the law of supply and demand –and that in the market of sex, they are the supply and not the demand (because it’s not like women ever really want to have sex themselves). As a result, the feminist-inspired young women of today are totally flooding the market with cut-rate pussy.
As Harlan explains:
The experts tell us that men have a much easier time obtaining sex than they did in days long gone. … Women who’d prefer to put a higher price tag on their sexuality are finding themselves locked out of the market.
The results are all too predictable. Women are having sex more often when they secretly are conflicted about it. We’ve frequently reported here about the proven gender “regret asymmetry” where young women have much higher levels of after-the-fact regret than men following sexual hook-ups. Regret too often is transmogrified into feelings of being used, and feeling used too often metamorphoses into a false rape claim.
Does Harlan have any evidence to back up this hypothesis? Yes. And it comes straight from his ass.
Having studied the false rape phenomenon closely for a number of years, it is my conclusion that young women are increasingly resorting to false rape claims as an inappropriate method of skewing the current economies of sex, which favors men and which makes sex cheaper than most women consciously or subconsciously prefer.
In other words: he has spent the last several years searching out news stories on false rape accusations to post on his blog. Because there are almost 7 billion people on planet earth, he has been able to find a fair number of such stories. So he’s concluded that there is some sort of “false rape epidemic” going on. In other words, his conclusion seems to be based almost entirely on what’s known as the “availability heuristic,” which, as Wikipedia puts it, “is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.”
Were I to start a blog entitled “The Dudes Peeing on Things You Shouldn’t Pee On Society,” guess what? I too could cite many examples, drawn from the newspapers of the world. Were I to do this for several years, my brain would be stuffed full of stories of men urinating on just about anything that can be urinated on, from prayer rugs to cough drops. This, through the power of the “availability heuristic,” might convince me that we faced an epidemic of inappropriately urinating men, and that this epidemic was getting worse by the hour. (I mean, before I started specifically looking for such stories I almost never heard about this terrible social ill.)
But back to Harlan and his argument, such as it is:
Women are pressured by feminist-inspired norms to make themselves more available to men than ever, but they have also learned that crying rape after-the-fact is a culturally accepted, indeed, feminist approved, antidote to sex they feel was too cheaply obtained. Instead of saying “no” up front, they are retroactively saying “no” — with false rape claims — after-the-fact. And society has given this backward state of affairs its imprimatur.
One solution? Women need to stop having so much sex — for the sake of teh menz. Or as Harlan, still working the creaky economic metaphor, puts it:
One cure is to enhance the value of female sexuality by decreasing the supply and thereby reduce both regret and false rape claims.
But, darn it, this won’t work, because women are out there marching in the street for the right to, you know, have sex when they want to with consenting partners without being shamed for it.
That, of course, can never happen in a society where “slut walks” are celebrated as liberating events, where colleges excuse women from underage drinking charges so long as they report they were raped, and where false rape claims are routinely excused and implicitly encouraged. In short, it can never happen in a society that encourages young women to be promiscuous and to then tell rape lies when that promiscuity results in an unfavorable sexual experience.
Harlan ends his piece with a call to lock up false accusers for a long time.
Certainly malicious false accusers should be charged. Women who identify the wrong guy in a lineup? No.
And it would be nice if Harlan extended the sympathy he shows for falsely accused men to real victims of real rape, a much larger group of people than the falsely accused. But instead he writes pieces like this one, and links in his sidebar to a host of misogynist blogs that, among other things, routinely joke about female victims of rape and murder, that urge men on juries in rape trials to vote to acquit the accused even when he’s clearly guilty, that claim that age of consent laws are inherently man-hating, and that think it would be great if sex robots and artificial wombs rendered women obsolete.
Those actually interested in helping those falsely accused – rather than supporting Harlan’s retrograde agenda — would do better to support The Innocence Project, and to stop reading Harlan’s drivel.
Apparently we feminists simply can’t understand the Men’s Rights Movement, because
feminist ideology is still stuck in the 19th century concept that women are second class citizens when objectively they are in a better position than men. … The[y] just cannot grasp that in modern western society men are second class citizens.
Oh, and while they’re at it, they would also like to explain to us at great length why the whole Slutwalk thing is so silly. I mean, telling women to not dress like sluts if they don’t want to get raped is just good common sense! And obviously dudes have a much greater understanding of the topic of rape and personal safety in general than silly ladies with their silly lady brains and their silly tendency to get drunk on silly lady drinks.
Because Reddit Men’s Rights is not completely dominated by retrograde MRA misogynists, there are actually some decent comments mixed in with all the patronizing nonsense. Enjoy?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the most odious misogynist bullshit I have seen thus far on the topic of the Slutwalks: a post on The Third Edge of the Sword, a blog that seems to go out of its way to be offensive and “edgy,” that takes victim blaming to a whole new level. Here’s the basic, er, argument of the post, which the author has put in giant pink letters so we won’t miss it:
Every woman marching in the Edmonton Slut Walk is publicly declaring herself a slut. This means every woman there desires sex with any and all partners. Any sexual activity you initiate with them comes with implied consent. They cannot say no, and if they do understand all their ‘no’s mean yes. They are all asking for it. They want it bad. Now. From you. Go get ’em!
Some other highlights:
[I]f you … dress slutty, men are going to stare at you. We’re going to catcall. We are going to tell you all sorts of sexual things we want to do to your body. And if you dress slutty and wave your ass in our face, we will do them. The organizers of this event are not oblivious to this point: what they want is a fake sexual revolution. They want to be able to impersonate sluts without actually being sluts, and that’s unacceptable. If you don’t want to be treated as a piece of meat, don’t marinate and grill yourself and sit perched on a piece of garlic toast. You dress slutty, you show off the goods, you try to get a reaction, you will get one. Hint: it’s not always going to be the one you want. …
The “reaction” he has in mind is rape. By calling rape a “reaction” instead of what it is — a criminal assault on someone, an act of sexual violence, a violation — he of course is attempting to switch the blame to the victim. He spells out his “logic” in more detail:
[W]hen you impersonate a slut we don’t fine you, and we don’t throw you in jail. There’s really only one punishment for dressing like a streetwalker when you aren’t one: you do have to endure the occasional rape. You should really suffer it in silence. Accept the character flaw within you that caused this, and move on. Police and court resources are already busy enough with real criminals: like actual rapists who do nasty things to their niece or the homeless native chick passed out under the bridge, or a conservatively dressed urban professional walking to her car, or a girl out jogging in a track suit. To equate the act of actually violating and raping one of these people with having sex with a girl who’s every square millimetre of public persona screams anybody who wants to can screw me right now is ridiculous.
Once again, this brand of misogyny leads to some conclusions that are pretty misandrist – namely, the notion that men are at heart rapists who can’t control their violent urges:
If you go out on the street in an outfit that would make Britney Spears feel uncomfortable, you do so knowing that your ultimate aim is to make men want you. Well, they want you now. Congrats. Oh, wait, you mean you didn’t understand what that implied? That in the great Bell curve of sexual congress you’ve just pushed everybody on the right-hand side of the -2 std devs line past that imaginary barrier that says “there is no power in the universe powerful enough to stop me from sliding my finger inside your panties”? I call bullshit. You do know. But you want to be a virginal slut, to dress in ways that makes men helpless to their urges but still leaves you fully in restrictive control.
The blogger concludes by arguing that the Slutwalkers are all “lying bitches” because they dress like they wasn’t to be raped, but do not actually want to be raped. Then he makes this lovely suggestion:
If your wife is one of them, I’m very very sorry. Maybe a good rape might make her a little more manageable around the house.
Now this post is an atmittedly extreme example of a misogynistic response to the Slutwalks. But the basic “logic” of this blogger’s would-be argument is essentially identical to that of many MRA and other “manosphere” pieces I’ve seen on the subject, the main difference between them being that this guy embraces the logical conclusion of his argument — that Slutwalkers deserve to be raped — while the MRAs who make essentially the same argument (and fling the same sorts of insults at the Slutwalkers) make a show of saying that they don’t really think the Slutwalkers “deserve” it. And maybe they’ve convinced themselves that this caveat means something . But in that case the extreme reaction that manosphere misogynists have had to the Slutwalks – the insults thrown at the Slutwalkers, the “jokey” references to rape, the prurient sneering – makes little sense. If you argue that women are “asking for it” when they dress like “sluts,” you’re essentially saying they deserve it. You’re making the same argument this guy is making, but pretending you aren’t.
Quite a few MRAs and MGTOWers seem to have have convinced themselves that women rarely if ever serve real time, or face any real consequences, for committing crimes. In the parlance of the manosphere, this is known as the “Pussy Pass.”
Now, this is, of course, almost complete bullshit. Why the “almost?” Because women do in fact receive somewhat lesser sentences when compared with men committing the same crimes. (So do white people, though you don’t hear the MRA crowd talking much about the “Honkey Pass.” )
Are the lighter sentences for women the result of evil feminist man haters? Not so much, Ampersand of Alas, A Blog argues in a thoughtful look at several studies on the subject. The author of one study concludes, as Ampersand summarizes it,
that this may be caused by sexist paternalism among judges; women are seen less as full adults, and as being less capable of being responsible for their own actions, and as a result judges depart from sentencing guidelines to give women lighter sentences.
Another study found that, contrary to what virtually every MRA or MGTOWer would assume, male judges were more likely than female judges to give especially harsh sentences to men. Let me repeat that: Male judges gave the harshest sentences to men. As the study’s author noted, “the greater the percentage of female judges on a district’s bench, the smaller the gender disparity.” (Emphasis mine.)
Just don’t try telling this to the MRA/MGTOW crowd. We saw the other day how the idea of the “pussy pass” – the notion that “the law does not serve justice” – has led some MRAs to advocate or voice their support for lynching female perps (with what degree of seriousness I don’t know).
Meanwhile, over on NiceGuy’s MGTOW forum, nigeles175d “humorously” suggests that the supposed existence of the “Pussy Pass” should also give guys the right to rape women who happen to give them boners:
[I]f we men cannot control our passions as women often claim, why don’t we get a Dickie PassTM like women get the Pussy PassTM? If women cannot control their tears, their screams, their giggles, and if women are driven to poisoning or murdering their sleeping husbands and use the excuse of years of abuse and being unable to control their mental state, why do we not consider a similar excuse for men. The way some women dress (hint, hint, SlutWalkers) to deliberately entice men to want sex with them, why is it not an exonerrating circumstance in the same way as it is for women? It seems women are never made to take responsibility for their actions, nor are they ever held accountable. Alternatively, if men are not allowed it, but women are, then we’re treating them like children and they don’t deserve the vote or positions of authority.
And of course it all goes back to women having the vote — the source of all evil in the modern world. Attitudes like this are, of course, what make the Slutwalks (and feminism in general) necessary in the first place.
Some highlights, by which I mean lowlights, of a recent discussion on The Spearhead of IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on sexual assault charges. The Spearheaders, naturally, have some unique and interesting perspectives on the case:
Black women (like the accuser) are all a bunch of liars. Run away!
I knew it was going to be a black woman- I suspected from the second I heard about this. Crystal Magnum anyone? Don’t want to make this a racial issue- but how can you avoid it? You take 5 ounces of Female/Feminist hate and deception, add 8 ounces of the stereotypical black thing of always sniffing around for a lawsuit, stir .. and you have more than enough reason to avoid black women even more vigorously than women in general.
The case is somehow all about how badly “beta” men are discriminated against by evil women:
Typically false rape allegations are made when a woman realizes she’s slept with a beta but doesn’t want her rep taking a hit and wants to avoid feeling like crap (betas are icky) my gut tells me either this is a totally fabricated set up (politically motivated) or Strauss-Kahn is getting a lesson in how betas have to apologize everyday for their existence.
She’s accusing him because she’s got AIDS and therefore (?) wants to make a quick buck, ethics be damned:
Since she has AIDS she knows that an infection could take her out at any time and she has a teenage daughter. A person like this will certainly not think like a normal person and may very well do something for a lump sum of cash since she has nothing to lose and may have some resentment towards men and doesn’t care what happens to this one guy. She also may be thinking that if she dies at least her daughter will have the money. This is not someone I would trust. …
I predict that Strauss will be released on bail tomorrow. He’ll pay the female’s lawyer some money and then the whole thing will just fade away.
He’s probably innocent, but he’s a white-hating Commie Jew bastard, so ha ha:
Libertarian here. I doubt this guy is guilty. Seems unlikely, yet possible. But as observed, this guy is a White-hating elite Marxist Jew. So while I agree that political disagreement is not sufficient grounds for wishing false-rape accusation/conviction on him, I submit that his hostility toward my people coupled with his general evil is enough to justify the enjoyment of his suffering. We can’t forget that his politics are what makes this possible in the first place, or ignore the ‘reap what you sow’ component here.
As a white guy, I’d like to say that goldenfetus does not in fact speak for “my people.”
And before anyone steps in to complain that I’ve picked the “outliers” in the discussions, the fanatics whose opinions aren’t shared by the MRA masses, I will note that (as is generally the case with Spearhead comments I quote) all of the comments here have gotten numerous upvotes from Spearhead readers, and only a handful of downvotes, if any. In other words, they represent something close to the Spearhead conventional wisdom. (And by “wisdom” here I mean “offensive idiocy.”)
A sex offender in Washington state who has spent most of his life behind bars, convicted of an assortment of different crimes ranging from check kiting to child molestation, is close to his release date. Not surprisingly, given his long history of preying on young girls, prosecutors are pushing for him to be sent instead to a facility for sexual predators, as a recent story on SeattlePI.com notes.
A state psychologist has described Donald “Theo” Holmes as a remorseless psychopath and a pathological liar who has managed to rack up an impressive array of crimes, many involving underage girls, during his stints outside of prison. As the psychologist observed:
“He uses women and children to feed his sexual desires, and he uses other members of society to supply him with money, clothes, and cars that make him look important and fuel the grandiosity which is an ingrained part of his personality. …
“He admits to multiple sexual conquests and is proud of the fact that he has 22 children and that he has had mothers and daughters … pregnant at the same time with his child.”
Holmes, for his part, simply describes himself as a “womanizer.” Apparently 12-year-old girls count as “women” in his world.
Fathering 22 children is not easy even without spending so much time incarcerated, so one can only assume that his criminality had absolutely no ill effect on his success with women. In fact, it may have enhanced his love life.
Here again, we see that being a good man has nothing to do with one’s success with women, and often is an impediment. One of the big lies of feminism is that women will shower affection on well-behaved men, and have no desire for the low-life thugs of society. Sadly, this is not the case.
Perhaps the most important message we can get out there to young men is that there is little connection between what turns women on and what is objectively good for society.
I don’t know any feminists who think that women only go for “good” guys; indeed, the feminists I know spend a lot of time discussing (and trying to help) women who are or were involved with not-so-good-guys. Evidently the imaginary feminists Price hangs out with, though, are reincarnations of Victorians who assume all women are perfect little angels.
Price is bad enough. Do we have to look at the comments too? Yes, yes we do. Let’s start with the very first one, from Opus, who asked:
but is he really so bad [?]… there is nothing to suggest that the minors were anything other than enthusiatic. Whatever views one may have as to the age of consent, the girls were not infants or children but adolescents.
Yep, in Opus’ mind, sex with 12- and 14-year-olds is no problem, so long as we assume (based on nothing) that they were “enthusiastic” about it. Last I checked, this comment had 16 upvotes and only 3 downvotes, so apparently he’s not the only one willing to blame underage girls for being raped. Sorry, having “enthusiastic” sex with a career criminal many decades older than them.
the state of Washington. There’s no way this guy could have spawned 22 children if he had to support them on his own. How many are on AFDC, WIC or other welfare programs, paid for by ordinary, working Beta men? Yes, this is a result of liberalism but it also is a result of feminism.
AFDC and WIC are, of course, intended to make sure that the children of poor women don’t, you know, starve to death. Now, I’m pretty sure Holmes wouldn’t have given a shit if his kids all starved. But apparently neither would Anonymous and his numerous upvoters. Why exactly should the children – some of whom may well be the result of the rape of underage girls — have to pay the price for Holmes’ despicable actions?
Yes, you can blame liberalism and feminism for the fact that these children are being fed. That’s not a bad thing. The actions of Holmes weren’t the actions of a liberal or a feminist; they were the actions of a seemingly psychopathic sexual predator who assumed, like many traditionalist men, that women and girls are put on this earth for men to use as they see fit.
NOTE: I didn’t set out today to write yet another post about The Spearhead. But I read Price’s post and sort of had to say something. My next post will have nothing to do with The Spearhead. I promise.
EDITED TO ADD: Picture credit: Zampieri, “God reprimanding Adam and Eve,” detail; photo G. Piolle.
So the other day we were talking here about how to have the hot sexes with someone who wants to have the hot sexes with you also. Lots of good advice in that thread, but none of it is very useful to guys sitting around at home with no one but Pamela Handerson willing to climb into bed with them. So how exactly does one find a special someone to have the sexes with – especially if you’re one of those horny, socially awkward guys who tends to get labeled a “creep?
Well, wonder no more, because two of my favorite bloggers have some advice for you:
In a post on the Good Men Project Magazine, Clarisse Thorn sifts through the sexist garbage that permeates virtually all Pick-Up Artist (PUA) websites in search of some decent, ethical advice that can help socially awkward guys connect with women. As she puts it:
the current pickup artist subculture has a monopoly on effective advice for how to break down social interactions and talk to women. Not all of it works, but enough of it works that it draws guys in. As a pickup artist instructor once told me, “When I first found the community I was horrified by how sleazy and gross it is, but I had never had a girlfriend, and I told myself, ‘Dude, if you don’t learn this stuff you’re gonna die alone.’”
I wouldn’t go so far as saying that PUAs have a “monopoly” on good advice, but there are aspects of the basic PUA approach that do make sense, and do work. To oversimplify a bit, the PUA approach encourages men to do something that women have been doing for centuries if not millennia: playing hard to get. Yep, guys who don’t come across as desperate and clingy tend to do better with the ladies than guys who do. That one basic insight is worth a lot more than an e-book-full of idiotic “openers,” not to mention the sleazy sort of date-rapey shit that self-described PUAs like the gun-happy Gunwitchpreach.
In any case, after offering a critique of some of the most obvious issues she has with PUAs, Clarisse links to a bunch of sites that she thinks can be genuinely helpful to awkward guys. Check it out.
Meanwhile, also on the Good Men Project, Amanda Marcotte – who is far less forgiving of PUAs than Clarisse — offers some specific advice for “self-described “nice guys” who claim they want non-sexist dating advice that works, but are forced to look to PUAs because there is no one else speaking to them. ”
Her first tip is golden: Dudes, if you want to score with a hot slut, stop thinking of women who enjoy sex as sluts. Or, as she puts it:
Be generous about women’s motivations.
PUA communities spend a lot of time disparaging women with words like “shallow,” “gold-digger,” and “childish,” for having what they deem to be incorrect desires. But often, women’s choices make much more sense if you assume women date for fun and companionship, just as men do. If you don’t judge men for wanting sexiness, fun, and ego-boosting from women, then don’t judge women for wanting the same.
On a completely unrelated topic: Are any of you having trouble posting comments here? If so, check your settings and make sure you’re allowing cookies from Blogger. If that doesn’t work, and you still have problems, send me an email. (See my profile for an email link.) Thanks!
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Harlan, posting as “Archivist,” complains about several recent campus events, in which college guys have literally put on heels (to raise money and awareness about sexual assault) and bras (to raise money for breast cancer research). Harlan isn’t thrilled about the causes themselves: he has sneeringly derided sexual assault awareness as “a supposedly good cause” and, while acknowledging that breast cancer research is theoretically a good thing, he’s evidently tired of hearing about it.
But he seems even more hot and bothered about the cross-dressing by guys he calls “chivalrous clowns,” describing the bra-wearing as “creepy” and deriding the guys “prancing around in high heels.” Apparently, as Harlan sees it, these fellows are just doing it to impress the chicks:
young men will do pretty much anything to help, to curry favor with, and to be admired by young women.
It is heinous to suggest that attitudes of sexual aggression and dominance over women are normalized, rationalized, and excused by the alleged beneficiaries of “patriarchy” in our culture. In point of fact, the foolish young buffoons in heels and bras are far more representative of young masculinity in our culture than is the young rapist.
There’s not a lot of logic in this, er, argument, but in an earlier posting Harlan elaborates on the distaste he feels towards the “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes” event, which was held at the University of Montana (clearly a hotbed of radical feminism).
It would be downright shocking if this or similar events ever prevented a single sexual assault from occurring because: (1) prancing around in high heels and similar useless stunts has nothing to do with preventing sexual assault; and (2) the vast majority of young men who strutted their stuff and who participate in such events are highly unlikely to ever rape a woman. …
If we want to curb sexual assault, we need to teach our young people the truth, but the truth doesn’t jibe with the current rape meta-narrative that holds only one gender responsible for stopping it. …
Young people generally do not understand that women experience much greater after-the-fact regret than men do. Sometimes feelings of regret are translated into feelings of “being used,” and sometimes feelings of “being used” are misinterpreted or purposefully misconstrued as “rape.”
Asking the police, a judge, or a jury to sort out what happened in an alcohol-fueled tryst based on a “he said/she said” account puts an impossible burden on our law enforcement and judicial apparatuses. …
There is no “rape culture”; there is no “rape continuum.” Rape is committed by social deviants, not the nice boy next door. It is almost a certainty that none of the charming young buffoons who strutted around in women’s heels yesterday will ever rape a woman. …
The sad, politically incorrect fact of the matter is that young women have far more power to stop rape than innocent young men by not putting themselves in situations where rape is more likely to occur.
There’s a lot of bullshit condensed into these short paragraphs. There’s victim-blaming, of course: do we regularly attack murder victims for “putting themselves in situations where murder is likely to occur?” There’s his weird complaint that actually investigating and prosecuting date rape puts an “impossible burden” on police and the judicial system: should we simply stop enforcing laws against all crimes that are hard to investigate or prosecute? And there’s his unwillingness to accept the simple fact that rapists all too often do look exactly like the “nice boy next door.” As for his complaint that these events target the wrong people, see here for an argument as to why it makes sense to raise awareness specifically amongst those men who are NOT likely to rape women.
In the past a few MRAs have asked me why I put the False Rape Society blog in my “boob roll” — and formerly in my “enemies list.” This is why. Spreading blatant misinformation and blaming victims: these are not exactly good ways to actually reduce the number of men falsely accused of rape.
And here’s another thought for the MRAs reading this, Harlan included: if you are truly as concerned about testicular or prostate cancer — or any other male malady — as you so often and so loudly claim to be, take a few moments away from your constant complaining about feminism and/or women, and actually hold a fund raiser yourselves. In a comment on his latest post, Harlan writes: “My problem is this: how about an event to raise funds for male suicide, etc. once in a while?” You know how events like these happen? PEOPLE ORGANIZE THEM. There is nothing stopping MRAs from organizing such an event on their own. How about it, guys?
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