Nathan Larson is a delusional fool. He’s running for congress in Virginia on a platform that can only be called raw misogyny, and it’s all under the banner of the “Red Pill”.
A red piller is someone who recognizes and is aware of (1) the way that feminism, feminists and their white knight enablers affect society; (2) the dark truths surrounding human sexuality; and (3) hypergamy, women’s AF/BB strategies, society’s feminine imperative, sexual differences in emotional attachment, and women’s attraction to DT traits and sexual dominance/violence. The red pill is extremely politically incorrect, and one may expect reflexive social ostracism for even mentioning the Red Pill in polite society.
You remember the Red Pill — it’s the choice Neo is given in that very silly movie, The Matrix. He can either take the blue pill and go back to living in a dream, or the red pill and wake up to a difficult reality. They’ve got it wrong, of course. “Red Pillers” immerse themselves in a fantasy world of evil women that explains why they are lonely and regarded as creepy, and they also get to learn a lot of bizarre jargon (look at that quote!) that makes them incomprehensible to people outside their little clubhouse. And look at that rationalization at the end — if people find their views repellent, then, well, that’s proof that they’re correct!
This sounds so much like an ugly mix of Scientology and radical Islam: the same isolating cult talk, the same elevation of their narrow group as True Heroes because their ideas are rejected as hateful by people who haven’t been soaking in their Kool-Aid.
It’s clear that it’s not just religion that rots people’s minds, though: a fair number, maybe a majority, of “Red Pillers” are atheists, and they are just as susceptible to cult-like thinking.
It may be permanently damaging, too. Here’s an account of people who left the Red Pill subreddit, and by their own words, most of them still sound like awful, horrible, repulsive people. They left because they found some other get-laid-quick scheme that helps them sleep with women, or because their racist views awakened them to the need to get women pregnant, beyond just having sex with them.
Every man on the Red Pill has a different story. However, each of them do have striking similarities. The main one is anger. Like the name of the subreddit itself, it is blazing red. We must understand the psychology behind the philosophy not to condone it, but to better tackle the poisonous spider slowly infecting those across the web.
It’s actually rather impressive how thoroughly a wrong and hateful ideology can take over a generation of young men and warp their minds so effectively — the author is right. These are phenomena that demand a better understanding of human psychology.
Unless we want to see more Nathan Larsons running for congress.
Bit of a Freudian slip on the reference to “political incorrectness.” He’s essentially conceding that viewing minorities–in this case, women–as human beings is all “political correctness” is.
Not mentioned, his other claim to fame: being the very first person ever to get banned from RationalWiki, for his essay advocating paedophilia. We’re probably excessively tolerant of people posting horrible garbage in the Essay: space, but that did it.
Ahem: The Matrix is excellent, provided we pretend the sequels don’t exist.
It’s sad that a benign metaphor from a movie got co-opted by hideous people and will be tarnished by that misogynistic association. To me the movie Matrix was a way to envision either idealism or brain in vat and to say think outside your illusory trappings or break out of a stifling mindset. Uggh!
I guess snowflake has enjoyed a similar trajectory allegedly coming out of Fight Club, but now a derogatory term with widespread usage.
I love what Amy Roth has done with it:
http://madartlab.com/for-the-snowflakes/
Isn’t “winter is coming” from Game of Thrones? I never watched.
A generation of young men? Come on, PZ – are your sons like that? Mine certainly isn’t, nor are his friends. Nor the hundreds of young men who attended the women’s march against Trump I attended in Edinburgh a few weeks ago (one of them was a co-organiser).
Unfortunately, this interesting article suffers a bit from “Both Sides Do It”:
Are there 200,000 “radical feminist”* misandrists on Tumblr? (The author says the red pill subreddit has 200,000 subscribers.)
*I have to wonder if Amelia Tait actually knows what radical feminism is.
Just so people don’t get fooled into thinking that there’s even a remotely scientific/complex meaning to the jargon, take a look at the term AF/BB as a “strategy”. It stands for Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks, the notion that women sleep with people what turn them on with the sexing, then “settle” later for the people what can support them once they run out of sex to give. It’s like the ultimate one-sided cuckold fantasy, imagining that all the women that should belong to you are instead having lots of pleasurable sex with other, more studly men.
That’s the level of discourse here.
#5: Not all of this generation. It’s just a contrast between this recent affliction that is tainting so many people, and previous generations that had a different taint.
Also, “DT” is short for “Dark Triad”, the pseudo-psychological classification of women (and “cucks”) as possessing the traits of “narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy”. It’s also nonsense. As are the other jargony terms he throws around: “hypergamy”, “white knight”, “feminine imperative”, etc.
Why does that first quote make me think of Bannon?
The use of Red Pill by those clowns is also interesting given the Wachowskis themselves.
@KG:
I think you are absolutely misunderstanding it. The point is that a fringe radical group that becomes an echo chamber gets dominated by its most radical views. It is certainly true of radical feminists.
The comparison to radical political Islam is extremely appropriate. That’s how radicalization works and that is how groups like ISIS operate, they prey on the vulnerable people, or those easily manipulated.
He is for child porn and father/daughter incest. He has a two year old daughter that he is trying to get custody of. Jesus Fucking Christ.
J. Edgar Hoover and John Wayne had it right: America, beware of the Reds!
oh fuck I’m shit
initial reaction to “allow incestuous marriage” was “okay, if both agree, why not” then read wanting to allow father/daughter incest (as the only possibility, what about mother/son?) that combination I strongly object to, while considering brother/sister or 1st cousins as acceptable given their circumstances.
shit
I just can;t come up with a simple general absolute rule. I always fill them with qualifications and clauses etc and sub clauses, like I’m doing right now.
farken A
In the end though, this guy is worse than me. Father/Daughter is easy one to go absolute Forbidden, no clauses no qualifications, just absolute NO, NEVER.
yuk
…
I’ll see myself out now before I become more asshole.
@Holms #3:
We also have to ignore the “battery” nonsense, which makes no physical sense. (It turns out that this bit of stupidity was due to studio meddling. The original explanation was meant to be that the pod people were used, not for electricity, but for their brainpower, linked together — they were the Matrix. For some reason, the studio thought people couldn’t deal with that idea, and the “battery” stuff was substituted.)
My personal retcon on that was just to assume that Morpheus didn’t know what he was talking about.
Re. a few earlier comments:
I have encountered a few “red pillers”. They tend to react extremely badly if you point out that the name they’ve given their particular variety of misogyny and toxic masculinity is derived from a science-fiction story written by two women (the Wachowskis) – as well as that they completely misunderstood that story.
Unfortunately, pointing out their hypocrisy has not been enough by itself to make them reconsider their complete ethical failure.
It seems I had missed a boat load of crazy by having not clicked on the first link. Holy shit.
This is actually surprisingly mainstream among Republican nutjobs because Ann Coulter believes in it and she is mainstream. I don’t know if polling has been done on this but I would not surprised by any result below say 50%; I guess above 50% it enters the “surprisingly” territory.
If there’s one common thread among all these stories it’s entitlement. Those guys are lonely and they believe that this is women’s fault, that they are taking something that they are entitled to. The perpetual anger that women are having sex, but not with them.*
They believe that women simply get all the sex and intimacy we want. Lonely women don’t exist.
BUt what also struck me is how young the “incels” were. A society in which 16 year old boys believe they are failures because they haven’t had sex yet is a fucked up society indeed.
*It’s also interesting if you do the numbers. If those “hypergamy” women sleep with 10 guys a year, with how many women do the guys sleep?
Oh blockquote monster, why do you hate me so?
Wrote up a haiku when I rewatched for the trans subtext I missed.
And like radical Islam, the red pill brigade, MRAs, PUAs, and all their vile misogynistic fellow travelers need to be viewed as the dangerously extremist and potentially violent groups that they are. Moving against high profile movements with an association with large scale acts of terrorism is relatively easy in terms of mobilizing political will, but groups like this foment a mindset that presents a dire threat to women and promotes an ideology that seeks to normalize and excuse sexual and gendered violence, and yet aren’t seen as a high priority or even as much of a threat by mainstream society. It might not manifest as suicide vests and automatic weapons (most of the time thus far at least), but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored as a toxic societal malaise that contributes to ongoing inequality and radicalization in a manner that harms a great many people.
The answer, as always in cases like this, is primarily going to be one of providing a superior alternative vision for society – in this case a more functional model of gender relations – and education. Unfortunately, while radical Islam has few proponents in Western governmental circles, the same can’t be said for misogynistic and anti-feminist movements. Any attempt to tackle this issue effectively will face significant push back, especially with a self confessed serial sexual predator occupying the White House.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @ 19;
I have never understood the mindset of MRAs and those like them – lots of men (in this example straight or bisexual, but there are of course also plenty of lonely gay men) are lonely or have a terrible track record on forming intimate relationships, but only a minority go on to develop this obsessive hatred of women and belief that it is all some feminist conspiracy. I wonder what the specific factors are that cause some men to lose the plot so completely like this? You would think that a basic faculty for empathy would reveal to them that, in the same way that they are lonely men, there will also be lonely women? It is not as though loneliness is a uniquely masculine preserve.
You would also think that a basic awareness of what is going on in our culture would make it clear to them that society places far more in the way of unrealistic expectations for notional (hetero-normative, but of course) desirability and relationship success on the shoulders of women then it ever has on men (the still common idea in even modern society that a woman who is unmarried and or childless by thirty is somehow a failure as a woman who has been left on the shelf), and that as such any pressure or sense of a lack of fulfillment they feel will likely be even worse for many women in a similar situation?
When it is so obvious that the burden society places on women is at least as great as anything they experience (and frankly is all but certain to be far more onerous in most cases), where does this ludicrously disproportionate sense of entitlement and then grievance come from?
The only answer I can come up with is that these Rid Pill types really do seem to reach such a point of deterioration in their rational and empathetic faculties that they see women as being an entirely separate species from actual human beings – quite literally as subhuman and undeserving of any consideration at all. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live that way. I mean, how do these idiots think they came into the world in any case? Being born of the very women they despise, shouldn’t they hate themselves too?
Giilell @ #19
Indeed, any society that makes “having sex” the measure of success and maturity is fucked up. The malaise of young people, both males and females, may be a quiet but serious public health problem. We’ve got a couple of generations who seem adrift and hopeless…the “Whatever” generation. What’s the use of even walking to the bridge.
Nemo @16: My favorite explanation for the ‘battery nonsense” in The Matrix goes something like this:
NEO: Wait, the Machines are using us as batteries? That’s crazy—it violates high-school physics!
MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?
NEO: In… [thinks a bit] …the Matrix..? [pause] Um… can I have a real physics book?
Given the republican Party’s hypocrisy I’m sure he’ll fit right in.
Oh, I thought red pill was going to mean some Republican connection, because red, and because awful.
I admit a great deal of ignorance on many of these topics y’all have been hashing out while I lurked over the years, but isn’t this so called redpilling just Patriarchy 2.0? I really don’t want to follow those dark avenues to learn more about *that*. Cringe!
Can we take it back somehow? To me a redpill would be to dissolve your certainty of the old order and learn to embrace uncertainty, ambiguity and diversity. Shattering gender categories and stereotypical roles would be an ideal. I have been toying (or struggling) with notions gleaned from Jamie Holmes’ book Nonsense about Kruglanski’s closure and Keats’ negative capability. Suffice it to say I landed on the metaphor of crystallization or a sugar cube that needs critical reflection to shatter or dissolve and reset in a better framework. Or Piaget’s dichotomy of assimilation ( Borg cube?) vs accommodation. Atheism+ or its successor is the best red pill. Would PZ be Morpheus?
I think it’s worth highlighting that the tactics used to keep Redpillers under control are largely the same tactics used by evangelical Christianity. Atheism, I think, has gotten distracted looking at belief as the thing that causes these horrific abuses of large groups, when study on how totalist beliefs take hold suggests that all that’s required is some sense of being part of a cause larger than oneself. I think this is in part because evangelical Christianity is large, in an influential country, and built on a massive perversion of their sacred text to justify that country’s virulent white supremacy. It’s an attractive target, but other than size they’re not much different to Scientology or the Red Pill.
I’m still reading into the psychology behind exit counselling but I have read Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which has much to recommend it. It’s focused on Chinese re-education camps.
Speaking as a 42-year-old cis-gendered, heterosexual male who hasn’t had a physical relationship, long or short term, in nearly 20 years I can understand how it feels to be single when you don’t want can be. You feel angry and jealous at every couple you see in public, even more so toward your friends who have SOs. You feel unwanted. You feel all alone sitting at a bar unnoticed or when you have an online dating profile that no one responds to. It hurts, especially when you had a taste of physical intimacy (although I’m still technically a virgin) and you want more. Sometimes I cry over it. I don’t believe I’m entitled to love, or even just sex, but I still want it and the fact that I can’t get is a source of shame, embarrassment, and frustration.
The difference between me and these creeps is that I don’t blame women my problems. I don’t blame women for not liking me and wanting to be around me, much less have sex with me. I’m overweight, I’m ugly, I have a crappy low-paying job with no prospects, I have a history of depression and anxiety problems. I wouldn’t want to fuck me, so why should I expect anyone else to either? The one and only woman who’d date me left because she realized that I was going to be a loser and didn’t want to dedicate her life dealing with my drama. It was either me or her, and she had a much better chance at living a better life without me around fucking it up.
These Red Pill jerks can’t bring themselves to look in the mirror and see that THEY are the reason they can’t find someone who can be stand to be with them. Do worry about your attitude, your appearance, your financial status, or your mental health! It’s not your fault! It’s so much easier on their fragile ego to think that the only reason why no one to share their bed with them is because of some massive feminist conspiracy to deny them sex.
I maybe a pathetic, geeky, middle-aged virgin who lives in his father’s basement, but at least I’m willing to take my self-loathing out on myself rather than turn on those who don’t deserve it.
Do you think the language of feminism/”Social Justice” is any less bizzare and incomprehensible to those outside the clubhouse?
Consider the following fragment from a comment I wrote nearly three years ago on Alas a blog, a fairly middle-of-the-road feminist/SJ blog:
I was extremely upset in that thread, not because anyone there had hurt me, but because I had to dredge up past traumas to be able to make my points. Consequently I was in a bit of an emotional state when my mental-health support worker visited later that day. I thought the best way to explain what was up, was to let her read the comments.
‘What does “cis” mean?’ was the first question. ‘Not transgender’. She knew what transgender meant, but got very confused. Was I trans? No, I’m cis, that means I’m not trans. When we got that sorted out, the next hurdle was the remark about spoons.
At this point I gave up. Despite being a trained mental-health professional, the language was incomprehensible to her.
Aside from the usual things, he went full AnCap. Never go full AnCap.
@8, PZ Myers
That’s what it stands for, but they don’t use it to refer to women or “cucks”. They use it to refer to the “bad boys” that they think women tend to be attracted to.
Hmm, it looks like they use DT to refer to traits of asshole guys and their imagined version of all women.
Hello Akira:
I’m 52 years old, also cis-gender, heterosexual and male. I haven’t had a physical relationship in nearly 10 years. I’m also overweight, ordinary-looking, haven’t worked in over 25 years, and have a history of depression, anxiety and other-mental health problems.
On the plus side, I’m not a virgin, having had a seven-year long sexual relationship with a woman that started when I was 32 and another which started, I guess, a little over a decade ago, and which continued for three or four years. Also I have a flat (=apartment. I’m a Brit) of my own.
Well I’ve never tried online dating, but other than that, yep, been there, done, and felt that. I hadn’t read your comment when I posted my previous one, so it’s purely coincidental that in the second comment I linked to, I said:
I’m not a red-piller, and I don’t know enough about them to know whether they blame women for their problems. Nor am I sufficiently interested to find out, which (if I were) I would do by listening to what the red-pillers say for themselves, and not by listening to their critics. I do note, however, that neither of the two passages quoted in the OP blame women for their problems.
I would especially be disinclined to give credence to feminists/SJ people, who routinely unfairly malign other groups of people I am more familiar with. (Not saying that you are a feminist/SJ person. I don’t know enough about you to form an opinion one way or the other about that.)
That said, I’m glad that you don’t blame women for your problems. Neither do I. That’s because they’re not.
Forget about the fucking for a moment. Are you really sure that women don’t like you and don’t want to be around you?
I ask because I’m a person who, over the years, has gone from being a person women didn’t like and didn’t want to be around, to one that they do like and do want to be around. And it took many more years for me to actually believe that this had happened. Could something similar have happened with you, but your own internalised self-repugnance is preventing you from seeing it, or believing it?
If it really is true that women don’t like you and don’t want to be around you, then it is certainly not because you are ugly, fat, have no-prospects, and have that mental-health history. I am and have all these things and I’m popular with women, at least on a just-friends level.
It might be worth figuring out the true reason they don’t like you, assuming of course that they really don’t.
I’m still not interested in talking about the Red Pill “jerks”. I’m interested in talking to you about you. That necessarily renders our discussion off-topic, so if you or PZM would prefer it taken elsewhere, feel free to post to any thread on my blog.
I agree that women don’t deserve it. I don’t think you deserve it either.
More so, given that feminism/Social Justice relies, to a much greater extent than these fuckheads seem to, on appropriating words that already have commonly understood meanings and giving them new, very specific “term of art” meanings which are distinct from, but not obviously unrelated to, the common usage. Facing an alphabet soup of unfamiliar acronyms, one is at least immediately conscious that one does not understand what is being said.
First, nothing in the passages you quote states or implies that women are evil.
Second, I don’t know anything about red pillers, but I do know about Nice Guys, who are also lonely and regarded as creepy. And I’ve seen similar claims made them, i.e., that they are lonely and regarded as creepy because they are misogynist.
And, for Nice Guys at least, you have cause and effect backward. These people start out as creepy because they’re bottom of the bell-curve when it comes to social skills. That causes loneliness, emotional starvation, and agonising mental pain which may be externalized in various misogynistic and misanthropist ways.
I suspect something similar is true of red-pillers.
I disagree that the terms of art have specific meanings. Does “privilege” simply mean that characteristic X makes your life easier in ways that you don’t appreciate, as suggested here and here, and here, and here or is it tied somehow to institutional power wielded by the privileged group as a class?
Is gender-based violence “violence that targets individuals or groups on the basis of their gender“, which definition would logically include, prison violence, conscription, and sectarian violence as kinds of violence typically perpetrated against men. Or is it “violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately”, which would exclude these forms of violence. If the former, then why are these forms of violence never included in any examples or analysis, and how can the claim that GBV mostly victimises women be justified given that exclusion? If the latter, then why is the statement that GBV mostly victimises women treated as a contingent fact about the world, rather than the tautology that it is? And why isn’t violence that is directed against a man because he is a man or that affects men disproportionately not considered to be gender-based?
PHMT, even NG(TM), so maybe I should shut-up and listen to WOC when talking about GBV, the VAWA, and anything else I find on the NOW website.
…And we have one in comments…
Also an actually interesting note is Tim Wise’s (antiracist activist) blue-pill, red-pill analogy, where he equates taking the blue pill to privilege blindness. He makes the point that people with privilege can walk around blithely unaware of how it effects others, as if on a blue-pill IV drip since birth. Learning about the perspectives and experiences of disadvantaged minorities is like suddenly having the matrix ripped away to see the cold, hard reality.
Cf also the sinfest comic strip with “the resistance” a group of feminist women and “the matrix” a web of misogyny (green, shiny trailing gendered slurs, sexist expectations spread over everything, invisible to men).
So it’s not necessarily a bad metaphor, just how you use it…there’s plenty of useful material in the matrix, but anything turns to crap when the MRAs get their hands on it.
=8)-DX, you independently made the same reference that occurred to me (and doubtless many others):
October 9, 2011: The Sisterhood 7
—
It should be understood that those people view the sort of people to whom this blog is amenable in a similar fashion, as the quotation featured in the OP indicates.
Daran @38:
Either, both or neither, depending on context.
(Try substituting each of your possible meanings for the actual term to try to see which actually makes sense — it might even make sense on more than one level!)
“most of them still sound like awful, horrible, repulsive people”
Did you read the same article? Because to me they sound like scared, confused children. And you sound like an asshole.
One what? And who or what are you referring to? Don’t be shy; spell it out.
Daran, nobody was named, yet you reacted.
(!)
Was I wrong to?
I guess we’ll have to wait till =8)-DX replies to get a definitive answer to that.
[meta]
Daran, of course you were not wrong to do so. After all, though it’s meta to the topic at hand, it need not thereby be irrelevant.
In passing, you could as well have written something like “Do you refer to me?”.
(Personally, I don’t actually know)
It’s that you felt the need to enquire which was informative, much more so than your tone.
I could have done. But that would invite a simple yes/no answer. I was hoping for something more informative.
Neither do I, hence the question.
Had the remark been posted after vytautasjanaauskas’ comment, I should have assumed that it referred to them.
I think it likely that “those” refers to that disparate group of people who, in various ways and degrees express disagreement with some feminist/SJ orthodoxies. I am certainly “one of those”. Moreover at that time, I was the only person in the thread who clearly was so.
Now it’s certainly possible that I’ve completely got the wrong end of the stick, and that =8)-DX meant something completely different by the remark. If so, then “spelling it out” would clarify the matter.
Daran, last one:
There’s no good reason to assume =8)-DX was not being topical, so it’s rather specific: “A red piller is someone who recognizes and is aware of (1) the way that feminism, feminists and their white knight enablers affect society; (2) the dark truths surrounding human sexuality; and (3) hypergamy, women’s AF/BB strategies, society’s feminine imperative, sexual differences in emotional attachment, and women’s attraction to DT traits and sexual dominance/violence.”
Nonetheless,
I imagine you believe you are quoting, though you are paraphrasing.
But fine, you acknowledge you in various ways and degrees express disagreement with some feminist/SJ orthodoxies, and therefore you think you have reason to believe you accordingly come across as, ahem, “one of those”.
“Those” are the red-pillers, who find their ideological identity in their antagonism to feminist/SJ ideals — or, as you put it, “orthodoxies”.
So… if that’s not you, then relax.
—
:)
Loop!
I refer you to my #44.
@John Morales
“I never said it was poison.”
No, I didn’t misunderstand at all. She did make the banal point that “a fringe radical group that becomes an echo chamber gets dominated by its most radical views”. She also made the false point that there is some sort of misandrist equivalent of the Red Pill Reddit among feminists, and she show complete misunderstanding (as you do) of what “radical feminism” means.
Oh, you mean like: “Women are full human beings and should be treated as such”, and “social justice is a good thing”.
Daran
Read the whole thing, maybe?
Please tell me how I am supposed to tell the difference?
Why the fuck do you believe that women don’t experience pain, hurt and despair at being lonely? There are about as many women as there are men and since we’Re not living in an Arabian Nights style fantasy where the top dog gets all the ladies it logically follows that for every single man out there there is a single woman as well (in numbers not in “a match”). My BFF hasn’t been in a relationship for over 10 years yet still I hear nothing out of her mouth that resembles a “Nice Guy”.
And just to be clear. Nice Guys™ aren’t simply nice guys. Nice Guys™ believe that just because they’re friendly they deserve access to your emotional labour and your body. They quite often turn violent when rejected. There’s more than one woman who was raped by a Nice Guy™ who walked her home, expected to be rewarded with sex for the service and then turned violent when she said no.
Also, women don’t label men creepy because we don’t care about them being lonely* and sad, but because they are creepy and we’Re afraid for our safety.
*This is another issue. Women already DO provide massive amounts of emotional labour for men. We listen to you, we sympathise with you, we give good advice but mostly don’t get anything in return. Men need to start doing emotional labour for each other.
Also, let’s not ignore the horrible heteronormativity of this discourse. There are lonely gay men and lesbian women as well, yet both groups seem to manage without complaining about women being so cruel and privileged.
That is the male entitlement, or one facet of it.
These kinds of guys are so obsessed with their own real pain that they focus exclusively on the most conventionally attractive women, often only the image of same presented by popular media. They see shampoo models tossing their perfect hair at their handsome TV dates and wind up viewing women as pure gatekeepers; MRA/MGTOW types will literally declare that any woman can have all the sex she wants (there is of course nothing else to a relationship), and interpret the fact that no women are choosing THEM as part of a conspiracy to suck resources out of men.
To them… gay men are just fags who couldn’t man up and don’t count; lonely straight women are their own fault and treated with intense contempt, often with phrases like ‘man the harpoons’; and lesbians are a category of porn, not people at all.
FWIW I don’t get a real Red Pill vibe from Daran. He just seems like a guy who has been hurt enough that his own painful experiences cloud his ability to understand how much privilege he has.
This sounds very much like me, except when faced with these problems of loneliness, I had the basic human decency to not be an extreme asshat. I still call myself a feminist and a social justice warrior (unironically), and I fight to advance these causes. I’m glad that I had enough basic human decency and empathy to not go down that path. Also enough intellectual honesty to recognize the outright ridiculous falsehoods of common MRAs.
This happens a lot. When I talk about the experience of being a Nice Guy – based of course on my own experience, time and time again other people post to confirm that what I said. This convinces me that I’m on the right track.
I did say “may be externalised” not “always is externalised”.
I’m glad you didn’t go down that path. I didn’t either. But I easily could have done, which means I have more empathy perhaps, for those who did.
Recognising the outright ridiculous falsehoods on the other side is easy. True intellectual honesty is recognising the truths on the other side, and the falsehoods on your own. That goes, for everyone, feminists, MRAs, what-have-you.
That’s horseshit. There are probably somewhat less rude ways to put it, but I’m not really in the mood for that right now. Let me try to explain what I mean….
1. There are these things called “sides,” which are presumably supposed to be inevitable or important or useful or worth mentioning … or nearly anything you like. I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t care, because that doesn’t actually matter.
2. For some reason, you’re on a side which has falsehoods — even after you recognize that fact, if it is indeed a fact. This does seem like a genuine issue worth caring about, and it shouldn’t be too hard to explain to yourself why that’s so.
3. Taking a side is apparently something you did prior to knowing shit about shit, which seems to suggest it’s not fucking important at all, but now (assuming you’ve learned any shit in the meantime) it’s too late to do anything about that. Or something. I don’t know the actual reason for it, if there is any reason.
4. It apparently doesn’t matter what sort of side anyone may be on, because they are all false. This goes “for everyone,” which is explicitly the claim that there are no people who are not on some side or another, I guess because you can call that a “side” if you feel like it (even if they would object). This seems to give you a license to discredit anything that anyone may ever claim, because you can tell yourself this same story (adjusting the details as necessary) whenever you find it convenient.
5. You seem to believe there’s some sort of integrity, maybe a little coherence, or at the very least something substantial, in the claim that “true intellectual honesty” consists in being on your side (whatever that is), despite the fact that it is recognized by you as false. I guess it’s supposed to be reassuring somehow, that other people on some other side are also wrong, but anyway I would not use those words in that way to describe anything like that. What would “false intellectual honesty” look like? No fucking clue. What would just plain old “honesty” look like? That’s not so clear either. I don’t know… Maybe you meant to say something completely different?
Daran (#56)
Oh, look. Someone’s trying yet again to rebrand the golden mean fallacy as “intellectual honesty.” But guess what! Some “sides” don’t have extremists; some “sides” are inherently extremist. Some “sides” are all bad because they’re based on hatred and contempt and a desire to eradicate or subjugate. What are the “truths” of Naziism? What are the “truths” of anti-abolitionism? What are the “truths” of white supremacy?
And guess how the regulars here know MRAism is one of those devoid-of-truth hate-movement deals. We bothered to learn something about it. More than something. Whereas, you? You admit you’re ignorant. Yet here you are talking down to us. Well, guess what? Your pearls of wisdom are nothing but cheap resin. They’re fake. Worthless knockoffs. Now either stop casting them before us and acting like we should be grateful or fuck off.
Amusing synchronicity:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-mens-rights-activists-use-cult-tactics-its-members/
It’s not only that, but also a question of expectations and cultural ideas about love, care and intimacy.
In our society, men are raised and trained to seek love, care and emotional support ONLY in an intimate partner relationship.
There’s a huge homophobic elephant in the room. Many women have emotional support systems among their female friends. Many guys don’t.
The resulting loneliness and pain are real, but not something women can do anything about.