I’m getting the vibe it’s less “I don’t care what women think of me” and more “women aren’t in a position to judge me”.
I think you’re wrong. A board for women in bad relationships would be all kinds of "Kick him to the curb NOW! And a boatload of, “Well you’re an idiot for staying!”, I’m pretty sure!
I think a board for women in bad relationships would likely be more of an “attack men” model than “attack women.” After all, if it’s appealing to women, it usually won’t be just an attack on women.
And I’m okay with support in the form of “Oh, I’m so sorry. Is it possible this is all a misunderstanding?” and “Oh, yeah, your doofy boyfriend is a poopyhead!” I’m not okay with support in the form of “Men suck and should be exterminated!” I’m sure boards out there cover all of these extremes and everything in between (I don’t spend much time hanging out on relationship boards, though I have seen quite a few).
How about “you need to start living for yourself and find out what makes you happy”?
Chauve: You’ve taken the opposite approach from me. I started with the blogs, and some videos. I’ve only just started reading the forums. Having said that, I was taken by this one:
There’s some support comments and some modestly good advice, and then this:
Then there’s more support, and not so great advice, and then this:
Which is actually pretty good advice.
What I tell my clients (both male and female) is: once someone calls the police on you, the relationship is over. (They don’t always listen to me, of course, but that’s what I tell them.) The important thing is to do whatever it takes to get a dismissal, because a conviction for family violence is a life-long ball & chain you will never ever get rid of. (Which is absolutely true, in my jurisdiction. As one example, if a man gets a conviction - or a deferred adjudication - he can forget about getting anything like an equitable resolution in family court.)
What I don’t always tell them, is that if the client is a woman, I already know it’s going to be a dismissal.
I usually get dismissals for the men as well, although it takes longer, and often winds up being more expensive.
Sounds like good advice to me.
I’d be fine if these guys were blaming society.
They aren’t. They’re blaming women!
That’s so bitter, it turns litmus paper scarlet.
Sorry, but this is not just some friendly self help group trying to make people into more fulfilled humans.
I am reading the forums right now. Let’s look at the first page.
The first post is a send up of a women’s magazine article that implies that women as a whole are dumb, lazy and manipulative. Then there is one that ridicules Anita Sarksesian, the video game commentator who has been subject to death and rape threats for discussing gender stereotypes in gaming. Next is one about how women have “psycho rat dogs”, which quickly devolves into just insulting women. Then there is a sort of manifesto that spends ample time musing about “sluts” and the like. Then there is some “horraying” of the guy who literally cut all the household items in half after a divorce, and a Reddit post about how women force men to leave their children. Then an article on how women ordered to pay child support do so less than men (which likely discounts the number of women with sole or joint custody). Then one about “the behavior pattern of women”, which goes about as you’d expect.
Interspersed are a few viral news articles, a couple of posts advocating some kind of real estate hustle, and one guy who inexplicably posts article after article about murders and animal cruelty caused by women. He does mix it up with an article about a man who behead a woman-- which the poster quips “may have gone a bit too far.”
That’s it. No self-esteem camp. No group hugs or howling at the moon or dressing up like Harrison Ford. No real relationship advice.
Just a long, boring, set of post after post about the evils of women. That’s nearly 100% of the topical posts. Frankly, if you substituted the minority of your choice, it’d very easily read as a standard issue hate forum.
I don’t see this as benign, and this isn’t the kind of “help” that people with emotional problems need. This is the kind of “help” that whips them up into a frenzy until eventually someone hurts someone.
Uh, is that somehow not bad enough? I’ve been joking around in this thread, but in all seriousness, I find it disturbing that your defense of this group is that “at worst” all they do is advocate behaving badly in response to perceived romantic slights. That’s the sort of thinking that led Elliot Rodger to murder six people and wound 14 others. While I certainly hope that most MGTOWs would never go to that extreme, even if their bad behavior never rises above the level of garden-variety obnoxiousness then this group is still (according to you) encouraging its members to make the world a worse place.
Yeah pretty much this. In looking at the website bellyaches these guys come across as social weaklings too clumsy and awkward at the mating game to get any play. I understand they are frustrated at the hand life has dealt them re their looks and clunky social skills etc., but this petulant bellyaching makes you want to slap them around and tell them to shape up.
If a man wants a woman and he is not a handsome, well hung, alpha male gazillionaire he has to develop some decent interactional skills that lets him come across as decent, interesting guy with a backbone and not some desperate, mopey, autistic jackass. If you’re not willing to work on developing those skills who is supposed to feel sorry for you?
One of the repeated complaints on that site is evil women who after and initial date or meeting do not call or text you back or drop out of touch when you are trying to set up a meeting as if going out with you is some business project they should be invested in completing. And they howl and obsess over this as if it’s some huge character flaw and yet they keep texting and phoning and texting and phoning the ignorer.
You want to pick these guys up and shake them and yell “What the hell are you doing you moron?! Catch a clue! She’s not interested! Move on!” And I guarantee you that doing this would not help, like rats wanting the cocaine pellet they would be back at it as soon as you finished chastising them. “Why won’t she call or return my messages?! Women are evil!!!”
That’s one view of Sarkeesian. Here’s another one: link.
Then there’s this. Which would be funny, if it wasn’t so sad.
It’s astonishing how these kinds of threads bring out perfect psychics, who can distill a person’s inner motivations from just a few sentences on a message board. Or is it just that you have three or four mental pigeonholes that people fit into and you’ve already lumped me into one of them?
At any rate, no, I don’t think that all education funding is just “throwing money”. I had been talking specifically about improving boy’s education. And I think the problems in that there are not specifically related to money but more about styles of learning. This isn’t about letting boys run roughshod but rather figuring out alternatives to forcing them to sit still for hours doing mundane busywork. This approach harms both sexes but the evidence suggests that it harms boys more.
And seriously, I have no idea where this 50’s thing comes from. That’s about the very worst era I can imagine being put in. I’m not particularly interested in stereotypically “masculine” things and was very lucky to be born in a time when there were alternatives. It’s still not great, but it’s moving in the right direction.
People are saying that the mode of education where you’re told to sit down and listen to the teacher is nothing new. It was especially prevalent when education favored boys and men. What changed?
So she received 157 abusive tweets including 13 death threats, 15 threats of rape and 31 assorted violent wishes a week because people don’t agree with her video game reviews? And the top phrases in these tweets just happen to be, in order, “bitch”, “cunt” and “whore/slut/ho”?
Yeah, I’m sure that this charming collection isn’t sexist at all, just some cheerful banter about a fun hobby:
What changed is that feminism removed (some of) the obstacles to girl’s education.
I’m making up numbers here, but just to demonstrate my point. Let’s suppose that everyone starts at 100% and that Shut Up And Learn style teaching harms boys more than girls.
So in the 50’s:
Boys: 100% - 40% (from SUAL) = 60%
Girls: 100% - 20% (from SUAL) - 50% (from sexism) = 30%
Okay, boys are way ahead. Now for today:
Boys: 100% - 40% = 60% (no change)
Girls: 100% - 20% - 5% (from decreased sexism) = 75%
Now, girls are noticeably ahead. Reducing one big obstacle to education exposed another.
the difference is that Anita Sarkeesian can make a point in a reasoned manner, and can back up her claims.
This guy? This is the best you can come up with as a response?
This genuinely sucks.
Isn’t this a good reason to at least try to consider alternatives to “Well, I know that my side is justified and good and their side is wrong and bad, and so when we hurl abuse at them it’s justified and when they hurl abuse at us it’s naked aggression!”?
I mean, the language people are using on Anita is beyond the pale even before the goddamn death threats. There isn’t equivalence there to “Haha, MGTOW are losers who can’t get laid!” But that’s not the worst of what’s being said. I mean, Solanas is an easy target, but if your standard really is “Can I find examples of people of this movement being terrible and advocating for purges of their ideological enemies?”, well, no movement is righteous.
Isn’t that even more reason to address people as people, rather than a collection of ideological labels?
No, but specifically, how? What did people do to remove obstacles to girls’ education, and how did that adversely affect boys’ education?
Well, you’re quoting me, so I’m guessing you’re addressing me. However, I’ve never encouraged anybody to wade through sewage, or to dial back anything, so I think that part might be addressed to somebody else.
As far as “empathy toward the above notion” you are of course free to have your own opinion.
For my part, my opinions on a number of things have changed over the years. They continue to change now, and I expect they’ll change in the future.
However, my opinion now is that men really do want to learn how to be men. I know that goes against the androgynous society project, but so long as many people - both men and women - don’t want to be androgynous, that project’s not going anywhere anyway. And again, my opinion is, many people, both men and women, do not want to be androgynous. (For those that do - go ahead. I have zero problem with other people being androgynous. It’s just that I don’t think it’s the solution for everyone.)
Anyway, the problem, from my point of view, is there is almost no guidance, anymore, for boys who want to become men. And I use the word “boys” not just for actual boys, but for males who are old enough to be men, but don’t know how to do it. The problem comes from a number of sources. Not just one. But feminism is certainly a source. Their relentless attack on men, “patriarchy”, “phallocentrism” and anything they see as male-oriented has had its effect.
And not an entirely bad effect. Many of the old-fashioned ideas of what it meant to be a man were destructive. And feminism has done a service in destroying them.
The problem is that nothing has been constructed, or reconstructed, to replace what was destroyed. Somebody, somewhere, needs to start the process, and it needs to be men.
That, from my point of view, is not great. It contains some stuff I don’t think should be there. But it also has some thing that are good: autonomy: standing up for yourself, even in the face of social pressure; and seeing the world for what it is and not buying into fairy tales.
Anyway, it’s a starting point.