Not doubt about it. I agree with you. All my point is is that it’s easy to beat someone down if they’ve pretty much already done the work for you. They may feel it’s impossible to keep trying but that perception may actually be the crux of the issue.
Okay, sure, it was mean of her. But it’s not her job to fix your flaws, nor is it anyone else’s job–unless you’re paying them to do that job. That’s what the therapist comment was about.
It sounds a lot like you’re vexed that all these women are unattracted to you but not providing you feedback about what’s unattractive about you. Why should they? What’s in it for them? You might not react to criticism by flying off the handle and calling them horrible names, or worse–but talk to some women about how men have handled rejection around them, and you’ll understand why women can be cagey about giving blunt feedback.
And again: it’s not their job to give you that feedback, to tell you that your smile isn’t good, or that you call too often, or that your shirt has mustard stains on it, or that your breath is foul, or that the way you make eye contact a little too long is creepy, or that you’re missing chances to ask women out when they’re interested in you, or that your body language screams a lack of interest and/or a lack of confidence, or whatever. Not their job, however vexing it is for you.
Absolutely it’s hard to fix a problem when you don’t know it exists. It’s still not their job to tell you that it exists.
Again: if it’s a serious problem for you, there are people whose job it REALLY IS to tell you what you can do about it. It’s their job because you and they voluntarily exchange your money for their expertise. Those people are therapists. When I ask what your therapist says, I’m not being condescending or insulting, just reminding you to turn to the people whose advice you ARE owed to get said advice.
True. A lot of kids are jumping on the Incel bandwagon just because they want to have an name for their angst. (A lot of kids also label themselves as Forever Alone too. It’s infuriating).
That’s why I think it’s important to target interventions towards young teenager (14 and 15 especially). They have such loose self-concepts. And I hate to beat the “social media and internet” drum so much, but I think both make it harder for people to get some perspective on their pain. I sometimes post on a Forever Alone board (I’m not a FAer, but I try to be a moderating voice there), and it amazes me how 20-somethings can have such twisted ideas of what normal milestones are. If by the age of 25, you don’t have a favorite alcoholic beverage, you haven’t solo-traveled to at multiple countries, and you don’t have lifelong friends that you regularly camp out with at exotic locations–let alone have a significant other–then you must be some kind of social retard and you might as well give up forever. This sadsackism comes from women as well as men. I have had multiple Forever Aloners make this kind of"observation" to me in a sincere, non-ironic way. As a 40-year-old, this is absolutely crazy to me, and it makes me want to grab these kids and strangle them. But when you remember that the average 20-something is living in a social media bubble, it actually makes some sense. Of course if you only see your peers’ highlight reels, you’d get a distorted sense of what’s “normal”. If you think of social connections as a massive competition (a race to get the most “likes”), then of course you’ll feel like you’ll never win unless you can keep up with the Chad and Stacey set.
So yeah, I’m feeling like the internet is making this shit worse. It’s making the crazy even crazier and the not-so-crazy be wanna-crazy. I don’t know how to fix this other than to keep trying to gently talk some reason into them. I have found that some of them actually do respond well to hearing something besides “buck up and stop complaining”. So there’s that, I guess.
For me it wasn’t so much impossible as futile. I had given up when my future wife approached me. I wasn’t exactly sitting there waiting for someone to approach me, though. I was talking with a couple of guys she knew, so she could see that I was capable of holding a conversation. Otherwise my "I hope you call me, but I’m not really expecting it " line after she asked for a ride on my motorcycle and my phone number would have sent her running the other direction. Yeah, I was messed up. So much as a tap would have beaten me into submission.
Black Mirror…Nosedive…
That episode was a reflection of reality for a lot of people.
I don’t agree that the label comes from the outside. It’s a subculture. Not only do they identify themselves, but they are gatekeepers of the identity, and with the identity comes an ideology. You can’t just apply it to lonely or celibate people because you or anyone else thinks they fit there.
This was not addressed to me, but often the lack of chemistry, “not clicking” or whatever you want to call it is the reason. Sometimes two people look like they’d be good together on paper, but it doesn’t work in practice and nobody did anything wrong.
I don’t hear k9bfriender saying he felt owed feedback or that he thinks it’s women’s jobs to give him that feedback. Your post is so much harsher than I think he deserves. It’s painful to read.
You can’t trust therapists to have any greater insight than anyone else. I know I wouldn’t trust a rando therapist who thought she or he could play Monday morning quarterback well enough to tell me why I didn’t get a second date. For every woman who wants to be walked to her door, another woman might find it creepy or aggressive. For every woman who is skeeved out by a nervous tic or a silly joke, another woman might find it endearing. Hell, the woman herself might not even know why she doesn’t want to keep seeing a particular guy, so how is a therapist going to surmise what the problem is? Barring the obvious offenses (body odor, talking too much or too little, bad body language, wearing a shirt with a butterfly collar), a therapist will likely have to do the same spit-balling than anyone else would have to do.
I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be harsh. I do hear frustration from him that women are turning him down without telling him why; if that’s not something he’s feeling, then I misread him.
Huh? What’s the point of a therapist, then?
If someone is missing out on a single date, then sure, a therapist can’t mindread the date to figure out what she specifically didn’t like. But here, we’re talking about someone who’s not getting any dates. That speaks to a pattern, and if I’m paying a therapist, I want them to help me figure out my self-destructive patterns and how to change them. Their insight is exactly what I’m paying for.
That’s kind of bizarre. Do women have any right to any kind of feedback on why they were rejected? I mean, to me it is only courtesy except in a few cases where it is inadvisable.
If no one has any right to expect any kind of feedback on why they’re being rejected by those they approach, ever, how does anyone ever figure out how to improve themselves and make themselves more attractive to potential mates?
Now I don’t mean ‘right’ as in ‘track them down and insist on your right to a reason’, because that’s crap.
Perhaps I’m misinterpreting this. It just seems cold.
Uh, the major difference is that most of us here argue with misogynists. We don’t let their bigotry pass unchallenged for fear of risking our “acceptance” by the community.
A forum where the vast majority of posters argue with and criticize misogynist viewpoints generally doesn’t get the rep of being a misogyny-friendly community. k9bfriender has so far shown us zero examples of an online community getting tarred with the “misogyny” brush just because a small minority of its members express misogynist views which get strong pushback and criticism from the rest of the community.
Left Hand of Dorkness, a therapist can provide pointers, sure. They can draw the outline for you, paint the broad strokes.
But unless they have you under survellience and they know the specific person you’re trying to woo, chances they aren’t going to know why you struck out with them. A therapist will only reliably help you develop a general script to use and help you formulate game plan. They can help you develop techniques for staying cool and calm. But if your date asks you what you do for a living and they think schoolteachers are lame, how would your therapist know that? And if your therapist did suspect that was the problem, would your therapist really advise you get another job? Or would they tell you to forget her and look for someone who likes you for you?
It’s no different than someone who strikes out in a job interview. Unless you majorly goofed up, some rando person isn’t going to really know why you weren’t chosen. There are way too many factors they aren’t privy to. Not all of them are based on merit and presentation.
Furthermore, not all therapists will give advice. Some actively avoid giving advice depending on their modality. You might expect your therapist to help you out in this department and be eager to pay them for it, but they are well within their rights to tell you they can’t help you. So even with a trained professional, you ain’t owed feedback.
No. Nobody has a right to that.
You ask your friends. You pay attention to how other folks are acting. You try different approaches and pay attention to what works. You read self-help books. You pay a therapist if nothing else works.
I’m not sure why it seems cold. IME very, very few people give feedback when they’re rejecting you, much less give useful feedback. This is true both in dating and in the professional world: it’s rare that I’ve applied for something like a job or a grant, not gotten it, and gotten actually useful feedback. In dating, though? Nope. Is your experience different?
Now, if an existing relationship ends, sure: give the feedback. But we’re talking about a nonexistent relationship. Nothing’s owed, not even as courtesy.
Okay, but again, k9bfriender isn’t talking about a one-off, he’s talking about a pattern. The only specific person common to these multiple events is himself. That’s where the therapist can look: it’s unlikely that, to use your example, a series of women in a row will find schoolteachers deeply lame, and yet that’s a cultural norm that the therapist isn’t aware of.
Right–but if I’ve applied for several dozen jobs for which my experience seems appropriate, and nobody is calling me back for an interview, I might hire someone to check over my resume for me.
That’s trivally true but obviously not what I’m talking about. Some therapists might avoid getting advice–those would not be the therapists I’m talking about when I talk about paying someone for advice. I mean, c’mon now.
You can’t see how a resume is different than a face-to-face meeting with someone who is evaluating you against her own idiosyncratic chemistry-based criteria?
I have a lot of respect for psychotherapy, but apparently not as much as you seem to have for it.
I imagine that in the near future there will be sites, perhaps city specific, that rate you as a good/bad date and why. I’m glad I will miss that era. 
If they don’t criticize and challenge the misogyny that some members of the community express because they’re afraid of risking their “acceptance” in the community, then yes, they’re okay with misogyny.
I’m starting to get the impression that you’re using this term in a kind of idiosyncratic sense.
You still haven’t given us any evidence in support of your claim that the ONLY communities that will accept such a person are misogyny-friendly ones.
If the customers were deliberately blaming you for something that wasn’t your fault, then I repeat, they were taking their frustration out on you in a cruel and hateful way. Just because it’s natural for people to want to do that sort of thing when they feel angry and frustrated doesn’t mean it’s not hateful.
Again with your puzzlingly idiosyncratic use of language. How is your merely saying “it’s about time” when the late mail arrives an instance of your blaming the mailman?
Actually blaming the mailman would involve saying something that indicates you think the lateness was his fault, such as “Gee, hope you didn’t strain yourself finally getting here, you lazy bum”. Merely saying “it’s about time” is about as mild and non-blamey a way of expressing your general feelings of frustration at the lateness of the mail as I can think of.
I already answered that question. Yes, blaming someone for something when you don’t know it’s their fault is hateful and mean.
ISTM that you’re still not getting this, or else I’m just not getting how you interpret words. No, blaming the mailman for being late with the mail if it was actually his fault is not hateful. But since “it’s about time” isn’t a blamey sort of expression anyway, your example kind of falls flat.
Of course. Which is why how society treats people is important. Ridiculing people does not cure their problem. Trying to find a way to include everyone does. That doesn’t mean the short guy lousy at basketball deserves to be a starting center on a varsity team. But maybe he can play with other people who are also short and not very good at it. Maybe the tall, highly skilled people can occasionally play less-intense pick-up games with the not-so-good people.
The socially awkward are NOT entitled to sex - but they should be treated with respect and NOT ridiculed.
Yes, it’s a metaphor, not an exact correspondence.
Yes, continual rejection takes a toll. That’s why it’s important for these guys to have some area in life they get positive feedback. I don’t pretend to have all the answers.
:dubious: While I’m all in favor of disapproving of, criticizing, and despising misogynists in general, I think it sounds a bit odd for such a man to foreground resenting misogynists because they get more dates than he does.
That makes it seem as though what he really objects to about the misogynists is not so much their abusing women, but rather the fact that they’re more sexually successful than he is even though they abuse women.
I don’t think such a man should necessarily be labeled as a “misogynist”. But I do think it would be kind of jerkish for a man to react to a woman’s physical maltreatment by her partner by making the situation all about himself. I.e., complaining that it’s baffling and unfair that a woman-beater can get pussy while he, a non-woman-beater, cannot.
Do you get how it could come across as rather selfish and entitled and callous for a man to respond to his co-worker’s being physically injured and endangered by a domestic abuser with a whine about the unfairness of a domestic abuser having a relationship when he himself doesn’t have one? As in, “Really, dude? That’s the part about your co-worker’s boyfriend punching her through a fucking wall that really bugs you?” :dubious:
A non-misogynistic man doesn’t look to abusers as “lifted up” role models, no matter how sexually successful they may be or how “desperate and unfortunate” he may be.
Do you see how it can seem kind of whiny and selfish and victim-blaming for a man to say things like “Well if women won’t date me but they will date a man who hits them, maybe I should try hitting them too!” Isn’t that to some extent selfishly elevating the man’s own feelings of loneliness and deprivation above the basic ethical imperative not to abuse other people?
The man we’re talking about may not in fact be a misogynist, but he sure seems to be prioritizing his own feelings of aggrieved sexual dissatisfaction above the feelings of women he claims to like well enough to want to date them. It goes without saying that any man who would actually physically abuse a woman because he has some distorted notion that it might help with getting him laid is not only a misogynist but a violent criminal, and has completely forfeited any claims to sympathy he might have had on the grounds of his being “desperate and unfortunate” or “socially awkward”.
If your only goal is to get laid, them I could maybe see forgoing any concern for your coworker who is in an abusive relationship. Yeah, that awful man gets pussy, as I don’t!!!
I’ve been in an abusive relationship, and anyone who looked at my bruises and resented that asshole getting some while they just languished alone- well, that guy wouldn’t be much of a friend to me.
If he claimed to care about me, on any level, while thinking perhaps Abusive Asshole was maybe someone to emulate- well, he’s an asshole, too.