Well yeah, if someone’s claim to superiority over someone is that they’ve had sex and the other person hasn’t, that’s pretty immature and shallow.
I didn’t get the impression that k9b was describing his only, or even his primary reaction to his coworker being abused. I think humans can see a situation and have multiple reactions and draw multiple lessons from it. If I knew someone who’d been beaten as he described, my first thought would be for her well-being and safety. I’d hope that she wasn’t badly injured, that she wasn’t being emotionally manipulated into staying, that she could evaluate her safest course of action, that she had family or financial resources to get out of the situation if she had to, and that she could protect her children or anyone else that was at risk with her. I’d offer her what help and counsel I could, without trying to take things over and tell her what to do. So no, it’s not all about me.
But with the immediate and personal needs dealt with, there are still issues that a case like this raises. I think a man who’d hurt someone he loved is as damaged as the Incels who hurt those they don’t. So what’s the difference between them? If it’s confusing to figure out why we’re rejected, it’s downright mystifying to wonder why a man like that isn’t. What does some woman see in him? I don’t ever expect an answer to that, and I probably wouldn’t like it if I got one. But, troubling as it is, the question is out there.
So I don’t see k9befriender prioritizing his feelings in this case. That may just be the part that relevant to this thread.
But can we ridicule them once they go on Reddit and start calling themselves incels? 'Cuz that looks like fun.
Before anyone comments, try to remember when I said I was mature and respectful. Can’t do it, can you?
I perhaps posted in a manner that did not make my supposition clear. Not the ratio of hateful to supportive posts on the board being very small, but the ratio of the absolute number of those who post hateful to all of the people who might be considered as at-risk.
There are a lot of socially awkward, fearful of rejection, isolated, lonely people out there. In comparison, I’m guessing, the absolute number of those who post misogynistic victimhood rantings is tiny. Visible, vocal, and on occasion even violent, but still relatively a small number.
Back to another subject. I don’t argue with or “criticize and challenge” every ugly post on these boards. I just don’t bother engaging them in those threads a large amount of the time. Yet if the discussion was about WestWorld or Steven Universe I may be reading what they write. I use this board for what I want to get out of it and ignore the rest.
Does that make me “okay with” any hateful views expressed?
Yes, actually. People who get all up in violence (Incels, Nazis, KKK, whoever) should be ridiculed. That’s how you deal with them and marginalize that influence on the larger society.
That’s considered bullying. They feel they are targets of hatred and persecution. Self-awareness level is negative twenty.
Well, I don’t know the details of his personal situation or how much of what he was describing was his actual experience as opposed to a hypothetical case, which is why I tried to frame my response in terms of “a man” rather than “you”.
However, he mentioned that some such man, whoever he is, got “labeled as a misogynist” for expressing his reaction. Either the person who called the man that is some kind of nutcase or vicious asshole who gratuitously labels men “misogynist” for no reason, or else the man came across as being misogynistically aggrieved and resentful that an abused woman had chosen an abusive man for a partner instead of him.
Which would be kind of a jerkish and self-centered way to respond to an abused woman’s plight. And also somewhat dehumanizing to the woman, who seems to be considered as some kind of malfunctioning sexual-rewards machine giving undeserved rewards to the abuser. Expressing more concern that the abuser is being undeservedly rewarded than that the abuser’s victim is being injured and terrorized would seem kind of, yeah, misogynistic.
[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
If it’s confusing to figure out why we’re rejected, it’s downright mystifying to wonder why a man like that isn’t. What does some woman see in him?
[/QUOTE]
I’m puzzled why you think this is mystifying. You don’t imagine that abusers start their relationships by beating people up, do you? That would not work with any but a very, very tiny minority of their victims who for some reason consciously want to be abused.
It is well known that abusers are often very charming to the people they’re trying to ensnare, and very good at fostering unhealthy emotional dependence and feelings of helplessness. There are hardly any women at all who actually want to be abused, but there are a lot of women who fall in love with an abusive man who at first seems to be passionately devoted to them and tremendously attractive. And then in many cases they’re too confused or gaslighted or intimidated or unwilling to struggle out of his clutches once he starts abusing them.
Women are not sexual-rewards machines that are programmed to dole out rewards based on some kind of mysterious algorithm where men just have to “crack the code” in order to score all the sex they want. Women are individual human beings who have different reactions to different individuals, not always for objectively consistent or rational reasons.
If it would seem legitimate and normal to you that, say, one of your cousins doesn’t get along well with his brother even though you think the brother’s a great guy, while a different cousin is very fond of to his brother who’s a screw-up and a jerk, then it shouldn’t seem “mystifying” or “troubling” to you that some women fall in love with guys who turn out to be abusive but don’t fall in love with other guys who aren’t abusive.
That doesn’t mean that women are “incomprehensible” or “inexplicable” or “incapable of rational behavior” or any of the other things that misogynists through the ages have liked to say about women who won’t date them. It just means that women are individual human beings, just like you and your cousins and their brothers and all other men.
I also really don’t get the obsession some men seem to have about “figuring out why we’re rejected”. Over several decades I’ve rejected quite a few men and been rejected by quite a few men, and have never seen the point of wondering why. Why wouldn’t any of us be rejected by somebody we’re attracted to?
Almost all of us who are reasonably self-aware are, at best, slightly above-average human beings with no overwhelmingly magnetic or desirable qualities. In our lives we may, if we’re lucky, run across anywhere from a few to a few dozen other individuals whose desires and qualities sync up with our own to the extent of inspiring mutual interest and attraction. Any given random individual you meet is overwhelmingly likely not to be one of the statistically rare people who can feel any particular interest in you, even if you happen to feel a lot of interest in them.
Being angsty that someone rejected you is like getting upset that a winter day is cold. A fortunate few people may spend most of their winters in tropical paradises, so to speak, but for most of us, a warm day in winter is a rare and special event, and some of us may experience it only a few times or never. That’s how life is. Yeah, you should try to avoid making your environment any colder than it has to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to expect lots of warm winter days.
I didn’t get the impression that k9b was talking about that as something that had specifically happened, but rather that the subject is completely taboo. Even if you offer a battered woman all the help and comfort that you can, even if you wait years, even if you’re talking to people who don’t know the woman in question, even if you’re speaking completely hypothetically, just asking the question “what does/did she see in him?” can get one labeled a misogynist. It seems like we’re on the verge of it in this very thread.
Of course I know that abusers don’t start their relationships with abuse. It’s like the frog in the slowly boiling water. It must be so tempting to try and fix things, and not to have to admit to yourself that you were fooled. And it’s so difficult to break away from someone, to muster the resources and face the uncertainty of living on your own. All of that is absolutely true. It’s not a just world; some sleazebags will have women who adore them and some decent guys will go through their lives unloved.
But the world is unjust in lots of other ways, too. Smart, hardworking people can struggle their whole lives while other who lie, cheat, and steal are on easy street. Innocent kids get hit by cars while Charles Manson lived into his 80s. We can commiserate about those sorts of injustices without being accused of feeling entitled, or wanting to be the people we despise, but not this one, it seems.
And I can’t help but see a parallel between your description of how an abusive relationship develops, and how someone might fall, gradually, into the Incel mindset. Do you think someone joins an Incel forum, makes an introductory post, and the first reply is “welcome to the board, now let’s go kill 'em all!” Scientologists don’t start with the whole Xenu story on your first visit. They start by charming the people they’re trying to ensnare. Later, not only are they confused or gaslighted or intimidated, they have to admit to themselves that they fell for it. They got suckered. That might be the hardest part of all. Nobody wants to feel stupid. The situations aren’t exactly the same, but they’re not a million miles apart, either.
A theme throughout this whole thread has been that unhappily celibate men should put their effort into improving themselves and their social skills rather than direct their frustration outward toward women. I agree with that. But surely the first step toward improving yourself has to be figuring out what your deficits are. How would you suggest someone do that other than by analyzing their past encounters and trying to figure out why they were found lacking?
Try this. You have to choose one person out of the last two or three good dates that you’ve had. Can you explain what the ones you didn’t choose are lacking?
monstro, it’s starting to feel like you’re more interested in winning some point than in hearing what I’m saying. This is the third or fourth time you’ve mocked my supposed claim that a therapist can pick apart the idiosyncrasies of an individual date. Now, for the third or fourth time, I’ll explain that I’m not talking about the idiosyncrasies of an individual date, but about the behavioral patterns of a client who fails time and again to go on a successful date.
If you want to win a point, cool I guess. If you want to respond to what I’m actually saying, read this again, and reread the previous posts to which you incorrectly responded, because I don’t think I have a fourth or fifth way of explaining the point.
Fuck the incels. That should be their slogan.
First, I don’t know what the fuck you are going on about. I don’t recall us ever having had this conversation before.
Second, I think it is weird that you are glossing over something that is very obvious to me. If a person has no success with, let’s say, three women, is that enough of a pattern for someone to run to a therapist and expect that therapist to effectively diagnosis the pattern? I would think not. Because each woman has her own rubric for deciding who is “dateable” and who is not.
Even if we are talking about a string of ten unsuccessful dates, I don’t think a therapist can pinpoint what keeps going wrong with those dates unless the client has some insight himself. They can make suggestions on what to do going forward (“Instead of taking your dates to Golden Corral, I would suggest you splurge and take them to a nicer establishment.”) But that’s not “feedback”. That’s just basic dating advice–the kind you can find on a message board like this one. A therapist isn’t going to know, say, that the client has bad table manners and that’s why he keeps striking out unless the client goes into this level of detail (which again, requires the client to have some insight).
I say all of this because I actually worked with a therapist for 10 years who is full of advice. TOO MUCH ADVICE, truth be told. I would frequently ask her to Monday morning quarterback awkward or unsatisfying social interactions with coworkers. I would give her the play-by-play, and she would give me a thumbs up for my good plays and a thumbs down for the not-so-good plays. I would say 99% of the time, I would only get thumbs up and she would conclude the quarterbacking with a statement like, “You need to associate with better people, my dear.” And you know what? She might have been blowing smoke up my skirt, but I actually think she was right. Once I started hanging out with coworkers who were a better fit with my personality, I stopped having awkward and unsatisfying encounters. I walked into therapy thinking I was socially inept and needed some pointers. When really all I needed was someone to diagnosis me with the common problem of trying to befriend the wrong people.
If I had done the same work with her in the context of dating, I can’t imagine it being any different. If I told her I was really nervous during the date, she’d help me practice my relaxation techniques and she’d help me pinpoint the thoughts that were behind that nervousness and challenge them. She would probably ask me what I wore and she’d likely make a recommendation to wear nicer shoes or swap out the fluorescent pink top with a black top next time. She’d almost certainly do some role playing with me so that I would have a script ready in case certain questions came up. But there’s one thing I don’t think she’d ever do and that’s tell me why a particular person (or string of people) weren’t interested in me. She would not tell me, "Hey, the reason why this person hasn’t called you back is because you have facial tics, you slur your speech, and you sometimes don’t make the best eye contact. " She wouldn’t do this because 1) she knows those things are intrinsic to who I am (so what would be the freakin’ point?), 2) there’s no way she can know that these are the reasons that a particular person (or people!) don’t want to date me (although they may explain why she wouldn’t want to date me), 3) there are plenty of people out there who would be able to overlook these flaws, and 4) I ALREADY KNOW THESE ARE MY FLAWS. A grown-ass adult with the insight to seek out therapy typically knows what their obvious social weaknesses are.
Maybe you’ve had as much experience with therapy as I have and you’ve actually had a therapist give you the kind of feedback that you think someone like k9bfriender is looking for. But my experience tells me differently.
I am not trying to “win” anything. I’m just challenging you on a particular point you made (and so confidently!) Either come back with a personal anecdote that might help me understand where your ideas are coming from or continue to sulk. I really don’t care. I just don’t like seeing a guy that I admire (you) playing the Internet Tough Guy. k9bfriender wasn’t saying any of the things you were intimating he was saying, and he didn’t need that smarmy advice about seeing a therapist. If anyone is chest-thumping for points around here, it’s you.
Yeah, okay.
I am not a therapist, and I have not been in therapy. But I’ve talked to a lot of people who have been in therapy, including my first husband, and I don’t think most therapists would be able to play the role and provide the feedback that I feel you are saying they would.
Maybe a dating coach could do it. And maybe friends could do it. And some dates could do it if they were feeling amazingly generous. But I don’t think most therapists could do it.
I think I could give my own perspective on it much of the time, yeah.
Sometimes it’ll just be a difference of opinion. Maybe she’s a huge sports fan and I’m not. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the answer (from her perspective, since you’re asking if I could provide feedback) isn’t for her to drop her fandom. There are clearly a lot of other sports fans in the world she might hit it off with. Maybe she’s the sort who needs to be pursued a bit, and I want someone who’s a little more of an active partner in planning our dates.
None of those are meant to be judgmental. I’m not trying to paint this as things that are right or wrong; liking sports or being pursued doesn’t make a person bad. And I’m not looking for the Grand Unified Theory of Dating, because I know there isn’t one. But just as one rejection isn’t the end of the world, one reason for rejection doesn’t tell someone a whole lot. But add up enough data and maybe something helpful emerges.
If someone I’d rejected asked me why, would I tell her? I think I’d assume that she genuinely wanted to know, and I’d try to be honest. Like I said, I don’t view this as judgmental, just different. What’s the phrase that people use to console themselves after something bad happens, “older, but wiser”? Getting rejected sucks. But getting older without getting wiser sucks worse.
Besides which, this isn’t information that has to come from the rejector to the rejectee. Maybe there are friends who have seen us together who spot some cues that I may have missed. Maybe I just describe a date to a friend and they can see where I dropped the ball. I was talking with a friend of mine some years ago and she was describing the circumstances of her divorce. It wasn’t one party obviously at fault, like adultery or something; it was just a degree, and type, of interaction that she needed from him, and that he wasn’t giving in quite the same way. I hope that talking with me about it helped my friend; gave her consolation, or information, or both. I’ve never forgotten it, and I got some insight from it that has helped me, too.
That’s a long-winded answer to a short question, I guess. I want to learn from my missteps, but first I have to know what they are. I realize it’s hard to do in practice. There’s potential for hurt feelings, but there’s also potential to learn something. If I was on the other side, and someone was trying to learn from what I thought, I hope I’d handle it with all the grace and tact I could muster, but I also hope I’d be helpful.
Right, I agree therapist is not the best professional for giving suggestions on how to make a person more dateable. An experienced dating coach would likely be better.
You may be right. I base my comments on a friend of mine who was terrible at dating and single for a really long time–so he went to a cognitive behavioral therapist. AIUI, the CBT gave him one real requirement: flirt with (and later ask out) a set number of women between each session. He had to give himself permission to be nervous, unattractive, desperate-sounding, maybe even a little creepy, as long as he fulfilled his quota (and to be clear it’s not that he was trying to be creepy, or actually doing anything stalkerish or anything, he just couldn’t let a fear of being creepy stop himself from filling his quota). At each session he and his counselor would deconstruct what happened and come up with ideas on how to up his game. It worked really well, and he developed a modest but acceptable ability to flirt, ask women out, etc.
My larger point is that there are some groups of people that it’s reasonable to expect specific feedback on your flirting/dating game from. Folks you’ve asked out once aren’t in that group: even though they might have the best advice, they also are in the most awkward, and potentially most hazardous, position for offering that feedback. Ask friends, ask professionals. Don’t ask women who’ve rejected yu.
Therapists are not Oracles, nor can they reach into the minds of strangers to see what they thought about you and why they rejected you. You’d have as much luck driving 100 miles in a random direction, stopping at a restaurant and asking the waitress why those other women rejected you.
Of course, they’d probably call the cops…
Well, I guess we’ll have to wait for k9b to return to the question to clear it up. I personally have never known any case of anybody being labeled a misogynist just for wondering out loud what a specific abuse victim of his acquaintance saw in her abuser.
But then, I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody actually to express confusion about what an abuse victim of his acquaintance saw in her abuser. This is because the answer to the question is usually pretty obvious. Many abusers have some very evident superficially attractive traits, and many abuse victims in the denial stage are quite vocal about what they love in their abuser and why they think he’s “really a good guy”.
[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
It must be so tempting to try and fix things, and not to have to admit to yourself that you were fooled. And it’s so difficult to break away from someone, to muster the resources and face the uncertainty of living on your own.
[/quote]
But those things aren’t answers to the question “what did she see in her abuser?”. They’re (partial) answers to the question “why did she stay with her abuser after he started abusing her?”, which is another issue entirely. (And there are many other potential parts of the answer to that question, including fear of violent revenge against herself and/or a loved one if she leaves him.)
[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
But the world is unjust in lots of other ways, too. Smart, hardworking people can struggle their whole lives while other who lie, cheat, and steal are on easy street. Innocent kids get hit by cars while Charles Manson lived into his 80s. We can commiserate about those sorts of injustices without being accused of feeling entitled, or wanting to be the people we despise, but not this one, it seems.
[/quote]
Uh, no, nobody’s suggesting that we can’t commiserate with sad and lonely people on their bad luck in not finding a partner. What we’re objecting to is the particular subset of sad and lonely people who take out their frustration and resentment at their bad luck by blaming the fellow human beings who don’t want to partner with them.
We’re all sorry for poor people, for example, who have to endure hardships in their daily lives that most of us don’t ever have to worry about. But when a poor person is constantly grousing that all their troubles are due to, say, the evil corrupt Republicans who are giving away to greedy billionaires the money that should rightfully be theirs, or to the sneaky “Meskins” who are taking away their good jobs and ruining the country for everybody, etc., then we’re less inclined to commiserate with them and more inclined to criticize them.
Feeling bad about your unfair burden of life’s troubles is not in itself censurable. But displacing your bad feelings onto other people by putting all the blame on them, and wallowing in your resentment and misery instead of trying to make the best of your life, is more problematic.
In any case, if sad and lonely men want role models for how to put up with their single lives without getting sucked down the rabbit hole of “incel” hatefulness, maybe they should try looking towards women. Sexually and romantically unsuccessful women have been constantly mocked and despised literally for millennia. (Do a Google search on the phrase “bitter old maids” if you want to see something like the scope of society’s traditional disdain for sad and lonely women.)
Women have had to learn to endure society’s unjust contempt and scorn for being unpartnered, without systematically blaming all their bad luck on the men who don’t want them (much less mass-murdering groups of random people out of their anger that men don’t want them). Men can learn to do the same, even as we all work together to lessen society’s unjust contempt and scorn for the unpartnered.
[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
And I can’t help but see a parallel between your description of how an abusive relationship develops, and how someone might fall, gradually, into the Incel mindset. Do you think someone joins an Incel forum, makes an introductory post, and the first reply is “welcome to the board, now let’s go kill 'em all!”
[/quote]
An important difference is that an abuser can make somebody into an abuse victim without that person’s consent: all they have to do is overpower them and beat them up. But nobody can make anybody else into a promoter of misogynistic incel ideology without that person’s consent.
:dubious: This is very silly. Of course people have self-destructive behavior patterns. Of course people have patterns they can’t always see themselves. Of course people sometimes go to therapists to help them figure out what they’re doing wrong and how to change that.
I’m really not sure why people are so determined to push back against this idea–it’s as if I recommended going to a doctor about that persistent cough, and people are all, “Doctors can’t diagnose every condition! Maybe you just coughed because you had some phlegm that one time! Anyway some doctors are doctors of philosophy and don’t know anything about medicine!”