Rolling 'this is sexist' thread

i'm curious, has anyone here run into one of these dudes irl?

I have, looking back, been negged in the past, but it's not happened much - partly a function of the social circles i run in and the places i go out to, partly I guess because i'm not sufficiently pretty** to be a target or for it to have the required effect. but also, like, i do not notice because i am basically not interested.

Also because (i think i've said this on ilx before) the first adolescent way i learnt to talk to strangers at parties was to find out someone's music taste (v often whatever boy had taken control of the stereo) and then pick an argument with them about it, so potentially i do not notice negging-type interactions because it is me who is the negger.

** i sort of mean "pretty" as a class, here, a qualitative thing. my actual face/body/etc aside, i don't, historically, dress the part of a pretty girl, i don't code as such. so, like, i took part in a good flirtatious conversation in an electronics store the other day which was largely about video games: whatever appeal i have to men it is not "pretty girl who needs to be cut down to size in order to notice you".

Looked up "derbyshire," saw chapter headings including "European Fertility" and "Female sufferage (cont.)" and was like, How about never? Is never good for you?

I don't even have anything to do, and I STILL don't have time for that.

if we're going to start using the word "negger" in this conversation I don't think I'll be able to control the full-on body cringes

Also somebody was trying to tell me the other day that women "want to feel intimidated" by men they're interested in. Uh, no, nobody really wants to feel intimidated. I thought that was kind of fucked up.

― Romantic style in da world (crüt), Tuesday, June 25, 2013 9:25 AM (14 minutes ago)

i dunno, people vary. i'm sure there are a significant number of men & women out there who are attracted to that which intimidates them. i have to figure (or at least hope) that they're a fairly small minority, though. it's horrible "rule of thumb" advice either way.

oops, in orbit already covered that

It's...complicated? Maybe some people do want to feel intimidated or overpowered or lots of stereotypical things women are supposed to naturally want by virtue of having vaginas or being observably feminine. Other women don't want those things. None of those kinds of desires are the problem.

The problem is when a suitor can't come to terms with women as people so those stereotypes are substituted for any acknowledgement that relationships and intimacy are complex and require work/risk.

yeah, I know what he meant by "intimidated" & I know for some people feeling intimidated/manipulated/powerless is part of the excitement & it's probably not fair to lump that in with the PUA game. tbf I am kind of a scaredy-cat when it comes to personal boundaries. I don't ever want to make people feel uncomfortable. Especially people I am attracted to!!

whatever appeal i have to men it is not "pretty girl who needs to be cut down to size in order to notice you".
i never thought mine was either, but some people will seriously aim at any target in front of them! even when it's me.

I don't think I'll be able to control the full-on body cringes

oh jesus i did not think of that

please can we pretend i wrote "the one who was negging", would that be ok with everyone

The basis of PUA stuff is that NO ONE ELSE IS A PERSON, LIKE YOU ARE, or at least if they are, they don't matter.

I feel like this is close to otm, but I think sometimes that people who tend toward PUA strategies have low self-confidence and self-esteem and instead of figuring out how to raise that, they learn ways to push the self-esteem of others below their own.

Yes? So do bullies and abusers, which are just other words for people who do that. The Game: Becoming a bully, an abuser, and finally a rapist, all in 10 easy chapters--that there should be an exception for anyone who pursues this? Nah.

^

bullies and abusers are also often people who hate themselves though. if they were more productive about dealing with their self-loathing, maybe they wouldn't abuse people. that doesn't mean that anyone else should care about them though... it's their fault that their mental problems manifest in a way that hurts others.

but still, i guess i think there is some value in recognizing how this shitty behavior arises out of insecurity, and for that matter insecurity that is caused by the same patriarchal system these dudes often seem committed to upholding.

Uh no it's their fault that they have chosen harmful ways to express/manifest their problems, an ongoing series of choices that they can stop making, hopefully, at any time.

I mean don't contradict your own point by using language that undermines it.

the patriarchy took their bootstraps, though

no it didn't

you're right, in orbit. i should beware of the passive voice. i think i am too likely, just in general, to provide excuses for people even when i don't mean to. side effect of spending a long time trying to not be "judgmental" toward myself and others.

I don't know that the PUA culture is teaching people misogyny, it's just giving them tools to act on it.

Was being sarcastic about bootstraps, I think if anything the patriarchy gives enough rope for these dudes to hang themselves with.

(working on an extended mixed-metaphor here)

have these PUA's shagged ariane yet?

negging ariane doesn't work tbf

I don't know that the PUA culture is teaching people misogyny, it's just giving them tools to act on it.

Well, luckily there's no need to choose only one.

Take two; they're horrible.

i think it teaches misogyny because it gives reductive explanations of the psychology of female desire and this is dehumanizing

if you at no point had a female role model, relative, or friend that made you question the misogyny inherent to our culture, then yes, this could introduce you to misogyny

I haven't been following it THAT closely because I value my mental health, but hasn't the internet/comedy world/talk radio world/WORLD-world been in an uproar for like 6 weeks now because Lindy West used the words "rape culture" and thousands of people rushed to say that it didn't exist/she was doing it wrong? I think you are vastly overstating most people's (and you can read that as "most men's" if you want) willingness to even discuss misogyny, much less allow that it exists and it's bad and we should work against it.

sorry, I was being unclear earlier and am getting a little testy, I was assuming that in absence of any corrective, there's enough systemic misogyny out there that PUA materials aren't going to be doing anything other than codifying attitudes and putting actions in a context. if there wasn't a dynamic of cultural misogyny in play, none of this shit would be marketable

we're not most people, we're ilx! can we assume systemic misogyny? any objections?

I don't think most people outside of ilx would agree with this, let alone want to talk about it, agreed

thank god for this message board, really. for all its flaws, it is like a utopia of enlightened discourse compared to most of the internet.

a big part of something like this that's often overlooked (I think) is that as goes back time immemorial when men talk about women amongst themselves it's inevitably a means of relating to each other and not to women--women as status, as object, as something which binds men together and makes their fraternity what it is based on that very exclusion of women. women are objectified in the discourse because they are literally not present in it as a subject. so while there are certainly problems with this or that piece of advice this root problem is the fact (as pointed out often in this thread) that women are not given a voice in the discussion, or if they are they are only allowed to speak for patriarchy.

PUA is just another way to exclude and thus oppress women, ironically (or not) through the practice of pursuing them. it's yet another way to immunize patriarchal dominance against external threats.

put more clearly, and as also already pointed out, PUA stuff is not in anyway about forming relationships with other people but instead it's entirely about foreclosing that possibility. it's about avoid that vulnerability through aggression. it's violence, pretty much.

so no, I don't see this as nerds looking for ways to connect with women but getting led astray. it's quite the opposite.

that's different from what i've been saying, sort of, but i think it's otm.

Tbh women talk about men as a way of relating to each other too, or as a way of working out and agreeing on "truths" about relationships, lyfe, and everything; that's one of the things that makes the Bechdel test somewhat complicated. But because of patriarchy, men's and women's conversations about each other can never be taken to represent the same things.

xp to myself: or rather, i think that the actual individuals are drawn to this dehumanized patriarchal worldview because it is easier for them to think that way, partly because they don't have to think of women as people and partly because it jives better with the sense of identity that capitalism and patriarchy have encouraged (forced?) them to adopt, rooted as it is on ideas of status and on this stoic image of masculinity. so on the level of society, PUA culture is about reinforcing patriarchy. but the reasons people get caught in that trap is because they have developed a false consciousness about What They Want. maybe this is naive and rousseauist, but i do think there is something very transparently artifical about the PUA worldview... it's like a caricature of the way capitalism distorts social relations for "ordinary" people.

can we stop acting like "capitalism" caused all of this rather than it being another symptom of the innate selfishness that drives human competition

no

or that is glib... i don't have an answer to what would come after capitalism, and am not nostalgic about what came before, but i don't think the idea of people being in competition with each other all the time is "natural" and should just be taken for granted as an eternal fact of life.

I don't think everyone living in perfect equality with one another and a lack of hierarchy or power dynamics is "natrual" either though

the problem with saying "patriarchy" and "capitalism" is that these are huge systemic things that it would take a series of social earthquakes to defeat: making it something so huge ends up with our being hugely defeatist.

capitalism may emphasize things like possessiveness and objectification, but I don't think it introduced those dynamics into human relations

also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_%28biology%29

i don't think the idea of people being in competition with each other all the time is "natural" and should just be taken for granted as an eternal fact of life

Well...there's no other way to put this: you are wrong. People are primates, and are in constant competition with others. The absence of "survival-level" challenges in most people's lives only makes the competition in other arenas that much more vicious, because you gotta find some way to prove you're better than that other fucker over there. All the big problems of human existence (sexism/patriarchy, racism, tribalism, violence related to any/all of the foregoing) are part of being animals.

Treeship I get where you're coming from but it's impossibly hard to generalize why individuals are drawn to this. There could be as many reasons as individuals! There could be good motives and bad. But the discourse as such we can generalize about much easier because its a codified system of behavior and not individual minds in all their variety. We can see what the discourse is doing, and so the discerning of "motives" for individuals using it is almost beside the point.

lol

this thread is going places!

haha here we go

I mean, does the fact that sun is hot make us defeatist about ever mitigating the effects of the rays of our closest star? Or uh something, that metaphor may be driven by the fact that it's suppose to be 100 degrees here today. One kind of approach to large terrible things is just to be like, okay, that exists. Let's minimize the harm to start with, and then see if there's any good that we can leverage. What's next? What's next? Etc. I am not an activist or a scholar or w/e, that just seems self-evident to me.

xposts, i don't have an answer about what human nature is and isn't but i think a lot of times people see historically produced forms of consciousness as expressions of something "natural" and that this has the effect of further reifiying them. maybe "competition" is an eternal impulse but the kinds of inequality this impulse gives rise to is determined by historical circumstances and the ideologies these give rise to.