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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:08 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:10 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:10 (ten years ago) link
I mean don't contradict your own point by using language that undermines it.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:11 (ten years ago) link
the patriarchy took their bootstraps, though
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:12 (ten years ago) link
no it didn't
― Romantic style in da world (crüt), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:14 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:14 (ten years ago) link
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)
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:15 (ten years ago) link
have these PUA's shagged ariane yet?
― Romantic style in da world (crüt), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:16 (ten years ago) link
negging ariane doesn't work tbf
― That booby's are HOTTT (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:17 (ten years ago) link
Well, luckily there's no need to choose only one.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:17 (ten years ago) link
Take two; they're horrible.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:18 (ten years ago) link
i think it teaches misogyny because it gives reductive explanations of the psychology of female desire and this is dehumanizing
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:18 (ten years ago) link
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
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:22 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:25 (ten years ago) link
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?
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:27 (ten years ago) link
I don't think most people outside of ilx would agree with this, let alone want to talk about it, agreed
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:28 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:32 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ryan, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:32 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ryan, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:36 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ryan, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:38 (ten years ago) link
that's different from what i've been saying, sort of, but i think it's otm.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:40 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:40 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:45 (ten years ago) link
can we stop acting like "capitalism" caused all of this rather than it being another symptom of the innate selfishness that drives human competition
― DJP, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:48 (ten years ago) link
no
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:48 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:49 (ten years ago) link
I don't think everyone living in perfect equality with one another and a lack of hierarchy or power dynamics is "natrual" either though
― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:51 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ✌_✌ (c sharp major), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:52 (ten years ago) link
capitalism may emphasize things like possessiveness and objectification, but I don't think it introduced those dynamics into human relations
― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:53 (ten years ago) link
also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_%28biology%29
― DJP, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:54 (ten years ago) link
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.
― 誤訳侮辱, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:54 (ten years ago) link
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.
― ryan, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:54 (ten years ago) link
lol
― max, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:54 (ten years ago) link
this thread is going places!
haha here we go
― ryan, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:55 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:55 (ten years ago) link
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.
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:58 (ten years ago) link
It is hot in NYC
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:59 (ten years ago) link
haha nice
p sure i've said this on other PUA threads we've had (lol, btw), but, what's crazy about that worldview is the recognition that there are two (2) kinds of people that seem to be able to just get (take?) what they want without much trouble: people who are genuinely talented, successful, attractive and sociable; and sociopaths. and the game shit is basically: "attention gentlemen: we have a program to turn you into a sociopath!"
― goole, Monday, March 7, 2011 2:59 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Why are men angry?
― goole, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:03 (ten years ago) link
two years ago huh
http://global3.memecdn.com/at-first-i-was-like-but-then-i-was-like_o_336323.gif
― goole, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:05 (ten years ago) link
so glad we've come onto the evolutionary psychology portion of this discussion, because ins't THAT a great forensic tool to evaluate PUAs by
― ⚓ (elmo argonaut), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:07 (ten years ago) link
if only humanity cd find some way to challenge and mitigate the effects of our inescapable evolutionary programming
― That booby's are HOTTT (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:22 (ten years ago) link
missed the lindy west rape culture meltdown. good christ, people are horrid things. except lindy west, of course. she's the cat's pyjamas. fwiw, i figure some degree of sexism was involved there, yes.
same goes for the pooas. like everyone else, i suppose they're victims of a world they never made, and many of them have probably suffered terribly for their social awkwardness -- but that in no way excuses shitty attitudes and behaviors. a pinch of compassion per pint of condemnation should be more than sufficient.
― controversial vegan pregnancy (contenderizer), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:22 (ten years ago) link
the (well, _a_) weird thing about PUA stuff is half of it is like 'you can unlock any woman you want' and the other half is like 'nah the secret is just keep asking ppl if they're dtf and eventually someone will say yes' and the same people seem to explain it both ways.
― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:26 (ten years ago) link
Yeah, the more things, uh...stay the same, the more they...huh. Yeah.
― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:28 (ten years ago) link
only somewhat on topic but it's strange to me how often people draw a straight line from evolution to what can only be called a kind of biological structuralism. as if the theory of evolution merely uncovers an eternal "nature."
But isn't the evolutionary point the opposite? Isn't "nature" mutable? Even diffuse and elusive? so what do we really mean when we talk about "human nature" in this context other than something under constant revision?
― ryan, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:28 (ten years ago) link
xxp well, then you just have to program yourself to think that the woman you want is the one that is dtf and it's a syllogism
― mh, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:30 (ten years ago) link
the one weird trick to having any woman you want
― Treeship, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:30 (ten years ago) link
i don't like the opposition of our 'evolutionary nature' and being a moral person in contemporary life. i don't think we have some kind of base or bestial nature that needs to be tamed by civilization, however conceived. evolution comprises our whole being, cognition, the works. it's like gravity, it's always on, everywhere, all the time. which makes it meaningless as a guide to proper action. that isn't what it is.
― goole, Tuesday, 25 June 2013 18:32 (ten years ago) link