Rolling 'this is sexist' thread

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.

It is hot in NYC

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?

two years ago huh

http://global3.memecdn.com/at-first-i-was-like-but-then-i-was-like_o_336323.gif

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

if only humanity cd find some way to challenge and mitigate the effects of our inescapable evolutionary programming

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.

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.

two years ago huh

Yeah, the more things, uh...stay the same, the more they...huh. Yeah.

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?

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

the one weird trick to having any woman you want

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.

otm

just yesterday i was musing about what a terrible thing evolutionary determinism is as i bashed my neighbour's skull in with a rock and ate his brain

our base and bestial nature is expressed by civilization!

i think i used to think i knew, definitively, what i thought on this issue but i'm not sure i do anymore. i think the idea "humans are inherently competitive and selfish", while it may have a relative degree of truth to it, is not the whole story. it is a popular idea, though, because it helps to justify existing power structures, built as they are on an ideology that stresses possessiveness, competition, and the justice of hierarchies as long as they are produced by "meritocracy. in my view, if people are naturally selfish and competitive, they are also naturally empathetic, and naturally cooperative, and also naturally inclined to be conflicted in our motives and not understand the root cause of our desires. our behavior is so thoroughly conditioned by social factors that it is impossible to say what kind of human being a non-oppressive society would produce.

so once i had this long commute every day and i was always tired on the rail and it was often boring. but one day (this was right around after the game came out and i still remember the scandal w/ the vv cover story vividly, which is why i was paying attention) there was someone who had been drinking, obviously, and he was wearing a very stupid looking hat and sat next to this woman and kept trying to talk her up, very loudly. i was sort of half asleep, and this bothered me a bunch. there were all sorts of things that made me think PUA, in particular how he'd ask her questions and be very interested than flip over and say mean things about her answers, and also the fact that he was wearing this insane hat with feathers and stuff and loved to talk about it.

and i just sat on the train, half asleep, and vaguely wondered if he had read the game or was just naturally that precise type of jackass, if i should go up and ask him about the game and see if he responded, if the woman wanted someone to go and help her deal with this guy or was doing just fine, etc. it was all sort of lynchian.

i might have a notebook somewhere i scrawled some of the conversation into, but i doubt i'll ever find it again.

I find that, if you want to talk shit about someone, it helps not to have on a stupid hat