Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Love-shyness and the perpetual resentment machine

She's so smug, that Mona Lisa!
Reading Love-shy.com, a forum for self-described incels (that is, the "involuntarily celibate") and other "love-shy" guys, is a depressing experience. On the one hand, there are a lot of guys there who are genuinely hurting due to social awkwardness, depression, and other serious maladies that would be better treated by a psychiatrist and/or a good therapist than by talking to other equally miserable guys on an online forum.

And on the other hand, there is so much seething resentment among the regulars, not only of those women who have rejected them but women in general. The complaint is always the same: women only like "bad boys" and thugs, and refuse to date "nice guys." That is, guys like those who post on Love-Shy.com.

In one recent, fairly typical, thread, an unhappy "nice guy" reports that a girl he had a crush on (and who, a year ago, had turned him down) is now pregnant:

And she lists herself as single [on Facebook], which means that she was knocked up by some loser. That could have been MY kid; instead, I'm left here wondering why she followed the stereotype, when I thought she was so different.

I swear, all women are the same. They ALL follow the same patterns. Even someone who considers themselves an outcast or eccentric themselves, they ALL follow the same patterns. Her boyfriends were always extremely good looking, too.

This is another example of a woman who is nerdy/geeky, and doesn't like the nice guys. Pathetic, really pathetic.

So her crime is that ... she is attracted to guys that she thinks are, er, attractive? Instead of a self-described "nice guy" who seems to think she has a duty to be attracted to him, and who is obsessive enough to still be nursing a grudge about her rejection of him a year earlier?

Others pipe up with their support:

This should be of no surprise to you. She clearly is a quasi-eugenicist that deemed your genes unworthy of propagation. She subsequently mated with another guy who had desirable genes so that she could have the best possible offspring. Classic eugenics, classic female hypergamy.

Yep. Women who are attracted to the attractive are "eugenicists," essentially little Hitlers at heart. "Classic female hypergamy," by the way, is basically a fancy way of suggesting that all women are essentially gold-diggers and/or alpha-dog seekers, going for men who are older and richer than they are or otherwise at the top of the heap. Get used to the term: MRAs, MGTOWs, and Incels use it constantly. (I should probably add it to my post on the lingo of the "manosphere.")

Another commenter picks up on the "women are eugenicists" theme:

If a woman is ever talking to you and the words "nice" or "sweet" comes out of her mouth, you then know that she would rather see you hanging dead from a rope before dating/sleeping with you. She wouldn't give you 2 dollars to save your life.

Women are not just turned off by nice, sweet guys. Women hate and despise them. They want them dead, they cannot stand undesirable genes.

A third puts it equally bluntly:

If you're ugly, women want you to die of a horribly painful death, and she would LOVE to torture you so that you suffer as much as possible.

Still another pipes up with a story of being similarly "victimized" by his "oneitis" -- that is, the girl he's completely obsessed with:

She always says I'm a lovely sweet guy. We also have loads in common, in terms of values, interests, etc. Now I know these are all the kiss of death. Girls don't really want these things (sweetness, kindness, loveliness). They want to spread the alpha male genes. ... I am the victim of classic female hypergamy too. She's with a doctor!

Meanwhile, another suggests that the OP is probably better off on his own, given that most women are lying, cheating whores:

you are used for attention whoring when the bad boy did all the fucking. Just get over asap man, can you imagine what would happen if she were your wife? More than likely she will cheat. Todays sad reality is if you are a shy, introverted guy you will always feel the threat of cheating even with your wife every fucking day of your life.

The only healthy thing in the whole thread? The OP reports that he's deleted the pregnant ex-crush from his Facebook friends list.

You know what? Life is unfair. Love is tough. Some people are better looking than other people. How many guys want to be Don Draper, minus, perhaps, the constant boozing and fairly regular assholism? Probably every man who watches Mad Men, and then some. How many look like Don Draper? A tiny fraction of a percent of the former group. There's a hilarious eposide of Between Two Ferns, Zach Galifianakis' fake chat show, in which Zach confronts Jon Hamm, the actor who plays Don Draper, with the fact of his astounding handsomeness:

Zach: "Does it make you sick when you look in the mirror to see how handsome you are and to know that people are disfigured? And don't you think you should think that?"

Jon: "I ... I've really never thought of it that way."

Zach: "You never thought, hey, uh, why is Jesus so cruel?"
Jon: "Well, I've thought that."

If it's any consolation, she can't really act.
So, yeah, some people have advantages in the world of love and sex. Attractive, outgoing, happy people generally fare better than unattractive, shy and unhappy people. (And it's not like the guys on Love-shy.com are all unattractive -- or that they have any great sympathy for women who aren't hotties.)  But even the beautiful people get their hearts broken sometimes. No one can simply have whoever they want. No one is entitled to have another person fall in love with them, or even just into bed. That is up to the other person. (See Hugo Schwytzer's recent post "the right to pursue, not the right to have," for more on this.) 

Yes, there's a difference between being rejected once in a while and being rejected all the time, or being simply so terrified by rejection you never even try to approach anyone. If you're depressed, desperate, awkward and needy, as many of the "love-shy" seem to be, you're going to repel most if not all of those you're attracted to. This fucking sucks. But it's life. The solution? Get some help, and get your shit together. Get your depression treated. (I've been on antidepressants for years; it's changed my fucking life.) Get your social anxiety treated. Talk to therapists abut your issues. Get lots of exercise. See a sex surrogate if necessary. I'm not saying any of these things to be insulting. I'm saying them because they will actually help.

Some things you shouldn't do? Embrace your (hopefully temporary) datelessness as a fucking IDENTITY. Spend all your time on a message board with others who've done the same thing. Cultivate your resentment of women for rejecting you, and receive validation from other guys for doing this. (Guess what? Just as most women can sniff out your desperation, they can also sniff out your resentment, and it's not an attractive quality.)

Or, finally, to assume that things are oh-so-easy for women seeking love and sex. If you're not aware of the problems women face in the world of dating, you're just not paying attention. Are there women who are always (whether they like it or not) followed by a small herd of lovesick men? Yes. Are there women who are 30-year-old virgins? Yes to that as well. Love is tough, but demonizing the opposite sex isn't good for anyone: you're creating a perpetual resentment machine.

And it won't get you laid.

15 comments:

  1. I don't know of any MRA bloggers who use the term "hypergamy" to mean women are "essentially gold diggers." I don't see many commenters using the term that way either, although I have never visited love-shy. Most use the term as F. Roger Devlin described it in "Sexual Utopia in Power.

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  2. Also, for what it's worth, I always thought incel was a stupid term. IIRC, somebody in the MRA or PUA blogging ring wrote up a good post about why there are no actual incels (since celibacy is always a choice) but trying to find it now would be awfully difficult. I should bookmark better.

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  3. I gave the dictionary definition of the word hypergamy, though it's true that when MRAs etc use it they tend to want to imply that women are fickle sluts always chasing alpha men, who hate beta guys and will screw them over at every opportunity. I reworded accordingly.

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  4. Ugh, guys like this have a complete lack of empathy. If they had one iota of awareness of other people, they'd realize that women who are not traditionally attractive go through the same emotional turmoil and feelings of invisibility that they do. But try suggesting that to one of these guys. They'll just stare at you with empty eyes. The very idea that women have their own internal lives, thoughts and desires just doesn't even occur to them. We're just pawns of other men, of the "alpha men" who we slaver over. Very pathetic.

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  5. On this type of discussion boards, "problem-solvers" (get your shit together, go to therapist/hooker, have drugs presribed, stop whining etc...) are as much common as resident "misigonists".

    They are not much of help there either.

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  6. Lol if you actually spend some time reading over there (which I definetly don't recommend) you'll see that in the same breath of saying "All women are picky" they'll say something like how they'll never ever date a fat woman. Ye-ah. These guys are single b/c they WANT TO BE.

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  7. I noticed in an article titled 'Thinking Like a Woman' on Citizen Renegade, he is actually instructing men to "dehumanize and objectify women" an point #3 of the fundamentals of game using those exact words.

    http://roissy.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/thinking-like-a-woman/

    I know they do it, I just didn't realize it was actually part of their curriculum.

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  8. Does it work or not, though? I'm no PUA m'self (lack of interest), but from what I've seen from some acquaintances of mine, following Roissy's advice, regardless of how uncouth it may be, has made them a good deal more successful in getting laid.

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  9. Well, it's weird. The essential message of most PUA stuff, aside from the silly formulaic "openers" and all that, is that guys should essentially play "hard to get," that is, not act like overeager puppies around women, to play it cool, don't fawn over women, laugh insincerely at dumb jokes, etc etc.

    This -- again, if you skip some of the other blatantly manipulative bits of PUA lore and focus on this core stuff -- is not really a misogynistic message at all; it essentially suggests that guys treat women more like they do their guy friends.

    What Roissy has done is to overlay misogyny on top of all that. The thing about "dehumanizing" women doesn't actually fit very well with the rest of his advice in that post.

    I may write a post about this.

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  10. @Tec,
    Because in the "world of dating" (which only occurs in societies/cultures where either sex are allowed to choose for themselves versus having their mates chosen for them by their family), the "man as pursuer, woman as chooser" paradigm is still the more socially acceptable one. Unfortunately, this gives the false impression that ALL women are equally desirable by ALL men, women can just sit back and choose whomever they want, which is seen by the unchosen men as completely unfair. What is largely ignored is that men as the pursuers are also the choosers in that they are choosing who it is that they want to pursue.

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  11. Hey David,

    I'm also a critic of MRA-PUA/the manosphere, and have a MRA-PUA parody alter ego, the alpha male "Sexy Pterodactyl": http://sexypterodactyl.wordpress.com. Would you like to do the mutual link thing? Some of my favorite parody posts include:


    Alpha MRA PUA Manifesto: Roissy-in-DC, Game and The Spearhead Submit to Pterodactyl: http://sexypterodactyl.wordpress.com/alpha-pua-manifesto-roissy-in-dc-game-and-the-spearhead-submit-to-pterodactyl/


    That post is sort of my own manifesto for why I critique certain viewpoints, particularly MRA PUA

    Facilitating Sexytime for Dudes (a Roissy-in-DC MRA-PUA Game Blog Parody): http://sexypterodactyl.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/facilitating-sexytime-for-dudes/

    That post is a spoof of MRA-PUA mentalities about women, hypergamy, Game, "surprise-swoop", and the oppression of male pterodactyls in universities

    I’m coming from a different political perspective than you (I’m a former left-liberal, now a socially-moderate libertarian-conservative), but we don't have to agree with everything the other has said or thought in their entire lives to be link buddies (I've made mutual link friends with lefties too)

    Also, at my serious blog, I’ve got critiques of MRA-PUA in the Game MRA-PUAs and Very Bad Females category:

    http://escapistart.wordpress.com/category/game-mra-puas-and-very-bad-females/

    Some you might particularly enjoy include the Really a Man series, especially Part 2 (a critique of MRA life-directives for women), and also "Why I Make Fun of MRA PUAs, Roissy-in-DC and The Spearhead"

    Best,

    Escapist (Sexy Pterodactyl’s perfidious female typist)

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  12. Sorry about the copy-paste, blogger was unhappy about embedded URLs

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  13. This actually was a really great indictment of identity politics in general. Good post.

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  14. She clearly is a quasi-eugenicist that deemed your genes unworthy of propagation.

    I choked on my breakfast at this.  I idly want a business card with this as my title.

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  15. Love-shys shouldn't be seduced by PUA. That community will savage them. Then blame them for doing so.

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