Feminism

[Gormongous]

I have no right following up such an excellent post by Syn, but I did think it was interesting in the comment thread for the video transcript that someone named Cthulhu's Intern has been reading Rodger's manifesto and made some remarks about an initially like-minded friend of his who took a different path.
 

He had a friend who had similar beliefs to him. That friend decides to actually improve himself, which causes him to be more social and be successful with women. He views that as said guy insulting him and becomes really hostile. The other guy seems really patient for a while, but finally fed up with his shit, says that “no girl would want to fuck him” to him (obviously, he didn't describe it like that, but it’s pretty obvious that’s what happened)

His friend was also a virgin, but had a more normal attitude about it. He says that this means that he’s “weak.” Because, in his words, “to be angry at the injustices one faces is a sign of strength.”

Oh, and said friend who also had a good attitude (whom I have to admire for his incredible patience, based on what I’m reading. He’s a better person than me.) eventually left him because every time they were around, Rodger would always be visibly enraged at any couple around him and would always talk about how much he hates them. Like, he said that he had one conversation in which he asked what he would do if he had total power over the world. He didn't really say what the friend said, but he described how he would torture and kill everyone who has “wronged” him (basically, anyone who has the audacity to have been on a date or have had sex). That was enough to make that friend leave him, a friend who was with him since he was about 5 or so.

His childhood actually seemed really good. Seriously, he had quite a few genuine close friends he did a lot of things with until he started being disturbing about his hostility towards sex.

 
It's really sobering to me that he had a friend who turned away from him and the darkness he represented and that his family also recognized there was something wrong with him, but that there didn't seem to be anything those support networks, however small, could have done. Even getting laid wouldn't have changed anything, because he still wouldn't have been a happy individual and the hate would just have been directed elsewhere.

[SuperBiasedMan]

It's interesting to read you guys saying that you think every guy goes through a phase of misogyny. Do you feel like this is universal or tied to any particular place or upbringing?

Just because, not to try painting myself as an overly individual exception, I don't think I went through a phase like that. Mostly because even from kindergarten I've always had at least one female friend. It's never been the case that family was my only experience with women.

I've still been a sexist ass, thinking of women as different and placing them in a different light without even noticing. But the idea of putting blame on them because I'm not getting what I'm entitled to isn't really something I went through.

 

I had elements of the phase where I feel like I thought I was in the ugly category and wasn't really going to attract the female attention that most of the good attractive guys would get, but I just thought that was a fact to be accepted and not something to blame women for. I was just pretty benignly resigned to my 'undateable' role.
 

It only now occurs to me that maybe I misunderstood a bit, and I'm still sort of describing what you guys meant, just a slightly different version of it. But either way I'm curious what you guys think.

[Gormongous]

It's interesting to read you guys saying that you think every guy goes through a phase of misogyny. Do you feel like this is universal or tied to any particular place or upbringing?

Just because, not to try painting myself as an overly individual exception, I don't think I went through a phase like that. Mostly because even from kindergarten I've always had at least one female friend. It's never been the case that family was my only experience with women.

I've still been a sexist ass, thinking of women as different and placing them in a different light without even noticing. But the idea of putting blame on them because I'm not getting what I'm entitled to isn't really something I went through.

 

I had elements of the phase where I feel like I thought I was in the ugly category and wasn't really going to attract the female attention that most of the good attractive guys would get, but I just thought that was a fact to be accepted and not something to blame women for. I was just pretty benignly resigned to my 'undateable' role.

 

It only now occurs to me that maybe I misunderstood a bit, and I'm still sort of describing what you guys meant, just a slightly different version of it. But either way I'm curious what you guys think.

 

I don't think I had a misogyny phase either. However, I did have a phase where I was pretty damn sure that I was unlovable and needed to make my peace with perpetual loneliness asap. A lot of that was characterized by self-hate that didn't really bear much distinction from just being angry at the world and everything in it. I think that's just growing up male, but it manifests itself differently in different people, sometimes barely noticeable but occasionally explosive and toxic.

[dibs]

I've always of the opinion that I am fucking awesome, but never of the opinion that anyone has to agree with me.

[Roderick]

Neither did I have a misogyny-phase, I grew up in an environment where from the start men and women were (at least at surface level) treated as equal. I never realized until later that women were at a disadvantage, culturally speaking. I did go through a mild nice guy phase, which I thankfully grew out of by reading up on it and improving myself.

 

I think a nice guy mentality is very easy to slip into, even without outside ideas. I was raised, and I assume many people are, with the idea that you should be friendly to people. It's not a weird thing for that to become your tactic when you want to seduce a person. Couple that with a youthful loathing of everything that was 'cool', and you can see how this recipe works out. Again, it was mild and thankfully I had the right resources and friends and online communities to get rid of those ideas.

 

I think basic 'love education', such as the Dr. Nerdlove articles on Kotaku, or Captain Awkward, can be a huge force in this for tons of adolescents dipping their toes in courtship.

[Ben X]

I didn't have the misogyny phase either, and I can only really think of one 'friend' who obviously did. (He was the only kid on my street so we hung out even though he was an arsehole, until a big falling out around the age of 12. We hung out once when I came home from uni for the holidays, and it was then I realised that he was also a creep, groping women in nightclubs and the like, and recommenced my avoidance of him.)

 

I did have relatively low self-esteem, though, which ironically caused some caddish behaviour up until my early twenties because it just did not occur to me that anyone would care enough about me to be hurt by my actions. Any romantic or sexual activity I put down to good luck rather than to do any good qualities on my part. Which I suppose you could say was a misogynistic attitude in the way that it ignored those women's social agency, but then I didn't have those thoughts about being rejected!

[James]

I don't think I had a misogyny phase either. However, I did have a phase where I was pretty damn sure that I was unlovable and needed to make my peace with perpetual loneliness asap.

Sounds familiar!

Yeah, I've certainly been guilty of sexist bullshit just like everyone else, but, unless my memory is deceiving me, I've never ascribed my frustrations to some failing in women (perhaps because I didn't have the confidence to open myself to rejection in the first place; i.e., I didn't make any serious attempts at a relationship until university). Before that it was mainly a lot of self-pity and self-loathing and I guess a certain amount of fishing for compliments. I feel quite embarrassed about that, but I hope I'm not deluding myself when I say I never blamed my frustrations on women.

[Merus]

I spent most of my formative years oblivious to the fact that there were different people, so I didn't really internalise any kind of attitude like that. You would have had to work pretty hard to convince me that girls were different to boys because to my mind they were all not-mes. I did go through an awkward "trying to be progressive but mostly making it worse" phase as an adult.

[Twig]

I'm perfect and I've never done anything wrong. Unlike other men. And women. And cows.

[Twig]

In fact I'm so perfect I had to post twice to make sure you knew.

[Nachimir]

I'd describe it as a sexist phase rather than a misogynist phase. If I'd believed ladder theory and kept pursuing that line of thinking, I might have ended up misogynist.

[SecretAsianMan]

I went through a "girls are icky and have cooties" phase when I was a child.  Does that count as misogyny?

[Ucantalas]

In high school I ended up putting a lot of emphasis on being in a relationship and basically defining my life on that fact... Of course this did not end up being a very good way to think. For a little bit I felt like blaming the people I asked out, but after my... oh, 5th or 6th rejection, I realized that its really not their fault, and that maybe I should focus on being a better person if I wanted to be in a relationship with anyone.

Just kidding, I got really depressed for a while and it wasn't until college that I realized I was putting too much emphasis on something not worth it, and that I really wasn't doing anything to improve myself.

[Problem Machine]

At some point, personally, I decided that relationships just weren't something I cared enough about to pursue. One of those things that I filed away in my mind as 'it would be nice', but never actually put any effort towards. I realized at some point that if it was something I wanted, I would have to actually work on it... and decided I didn't feel like it.

 

I think it was a valid decision, but that doesn't stop me from occasionally feeling like an outcast by society's standards.

[Bjorn]

In high school, I had a lot of female friends, but was at a complete loss to figure out how to actually talk to a girl I liked romantically/sexually.  I would say I was mostly just confused by girls and sex at that time.  But in my early 20s, I definitely went through a phase of being very angry about not being able to find a relationship or even get laid.  I remember the anger being very vague and general, not like misogynistically focused on women.  But at that point I was broke, had dropped out of college and worked a series of shitty dead end jobs.  I think my anger, depression and discontent was influenced by a pretty big range of things, but I certainly focused some of that on the frustrations of not having any fun sexy times.  Which, gee, surprise, when you're angry and depressed, fun sexy times do not often find their way to you. 

[Argobot]

I'm glad that all of you can be so open about this stuff. What you're describing isn't uncommon to women either; there are plenty of women who at different stages in their life, have felt like they are inherently unlovable or unattractive to people. The difference is that men are taught to feel entitled to sex and relationships, while women are taught that we have to earn the latter and gatekeep the former. If you're not in a relationship, then you're not doing something right (and here are the 10 cosmo tips on how to change that!) or if you're having sex but are not in a relationship, then you're a slut who no one will ever want to date. That kind of social conditioning doesn't lead to the anger that a lot of you have described, but it definitely can create a lot of feelings of self-loathing in women.

 

Not sure if that is worthwhile to the conversation, but I felt it might be good to contribute at least one perspective from the other side.

[Nachimir]

(Edit: That's interesting, thanks Argobot. I don't think I have much to say about it

Stuff below in response to Bjorn's post)

 

That's kind of how it was for me, though I too realised this:

 

Which, gee, surprise, when you're angry and depressed, fun sexy times do not often find their way to you. 

 

I was very intentionally steering clear of the manifesto type thing Eliot wrote, but someone linked it on Facebook. His mindset was weird, very intensely built up in an unhealthy way. He didn't believe he was a nice guy and that's why he deserved love/sex/etc. He believed he was a superior guy and deserved it on that basis, but it seems like none of his time was spent improving himself at all.

 

A great many times, he refers to women having "rejected him", but he never approaches or talks to them. As well as toxic PUA bullshit, he was also intensely into "The Secret", another bullshit ideology based around entitlement and woo. He repeatedly drove to Alabama to buy stacks of lottery tickets, believing on the basis of The Secret that if he just wished hard enough, he'd win the lottery and then he'd have a beautiful blonde girlfriend and kids, a mansion and get to rub it all in everyone else's face.

 

Potentially distressing parts in this spoiler tag:

 

After buying his first gun, he waved it around at home thinking "Who's the alpha male now, bitches?"

 

Everything in his mind was passed through a lens of hierarchy, and his repeated references to his impending killing spree were based around ideas of "overthrowing women". In the epilogue, he fantasises about a concentration camp, with him living in a tower at the centre and all of the women in the world starving to death as he watches.

 

His thoughts are some of the most misogynist things I've ever read. Sex would not have fixed this situation, and the PUAs claiming it would as some form of validation have dropped even further in my estimation. They are pond life, but I'm pretty sure Elliot was a psychopath. He shows an extremely volatile mix of soppy romantic ideals coupled with extreme narcissism. The police interviewing him weeks ago then concluding he was a "perfectly polite young man" doesn't stack up with the idea that he had Asperger's.

 

If that's correct, he'll be written off as "just a psychopath", and the incels/PUAs/MRAs etc. will take nothing from this

[Stuart]

Fuck everything.

 

[Apelsin]

I so hope all of those are trolls. But even if that were true... Yeah, fuck everything basically.

[Bjorn]

Not sure if that is worthwhile to the conversation, but I felt it might be good to contribute at least one perspective from the other side.

 

Absolutely valuable.  Because MRA types objectify and lump all women into a kind of single "other" entity, it can be easy to accidently do the same thing when talking about them because you are talking about their beliefs and writings, but not necessarily delving into the diversity and experiences of women.

 

 This is getting afield from Rodger himself, and more into general MRA/PUA stuff, but the obsession with sex as a commodity and the woman as object is so alien to me.  It seems like it all comes from a place of self-sabotage.  If your ultimate goal is just to have some sex, that's actually not that hard of a thing to accomplish in modern American society (particularly if you don't worry about pursuing whatever criteria you find personally attractive).  But their standards, methodology, attitudes and whatnot all create a situation in which having sex is next to impossible for them.  It's like what they really want is to be sexless, angry, hateful misogynists, and they've created a self-fulfilling breeding ground of resentment that would actually be really easy to escape from, if they wanted to.  They can't imagine, or accept, anything other than this elusive perfect power dominance of another human, something they've convinced themselves once existed and was lost. 

[Nachimir]

It's transference of any culpability for a situation from oneself to the outside world. In my case, I certainly felt some of that before developing an understanding of more than simply how I felt and what it immediately related to. That hatred also manifested in a taste for post-apocalyptic fiction, which faded as I became better adjusted.

 

Argobot, I didn't mean what I said about your post in my last one to sound dismissive, but it does now I read it back. Sorry.

 

What you describe actually reminds me massively of the religion I grew up in. Advocation of total abstinence from anything sexual (including masturbation) until marriage creates, funnily enough, chronically low self esteem among Jehovah's Witnesses. They have many other contributing standards beyond sex, but it's the biggest form of self-denial they practice. I think many kids who leave it the way I did (reading rather than partying) continue to struggle with that repression.

 

I got over it eventually, then gradually parsed the double standard. I got into some relationships with women who shocked me in how repressed their sexuality was, and how eerily similar that repression was to the remnants of cult conditioning in my own. It's not that they were disinterested in sex, it's that even in enthusiastically consensual situations it still took some work to draw that out of them. My own sexuality works kind of like that, the conditioning was deep and I think has probably had permanent neurological effects. Obviously, that stacks up poorly with the masculine image of being an insatiable, instantly erect alpha-monster. My own situation was extreme, but again once I was out of my early twenties I realised a lot of men don't and can't conform to that image either.

 

All of it, the sexual repression of women and alpha male hypersexuality have always had the stink of my culty upbringing about them. The double standard isn't just one half being denied something the other gets a free pass for; it hurts everyone.

[miffy495]

Neither did I have a misogyny-phase, I grew up in an environment where from the start men and women were (at least at surface level) treated as equal. I never realized until later that women were at a disadvantage, culturally speaking. I did go through a mild nice guy phase, which I thankfully grew out of by reading up on it and improving myself.

 

I think a nice guy mentality is very easy to slip into, even without outside ideas. I was raised, and I assume many people are, with the idea that you should be friendly to people. It's not a weird thing for that to become your tactic when you want to seduce a person. Couple that with a youthful loathing of everything that was 'cool', and you can see how this recipe works out. Again, it was mild and thankfully I had the right resources and friends and online communities to get rid of those ideas.

 

This, although not quite as mild. I spent a good portion of my teen years thinking "What the fuck is wrong with girls? Can't they see how nice I am?" before eventually realizing around age 19 how toxic that was. Oddly, for me one of the biggest pushes to getting over myself was having a friend who believed the same thing just enough more than me to strike me as kinda sketchy. Having a friend standing next to you who is a manifestation of a straw-man of a belief you have is a really good way to shake you from it.

 

At some point, personally, I decided that relationships just weren't something I cared enough about to pursue. One of those things that I filed away in my mind as 'it would be nice"...

 

That point for me coincided with getting over my "nice guy" shit. Oddly, when I gave up pursuing it all the time, I also stopped doing something that I didn't even realize I was doing. That is, when you're always on the lookout for sex, people have a tendency to have that as an unconscious subtext to pretty much every interaction with people they're attracted to. When I gave up on looking, I dropped that subtext without even realizing that it had existed in the first place. Now I have male friends who think I'm some kind of ridiculous player, when in reality I'm pretty sure it's that I just started thinking of sex as "something fun that people who like each other can do together", in the same category as board games or campfire singalongs, rather than as the goal of a social interaction. From what I've gathered from women I'm friends with, it's pretty much just that it's relaxing to be around a guy who doesn't care if you fuck him or not, so they hang around me. This meant that when I gave up, about three months later I found the partner that I've been with for 7 years, and I have a much more diverse and rewarding circle of friends than I would have otherwise. It's so sad to me the amount of pressure our society puts on sex, because it results in dudes like Rodger and it was exactly my rejection of that which made my life drastically better.

 

And yeah, Argobot, yours shows the other side very well. It feels weird sometimes to be the vocal feminist at a table with four other people when I have the only Y chromosome there, but I find myself having to remind people to think about what they're saying about others a lot. I have seen that there's actually quite a bit of anger there, but it's mostly directed at other women for "making the rest of us look bad." The amount of slut-shaming and other bullshit that is built into women by our society is a huge bummer. Sex: it just isn't that big a deal.

[syntheticgerbil]

It's interesting to read you guys saying that you think every guy goes through a phase of misogyny. Do you feel like this is universal or tied to any particular place or upbringing?

I think it's just me then, but I remember it was also at the same time of feeling way too alone and hateful towards most everyone not just women, and around 14-16 years of age. It also was sort of like Ucantalas was saying, where having a relationship with an actual person felt way too important. Also the group of friends I had growing up disappeared and I had to find new ones.

 

Sorry everyone, I didn't mean to paint with a broad brush!

 

His thoughts are some of the most misogynist things I've ever read. Sex would not have fixed this situation, and the PUAs claiming it would as some form of validation have dropped even further in my estimation. They are pond life, but I'm pretty sure Elliot was a psychopath. He shows an extremely volatile mix of soppy romantic ideals coupled with extreme narcissism. The police interviewing him weeks ago then concluding he was a "perfectly polite young man" doesn't stack up with the idea that he had Asperger's.

 

If that's correct, he'll be written off as "just a psychopath", and the incels/PUAs/MRAs etc. will take nothing from this

Everything you said is what I got from what I bothered to read. This guy had a severely warped mind. Is it so wrong he's written off as a psychopath? He clearly was for me. I don't think he is a good example of what happens when men get too in to this MRA and PUA stuff because he is extreme and over the top and there's not a whole lot to learn there. On a lot of his forum postings he's the most hateful person in the room and either everyone is ignoring him or someone calls him on it. I'd like to think those who get in to PUA/MRA/incel literature are redeemable and can be brought away from that mindset, but in no way was Elliot Rodger's redeemable at any point I can see.

 

As you point out, he had extreme narcissism. He could have very well just instead went with his racist side and made that what he wrote about every day and made his need to kill target people of color.

[Problem Machine]

Even if he was a psychopath, the way it manifested itself into a violent rampage, the justifications used for him to get there, that still matters. Even if he was a psychopath, there are still people posting comments saying that it's women's fault this happened because they wouldn't fuck this kid. Even in cases of extreme and violently-manifested mental illness, the dialogue of rage and entitlement that turns it into a rampage has to come from somewhere.

[Gormongous]

Even if he was a psychopath, the way it manifested itself into a violent rampage, the justifications used for him to get there, that still matters. Even if he was a psychopath, there are still people posting comments saying that it's women's fault this happened because they wouldn't fuck this kid. Even in cases of extreme and violently-manifested mental illness, the dialogue of rage and entitlement that turns it into a rampage has to come from somewhere.

 

Yeah, I agree completely. That's why I hate that the general public and the media are as obsessed as they seem to be about finding an ultimate cause and leaving it at that. Rodger might have found some reason to shoot up a university campus no matter what, because he was a very sick and hateful individual, but it doesn't change the fact that PUA/MRA culture was there to give him the reason that he actually did find. Not all ideologies are created equal in the type of worldview they encourage, so it's clearly a smoking gun here, but more attention needs to be paid to how PUA/MRA stuff interacts with mental illness, internet anonymity, and gun culture, because Rodger stood at the intersection of all those and made a series of decisions that most never do.