He starts his little essay with an observation he claims is true.
“The army of unfuckable hate nerds”—Marc Maron’s term for the mass of young men who pollute the internet with their misogyny. “They play video games all day,” the comedian said on his podcast, “then they watch MMA, then they spend the evening jerking off to … porn, then they put a few hours” into attacking women online.
He’s right, of course. There are hordes of these young men (and, no doubt, of not-so-young ones). They congregate on Twitter, in comment threads, on forums and platforms like Reddit, Discord, Kiwi Farms, and 8kun, the successor to 8chan. They trade in misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and assorted other hatreds. Their words are violent and vile.
OK, but I would have gone on to qualify that with a “not all men,” because I do think he’s talking about a small vocal minority of horrible young men. That’s not Deresiewicz’s tack, though. Instead, he’s going to ask his readers to sympathize with them, because — brace yourself, he’s going to merge with the mob of misogynists — women are bad and have it so easy.
Any young woman who is even moderately attractive will be courted, complimented, paid attention to, by women as well as men. Older men will buy them things. People will hang on their words even when they aren’t interesting and laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. They will have entry into places—private clubs, backstage after a show—young men can only press their noses against. They will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men. Young men, meanwhile—those losers, those loners, those apes—are left to pick their psychic zits on the periphery.
There’s more. Young women can have sex whenever they want. For most young men, persuading a woman to sleep with them is like trying to crack a safe. You understand that it’s theoretically possible, but you have no idea how to do it. Which means that you’re stuck with your hard-on. Unfuckable? No one needs to tell you that. You are unfucked: unwanted, unattractive; in the most literal sense, unloved.
Wow. No wonder he saw truth in Maron’s description. It’s because he was one of those awful women-hating young men, and he never outgrew it! He’s unable to see the world through the eyes of the women he describes, a world where they are rewarded for being subservient and dependent on older men, where they can advance by clinging to the coattails of men, where they are expected to submit to sex at will with men who might kill them.
I was a young loser once, too, but I managed to get over it by not thinking of women as bodies to be exploited, but as my peers who were trying as best as they could to make it through life. There are no excuses for “misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and assorted other hatreds.” But for Deresiewicz, the problem now is misandry. After stereotyping young women as having it easy, he thinks the solution is that we have to stop stereotyping young men and treat them with love and respect. Sure. Too bad he has no respect to offer women.
Man, Deresiewicz just let his ugly self hang out exposed, thinking that more misogyny would justify young men’s misogyny. It just doesn’t work that way.
Have these people perhaps considered that putting sexual intercourse at the heart of their mental world is not exactly the healthiest thing to do?
WONT SOMEONE THINK OF THE ASSHOLES!?
Two suggestions for William Deresiewicz, if he wants to impress women: Common courtesy and good personal hygiene.
@ F.O, # 2: Good one!
That’s just sad. I’m an old fart now, but I never felt that way about women and I never lacked their company. My mother gave me some sage advice when I was 15. She said if you wanted to be liked by girls you have to listen to them, let them talk, get to know what they wanted. Girls love to talk, often much more than we guys do. Sure, I wanted to have sex, but once that hour of fun is done you have to be able to converse, play, dance, do mutually enjoyable things together, cook her a good meal, walk and talk. And maybe, just maybe, show them that you might be good for the long run. There was no internet in my day (I said I was an old fart) so I had to ratchet up my courage and actually talk to the girls. Face-to-face. Show them that I wasn’t interested in just fucking, which is, I have to admit, not that easy when you’re 17 and get a boner whenever a pretty girl sits next to you. It’s that damn Golden Rule again. Treat them the way you wish to be treated. Why do so many guys find this so hard? Be nice and nice things may happen to you too. Pornhub is not a user’s guide for developing a relationship with a woman.
I second much of R. L. Foster’s comment @5. I (39M) have had 3 sexual partners in my life (all women) and never had to persuade any of them to have sex with me. The last 2 were, in fact, eager to have sex with me. Now, sure, people tell me I am attractive and, OK, that’s probably true since I am an athlete and take good care of my physique…but I think the “secret” of my success is that I wanted to get to know them as people as my first priority. Having sex was secondary, if not even further down in priority.
Oh, and then I feel the need to remark on Deresiewicz’s suggestion that women “will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men.” If that were true, why aren’t there more women executives? Seems like he’s full of shit on that point.
@6: The idea that women can have sex whenever they want is a lie, too. For one because it’s ignoring any social consequences they might face, up to and including the political movement telling them that if they so much as show skin they deserve any sexual assault or unwanted pregnancy that might result.
For two because it’s always imagining the sort of person they might hit on…but women don’t all have the appearance or social skills to find the relationships they want either. The term “involuntary celibacy” came from a website by a woman before it was taken over by these creeps.
This reads like “black pill” ideology, which is a cancerous evolution of “red pill”,/incel ideas, even more anti-feminist misogynist, full of Petersonian evopsych bs
False equivalence
See, boys/men can have like 80% chance if orgasm with a random encounter. And like (making stats up) 10% change of horrible stuff happening women, like 10% chance of orgasm and 20% chance of horrible.
There is a reason I don’t do one night stands
And it’s not because teen girls don’t want to fuck themselves stupid
False equivalence
See, boys/men can have like 80% chance if orgasm with a random encounter. And like (making stats up) 10% change of horrible stuff happening women, like 10% chance of orgasm and 20% chance of horrible.
There is a reason I don’t do one night stands
And it’s not because teen girls don’t want to fuck themselves stupid
The real issue is a culture that puts entirely too much social value in having/being able to get a girlfriend/boyfriend.
Admittedly I was growing up in the south in the don’t ask don’t tell era, but boys who hung out with boys and didn’t talk about it or give the appearance of pursuing girls were called “faggots”. The entire high school social fanfic seemed to be concerned about who was dating who, what each person’s “types” were, which teachers were gay/dating, etc. It at least gave me a schewed perspective of personal value that I had to work on to rectify. It also served as quite a strong contrast to the description of high school life in “A Separate Peace” (one of the required reading for English Lit at the time) which IIRC has no mention of any romantic interests at all.
LOL.
We had to read that one too.
I didn’t much like it because it is sort of a pointless tragedy and one of the main characters dies young and implausibly.
There is a reason why there is no mention of romantic interests at all.
It’s set at an all boys boarding school in New Hampshire. No girls.
It was written in 1959.
I know zero about what it is like going to an all boys residential school which aren’t common on the west coast and certainly not in the rural nowhere area I grew up in.
There might be romantic interests at an all boys boarding school, but any novels with that in it aren’t going to be required reading in high school for obvious reasons.
There could have been all kinds of romance going on, suppressed.
Just about every sentence William Deresiewicz wrote about girls and women is just wrong.
The one thing he got right is waving around enough gigantic Red Flags so any women know to run away as fast as they can when they see him.
He comes across as hostile and dangerous.
Not exactly true.
Young and not so young women can also get pregnant, whether they want to or not.
And there is a huge segment of our society who are making pregnancy into a forced birth/female slavery condition.
In Red states, women by law aren’t allowed to control their own bodies or their own lives, thanks to the overturn of Roe versus Wade.
And a child, wanted or not, is a life long major cost and responsibility.
This is something a creep like Willian Deresiewicz will never have to worry about.
You can tell that he hasn’t even bothered to think about it.
In theory, men are supposed to pay child support but that doesn’t happen a huge amount of the time and there isn’t much in the way of enforcement for that.
@FO #2 – classic comment!
I have been a “lurker” for quite some time here, and just recently decided to sporadically comment, but what always leaves me awestruck in questions about sex and/or gender is how some people can be so incredibly reductionist and ignorant to ignore everything that might add nuance and complexity to it, starting from a fact everyone can at least narrowly grasp right away druign their lifetime : history
Ugg. At asshole quoted in OP: Could we stop with this ridiculous obsession that playing video games makes you less of a man or something? It’s getting really annoying.
Ew.
This shit is why women and other non-men don’t want to date cis men!
Assholes like this give social awkward, straight, cis guys who can’t find love a bad name.
His description in the second quote… does appear to be in line with these hate nerds’ warped perception of reality. If we offer him maximum benefit of the doubt, and assume that this is what he is trying to convey, there is — almost — some grain of truth there. Where he goes wildly off the mark, I think, is in suggesting that there can be any comparison between the overt, vitriolic hate that the Online Asshole Brigade directs at women and at anyone who won’t take their side, and the repulsed reaction that literally everyone else has to said Online Asshole Brigade. A response of horror, or fear, or even revulsion to bigoted viciousness is not hatred. And while such reactions may not do much to deradicalize the Online Asshole Brigade, that is not and can never be our top priority.
I am a big advocate of empathy for monsters. I think it helps us maintain our own humanity and makes us more effective in our attempts to change the world. This always, always needs to be contextualized with the point that our first priority is preventing them from harming others, though. Rehabilitating the monsters and educating them out of monstrousness is a distant second, if that. And even in the most charitable reading possible, Deresiewicz does no such thing. As a result, he provides cover for the monsters far more than a useful perspective to the rest of us. It’s a really bad take, no question about it.
Jeanmeslier @ 16
Some people get an opinion when they are teenagers and never re-evaluate it. Thus we have big demographics ruled by ideas so simplistic that 15-year-olds can grasp them.
And it is no coincidence that there is a big overlap between “sexist assholes” and “racist assholes”. They collect simplistic ideas like it was pokemon.
GerrardofTitanServer @17
We have learned (or maybe ,hopefully already knwon), on this blog, but also by hopefully using our own brains and non-stagnant but progressive ideas
that there is no marker that makes you “less” a woman/man/other , it is silly especially that it often comes , in this case from gender essentialists who insist on a signel bioligcal marker and at the same time use a social marker (such a a hobby) to define “manhood”, almost like they expose themselves all the time
@birgerjohansson #17
If it is not power, hegemony or hatred that drives a right winger, it is commodity.
Saying we can get laid whenever we want speaks volumes about how this pompous bellend sees women – no humanity, no individual preferences, just a hole between two legs and a light that goes green or red. Hopefully always red for him.
And even that barely-registrable awareness is limited to “hot” women. Despite being well below average in the attractiveness stakes himself, he literally does not include average women in his definition of ‘women’. We don’t exist. The billions of us who can get laid any time we want… as long as we don’t care who by.
I literally had one of those dreams that feel like an all-nighter last night, about my years-long crush in high school who never gave me a second glance. This was like 30 years ago and I still remember knowing it was hopeless and yet my heart skipping a beat every time I saw him. It’s just a bittersweet memory now, but how mad it is that some men lack even the tiniest crumb of empathy for their fellow human beings despite EVERYONE going through this at some point.
@mooskaya #24
I dont even know if incels, TERFs and other regressives deserve this any of discussion about them. The only reason it is needeed is due to the damage they inflict on society. Because one would think that anyone with a working brain would view what you wrote from §2 as self-evident and -explanatory
[Women] will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men.
This sentence makes the whole argument self-refuting. If wimmen really have so much more opportunity than men, then who do they have to bat their eyelashes at? Their mothers? If more of them actually got up to CEO level, then younger women wouldn’t be able to bat their eyelashes at ’em, would they?
To the extent that the injustices against men and boys, as alleged by the MRAs, are real, they’re injustices perpetuated by OTHER MEN; and bashing and blaming women for all of it is pretty much the opposite of an appropriate response.
Also remotely reminds me of JayPee’s “idea” that women who are “sexy” in the workplace are giving men an “invitation”. But yes, it is the feminists and womenz who dominate the world.. by fighting for basic rights and dignity while the MRAs and whatever pillers provide no solution to any “problem”, they just spread hate and propaganda, utilising mass psychology at its best to radicalize people in need of help against an “enemy” commonly hated.
@12: I was at a boys-only boarding school in Hampshire from 1956–62 (yes, I am old) and at another school, all boys and mostly boarding, in London from 1962–66. I am sure there was plenty of masturbation going on, especially at the second one (introspective memory confirms this; ah, Raquel Welch! Ursula Andress!), but remarkably little even semi-overt homosexuality. Amusingly, I was at Oxford (67–70) with a contemporary from that school who everyone, including me, had thought must be gay (queer, faggot, etc); he had one of the most vigorous heterosexual dating lives of anyone I knew. Girls seemed to like someone who was a little fey.
So very much wrongness. Let’s pick it apart now that no one’s in this thread any more! (I was busy this week).
Any young woman of any level of attractiveness will also be called an number of slurs, including ugly. They will be harassed, followed, and “complimented” things that are gross. The attention they receive will be unpleasant as often as not.
Older men will have money in which to buy them things. Money that they, as young women, do not have. These things will not be gifts. There are strings attached.
What the hell world is he living in? Women, especially attractive women, are told over and over again that they aren’t funny. Women are expected to hang on the words of men, find them interesting when they are not, and laugh at their jokes when they aren’t funny. This isn’t to gain the pleasure of their company; this is a survival technique taught young.
They will be part of the atmosphere of those places, not participants of. And again, this isn’t for “Moderately attractive women”. This is for attractive women, and a small percentage of them. Most women are invisibly pressing their noses with those young men.
No. Just, no. That’s not how this works at all. To advance professionally, women will have to navigate a minefield of harassments, assault, and culture that renders them after-thoughts at best.
Except some of them eventually become those powerful old men. Those professional women will grow older, and if they do make it to the top will be accused of sleeping their way up.
Young women cannot have sex whenever they want. The most attractive women can’t even guarantee to get the sex they WANT whenever they want. The fact that he doesn’t seem to see the act of “sex” from anything besides his perspective is really, really irritating.