I was going to write something about how if there was a war and millions of men were dying after being drafted, this conversation would be easier - they were talking about drafting women in the Republican debate last night - but then I remembered that suffrage happened in Britain so quickly after WW1. Why bother.
Dismissing historical sexism as a minor issue is an utterly "let them eat cake" attitude...I get it - it's the "women are happier when men dominate them" argument.
When I weigh the human turmoil wrought by feminism against that experienced by women under the patriarchy with the scales of justice, it's not even close. It's like weighing a cannonball against a feather.
That was flippant. I take it back. It’s more like the weighing a pyramid against fifty cannonballs.
I know exactly how much that feather, I mean, 50 cannonballs, weighs - the misery of women under the patriarchy is extensively documented and distributed in the education system and pop culture. Women were beaten and mistreated by their husbands, female geniuses had their talent wasted (Mozart’s Sister!), or at best they did work that their husbands took credit for, or a woman crying when she heard from a job interviewer that she was qualified but they would never hire her because she would take the job from a man who might need it to support his family. And then there's the ubiquitous humiliation - I saw a Buzzfeed video on what it feels like to be a woman, and the picture of a hypothetical history poster with 43 female presidents left a deep impression on me. I'd previously dismissed the need for a female president qua female president as silly, but that image made me get it. It was deeply disquieting, chilling even. I'm fairly neurotic on the Big Five, and I'd like to credit myself with an active imagination, and that picture really brought the notion of sexism to life. It would definitely make me think of myself less, straightjacket me with the notion that I was destined for subservience, etc, etc.
Then there’s the fact that you can’t overcome your ugliness with money and fame. This is such a dreadful fact that I would never even think to discuss RP with a woman below 8/10 because her resentment is more fiery, and will last longer, than the sun.
I feel your pain. (And I've been depressed myself, no that's not me, but I get it.) Our culture makes it incredibly easy with empathize with women.
Everything you could possibly bring up about the agony of women under the yoke of structural sexism wouldn't change my mind in the slightest, because you couldn't possibly tell me something I didn't know about (on a general level). Our culture is saturated with that information.
But you couldn't possibly get mine, or that of millions of men. It goes far beyond what you see in MerP, RP doesn't even scratch the surface. It's a hub for social tactics, not expressing your sorrow, and the attitude is that of faux-triumphalism. That's the culture there. The pain is largely unspoken. No man would ever dismiss the female need for affection and social interaction with the ease you dismissed the male need for sex. That you don't get it is blatantly obvious. If you did, you'd understand that you don't really get it.
The more I understand women, the more I understand that I can never empathize with them 100%, that I'll never get them like their female friends do, because the psychological distance is just too great. I'd put the average man's understanding of women at 15%, myself at 55%, and your understanding of men at 20%.
But there’s understanding, and then there’s empathy, and then there’s gender-specific empathy, and that’s where women fall short, and it’s obvious. I don’t have ESP, but I can infer your lack of empathy from the way you cussed me out, multiple times, when I hesitantly unfurled some of the more offensive facts about male sexuality. I would put the average man’s empathy with women at 20%, the reverse at 5%, and my own at, again, 55%.
…..
God, I can’t believe I have to go through things that are so rudimentary, but here I am.
Let’s, first of all, suspend the question of whether the high value that men place on on sex, and female beauty, is the result of nature or nurture, whether it’s “natural,” etc. I won’t argue that, you can assume however much you want to that it’s a result of pop culture or socialization, etc.
But that most men placing an overwhelming value on it, would go to extraordinary lengths to obtain it, treasure it, that it gives them great joy, that most men work backbreaking jobs and earn a high income just for that purpose, is an undeniable fact. This is exaggerated, but 85% true. When a man says that a dead bedroom, or a virtual dead bedroom, is like spiritual death, they’re no exaggerating. But when they cry out in pain, and they say that the pain is a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, it gets dismissed.
When a little girl is sad because all of her friends are wearing designer brands, or that her peers’ parents drive them to school in nice cars, we don’t just dismiss it as nothing. When a woman is angry that her boyfriend forgot their anniversary, we don’t just dismiss it as nothing. When that blonde girl from Bunheads cried to ballet teacher because she lost her virginity to a super cute guy who then didn’t call her back, I didn’t think, wow, what an emo, she had sex with a hot guy, what’s her problem?
When women spend obscene amounts on designer dresses, handbags, etc my first thought isn’t that their expenditure was a waste, a pathology that should be eliminated, but that, well, different folks have different things that make them happy. I don’t think it would be OK if someone robbed them since their values aren’t real values.
“Women are mysterious,” means, “I don’t understand, but I’ll acknowledge that her description of her own lived experience is valid.” When women think they get men, they’re just pathologizing all the aspects that they don’t get as cancerous offshoots of incorrect nurture that will inevitably be eliminated in the future generations.
The amount that men are willing to pay, in the context of their total income, for prostitutions (and risk their assets in a marriage) is a pretty good proxy for how much happiness sex brings to them. Some are willing to pay $10,000 for a single night. Some lose their entire fortunes to prostitutes.
The decline in the amount of sex had as a a result of the sexual revolution and female independence has dealt a catastrophic blow to total male happiness. Dead bedrooms were a thing in the past, because of marital rape. That along, to me, would easily outweigh the career aspiration of a few thousand scientists and doctors and captains of industry who find their jobs really really self-actualizing. Most women, like most men, don’t have self-actualizing jobs.
And then there’s all the abuse in the divorce courts, alimony, etc, but there’s so much more than that.
When a man works his whole life to become a good man in the hopes that his virtuous behavior will be rewarded in some way by women, and find out that in fact the opposite is true, that he’s been lied to his whole life, that the entire system is designed, if not intentionally, to bamboozle him and suck him dry, there’s a necessary crisis of faith. You see this in the declined morals of post-Soviet countries. When you live under the reign of treachery and deception, it erodes your morals. You become nihilistic.
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” - Theodore Dalrymple
If you look at history, committed cads are exceedingly rare, and even they want to settle down eventually. RP life as a mass phenomenon is a social mutation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Hefner
"Before the wedding, Mildred confessed that she had an affair while he was away in the army. He called the admission "the most devastating moment of my life.” A 2006 E! True Hollywood Story profile of Hefner revealed that Mildred allowed him to have sex with other women, out of guilt for her infidelity and in the hopes that it would preserve their marriage. The two were divorced in 1959.”
Love is a fragile thing. Every piece of evidence for the fact that chicks dig jerks chips away at a man’s ability to believe in love. The more freedom women have, the more you see open hypergamy and asshole-chasing, and the more men there are who can’t believe in love.