I’ve been feeling a bit low just lately, what with it getting dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. It’s the kind of lifestyle in the kind of latitude where you realize that it’s entirely possible that you became a vampire weeks ago, and you just haven’t noticed because sunlight hasn’t touched your skin since god knows when.
One of the things I’ve done to try to avoid sinking into serious depression is spend more time with the women I’m involved with, including making a point of seeing up to three girlfriends in 24 hours. One reason for this, obviously, is that spending time with people who love us can, in some cases, really help with mood issues. The other reason is, equally obviously, much much creepier. Reminding myself that I have all these girlfriends makes me feel like a big man, for societal reasons I’d like to dig into a bit. Bring a shovel and a revolver; it’s gonna be one of those Indiana Jones kinda digs.
It’s no secret that part of how a man is judged in our society is by the woman or women he’s got around him. This, oddly, isn’t tied to the perception of the man’s sexiness, it’s more perceived as a measure of his success (of friggin’ course). Some people take this to sociopathic extremes, of course, but let’s face it, there’s a reason “trophy wife” is a trope everyone knows.
I unironically love the man’s music, but seriously. She’s almost exactly his daughter’s age.
Now, there’s certainly a generous reading of this impulse; if you prioritize schtupping attractive women (for whatever definition of attractive you like) in your own life, then actually schtupping a lot of them does, by definition, count as a genuine success. You intended to do it, and you succeeded! Well done, old chap! Obviously, this is the interpretation I prefer to apply to myself.
No one here is my type, but I still feel an odd impulse to applaud.
Thing is, it’s still problematic as fuck. On the most obvious level, there’s the fact that it undeniably objectifies women, turning them from human beings into… well, “trophies” is actually the word everyone uses. Hence my guilt about, on some level, thinking of the women I love as a collection of prizes that prove how awesome I am. Yeah, it’s an enculturated notion and it’s not like I made it up, but… damn, I want to punch myself in the head.
Ow. That was ALSO a bad idea.
Here again, though, Ozy’s Law is like Ozy’s love: merciless. The flip side of the idea that being waist-deep in pussy makes a guy successful and awesome is that guys who aren’t… well, they must be losers. Failures. In that endlessly mockable Roissy piece I’ve now linked twice, he explicitly says that no other form of masculine achievement is of any worth whatsoever. Thus, this ridiculous, sexist, ugly idea also serves to make more men feel like failures.
Asexual or just low libido? Doesn’t matter, loser. Monogamous with one person your whole life? Doesn’t matter, loser. Only into long-term committed relationships? Pffff, yeah right, you must be gay. Actually gay? …okay, maybe that’s a different issue.
Maybe not that different.
Perhaps most commonly, you get the attitude that’s all over, among other places, the comments in Ozy’s Nice Guy threads. The genuine pain of guys who’d like to be with more women than they are, but it’s not working out for whatever reason. Then there’s the ugly resentment that often comes out of that pain, which is as unfair and indefensible as me looking at my girlfriends like so many Steam achievements, but alas, is just as enculturated.
The fact is, it’s very easy for a guy to take “No thank you, I would prefer not to touch your penis” as “You are a worthless human being, a loser, a failure, worthy only of contempt and the mockery of your peers. You will die alone in a ditch and be eaten by wolves and nobody will miss you.” The system is set up so that the former actually implies the latter. Sleeping with women=success, not sleeping with women=failure, so therefore if a woman declines to sleep with you, she has on her own authority made you a failure.
This is, of course, utter horseshit. “No thank you, I would prefer not to touch your penis” means only what it says. The lady declining the ride on any particular baloney pony is not calling the pony owner a loser, she’s just saying no thanks, and then this ugly, dehumanizing cultural expectation comes in and calls him a loser. Since these happen almost simultaneously, though, it gets real easy to conflate them. Take things the wrong way, put the wrong spin on them based on some bad unexamined assumptions, and… well, we’ve all seen the kind of vicious misogyny that can result, haven’t we?
So once again, we see misogyny inextricably bound up with misandry, and not bound up in a sexy way. The only way out that I can see is to begin to separate out the assumptions from the actions. That feeling of worthlessness that comes over you when the lady (or gentleman, or whatever term you prefer) of your desire rejects you has nothing to do with her. That feeling is entirely separate, and comes down to us from a million sniggering locker-room jokes, a million sneering virginity references, from… well, probably every single thing that happened to you in high school. Including that one geometry test, somehow.
This, to my mind, is the point of examining and dissecting men’s issues. We can separate out the actual sources of our pain and alienation from the unspoken assumptions that we take for granted, and we can begin actually addressing the real issues. The more we dig down beneath the surface, the more things turn out to be caused by unspeakably awful forces we never suspected. I warned you this was gonna be some Indiana Jones shit.
About Noah Brand
NSWATM is sometimes mildly triggering for me when people here describe their very successful/active sex lives.
This, so much. On Manboobz too, actually. I get so tired of people bragging about how much sex they’re having when I don’t even have a sex life…
Advice tends to be overwhelmingly “Well, duh, confidence is attractive, you won’t be attractive if you don’t have confidence” and then at the same time there are incredibly strong implicit assumptions that if you’re really unsuccessful with women, you’re both a loser, *and* that that you deserve to be alone.
I really hate this. One problem with this is, a lot of the people who aren’t successful with women don’t have confidence (due to, for example, being systematically harassed and persecuted in school), and can’t just magic it up out of nowhere. And this on top of whatever other social awkwardness they might have. And the best source of confidence with women is, of course, success with women, which you need confidence for, making the whole thing a stupid Catch-22…
Agreed, telling guys they’ll attract women, or in my case guys, by being more confident is roughly as helpful as telling guys they’ll be more attractive if they grow a few inches taller.
What gets me is the way that people are always told that shit about confidence – ‘just be confident! duh!’ , which for the unconfident folks, just being told to ‘be confident’ results in feeling less confident! Like, oh great now I can feel insecure about my confidence level. Same with being told ‘just be yourself’, cuz then alla sudden you become conscious of your ‘self’ and what it’s doing and if it looks weird while it’s doing it.
Well, at least that’s how it works for me… it’s all meta and whatnot.
@Pterygotus
“I really hate this. One problem with this is, a lot of the people who aren’t successful with women don’t have confidence (due to, for example, being systematically harassed and persecuted in school), and can’t just magic it up out of nowhere. And this on top of whatever other social awkwardness they might have. And the best source of confidence with women is, of course, success with women, which you need confidence for, making the whole thing a stupid Catch-22…”
Amen. And then to top things off, you don’t just need to be confident in who you are, you need to be assertive – confident in *how people will react to you*, which is even more strongly tied to experience than regular confidence is. Believing that you’re an awesome person only gets you halfway if you aren’t used to people reacting to you like you’re awesome, which requires experience or general social validation.
Speaking as someone who seems to be getting away with improving the whole confidence thing: a useful substitute for it is going “Ehh, fuckit” and just trying not to worry about it. I realise that’s really quite difficult, but I think it’s a little more practical than just magically Becoming More Confident. If you manage to adopt the attitude that it doesn’t actually matter whether you succeed in impressing the person you’re talking to, it looks like confidence…
It’s not easy, it may not be something you can just do, and it might take something fairly major happening to get it working, but it can happen.
For me, I said, “fuck those type of chicks” and changed where I was hanging out and who I was hanging out with. I didn’t do that well in pick up joints or clubs but I did well at things like office parties and when I had to travel to different company sites. Instead of going to a club maybe I’d do happy hour after work. Now it’s not that I’m going around hitting on 40 year old women…it was just that in this type of environment I had the 40 year old women pining for me. Having the attention of real adult woman was (for me) 1,000 times better than the fake attention from MeanGirls(TM). And I didn’t have to change who I was or how I acted. My change was that I learned I was hanging out in the wrong places to meet the kind of women I wanted to get involved with.
Some of you may already have read The Man With No Spine – it’s been around for about a decade already, but I want to link it for those who haven’t seen it yet.
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The Man With No Spine – A parable for “Nice Guys”
By John Russell
There once was a man without a spine.
He was a very likable guy. The advantage of not having a spine was that he could fit himself to anyone, and he frequently did. He could flex this way and that.
But he couldn’t stand up …
…and being kinda mushy and flat most of the time, people often walked on him without realizing he was there.
…
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It continues here (imo it’s actually sort of heartwarming, and it has a happy ending) : http://www.heartless-bitches.com/rants/niceguys/spineless.shtml
- and also a trigger warning for those tempted to peruse the rest of the heartless bitches rants section