they clearly mean “ugly on the inside.”

/snark

They lament that women value men’s money and jobs so much, as if that makes women more shallow than men, who merely place a premium on a tight ass and clear skin.

This is so ridiculously true. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve read some schmuck on the Internet write about how shallow women are for only wanting rich guys, and how deep men are for only wanting hot women, I’d have a lot of dang old nickels. This is probably my favorite example.

And also, holy shit, if your best political rebuttal is, “Heh heh, you’re ugly!” it almost certainly means you have no intellectual ground to stand on.

I think this was actually one of the tactics used by the media in the late 60’s to malign the burgeoning feminist movement.  I remember reading about some major magazine (Time, Life, something like that) sending Diane Arbus, who was famous for photographing sideshow freaks, drag queens, and all sorts of other weirdos, to do the photos for an article on Redstockings (or maybe it was that group that Ti-Grace Atkinson* was the leader of?), in hopes that they would come off looking like a group of mannish extremists whose main problem was that they just couldn’t land a husband.  Even though most of them were either married or shacking up in protest of the institution of marriage.

*Who was yet another of the many quite striking women who tend to be feminists.  Seriously, if you’re going to argue that we’re all ugly, you might want to look at some of pictures of famous feminists over the years.

But they continue to support a system that creates these priorities for women, and try to resolve the contradiction by arguing that women are shallow from biology, not society.

Of course. If women weren’t golddiggers, then the reason you cculdn’t get laid would be your ugliness and horrible personality, not your lack of income, so you’d better do everything you can to make sure women remain golddiggers, so you won’t have to face your own personality flaws when lamenting how hard it is to get laid. If you’re one of the lucky rich ones who can get laid, you’d better make damn sure women only ever care about money, because that’s all you have to offer them.

I don’t know how I could sleep at night if I were a male misogynist, but I guess they must be used to quelling the misery and self-hate.

This is a pretty classic accusation about women’s rights advocates that predates the 1960s. The depictions of political women from the Seneca Falls attendees to Suffragettes to 2nd wavers have been almost uniformly caricatures and satires pointing to their shrillness and unattractiveness.

The accusation is that ugly women can’t manipulate an individual man to provide them everything they want so they have to bully all of society into giving them that they want.

I ran into Gloria at Smartbar last weekend and she would just *not* leave me alone.  I tried to let her down easy, but damn.  That girl gets 5 drinks in her and she gets persistent.

”...and how deep men are for only wanting hot women,...”

WTF???  How <u>does</u> that argument go??

WTF???  How does that argument go??

Honestly! We swears it! Read the thing I linked to. The guy waxes poetic about how when he falls in love with a woman, he falls in love with her hair and her smile and the way she walks, but women only fall in love with money and status. Umm, last time I checked falling in love with appearances are pretty much just as meaningless as falling in love with money/status. But, like junk science said, if you can’t see women as gold-diggers, you have to acknowledge they might not be attracted to you for legitimate reasons, no matter what sort of mental gymnastics you have to go through to keep believing that.

“They [women] are interested in how other people view him—how many people want to be around him, how other people interact with him and whether their interactions convey that he is special and amazing. They want him to be extremely outgoing”

You women are so shallow for liking dudes who have friends and can hold a conversation. 

Why oh why aren’t women attracted to silent creepy loners?

I like how he doesn’t mention her emotions, but “the way she breathes while experiencing different emotions.”  It’s so creepy, like she’s a lab rat and he’s testing response to different stimuli.

I remember one particular case from the early ‘70’s of a couple who seemed to be made for each other until the woman became very active in the feminist movement.  Said boyfriend bowed out of the picture when his friends began noticing how ugly the woman had suddenly become.

I have to say, for myself, that the realization I lived in a society that deemed me a miserable failure as a female because I didn’t look like Heather Locklear (uber icon of hotness in the mid-80s) was a catalyst for me becoming a feminist.  You are 100% correct, though, that it was not driven by a desire to make my male contemporaries desire me.  It was borne of white-hot anger at seeing how the patriarchy ladled out buckets of privilege to those stupid shallow louts while promising me a few crumbs if I was on my best behavior at all times, while apologizing profusely for my inadequate physical attributes.  Once that fact sinks in, it all clicks together.

Holy crap, Lauren!  What a find.  That’s a classic.

Interestingly, male dominance actually has a positive sexual value for ugly men, one that even the worst chauvinist will admit

Huh. This made me think of Flavor Flav and his abhorrent reality show, as all of those female contestants strived so vigorously to send womankind back a couple of decades. So will this now lead to “but what about the ugly menz!”-screeds by male trolls on feminist blogs? Yay, new bingo spot!

“That anyone can hold such a ridiculous fantasy without immediately dying from shame”

Seriously.

Notably missing from this list: Her opinions, thoughts, jokes, personality traits, or any of the stuff that people think of when they think “me”, i.e. the inside parts.

It’s so creepy, like she’s a lab rat and he’s testing response to different stimuli.

Not to cheer for the asshole team, but his description doesn’t strike me as that shallow or creepy at face value. If I’m in love with someone, I’m finding myself fascinated by little details like how their hair falls over their face or the shape of their hands, which only happens because I’ve already fallen for their thoughts or jokes or personality traits, and the tiny things that make up their physical presence remind me of who they are. I don’t go on to accuse them of only wanting me for my wallet, though.

Remembering some earlier posts on this topic, I like when Amanda refers to these guys collectively as “Mr. Collins”.

Holy Shit, Lauren O 09/06 @03:24 PM… that’s a link for the ages.

Notably missing from this list: Her opinions, thoughts, jokes, personality traits, or any of the stuff that people think of when they think “me”, i.e. the inside parts.  Your conscious existence.  The “deep” parts.

That link seems to basically be a self-portrait of a tortured, unhappy man. Amanda’s analysis seems apt. This guy does not seem to have really known women on an emotional level. I agree with Junk Science that his physical descriptions of women are not shallow or creepy in and of themselves. These are the sorts of things that anyone who experiences physical attraction to another human being will feel and notice. What’s strange and sad and creepy is that he’s so obviously fixated on these women, yet he also has such contempt for these “greedy materialistic prostitutes”. He is outside of the women’s world & knows this on some level. “She doesn’t care who he actually is or EXACTLY what he looks like physically, she only cares about the VALUE of the life he has constructed around himself.” The women he has surrounded himself with don’t really care about him.

He’s in a system, and he works this system to get women. But basically, this system sucks to him. His system works off of his sexual attraction to women on one hand and women’s desire for his stability and status and wealth on the other. And it’s an unbalanced, neurosis-making system—he even realizes this, and at the end of the post he is wishing for a way to balance the system by removing his libido, so that he could resemble his image of uncaring women. And since he’s never going to be rid of his libido, this is a vain pointless wish.

What he should realize is that there is a way to balance the system, just start hanging out with women who already have some security & status. These women wouldn’t need his money or house. Or, he could stop focussing so much on aggregating wealth and status, move to an apartment instead of a house, and then the women who only wanted status & wealth would have less reason to be with him. Either way, if he equalized the wealth/security level between himself and the women in his world, his problems with vastly unequal attraction ratios would probably fix themselves too.

But here’s the thing, if he has contempt for women & considers them to all be whores, does that mean he will stay away from women who already have wealth/status/security? Quite possibly. And if he thinks it is necessary to aggregate wealth, maybe he’ll never consider the option of giving away his wealth. So, he may end up just getting more and more callous as this crap system of his entraps him more and more.

Hard to see how this one is going to end.

Also, it is a little wierd how he looks at his own life situation and immediately generalizes to all of humanity. He hangs out with women who aren’t really attracted to him, just his money and house. Therefore, all men are like him, and all women are like the women he hangs out with. That’s too self-involved.

Huh. This made me think of Flavor Flav and his abhorrent reality show, as all of those female contestants strived so vigorously to send womankind back a couple of decades.

That show depressed me. I love Public Enemy, even in their current incarnation. So it was depressing to watch Flavor Flav be at the middle of that crap show, and obviously enjoy it. Just goes to show, talented people can be assholes.

So, to link this back to the topic of the post, I guess you could say that Lauren’s find, I guess call him X, is another inhabitant of the “Misogynist world”, but he’s more honest about its suckitude, even if he doesn’t totally get the reasons for this suckitude. Whereas the people who say, “Feminists are women who really, really want to fuck me—-a conservative asshole who radiates hatred of women—-but alas, I totally blew them off.  So they organized and are angry.” are more denying the suckitude.

Something like that. Does that seem accurate?

Either way, if he equalized the wealth/security level between himself and the women in his world, his problems with vastly unequal attraction ratios would probably fix themselves too.

The sneering, petty asshole in me finds it hard to believe that it’s wealthy, successful men who sit around writing craigslist screeds in their free time. Money may not buy happiness, but it’s a hell of a starting point, and it seems to me that genuinely unhappy rich people can find better ways than this to cheer themselves up. Rich men who think of women as whores are too busy buying pussy to complain about how women don’t love them for their beautiful souls. It’s like how men who think “women love assholes and reject nice guys” are always the “nice guys” in the equation, not the “assholes.” I think this is just another guy trying to figure out why he can’t get attention from women and conveniently skipping over “I’m an unhappy, self-absorbed misery addict.”

How does his theory explain all the feminist women who complain about sexual harassment and unwanted attentions from men?

How does his theory explain all the feminist women who complain about sexual harassment and unwanted attentions from men?

Oh, they’re just overreacting to totally normal social interaction.  Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

Personally I’d put the “feminists are ugly women” down to a combination of a convenient way of dismissing valid criticisms, and an attempt to hurt in the only way they know - because, of course, a woman can only value herself by her looks.

(This thread made me go back and read my last love letter to someone. I was nonplussed to note, pace Amanda’s comment at 6:29 above, that I spent 5 paragraphs praising *her* before mentioning her smell, which was the only physical attribute I noted.  I need to work on being a shallow asshole a bit more I think.)

So, in other words, they resent women and look for any excuse to hate on us.

So, in other words, they resent women and look for any excuse to hate on us.

Not women, per se.

They’re *afraid* of feminist arguments because they can’t engage them constructively. It’s difficult not to concede the assertion that women are as much people as men and, oops, once you do that, you have to concede that many feminist critiques have merit.  Therefore you have to find some way to dismiss them rather than engage them.  Of course, since ugly feminist lesbos only make these complaints because they’re too ugly to get men, you dan’t have to bother arguing with them, right?

And they want to hurt *people* they disagree with because they’re right-wing authoritarians.  It’s what they do.

They’d be the first to yell that they love women while engaging in this misogyny, and they wouldn’t be lying.  They love particular women, and they love a particular vision of women, limited and bent to conform with their vision of her natural place in society.

The sneering, petty asshole in me finds it hard to believe that it’s wealthy, successful men who sit around writing craigslist screeds in their free time.

Good point. Though, I still think he could be some dude who works to keep his lifestyle up and resents the need to do so. Someone who’s not exactly rich ‘n successful, but is working toward that.

This makes me think of two things: first, the male discussion of the looks of the women who sued the college I went to for sexual harassment—it was widely agreed that they were all kinda funny-looking, and that that explained the suit. (Because, I guess, if they’d been prettier they would have attracted a better class of harassment and been happy to sleep with their professors or something.) Second the advice my mother recounted from her father, telling her that she would never be pretty enough to catch a man, so she’d better be smart…

I’m in the group that thinks the description of falling in love physically is a little creepy, not in the sense that the writer is particularly skeevy, but in the sense that the whole damn patriarchy is creepy. Faling in love with someone’s physical side lets you project whatever emotions and thoughts onto them you want. And boy are they going to be in trouble if the real ones don’t match up.

Ah, Craigslist.  The personals are fantastic.  That’s also where I found the guy who was looking for <a href = “http://punkassblog.com/2007/12/29/i-dont-remember-prince-charming-talking-that-much-in-any-of-the-movies/”>his muse</a>, which is another entry in the Nice Guy field guide y’all might like.

Now how’d I fuck that up?  Here, take the link.  Just take it. http://punkassblog.com/2007/12/29/i-dont-remember-prince-charming-talking-that-much-in-any-of-the-movies/

Capitalists would love to have men spend as much on clothes and beauty products as women, but they haven’t been able to compel that behavior. 

Maybe it’s just easier for the market to up the ante for women.  We’re used to doing more about our physical appearance than men are, so higher standards for men can easily translate into even higher standards for women, for which there is already a commercial infrastructure.  We already have a place to go to wax our legs and eyebrows, it’s easier to add a room for waxing your crotch than it is to create that kind of space for men.  It’s easier to admit that we do it, too, and get information or recommendations or make a day of it with friends.  This is the general we, here, I am certainly not admitting to ever having gotten a Brazillian wax.

However, that said, I also find that men my age and younger do have ball-grooming standards that seem higher than those of older guys, insofar as I can tell.  This makes me think that men are frogs in a pot of water, it just takes time for the market, and cultural forces, to get the pot boiling.  If we go too fast, everyone might jump out.

atheist, I think the flaw in your suggestion for the craigslist guy is that independent women who do for themselves don’t have any desperation to latch onto to lure them into your life if you can’t win them over with looks or personality.

Yeah. Looking at it from a wider angle, the unnamed Craig’s list guy probably has issues that are deeper than just his economic and social milieu.

I’m in the group that thinks the description of falling in love physically is a little creepy, not in the sense that the writer is particularly skeevy, but in the sense that the whole damn patriarchy is creepy. Faling in love with someone’s physical side lets you project whatever emotions and thoughts onto them you want. And boy are they going to be in trouble if the real ones don’t match up.

OK, but, even if physical attraction does twist your mind & potentially make you believe things that aren’t true, it seems to me that it’s just part of being a human. Hell, being a primate.

Don’t you think that if a non-patriarchal society is ever achieved, people will still be physically attracted to each other in that society?

It’s not at all clear that physical attraction is part of being a primate, considering that our closest relatives appear to mate on either a quid-pro-quo or a social-status basis. And although it’s certainly a big part of being human, especially a male human, it’s also fairly overrated. (Of course, all the involvements I’ve had as a result of purely physical attraction have turned out middling-to-disastrous; the good ones have been about mental attraction with the physical side in significant part growing out of the shared intellectual pleasure. The initial crush on my spouse of 12 years or so was entirely textual in nature, for example.)

I think that in a non-patriarchal society, physical and mental attraction (for the values of “attraction” that include something like “falling in love”) will likely be more closely linked than today, because men and women will be more equal participants in conversations, and because there will probably be much less of the seeing from afar without ever communicating that goes with the traditional models of romantic love. But I could be entirely wrong.

If I’m in love with someone, I’m finding myself fascinated by little details like how their hair falls over their face or the shape of their hands, which only happens because I’ve already fallen for their thoughts or jokes or personality traits

That last part is what the Craigslist guy seems to be missing, which is what makes it creepy.

Don’t you think that if a non-patriarchal society is ever achieved, people will still be physically attracted to each other in that society?

Yeah, but when a society is not so reliant on judging women purely by their looks, being physically attracted to someone won’t be such a fraught issue. I mean, surely your physical attraction to someone is already linked to your mental attraction to them because you are not shallow. If everyone were like that, objectification and pedestal-putting-on probably just wouldn’t hardly ever come up.

Anyway, sorry for derailing the thread with that Craigslist thing! Didn’t mean to!

Yeah, but when a society is not so reliant on judging women purely by their looks, being physically attracted to someone won’t be such a fraught issue. I mean, surely your physical attraction to someone is already linked to your mental attraction to them because you are not shallow. If everyone were like that, objectification and pedestal-putting-on probably just wouldn’t hardly ever come up.

Lauren, thank you for assuming that I don’t purely shallowly lust after people’s bodies, ignoring their minds & lives.

However… I don’t know, I just think that in any situation where there’s humans, there’s likely to be lots of lusting after people’s bodies. If society put less emphasis on this feeling, and more emphasis on attraction toward people for mental things, then yeah that would be a big improvement. Maybe I’m just too cynical about this.

I don’t know, I just think that in any situation where there’s humans, there’s likely to be lots of lusting after people’s bodies.

I meant to make a distinction between feeling shallow physical lust for someone you don’t know and actually being in love with them and therefore fascinated by their physical traits, both of which I find entirely healthy and non-creepy. Obviously craigslist-screed-writers who have never gone beyond initial physical lust would have no idea of this distinction, which makes them less healthy and non-creepy.

Things like lust and objectification aren’t bad on their own. It’s when they become corrupted by a misogynistic worldview that they turn ugly. In a misogynist’s perfect world, women are purely objects to be lusted after by men, and whether they feel anything for men in return is a non-issue, because they have to say yes anyway.

If ugly women are organizing in protest that they aren’t getting attention from men, then wouldn’t their demands be for things that make men more likely to want us?

Yes, but these men deal with their rejection by women by demonizing and hating them, so they figure women do the same. If they could conceive of a more evolved response, they’d practice it in their own lives.

They’re incapable of “a more evolved response.” Judging from this response, the porn industry has a firm grip on them. It’s the lens through which they define who women are and what women want. It’s all they know.