#male bullshit stories

[lebensmudewing]

I made a correction in this post, I developed a bit some things and added a new section.

Why "male loneliness epidemic" is a male supremacist psyop [corrected ver.]

I said in a former post that the "male loneliness epidemic" is not real and is a male supremacy psyop, and I want to explain more broadly why it is.

Manosphere

If you don't know about it yet, there is a thing called "Manosphere", a name that stands for a group of communities created by men and oriented towards men. Manosphere is composed of incels, redpill, blackpill, MGTOW and MRA ideologies.

Incels are "involuntary celibates", men who want to date but can't do it. The term was created by a woman called Alana (invcel) and mostly referred to people who felt isolated and incapable of forming romantic relationships or trapped in a dying relationship. But nowadays it is tied to a broad ideology that I will explain later.

Redpill stems from the Matrix scene where Neo has to choose between the redpill and the bluepill, being the redpill the one who will awaken him. The whole ideology started to take its form in pick-up artistry forums such as SoSuave, and states that in order to mate and get laid a lot you have to become a "high value male", while also understanding "female nature". The original big three exponents of this ideology were Rollo Tomassi, Chateau Heartiste and Roosh V, but nowadays only Rollo remains moderately relevant.

Blackpill is the most pessimistic and nihilistic version of the redpill, it is tied to incels but is not exclusive of them. It focuses on biological determinism, and states that the most important thing on mating is looks. That seems innocent at first sight, but this ideology also states that most men are not attractive to women, and they are having a soft harem relationship with “Chad”, a highly attractive man, in detriment to average men and creating incels in the process.

MGTOW started as an independent community, with a first manifesto written in 2001 in a male focused forum. In the manifesto they advocated in favor of a society with enforced gender roles and a smaller state. But nowadays they are connected to redpill and blackpill. It is mostly overlooked, but in Spanish communities there are also two other manifests, MGTOW 2.0 and MGTOW 3.0. I don't know if there is a fourth one nowadays, but they help to understand the transition MGTOW has made over the years and how manosphere ideologies have been adopted by this group.

MRA stands for Men's rights activism, also called Men's rights Movement (MRM). The father of the movement is Ernst Belfort, who wrote against women's rights and the "legal subjection" of men, in response to feminists and John Stuart Mill. Nowadays it is also tied with redpill, given that prominent figures of the movement promote or believe in redpill ideology, such as Paul Elam or Karen Straughan.

In 2014, Cassie Jaye who was allegedly a feminist by that time, did a documentary on MRA called "The Redpill". It's not clear why she called it that way, but it is suspected that it was with the purpose of dragging more people on the redpill. It is also said that she received money from r/Theredpill subreddit. The documentary was international, since it reached both English and Spanish audiences (I don't know much about other languages/countries). It exposes a lot of problems men face, such as dying in war, losing custodies and domestic violence, but never explains what MRAs do to help those men.

That term

Once you become familiar with all these communities, you start to see how they are all the same. They share the same stats, the same studies, the same terms, the same narratives. The only thing that changes is the label, if the members can or not to have sex with women, if the members want or not to have sex with women, and if the members "care" or not about society.

One of the core terms that is transversal to almost all communities is "Hypergamy". (The central one on MRA is Gynocentrism). And it is a tricky one.

Men in these communities are used to gaslight and belittle external people, but also they bully each other constantly. In Spanish, for example, MGTOW ones used to dedicate long livestreams and called each other cucks, betas, manginas, etc. One point of discussion and "artistry" in the manosphere is hypergamy. It has inspired long videos, live streams, books, blogspots and debate among its members. Entire communities have been divided over this concept, and others have been created.

In their videos and "private" spaces they call any woman hypergamous. I remember when MacKenzie Scott divorced Jeff Bezos, and she was called hypergamous by these people, arguing that she planned it all - “they marry the provider and once they secure their money, they go with someone they really like”- and ignoring that she divorced because Jeff cheated on her. 

“Hypergamy” in short, is mating “up”, but the manosphere twists this term to make it fit anything women do. Women who date men who are more attractive than them are hypergamous, women who date men who are less attractive than them but have money are hypergamous, women who date men with less education than them are hypergamous. Women who rate men "below average" (another male bullshit story) are hypergamous. 

Women's nature is hypergamous and male nature is not, even if men also leave their geriatric wives for 20 year old women, even if men also cheat with a more attractive mistress, even if men marry more educated women, even if men marry women with more money. They are not hypergamous, they are polygamous, but also don't mind settling with a woman given that "women choose" and men barely have any chance with women. 

Anything a woman does is hypergamy. Except when you call them out and tell them it's all fake, or where is the inner consistency, given that they call marrying a poor man and a rich one “hypergamy”. Then, they come with studies on hypergamy. "How can you say that women are not hypergamous if this study says that they 'marry up'?". Suddenly the term only applies to marriage, behind are left all those theories over “Chad” being picked by all women.

Hypergamy, in academia, is a term used by social scientists that is related to marriage and the act of marrying up in social class, annual income or status. Since superior education in the west is a high sign of status (repeated two times in a list of status signals among men and women across 14 countries), studies on the subject account for income and degrees. 

The research found that women are married to men who earn more than them, but don't have more education than them, so men are "marrying up" in status. Such a trend has not substantially changed among decades. Nevertheless, it is recognized that it doesn't translate on men being the breadwinners, given that most marriages are dual income, and that hypogamous marriages, where the man has less education than the woman, are becoming more common.

Nothing about women making heartless plans on marrying with the rich one, divorce him and then mate with “Chad”, nothing about women sleeping mostly with “Chad”, certainly nothing about hypergamy being exclusively female. But it's enough for them, even when the second they provide those studies they make it clear they are being dishonest. The seeds have been planted; women are choosing only the rich ones to marry, leaving poorer men single. The one who is debating them and the ones watching the exchange, only have to start to believe that female hypergamy is rising, being amplified by technology and being extended to other aspects of relationships.

The Lie...

...and how everyone decided to believe it

As we have seen, the manosphere term is not the one that social scientists use. It is whimsical and doesn't make sense...on the surface. The magic is in repeating that women are hypergamous, that they will choose all the time only a few men and let the rest sexless, single or childless, that sexual revolution and women's freedom of choice is a disaster and contrary to civilization. If the lie is repeated enough times, people will start to believe it. 

And well, it worked. It worked so well that feminists, instead of checking the data, seeing the male strategy and debunking the nonsense, decided to repeat the same lie. “Women are choosing better, women are making men single and sexless! Pussy Power!”. There is literally a book on this. 

White supremacists also adopted the term, and the manosphere also adopted white supremacists perspective; they quote the work of Roger Devlin, Sexual Utopia in Power from time to time. 

Authorities regarded as “thinkers”, such as Jordan Peterson, and a long list of influencers also adopted the narrative and repeated it to the public. 

Normal people also believe in it, in 2019 The WaPo decided to craft and release a graph that, until today, is made viral countless times in social media, indicating that “men are in crisis” given that “ a third of them are sexless”. They repeat that there is a “male loneliness epidemic” and it’s implicit that women are the problem; “they should lower their crazy standards, they should stop being delusional”.

Women are rating 80% of men below average! They are delusional! Their simps make them believe they are 10/10!

It's extremely easy to fall in the rabbit hole. They start hearing about a disbalance on the distribution of sex, or dating, or in dating apps matches. They start hearing about a singleness crisis among men, and they have already accepted that such disbalance, such crisis, is a modern thing, because no one seemed to talk about it in the past. (right?)

They hear about male loneliness and mental health issues, and they understand that the disbalance is a bad thing. So they are one step away from starting to believe that mating is a process that should be regulated and controlled by the state, religion or cultural norms. Like, one click away from watching Jordan Peterson saying exactly that.

The manosphere has been repeating this idea for more than 10 years. At least one decade feminists had to stop this shitshow and they didn't, which is surprising given that the whole thing is perfectly summarized in the white supremacist essay I linked above. But they didn’t, because at some level, this meme also can benefit liberal feminism. The ones who spread and believe in this idea don't care about the data, they want the narrative, and it can be used to promote diverse agendas. So, instead of debunking and calling out, they chose to use the narrative for the feminist cause and they are now losing. Women are losing. Women lost.

The truth

While the General Social Survey graph from 2018 is made viral again and again on social media, the same survey on more recent years is completely ignored. 

The most repeated bunk of the last couple years.

Reality is that in both 2021 and 2022, the sexless in those years were below 20%, which is consistent with former years. Most men and women were having sex. In 2021, women even reported being slightly more sexless than men -but no one threw a tantrum over a “female loneliness epidemic”.

The survey also included a variable to measure people who were sexless for the last 5 years. Less than 10% of men and women reported being sexless that amount of time. It indicates that there is not “soft harem” around “Chad” or “Alpha males”, but people are having sex in a 1:1 ratio, and that most of the time, for every sexless man there is a sexless woman.

It is also repeated constantly that there are more single men than women, and it is suggested that it is because women are part of soft harems with High Value Males. This idea has been repeated so many times that even researchers have adopted it.

But the truth is that this disparity has been a thing for decades, even a century.

Before the sexual revolution, when everyone was married (right?), there was also a disparity between single men and single women. The key here is that the disparity exists between young people, and the most near explanation is age gap relationships; young men are more single because their female counterparts are dating slightly older men. But also, nowadays single people report less interest in having a relationship; men are not suffering for their “involuntary celibacy”, they are not into it.

I't curious how the "women and men are different" crowd swear that single women are looking for casual dates with "high value males" when it has been proven over and over than men have a higher sexual drive.

It’s also said that Dating apps have caused a disaster on the “dating market”, given that women nowadays have instant access to “high value males” and can ignore average men, while they are there longing for the minimum chance. Again, the idea that women are into a soft harem with “Chad”. This idea doesn’t hold reality, it’s true that by taking into account raw data, it seems that women have much more matches than men, but the major factor ignored is the gender ratio within dating apps; when adjusting that, matches become even, again fulfilling the expected 1:1 ratio between men and women.

It’s also stated that dating apps have increased “hook-up culture”, but that doesn’t seem to be true. Here's a deep dive on dating apps and dating.

Academic naiveté(?

Manosphere gives a final push for the hypergamy narrative by quoting the experts on the matter. And somehow, researchers don't have a problem with it.

It has been said -by prominent figures like David Buss- that there is or will be a mating crisis among educated women, because there will be a shortage of high income husbands. They say "women don't marry because there are not enough economically attractive men". And with "don't marry" they understand "remain single and childless".

That crisis doesn't exist. Marriages between college educated people are the longest ones, there are less widows and divorces even. Educated women are more likely to be married than the opposite.

The focus also is steady on marriage, and I suspect that’s because their narrative perishes if they actually start to value mating and reproduction instead. In the US, at least 40% of all births are out of wedlock, and that figure increases if we take into account other American and European countries. Maybe women are not marrying out of “lack of economically attractive men”, but they are still reproducing with them. More bluntly: women are having kids with men that can’t buy a ring, but they keep saying that women are “too picky”.

The real crisis, if there is any, is happening among classes, the poor are poorer and the rich are richer. They are sharing their assets with each other and forming strong families while the poor prioritize reproduction since they can’t afford marriage and everything that entails.

Ironically, equality and women's choice have achieved what these men are apparently longing for. The secretary marrying her boss or the nurse marrying the surgeon is becoming a thing of the past -or probably it was never a thing. The doctor is marrying another doctor, the boss is marrying a woman with a Phd. Rich men are not dating down, even when rich they marry rich women, not the cashier 20 years younger than them. 

To counteract this they quote Leonardo Dicaprio and his creepy behavior, without noticing that the man is not marrying or having children with those women. While even richer men are married and with kids with women at their level.

The future

It's clear to me that the agenda is settled, and they will do anything that can reinforce it. If we push for the truth to be known, they probably won't be able to use sexlessness or the singleness gap as a thing, so they have created a new term: "dysphoric singlehood". And they will start measuring it soon. 

The stats, the terms, the memes will change. But the core will remain the same. Women’s choice is dangerous, it leads to the creation of more incel men and to degeneracy. "Women will destroy civilization" at worst and "women's nature causes pain to men and it should be controlled or put in check" at best. And there are and there will be groups who will propose tight control from men over women as a solution.

Call to action

Nowadays, as I have said, this conspiracy is shared by a lot of different groups with different interests, but are more tightly enforced by male supremacists.

As feminists are interested in women's well being and freedom, they shouldn’t make male supremacists work easier by repeating their lies. Sadly, I have seen countless times feminists, here and in other places, spreading manosphere lies, mostly because it serves to a temporal sense of victory over men or because it can feed the “patriarchy hurts men too” libfem bit.

But feminism shouldn’t prioritize fantasy over reality, even if it’s rough; almost everything remains the same in the heterosexual world, women are still dating, having sex, marrying and having kids with men in large numbers. Incels are tiny outliers in the big scheme of things: nothing is rising.

Our sisters should know the truth, our nature is not contrary to civilization, our choices are not detrimental, we shouldn’t be controlled. Nature runs its course.

Conclusion

It is important to understand that evolution doesn't allow everyone to reproduce. It's nothing new that some men and women didn't pass their genes, this was a thing in the past and will always be. 

Mating, having sex and therefore, reproducing is not a right. The whole point of evolution is that effective subjects make it, and the few remaining ones are left behind. This process is not being blown up by technology or women having more freedom. 

The influence of women on reproduction is discussed, but given that even in cultures with arranged marriages the future wife has a word on it and mothers, who are also women, have also a said in who the husband should be, I highly doubt that there was a long period of time in human history where women had no choice at all. It doesn’t seem to be consistent with reality to believe that women are programmed to only like a few men.

About data on human relationships, I think it’s important to be skeptical from now on of every viral graph and any “too perfect and bright” theory. If it relies on a result given in only one year, it’s bunk. If it incites a moral panic, it’s bunk. If multiple sources don’t show a clear trend, it’s bunk.

Doesn’t matter if it comes from your respected professor, that influencer or popularizer that you like, that intellectual that always transforms big chunks of information into easy concepts to get. Don’t trust, they are probably wrong. If your grandma knows about it, you are late in your contact with reality by at least 20 years.

[dollypopup]

y'all can all cancel me (again) for this, but if there's even a SHRED of 'who should I pick?' from Penelope in season 3, I am tuning out SO fast because like. . .sorry not sorry, there IS no choice. Debling is some crusty OC suitor she barely even knows and Colin is a man who she has been so supposedly in love with to the point where she'd ruin her entire family's reputation to have a potential love story with him. Penelope and Colin have background, years of knowing each other, intimacy that few people in the Ton can boast of having (letters, conversations about purpose, fights and arguments and makeups) and her and Debling have. . .a dance or two at a ball because he's a rebound for Penelope's broken heart. he means nothing. he has no nuance, he has no weight to the story, he is such an afterthought to me. either I wanna see Penelope going 'you know what? I don't even LIKE this dude. he's. . .fine, but I don't care about him even a shred as much as I care about Colin' or the INSTANT Colin's like 'you know what? we should get married' if it's not an immediate 'say less, you're already my husband, try returning me without the receipt, Debling whomst?' then I don't want it!

like. . .it's just so frustrating to see all the 'I hope Debling sweeps her off her feet and she rejects Colin's proposal and she makes him work for it and and and-' nonsense from the fandom and it's always tagged and no matter how many times I block it, it just keeps popping up. I go into the Polin tag for POLIN. I don't give a SHIT about a male love interest other than Colin. Not one. Not a shred. Not an iota.

and also. . .Debling has the 'benefit' of not having depth, or character traits, or HISTORY, so peeps can project onto him however they want, but I'm calling it now, there is NOTHING he could do or be that would make me like him more than Colin. Colin will always hit different, and I will always love him more. and if Pen's not on that same page? lol bye

you want me to believe Penelope and Colin are soulmates and it's romance for her to hem and haw about how difficult a decision it is for her to marry a stranger who knows barely anything about her. . .

when Marina was out here dropping banger lines like 'You were the only man with which I could see myself being happy' and 'I do not care about any of these men, where is Colin?'? like hello??? and she wasn't even fully in love with him!!!! but we'll demonize her until the cows come home in our fandom and make her the villain in Polin's love story for DARING to get in between Polin, yet Debling, a white man, is a darling dear perfect prince for getting in between Polin? existing in our fandom solely so Penelope can be like 'lol, Colin ain't shit, let me entertain any and everyone else'?

if that's the direction it goes then, ten toes down and on my mama, she doesn't deserve Colin and she can move because I'm on my way to court him my damn self

and that's that on that

[flugame-mp3]

what do you fucking mean that's how charlie dies. THAT'S HOW CHARLIE DIES??? i mean i know the show has a penchant for killing off every character who's not a winchester brother or an angel of thursday but good god. what the fuck. charlie was such a good and enjoyable recurring character, and she had such a fandom impact that i've seen, and she's only around for THREE SEASONS?? (sidebar: it's amazing she has the presence she does for only being around for a couple episodes in the long run!) but: was this necessary? and she just dies offscreen after her skills are utilized to progress the plot of decoding the book of the damned?? oh my god. what in the actual fuck. i'm finding myself getting genuinely very upset at her death. she did not fucking deserve that. and i can absolutely see why the fan response to her death is what it is now. completely fucking unjustified and throwaway and useless.

[lebensmudewing]

Erin Pizzey, the MRA figure for excellence, founded a Men's shelter. Contrary to MRA narrative, she did get funding for it, the government gave her a shelter for men. The reason why it didn't thrive is that they didn't find any male volunteer to help those men; men didn't donate to the shelter -most rich people are men-, and male "victims" themselves didn't cook or clean or made community with each other at all.

And I said "male victims" because since Erin Pizzey says that "mutual abuse" is real, it's not clear if those guys were actually the abusers or victims. In her autobiography the whole thing about men's shelter is not broadly explained and it's not clear who went there.

Remember this when they start with their "but what about men".

They had a chance, and they didn't care.

Here's a video on the topic:

They prefer to harass women when they are talking about their experiences instead of spamming powerful men accounts, send emails to politicians or support men who have been actually abused.

Don't be fooled when some MRA says "bbut I donated to X,Y,Z organization". For every MRA who say this, there are 100 MRAs who still don't do shit and harass women for talking. Those MRA who donate don't call out those men, they still prefer to call out women.

The man of the video suffered domestic violence in hands of a female partner and he reports constantly being harassed and ridiculed by those same exact males who say "bbut men too" all day.

The reason why MRAs don't support him is because they can't weaponize his story against feminism, and is the same reason why they keep bringin Erin Pizzey to the conversation. Once Pizzey failed with her men's shelter, she joined MRA's and repeated nonstop that evil feminists shot her dog, that evil feminists shut down men's shelter and male victims. Anything but recognize that yes, the shelter was done and men didn't care then.

“And I have talked to some genuinely mistreated men, and that was, indeed, how they reacted; they come up to me and say things like, “I really get what you’re talking about, because I actually had a pretty similar experience.” So I get immediately suspicious of a man who stands up angrily, and starts growling, “Why aren’t you talking about this happening to men?? This happened to me!!” This style of guy doesn’t express any caring about what is happening to women. Nor does he express any gratitude towards the women and men who are working to assist abused women and to stop abusers. There’s no sign that he feels any sense of common ground with abused women. So I don’t buy his story. I think what he’s really mad about is that we won’t shut up about what so many men are doing to women.”

“Twenty years or so ago, we started to hear that it was important to talk more about male victims. The argument was that it would give our movement against domestic violence more appeal, because men would realize that it can happen to them too. We’d broaden our reach. It’s been a tremendous mistake.”

“The domestic violence movement has de-genderized itself. The programs are now called “domestic violence programs,” not “abused women’s programs” as they were known before. We talk about abusers and victims as “he or she,” ignoring statistics that show that it’s overwhelmingly male-on-female. When we talk about the issue, we try to make sure we aren’t hurting men’s feelings with too much truth-telling. Has this broadened and strengthened our movement? No, not a bit. The domestic violence movement is far weaker than it was twenty years ago, not stronger. Many, many of the gains that we made are now being stripped away, more every year. (Women’s rights in general are being stripped away in our times, as you have most likely noticed.)”

“Don’t be apologetic about making women your agenda. Don’t apologize for putting women’s needs and rights front and center. When someone tells you that you should be talking about male victims too, I encourage you to respond, “There are hundreds of issues in this world that need to be addressed. Are you saying that I can’t address what happens to women unless I also address every other wrong that happens in the world? Why isn’t it okay to make women my focus?””

Excerpts from: Lundy Bancroft. Men’s Angry Messages to Me Part 2. November 14, unknown.

[thesmokinpossum]

I can't believe y'all almost made me pay to go watch po*r th*ngs in theater without telling me that the whole thing revolves around a hardcore born sexy yesterday trope with a side dish of pseudo necrophilia where a woman with the brain of a litteral foetus who don't have periods or body hair (but do have boobs!) find joy and freedom by having a lot of sex with a bunch of men, shoving a apple up her vagina for some reason and joining a brothel (but it's a cool socialist brothel and all the girls looove being there, don't worry guys), all of that written and directed by two men, I'm never gonna trust you guys after this one lmao

[dbphantom]

Hate having adhd went to go work on my fallout modpack, got distracted while going to disable the steam overlay, ended up in the points shop, went to go edit my profile, decided to change my pfp, found a buried folder I forgot existed, found some old Veneer art I forgot existed, spent 45 minutes looking at all the old photos, STILL HAVE NOT TOGGLED ONE SIMPLE OPTION THAT SHOULD'VE TAKEN 30 SECONDS AT MOST

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Death of the Author by Ronald Barthes (1967)

Full disclosure, I've never really liked this essay. That said, I do like Barthes' other arguments. But I always found this one lacking, not in its central thesis that readers also matter, but I find that the lines of evidence are really poor. People worship this argument far too much without examination of why it has no citations and no one seems to be willing to question the argument in full from other viewpoints of things like, does it make philosophical sense?

But then people often use this essay as a crutch to say they don't need authorcism, and in fact go towards 100% readercism and then skip out on other critical theories. This isn't exactly what it argues, but I also feel like it doesn't argue the points it wants to make well. And truly, if I handed something like this in as an undergrad to my English classes, I'd be marked down hard. I think we need the same level of scrutiny towards the so-called masters as we do towards students and don't make excuses for "Because he's well-liked". This wasn't a new idea like he suggests. Authorcism goes further back than he suggests–but because people don't want to challenge these notions (and apparently don't read all the way through Poetics?) they think he's brilliant?

Dude gave no citations. Seriously. All his assertions are on weak ground.

Man, sometimes I think being born a white straight male means never being questioned when you make wild assertions and no one will ever fact check you ever. Well, I'm fact checking this thing, and it's not coming up the way he wants.

Original file: (translated, 1977)

No one wants to say this is racist or challenge the whole, "In ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or realtor whose 'performance' the mastery of the narrative code–may possibly be admired but never his 'genius'."

The core idea that the "author" is a modern figure is disputed by Aristotle, when Aristotle goes on and on and on about how much of a effing genius Sophocles was. I mean that Homer dude, that Homer dude wasn't good for anything and is a distant second to Sophocles. (Why do I remember this? Because I read the whole of Poetics and *cough* Aristotle waxes on poetic about Sophocles and barely mentions anyone else.)

No one wants to challenge how this basis and core of his thesis is coming off racist?

It's reading as those "primitive" people in that effing functionalist snobbery where some civilizations are "more advanced" than others storytellers aren't lauded. Ummm... OK, prove it, buddy. Your anthropology is faulty.

Often shaman, the keepers of the stories of the tribe/organization are lauded in their communities as important. If this was NOT true, the British Empire wouldn't have specifically gone after and tried to KILL those people. If he's arguing that the author was less important in those stories, that those people said, which is an interpretation, because he's not directly saying it, then the problem with that is there is a difference between losing the author, and what we'd call resonance of the words. And then you have a whole semantics question here on how much do stories outlive their authors, and how much there is over attribution issues to people that should not be lauded.

And then that's a whole other question than authorcism v. readercism. Because even those stories without the original author who might have shifted over time, still have other ways to read the text. Those are historicism, cultural relativism, race theory, etc. All of which, BTW, did exist by the time Barthes was writing. To pin his hopes on readercism, and say something this effing racist, that copyright does not matter to tribes, without textual evidence, when Kung! do respect copyright ideas, at the very least, is trying to kill the author, but also bury everything else in literary discourse, which was an issue I had with Percy Lubbock, to be fair, because I thought his way of thinking was far too reductive.

There's no citation?

The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single·person, the author 'confiding' in us.

I disagree, it's an overstatement at this point in time. Selden Lincoln Whitcomb, did do some of this, but he also looked at other things to explain the text. And there was Percy Lubbock who introduced Readercism (not the coinage, but the concept) in 1921. (yes, 1921, eat it, it sounds like plagiarism....). The absolutist idea that it was always sought through the author before this point isn't true. 'cause I effing did my reading.

Percy Lubbock said it was ultimately up to the reader to know the context, etc. Earlier critics have also suggested things like partnership between audience and creators. This would be writers such as Bertolt Brecht, who was around by the time Barthes was writing and gets half-hearted cited, no less. TT I did a ton of reading. There was a ton of effort in the early 19th century to give more context to plays like Antigone. Even that jerk, Freytag tried to give context to Aristotle, though wrongly. He uses (wrong) Historcism in order to illuminate Aristotle.

Though the sway of the Author remains powerful (the new criticism has often done no more than consolidate it)

What? As I outlined, I don't see that. He's making assertions without citation. And then people aren't challenging it. Why? I would be 100% be required to give citations for either assertion.

In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'. Mallarme~s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader).

Stéphane Mallarmé was born 1842. No citation of the essay. TT Again, I'd be required to cite the effing essay. No one wants to challenge this? Intertextual evidence is missing. For a guy who says the reader is most important, he isn't doing a lot to prove it in his own work.

Instead, Barthes gets lauded by later writers by interpreting what the author meant when the author didn't say it?

It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature. Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem." --Barbara Johnson, "Translator's Note" to Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Johnson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pg. 301.

Isn't this against what he's arguing for? He didn't leave it on the page. He didn't say any of this. Barthes left no evidence. Reader with no context wins?

To be fair, here, I've seen Barthes other work and he does know how to do citations, but Johnson is flat out trying to explain the author for him and I don't like that. If you're arguing for readercism, then the author's intentions shouldn't need to be explained.

By putting it behind a veil of "Well, he did no citations, so we need to interpret what he meant" when he doesn't leave it on the page, that's authorcism, ironically. Makes me cranky when white men get away with doing no citations to prove their thesis.

Barthes cites Valery is Paul Valéry b. 1871, also no citation. I'd get lambasted if I did this. Ah, white male privilege.

No intertextual evidence for his assertion here, either. While I don't love Lubbock 100% and I thought he oversimplified, at least he put *effing citations* on the page to prove his assertions.

Where are the citations? He doesn't need them? Why?

Proust gave modern writing its epic.

There's no proof for this assertion. I don't think it's true either. Epic of Gigamesh. It was translated in 1875, not by Proust. Barthes knew about it. He's not giving the context well in the text either.

There's no citation for his assertions of Proust either. He makes opinions, but where is the textual evidence?

The removal of the Author (one could talk here with·Brecht of a veritable 'distancing', the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage)

He cites Brecht, not the particular work?? But also Brecht argued for partnership between audience and author a bit at least?

Urrrgghhhh I HATE writers like this. Have I not gone over how much I dislike people who do assertions without citation and then get lauded?

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as" the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically " on a single line' divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.

Barthes, citation? No citation?

You asserted it was a "New idea" that the author reigned supreme. Prove it. Show the work that says that. Because Aristotle, nope. Aristotle worshiped the living pants off of Sophocles.

Look, Lubbock did a better job supporting his assertions in this area. He actually cited living works and did intertextual evidence. I agreed that his assertions are reductive like Virginia Woolf, but at least the man cited Tolstoy. He didn't make wild assertions about Tolstoy and then hoped that someone would get the references, and then cite no works.

In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text IS eternally written here and now.

Modern from when? What time period? If you're trying to argue anyone before Stéphane Mallarmé existed, again, effing Poetics. Not to effing mention the whole of Aelius Donatus's entire treaties on how plays should go was based on a single author: Terence. In what time period are you talking about? Author worship goes way back in time. Effing reading about Aelius Donatus loving the hell out of Terence's play with r*** made me cranky for a week. He found it sooo funny. And I was struggling with the Latin too.

The fact is (or, it·follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, 'depiction' (as the Classics would say)

which ones, Barthes, which ones? Give me an effing citation. 'cause I can't see that the "depiction" reigned supreme over the "author" through Aristotle literally ranking Sophocles as better than Homer. Aristotle kept going on and on about it. Plus you just cited Brecht earlier, who hates Aristotle's ass. So, make it mesh together. Which parts of the "Classics" are you citing, and which parts of Brecht are you taking from? Brecht HATES Aristotle, and most of the time when people talk of Classics, they are talking about Greek plays. You need to delineate which parts you are taking and which you leave behind.

rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given in the first person and in the present tense) in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered - something like the I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets.

No citation again. I'm cranky. No citation or quotes for all these pages. For an author whose supposedly arguing for "readercism" and "simplicity" by leaving it on the page, as the critic earlier, Johnson, is saying, he's not doing either, honestly.

Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin - or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.

Honestly, there is more burying of citations.

He's saying in the fanciest of words to make it sound like he's smarter than he is, that "You aren't dumb 'cause you don't understand the author." If he's arguing for simplicity and leaving on the page, he's not practicing the same himself. So I don't know if the earlier argument by Johnson works in his favor at all.

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none' of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.

I have issues with this from a philosophical PoV.

The question of originality, is certainly something that rose with industrialization, but that's more of an individualism, rather than an authorcism, I would argue–given how much that Aristotle, Aelius Donatus and others around the world tried very hard to preserve authorship. An argument of lost authorship overtime is a totally different affair, and one I've been dealing with as people over attribute, and I find that quotes are wrongly attributed because people don't remember the author or are too lazy to look up the texts they are talking about (I'm staring at you Barthes).

Individualism, is well, well argued to have risen with industrialization. Off the top of my head, though not in Barthes' time, you have Lucy Worsley, who in A Very British Romance argued that individualism in Romance is a very modern notion (argued, first episode within the first few minutes). Not to mention a lot of social sciences, in general, argue for this type of individualism, and then that argument, in general, leading to the arguments for why industrialization often leads to loneliness. To be contextually fair to Barthes, he didn't have the bit about loneliness yet, since that's a more recent sort of studying, but the scholarship on individualism as a part of industrialization should have been emerging in his time period, IIRC. This might have spurred this essay, but the notion that historicism and other ways of examining the text along with the author did not exist is a farce, at best.

One could argue the Butterfly effect, which is Henri Poincaré, prior to Barthes' existence of his essay, would disprove the idea of originality, but we're getting neck deep into physics and philosophy here. I am a nerd and interdisciplinary, so...

Say huip is a new thingy. It weighs 200 lbs. It does a bunch of new stuff–very theoretical. It doesn't matter. Someone newly buys this object that can do new stuff. It is a result of culture. Yes? Interwoven culture, as Barthes describes.

Bob has bought this huip thingy, and drops it down some stairs and finds that it rolls, not doing the original intended function. This is his particular life experience with huip. He thinks that 200lbs being able to bounce down stairs is awesome. I mean, dude, it defies all physics and is able to go down and turn on stair landings.

Bob posts this information somewhere, puts it into text, and then his interpretation, is by writing it, it is fun.

Sally, say, does the same thing, but kills a cat.

The first ripple is that it has killed a cat. Oh no, Sally's interpretation of huip is that the cat is dead and she's getting sued.

Isn't Sally's interpretation of huip and this thing it can do, but wasn't designed for novel as Bob's interpretation? If they both post about it, they are authors of a new experience.

If the manufacturers of huip say, but Huip isn't supposed to do that and do a total recall of the product and start doing things like making it so it can't roll, or weigh that amount, then the experience of the object changes. A new novel experience happens.

So the philosophical question is "What is then new?" in this scenario. If Barthes says "nothing" then it becomes an issue. Because humans aren't the same over time. And if you say that the author, Bob of the huip meme, didn't have a novel experience, dude, it is 200 lbs of menace and he discovered something new.

The fact that Sally interpreted it and then it ran over the cat and killed it... who is liable in that scenario? Bob, who didn't follow the instructions and accidentally found out and memed out what huip can do, the manufacturer, or Sally or all three?

Something clearly new happened.

BTW, I randomly pressed letters to come up with said object, huip.

If the experience is always anterior and not original, then how come witnesses never agree on anything? I don't think Barthes thought this part through completely. It's missing some key French Philosophers.

His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them.

Writers go outside and do things like experience seeing a new animal. Saying that a writer only mixes previous writing and cultural functions... meh, I'm not quite sure about this.

If his total argument is culture shapes the writer, and the writer has no free will, and the writer is merely mixing other writers, thus there is nothing new, this is more like an argument for determinism over free will, which runs into philosophical problems as I illustrated with Bob up there. Bob had a novel experience he wrote about. It wasn't the intention of the manufacturer, but gravity is not manufactured by culture. Stairs are manufactured by culture. Did an accident with gravity and a manufacturing error shape Bob into writing and memeing what he did with the huip? Or was it really Sir Issac Newton whom Bob never bothered to read, but loosely heard about once in Science Class for a test and he can't bother to remember the numbers for gravity.

Writers have experiences outside of books. The filter might be culture, but the filter doesn't always shape everyone's opinion exactly the same. Perspective, worldviews, and experiences do, and that's what's novel.

Barthes further argues that because the author has a dictionary, they are caught in culture. Urrggg. I made up huip on the spot. You still have no idea what the primary function of the object is. I'm sure someone is trying to make up one in their head. Or I typed that up and someone is making it up. But I don't particularly need to know much in order to make up that context. I need stairs, some name, and a mythical object I banged my keyboard for. Gravity is a natural force I personally experience. Especially when I was struggling to put an air conditioner in my window, heard a cat and then wondered what would happen if said air conditioner landed on the cat and then posted about it on Nanowrimo in 2008-ish.

Barthes might argue that I got it from literature somewhere. But the filter of words had nothing to do with the initial experience. I didn't have to put it into words. No one else was there.

Where did I get 200 lbs? Uhhh... random number.

Where did I get the runs over cat–from the original experience of worrying about the air conditioner falling from the window.

Where did I get magically rolls down stairs? I had an experience with a friend of mine that liked to roll down stairs. It was a novel experience for me. She liked to bounce around corners. (Hello, Libbie). If writing is purely words, culture, not nature, experience, worldview, opinion, Barthes has an issue with the treaties here.

My novel experience with the air conditioner and feeling like a weakling and hearing a cat though cat is not a controllable object in my framework, lead me to post about air conditioner falling from my apartment window into a roof, killing a cat, and typing it into Nanowrimo's boards.

Is Barthes saying the entire incident is mediated purely by words? That's a lot of coincidences, don'tcha think?

Gravity isn't a cultural experience and not everyone thinks in words either. In order to write you have to use words, certainly, but the initial experience still is not necessarily mediated by words or culture as he'd expect.

Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the·very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Untrue. Aristotle spends a HUGE amount of time on it. HUGE. !@#$. (We need the play to have negative reinforcement on the reader in a morality PoV–he spends a lot of his treaties on this. How do you achieve this as author. About how the audience should feel. How plays are inferior if they don't achieve this. About how Homer was a poor writer for not doing it correctly and the impact being wrong.) Aelius Donatus even talks about it. (We Latins this. We Latins that. What does the audience think. What's the difference between 'us' Latins and the Greeks? Should we account for the differences?)

His idea is that in the past authors were never worshiped, until the "modern era" and copyright didn't matter. (Untrue, Aristotle). And that the reader has forever been ignored in literary criticism before him. (Brecht, Aristotle, Aelius Donatus?)

We should ignore the author because the reader is the ultimate decider–honestly Percy Lubbock did a better job arguing this in 1921 with less convoluted language.

That everything is mediated by culture for the author and previous texts. (Didn't read Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi-Strauss? Levi-Strauss, BTW, was French and published before him) And that copyright didn't exist in those all oral tradition tribes. TT Kung! Anyone?

Because you see, according to him, writers don't experience or mediate it through their own lives. Only through texts.

I think the better argument for readercism would follow like this:

Readers have their own experiences and worldviews. This will not be universal or resonate reader to reader because inherently no two people will agree on anything. Despite that there is a sort of cultural agreement to tame what seems like chaos. Writing comes into this chaos and tries to pull meaning from it.

The writer and reader's experience will not close to always match, so the impact of the writing is not going to be the same no matter what you will do. The best you can do is mediate your experiences, whether it's with culture, nature or your personal experiences through writing which is interpreted by others.

As Lubbock said, the text doesn't come alive until a reader reads the text.

To me, Barthes' argument is far, far more poor than Lubbock's argument for the same. At least Lubbock's argument for the same wasn't effing blatantly racist. (I give more leeway to Lubbock in 1921, before the 1960's than Barthes in 1965 who is also French and has clearly access to Levi-Strauss and even talks about ethnographies) It's based on assumptions, the majority of which aren't backed up. Plus he has more to work with if what he says is true. D- argument. He doesn't argue for what to replace it with, doesn't talk about the other critical theories at all. Urgghh. He's done better. But I know, I'm not supposed to question the greats when people worship them. But it irks me that he gives one citation, maybe, and then we blindly believe everything else he wrote. Why? I want some critical thinking here.

For the record, I hated Derrida too. His major flaw for me, BTW, was that he said everything is mediated through words, which is not true. Functionalists suck. Structuralists suck less, but are still effing prone to racism.

Sometimes I wonder if academics purposefully like to teach convoluted texts like this without citations, rather than a cautionary tale, of what will happen, but because it sounds smart and convoluted and because they don't check the assertions as true or not and plus there is a bonus points for the level of racism they can force their students to read, but they gloss over it and say ignore it. I mean, you absolutely need to read Emmanuel Kant, even if you can't with his hatred of women and you're supposed to ignore that part because there are no substitutes in the world that might have said the same things he said better. Urrgghh. Do you purposefully choose the most uptight racist white men to teach and tell that they are lauded? Lubbock made a far, far better argument. Lack of citations and blind worship because of lack of citations+white maleness makes me cranky.

[lebensmudewing]

I will save your time, you don't have to play the devil's advocate anymore. I inform you that such loneliness crisis doesn't exists at all 😊

Maybe if men didn’t think talking to their male friends about their personal lives and feelings was gay they wouldn’t be having such a loneliness crisis.

I saw a tweet the other day from either the “sex worker” herself or the man idk. Saying that he just pays her to talk to him/ let him cry or express emotions or some shit. That��s just pathetic. It’s antisocial and pathetic.

I had a male friend tell me that he has different friendships with females than males, and him and his male friends don’t talk about deep stuff or something.

Literally if I was to play the devils advocate, I’d say “learn to express emotions and share your feelings with your male friends” but deep down they’re not lonely. Not lonely enough to seek emotional connection with their male friends. They just want to wallow and complain because they bored of they hand and feel entitled to sex.

[princecrows]

sumire is a good character on paper and if i wrote her in fanfiction i think i could become a Liker of her but as it stands for literal years since royal came out ive always hated her because of how obvious it is that she exists in the video game persona 5 royal to reach a heterosexuality quota.

its not her fault shes written specifically and explicitly to appeal to the male gaze while also trying to criticize the sexism women have to endure in trying to appeal to the male gaze (really have your cake and eat it too moment) but because her writing is so bland because the game isn't confident in her character yet really wants you to like her i dont like her.

not because i dont like her actual character but because i dont like how the game wants this literal 15 year old to appeal to the male audience so fucking bad, its gross.

[cherish--these--times]

Sure, baking biscuits every single day for your boss is peak platonic behaviour. Sure, offering millions of pounds and finding a job for your ex-wife is peak platonic behaviour.

If Ted and Rebecca had been gorgeous twenty-somethings I bet the overall we-should-have-more-platonic-male/female-friendship-onscreen discourse would have not even emerged....

[lebensmudewing]

"Hating on men and claiming masculinity is evil is going to have the complete opposite effect as to what you intended."

Men and male advocates seem unable to understand that "toxic masculinity" is the same shit as saying "purple crayon". In the second setence everyone with more than two braincells can get that it is being said that some crayons are purple, but they can't manage to apply the same logic to "toxic masculinity" and get that it is being said that "some masculinities are toxic".

And I don't know why people can't type "toxic masculinity" and read on the wikipedia page that they term was created by men themselves to describe their experiences.

"Toxic masculinity emerged within the mythopoetic men's movement of the 1980s, coined by Shepherd Bliss. Bliss confirmed to me in a 2019 email that he coined the term to characterize his father's militarized, authoritarian masculinity."

"Instead what happens is he gets met with dozens upon dozens of people claiming men DON'T have emotions"

Are those dozen of people in the room with us right now?

Like, women can be told they are inferior, stupid, that they are uninteresting, that their hobbies are not real hobbies, that they cry to manipulate people, that they are "asking for it" when they share their SA stories and then still don't want take men's rights away.

"He's going to assume that's his fate and be shitty, because he was never met with kindness and understanding, he was told his kind is automatically evil."

Ah, the classic case of being called a bad person by internet strangers and then not having more remedy but being a bad person.

Yep, that's how it works.

You all are desperate to portray men as this innocent and hypersensitive creatures without critical thinking skills that are only bad because they are not pampered enough, swearing you are making a great case in their favor, when just confirms that men are entitled crybabies that can't handle a fraction of what they dish out.

Their tragedy is not getting enough free emotional labor from women, my tragedy is that men strip women's rights away.

Hating on men and claiming masculinity is evil is going to have the complete opposite effect as to what you intended.

Let me set the scene, there's a freshly 13 year old boy, he's been told his whole life that boys don't cry, boys aren't allowed to have feelings. He gets internet access, and what SHOULD be happening is that people tell him that's all wrong and of course boys should have emotions, but that doesn't happen. Instead what happens is he gets met with dozens upon dozens of people claiming men DON'T have emotions. This boy tries to fight back, he replies to a post and he says that it's not true, boys aren't evil and they can be sad and hurt sometimes. What happens? People bully him. They laugh at him for being sad, say he deserves it. They tell him all men are horrible and he's destined to be evil.

What do you think happens? Do you think he's going to put in the effort to be a good guy? Fuck no. He's going to assume that's his fate and be shitty, because he was never met with kindness and understanding, he was told his kind is automatically evil.

[arolesbianism]

Every now and then I have to remember I got into oni for the gameplay. I bought the game solely because the gameplay looked interesting to me. Even once I realized there was lore I actively decided I didn't care enough to go through it. I fell down the rabbit hole on Accident. And it's all because I read scientist Bubble's journals and realized that onis story was the most me bait thing I've ever seen Ever

[musical-chick-13]

Cannot BELIEVE I had to have a conversation with someone where, after I complained about people Not Wanting To Write About Women, I then had to explain that yes, I DO write about men sometimes, actually; no I don't hate men; yes I write from the POV of the men in numerous cases and also analyze them.

[klara-rosa]

honestly if these books weren't already utter nonsense and a piece of garbage, this one thing Rhysand says to Feyre in the last chapter of ACOWAR would make me ask for the bullet to end it all

"I couldn't let all you ladies take credit for saving us. Some male had to claim a bit of glory so you don't trample us until the end of time with your bragging."

Honestly...then and there. Then and there I would've stabbed him

[lebensmudewing]

Incels complain about inceldom and "its cure" being sex centered, but were the first ones spreading The WaPo graph on sexlessness as a proof that "hypergamy" was causing an incel rising, and mostly any number around inceldom they use revolve around sexual partners.

Their mythical "Chad" is a man that has a lot of sex, instead of being "Joe", the man with a loving wife with whom he has a deep emotional connection and passionate romance or something like that. Chad is the winner, and Joe is a beta bux.

I can't stand when they start moaning about how "society doesn't gets them" and "makes everything about sex". Dude, do you hear yourself? Every single time a woman suggest that she is lonely, you bring up how she should stop chasing Chad -the one who, I remember you, fucks women and leaves them as trash- and just "date her looksmatch" or "date one of her orbiters" and how women have it easy because they can get fucked.

Simps are not romance starved and orbite attractive or sexualized women, not female autists that at the very opportunity make you a trivia dumping about Isaac Asimov and are sex repulsed.

Incels have created a mythology that backfires once they say they don't want to date XYZ women. And, by the way I see it, it also backfires when they refuse to hire a sex worker. Their whole myth revolves around hypersexuality, paying for intercourse or having a completely transactional relationship doesn't seem out of tune with that.

It's everything a constant flipping and bending only to gatekeeping loneliness and suffering from women. Maybe because they hate them, or maybe because it doesn't seem logical that a same number of men and women aren't dating (date each other, huh?), it doesn't inspire compassion but just a "suck it up" sentiment. It also protects their masculinity, they don't have to be sensitive "faggots" who long for intimacy-and-connection uwur™, but men who want SEX.

Femcels are real

Femcels are real and I'm tired of people pretending that's not the case, it can be seen more clearly when it comes to counter arguments against people that state that incels don't exist.

People say that incels don't exist, because men can always pay for sex. The standard response to this is that sex workers cost money -apparently men can't get a job either - and that prostitutes don't really desire incels. That it isn't about sex, but validation from women and being desired.

But the same men who affirm that, then make a flip when it comes to femcels and say that women can get sex easily so they can't be really lonely. The fact that men in casual encounters don't care about women's pleasure and having intercourse for the first time(s) is often painful for women is ignored and minimized.

The conflict is obvious, if for incels paying for sex is not a real solution because it doesn't involve the organic process of mating everyone else experience, why is a real solution for virgin isolated women to get fucked by a stranger than doesn't really care about them?

It is said that "men can want you for sex but not for a relationship", and there is skepticism about it. People who often rebuke manosphere and incel narratives, don't agree with that statement, they say that of course men would be open to have a relationship with women. But any sane woman disagrees, most of the time hook ups don't lead to relationships, and relationships where the only thing at play is sex are demoralizing and even emotionally harmful.

The double standard is even more evident if we go back to the prostitute argument and we refine it a little bit: well, you can always try to make more money and get a vase girlfriend that only tolerates you as long as you give her gifts.

It is rejected, the first reaction at play is: "that's giving them a point” and somehow, suggesting that men will maintain a relationship with you as long as you have sex with them is not "giving manosphere a point" even when they repeat to oblivion that men only bring money and women only sex to relationships. For me it reaches the level of falling in a fairy tale, suddenly men bond through sex and they become loving partners once you have sex with them.

The second common response is that it is not always possible for incel men to earn more income, since they are also failures in other aspects of life. The same ones who affirm until they turn blue that men and women are different, and women have less sociosexuality and sexual drive, don't see how women would have a problem with having a relationship based on sex and sleeping with strangers with the hope of obtaining romantic affection. But they are quick to catch all the hardships of incel men.

From incel types, is the case is even more curious, since they are quick to affirm that women get damaged from sex but don't hesitate to deny femcels existence because, again, they can get easily fucked.

Incel men deserve empathy and exceptions made for them, paying for it is not a real solution, buying the affection of women is not a thing. But there is no compassion towards lonely women, having degrading encounters and void relationships is a solution that they must take.

It is also said that "femcels should date incels", and it comes with vague references to how femcels on certain forums complained about "harassment" from incels, suggesting that in reality incels tried to flirt with femcels.

I have gravitated around incel/femcel spaces for years, and not a single one flirted with me. They told me that they would kill me with their bare hands, that I was probably a used up hole, that I was retarded, that I was a landwhale, that I probably looked like a tranny. Just pure vitriol, nothing really human, they were just there to troll and mock women.

Incels there also said that they just didn't want to date a landwhale, that their only standards were "1. Exist 2. Don't be a landwhale". Any honest person who understands that attraction doesn't work like a job application knows that it's not true. That guy, in fact, was talking with a slim woman who just existed on a forum and decided to be a hateful pos anyway.

The relevant thing here is that incels constantly repeat that they don't want to date certain types of women, fat women mostly, and...no one denies them their incel status. The same happens with figures like Elliot Rodger: he admitted he didn’t really try, but is still the incel autistic guy who did a mass shooting. It's still involuntary if they reject fat women, it’s still involuntary even if they don’t try it until their last breath. But women are totally voluntarily celibate if they don't want to date men that hate them, it's totally voluntary if they don't date men they don't really desire.

Again, people who claim to be contrary to incel ideology give them the point that women are picky beyond any reason, while incels are just these reasonable beings that just try but can't, that just can't have the chance nor properly take them when they present to them.

The case becomes even more compelling when they start to affirm that, actually, incels are autistic and mentally ill. So, not only are they sweethearts that just want to flirt with femcels and are too sensitive to pay for sex, but now they are mentally ill autists who deserve compassion and help.

Women can be also autistic and mentally ill, women struggle with late diagnosis or multiple wrong diagnosis, chronic burn out, and make masking efforts to fit in society and survive. They are also more likely to be sexually abused. Autistic women are inclined to date autistic, ND or mentally ill men, given that humans mate assortatively, but the sentiment that they are still too picky, too entitled, and with an unfair advantage over men remains even for the most skeptics and critics with incel ideology.

The later ones need incel ideology to exist, it gives them relevance, it gives them the status of being the heroes against the most widespread bunk of our times, so they will debunk and argue until you touch the object of their study. But I don't have anything to gain out of it: incel and femcel, both are slang terms that don't deserve another minute of our time.

The thirsty -but well meaning- subject ready to take any hook up chance at any cost with no exceptions or inhibitions doesn't exist within incels, because if that were the case, incels wouldn't exist. The conditions that define incels can be applied to women, doesn't matter how much you spin and flip it. That strips the concept of any validity and reveals that the problem is proper of mentally ill neurodivergent and disabled people who can't thrive in most aspects of their lives, not only the sexual ones.

There is no loneliness epidemic, there is no pure sexual and romantic tragedy here. Only a couple of outliers who don't fit in society.

[zoe-oneesama]

What are your thoughts on what happened to Chloe at the end of Season 5? Do you plan on watching Season 6?

Like as IF that's the last we'll see of her.

I was gonna wait to give my review of Season 5 - I wanted a release date for Season 6 and then drop them like a count down leading up to the new season - which is why I haven't delved in much and talked about my opinions.

But Chloe's ending was bullshit, and we all know it. Not because she leaves Paris, not because she loses the few friends and connections she has, and not even because she's a massive brat who finally gets some form of comeuppance.

But because of the form that comeuppance comes in.

Why on God's Green Earth is ANDRE the one? ANDRE is the one to drag her ass out of Paris and condemn her publicly and gets to act like the big hero, doing the right thing and putting Chloe in her place? ANDRE. The one who GAVE her her place and covered it in gold leaf and never once until this whack-job of a season considered that a bad thing?!

Appropriate, appropriate face Caline.

The absolute absurdity of them to write THIS MAN in any sort of correct light, the one who from Day 1, Season 1 has been a solid and complete background for why Chloe is...Chloe. Who spoiled and abused his power to make sure she never felt an ounce of consequences or remorse or backlash. How dare they try and pull this move on us when they could remove Audrey from the story entirely and no one would second guess Chloe's entire personality or upbringing?

These writers have somehow convinced themselves that Andre is not only without any guilt in the outcome of this situation, but that he's redeemable! Redeemable through the act of shipping off his daughter, whom he's been nothing but devoted to, and sending her off to a boarding school with her (AS HE ADMITS) just as awful mother as her chaperone, while he abducts casually replaces her with his new better daughter, Zoé.

I'm sure that won't have an adverse effect on your child who is used to absolute and unconditional love for her whole life, you are definitely a good person who's finally figured out how to do the right thing.

/s

These writers have somehow convinced themselves that Chloe is absolutely hopeless and evil and has reached the point of no return, but ANDRE. Andre's fine.

And Gabriel too, apparently. Hm, seems to be a theme with these worthless male parents and getting off scott free....