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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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It’s easy to forget that when the large majority of men suck, the large majority of women are unhappy. If you think it’s tough being a shitty loser man in a low-sex marriage, imagine being his wife and having to fuck him every month. Having to muster up the willpower to, essentially, let a man that you don’t want to fuck – that every fiber in your body is screaming at you to run away from – rape you, because you don’t want to break apart your family or lose your stability.

Many wives and girlfriends, simply put, do not want to fuck their loser men. But the alternative is worse. Breaking families apart, losing financial stability and all of the labor their men provide, turning their lives upside down – these women essentially feel like their lives are being held at gunpoint. They don’t want to have sex, but the men in their lives have power over them, and because these men have power over them, they allow these men to rape them. They don’t love their men – at least not in a sexual way – and are simply allowing themselves to be used for sexual release by someone who has power over them.

Women who are married to or involved with loser men feel like handmaids, from the TV show. No respect, no love, just monthly rapes because the alternative is worse. And this is why The Handmaids Tale speaks to so many women.

Like most fictional novels, The Handmaid’s Tale caters to its audience. Not too long into the book, the evil oppressor man who owns the female protagonist starts to become interested in her for more than just her handmaid duties. And, of course, there’s another man that she eagerly wants to fuck in between forced fuckings, who loves her back because, as we all know from Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and other such books, men always fall left and right an average woman for absolutely no reason whatsoever simply because there’s something so darn indescribably special about her. The book quickly turns from its dystopian commentary about America’s dark future into a tale of this woman’s hopes, dreams, and attempts to escape to a better life with a better man – directly speaking to its target audience of unhappy wives.

Remember, the majority of men are losers. Well, not really. They’re average guys. But in the eyes of women, that makes them losers. Most women are not happy with most men. They’re just whoring themselves out for money, labor, and stability. Meanwhile, they dream of an escape to a better life with a better man. And over time, these feelings take a toll. The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to modern women because modern women literally feel oppressed by their men. On some level, deep down inside, they feel powerless, used, and raped by the men who love them.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/6dyf0y/why_women_are_so_entranced_by_the_handmaids_tale/

Umm, if the women who watch the handmaid's tale find themselves identifying with the protagonist as an unloved sexual object, then perhaps it's not because they hate their husbands. Perhaps it's situationships, hookups, and casual dating- after all, the handmaid's tale's audience is pretty hardcore liberal/progressive and likely more onboard with such things, and women seem to dislike actually being in them even if they won't demand commitment before sex.

situationships, hookups, and casual dating

But those, as far as I know, aren't present in the novel/series at all, so the latter won't have a message that resonates with women who feel wronged by bad hookups/one-night stands/dates/flings.

Sex without love or commitment by men who treat the protagonist as property, however, is.

"Marriage is just a prostitution-exclusivity agreement that costs a lot" is a line I don't see used much despite its trivial truth for most relationships, probably because the higher-quality people tend to end up in marriages that claim doesn't hold for.

The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to modern women

It appeals to Boomers and their children that uncritically parrot all of their grievances (and because "literally feeling oppressed" is both a fetish and a worldview that scores you political points). Meanwhile, modern women just don't get married since they're stable all by themselves (though their parents' policies have put this in jeopardy, that also applies to the men); if you're going to sell your body corporate pays better than domestic to the point that the two-income trap that tends to create puts women who aren't so modern in a disadvantageous position.

The book [is the standard pornography women consume with grimdark elements]

So basically, it's 177013 for women.

Hat tip for the hentai reference! The crucial difference in terms of social context, of course, is that 177013 never got the benefit of having a 5-season TV series with full normie appeal getting based on it. This is the reality of current society.

Man, that post is a blackpilled take completely divorced from reality.

Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale was not "unknown" to Western women until the TV series. It's been a very well known book since it was first published. Sure, very few women have ever actually read it, but even fewer men have - that line about how women "don’t give a flying fuck about books or literary concepts unless they see them on a screen" is doubly true of men. Seriously, it is a statistical fact that women read and buy more books than men. (Yes, the majority of books bought are romances, but even in other genres, except perhaps SF and non-fiction, women are bigger readers than men.)

It's weird seeing this poster take the old radfem line that all sex in a patriarchy is rape and women only pretend to love their men, and switch it around to say this is essentially true but it's because all women lust to be owned by an alpha. Horseshoe theory strikes again, I guess. Something something Hlynka?

The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives. But the tonal and thematic differences between stories like 50 Shades (or John Norman's Gor series, which has some female fans as well though it's mostly aimed at men) and The Handmaid's Tale are pretty dramatic. I haven't seen the TV show, but no part of the book makes it sexy or appealing even to men who like the idea of dominating women or women who like the idea of a domineering man. The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists. I can't say I can speak for Afghani women but let's say I have grave doubts about Dread Jim's belief that those women and ISIS brides are actually living in sexually satisfied bliss being literally owned by men who treat them as chattel. The women who are really into Christian Gray imagine a billionaire giving them his undivided attention and care - the point of the fantasy is that even if he's rough and controlling, he only has eyes for plain little ol' her, and they have super-hot sex, but then she's allowed to continue living her life as the cherished object of a rich man who's actually devoted to her happiness, not a religious fanatic who will beat her if she lets another man see her elbow.

Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale was not "unknown" to Western women until the TV series. It's been a very well known book since it was first published.

Well, I'm not a Westerner, so I'm not really qualified to comment on that. The OP claims "it's a popular book in hardcore womens' studies programs, but not too well-known elsewhere". The "hardcore" part is maybe unwarranted if I want to be completely fair, but otherwise I find the assessment correct. Maybe I should make the nuanced argument that it was relatively well-known among suburban middle-class Blue Tribe women / wine moms / soccer moms and generally women that are exposed to feminist doctrine.

that line about how women "don’t give a flying fuck about books or literary concepts unless they see them on a screen" is doubly true of men. Seriously, it is a statistical fact that women read and buy more books than men. (Yes, the majority of books bought are romances, but even in other genres, except perhaps SF and non-fiction, women are bigger readers than men.)

Well, I guess you're right, but that probably has a lot to do with recent cultural trends of SF, YA, fan fiction and similar literary genres being increasingly captured by feminists.

It's weird seeing this poster take the old radfem line that all sex in a patriarchy is rape and women only pretend to love their men, and switch it around to say this is essentially true but it's because all women lust to be owned by an alpha.

I'd say he argues that it's essentially true because feminist doctrine has become wholly normalized among Blue Tribe middle-class suburban women.

No, The Handmaid's Tale used to be famous mostly for being a work of dystopian fiction. Its feminist themes were quite obvious, but it wasn't just wine moms and women's studies majors reading it. I know a lot of other SF fans who did, for example.

Margaret Atwood has been a big literary name for years. She's written a lot of other well known books (and used to be known for writing sci-fi dystopias while sort of disdainfully avoiding the "science fiction" label).

I don't think you accurately capture the argument about why incels and manosphere activists believe the same thing radical feminists do (essentially, that the sexes hate each other and we can't really be happy with each other without reordering society in some way - both sides essentially arguing "the opposite sex must be put under our boot").

Fair points, although I wonder just how large the overlap is between "women who read SF" and "current/future feminists".

Most women who read SF are probably feminists, but I don't think most feminists are SF fans. Indeed, SF used to be more of a male genre (and much of the culture war in SF fandom is over women "taking over" science fiction and shifting it more towards YA-ish fantasy/romances).

It's a well known in certain circles finding that happiness, for American women, is correlated with traditional style marriages in a religious context. I'd like to see if the same finding holds true in Turkey, Iran, etc. In other words, Islamic marriages which are more contractual and put women on a lower level compared to men.

For most people here, "traditional style" marriage means something like "Husband is the head of household and primary breadwinner, wife takes care of the house and children, wife defers to husband in most matters but still has a voice and expects her needs and desires to be taken seriously, and should not be abused or cheated on."

People who think "traditional style" marriage means the husband is lord and master, does whatever he pleases, and she will shut up and take it because that is her role, are not describing real traditions, though they may be describing certain subcultures. The average Muslim woman certainly doesn't consider that to be what an Islamic marriage is supposed to be like.

People who think "traditional style" marriage means the husband is lord and master, does whatever he pleases, and she will shut up and take it because that is her role, are not describing real traditions, though they may be describing certain subcultures

Yeah, I think that's just called being selfish. And I think it's important to notice how selfishness manifests itself in both genders (which tends to be 'only my contribution matters' for men and 'your contribution will never be good enough' for women), and how certain traits of biological reality tend to enable/excuse this selfishness even in people who should intrinsically know better (see honey, it's in the law, that means I have an excuse... and anything can be used as an excuse).

The average Muslim woman certainly doesn't consider that to be what an Islamic marriage is supposed to be like.

But it is what an average Western man or woman considers that to be what an Islamic marriage is supposed to be.

Perhaps pornography doesn't actually provide a realistic or positive view of culture or relationships? Big if true.

Well yes, ISIS and the Taliban are likely deviations from ultrafundamentalist Islam(in which a man may beat his wife four times before being required to divorce her- rather similar to the rarest of rare criteria held to in Christendom before the enlightenment when you think about it). But Islamic fundamentalists do observably tend to treat their women worse than Christian fundamentalists, and the difference is old- we know women were more liberated under Christianity than under Islam starting at some point in the middle ages.

I'm just pointing out, because it is mentioned so often by people who seem to think "Islamic culture" = "women are treated as chattel/sex slaves" ("and this is how all traditional societies were!") that most modern Muslim societies aren't actually like that (and even in ancient times the "model" Islamic marriage was not supposed to be like that). Muslims are very conservative and trad compared to the West, yes. But Dread Jim/KulakRevolt's Bronze Age fantasies are just that.

I don’t think Jim and Kulak actually know what patriarchy is- it’s rule by, specifically, fathers, and that means the high-vitality young men BAP and Kulak idolize are on a short leash and don’t get to do what they want within the community. Patriarchal societies, again and again, tend to create structures to protect women from those young men, because patriarchs care about their daughters even if they don’t regard them as needing independence. Actual historical patriarchy is as much rule by the old as it is by men.

I think Kulak and Jim are taking feminist fan fiction of an actual anthropological phenomenon(where older men tend to hold social power) at face value. Rather ironic for such red pilled spicy take generators.

because patriarchs care about their daughters

The word is "dowry". Daughters aren't productive like sons, so if you have them, you're expecting to raise a high-quality girl for a one-time cash payout (which is the historical answer to what the "having a daughter is the ultimate cuck" copypasta points out).

It is not meaningfully distinguishable from pimping, which is why, shock of shocks, women don't like it very much. (In modern times the woman [and her husband] capture that value surplus, and the copypasta is just bitching about this while simultaneously not being smart enough to remember what used to happen.)

Dowry is the property given by the bride's family to the groom. I think you're confused as to what's what.

Bridesprices are an Islamic thing which doesn't exist in the west, and as far as anyone can tell, never have. Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and most societies in Christendom gave property to their daughter's husbands/husbands' families upon marriage.

The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives.

It is important to note that the female fantasy is to replace their husband with the 6/6/6 alpha, while the male fantasy is to add the barely-legal bikini model to a harem with their wives. Men are polygamous, women are serially monogamous, because a woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time, while a man can get multiple women pregnant at the same time.

Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

why you think so?

If you're a guy who got dumped for a 6/6/6, you're now unmarried and free to look for another wife. If you're a wife who got sidelined for a bikini model, you're still married but receive only half (likely much less) of the commitment, and there's now one less woman for the rest of the men in society, statistically leaving one man completely without a match. It does look like the man's fantasy as you described it is the evil one.

What makes wanting an attractive and successful husband evil?

That part is normal and (according to the red-or-darker-pill view being expressed here) even biologically imperative. Presumably the evil part is the part where (again, according to that specific view) they're prepared to dump their existing husbands on a dime for him.

I don't think I'm anywhere near to fully agreeing with this, but I have seen a lot of media geared to women that treats female cheating very casually or sometimes even as virtuous, while this is rarely the case for male cheating in media aimed at men, and it's bothered me before.

Also, when women practice promiscuity, they prefer to do it in the form of serial monogamy / branch-swinging. In men's case, it's plate-spinning / soft harems. I don't think I need to describe how society treats these behaviors vastly differently.

while this is rarely the case for male cheating in media aimed at men

I definitely seen this glorified in many cases in media aimed at men (and not only in blatant porn or things pretending to not be a porn)

Pretty much no woman who is already married with children (having entered the marriage childless) is going to be able to ‘date up’ after divorce unless she picked a truly terrible husband. At best she’ll date sideways, most likely down.

Perfectly true, but media aimed at women such Eat, Pray, Love continues to sell them the fantasy that they will do better after a divorce, lots of women believe it, and destroy their husband's lives, their children's lives, and their own lives chasing Chad, not realizing that if Chad didn't want to settle down with them when they were young and childness, he definitely is not going to want to settle down with them now that they are old single mothers.

Do you have any actual statistics to back this up? I see y'all in the manosphere claiming this a lot, that it's just a typical woman thing to dump a good husband on a whim because she thinks she can do better. Women be dumping their loving, devoted husbands right and left, abandoning their kids, doing it all with no warning or justification, because a passing chad gave her tingles. Daily, hourly! And they're such stupid delusional cows, they have no idea that Chad Thundercock is not going to wife their newly divorced ass up!

It sure is a story y'all like to tell. And no doubt it's happened a time or two. But for every story like that, women have a story about the husband who left his good and faithful but aging, sagging, graying wife for a younger, fitter lass with boobs that still kiss the sun.

Whose story is more truthy? Which actually happens more often?

The reality is that most people don't casually derail their lives on a whim just because someone cuter winked at them (and if you married someone like that, your vetting instincts really need an upgrade). The man who dumps his wife for a younger model probably has his own version of the story, and so do the wives of the men who claim their wives just "destroyed their lives and their children's lives chasing Chad."

People can be shitty to each other, they can make bad choices in love, and they can be emotionally immature and irresponsible. What do you have besides resentment and just-so-stories to justify the assertion that women are more guilty of this?

I think that media is specifically geared towards the bottom of the barrel women who are already engaging in terrible or trashy behavior.

Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

That's, uh, quite a take.

You know, I have said this before and I'll say it again: evolutionary psychology has a lot of explanatory power, but humans are not hardwired circuits of evolutionary psychology. We are not spermatazoa and eggs being inexorably guided towards union in our every thought and action by chthonic reproductive forces. (And if we were - if what women do is just their evolved natures - then how is it "evil"?) At the very least, you must acknowledge we all live on various bell curves, in which some of us adhere to the "modal male/modal female" behavior more than others.

Detached from evpsych "Why women are evil hypergamous whores" arguments, I think the moral claim that it's "more evil" to want to replace your spouse with a hotter spouse than to want to make your spouse part of a harem is pretty weak. Why should a man find it more objectionable that his wife harbors desires to fuck another man instead of him than a woman should find it objectionable that her husband harbors desires to fuck other women in addition to her?

I have the intuition that adding a relationship is less bad than replacing a relationship. Like, if a married couple that already has a child decides to have a second child, or if a person who only has one friend one day manages to get another friend, that's a perfectly normal and positive development. Whereas if a couple has a second child and then throws out their first child into the streets because the second child is taller and stronger and smarter and they have decided that they want to invest all of their resources into one child, that would be evil.

Likewise, the desire of men to add a second woman to their marriage seems to me a lot more honest and healthy than that thing women do where they swear they will love you forever only to turn around and act like you never existed the second a better option comes long.

I think I would have preferred being the senior member of a harem to that.

I have the intuition that adding a relationship is less bad than replacing a relationship.

In a polygamous society you could call adding a wife "adding a relationship," I guess, but in our culture we don't see it that way and it's just cheating. Not at all the same thing as adding another child.

Likewise, the desire of men to add a second woman to their marriage seems to me a lot more honest and healthy than that thing women do where they swear they will love you forever only to turn around and act like you never existed the second a better option comes long.

Damn, dude, find you some better women. I mean, if you sincerely believe that "that thing women do" is just something that is natural to all women (AWALT), why do you even want to have a "relationship" at all?

You do know that men also have been known to profess eternal love for a woman only to dump her for a younger, hotter model, right?

I think I would have preferred being the senior member of a harem to that.

I doubt you would, actually, and certainly you wouldn't prefer being a junior member of a harem.

I doubt you would, actually, and certainly you wouldn't prefer being a junior member of a harem.

Ergw strikes me as having a bit too much pride to agree to be one of these guys, but if the only alternative to such relationship is separation, a person who is sufficiently in love and scared of being alone would put on the horns.

Goddamn, that picture...

That's one of those images about which people are going to start saying "That has to be AI because it can't be real."

Anyway, yeah, my point is there are worse things than being alone (for women too!) and if you really believe the entire opposite sex is evil, that would be enough for a rational person to just nope out.

Obviously, I don't think these people are rational, and schemes to "control" the evil hypergamous whores that they imagine represent how "trad" societies did it are, as hydro put it, patriarchy fan fiction.

The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, if I remember correctly. It was written in 1985 and Taliban didn't exist yet.

Neverthless, it's true that Atwood's book never makes the sex seem appealing at all, and there's only a couple of instances of "sex scenes", if you can call them that. I haven't seen the show, either, but all the publicity makes it seem rather more culture-warrish than the book which, if I remember correctly, only contains one line about abortion (offhand remark by Offred that she can't even remember why everyone cared about legal abortion so much since in the book's present-day society everyone wants, more than anything, to be fertile) and scarcely more than that about gays or lesbians. It's really more of a personalized "what would I do if enslaved by a tyrannical society" thing than about the exact details of the society itself.

Atwood seems to have leaned into the narrative about it being modern-day anti-GOP commentary in recent interviews, but then again, she has just received quite a bit more of publicity than she had before and that sort of a thing creates an easy need to cater to your new audiences.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, if I remember correctly. It was written in 1985 and Taliban didn't exist yet.

You're right, my bad (memory).

I am not surprised that Atwood today is more willing to have it read as an allegory about the Republican Right, but at least when I read it in the 80s, it was more nuanced and less overtly contemporary culture war.

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