If you unironically reblogged this post, you can never call yourself a feminist or even an MRA ever again. If you unironically reblog this, you have more in common with these incel alt-right gamer stereotypes the media loves to hate on than you want or *could* ever want. If you find this #relateable, you are part of the problem. If you find this #relateable, you are like all the women I know IRL who are very #trad in their personal life and revealed preferences, while you tumblrers complain about the aggregate social inequality that emerges from these preferences, these choice that you yourself make differently. If you find this relateable, search your feelings. The only constant in all your failed relationships is you. TFW no BF.
This is the hill I should die on. I don’t want to. Not because it’s kind, or true, but because everybody has to die somewhere. THIS IS THE FUTURE FEMINISTS WANT. THIS IS WHAT YOU DO TO US.
My opinion is “people shouldn’t call themselves feminists or MRAs regardless because both terms are needlessly contentious and distracting,” but, this is, uh, a pretty uncharitable take? The reason people get mad at incels and “nice guys” is because they see them as channelling their frustration with sexual rejection into blame and resentment toward the opposite sex, both generally and specifically. I don’t really see that here. Yes, she’s unhappy about being undesirable, but simply being unhappy isn’t enough to draw the kind of fire you’re objecting to.
It’s I think a justifiable objection that a man who said this sort of thing might get rounded to an entitled misogynist by uncharitable people, but that happens because the guys who talk openly about this stuff are weighted pretty heavily in that direction, which is much less a phenomenon with women. (Conversely, women are a lot more likely to get rounded to unreasonable feminists when making reasonable feminist points.) But very little of the blowback I’ve seen against TFW no girlfriend types has been targeted at comments like:
In our beauty and sexuality dominated culture, this isn’t just about not finding a husband or wife. The beautiful get better job opportunities, they get on tv no matter if they’ve got anything to say. Now that there’s no health insurance anymore, it might be that only the beautiful survive, better able to draw sympathy and donations to their gofundme for life or death surgery.
or (swapping the genders here)
So how much has to happen to build ugly boy sanctuaries, to give men’s lives meaning outside of romantic redemption, becoming fathers, being seen and desired, that rewards ambition for truth over scandal? The convent of the non-camera ready, the home for those denied pediatric dentistry, the chapel Our Lady of the Untouched.
It’s very noticeably a criticism of social systems and a call to change them. Arguments from men that go the same way tend to reach a sympathetic audience, in my experience, except when they’re something like “we should go back to requiring women to marry unattractive men in order to feed themselves”.
I think it’s fair to criticize this person for mainly caring about this in the case of women, because there is some generality to the problem that needs to be tackled all together. (I don’t get the impression she thinks it’s fine when similar things happen to men, but she obviously doesn’t consider it her problem, which I find questionable.) On the other hand, there are some legitimate reasons to care more about the problem for women than for men: women have fewer ugly role models in the media and popular culture, have more social roadblocks thrown in the way of lifelong self-sufficiency and non-sexual achievements, and are more stigmatized for doing following that path – like, with the last paragraph, notice that it sounds kind of silly to say that society ascribes men’s lives no meaning outside of romantic redemption, becoming fathers, and being seen and desired? You can construct a parallel that sounds better, and we have made a lot of headway toward even-handed sexual objectification over the years, but it seems fair to say that there’s still an underlying imbalance there. I’ve seen a lot more women complain that men won’t take them seriously because they’re ugly than that men won’t date them, and with men I’ve mostly seen it the other way round, so it seems like there’s something going on there.
A tangential point:
It’s I think a justifiable objection that a man who said this sort of thing might get rounded to an entitled misogynist by uncharitable people, but that happens because the guys who talk openly about this stuff are weighted pretty heavily in that direction, which is much less a phenomenon with women.
…is true, but it’s worth remembering how much that’s an outgrowth of cultural enforcement and signaling spirals.
In the halcyon days of my youth, “ugly awkward guys don’t get women” was a commonly-cited trope, and it was usually cited sympathetically. Often there was an undercurrent-moral of “the Best Women prove that they’re not shallow by looking past ugliness and awkwardness and getting together with the [ahem] nice guys.” It wasn’t just the proto-incels who were saying this; it was everyone. It was mainstream literature, from popular fantasy novels to newspaper cartoons. Certainly you would hear it a lot if you talked to actual ugly awkward nerdy dudes generally, even if those dudes were generally nice and generally more-or-less feminist, as they often were.
Then we got hit with an avalanche of information about the Correct Woke Way to talk about romantic and sexual dynamics, and it turned out that the rules included “definitely don’t talk about how it’s sad that ugly awkward guys don’t get women.”
When guns are outlawed, as they say, only outlaws will have guns. The people willing to flout the basic social norms are people who are too sunk in bitterness and despair to care about the reputational cost, and who are too angry and hostile to care that they’re going to make others uncomfortable. That’s a pretty heavy selector for “bad news” right there.
The point being: there’s nothing inherent about this trope that makes it especially attractive to bad guys, but the very fact that it’s taboo means that it’s eschewed by almost everyone except for bad guys and true iconoclasts, and that dynamic applies regardless of what the taboo is.