When Blogospheres Collide -- Feminism vs. MRA/MGTOW/PUA
If you follow any feminist blogs, you can't have missed that the MRA (Men's Rights Activists), MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and PUA (Pick Up Artist) communities have lately been visiting feminist blogs, most conspicuously at Dave Futrelle's Manboobz.
These men seem to believe that women rule the world. They're mad as hell and, at least for the MGTOWs, they're not going to take it any more.
What's almost funny about this is that many of them do have reason to be angry, but they are angry at the wrong things.
PUAs, for example, focus on dating, which is code for who has control of women's sexuality. PUAs tend to go places where the women are attracted by men with money and status, then are angered or dismayed when they can't compete.
These men do not focus on other forms of male privilege. They believe "privilege" has to do with money and cars and sexytimes. So they do not realize that the ability to walk down the street without being sexually harassed, the likelihood they will be paid what they are worth (or more), the fact that they are taken more seriously in politics, society and religion, is privilege they share with other men.
PUAs do not simply try to find women who aren't into the money and fame thing. They have instead adopted a strategy, called The Game, whereby you don't have to be high-status to get the "prizes." You follow certain rules and apply them to a lot of women and eventually you'll supposedly get what you want — sex. These rules tend to work best on women with weak boundaries. The subset of PUA men who tend to be controlling or abusive find these rules very handy in locating good victims.
Anyway. The PUA is gaming a flawed system. Even if we agreed that women are objects, it's not a fair system because fair allocation of the objects is literally impossible when the high-status men get more than one each. You can do better than the next guy, but the system itself is unfair.
It's not unreasonable to wonder if men who go for the status and money hungry women are really just using the women as a marker to prove their status and fake having the money. The fun may literally be in "the game" itself and not in having sex with women or enjoying their company.
The more fundamental flaw, as I hinted above, is that women aren't objects and so any attempt to "allocate" them by men for their own reasons and with their own priorities is morally ad fundamentally wrong. Some counter this with a pseudo-naturalistic argument that it just allows men and women to allocate themselves, but the mechanics by which women are freed to make their own decisions tend to seem repugnant to PUAs.
The final problem with PUA strategy is that, if you win, you probabloy just won something you don't want. Women who are dumb or vulnerable enough to fall prey to the game aren't admirable. Why would you want to be with someone who is either too dumb or too beaten down to resist?
It's the old Groucho Marx "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member" problem.
MRAs more typically focus on control and money.
They see control of women and control of family assets (including children) moving away from powerful men and into the hands of women.
There's an interesting parallel here with right-wingers, who fancy themselves the ones who will have financial power even if they are poor already. They fear dismantling a system that seems to offer them the promise of being "on top."
For them, it's like the game's being called before they have a chance to win. All the prizes have been pulled from the table, no more cake, waah.
To their credit, they do correctly identify their power in the current system as limited. They just don't look beyond the game.
They look to their individual lives, and places where they do not have control, and identify those as places where women more and more have gained control, and think that women should not have control.
They cannot see that women do not currently have even their level of privilege. Often this is because they compare women of the upper classes to themselves, and since they tend not to be upper class, the gap between these two groups is mistaken for a gap between the sexes instead of a gap between the classes. They do not think to compare themselves to upper class men, because somehow they've convinced themselves that those men deserve their positions.
Like the PUA game, there is no way to make it fair. They want to be the winners, but this means many other men will be losers.
There is no escaping that this philosophy is the same as that of Republicans who aren't well-off. They are in favor of a system laid out to cheat them because they hope to win the lottery and be one of the few winners. They do not see the unfairness in the rigged system, they only complain that women and minorities are allowed to play and therefore lower the odds even further that they could be "winners".
These men seem to believe that women rule the world. They're mad as hell and, at least for the MGTOWs, they're not going to take it any more.
What's almost funny about this is that many of them do have reason to be angry, but they are angry at the wrong things.
PUAs, for example, focus on dating, which is code for who has control of women's sexuality. PUAs tend to go places where the women are attracted by men with money and status, then are angered or dismayed when they can't compete.
These men do not focus on other forms of male privilege. They believe "privilege" has to do with money and cars and sexytimes. So they do not realize that the ability to walk down the street without being sexually harassed, the likelihood they will be paid what they are worth (or more), the fact that they are taken more seriously in politics, society and religion, is privilege they share with other men.
PUAs do not simply try to find women who aren't into the money and fame thing. They have instead adopted a strategy, called The Game, whereby you don't have to be high-status to get the "prizes." You follow certain rules and apply them to a lot of women and eventually you'll supposedly get what you want — sex. These rules tend to work best on women with weak boundaries. The subset of PUA men who tend to be controlling or abusive find these rules very handy in locating good victims.
Anyway. The PUA is gaming a flawed system. Even if we agreed that women are objects, it's not a fair system because fair allocation of the objects is literally impossible when the high-status men get more than one each. You can do better than the next guy, but the system itself is unfair.
It's not unreasonable to wonder if men who go for the status and money hungry women are really just using the women as a marker to prove their status and fake having the money. The fun may literally be in "the game" itself and not in having sex with women or enjoying their company.
The more fundamental flaw, as I hinted above, is that women aren't objects and so any attempt to "allocate" them by men for their own reasons and with their own priorities is morally ad fundamentally wrong. Some counter this with a pseudo-naturalistic argument that it just allows men and women to allocate themselves, but the mechanics by which women are freed to make their own decisions tend to seem repugnant to PUAs.
The final problem with PUA strategy is that, if you win, you probabloy just won something you don't want. Women who are dumb or vulnerable enough to fall prey to the game aren't admirable. Why would you want to be with someone who is either too dumb or too beaten down to resist?
It's the old Groucho Marx "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member" problem.
MRAs more typically focus on control and money.
They see control of women and control of family assets (including children) moving away from powerful men and into the hands of women.
There's an interesting parallel here with right-wingers, who fancy themselves the ones who will have financial power even if they are poor already. They fear dismantling a system that seems to offer them the promise of being "on top."
For them, it's like the game's being called before they have a chance to win. All the prizes have been pulled from the table, no more cake, waah.
To their credit, they do correctly identify their power in the current system as limited. They just don't look beyond the game.
They look to their individual lives, and places where they do not have control, and identify those as places where women more and more have gained control, and think that women should not have control.
They cannot see that women do not currently have even their level of privilege. Often this is because they compare women of the upper classes to themselves, and since they tend not to be upper class, the gap between these two groups is mistaken for a gap between the sexes instead of a gap between the classes. They do not think to compare themselves to upper class men, because somehow they've convinced themselves that those men deserve their positions.
Like the PUA game, there is no way to make it fair. They want to be the winners, but this means many other men will be losers.
There is no escaping that this philosophy is the same as that of Republicans who aren't well-off. They are in favor of a system laid out to cheat them because they hope to win the lottery and be one of the few winners. They do not see the unfairness in the rigged system, they only complain that women and minorities are allowed to play and therefore lower the odds even further that they could be "winners".
I agree that most PUA literature is pathetic if not disturbing. Of course, there is something to be said for the idea of teaching men how to attract women, and, more generally, how to navigate social interactions successfully. The problem is that applying an understanding of social psychology to actual human interactions can easily slide into the realm of manipulation. It's one thing to give a guy relaxation techniques, give him some insight into body language, teach him the art of conversation, and show him how to indicate sexual interest without being fawning or creepy. It's another to give him a bullet-pointed game plan detailing what kinds of things to say, when and where to touch, etc. That's manipulation.
I do disagree with you about male privilege, though. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist--it does--but female privilege also exists, and it has for a long time, not just in modern societies. Both our genes and our societies seek to use us for their own purposes, not consciously, but because that's their nature. Males and females have both been used and abused by their genes and by their societies for tens of thousands of years, albeit in different ways.
One of the feminist blogs has an FAQ that denies the existence of female privilege, calling it "benevolent sexism". The implication is that men control society, so they (whoever "they" are) pick and choose who gets what privileges. This idea is erroneous because it denies the phenomenon of emergence. Even though cells are technically made up of subatomic particles in various elaborate arrangements, particle physics can't explain biological phenomena. In the same way, societies cannot be completely understood as collections of individuals.
For example, professional basketball players could be said to have "height privilege", in that people of average height are extremely unlikely to be able to play professional basketball. But there is no conspiracy against short people, and no person or group of persons can be blamed for their disadvantage.
Reply to this
Privilege just means you are never placed in the position of being discounted because of who you are. You have the privilege of being judged solely on the content of what you say and do. Not on whether you are fat, sexy, feminine, butch, disabled, Black, Asian, old, disabled, etcetera.
It doesn't require malicious intent, in fact it works even better without it. If you are privileged you never have to think about it. That's the privilege.
No one thinks, well sure, that's what a middle-class average white guy would think or say or do, and then discount it, saying, we don't need to listen to that. The middle-class average white guy's point of view is automatically considered valid, all others are suspect to varying degrees.
Reply to this
I mistakenly visited your site after seeing the word old and equated it with reformed. Please insert the word "clown" between old and feminist so as not to waste the average guy's Internet surfing time.
Reply to this
This article misses the point of all three movements. Disappointing. Do your research next time.
Reply to this
Matt, you miss the point of commenting, which is to add information, not simply say "wrong." Disappointing.
Reply to this
"You have the privilege of being judged solely on the content of what you say and do. Not on whether you are fat, sexy, feminine, butch, disabled, Black, Asian, old, disabled, etcetera."
Amazing how you can speak for an entire class of people. A class to which you don't belong, and therefore, using the logic inherent in your own ideology, cannot possibly understand.
Reply to this
Polylogist_innit, I'm not speaking for an entire class of people. I'm speaking about them from my observations as someone in a class defined as below them.
Reply to this