No, that’s not a character from
Cats – it’s our reality-challenged friend who frequents the “Love-Shy” discussion board and is often C&P’d to
Fundies Say The Darndest Things. I dropped in over there this evening (Jeremiah’s been so quiet!) and had to share this amusing rant. If you don’t mind, I’ll deconstruct as I go. (And do take a look at some of the
comments at FSTDT. Priceless.)
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[An answer to the question, "what exactly is wrong with being a slut?"]
Well, sluts are bad for men, women, and children. Did I miss anything? Oh yes, sluts destroy civilization.
There you go! A behavior that is not only universally evil and with us from the beginnings of society, but is
still destroying civilization. Must not be doing a very good job of that last, if it’s taken them so many centuries and yet nations, buildings and even men, women and children still stand.
Sluts are bad for men because they only have sex with the "top" men. Most men have much less sex in a slut culture than in a monogamous culture where every man gets a woman.
Oh, yes, how splendid it would be to live in the kind of society where you could stop in at the Monogamy*Mart and pick up your ration of Woman. Talk about your sense of entitlement! News flash: a woman is a human being, not a commodity to which anybody is intrinsically entitled, or which everyone of the opposite gender automatically “gets.”
In a slut culture, men are trained to behave in whatever way attracts women. Sluts are attracted to jerks, so men are trained to be jerks. So the quality of men declines in a slut culture.
But, I thought sluts were only attracted to the “top” men. Does that mean these “top” men are also, by definition, jerks? This guy wants to have it both ways. Women aren’t interested in him, so he has to rationalize that either it’s because they’re only drawn to people more successful – whatever his definition of success might be – than he is, or to people that are jerks. It couldn’t be any of his
own fault: no, it must be all those sluts out there.
In a slut culture, men constantly hit on women. This causes women to become hostile, rude, and obnoxious. Because men are desperate and will take anything, women lose any motivation to care about their appearance. So sluts become ugly hostile creatures.
Here’s my guess: in line with his views on the culture, this poster began to “constantly hit on women” with the line that he was “desperate and will take anything.” I doubt he can see how not-endearing an approach that would be. It is also very possible that he is misinterpreting as hostility, rudeness and obnoxiousness the fact that women have been telling him to buzz off. Why on earth might they do that? I mean, he’s desperate and will take anything!
(Also, did you notice the moment in there where he slipped up and equated "women" with "sluts" without qualification? See a pattern emerging?)
As sluts age, they lose their ability to attract the "top" men, but still reject all other men. So they become spinsters. So now, not only are they ugly and hostile, but they are also miserable.
Translation: I can’t even get anybody on the rebound or on the far side of the speed-dating age to notice me.
They must feel really miserable about this.
In a slut culture, illegitimacy rates go way up. Children are raised without fathers. This usually makes for a less happy childhood. So children are less happy in a slut culture.
Well, I personally believe in the nuclear family as an ideal, but not in this kind of blind, doctrinaire way. Children can be happy or unhappy in any flavor of family situation, depending on the family dynamics and, especially, on how they are nurtured in early childhood. This goes for whether you’re a single parent, in a traditional heterosexual marriage, or in a gay or lesbian partnership. Loving the child is what matters, period. The nature of the presence or absence of one or the other parent? Not so much. And I don’t think the children matter to this guy, anyway. Hop back a few points and you’ll see him saying that his imaginary “slut culture” is bad because it reduces the amount of sex that men – especially men like himself – are (or aren’t) getting. It’s pretty clear where
his priorities are, and he's not focused on the kids.
In the book "Sex and Culture", Unwin showed that civilization depends on female chastity and that a civilized culture cannot survive more than three generations of sluts without collapsing. We can see this process before our eyes.
Ooh, let’s sound all scholarly by throwing in a gratuitous reference to something published and then purporting to quote what it says. I haven’t read this text myself, but I feel fairly safe in saying that it probably says nothing remotely close to this. Among other things, there are no many
non-sequiturs in the claim that “civilization depends on female chastity,” I can hardly read that line without giggling. And we’re also officially full circle to the opening of this post, where I observed that centuries, let alone three generations, haven’t made a dent in the ability of some women to behave in a trashy way, nor have they yet resulted in the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Any more questions?
A few, actually, buddy, and I’ll pose them to you directly even though I doubt you'll ever stop by this blog. The first one is…is your self-esteem really so abysmal that you have to blame everything that is wrong with civilization on a fantasy sociology you’ve built up from being turned down so consistently? Because it sure seems like you’re trying to assign responsibility for your own issues to big, zeitgeist-style movements that are conspiring to keep you from your rightful, guaranteed place in the world. Grow up and take ownership of your own life, successes and failures alike. Whining isn’t becoming,
in or
to anybody.
Second…as Sherlock Holmes said, once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth. You’ve gone to great lengths to blame your poor appeal to women on anything and everything
other than yourself – even extending that blame to a culture that somehow synergistically affects how all men, women and children on the planet behave. That’s one hell of a lot of projection, and it’s a house of cards that just doesn’t stand up. So, we have to eliminate it. And that leaves us with an inescapable conclusion. The problem? Is YOU. Not other men, women and children; not big societal tides of behavior and attitudes. People don’t like YOU.
Can we see why that might be? Well, gee. You seem to think you have some kind of innate right to a woman’s affection and attention, for starters. Do you think that kind of arrogance is attractive? You sound like you think a relationship is a guaranteed given. Like a cookie at kindergarten snack time, everybody gets one. WRONG.
You claim that this culture you posit causes men to behave in ways that simultaneously (a) make them jerks, (b) make them attractive to women and (c) cause them to constantly hit on women. Those would seem to be at odds. I am a woman, and I don’t know of any women, including myself, who find the experience of jerks or pests constantly “hitting on” me as remotely pleasant. Quit blaming your competition, pal, and turn your lens on yourself. If you’re not being noticed, it’s for other reasons than the way other men are behaving. It’s probably about your own misogynistic stances.
A final word of advice to our disturbed poster: think about the way you are thinking about women. You’re categorizing us into tidy boxes that line up with your world-view of victimization. When we reject you, it’s because WE are either “sluts” or “miserable” or “ugly and hostile” or “spinsters” or, I imagine, any number of other things.
How would you feel if I put you in boxes labeled “loser” or “predator” or “creep” or “fat-ass bastard” or whatever other pejoratives I could dream up? (Not to say that I'm
not doing that...but, then, I'm not looking to proactively draw your attention in a positive way, am I?)
You need to quit labeling women as categories and start looking upon them as people not unlike yourself – imperfect, awkward, and hopefully with some redeeming qualities. I have yet to see any from you, I admit…and I likewise suspect that women you have approached have the same problem. Quit blaming the cosmos for your woes, find your best foot, and put it the hell forward. Nobody likes a narcissistic victim, and that's what your every post seems to show you to be.
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All the above is not to trivialize anyone's emotional life. It is replete with ups and downs, the ecstatic and the devastating, and we all experience both. But to see this fellow consistently appear on FSTDT bemoaning how unappreciated he is, while demonstrating with every post how much he has clearly invited and reinforced his own position...I'm sorry. That's funny.
