A couple thoughts:
Certain people make intelligent discussion impossible. You're having an interesting discussion with someone, and then someone else comes in, and starts cracking jokes, debasing the discussion to the level of facile comedy. There are plenty of guys like this - because they have nothing to contribute intellectually, but also don't have the maturity to remain quiet, they bring the conversation down to their level. And there are *even more* women who do this. Often, it's not even their fault - most men are not like Roosh, they accord women, especially younger ones, extra special status for having a vagina. Their words are given extra weight. They immediately become the center of attention. The girl starts talking about "what I feel..." and no one can disagree with her feelings. Young, attractive women have outsized power in saying who is cool and who isn't, unless men collectively disregard her. For most people, if a girl says someone is creepy, there's no debate about it, he is.*
This is actually a huge part of the problem - men giving way way way too much credence to the average girl's opinions. Maybe a guy refused to buy her a drink, he's a creep, so now all the men around her will lend her a sensitive ear and shun this obstreperous man. I suspect if there were more exclusively male spaces, men wouldn't kowtow to every woman that has a half-baked opinion. The current strategy of a ubiquitously co-ed society isn't working. Men need to stop giving women so much credit, and treat women as they would a man.
One of my most consistent disappointments with modern men is how they give a fuck about what girls say, because they're girls. Before these girls have even proved themselves. If you subject her opinions to the same scrutiny you would a man's, you're a misogynist. You're hurting her feelings. One thing I encounter in the workplace is that women are largely free to make dirty, sexual jokes. They can set the bounds almost anywhere they like. But if you, as a man, do it first, woe unto you, because you may be guilty of 'creating a hostile work environment.' Especially if you have no charisma. Instead, you have to wait for her to make a joke about say, teabagging before you can even acknowledge that women have breasts. Not even joking. When the rest of society militates against free expression, men should give themselves a space where they don't have to whip themselves worrying about some girl crying "CREEP!"
If the forum was the only outlet for expression on the internet, yeah, barring women might be problematic. But women have plenty of other venues for making their opinions heard, like Youtube.
Also, I see two groups of people who really truly "get it," who understand with any consistency the true nature of men and women - players and patriarchists, people who broadly endorse the idea of the rule of fathers. Modern women are unlikely to fit in either category. When they claim to be conservative or traditionalists, they still have strong feminist beliefs lurking under the surface - the blogger Dalrock has plenty of examples of this. The views held here are so extreme, so far from the mainstream, that you have to be extreme yourself in some way to agree. Players come to it via perceptive reflection on personal experience, and patriarchists by ignoring a century's worth of feminist programming.
People who DON'T fit in these categories, but who claim to be anti-feminist are often 'MRA's. And these guys are just fucking insufferable pussies, who wallow in their own victimhood. If you question feminism, the belief that all discrimination on the basis of sex is immoral, that women are entitled to occupy the same roles as men, they will attack you like a rabid dog. They're still feminists. They're angry because the feminists are being bad feminists.
*I saw this post elsewhere, on a consistently PC, feminist website, and it's great:
Quote:Quote:
If you're a woman of average or better looks, you have one under-spoken superpower. Namely, how you interact with other men will have a huge effect on their social status. I'm not talking about overt flirtation (don't do it) or office relationships (avoid, avoid, avoid). I'm talking about more subtle stuff, like who a woman smiles at, who she initiates conversations with, and what her body language is toward various people. This will have huge ripple effects on the male status hierarchy. Much of the reason why men tend to seem "afraid of" women in the office is that they're afraid she'll judge him lowly and send out "loser signals" about him, bringing him down a notch or two. Since everything that happens at most workplaces (especially cliquish startups, so don't give me this "meritocratic" bullshit) is really about social status-- "performance" is a myth made up to justify firings and scare the mediocre-- this is huge.
Overtly flirting with the men in the office will destroy a woman's reputation, for sure. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the subtle fact that, among groups of people, women have the capability to exert a disproportionate influence on the status ordering. In fact, the best way to use this is to do exactly what a young man would do: be nice to everyone, reach out and try to make allies, seek mentors... but also take a small comfort in the fact that men have an added incentive to be nice to you-- you have a disproportionate effect on their image, and they want to be seen with you.
For example, a 23-year-old with 6 months on the job comes into the office of a powerful person (MD in banking, Partner in a law firm) and says that (s/)he is bored with the work that (s/)he is getting. If male, he's just another entitled fuck looking for an advantage. The response usually is: go away, pay your dues, and come back in 7 years after you've proven yourself (if I haven't fired you before that). That's because humans have a visceral hatred of low-status males, and in the workplace, men in the youngest 15% are almost always of low status (hence, they get the shittiest work).
If the 23-year-old is female, this 45-year-old executive might realize that having a 23-year-old woman come into his office once a week might give him a younger, "cooler" image and prevent him from getting "managed out" (read: fired) for being "resistant to change" (read: old). So he might give her the kind of work that most people have to wait a few years to have a crack at.
Again, she's not flirting with him, or compromising herself in any way. She's doing exactly what a man would do if he had the courage: going into a powerful person's office and asking for better work.
It doesn't always happen this way, but it can. Career advancement is about stringing together a large number of high-impact, low-probability prospects (with enough parallelism that the likelihood of some success becomes high) and waiting for one to hit. The "superpower" that an attractive woman has doesn't turn the low probability into a high one; it makes it slightly less low.
I'm not saying life is fair and, on the whole, women almost certainly have to deal with more bullshit than men. It's wrong that women's looks are taken to matter so much. It's wrong that people are huge dicks to women about aging. Some of the "old lady" comments I heard when Clinton was running for President in 2008 made me want to vomit.
Men have a huge and unfair advantage after 32, which is that they can have children with their careers interrupted, and that their social status (being abysmal, in the workplace, at 22-24) peaks around 40-50. Men can (and are expected to) work through child-rearing, while for it to make sense for a woman to keep working after having children, she has to make about 2.5 times the average income (to hire help, day care, etc.) On the other hand, women have a huge advantage from 22 to 32, which is that they have the subtle but potent ability to determine who's "cool", and if they're aware of how to use it, they can speed up their careers. And given the heaping plate of bullshit that society gives women once they get older (and it starts in the 30s) they pretty much have to use this advantage while it's there.
Link:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4732168