Debbie says:
Jonquil has found a couple of essays on related topics, both by politically conservative Anglo American men, and she and her commenters have drawn some interesting and useful conclusions from them.
Steven den Beste is unhappy, because women have been replaced by “female persons,” and female persons don’t smile at him, or hug him:
I paid Raven $200 plus a big tip for a private dance on Sunday.
Wednesday I returned to the same club. I walked in as she was on the stage, and she recognized me immediately and her face lit up and she said “You came back!” and called me over to the stage and embraced me; later she sat down and talked to me. I again paid her about $200 for private dancing and again tipped well. Later after I’d spent as much money as I could justify to myself (I had more but really needed to stop) I was walking towards the door and she saw me and asked me if I was leaving.
Now I have no illusions about her motivation: it was mostly mercenary (though that doesn’t completely explain that last big hug). But it doesn’t matter why she treated me the way she did; the point is that way her face lit up upon seeing me when I walked in, that initial embrace, that eagerness to talk to me, that hug as I left — those are the things I need to be happy in life. I need to get that from someone. I need that to happen a lot. I need it daily. I need it as much as I need food or sleep or water to drink.
And I haven’t got the slightest idea, not the faintest hint, how to get that without paying for it. (And paying for it routinely is not an acceptable answer.) Because I can only get that from a woman, and I’m surrounded by female persons. The only women I know of are married, engaged, or work in strip joints. Every female who’s single that I know is a person, not a woman. I’m not a man to any of them and they don’t treat me that way.
The point is that it doesn’t have to be the way it is. Anglo women have done this deliberately, and I’m not sure they realize just how much they’ve damaged Anglo men in their search for professional equality. There’s a price for everything, and in this case it’s the male persons who have paid most of it. By changing from women to female persons, they’ve forced all their male coworkers to change from men to male persons, whether they wanted to or not. And that was a very high price for the men to pay, because unlike the women, the men got no benefit whatever out of this change. Just pain and loneliness and confusion and fear.
Leo Frankowski (who wrote some very entertaining science fiction novels back when I was a bookseller) has “solved” a very similar problem.
And the more that I looked at the women of America, the less I wanted to do anything with them. I wanted a woman like my grandmother was. Intelligent, tough, and self reliant. Warm, loving, and absolutely straight. Compassionate with all that lived, caring and supportive, but don’t you DARE cross her! There don’t seem to be any of those any more in America. Then I stumbled across a web site that told me that for the price of a small used car, they could bring me a place filled with beautiful women eager to meet me.
Six months later, I flew to Russia, and had a wonderful time. Beautiful women, sometimes three and four a day, were absolutely eager to meet fat, old me! In a few weeks, I picked a pretty thirty year old who ran her own business. That’s right, I picked. I wasn’t in Kansas any more, or Michigan either. I bought her a diamond ring, and we spent a weekend in St. Petersburg together. Then I went home to get her Fiancee Visa going. Well, I picked wrong, and in a few months I broke it off.
But after I spent six more months back in Michigan being lonely, I … headed back to Russia with two suitcases. It was the smartest thing that I’ve ever done. Over the next year I dated over 80 fine ladies, and finally picked Marina, whom I married.
If your stomach can stand it, more in a similar vein can be found in this 2006 Harpers article by Kristoffer Garin.
Jonquil pretty nails one key point:
Leaving aside the commoditization of women, there’s a fascinating political conundrum here. Either of these men would be severely mocked by his cohorts if he complained that he wasn’t getting the wealth that he was owed, or that he couldn’t get health insurance and other men could. He would be told to suck it up and compete in the marketplace; that losers deserved to lose. And yet “women won’t pay attention to me” is a plaint that can be made with no fear of abuse from other conservatives — if attractive sympathetic women are a rare commodity, the fault is that of society rather than that of the commodity-seeker. This is the rare situation in which society apparently owes resources to the individual.
In a related, but more body-image-relevant point, what struck me in den Beste was the absolutely overt racism:
And every single Hispanic female [at a wedding] was a woman. And every single Anglo female there was a person. The contrast could not have been more vivid. It was astonishing, and to me even a bit intimidating: every single Hispanic woman there liked being a woman and liked men. You sure couldn’t say that about the Anglos, though.
I can guarantee you that if I had the opportunity to tell den Beste that this is racist, he would tell me it was anti-Anglo and pro-Hispanic. However, in the first place, any bright-line division of behaviors by race or ethnicity is racist. In the second place, what he’s really saying is that (some) Hispanic women have comparatively few economic and professional choices, and thus may have more need or more motivation to attach themselves to men. And every woman knows what kind of behavior is required to attach herself to a man. den Beste is smart enough to know that the lap dancer is responding to his money, not him, and it’s worth it to him to pay her for her attentions–he’s just unable to make the jump to see that the Hispanic women may also have been responding to his money, job, and class … or practicing on him until they find a man they like whose money, job, and class suits them.
Frankowski is dealing with Caucasian Russians, so he forsakes racism for classism. Notice how he is proud of “choosing” a woman, and “picked wrong.” There’s absolutely no indication of what happened to the woman who was the wrong choice: she could be dead, she could be in jail, she could be stranded in this country with no job and no income; she could be married/ remarried; or she could be in Russia in her old life. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. She’s not real to him; he’just “picked wrong.” And because he has American money, he can pick again and, he can pretend that he’s bought genuine love rather than value for dollars.
So many things are going on here: these men don’t understand that affection, attention, attraction, sex, and love are all different things. They don’t understand that economic freedom for women means at its most basic level that women are under much less pressure to settle for the best of a lot of bad choices. They don’t understand that human interactions are complicated and rich and nuanced, that women who don’t run up to den Beste and hug him at work might very well go home and hug their sweetheart(s) with great delight, that women who don’t fall at Frankowski’s feet might simply be looking for a different kind of man (possibly one who thinks women are human?).
It all comes down to two truths: 1) if you want something badly enough and you have money, you can almost always pay for an imitation and pretend that it’s the real thing; and 2) to get real loving attention from someone, you have to offer exactly that to people until you find someone who wants it from you. That’s how you get it back. As long as (some) men continue treating women like a commodity, they’ll be paying for those imitations … and blaming women because it’s so much easier to blame women than to take responsibility for how people respond to you.
gender, men, women, sex work, overseas brides, feminism, racism, sex, love, Body Impolitic