Friday, October 4, 2013

Stop saying stupid things

If you want people to pay attention to you. Some women don't seem to understand that the reason men don't listen to them has nothing to do with who or what they are and everything to do with what they are saying:
I was running on very little sleep and in pain, and the internet was full of spite and anger, over reviews, over Evil Old Fans, over women who speak up and male authors who object. Over lack of diversity and prejudice and abuse. All day I watched men complain and demand, and women of all ages try at length to find answers and compromises, to help, to support, to nurture, to explain, to ameliorate. And the men ignored them or said 'Not good enough.' I noticed the Very Important Men interact with each other and reflect each other and ignore all female input, unless it came from a very small selection of Women Who Matter, who were almost all young, pretty and successful, and usually also white and heterosexual and able-bodied.

I saw, in particular, older women of all races say and do intelligent, positive things, and be ignored.
Look a little more closely at what she is saying. "women who speak up and male authors who object". Women like her never seem to grasp that it is the content of their speech to which men are objecting, not the mere fact that they are babbling nonsensically away about something again. Does she seriously want to try to deny that those male authors have the same right to object to what the women are saying that the women have to say it in the first place? Why does she think she can object to the behavior of others, when they are doing nothing more than what she is doing.

The main reason Very Important Men tend to interact with each other and ignore female input is because female input, most of the time, is solipsistic, short-sighted, self-serving, and not infrequently unrelated to the topic at hand.  For example, when male scientists are discussing the best way to cure cancer while women are complaining that there are too few female scientists, the correct thing for those male scientists to do is to ignore them.

(In fact, the more female scientists there are, the worse off science is likely to be in the long run, due to the fact that those intelligent female scientists have been statistically observed to be disinclined to reproduce and contribute multiple generations of male scientists, whose collective contribution is likely to considerably outweigh her own.)

Now, it is true that men are willing to pay attention to sufficiently attractive women, no matter what nonsense they are babbling. But all that does is put the other women in exactly the same position as every man in the world, judged by the content of her contributions rather than by her superficial attributes.  This woman isn't calling for equality, she's simply bitter that she doesn't qualify for either male respect or unmerited male attention.

Got something to say? Good. Say it. And if it's self-serving, contentious illogic, you'll be rightly ignored, unless you're pretty enough to be humored. That is the way of the world. Deal with it.

35 comments:

Bernard Brandt said...

In fact, the more female scientists there are, the worse off science is likely to be in the long run, due to the fact that those intelligent female scientists are not

Are not what? Inquiring minds want to know. At least my mind does.

VirtualAlaskan said...

It is a complete sentence, lacking only punctuation.

VD said...

Sorry, I thought I was going off too far on a tangent and dropped it, but forgot to take it out.

Bernard Brandt said...

Mr. O'Connor,

The sentence posted above may be a complete sentence, lacking only punctuation.

What I am saying is that the last clause of that sentence appears to express an incomplete thought.

Demonstratio:

...those intelligent female scientists are not..."

Are not intelligent?

Are not the majority of the female scientists in existence?

Are not the minions of the flying monkees of the Wicked Witch of the West, who in fact is the secret ringleader behind feminism?

Quod erat demonstrandum.

P.S., I'm going to this trouble, not because I wish to make fun of VD (I do not), but because I would really like to know what he is saying here. As the highfalutin' Greeks say, 'even Homer nods'. And as I am saying, sometimes, even VD does not finish a thought.

swiftfoxmark2 said...

This month is Breast Cancer Awareness month. Yet there are very few people who are not aware of breast cancer or most other forms of cancer. But we have to promote awareness, not prevention, not a cure, just awareness.

Krul said...

All day I watched men complain and demand, and women of all ages try at length to find answers and compromises, to help, to support, to nurture, to explain, to ameliorate.

Does she live on Planet Backwards? Here on Earth it's normally the women making demands and the men making compromises.

Stickwick Stapers said...

That is the way of the world. Deal with it.

Yes, well, that would be the rational thing to do. But, as with all groups that comprise the Left (and these sorts of women certainly belong in that category), they're not at all interested in conforming to reality. The fact that they think they can control entire economies and the global climate should suffice to prove that. It's all about making reality conform to their ideal.

For those women who are interested in engaging with reality, there is a very good way to hone one's interactions with men, and that's by making use of the semi-anonymity afforded by the Internet. For a lot of the writing (and gaming) I've done online I've used an androgynous, or even occasionally a male, handle. Unless/until I identify myself as female, the default of readers is to assume I'm male and treat me accordingly. If I'm ignored, I know it's because nobody thought what I was saying was interesting or useful, and I can't blame male privilege or whatever.

Women like this complainer above should give it a try, just as an experiment. Choose a neutral or male-ish name, refrain from divulging any information that would overtly identify you as a female, and then write stuff on the Internet: compose blog posts, get involved in discussions, ask for feedback. If nobody responds to you or you get negative feedback, you'll know it's because you're offering nothing of interest, not because someone is going out of his way to ignore you. The next step is to study what sorts of comments do get the kind of attention you (ostensibly) want, learn from them, and practice mimicking their style.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of sentences and punctuation, the woman quoted in Vox's post could use a little more of the former and less of the latter. Run on you crazy diamond, Pink Floyd might say. It's no wonder anyone with a serious brain would ignore the sort of input that amounts to a comma-delimited list of infinitives. Stylistically, it's a bore, especially following so closely a list of indicative claues masquerading as prepositional phrases.

I'm assuming the writer was one of the "older women" (though possibly not of all races all by herself). But what she wrote there was neither intelligent nor positive. If a man had wrote it, Very Important Men would consider him a lightweight twit.

Athor Pel said...

"Stickwick Stapers said...
...
For those women who are interested in engaging with reality, there is a very good way to hone one's interactions with men, and that's by making use of the semi-anonymity afforded by the Internet. For a lot of the writing (and gaming) I've done online I've used an androgynous, or even occasionally a male, handle. Unless/until I identify myself as female, the default of readers is to assume I'm male and treat me accordingly. If I'm ignored, I know it's because nobody thought what I was saying was interesting or useful, and I can't blame male privilege or whatever.
...
October 4, 2013 at 9:14 AM "



For any women inclined to follow Stickwick's advice I have a warning. You will find out very quickly that unless you think like a guy and speak like a guy or can fake it pretty well, you will be found out. I'm not telling you this in order to discourage you. I'm telling you this in order to prepare you.

Women have certain habitual communication traits and ways of looking at the world that they find very hard to shake off. They will trip you up.

I say these things not because of my exposure to the manosphere but because of exposure to another world entirely. I've done plenty of online gaming. I got very good at determining the real world attributes of the people I was talking to in text chat inside the games. Normal untrained people just give too much away as a matter of habit. Once you start paying attention to these things it becomes very easy to spot who was who.

The nature of online games help greatly. To explain, the world inside these games offer the same challenges to every player so how individual players react to those challenges tells much about their personality. The rules of the game enforce a meritocratic hierarchy of status within the game.

The only closeted women I ever missed were those that intentionally limited how much they talked, only communicated at a functional 'needs of game play' level and never communicated in matters of opinion or on topics outside the game.

Anonymous said...

I once read a blog which was clearly written by a woman, but she went to great lengths to conceal this. Actually, she even went to great lengths to conceal the gender of the people she was writing about, using shitty non-standard pronouns (e.g "ze was driving hir car"). I estimate that P(woman|feminist pronouns) = 0.90.

Someone wrote in a comment that the author was a woman (in an off-hand way, it wasn't the point of the comment) and the author went completely apeshit. All this did was confirm what all attentive readers knew. So, if you want to engage in a bit of online genderbending for your own amusement, don't get mad and snarky when someone points it out. It's a dead giveaway.

Stickwick Stapers said...

For any women inclined to follow Stickwick's advice I have a warning. You will find out very quickly that unless you think like a guy and speak like a guy or can fake it pretty well, you will be found out.

This is true. How often over at VP have regulars asked a new commenter, "Are you a woman?" after an emotional outburst or a spectacularly illogical bit of "reasoning"? The point is not to immediately identify yourself as a woman, because I suspect a lot of men auto-ignore women commenters (for good reason). With my method, at least you'll have confirmation that it's your feminine style that's off-putting, not the fact that you're a woman.

Now, if it's especially important to a woman to be accepted in the male world, it's possible, through a lot of study and practice, to cultivate a style that's not off-putting to men. That is, if you can find men who are wiling to put up with you long enough to get proficient at it. Speaking of which, it's rather ironic that Vox is so often accused of misogyny, because VP is one of the few places where I've not only been treated with genuine equality, but tolerated while I honed my male-friendly commenting skills. I've been commenting at VP for over four years now, and in that time I've gotten good enough that I've been mistaken for a male commenter many times. It can be done. But if a woman is not inclined to take the time, make the effort, or just isn't wired for male-friendly discourse, then she ought to learn to live with that limitation and focus on female-centric things instead of boring everyone even more with her complaining. I mean, if women are so superior to men, why should any of them care whether men listen or not?

LibertyPortraits said...

Being taken seriously is every man's quest; every woman's expectation.

Revelation Means Hope said...

Reading through her comment, two things stick out.
1) Her contempt for the complaining and whining behavior of the men (any men, high or low value). Notice even legit issues get lumped under complaint. In woman speak, a man complaining is contemptible.
2) Her real problem is the men with perceived high value are ignoring HER, not just other women. She would have zero problem with this if the Men Who Matter were listening to her opinions and shutting out the others. In fact, she'd be finding a way to humble/brag about it the first chance that she had.

Athor Pel said...

I'm going to list some of the most common indicators of true online identity in the context of massively online gaming. Most are related to in-game texts and not necessarily indicators of sex so much as maturity level. Most are actually on topic for this post, some I include just because they're funny.


Any comment that when unpacked says, "I'm bored." This will instantly downgrade the maturity level of the commenter in the eyes of all reading it, unless they themselves are at or below the same level of maturity. In other words they're 12 years old and they expect to be entertained.

Any loud appeal to fairness based on how a situation makes them feel. Prices too high in the auction house? Unfair. Loot roll didn't go their way? Unfair. Their character class got hit with the nerf bat in the last patch and they can't pwn noobs in PVP anymore? Unfair.

When given constructive criticism after a run through a dungeon react with vituperative attacks on the critic's character rather than listen and try to perform better. Or they try to blame someone else for their failure, though this doesn't work well anymore because of all the add-ons that log game data for player review later.

When guild mates poke fun or otherwise try to get their goat they blow up in spectacular fashion only reserved for children and the very thin skinned. Or worse they huddle up into a cringing ball like an intimidated puppy and refuse to interact at all unless begged. Pouters and screamers, ugh.

When given help by guild mates they don't feel a need to reciprocate.

They think that lots of participation in guild activities at lower character levels means that they deserve a spot in the weekly max-level guild raid group once they reach that level themselves. Though, depending on the guild, just showing up consistently is a big leg up on the competition.

They go AFK in the middle of a dungeon run leaving the rest of the group in the lurch. This tends to mean one of two things, they have kids or they are a kid themselves and Mom made them take out the trash, right then.

They log off in the middle of a dungeon run. Again, have kids or are a kid.

Their character runs off a cliff or into a boss mob, dies and they won't answer any tells. Very young kid got on the keyboard while parent was away or the cat did it.

They actually try to engage trolls in general or trade chat. Though this is usually more of an indicator of being new to online games or online culture rather than maturity level.

They go to the trouble of assembling an in-town-only armor wardrobe for strictly aesthetic reasons in a game that doesn't make that task at all easy. Old school WoW (hard) versus GW2 (easy). This is the gaming equivalent of paper dolls.

Women generally don't like PvP.


These have all been behavior based. Any others that I could list are text or information based and make the job of judging true identity much easier. The classic slip of the tongue.

Anonymous said...

I went to the website because I found her rant incoherent. I still have no idea what she is talking about other than a general rant to be taken seriously. Of course, nobody could be faulted for considering her unserious at this point.

Markku said...

Almost all of the time, Stickwick talks about external facts. Which makes it really, really hard to tell that she's a woman.

Of course, although this strategy sounds simple, it in fact isn't; to utilize it, you have to know and think about external facts.

Lucas said...

Female robot used as a tour guide is FIRED for being too attractive.

http://dailym.ai/1gao6Qw

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

A note of warning to those working on Breast Cancer awareness. A nursing mother may have lumps in her breasts, but I can assure you, those are not cancer!

The more you know!

Markku said...

Female robot used as a tour guide is FIRED for being too attractive.

Doesn't fit the narrative that one would probably initially think of, though. It wasn't decommissioned because ugly women were offended, but because people were fiddling with it so much that it broke down often.

Anonymous said...

I just read that link. Ok, does she not realize that her works will speak for themselves? If she is a kick-ass writer, it matters not what others think, only what she can sell. Isn't that the point of being an author?

And on a somewhat related topic, women cannot even have unity when they all have the same equipment (mostly, unless it's the made kind, and even then, I suppose it is the same equipment except it's probably more idealized than the varied parts we have).

No wonder men get sick of our shit. I get sick of it too.

Doom said...

Are you crazy? Look, women are going to say stupid things, at stupid times, and... it's a ploy. Not saying they don't think stupid things, or want to be where the boys are, just that it isn't what it seems, always. A woman who presents in a certain way is just asking to be handled. I, while looking for a woman, look for... toeholds into her world. Flaws, weaknesses, exposed bits. Most women leave little breadcrumb trails and have weak egos. A woman saying a stupid thing at the wrong time is just asking to be confronted. No breadcrumb trail or attempt to cover up, she has openly exposed her tenders. No thumping needed to see if the melons are ripe.

The more serious her reaction to being put in her place, the better, for me. Anger and other strong emotions? Pour it on, I can not only handle it, I can convert it into sugar. And I enjoy, immensely, doing so. I prefer it. And I am immune to tears. I can convert those to anger, then to sugar. Hell my mother thinks I'm a cold heartless bastard. And she still loves me.

All I am saying is don't think of a woman being a twit as anything other than an invitation to begin teaching and managing her. That is what she is asking you to do. If you are otherwise involved and serious about it, see it as an opportunity to give her a little attention and send her on her way. Getting a little yourself, an ego teaser, and a new little friend. Carefully. She may easily take it the wrong way. Actually that is all but guaranteed. Ugh... and they say men only want one thing.

Stickwick Stapers said...

Almost all of the time, Stickwick talks about external facts. Which makes it really, really hard to tell that she's a woman.

Thank you. And now I'd like to hijack the thread into a discussion of my very deep and profound feelings about this. In fact, I've written a poem about them ...

Acksiom said...

>Almost all of the time, Stickwick talks about external facts. Which makes it really, really hard to tell that she's a woman.

. . .using that kind of tell.

Try counting personal pronoun usage instead. Best 1st metric of approximation so far IME is the ratio by sentences. Forex. . .

>Thank you. And now I'd like to hijack the thread into a discussion of my very deep and profound feelings about this. In fact, I've written a poem about them ...

See?

Stickwick Stapers said...

There's also very good metric of approximation for the inability to detect irony. Forex, the above ...

Bernard Brandt said...

I'm sure that if Stickwick were to publish a poem concerning her feelings, said poem would have the same mordant wit of Dorothy Parker.

Otherwise, it would be unlikely she would publish it, at least in these parts.

And that's a rather high irony diet you displayed with the last two entries. Cheers.

Acksiom said...

>There's also very good metric of approximation for the inability to detect irony. Forex, the above ...

No, that would be "the immediately preceding", sweetie, since you were the one who missed mine.

Y'see, even if you were being ironical. . .you still followed the metric.

You could have made a lot of jokes.

But you *chose* to make the one that allowed you to use three 1 person pronouns in three sentences.

You can't help it.

You're compelled.

And that's why it's such a good tell.

Markku said...

But you *chose* to make the one that allowed you to use three 1 person pronouns in three sentences.

Well, obviously, since that's what the irony was about. Going straight for the typical feminine response.

mmaier2112 said...

(facepalm)

Bernard Brandt said...

Give up, Acksiom. You've been played. Sometimes the best endgame is to remain silent, while you remove your foot from your mouth.

But if you do wish to continue, please be our guest. Enjoy the taste of shoe leather and tinea pedis

Stickwick Stapers said...

Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?

Yes, it's like goldy and bronzy only it's made out of iron.

Bernard Brandt said...

Good God, Stickwick! Not only have you taken both Charles Dickens and Monty Python in vain, but now you've gone and desecrated Black Adder as well!

The Republic totters!

Stickwick Stapers said...

That's Dikkens with two k's, the well-known Dutch author.

Bernard Brandt said...

I'm sorry, but I thought it was Farles Wickens who wrote Stickwick Stapers. And that the author's name was spelled with four Ms and a silent Q!!!

Stickwick Stapers said...

Oops, yes, right you are. I was thinking of Rarnaby Budge.

Unknown said...

"she's simply bitter that she doesn't qualify for either male respect or unmerited male attention"

Line of the day, right there.

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