Friday, February 28, 2014

Willful incompetence

Sans Game, it is impossible for men like this British doctor to understand the firm and determined failure of women to have a realistic perspective on men, although Dr. Theodore Dalrymple makes a better stab at it than most:
My patient was intelligent but badly educated, as only products of the British educational system can be after 11 years of compulsory school attendance. She thought the Second World War took place in the 1970s and could give me not a single correct historical date. I asked her whether she thought a young and violent burglar would have proved much of a companion. She admitted that he wouldn't, but said that he was the type she liked; besides which—in slight contradiction—all boys were the same.

I warned her as graphically as I could that she was already well down the slippery slope leading to poverty and misery—that, as I knew from the experience of untold patients, she would soon have a succession of possessive, exploitative, and violent boyfriends, unless she changed her life. I told her that in the past few days, I had seen two women patients who had had their heads rammed down the lavatory, one who had had her head smashed through a window and her throat cut on the shards of glass, one who had had her arm, jaw, and skull broken, and one who had been suspended by her ankles from a tenth-floor window to the tune of, "Die, you bitch!"

"I can look after myself," said my 17-year-old.

"But men are stronger than women," I said. "When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage."

"That's a sexist thing to say," she replied.

A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general and of feminism in particular.

"But it's a plain, straightforward, and inescapable fact," I said.

"It's sexist," she reiterated firmly.

A stubborn refusal to face inconvenient facts, no matter how obvious, now pervades our attitude toward relations between the sexes. An ideological filter of wishful thinking strains out anything we'd prefer not to acknowledge about these eternally difficult and contested relations, with predictably disastrous results.

I meet with this refusal everywhere, even among the nursing staff of my ward. Intelligent and capable, as decent and dedicated a group of people as I know, they seem, in the matter of judging the character of men, utterly, almost willfully, incompetent.
The women's incompetence is not almost willful, it is willful. They simply don't wish to admit to the reality because doing so would inhibit their ability to "have fun" and act on the basis of their sexual desires to the extent permitted by the current strictures of the local herd to which they belong. It's not very different than the case of the young man who drinks and drives too fast. He understands intellectually that he is taking a risk, but he denies the existence of the risk in order to permit his actions to be in harmony with his emotions.

This is why one need spare no sympathy for most women who are in "abusive" relationships. They knew perfectly well what they were getting into. They knowingly chose to take the risk in order to reap the benefits of a relationship with a dangerous man rather than forgo them in choosing a relationship with a man they found less exciting. The fact that they pretend otherwise only makes them dishonest, it doesn't make them innocent victims.

For those who feel sympathy and wish to help them anyhow, it must be understood that they cannot be helped on the basis of a false paradigm. To pretend that they are not actively seeking these relationships is playing into the willful incompetence and it should not be surprising that most such efforts to help these women fail. They are bound to fail because they are based on a false model of human behavior.

28 comments:

Harambe said...

Wow

Dexter said...

Reality is sexist.

Trust said...

"but, but, but in chick flicks the stable man is always hiding his jerkdom, and the jerks is repaired by the magic black and decker. i remember this katherine heigl movie and she...."

thus spaketh the hamster

Laguna Beach Fogey said...

Everything about them is so easy to understand when you take the hamster into account.

A Traveller said...

I new a girl who willingly separated from the USAF in order to continue her relationship with an abusive dude. After her supervisors and commanders did all they could do to protect her from herself she still made the final choice. That was twenty years ago and it was not until I became aware of the imperative that her behavior made any amount of sense.

texaust said...

@JP don't you mean wowjustwow ?

Also, this article is 15 years old -- imagine how much worse it's gotten since.

8to12 said...

"This is why one need spare no sympathy for most women who are in "abusive" relationships. They knew perfectly well what they were getting into."

When you protect someone from the CONSEQUENCES of their bad decisions, they will continue to make those bad decisions.

The laws over the last few decades have been beefed up to protect women from physical abuse. Whether it actually protects women from physical abuse is debatable, but women certainly believe the law protects them from physical abuse. Consequently, women are more likely to hook up with a dangerous man, because they think the law will protect them.

If we rolled back some of the abuse laws (not that that will ever happen), then maybe women would be more discerning about the types of men they chose to become involved with.

The statemen "all men are the same" when it comes to physical abuse isn't true. It is (imho) fairly easy to predict which men will physically abuse a woman and which won't. All you have to do is open your eyes.

Of course, when this woman says "all men are the same" she really means all the men she is attracted to are the same. Which I'm sure is true.

Unknown said...

In the military we call these willfully incompetent people "fucktards."
These are the people that have the right decisions staring them in the face, practically biting their asses, but stil can't seem to make the right one.
Most of the time you see this behavior in the very young, the immature, newly escaped from parental influence punkass child.
It always boils down to a denial of reality.

slarrow said...

To be fair, even in that 1999 article, Dalrymple has no trouble acknowledging the blindness as willful in his female patients; he states that very thing about halfway through. Indeed, he notes that for them, such blindness "serves to absolve them of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them to think of themselves as victims alone rather than the victims and accomplices they are." So he explicitly acknowledges the lessons in the article that Vox draws in his commentary...at least about his female "victims" of domestic abuse he saw in his hospitals.

No, the peculiar thing to him is that his nurses do so as well, and to his mind, it's not just the hamster. He writes, "for them, there is no difference between suspending judgment for certain restricted purposes and making no judgment at all in any circumstances whatsoever. It is as if they were more afraid of passing an adverse verdict on someone than of getting a punch in the face—a likely enough consequence, incidentally, of their failure of discernment. Since it is scarcely possible to recognize a wife beater without inwardly condemning him, it is safer not to recognize him as one in the first place." In that view (which accounts for the "almost" willful aspect, it seems, to his mind), the other factor is a persistent drumbeat from society that has told people not to judge, regardless of the behavior, since excuses can always be found. This poisonous cocktail of the hamster and "intolerance about intolerance" he noted in England 15 years ago has only gotten stronger at home and abroad since then.

slarrow said...

Dalrymple further concludes: "The sexual revolutionaries wanted to liberate sexual relations from all but the merest biological content...That the heart wants contradictory, incompatible things; that social conventions arose to resolve some of the conflicts of our own impulses; that eternal frustration is an inescapable concomitant of civilization, as Freud had observed—all these recalcitrant truths fell beneath the notice of the proponents of sexual liberation, dooming their revolution to ultimate failure. The failure hit the underclass hardest."

As Vox notes, people are working with a false model of human behavior today. Not only is it false, it's absolutely backwards: instead of restraining the hamster, it feeds it and, indeed, trains it to see no difference between the civil man and the savage man. It serves few well.

Weouro said...

Sans Game, it is impossible for men like this British doctor to understand the firm and determined failure of women to have a realistic perspective on men

I think Zippy has a way to understand the situation, sans game, as such.

http://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/fabulous-disasters-and-the-men-who-love-them/

Paul, Dammit! said...

Pretty impressed with this whole thing... I do have a lot of sympathy for women and men who are in relationships that devolve into abuse in the course of living. We're all guilty of solipsism in many regards... but willful ignorance, on the other hand, whether it's staying in a doomed relationship or outright cultivation of abusive relationships... well, that's a fine argument for letting nature take it's course.

Anonymous said...

I think the "fool me once. . ." principle applies here. If a woman gets out of her first abusive relationship early, there's a decent chance she's learned from it and will avoid similar men in the future. (My wife is an example.) If she goes back to him, or to a similar man, the hamster has won, and she has about as much chance of recovery as any other addict.

Trust said...

This is why I have no animosity toward PUAs.

I can feel sympathy for a woman which is treated well by a man who says he loves her just to pump and dump her.

Normally though, a nice guy has to pretend to be an asshole to get laid. In which case, what can she cry about?

Trust said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Dalrymple provides a revolutionary and honest description of the lower class as it seeps into upper echelons. His criticisms against sentimentality have been decidedly incisive in their ability to push past the barrier of feeling that is the modern fool's solipsism concerning current action and thought.

I have noticed that the vast majority of middle class feminist women and shadow-feminist men wield these seemingly magnanimous opinions of the poor and downtrodden, yet have no experience in actually interacting or living next to these same people. Thus, it is frequently the older men in our society or those who directly work with this population who have the factually-based opinions. Intelligence, unfortunately for the confidently +1 SD IQ folks out there, is a poor substitute for the wisdom gained by experience. Older men, after enough intermittent interactions throughout their life lack sufficient sentimentality that they can, occasionally, formulate a conception of society that, although uncomfortable for the younger crowd, approaches reality.

The gospel of reality, however, is easily waved off as white prejudice amongst the men aged in their forties and fifties.

Robert said...

I can't imagine a conventional, successful, intelligent man being addicted to a self-destructive, violent, abusive woman and making excuses for her on the basis that it was "sexist" to say that such behavior was dangerous or typical of that type of woman. Does this mean men have a better grip on reality than women?

Anonymous said...

Look up Erin Pizzey, a woman who opened the first domestic abuse shelter in England 40 years ago. She discovered after many years of working with these women that most of them were intentionally involved with these men and that they were each acting out violent behaviors they'd learn to equate with "love" while growing up in their twisted homes.

Trust said...

@Robert

I agree. But I have also seem men who want to believe women are above certain behaviors. Over romanticizing of female nature and virtue often by men is largely how many of our laws and institutions became so misandric.

Similar to a debate I had here with I think loveashley a while back, who held that alphas were above violence against women because an alpha told her so.

Most of us want to believe our desires are more pure than they are, and what turns us off is more contemptible than it is.

Which is how a violent man gets absolved by the statement that "all men are the same," whereas a kind man gets condemned and punished by the same words, regardless if their behavior.

Trust said...

Actually, now that I think about it, that is a pretty good rule of thumb.

A woman says "all men are the same" for two reasons, to let an alpha bastard off the hook for what he does, or to punish a dependable beta for what he doesn't do.

It's one of the hamster's marching songs.

Anonymous said...

I wish I had the link to it, but I read somewhere that a study found that, if a man and woman are in an abusive relationship (I think they were just looking at man-hits-woman in this case), she's actually more likely to have had other abusive relationships than he is, and more likely to have more of them in the future. In other words, some women seemed to just seek out abusers, and if they happened to hook up with a guy who wasn't normally that way, they'd provoke him until he got violent.

Sounded about right to me. I had one girlfriend who claimed to have been through a string of abusers, and she seemed determined to make me lose my temper. I refused, and eventually she got bored and left. If you read about BPD, you'll also hear about women saying things that boil down to, "He cares enough to hit me." They read any strong emotions from a man, even anger or hatred, as a sign that he has strong feelings about them; and they prefer that to a calm man because he doesn't seem to care enough to get mad.

Anonymous said...

In female-speak, "all men are the same" = "he doesn't read my mind and automatically do what I want him to do."

mmaier2112 said...

@ cailcorishev: I could believe that. I've seen what seems to fall into that pattern with someone in my own life. She actually struck her husband with his family around. I was half-tempted to knock out some teeth on his behalf. And I saw her punch her young teenage son in the shoulder out of anger cuz he was a little slow in responding.

My favorite is seeing on FB a female acquaintance mourning her dead ex-BF. Apparently he used to physically abuse her.

I've been tempted to post "I'll come slap you around if I can bang you after" more than once.

Unknown said...

well! I think it is scarcely possible to recognize a wife beater without inwardly condemning him, it is safer not to recognize him as one in the first place." In that view (which accounts for the "almost" willful aspect, it seems, to his mind), the other factor is a persistent drumbeat from society that has told people not to judge, regardless of the behavior, since excuses can always be found.
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Akulkis said...

Yes, Liza, but which segment of society keeps beating the "don't judge anybody" drum?

Unknown said...

It's easy to say that her ignorance and incompetence is willful and leave it at that.

The greater and far more tragic truth is that the education system has filled these
girl's heads with shit in the form of an idiotic ideology (feminism) and then closed
their minds to common sense which would help them to keep away from trouble.

Dexter said...

I can't imagine a conventional, successful, intelligent man being addicted to a self-destructive, violent, abusive woman and making excuses for her on the basis that it was "sexist" to say that such behavior was dangerous or typical of that type of woman. Does this mean men have a better grip on reality than women?

Men lose their grip on reality in different ways.

For example, one can easily imagine a conventional, successful, intelligent man wanting to bring certain destructive, violent groups to his neighborhood (or his children's school, or his country) and making excuses for them on the basis that it was "racist" to say that such behavior was dangerous or typical of that group of people -- never mind the centuries of evidence to the contrary.

Feminism is just a form of Leftism, which also affects men, and which requires constant, active denial of reality.

Glen Filthie said...

I will pop another myth about domestic violence - having done volunteer work for a local battered women's shelter. We ran errands, shovelled snow, picked up donations and weren't supposed to talk to the women...but we still saw enough to understand the basic sham.

Domestic violence is almost always a case of two idiots fighting, and the smaller, weaker idiot losing.

Most 'battered women' are fish wives that have been back handed with a little too much enthusiasm - by husbands that they have provoked beyond rationality.

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