By David Futrelle
Beware of women bearing potato chips, because they’re out to kill your sexy, sexy body and make you, like, a fatty. Especially beware when the woman in question is your longterm girlfriend, because this is all a devious plot to kill her feelings of attraction towards you because secretly all women want boyfriends they don’t think are attractive, or something.
Sorry, I’m having a little trouble understanding this latest theory from the Red Pill subreddit. So let’s go through it in detail and see if it makes more sense the second time around.
“Food is a trap. Don’t fall for it,” the Red Piller known as NorthEasternNomad declared in a recent post.
[A longterm] partner will almost always try and “fatten you up.” But that makes me less attractive, you say. Why would she want that?
Simple: It reduces your SMV [Sexual Market Value].
Ok, it’s still not making sense yet, but let’s hear this dingus out.
Validation is sex for women. Its their primary need, in terms of what they get from men. Sex itself is secondary; its the validation they are after.
Huh. This sounds just a teensy bit like the sort of thing guys tell themselves when they’re not very good at sex.
Meanwhile, SMV for men is determine by a LARGE margin, by physique. Thats not the ONLY factor, but is a BIG factor.
Yeah, if you get off of the Red Pill subreddit and into the real world for a few minutes you’ll notice rather quickly that women tend to be flexible on this point.
By “fattening you up” she is essentially taking you off the sexual market. Making it so that other women, are not even interested.
But, again, even if we accept the premise that fat or even slightly pudgy dudes are inherently unsexy to all women, which isn’t true, this makes no sense because it means the girlfriend in question doesn’t find you sexy either.
This gives her the power. It places your existence, within her frame.
Oh noes!
Think about if: If you are off the sexual market, Dread Game is impossible.
“Dread Game,” by the way, means manipulating a woman so she’s constantly worrying that you’ll leave her. It’s a favorite strategy of the Red Pillers, because at heart they’re a bunch of manipulative abusers (or manipulative abuser wannabes).
If no one wants your fat ass, she never needs to worry. The power dynamic shifts to favor her to an immense degree. But this also means you can never, ever make her tingle; if there’s no risk inherent in the relationship, no dread, her hamster has basically rolled over and gone to sleep…until someone ELSE wakes it up.
So her strategy is to make you fat and unattractive … then to move on to a new, non-fat guy? Why? Why go through all this trouble when she could simply have you in your original form?
Do not let her junk food fixation, become your way of life. She will try. SUbtly, at first. Desert night once per week. Then next thing you know, she’s buying potato chips and ice cream on every shopping run.
POTATO CHIPS ARE THE DEVIL!
Maybe she knows why she does it; more probably she doesn’t even understand her compulsion to fatten up her husband or long time partner. But the fact remains: The result is your removal from the sexual marketplace completely, the utter inability to use dread game, and her complete stranglehold on your sex life and the relationship as a whole.
This leads to staleness and boredom. A complete lack of emotional tingles. And we ALL know where the next step is from there.
In case anyone didn’t get what NorthEasternNomad was implying here, one of the commenters made a little diagram.
Get tingles > fuck > marry > lower partners smv > no more tingles > divorce > get tingles
Huh. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just do
Get tingles > fuck > marry > fuck more
In addition to everything else wrong with it, the Red Pill just seems needlessly complicated.
H/T — r/TheBluePill
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@Viscaria
It reminds me of the part of Flowers for Algernon where Charly learns about commas and uses them randomly multiple times per sentence. Except unlike Charly I don’t think the red pillers are getting any brighter.
@Naglfar
I’m pretty sure of it too, but this topic just hits too close to home for me to process that thought. I was overweight for most of my life and I’ve gotten a shit-ton of discrimination from both men and women on account of it. So yeah, guys don’t really have it that much better than women concerning this topic. I’m not going to turn the thread into a discrimination Olympics but fatphobes are relentless trash.
Are gyms, treadmills, trails, and roads off limits to married men? Can he not use his big boy voice to say no to potato chips and ask for salads? This all sounds so weirdly passive.
Aren’t these the same guys who are forever urging each other to ditch their 35 year old wife for a younger model? It’s only tragic and unnatural when it happens to them.
Also, that word “tingles” is so cringey and revolting. I know they’re trying to belittle women’s sexuality when they use it, but it makes them sound like ten year olds who haven’t yet learned the adult words for things.
@Diego Duarte
My apologies if this is a sore subject. I don’t mean to downplay fatphobic bigotry against men, and I’m sorry if my comment at all downplayed the harm. Hoping you aren’t still being discriminated against.
@Buttercup
There’s plenty of other ways they sound like ten year olds as well, but no ten year old I know has been as fiercely hateful as an adult MRA.
Another way they sound like kids is how so many of them act as if women have cooties (e.g. semen retainers who think women steal their life force, MGTOWs who complain about women relentlessly, etc).
It’s almost as if treating women as interchangeable makes you think men are interchangeable. Who knew your attitude towards people could change the way you feel about people?
I’ve seriously never been in a relationship and even I know personality factors into it somehow.
@Naglfar
Don’t worry, you didn’t actually say anything offensive, just clarifying something. Also, I’m not being discriminated against anymore, but that has more to do with the fact that I lost weight and have managed to keep it off for 4 years so far. Doubtless I would still be receiving the same treatment were it otherwise.
But yeah, from my experience women aren’t that much better than men around this issue. They can be (and are) just as cruel and vocal about their fatphobia.
Naglfar:
That part was actually quoted (from Finnish translation) in one of my school grammar textbooks – discussing punctuation in the context of Finnish language. That was before I read Flowers for Algernon for the first time.
When I began learning English, I remember using articles too liberally – It was a novel linguistic concept.
Ugh, the sentence, “If no one wants your fat ass, she never needs to worry.” If that’s how Red Pillers “encourage” each other…yikes.
@occasional reader – This made me laugh:
…Although I’m not sure everyone gets this. Question to folks in English-majority places: Do you “validate” your bus pass/ticket or is it another word?
My translation of “valider votre titre de transport” is “put your card on the beepy thing.” 😛
…
Can I rant about Montreal a bit? Because people here are being assholes. This is the 3rd article I read talking about Montrealers accusing Jews of spreading COVID-19 because some of their communities are more hard-hit (way to kick people when they’re down, too). E.g.
As I read elsewhere, it’s not like people in Boisbriand or Cote St. Luc or Outremont were being more irresponsible than everyone else. It’s just that more people got COVID-19 there because of a) seniors in Cote St. Luc returning from vacation, b) weddings & such with invitees from NYC before the current restrictions were in place, and c) Purim gatherings March 9-10, again before the social-distancing rules.
And it surprised me to hear about blatant anti-Semitism in Montreal of all places. Maybe I was naive. Did I think the people who hated Muslims hated only Muslims? …Not that that’d be cool either. Nazis of all types – fuck off.
My roommates do not have Covid-19! They’re still both very sick, but not with Covid-19!
@ lumipuna
I read a thing recently about the difficulties of translating Orwell’s 1984 into Finnish; specifically the Newspeak aspect.
The claim was that, because Finnish uses a set of base words and then just applies modifiers to them to produce antonyms and superlatives, Newspeak didn’t come across as all that peculiar.
Any truth in that?
@epitome
Where I live we don’t have buses, but I think it would be correct to say that.
Accusing Jews of spreading disease is an old tradition—during the bubonic plague Jews were murdered on accusations of poisoning wells. Then, Jewish communities were less hit in part because of ritual cleanliness that was absent in medieval Christian practice. It’s awful that this has resurged, but I’m not surprised. Bigotry dies hard and Jews are perpetual scapegoats.
It is rare to find bigots who only hate one group. Bigots will hate whoever they can. A lot of non-Jewish people don’t notice antisemitism until it boils over, but it rarely comes out of nowhere. This was just a flash point.
Alan – Hard to say about Newspeak. I did once skim-read the Finnish translation of 1984, but haven’t read the original so I can’t compare.
@ lumipuna
Cheers. I wonder how they dealt with that appendix that explains Newspeak.
Right; I’ll have to use the lockdown to learn Finnish!
Somewhat OT, but manosphere-related:
My dad passed away just over five years ago, and on the anniversary of his death there are several songs that I like to play. One of these is Breaking Benjamin’s “Anthem of the Angels.” Someone had made a mashup video for the song using the Hillary Duff film Raise You Voice, in which Duff’s character loses her brother.
I made the mistake of reading the comments. (On YouTube, yes, I know.) It was mostly people like me associating the song with lost loved ones, or wanting to know what the movie used was, and the usual “Who’s listening to this in (current year)?”
A few commenters made comments about how pretty Hilary Duff is (nothing distasteful, thankfully, given that she was 16 when the movie was shot). Which led to this response that I’m sure would fill up one of the WHTM Bingo Cards (specifically one where the free space is “Why don’t you have a seat over there?”)
These creeps just show up everywhere, don’t they? And you can be sure this one of those “It’s ephebophilia” guys, too, because that somehow makes it better in his mind.
@Allandrel, yikes. That sounds like a guy who could list ages of consent in numerous states and countries from memory.
If a youtube commenter mentions that they find a woman attractive (which is usually an annoying comment in itself), it seems there’s almost always someone who will earnestly tell them that they are objectively wrong.
@Allandrel
Sorry about your dad.
Re: the video comment, a few things:
Just looked up a picture of what Duff looks like now, and maybe my perspective is unusual, but she still looks attractive IMO.
It seems like the alt right finding Taylor Swift attractive then making an about face had less to do with her age and more to do with her endorsing Democratic candidates. They immediately stopped seeing her as an Aryan goddess when she revealed her politics. This part of the comment makes me thing there’s good odds that commenter is a white nationalist.
That’s just rapey, not sure how else to describe it.
Is there a word for when someone goes off on a creepy rant then concludes with a salutation that somehow makes it creepier? I’ve noticed some other people do that a lot as well.
@Allandrel
After all those words and all that enthusiasm, the commenter seemed to run out of both at the end.
@Cats in Shiny Hats
That’s very good news!
Something tells me NorthEasternNomad has mistaken fetish fiction where a character is fattened up by another character through deception, with real life.
Translation is definitely a tricky thing. I read a critique of the English translation of Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto’s novel Kitchen some years back. It argued that the translation missed some of the character of the novel, because it didn’t take into account how the honorifics one character uses for another reflect the development of their relationship.
> epitome of incomprehensibility
Ah, my bad, then. I was thinking it was an expression we have in common with our British neighbors. As usual, my puns fall flat.
> Cats In Shiny Hats
Good ! Continue to stay safe, then.
@Alan
I’ve only read 1984 in English, so I don’t really know about the Finnish translation. I remember reading a thing where some Finn complained that Newspeak doesn’t work as a cautionary tale in Finnish since that’s how Finnish already operates. That puzzled me because from what I remember I thought Newspeak was meant to restrict thought and take away nuance, but I read elsewhere that this modifier thingy makes Finnish extra expressive and really Super Creative (Finnish was this expert’s first language, if you hadn’t guessed).
From what I’ve seen of Newspeak in Finnish (Uuskieli) elsewhere, it does look kind of strange, but I don’t know if that’s on purpose (to make it seem stranger than it needs to be to get the point across) or if it’s just coincidence that (for example) epähyvä (ungood) is not a word anyone would use. I don’t have the linguistic knowledge to know why it’s an odd combination, though, when epähieno (negative prefix added to a word that means fine or great) is a normal word.
But the modifiers aren’t that simple when you get down to it, since when I was a kid, I thought that the word epähieno meant just “bad”, but it turned out I was wrong and it means indiscreet or tactless.
@tim gueguen:
This is something I often noticed watching anime, even as a novice at the language. It’s very easy to spot the forms of address used, and whether a character uses plain or polite speech, and these often convey dynamics which are missing from the subtitles.
I loved Kitchen when I read it, years ago. But I wasn’t much aware of trans issues at that time, so I’m kind of hesitant to reread it, in case it turns out to be less sensitive to the trans character than I recall.
I feel like this guy over heard some couple say a joke and just made wild accusations after that. I tease my husband sometimes that I’m going to make him fat so that he won’t leave me or cheat on me. Normally i make this joke after he teases me saying I’m trying to make him fat with my cooking when he’s home. I don’t mean it seriously. If he wasn’t happy with me anymore and we couldn’t solve an issue in our relationship i would want him to leave me so he could be happy and I know he would never cheat on me. I also do not care what his weight looks like. If his skinny, fat, muscular, I don’t care as long as hes still him.
So I feel like this guy over heard similar light banter and just made assumptions like red pillers who can’t really love a woman would do.
Is desert night the one day of the week they drive out to the desert and gorge themselves on cacti?
In Terry Pratchett’s “Last Continent”, Rincewind was lost in a desert where he was surprisingly capable of finding food for himself (obvious reference to Australian “bush tucker” tradition). As in, various magically appearing dishes of fine Morporkian cuisine.