The charming Man Going His Own Way who calls himself Rex Patriarch has written up a short treatise entitled “Women Are Incapable of Love.” (He’s also posted a video by another MGTOWer making the same point, but we’ll just ignore that for now, because I didn’t bother to watch it.)
Anyway, here’s Rex’s argument, such as it is:
Look guys, women are like pets.
Do pets love you?
No, of course not but they do feel the warmth which is the love you may have for them. At a minimum you are their meal ticket. That in of itself is why they stick around.
Same same with women. As long as you are their meal ticket they “love” you but the very moment you can’t provide for them. The very moment they find a better deal, find some higher status.
Watch how fast that “love” goes out the window.
The reason being is it never was there to begin with. It was just something they were telling you to keep the goodies coming. Up until they could find something better. If they can.
The thing is men can love women all they want or none at all but don’t expect them to love you back in the same measure. They simply do not have the ability.
What’s interesting about this argument, insofar as anything about it is interesting, is that he’s not just, you know, wrong about women. He’s also wrong about pets.
Now, anyone who’s bonded with a pet certainly feels that their pet loves them back. (Or at least some pets do; I’m pretty sure the turtle my brother had as a kid didn’t really love anything other than worms.) Still, some skeptics insist that we’re just anthropomorphizing when we look at our pets and see love in their eyes.
But researchers are increasingly seeing harder-to-dismiss signs that animals may have emotions remarkably like our own — and that they can indeed feel love. By scanning the brains of dogs, Emory University neuroeconomics professor Gregory Berns has found that dogs and humans are alike in some key ways:
All in all, dogs and humans show striking similarities in the activity of an important brain region called the caudate nucleus. So, do dogs love us and miss us when we’re gone? The data strongly suggest they do. And, those data can further move humanity away from simplistic, reductionist, behaviorist explanations of animal behavior and animal emotions and also be used to protect dogs and other animals from being abused.
You can read more about his research, and what he sees as its implications, here.
More on animal emotions here and here.
You can also learn a lot about how animals — including the animals called humans — think and feel by just fucking paying attention to them and having a tiny bit of empathy. This is apparently a bit too much for some people to manage.
*sigh* This seems oddly appropriate, since I was just thinking of ol’ Harry Harlow. You know, that dude who did experiments on infant attachment in monkeys? This was back in the goddamned FIFTIES, and he systematically, scientifically proved that infants need way more than just a food dispenser to be healthy. So yeah, where’s your evidence, Rex Patriarch? Oh, that’s right, you just pulled shit out of the Institute Of Your Ass.
RE: wordsp1nner
I also just found (and am in the middle of reading) Beasts of Burden
YES GOOD. I love Beasts of Burden so much, and am happy to see other people reading it! I’d prefer THAT Rex to OP dude any day of the week. (Though my favorites are still Ace and Jack.)
@Kitteh, I really wish I hadn’t read about Descartes, if I were you I wouldn’t, it’s just all blargh! The trouble is, even when the academics try and sanitise it, he’s still just the Mengele of animals.
Lovely pic of Katie. Mine have just destroyed the box off my ‘Complete Calvin and Hobbes’. £50 Birthday pressie, good job they’re cute. 🙂
So sorry about 2009, it sounds awful, yay Louis. Also, still haven’t heard how she lost her tail, poor Katie.
OCD is really making it hard to comment tonight so I’m going to go to bed and hope it leaves me alone. (Not gonna read this back, so hope it makes sense, bloody sodding 15! Bloody sodding OCD!)
Nighty, night everyone.
Niters, Ophelia! I’ll tell you about Katie in email sometime.
Totally agree about Descartes, what little I know of him says Mengele of animals is correct. Even if I were into philosophy, I would not be reading about him, or his work.
@Sandy, Can you please not misgender people and question their sexual orientation? There are lots of legitimate reasons to criticize this asshat, but those aren’t legitimate reasons.
Because women and girls are the worst, amirite?
Sandy, mind NOT implying that being a woman is a terrible thing? That’s extremely misogynistic, and it doesn’t make you any better than the MRAs.
Those stories about dogs staying at their people’s graves must be because the gravestones dispense treats!
Wow, intentional misgendering, misogyny, and a “joke” about how he must be gay. Trifecta! Do I get a prize? (Can it be Ally making her post about “jokes” into a series? [I broke it again earlier, it is fixed, I apologize to anyone who saw that mess!])
“Women are like dogs, not humans.”
Do these people seriously not understand how absurd they sound?
If animals do not have feelings of love then how come my big cat Anne keeps coming on my shoulder or chest seeking reassurance I love her while showing she loves me by sticking her nose in my ear?
I also come across people now and then who are like “people used to believe that animals didn’t have emotions, just look at Descartes yada yada”, although pretty much every philosopher except for him in the entire history of philosophy believed that animals differ from people by lacking reason, not by lacking emotions (with a few exceptions, like David Hume, who believed animals were pretty similar to us reasons-wise as well).
I really have no idea why Descartes in the minds of many people have come to represent how “we” used to think about animals before we became more enlightened in modern days.
More Descartes trivia: Descartes had a long philosophical correspondence with princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. Descartes laid out his theory of mind-body dualism, and how mind and body are completely different things because mind is immaterial.
Elisabeth: Okay, but if mind is completely immaterial, how can it have any effect on the body? How could something immaterial set the fluids of the brain in motion?
Descartes: Well…. these fluids, they’re like, really really light and very easy to move.
Well, if women are like dogs, then straight men are like cats. In that many of them enjoy laying on boobs.
In general it’s not a very good idea to judge a writer without actually reading zir writing and you tend to lose all kinds of good ideas if you write off a philosopher as a whole based on zir having one really bad idea, so I’ll give Descartes the benefit of the doubt until I actually read his book where he talks about animals.
Tigger gave me a nice 30-lb-cat punch to the boob once. So that’s similar to lying on them I guess.
But seriously, I hope this guy doesn’t have any pets because I don’t at all trust him to treat them with the care and kindness that they deserve.
I’ll be working on a post about bigoted jokes very soon.
@opheliamonarch
Cassandra’s earlier post, (“So the guy who doesn’t think women are people can’t accept that animals have emotions? What a shocker.”), reminded me of Bekoff’s The Emotional Lives of Animals even though I read it years ago. Excellent book.
I went to a wildlife preserve this summer and chatted with someone who worked with elephants. With their long lifespans, complex social relationships and high intelligence, elephants have an astonishing emotional inner life. But as Cassandra points outs, if Rex hasn’t picked up on the fact that women are human, he’s probably not interested in how scientists have observed animals experiencing grief, joy, empathy, altruism and other emotions.
In fact I’d wager Rex only cares about himself and getting men to agree with his endless blather.
@ Viscaria
Ouch.
The worst my cats do is try to sit on them when they are tender. (Like, say, tonight.)
“Mommy, what does “in of itself” mean?”
“Don’t worry, honey, that’s just something bad people say, he doesn’t mean it.”
*wraps self tightly in blanket* “I want to stay in school forever, mommy.”
*hugs kid* “I know, baby. I know.”
Oh no :-[ I hope they settle down on your stomach instead. Tigger’s a very gentle kitty really, he just doesn’t seem to be totally aware of a) what a giant bruiser he is and b) how squishy humans can be.
Hi Discordia! Haven’t seen you in a long time. Hope you’re doing well!
Just another dudebro trying to tell other people (including other animals now!) how they feel, because he can’t possibly think of any other reason why no one would love his charming self. So goes the ever blameless philosophy of the misogynist.
Same ol’ same ol’.
I love it how the Hatosphere accuses women of being solipsistic and then turns around and does it themselves. See, in his experience, women only stick around for the couple of minutes he’s offering to buy them drinks and then they disappear!
@Athywren said
The great primatologist Frans de Waal calls the insistence on the uniqueness of our species and the refusal to admit that non-human animals experience emotions and motivations “anthropodenial.”
http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/OurInnerApe/pdfs/anthropodenial.html
I strongly recommend reading de Waal’s books; he’s been working on this stuff for 30 or 40 years. My favorites are “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Human and Other Animals” and “The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist.” “The Age of Empathy” is also good; it’s a shorter book with less scientific detail that provides a good brief overview of his work.
katz, if you’re wondering if Descartes is that bad, he is. He was a vivisector.
TW: this is horrific.
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/01/scientists-can-be-cruel.html
As for dismissing someone’s ideas because of one – I don’t give a flying fuck what his other ideas were, knowing this.
Lady Mondegreen – anthropodenial, love it!
Oh dear, I checked out his page and he’s even stupider than I thought–
Major reading comprehension fail there, sugar balls. Erm, no, she didn’t say prostitution is illogical; she clearly said punishing the sex workers and not the johns is illogical.
(Of course, leaving aside the lack of evidence for his assfact that married men visit prostitutes because their wives withhold sex–it’s a human right to be able to “withhold sex,” from husbands or from anyone else. Implying that the right to withhold sex is “immoral” is pretty damn creepy, akin to arguing a moral right to rape. But leaving that aside, the glaring misreading of the DA’s quite clear and easily-comprehended statement is idiocy enough all by itself.)