By David Futrelle
Reddit’s contingent of Men Going Their Own Way are more than a little bit obsessed with the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, seeing Markle as a devious manipulator trying to transform her husband into a spineless woman-worshipping simp willing to give up many of his royal privileges for the sake of his wife
Now a MGTOW Redditor called auramirror has a new theory: what if Harry’s wife-pleasing simpery weren’t just a side effect of being married to Meghan but the whole point of the marriage in the first place? What if the entire marriage is part of a plot to turn men in the west into simps? What if Harry isn’t a simp at all but rather a pawn in some vast conspiracy?
In a post to the subreddit last month, auramirror shares his dark speculations about the royal couple:
I understand why everyone here thinks Mr. Harry Markle is a simp who went with Megan and gave up his princehood and his rifles because he’s a blue pilled beta.
But that is wrong.
This is the royal fucking family we are talking about. The elite of the elite. The people who run this world on the surface, connected to the people who pull the world’s strings from the shadows.
So what are these shadowy people (or perhaps evil space lizards) up to?
The media’s constant promotion of “look at all the amazing things this man has done for this woman!” is a form of propaganda. It is norm-setting. It tells men that the standard should be to change yourself and give up everything you have for a woman. It tells women that they are entitled to men changing for them, because “even a commoner can marry a prince.”
This is all intentional. Calculated. Manipulated.
What does this mean to poor, poor Harry, forced into a marriage with an attractive, accomplished woman he seems to love?
Harry is simply a chess piece in the elites’ grand agenda to hand power over to women. This is setting a standard for future generations that continues to fuel the fire in the war between the sexes.
All media is propaganda. Do not believe the constant stream of brainwashing you hear in the news. Harry is being used as a pawn in a game that is larger than you could even begin to imagine, and if he dares walk off the chessboard he could lose his life. …
Be grateful you are not one of the gears in the propaganda machine. Go your own way, and be free.
Apparently the thing these guys are going their own way from is reality.
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@Ohlmann
This sounds a lot like the men who deny misogyny by claiming the patriarchy hurts men too so somehow there isn’t misogyny.
@Ohlmann
Beware of the”ally” more concerned about their personal discomfort hearing about racist threats than the actual safety of people targeted by racism….
@tim gueguen:
It’s not like Andrew exactly has a reputation to save. He was nicknamed ‘Randy Andy’ for a reason.
@Steph Tohill:
It is mind boggling to me the amount of people who think there is something wrong with Harry from stepping back from his vocation and following Megan to the USA.
Canada, actually. They’re living in Victoria, B.C. at the moment. (Well, strictly, North Saanich, which is a mostly agricultural community just north of Victoria, and closer to the airport.) And apparently the locals have been helping to run interference against the paparazzi so that they can have some privacy, which was most of the reason for moving out there to begin with.
Well, the paparazzi and the absolutely horrid treatment of Markle by the British Press, mostly due to her biracial background.
(James Douglas, the second governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island and later the first governor of the Colony of British Columbia back in the 1850s, was also biracial. Probably a coincidence.)
And well-documented, considering the amount of time spent pointing out how differently the tabloid press were treating Meghan Markle compared to Kate Middleton, often for doing exactly the same things.
Saanich and the Gulf Islands, which is the electoral district they live in now, elected the first Green MP in Canada. There tends to be a fair bit of ‘do your own thing but don’t hurt anybody’ attitude around there. (That’s also the district my parents live in.)
@Perry:
Well, the intentional goal is to keep power in their own hands, and using a divide-and-conquer approach on others (men vs. women, white vs. black) helps with that. Naglfar’s got a point as well, but I think ‘keeping the masses divided against each other’ is more important to those in power than the specifics of which side of the division is considered ‘better’; it’s just that patriarchy has such a long history that it’s an easy tool to use for that.
Strictly speaking, Harry is in line for the throne… after his father, then his older brother, then his older brother’s three children. So yes, the likelihood of him ever sitting on the throne is really low, will only get lower unless lots of death is involved, and not only does he accept that I think he’s happy about it, because both he and his older brother seem to have picked up their mother’s distaste for the whole arrangement.
He has lost some things: he’s been pretty much cut off from being able to call on most of the resources of the royal family, at least officially. But he seems to consider that an adequate trade for getting out from under the panopticon.
Jenora Feuer: they’re in the LA region since this spring; they were only in BC a short while.
More fundamentally, I don’t get why anyone gives a rat’s ass about the royal family. It’s not like they really have any power.
@Jenora Feuer
AFAICT it isn’t much fun to be the ruler of the UK, seeing as they don’t have much real power and are constantly inundated by the paparazzi.
@numerobis
From what I can see, it just seems like a pleasant distraction from things of real significance. In a depressing world it can be nice to have someone to gossip about without real world consequences.
@Naglfar
Unless it’s 26-dimensional chess, and the pieces literally are quantum strings?
This sentence sounds like a blurb from a bad airport novel:
Any time someone does something these guys don’t like, it’s always because they’re being brainwashed or manipulated by some shadowy larger organization. You’d think it would be logistically exhausting to keep track of that many puppets and make sure they all get their feminazi marching orders in a timely fashion, with no mixups.
@Ariblester
It’s a contraction of “simpleton” dating to sometime around the turn of the last century. This has come up here over a dozen times now, and I know some of them were threads you were in.
@Buttercup
Now now, I can only keep track where to move the knight in this universe, not 10^500 similar yet slightly different parallel universes.
Eh, sometimes there are mixups. Like how Hillary Clinton did not become president to make the US a gynocracy. The Judeo-Feminist-LGBT conspiracy can’t hit home runs every time. /s
Being a British royal is, to the best of my understanding, being born into a tourist attraction/paparazzi-facilitated reality show. Who wouldn’t want to escape from that? It sounds horrifying.
Being born as a tourist attraction/reality show is the kind of thing that seem a lot less bitter when it also mean being born pretty rich and with all sort of influence.
I am not saying it’s wrong to want to get away from that, but more that all thing considered being a british royal is a high upside / high downside lot.
@Ariblester
@Naglfar
I woundered about that and tried going to RationalWiki’s alt-right glossary to see if the term has been added and seeing just what that piece of Neo-reactionary lexicon is even supposed to actually mean. Apparently, “Simp” (hate writing these alt-right garbage words) is supposed to be an acronym for “sucker idolizing mediocre pussy”(charming -_-) , so basically it’s a less comprehensible and more convoluted and derivative alternative to the term “White Knight” that they coin, but even more degrading and more opaque.
And the Manosphere had, as always, expanded this pejorative, degrading and insulting term far beyond its original use, and it is now appears to be used to describe any male who expresses any sort of kindness towards any women or girl. Because of course they do.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Manosphere_glossary#Simp
These dirt-bag Misogynist Neo-reactionaries have the appeal of boiler sludge.
@Naglfar
All true. I think I was trying to differentiate between patriarchy as an invested goal and patriarchy as an externality of capitalism, and I think I underestimated the former. Though there are definitely varieties of feminism that perfectly gel with capitalism, it would be a mistake to assume that the current billionaires and elites are all socially detached moneymakers without irrational bigotries of their own. And no matter how much they all capitalize on liberal feminist rhetoric for the sake of PR, their general oldness, whiteness and maleness would definitely encourage them to tend towards social conservatism.
@Ohlman
I don’t know much about D&D, but I’m sorry this happening in your community.
It’s not exactly the same, but this stuck out to me as indicative of the same mindset that allows people to dismiss sexual assault. Are we such a litigiously-minded society that we can’t conceive of accepting people’s experiences until a court of law tells us it’s okay? Though we do put far too much faith in the accuracy and legitimacy in the legal system in my opinion, the answer is still no.
Because no one actually consistently treats the people around them as if they’re on trial, and insists on an adequate amounts of court-admissible evidence attitude for every claim. It’s a tactic that’s brought out specifically when one wants to disbelieve someone.
And I do think “innocent until guilty” is a necessary tenet of any justice system that has a hope of being just. I just recognize that for the vast majority of cases like this I’m not operating inside a justice system, I’m just being a fucking human being with an independent capacity for judgement.
All that to say– fuck anyone who uses that sort of argument. Not only are they dismissing traumatic experiences for no reason, they’re being dishonest about it.
@Perry
Definitely. Corporations will constantly pretend to be progressive by using language or imagery of feminism, LGBT rights, or other social justice, but their only motive is cash. As a result, many critics have pointed, for example, that there is a wide gulf between liberation and rainbow capitalism.
I agree, but I do think as an individual I can believe survivors at their word and that unless evidence can be demonstrated otherwise I will listen to the first hand accounts of people who survived oppression and/or assault. “Innocent until proven guilty” has become somewhat of a buzzword for right wingers to use when defending people (mostly white men) accused of assault or discrimination.
Also, just saying “I doubt the story of X” without adding any additional element is pretty dishonest. If one think he don’t have enough element, his position is “ignorance” and not “doubt”.
“This is all intentional. Calculated. Manipulated.”
OR MAYBE:
Harry Windsor figured out that he was no longer 20 years old and that zooming around like a bat out of ginger hell was no longer becoming, or even very satisfactory. So, he decided to find a nice girl and settle down with her.
Yeah, I know. Nobody ever acts that way — it’s flat-out contrary to human nature. Whoever heard of such a thing? Those string-pullers have got to get better PR men, that’s what; maybe from Breitbart or the less-simply element at Fox — then their story might be more believable. It’s sure not very persuasive now.
OTOH, finding a woman and settling down with her was enough for Roosh, so why is what was good enough for Roosh not good enough for Harry? Darn it all, now I’m confused. It’s an impenetrable mystery all around, gotta admit: who can be blamed for being puzzled by it? (I ask.)
@Naglfar
Definitely, no disagreements here.
@Perry, Naglfar, Ohlmann:
There’s the burden of proof required to convict someone in a court of law, or to state in print that they’re a criminal, which is rightly quite high; the burden of proof for not leaving your drunk friend alone with them (or not putting them in some other situation of trust) is a fair bit lower.
‘Innocent until (unless would make more sense but eh) proven guilty’ only applies to the legal system, I will 100% take the word of the victim over that any fucking day.
Edit to add: “zooming around like a bat out of ginger hell” is my new favourite phrase!
@bekabot
I bet if Roosh did find a woman he’d find some other reason to be dissatisfied.
@Moon Custafer
Or the burden of proof for opposing their nomination to the Senate/Supreme Court/some other position of power is also lower.
@Jenora Feuer:
Cue 2020 being capped off by a doomsday meteor hitting London and wiping out everyone ahead of him in the line of succession …
Surplus to Requirements: Louis XV was 5th in line but made it to king with a mix of smallpox and measles.
COVID is about equally deadly as measles, so there’s always hope for Harry.
@numerobis:
I hadn’t heard that they’d moved to LA; then again, I’m not an obsessive royals-tracker. I can’t say I’m surprised given Meghan’s an actress. Of course, now things are going to be difficult if they want to get back into Canada.
@Naglfar:
The royal family doesn’t have a lot of day-to-day political power, true, but structurally they still have some.
I’m obviously more familiar with the Canadian system than the English, but in Canada the Governor-General (who acts as the Queen’s voice here) does have some powers that aren’t strictly ceremonial. Granted, a lot of them have to do with ‘what happens between parliaments’, and are mostly involved with ensuring a stable transition of power, so the term of office of a Governor-General is set up (as much as possible) to avoid having both the Governor-General and Parliament both be changing at the same time.
Also, a number of the powers that the Governor-General strictly has by law would probably precipitate a constitutional crisis were they to be actually used.
@Surplus to Requirements:
I spent a while trying to figure out how to say what I was saying without sounding like somebody might consider organizing a terrorist attack. I’m not certain there was a way.
@numerobis:
I don’t think Harry considers that ‘hope’, I think he considers that ‘dread’.
Actually, given the way he’s been cut off currently… hmm. No, he’s probably still in the line of succession unless he explicitly abdicates. It doesn’t help that the ‘line of succession’ isn’t just an England-only thing… every member of the Commonwealth independently has rules for it.
This came up some years back when William’s got married in 2011, when there was a push to change the rules of succession, because previously the rules only allowed a woman to inherit the throne if she had no brothers at all: within a family it was all boys, eldest to youngest, and then the girls. Back when Kate Middleton was first pregnant, the rules were changed in England so it would be strictly by age only, and every other member of the Commonwealth (basically every country that defers to the British royal family in one form or another) had to pass laws within their own jurisdictions to match. I remember this coming up in Canada.
Now, given that the first child was a boy, it didn’t really matter immediately. The actual changes didn’t take effect until early 2015 after all the countries had made their changes, by which point Kate was already several months pregnant with their second child. (Who would be a girl, so it was a good thing the changes took effect before she was born.)
Fortunately, we seem to have been spared wondering what would happen if not all the countries switched over to the new method and we’d end up with different members of the Commonwealth having different monarchs. That would have been… complicated.
Would that really have happened? Or would there have been some attempt to harmonize the different orders of succession?
Though, the latter would seem to run afoul of the Arrow theorem, much like ranked-choice voting …
Interesting about the etymology of “simp.” I always assumed it was about these weak betas simpering to women in the hope of gaining their favors.
That is entirely possible; I have been popping in and out of discussions infrequently. I can’t find the exact thread that I was in, but it was definitely quite comprehensively discussed in this one, which I wasn’t around for, so apologies for bringing it up again.
I know, right?