Men’s Rightsers and Pickup Artists alike are obsessed with the dilemma of the so-called “Nice Guy” who can’t get laid. MRAs see his plight as a symptom of a gynocratic society in which fickle, asshole-loving women are the gatekeepers of sex; PUAs see it as a sign that beta males need to learn how to imitate the vaguely aloof swagger of the natural alpha male.
And both MRAs and PUAs completely miss the point.
To see just how badly they do, let’s take a look at a recent post from the sadly influential PUA shitbag Heartiste, who uses an alleged Facebook screencap of uncertain provenance as a springboard for a diatribe against the “desperate male,” that is, the “desperate, clingy ünterbeta male” who pursues a woman, often in a weirdly apologetic, even abject way, long after she’s made it clear she has no interest in him.
Some people dream of going back in a time machine and strangling baby Hitler in his crib, thus preventing World War II, the Holocaust, any number of stupid memes. Our dear friend Heartiste — the repellent right-wing pickup guru — dreams instead of delivering the incredibly wussy teenage Hitler his own Sixteen Commandments of Poon, thus saving young Adolph from the horrors of Betahood and perhaps also preventing World War II, etc.
Heartiste, who evidently gets his news from seven-year-old stories in the Daily Mail, has been reading about a not-so-new book that tells the story of teenage Hitler’s unrequited crush on a girl named Stefanie Isak. To hear the Daily Mail tell it, Hitler was quite the beta simp, watching from a distance in fury as alpha male army officers charmed (and won over) the young lass. Heartiste is driven to comment:
Mark Minter, a bitter, angry, divorced man in his late fifties, made a name for himself over the last year or so in the tiny world of the misogynist manosphere as that subculture’s most vociferous opponent of marriage.
In a series of little manifestos, deposited as comments on various manosphere blogs, Minter excoriated the institution he thought made a “slave” of men. “Get it through your head,” he wrote in one,
Men are from mars; women are FUCKING IDIOTS.
Never marry. … Duh. Game. Duh. Pump them, dump them, next them. Duh. THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO WIN. Duh!!!!!
That was the old Mark Minter. Then, last week, word got out that Minty was getting married. To a single mother (oh no!) over the age of thirty (eek!) that he’s apparently never even met in person (well, actually that does sound a bit worrisome).
A better way to retain your mate: Be a sharp-dressed man.
You may know Heartiste as a reactionary, misogynistic, proudly racist dispenser of manipulative, sometimes abusive dating advice to would-be “alpha males.”
Did you also know that he was an open advocate of domestic violence against women?
Well, I didn’t, until a friend pointed out a strange little exchange on his Twitter account the other day.
Last Tuesday morning, apropos of nothing in particular, Heartiste made the following pronouncement:
Depriving men of the means to make credible mate retention threats will assure that women need more retaining. #evolutionaryarmsrace
The latter three items on the list (“Abandonment. Shame. Ostracism”) are standard techniques in Heartiste’s dating strategy, but the open advocacy of violence is, I think, new.
In addition to being repugnant, Heartiste’s argument here doesn’t even particularly make sense. Essentially, he seems to be saying that men need to be able to hit women to keep them in line so that they won’t have to … hit women to keep them in line.
Also, the phrase “mate retention strategy,” apparently popular with Evo Psych types, gives me the creeps. I’m pretty sure the best “mate retention strategy” is to be the sort of person your “mate” wants to be in a relationship with.
I did a quick search for the phrase, and found numerous references to two academic studies. One suggested that some women fake orgasms as a “mate retention strategy.” Another possibly more revealing one claimed that men of “low mate value” often insult their mates to lower their self-esteem so they won’t feel confident enough to leave. That seems more or less in line with what Heartiste’s general approach. And certainly, by any reasonable definition of the term, Heartiste and his followers are some pretty “low value” people, both as “mates” and as decent human beings generally.
I also found this reference to research by Evo Psych big daddy David Buss suggesting that violence — surprise! — isn’t actually a particularly effective “mate retention strategy.”
Also, beating up your mate is, you know, just generally a pretty shitty thing to do.
If Heartiste takes his tweets down, I’ve got screenshots.
EDITED TO ADD: Heartiste has really been going wild with the Twitter lately.
Here he claims to have invented the term “hivemind.”
Interesting that this pants-wetting manboob stole the Chateau Heartiste coinage "hivemind." A reader is outed! http://t.co/F729vnZLRe
There’s no good way to illustrate this post so here’s sleepy Maru in a box.
Lady feminists! I have some terrible, terrible news for you from pickup artiste Heartiste, the would-be God Emperor of Poon. Apparently he and his pals have been having sex with you all.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t how birth control actually works.
You might think that Pickup Artists, dudes obsessed with sexing up the young fertile lasses, would be huge fans of contraceptives – which, after all, are what makes their particular lifestyle possible. But some prominent PUAs are about as enthusiastic about contraception as a Pope.
In the case of the charming fellow who calls himself Heartiste, I mean this literally. In a recent posting, he quotes approvingly from Pope Paul VI’s 1968 Humanae Vitae dissing contraceptives for allegedly demeaning the women that use them. Paul suggested that contraception may cause men to
lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.
I’m no Pope, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.
Over on Chateau Heartiste, the adult man who actually goes by the name “Heartiste” is getting into the spirit of the election season by going all Ann Coulter on us with a post on how terrible it is that single women can vote – mainly because they vote for Democrats, which Hearty attributes to the lack of real men in their lives.
When you don’t have an alpha male in your personal life to admire and rely on for support (partly because you make your own money and don’t feel a pressing need to have a middle class compliment&cuddle herb around for security), you turn to the next facsimile — the substitute alpha male who promises limitless resources for you and your future sprogling. This substitute alpha male is The State, and its shaman emissary is Obama. …
Single women are bankrupting this country. And they don’t give a shit, as long as they get theirs, which includes tingles.
Manosphere misogynists like to tell themselves fairy tales about women. Their favorite such tale, repeated endlessly, is one called “The Cock Carousel” – sometimes referred to in expanded form as the “Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel” or the “Bad Boy Cock Carousel.” (Hence that Rooster-riding gal you see in this blog’s header about half the time.)
Despite the different names, the story is always, monotonously, the same: In their late teens and twenties, when they’re at the height of their sexual appeal, women (or at least the overwhelming majority of them) have sex in rapid succession with an assortment of charismatic but unreliable alpha males and “bad boys” who make their vaginas (or just ‘ginas) tingle. Then, sometime in their mid-to-late twenties, these women “hit the wall,” with their so-called sexual market value (or SMV) dropping faster than Facebook’s stock price. As Roissy/Heartiste puts it, in his typically overheated prose:
An innately unsexy lady athlete somehow cons a dude into kissing her.
So over on Chateau Heartiste, the Dude Who Used to Call Himself Roissy seems personally affronted that the female athletes in the Olympics, by and large, didn’t live up to his wet dreams of Perfect Womanhood. In one post, he hails a Turkish newspaper columnist (yes, the same one we talked about here) who complained about the allegedly unwomanly bosoms of female Olympians, and offers his own less-than-complimentary assessment of their looks:
Who with the eyes to see hasn’t noticed the narrow hips, the grotesque six-pack abs (never a good look on women), the chest “stubs”, the linebacker shoulders, and the manjaws of an inordinate number of the female Olympians?
So why does it matter that Roissy/Heartiste couldn’t get a boner watching the Olympics? Apparently because these women are violating the PRIME DIRECTIVE, which forbids representatives of the United Federation of Planets from “intervene[ing] in matters which are essentially the domestic jurisdiction of any planetary social system.”
Chris Brown, who’s convinced that he’s apologized enough for what he calls his “mishap.”
Over on his little chateau, otherwise known as a blog, the pick-up Heartiste Formerly Known as Roissy suggests a rather unusual role model for young and not-so-young men hoping to impress women with their alphaness: Chris Brown. Not for being a charismatic singer, but for that time he nearly beat Rihanna to death.
Oh, you don’t have to literally beat up women to be an alpha. Just work on making them uncomfortable and insecure.
Maxim #19: Making a woman feel a little emotional pain will reward you a thousandfold in returned physical pleasure.
You don’t have to be fists-of-fury Chris Brown to pick up a Rihanna and make her fall in deep, profound love with you, but don’t let the lesson of their relationship be lost on you. If you are a beta male — and odds are you are — you can superglue your relationship bond by instilling in your woman a calculated level of discomfort and insecurity. You won’t feel bad about this, because you will know that the discomfort you create is subconsciously DESIRED by your girl. Despite her outward appearance of frustration and timorous appeasement, you will know that inside, she is lit up like a vagina tree, with a squirting orgasm shooting out of the star on top.
In addition to everything else that is horribly wrong with this quote, let me just say that “lit up like a vagina tree” is not a phrase that I hope works its way into the vernacular.
