Feminism doesn’t just hurt men. It also hurts women. It hurts top tier women because it creates a culture in which they can no longer hold onto their top catch man. It hurts bottom tier women because they’re sold a bill of goods and convinced that they can have much better men than they actually ever can.
It also hurts the women whom it convinces to forgo family altogether in pursuit of a high paying, high status, or deep and meaningful career. Like my sister.
I was initially going to write this in the comment sections of Vox’s fantastic post but then I realized that I had more to say than that. You could write volumes on my sister and how she demonstrates so much that is broken in society.
Where do I even begin? My sister (whom I have dubbed Hillary) is the archetypal radical feminist and has been her whole life. So radical that she’ll sit there with a straight face and tell you she’s not radical at all. How she can hold this when her views fall so far to the left of even mainstream feminism was completely beyond me, until I learned the hamster metaphor. Oh, there’s a GIANT hamster at work there. In a previous post Vox describes his experience with women and their desires to have children.
Every woman I knew in high school and college swore up and down that she didn’t want to have children. Every single one. All of them that are married, as well as some who are not, have children now. The rest wish they did. Most of the married, but childless, working women I knew said that they wanted to continue working after they had children. Only about half of them returned to their jobs and most of those who still work wish they didn’t need to do so.
This has been pretty much my experience as well. The only real difference in my case is that it was more like 70-80% of the women I knew saying they didn’t want children. I don’t know where Vox is from, but I attribute the difference to growing up in the south where feminism doesn’t have quite as much control over the general consciousness as it does in other places.
More to the point, it perfectly describes Hillary. I can’t tell you how often, loudly, emphatically and consistently throughout my life I’ve heard her say she absolutely, positively was not interested in getting married and having children. Now she’s almost 37 and completely distraught about not having any kids. Watching all three of her brothers have children within a year and a half of each other just ramped up the distress even higher. And it’s just about too late. She’s hit the wall bad over the last two years. She was always kind of pretty, and could’ve been fairly hot (probably a solid 8 or pushing at a 9) if she’d lost about 10-15 pounds and allowed herself to dress like a woman. Don’t get me wrong, she always dressed nicely. In power suits and pants and all that empowered woman crap. Even the skirts and dresses she wears trend to that look.
But damn, I don’t know what happened to her. She went and got an advanced degree at an Ivy League, graduated about two years ago, and bam. She’s gained about 30-40 pounds (maybe more) and aged about 10 years all at once. Add in the attitude she’s always had and marriage is pretty much out the door. Given that she’s a protestant minister, having children out of wedlock is pretty much a career killer, and at 37 her fertility is pretty low anyway. At best she’s got about 8 years of fertility left, all of it with considerably lower odds of success and higher odds of problems than she would’ve had in her younger years. And the weight doesn’t help any either.
Then let’s factor in the attitude. My sister is a 7 who could’ve been an 8 but in her head she’s a 13. The bitch shields are off the chart. Worst of all, she’s totally stuck on only the best of the best alpha males for her, and completely can’t understand that not a one of them would put up with her shit for the 15 minutes that a pump and dump would take.
She actually did almost marry one once. The story shouldn’t be much of a surprise to the Game community, although it took me years to learn some of the important details from my father. Hillary won’t talk about it to this day. She met the guy in college. When I was 14 I flew up to visit her over spring break and spent most of a week there. And I find out from her and her friends that she has a big time crush on this guy. Huge. The kind that turns women into beta males. Of course, he already had a girlfriend at the time, and evidently had had several during their time at school. They were freshmen. So in less than a year, this guy had had more than one semi-serious relationship. Alpha. And Hillary was dying, because he never noticed her.
Fast forward a couple of years and he’s driving down with her to visit the family because they’re engaged. I actually meet the guy for the first time I’m not impressed. He’s not that bright. He doesn’t particularly treat my sister well (which I now know is part of why she liked him). He’s not even that cool (the kind of trait you’d associate with an alpha male). And there was something about him that was just a bit… slimy. But something must’ve been working for him to get all the girls he did. A while later his parents came down to meet my parents. Them I actually liked OK, although they didn’t strike me as a family that had much in common with ours (I believed then and still believe that coming from similar family backgrounds is helpful for long term marriage stability).
About two months before the wedding the whole thing was called off. I had absolutely no idea why. Hillary wouldn’t talk about it. My parents pretended otherwise but they didn’t really seem to know either. The closest thing to an explanation I got at the time was that he was asking for more than my sister was willing to give up. I didn’t have any trouble accepting that explanation. It was always all about her. Over the years I tip toed around the subject and tried to pry more out of her, and about all I could get was that he was an asshole jerk and I should let it drop.
A couple of years ago my dad finally filled me in. I’m not sure he had known until shortly before that, either. Evidently the guy had wanted to set up some kind of open marriage where she’d follow him off to grad school, support him while he finished, and they could keep seeing other people. I admire his balls for trying to arrange such a thing. I admire my sister for telling him to go fuck himself. It’s one of the few smart decisions regarding men she’s ever made.
The pathetic part is how utterly easy my sister would be to Game if anybody put in the effort. She thinks she’s this amazingly strong, super brilliant, educated, modern, feminist, empowered woman who won’t put up with any shit from any man. And she wouldn’t – from any beta man. But a couple of nuclear negs to offset the 13 ego that comes from the ultimate life of gold stars and pats on the head, a healthy dose of “ignore her” game, and just not putting up with any of her shit and she’d be putty. If she read this blog she’d be the first one to leave the feminist rage comments about how I’m putting women down, women aren’t really like that, it’s all society, we’re misogynistic pigs, and none of it really works anyway. But it’d work hard core with her.
She’s also ignored all the beta boys her whole life. Like the nice gentleman down the street who was very bright, hard working, clean cut, and very nice. He took her to senior prom as “friends.” She should’ve married him. He’d have been a good catch. But of course not. Typical LJBF territory. She’d go on and on and on and on and ON (and still will) about how there are no good men out there who meet all the criteria she’d lay out. Always the same laundry list of characteristics that in reality will get you branded an LJBF. Nevermind that there were always dozens of those guys around that I could’ve pointed to.
Moving on… from a comment by The Duece in the first post I linked above:
The funny thing is, when they’re not being offended at a man pointing it out, women will gladly point out that they don’t know what they want themselves, though not in those exact words, and will attempt to spin their fickle nature as a strength. You ever heard Shania Twain’s “Any Man Of Mine?”
Again, absolutely true about my sister. The whole time I was in college she kept telling me how amazed she was that I knew what I wanted to do and didn’t struggle with it. The whole time since then she’s kept telling me how amazing it is that I always knew what I wanted to do. Nevermind that it’s total crap and that the only consistent plan I ever had was, “I don’t want to spend my whole life working for the man like my father did.” She herself was happy to talk about how she didn’t know what she wanted to do (neither did most of her friends). But if anybody had dared to mention it being a general female problem, she’d have gone apeshit.
Part of me is still angry at her for “teaching” me so much about what women want that turned out to be so horribly wrong. Angry that I can, justifiably, lay 80% of the blame for my youthful frustration with women squarely at her feet. But mostly I’m just sad for her. Sure, she’s got her fancy pants Ivy League graduate degree. She’s not rich, and never going to be. She’s not famous, and never going to be. She’s not going to leave a massive mark on society the way she’s always wanted to. She will have people who remember her when she’s gone… but only for a while. And then there will be no children to give her the only true immortality we only have. No grandchildren to keep her company in her old age. No husband to grow old with. Just a lot of tears and bitterness to enjoy alone with her dog (at least she won’t be the cat lady) while she grows old on government retirement subsidies (if she’s lucky enough for it to still be there).
This is the liberation and empowerment that feminism has brought. And odds are that she’ll swear until her last miserable breath that it was all worth it.
