Ok so the Alyssa Bereznak hub-bub has come and gone, and I'm a latecomer to the story. And for me this story wasn't about Alyssa Bereznak or Jon Finkel (who despite Alyssa's caricature seems to be a rather successful handsome well-adjusted fellow with alpha-activities such as poker championships and hedgefund trading). So its not about feeling sorry for Jon Finkel personally but what he represents.

The thing that really got me, was not the story itself but the response of the feminisphere to it. Despite or perhaps because being a subomega male virgin loser, I've always been sympathetic to women. It comes not so much from feminist propaganda as just hearing the way regular guys talk about women. They way they totally dehumanize them into sextoys and piece of meat to be used for pleasure and then disgarded like a used condom. And I'm not just talking about alphas here but even "good guys" who maybe really nice to me personally and generally decent people, even they talked about women in the same way. And the more I read PUA blogs like Roissy, Spearhead, Tucker Max etc the more I really felt for women.

I guess what got me about the feminist blogs response to the Jon Finkel incident is that for the 1st time in my life I felt like shouting at women "men are real human beings". I was shocked to the degree in which feminist blogs were willing to totally dehumanize loser men. A woman's sexual autonomy came above all else, even if it were used in a cruel sadistic manner. Alyssa was even a hero standing up against the evil patriarchal Disney plot to force women to give frogs a chance. Beauties don't have a responsibility to give beasts a chance.

I guess the most representative post, that really captures the whole situation was a sole dissenting voice on a geek feminism blog, that actually had to remind women that loser nerds are actual human beings with their own problems-

Quote: "I lived through it. I was the a girl in a group of predominantly-male geeks, and I watched my male friends be subject to gender-policing violence on a daily basis that I and the other woman were never targeted by. They were sexually assaulted, beaten, mocked and socially ostracized (we were socially ostracized and got the occasional prank call, but were otherwise ignored, unlike the boys.) For those who didn’t leave our small, rural town after graduation, the mockery, social ostracism and sexual harassment continued after graduation.

It isn’t an excuse for their misogyny, but it is an explanation; women were both part of the patriarchy that kept them down and a safe, dehumanized target for their anger (they considered me “not a girl”. At the time I took it as a complement; boys aren’t the only ones who can protect themselves by buying into misogyny.) The only time I saw one of them interact with a girl romantically, it was a practical joke by one of the “popular” girls. I know it’s an unpopular position around here, but at least sometimes these things are real. I saw them happen.

It also doesn’t stop at high school: I had a guy at my (very geeky) job call LARPers stupid, pathetic, bizarre and immature (they had no idea I larped, of course, because I was terrified of being considered all those things. Instead, I went out of my way to learn the names of several campgrounds I could claim to be camping at those weekends.) The men who learned to blend in during high school or college may not continue to have problems (unless a date googles their name), but the men who still fail to fit society’s standards of “acceptable”, by being over-weight, not understanding the rules of social interaction, being excessively interested in nerdy topics or wearing super-thick glasses continue to be excluded and possibly lonely. I meet them at conventions and in nerdy spaces and I can understand the exclusion; it is uncomfortable to interact with someone who so clearly doesn’t understand social graces. But that doesn’t mean the exclusion isn’t real, or hurtful.

This also isn’t to say that every geeky man is a misogynist. I’ve seen some who correctly draw parallels or formed alliances with queer, artsy or otherwise-deviant boys and became feminist allies. I have also met men, more common among my friends group now than the misogynists, who married the first woman he had a long-term relationship with and stays with her no matter how badly she treats him, because he thinks she’s doing him a favor by being with him. Almost a quarter of my male friends are in what I consider to be abusive relationships, and they seem really surprised when they confess their unhappiness to me and my response is, “you know you’re not the only one, right?” For some reason none of them talk with the others about living in misery in order to avoid being alone.

Do either group of men have it “worse” than woman under the patriarchy? Probably not, though I believe Oppression Olympics is unhelpful and a sign of derailing. I can guarantee you that individual men who were harassed and abused for not fitting in to a non-nerdy culture have had it worse than individual women who have been otherwise rewarded by the kyriarchy, because I can think of two people on either side of that equation.

It’s a privilege to not have seen or experienced the social ostracism, harassment and violence that I have seen and experienced being targeted at boys and men because of their status as geeks, but just because you didn’t see it happen doesn’t mean it didn’t exist."

Its the first time I've had such a visceral gut reaction to feminist writing the same way I did to Tucker Max or Roissy in DC. And we're not talking "Heartless Bitches International", but blogs that I would consider legitimate feminist blogs with actual knowledge and background in theory and the structures of society.

I guess as I look back at my own life, its not the case that I as a male had any power over rich, popular, white females. They had the power and they used it to be cruel. And I'm not talking about simply ignoring and rejecting me. No they actively pursued me as a loser to tease and taunt.