Misogyny

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Why do you think you aren't racist?

for the same reasons you think you are.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

I bet, with a small research budget, I could demonstrate your racism. I haven't met someone whose issues I couldn't expose, and I suspect racism to be universal.

i bet you could not.

Slightly off-topic here, I know, but I didn't start it. I hate to be seen even slightly to disagree with hyperlexian, as some people will imagine me to be doing. Deep down, where it counts, I'm with her all the way.

Fact is, though, I agree that racism is probably culturally, rather than individually, universal. In the earliest days of human civilisation/ non-nomadic cultures 'Beware the stranger' would have been sensible advice - really right up until the last century when air travel buggered everything up. Strangers would be prone to bringing strange killer diseases (remember measles, anyone?), competing for scant resources, and sometimes interfering with the gene pool in unsanctioned and destabilising ways ...

Later, any culture descended from Anglocentric origins (about which I feel entitled to speak) - many others, too, but this example is as good as any - is likely to have inherited, in addition, the far more recent colonial/ conquest mores. We Brits get a bad rap all over the world because of what our leaders have done to suppress other cultures, and their populations, over the last relatively few hundreds of years.

Seems to me the cultural memory of that 'stranger caution' stuff must have been handed down forever, and morphed somewhere, by whatever process - probably deliberately, for cynical reasons, but I'm no expert - into the much more destructive thing we now call 'racism'. I'm not saying it's a good thing. To me, right here, right now, it's bad. No question. Absolutely the time of its usefulness has passed. We encounter strangers, and people who look different from ourselves, every day. If we haven't grown up amongst people of other appearances there can be a sense of strangeness. We can choose for that not to act out in bad ways, but I think the first step to really rooting out racism has to be assuming its progenitor is there in us, because it's in the culture that spawned us. After that it's easy: the second step is systematically dismantling it in ourselves; and after that we're in a really good position to work for change around us.

Hope this doesn't muddy the waters too much. Actually, I'm trying to build a bridge ... but getting those darn pile-drivers started can make one hell of a mess ...

Oh yeah - and for these reasons I don't buy that misogyny is anything like racism. There is no rational cultural origin for it (again, for the record, I'm not saying racism is rational; I'm saying it is possibly a corruption of something that may have been rational, very early in human evolution). There is nothing analogous that misogyny could possibly have morphed from. Women have always, everywhere, been the lifegivers. No 'stranger' component there. WTF is misogyny about, then? Where did it come from? Just a wild guess, I'd say it's much more recent ... a cultural artefact of a different sort ... but I don't have any clues on that one. It's just nasty, and stupid.

If I'm racist from not seeing a black person until I was 18, you're racist for not seeing an Eskimo.

Misogyny is cultural; a lot of religious tradition arose out of the desire by scared weaklings to control women.

I'm still struggling when it comes to women, but no I don't hate them. You might not have a rational reason to hate them, but your hatred is self-consistent with your logic. It doesn't just come out of nowhere. If you have a sense of entitlement, then you will feel resentful towards women because you feel that they owe it to you. This isn't healthy at all and you should work your way out of it. You should expect mutual responsibility instead. Whatever you expect of her should be expected of you too. If you want a chick that puts effort into her looks, you should also put effort into yours. If you treat her with good manners, then she should return the favour with good manners but nothing more and nothing less.

pshaw, you can disagree with me all you want. i understand what you mean about racism being cultural, but not every person's birth culture is necessarily racist. just because the roots of a culture were racist doen't mean that my family or microculture is racist. i live in a multicultural nation and have experience with people of all races since early childhood. so there wasn't a sense of "different" necessarily. ultimately, social and cultural tendencies don't always determine individual behaviours.

misogyny means hatred of women based on the simple fact they're women.

I didn't see that hatred in the OP. All I saw was understandable frustration with women. There's a difference there.

Also, the word "misogyny" tends to be carelessly thrown around like some toy without people understanding what it's really about.

It's like calling every guy who happens to like 20-year-old girls a pedophile.

misogyny can be the hatred of certain groups of women only, as opposed to all women - it depends on what definition is used. many misogynists love their mothers or other non-sexualised women, for example.

Yes, I can tell you love that word so much you're willing to redefine it for your suitable purposes.

But let's review the OP's post for a second:

The gist of his post (when taken in context) is that he wouldn't mind interacting with women and actually liking them but that he's really pissed off at even the remotely attractive ones because they won't give him the time of day.

Please point out the hatred towards women bit in his post because I don't see any (aside from that "hate" word which he could've just stated out of frustration and not because he truly hates women in general and treats them as inferior beings).

Yes, I agree. I'd say, though, that for you (or me) to have reached that individual position, some people, somewhere in our background, have chosen to undertake what I call steps 1 and 2 of the necessary work to root it out. At some point they would likely have been bucking the system around them to do so. Sooner or later you would get generations - or at least, as you say, microcultures - where it has been more or less devolved. With real delight I saw that possibility in early life for my son, to whom skin colour differences were imperceptible, being utterly devoid (to him) of significance. For an intelligent adult, however, I choose to face and accept the fact that it is impossible and inappropriate to maintain that sort of colour-blindness if racism is to be rooted out at an institutional level in a broader racist culture. This consciousness is a necessary intermediate stage, as I see it, and self-congratulation somewhat premature.


Yes, or a subclass of women based on the fact that they are, or are imagined to be, women of a certain 'type'.


His frustration is not with women. It is interior frustration projected outwards onto a subclass of women. It is not the product of a natural human exchange; it is unidirectional, targeted and chaotic.


Yes, it does. But NB this was (presumably) the OP's choice of heading for the thread, not that of the respondents.


It's not even remotely like that. If you have sensible points to make, deserving of attention, you blow your overall credibility by coupling them with something so patently nada, i.e. that nobody of intelligence would say/mean/believe. A 20-year-old is not a child, by definition.

Are you being celibate for religious reasons? Or just because? Because if it's for religious reasons in any way, well, God definitely doesn't want you hating women.

Women are pretty neat, imo, they're occasionally even into the same things I'm into. It's so crazy right?! But, the big problem with me and women, isn't so much that they hate me or anything like that, but as CS Lewis called it, the "sword between the sexes."

I'd say if you care, try to just see women apart from sex, like, try the best you can to just appreciate them for, say, what they bring to a discussion or what you can learn from them. Figure skating for example, got me around significantly more women than I used to be around, and it's a situation where they often can give me advice and stuff like...asking a guy how to do stuff in shop class. So in a setting like that, they're complete equals or more than likely better than me at what I'm trying to do.

As far as if a girl wants to have sexual relations with me, well, Christian no sex before marriage thing, but really, I think I'm too oblivious to notice the cues associated with laying a girl, so I don't know if I'd have to worry too much. Maybe I will. So many times, have my NT friends been like "DUDE SHE THINKS YOU'RE HOT" and I was like "huh?" So my chances of having premarital sex or dating for that matter are limited for that reason.

I don't know. Maybe it's forbidden for women to be sexually open, then again maybe it's biological and societal.



I do know that whenever I'm public about my sexuality around most boy or girl, I feel like the minority that is hounded or scolded.

It's more a strong dislike for men for me. Not for reasons anywhere close to OP's, I just don't, can't, feel comfortable around men. My mother raised me on her own, so I kind of hold "The Woman" on a pedestal, but even with that I always feel uncomfortable around guys.