As part of my ongoing mission to combat the lies about men and women that modern society attempts to beat in our skulls on a daily basis, I present “Mr. Bardamu’s Bookshelf,” an occasional series dedicated to analyzing works of literature that every right-thinking man ought to have in his personal library.
Why call it “Mr. Bardamu’s Bookshelf,” you ask? “Ferdinand” has one too many syllables.
If the amount of outrage and vitriol directed at something is correlated with its truthfulness, Madame Bovary was one of the most unpleasantly honest novels of the nineteenth century. When Gustave Flaubert’s seminal work was first published in 1856, public prosecutors charged him with “outrage to public morality and religion,” which lead to one of the most famous obscenity trials in literary history. Flaubert was acquitted of all charges the following year, and Madame Bovary went on to secure its place in the canon of Western literature. What about this little novel so upset the sensibilities of the French morality police? Quite simply, Madame Bovary laid bare the true nature of woman to an audience that had become dulled with Victorian sentimentalism. In particular, Flaubert exposed the nature of female infidelity and the role men play in fostering it.
Madame Bovary opens by describing the formative years of Charles Bovary, a quiet nerd of a man who spends his school years getting mocked by his classmates. After completing his education and opening a medical practice, his mother marries him off to an rich widow, who treats him like the glorified kitchen bitch that he is:
Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was master; he had to say this and not say that in company, to fast every Friday, dress as she liked, harass at her bidding those patients who did not pay. She opened his letter, watched his comings and goings, and listened at the partition-wall when women came to consult him in his surgery.
She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles returned in the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets, put them round his neck, and having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he was neglecting her, he loved another. She had been warned she would be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love.
Nobody respects doormats, least of all women.
After going on a house call to a farm, Charles becomes smitten with Emma Rouault, his client’s young daughter. Of course, in typical nice guy fashion, Charles spends his days hovering around her in a purely platonic fashion instead of just stating his intentions upfront. When his wife kicks the bucket, Charles courts and marries Emma. Unfortunately, not long after their marriage begins, Emma becomes bored with Charles, and begins dreaming of romance and adventure. Flaubert pulls no punches, blaming the inattentive husband as well as the disloyal wife. Charles is portrayed as a schmuck who is both incompetent at his job (he is not skilled enough to become a doctor, instead being an “health officer”) and hopelessly supplicating. He believes Emma to be perfect in every way, regarding her “conduct” as “irreproachable,” going so far as to give her complete control over their finances.
As the novel develops, Emma becomes obsessed with Léon Dupuis, a young law student with whom she develops a friendship. As Charles remains oblivious to her feelings, Emma becomes increasingly disgusted with him:
What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.
On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.
As far as Emma was concerned, Charles was guilty of EWB: Existing While Beta.
Later, after Léon departs for Paris, Emma meets the dashing alpha male Rodolphe Boulanger, who is able to see in a few minutes of conversation what Charles cannot:
“I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty nails, and hasn’t shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his patients, she sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would like to live in town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman! She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table. With three words of gallantry she’d adore one, I’m sure of it. She’d be tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?”
The men who know women best are the ones who have bedded countless numbers of them.
And with that, Rodolphe sets out to seduce Emma, a task made easy by Charles’ romantic ineptitude. After taking a fairytale-esque horse ride through the woods, Emma gives herself completely to him, as her gina tingles override her conscious brain:
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights.
Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the love-dream of her youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse, without anxiety, without trouble.
Now where have we heard THIS before? Oh, right:
Women involved in extramarital affairs speak of “feelings unlike anything they’d experienced before. They felt ‘alive’ again.†This euphoria was, however, combined with pain and guilt. Often before a tryst, they would vow that ‘this would be the last time,’ but were unable to keep their resolutions. The author interprets this as addictive behavior related to the brain chemistry of erotic attachment. She conjectures that the “high†produced by adultery is more intense than that of lawful courtship because of its association with shame, guilt and secrecy: a plausible hypothesis, and possible topic for future research.
She spends the next few years in a affair with Rodolphe, lavishing him with expensive gifts that she racks up enormous debts in order to pay for, and even makes plans to abandon Charles and elope with him. Tired of her clinginess and worried that she will expose their secret, Rodolphe writes her a letter breaking off the relationship and vanishes. His rejection of Emma shatters her mentally and emotionally:
She leant against the embrasure of the window, and reread the letter with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the more confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth might crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself, “Come! come!”
The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging, surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself be taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry voice calling her.
She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as if to examine the darns, and she really thought of applying herself to this work, counting the threads in the linen. Suddenly the remembrance of the letter returned to her. How had she lost it? Where could she find it? But she felt such weariness of spirit that she could not even invent a pretext for leaving the table.
Again, this sounds awfully familiar:
Sometimes the paramour breaks off relations with the adulterous wife, for any number of reasons. In these cases, the women “experienced extreme grief, became deeply depressed and expressed tremendous anger toward their husbands†(my emphasis). In fact, according to Langley’s hypothesis, they were experiencing another form of withdrawal—they were stimulant addicts forced to go “cold turkey.†These women “placed the utmost importance on finding a relationship that gave them the feeling they experienced in their affairs.
No woman ever really gets over being dumped by an alpha.
After falling ill and recovering, Emma re-encounters Léon Dupuis, and she embarks on another extramarital affair. Like she did with Rodolphe, Emma begins buying expensive gifts for Léon, exhausting Charles’ savings and putting them in massive debt. Once Emma’s tab is called, she is unable to get the money to pay her bills from either Léon (who has gotten sick of her clinginess) or Rodolphe. In one last dramatic act, she commits suicide by swallowing arsenic.
Throughout the entire novel, Charles remains blissfully unaware of his wife’s indiscretions, and after her death, becomes so crestfallen that he abandons his practice and becomes a recluse. When he finally comes across evidence of Emma’s adultery, his response is stereotypically beta:
One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper. He opened it and read: “Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your life.” It was Rodolphe’s letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes, where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had just blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even than he, had thought of dying. At last he discovered a small R at the bottom of the second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodolphe’s attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained air when they had met two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter deceived him.
“Perhaps they loved one another platonically,” he said to himself.
Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe.
Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have coveted her. She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable.
This continues when Charles meets Rodolphe for the final time:
One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse—his last resource—he met Rodolphe.
They both turned pale when they caught sight of one another. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and very hot) to the length of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the public-house.
Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved. He seemed to see again something of her in it. It was a marvel to him. He would have liked to have been this man.
The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in. Charles was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the succession of memories that crossed his face. This gradually grew redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at last a moment when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon the same look of weary lassitude came back to his face.
“I don’t blame you,” he said.
Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow—
“No, I don’t blame you now.”
He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made—
“It is the fault of fatality!”
Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean.
Is it any wonder the moral orels thought this novel was obscene? How can you sympathize with a man who upon encountering the rake who screwed his wife, FORGIVES him? If Charles Bovary was a real person, he’d be the Beta of the Decade.
Virtually every bit of knowledge imparted by game is backed up in Madame Bovary, a novel that is a century-and-a-half old. A woman despises it when the man in her life is a squishy, spineless lump, and will actively seek solace in the arms of manlier men. She’ll do things for those manlier men that she would never do for her schmendrick hubby, including showering them with gifts and dirty sex acts. She can only love one man at a time, meaning hubby will get replaced in her heart by whatever sweet-talking sexy dude has made her loins quiver. And hubby, because he failed to keep her in line and in love, is partially to blame for his wife’s whoring. All of these things were known, if not openly acknowledged, by our forebears, but we are just beginning to rediscover them.
For further reading, here’s the complete English translation of Madame Bovary that I used to write this post. For those of you who speak-a the language of love, the original French text is here.
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{ 69 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent choice FB – Mme Bovary is one of my own top two picks of classic literature that remains highly relevant to men today (Anna Karenina is the other). Interesting the way you’ve cast it in modern Game parlance.
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Bovary is better than Karenina on this point, in my view. because it’s less sympathetic — Tolstoy took sides a bit too much in Karenina, I think, but of course there are other themes in that novel.
I must say that I do very much disagree that female adultery is somehow “justified” by a lack of satisfaction in a marriage. Moral choices are always just that — choices. If a woman is dissatisfied in a marriage due to her husband neglecting her or being a beta or what have you, the thing to do is to either see if that can be fixed or, if not, to divorce. Adultery is always a vile choice, and is not justified by being unhappy in a marriage. Hence the notion that a man is somehow to “blame” for his wife’s adultery strikes me as chivalry raising its ugly head again — men are not to blame for that choice by a woman. It is ultimately her choice.
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Excellent post applying Game to the classics.
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There are a couple of scenes in the novel that you might be able to help me understand. It’s been ten years since I read it, so I apologize if the details are a little fuzzy, but hopefully you’ll recognize them.
The first is a scene in which Emma and Charles are out with a small group and they encounter some kind of technical problem which Charles is able to solve with a knife he is carrying. For some reason, Emma sneers at this accomplishment, mentally deriding it as “common” (I think). But why? Isn’t problem-solving in a group situation the dominant behavior? Why would Emma rather admire just standing around? Or perhaps the scene illustrates that at this point in their relationship, it is impossible for Charles to do anything right in her eyes?
The other scene involves an interaction that Emma has with the local parish priest. I don’t remember the details, but my reading of it was that Emma was on the verge of seeking counselling for her lust. But she changes her mind at the last minute. (I think they might have been interrupted.) What is Flaubert trying to communicate here? The uselessness of religion (he is French, after all)?
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Novaseeker: my take on the difference between what Tolstoy and Flaubert are trying to communicate is that Tolstoy, as a Christian, is concerned with the spiritual injury (guilt and shame) of adultery, while Flaubert is concerned with its material consequences. Karenina, after all, is neither jilted nor impoverished — on the contrary, she is nicely provided for by her lover Vronsky. Tolstoy’s point is that these do not compensate for the guilt and shame she feels.
Flaubert’s Bovary, in contrast, is remarkable in her utter lack of self-awareness. Her suicide is driven only by the circumstances to which her adultery has brought her. She learns nothing, even in death.
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I suspect it might have been the the depiction of a wife as something less than perfect which scandalized the opinion of the time.
Now I have to be honest and tell you that I don’t really know what game is. As a mathematician I am familiar with Game Theory but regard it as lightweight coffee table mathematics.
Also I would rather see the competition between men for the attentions of a women as something wholly detrimental to men and MRAs. Fighting amongst ourselves over women only leaves women in control and that is the last thing I would want. If that is what game is then I think the manginas are playing it, for surely what they do is nothing more than a supercilious and grovelling way of crawling into a woman’s cunt.
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Paul:
“Now I have to be honest and tell you that I don’t really know what game is. ”
Game is the sum total of the attitudes and behaviors that women find attractive in men. Practice and perfect game and women will be attracted to you.
“If that is what game is then I think the manginas are playing it, for surely what they do is nothing more than a supercilious and grovelling way of crawling into a woman’s cunt.”
This is a misconception. Game is not about “groveling” – it’s about getting in the driver’s seat. “Groveling” is what people without power do. A man who practices game has control over his life and his sexual behavior. Given that there are a sufficient percentage of men who want to experience relationships with women, I advocate game as a means to help them. It’s all about choices.
Nova – I think the prevailing wisdom is that if he did nothing to make the marriage work, he is partially to blame for the consequences thereof. Similar to this – if you never, ever lock your car, leave expensive electronic gadgets in it, and constantly park it somewhere highly suspect, are you not to blame at all when someone steals them?
No. You were being fucking stupid.
That doesn’t make the act of stealing right, of course, but it doesn’t fully excuse the individual who was stolen from; one should not make a career out of being a victim, in essence.
With that said, that doesn’t excuse the other side, either (and in the case of women who could simply get a divorce, given the ease of doing so for women, that makes it all the more loathsome); just because you did something stupid doesn’t mean the other person is not to blame.
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Oh I agree that if someone does nothing to make the marriage work, he is responsible for it breaking down. However, not for the *adultery*. I draw a distinction between marital dysfunction, on the one hand (which is a direct result of one or both parties failing at being a spouse), and adultery, on the other, because the latter is always a personal decision of the person committing the act. It is not a logical or necessary consequence of marital dysfunction, and is a separate decision.
So I’m all for blaming spouses for their respective responsibility in marital breakdown — that makes sense. But the cheated upon spouse is not, in any way, responsible for their spouse’s decision to commit adultery — that is a separate decision, whether it is based on marital dissatisfaction or not.
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At its simplest level, “Game” is a spontaneous re-discovery by younger men of the principles, attitudes, and behaviors of masculinity which women find attractive and which were taught to most young men by their upbringing and cultural conditioning as recently as 50 years ago, but which have been eclipsed and lost as feminism has ascended as the dominant cultural paradigm.
The choice of names used to refer to it are unfortunate when it comes to older guys understanding it, because of the connotations of dishonesty and manipulation that we tend to put with terms like “Playing Games” or “Pick Up Artists” (PUAs). But, in some respects that kind of disconnect is necessary due to the world that younger men have lived in. They are “gamers” in general, and the same type of intense interest in mastering challenges posed by electronic gaming also appeals to them in the much higher stakes “game” of life and finding and choosing a suitable mate.
Several factors have been at work separating younger men from older men – particularly their fathers. The massive scale family breakdown caused by divorce left a lot of young men totally at the mercy of their mothers and without any models of intact male power being able to counter-balance the female’s power. They have been left alone to navigate the transition from supplicative child, who has learned that the secret to a happy life is to make mom happy, to adult man who asserts his own wants and needs in the face of often extreme opposition, entirely on their own.
Game is a rediscovery of what actually works, in stark contrast to the absolute nonsense they have been fed all their lives. Due to the fact that they weren’t given the basics long before they hit puberty – as many of us older guys were – it is not surprising that their first few attempts will be less than spectacularly graceful.
One thing that strikes me about is that despite how much effort feminists and women in general have put into stamping out masculinity, it seems to be spontaneously regenerating itself. I never doubted that it would, but I was a bit surprised that we had to wait until the gang of knuckleheads born between the late 1940s and early 1960s aged out of the mating years in order for it to happen.
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Thanks Ferdinand. I think I understand better now. Is game for all ages, or is it just a young man’s tool? Does game fortify a man against his obliging nature which I think is the reason many get married?
I have thought about getting the book Bang. So far I have only got as far as the website.
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Is game for all ages, or is it just a young man’s tool?
I think that depends on what stage of his life a man is in. If having a relationship with a woman is something that is still important to him, then Game does give him some tools which can be effective in the absence of complete indifference.
However, if he has reached the state of true indifference – perhaps having reached the lifetime toxic dosage of drama – then it is about as pointless as playing poker with free chips. It works for those who have an investment in the game that they are seeking to protect, and a reasonable expectation of gaining something from it. But for a man who has neither anything to lose nor anything which interests him to gain, fishing is probably a much more satisfying passtime.
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Paul:
“Is game for all ages, or is it just a young man’s tool?”
Yes, it’s for men of all ages, though as zed stated, it’s younger guys who generally take a greater interest in it.
“Does game fortify a man against his obliging nature which I think is the reason many get married?”
Yes. Dave from Hawaii (Hawaiian Libertarian) has written extensively on his blog and at Roissy in DC on how learning game saved his marriage.
Bovary is more the type of the silly, overly romantic female who cannot accept how mediocre much of reality is, while Karenina is more a force of nature whom very few husbands could possibly keep up with. Both to a large degree resemble the different personalities of their different creators.
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I read Madame Bovary when I was 11. I felt bad for her for being married to that dull doctor. Forever, I seek to lasso a Rodolphe with a wedding band. It is like trying to catch rainbows.
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The third 19th century “adultery novel” I remember is Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest. I did read it, but can’t remember much of what it was about. I believe Leopold Alas’ La Regenta from Spain is also an example of the genre.
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I just remembered, I for some reason was always faithful in my fantasies. I masturbated only to a single fantasy character of my own creation. A couple of years after reading Madame Bovary, I named my character Rodolphe. The name signified elegance and danger at once.
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Ah, yes, Effi Briest. I was assigned to read that one in German when I was living in Berlin. As I remember it (and I do not remember it terribly well), it had similar themes of the moral hypocrisy of the “Mittelstand”.
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Zed,
“At its simplest level, “Game†is a spontaneous re-discovery by younger men of the principles, attitudes, and behaviors of masculinity which women find attractive and which were taught to most young men by their upbringing and cultural conditioning as recently as 50 years ago, but which have been eclipsed and lost as feminism has ascended as the dominant cultural paradigm.”
Well, I wasn’t taught such things. (Born 1952)
On the contrary, I was brought up to open doors for women, to raise your hat, to offer them your seat, and so on; i.e. to be a chivalrous gentleman.
This sounds more like training for betadom, doesn’t it?
I was taught NOTHING about women, and neither were my friends. We had to discover such things by ourselves.
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At modern times, definitely. But not when Karenina or Bovary were written. It wasn’t complitely impossible for a woman to get a divorce in Russian society at least (and Karenin does consider giving one to Anna), but it would have been a huge fall from grace for a woman. So basically women were trapped in loveless, unfunctioning marriages without escape. No wonder that extramarital affairs were so common… (Anna’s mistake actually was not her affair per se but how she handled it. She had friends who had multiple affairs and did not suffer like her.)
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OK, I can see this is going to take some explaining.
I wasn’t necessarily taught much specific about women, in part because they were something of a secondary consideration. The one aspect of the criticisms by older men of the Game community which I agree with is that they seem to focus far too much on women and what they want. If I could over-simplify the core message of what I was taught, it was “Focus on what is important and becoming good at it, take care of business, and there will be plenty of women who want to come along for the ride.”
I was taught a sort of compulsive civility which extended to men as much as it did women – up to and including getting my ass beat for addressing an adult by his first name. It was ALWAYS “Mr., Mrs. ,Miss” _________. That sort of formal distance can often come across as aloofness, and a lot of women will get their panties in a knot trying to overcome it and prove their sexual power.
Yeah, Harry, it does sound like you were trained for betadom. But then, you’re British, aren’t you? That fits in perfectly with the stereotypes we over here in “the colonies” have of British reserve and manners. I was also brought up to open doors for ladies, pull out their chairs, rise when they entered the room, etc. But, at the same time those affectations were reserved for the parlor where few men spent very much time. Outside, “on the frontier”
, where work was getting done, the standard attitude was “you girls stay out of the way, so you don’t get hurt.”
The emphasis was far less on the social dominance that Game theorists make central to their ideas, and more on mastery of the physical world and one’s surroundings. That did translate into social settings of an attitude that while women were certainly treated with courtesy, the goal was something other than pandering to them and they had to work to gain men’s attention – which they did.
Women valued men who were competent, and boys were brought up to be competent, which naturally attracted women. I do realize that I was raised in an agrarian setting in which competence in the physical world was far more important than social success – both for short term survival and long term prosperity. Severing men’s connection to the physical world and mastery of it did cut them off from the source of a lot of their strength, and most men today live in a social world with no roots in physical competence.
I was also raised in a time and under a set of values which reserved sex for marriage, so social interaction was focussed on the interaction itself. Playful bantering happened for its own sake, and was not a prelude to sex, so it was easier to get good at it because that was a skill to be enjoyed for itself, not for how instrumental it was in getting sex.
It’s a bit like the difference between the guys who played sports because they liked sports, and the ones who played sports because they thought it was a good way to get chicks. The ones who played for the love of the sport itself were always better than the guys who did it just to get the letter jackets, and not surprisingly they still got more and better women than the poseurs.
Go figure.
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@Paul,
you sound like a young guy. The best resource I have ever seen with respect to understanding women is ‘Men are better than women’ by Dick Masterson. Just buy the book off amazon and read it. As a man 43 and divorced I learned a LOT from that book. It is also presented in such a funny way as to be hysterically funny. I read it again recently and it was even better the second time around. I was so impressed I made a large donation to the ‘mabtw billboard’.
Also try http://www.menarebetterthanwomen.com/forums. Alas Dick allows too many women on the forums so you have to scroll past a lot of womens crap to get to the good stuff. On here you will find 10,000 posts about women.
Its not PUA or anything like that…it is simply this is what women are like…here is how to deal with them.
His video on the front page has now had 1.4M hits which puts him high on the list of guys making a difference in educating young men that MEN ARE BETTER THAN WOMEN. We always have been. We always will be.
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“MEN ARE BETTER THAN WOMEN. We always have been. We always will be.”
So you’re not just an anti-misandrist, which is fine, you’re an active misogynist. Good luck with that, but I don’t think that’s what this site is about, nor do I think that is the solution to readers’ ills.
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Ferdinand,
LOUD APPLAUSE!!! What can I say? Nail……..meet hammer.
Dude, that right there was the story of my life until 2 years ago…pathetic really…the further I get away from it the more pathetic it looks to have been a faithful partner and husband for 23 years, raise 4 kids, be a model citizen, be honest and hard working, do ‘all the right things’….All complete crap. And you are correct. Only one woman of all my women friends showed me some respect and recognition for being ‘what every women told me they wanted in a man’. Really? I’m a ‘bad husband’? Thanks for telling me. I’ll make sure all the younger guys know not to be a ‘bad husband’ like me. So part of my commitment is to explain to young men just how crap western women are now and to tell them to avoid getting married.
Women really hate ‘beta providers’ like I was. They hate them with a passion but they marry them because they want the ‘easy life’. As I recover from my 23 years as a ‘beta provider’ and date more women my respect for western women continues to fall. It is really quite amazing. If you told me I would have this little respect for western women 2 years ago I’d have said you were dreaming.
Western women now bitch at me for ‘not giving women the respect they deserve’. I tell them, “alas, my dear, I AM giving western women EXACTLY the respect they deserve, which would be none.” If women wanted ‘respect’ then they would do well not to abuse men who have been great husbands and fathers. Nope. I have severed all my relationships with western women except that one who supported me and maintained my respect by her actions. There is no point. They are worthless as friends. My longest female friend, whom I loved since I was 12? When I told her I was dropping her as a friend she just said “You are the only person in the life who has wished me happy birthday every year since I was 12. Not even my mother did that. Have a good life.” Yep..”have a good life”…that from someone where we have both cried on each others shoulder many times over 32 years. How pathetic.
I rather think my ex despised me for being so ‘weak’ as to be able to be ‘dominated’. I had access to her email for a day during our separation and I could read her email log. (Yes, she was dumb enough to use ‘mothers birth city’ for her secret question on hotmail. Duh…) It ‘broke my heart’ the way she talked about me. Absolutely no care or concern at. Her emails were really cold and callous. Not many men get to see the inner thoughts of their ex wives like that. It was really, really depressing. Young guys. Let me tell you. No matter I had two children with her, she didn’t work for 16 years of an 18 year marriage, and helped save my step son from cancer…my wife couldn’t care about me in the least. Don’t do it….just don’t do it. It’s not worth it.
Once I stopped listening to women tell me what they wanted and started listening to MEN tell me about women my impression of women fell even further. It must have been about May last year I read ‘Men are Better than Women’. Dick Masterson is a man before his time (www.menarebetterthanwomen.com). So I checked it out. I went over my entire life with the assumptions. “Women want babies and money”, “Women have vastly less processing capacity in their brains”, “Women are children”. And you know what….these three things fit perfectly.
I’ve been separated now 2 years this week. When we split I really did want another ‘relationship’. Over the last 18 months I guess I dated about 15-20 eastern european women and had 2-5 on the go at any time. They have been really lovely. I have managed to build up to three ‘favs’ now. I have known fav#1 for 2 years but only been dating for 18 months. Even though fav#1 is stunningly beautiful, lovely to talk to, so much fun to be with, she is still very ‘child like’. Now I can see these things it really saddens me. More than anything it saddens me. I wanted a wife who is an adult. But as you can see from Ferdinands writings here….women just are not adults. Shopenhauer noted the same in his ‘Essay on Women’.
I spent three solid days with my fav#1 a couple of weeks ago and it really struck me that as much as I would love to have her in my life for a long time there is just no way that is going to happen. I could not put up with her in my house on a permanent basis. So just these last two weeks I have been going through the process of giving up ever finding another ‘good woman’. What I want does not exist. Not even in the lovely eastern chicks I have been dating.
Instead I will just have to date young hot women, have wild passionate sex, sensual intimate lovemaking and when I can’t do that any more I will just lay on the train tracks and say hello to my maker. What a shame women couldn’t be a little better??? I really would have liked to be with one in the years to come. I think it is the ‘beta’ repeating on me a bit..LOL!!
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Φ:
“The first is a scene in which Emma and Charles are out with a small group and they encounter some kind of technical problem which Charles is able to solve with a knife he is carrying. For some reason, Emma sneers at this accomplishment, mentally deriding it as “common†(I think). But why? Isn’t problem-solving in a group situation the dominant behavior? Why would Emma rather admire just standing around? Or perhaps the scene illustrates that at this point in their relationship, it is impossible for Charles to do anything right in her eyes?”
A sizable part of “Madame Bovary” (which I glossed over, as it wasn’t relevant to my criticism) is Emma’s desire to be of the aristocracy and her reality of being a peasant. In Flaubert’s time, “just standing around”, or more appropriately, wasting time, was a desirable thing – only the lower classes would stoop to doing manual labor. In fact, here’s a passage that states this more eloquently:
“‘Ah!’ she said to herself, ‘he carried a knife in his pocket like a peasant.’”
“The other scene involves an interaction that Emma has with the local parish priest. I don’t remember the details, but my reading of it was that Emma was on the verge of seeking counselling for her lust. But she changes her mind at the last minute. (I think they might have been interrupted.) What is Flaubert trying to communicate here? The uselessness of religion (he is French, after all)?”
Presumably, Flaubert was conveying that by the time Emma seeks religion, she is so corrupt and debased that not even God can save her from her own lusts. Probably a partial product of his Frenchiness (as you mentioned), but he might have a point.
@Zed
“Women valued men who were competent, and boys were brought up to be competent, which naturally attracted women.”
Yep.
“I was also raised in a time and under a set of values which reserved sex for marriage, so social interaction was focussed on the interaction itself. Playful bantering happened for its own sake, and was not a prelude to sex,”
Yep.
But round here, in the UK, I got no advice about women as a youngster, not even from my own mother. LOL!
In fact, she gave me just one piece of advice – which I remember. And she only gave it to me because I was dating a remarkably rich female at the time.
“Never marry a woman who is richer than you,” is what she said.
By this, she meant that if the woman has more money than the man(and, of course, she will also ‘own’ the children and the house) then the man does not have that much to offer her – and so he is likely to be discarded at some stage.
These days, of course, marrying a rich woman can lead to some goodies following a break up – but not in those days.
Young women in my time were told by their mothers to evaluate men on the basis of their work prospects – and not much else – despite all the public talk about marrying for love.
In other words, the basic message to young women from their mothers was, “Marry for money.”
And throughout my entire life I have seen very many women doing exactly this.
Finally, here is some general advice that I would give to young men.
1. Follow your own personality (more so than your intellect) when it comes to choosing what you want to do and where you want to go.
2. I spent a good part of my life in the company of some of the richest people imaginable, and I can assure you that having a lot of money does not bring happiness – so don’t chase money unless, in doing so, you also happen to be fulfilling other needs at the same time.
3. When it comes to women, you might be their Number One for a good few years but, if they have children, no man will ever be their Number One again.
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Although the comparisons between Mme Bovary and Game are interesting, there’s a more general theme in it than just ‘beta disgusts wife’. Mme Bovary isn’t just disgusted with Charles – she’s disgusted with everything that she has. She used marriage to escape from a home-life that she had no reason to detest – but detest it she did. Although initially delighted to be married and reveling in her rise in status, as soon as she becomes accustomed to it, she starts to loathe it and that loathing starts to penetrate every aspect of her life she takes for granted, not just her husband. Her gaze is ever forward into a more glamorous future – she lives in a world of dreams against which no reality can compete. It’s this that makes her congenitally unhappy. The alpha Rodolphe would have soon disgusted her as much as Charles if she had been given a chance to become accustomed to him – but his real distinction is that he knows that, and doesn’t become emotionally embroiled. He doesn’t give her that chance.
This is the big truth that dare not be said that landed Flaubert into so much controversy. The essential nature of women isn’t virtue and caring, but unenlightened self-interest – and it shows itself as ingratitude, disrespect, recklessness and abandonment. Perhaps I’m being too sweeping in characterizing all women this way, but all of Flaubert’s readers would have recognized several Emma Bovarys in their own lives. Who here hasn’t?
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When I went to a state-run library in Beijing back in the 90s, Mme. Bovary was one of the most prominently displayed books. There were precious few English language books, but that was one of them, and it was right alongside English translations of Das Kapital and such. I was naturally put off by the emphasis on Communist literature, and assumed that Mme. Bovary must have been heavily political, so I didn’t bother with it.
However, now that I know more about the book and the author, I think the Communists must have latched onto the book because of its criticism of the bourgeois lifestyle.
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“However, now that I know more about the book and the author, I think the Communists must have latched onto the book because of its criticism of the bourgeois lifestyle.”
Feminists also latched onto it as a classic tale of the oppressive nature of marriage, and how it drove women to desperation.
It’s usually the mark of a great work when so many disparate viewpoints see something in it that they recognize. The truth is funny like that.
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As Ferdinand pointed out, the content of the novel flew in the face of Victorian idealization of women. It is easy to understand the hysterics of women over having their capacity for shallowness and self-centeredness exposed, but I think it is instructive to also look at how and why it upsets men so much.
In many respects we are currently dealing with the same cult of inherent female moral superiority which characterized the Victorian age. The issue of false rape accusations was recently highlighted by the Hofstra case, with women almost in unison chanting “women NEVER lie about rape.” What is puzzling is why it is often so difficult to convince men that women have an equal ability to succumb to temptation, or pettiness, or the desire for revenge, as men do.
I think that some clues can be found in the character of Charles. It has been my experience that some men fall in love so hard and so deeply that they cannot do anything other than idealize the woman they love so dearly. This is also seen in Don Quixote in the character Dulcinea (Aldonza, “the whore”). It seems almost as if men have to justify themselves and their feelings by ascribing to the woman a worth which would justify those feelings, otherwise they would appear to be fools both to themselves and everyone else. They cannot reconcile that they may be totally, madly, in love with someone who has few, if any, truly admirable qualities. Thus, he must put her on a pedestal and keep her there as a way to validate his feelings toward her.
To see how little things have changed in the past 150 years, one only has to look at the brouhaha over Larry Summers’s very mild suggestion that there might be some innate differences between men and women.
I also see a factor of significance for the concept of marriage which relates to this comment by Harry –
I surmise that in the past it often worked the same way for men. Marriage was a means for producing children, and I suspect both parties valued each other primarily based on how well they served their role in producing them. I remember a fellow a few years older than myself making the comment about his wife “well, she is the mother of my children” giving both the impression that there wasn’t much more to her than that in his eyes, but that by itself was enough.
My own parents’ marriage, and the marriages of my older siblings certainly put to rest forever in my mind that romance had anything whatsoever to do with marriage.
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This all really boils down to one thing, IMO.
Understanding the base female nature of hypergamy.
All of the problems associated with this story (and globalman’s account of his own failed marriage) stems from the female’s subconscious desire to have a dominant male as her sexual partner.
When a female gets married, and her husband no longer dominates her in any way, she can’t HELP but develop contempt for the Beta in her bed.
Many, many men will read what I just wrote and take issue with it. Many will say this means women are shallow or evil or just bad.
This is where you need to try and understand that raging against women’s hypergamous nature is like getting angry at the sun for rising every morning.
With our culture of lies and feminist propaganda and it’s emasculating zeitgeist, far too many men who are socially dominant as boyfriends, than get married and “beta-ize” and cede all control and power in the relationship to the woman once they are married and have children. I say this as one who did that exact same thing…and I nearly paid for it in divorce court.
When a man who think’s everything is just fine, and feels like he’s being a great provider and that should be enough…yet she is an extremely unhappy and dissatisifed woman…you need to take a very real look at your relationship dynamic. If you are at a point in which she is but a mother, and you a child that seeks her approval and permission…and are afraid of upsetting her, you are heading down the exact same path as Charles in the novel.
Because no matter how good of a provider you are…if you are not the dominant partner in your relationship, she will not respect you. She will not lust you. She will only have contempt for you.
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That is valuable advice from Dave in Hawaii. This is just about the most important thing a man can learn. This has far more impact than anything he can learn in college, etc. Valuable, valuable stuff. This is what ‘marriage counseling’ should really be.
Too bad that socialcons (Betacons) refuse to admit that Dave in Hawaii even exists. For them to admit that would be to admit that ‘Game’ is not merely ‘hedonism’ that they need to invent so that they can falsely conduct pseudo-moral posturing to mask their own envy and resentment, as well as their extreme fear of receiving shaming language from feminists.
Dave in Hawaii’s existence is too inconvenient for socialcons/manginas.
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Harry, here’s what advice I got from my parents about women when I was growing up.
My mum’s advice boiled down to (a) be yourself, and (b) love her unconditionally. My dad’s advice boiled down to, women want to be looked after.
Yes, my love life has been an impressive disaster area. I’m forty on Thursday, single, and, in zed’s words, I’ve “reached the lifetime toxic dosage of drama”, and just can’t be bothered with it anymore.
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Too bad that socialcons (Betacons) refuse to admit that Dave in Hawaii even exists.
What I’ve found out is that those of the Socia-Con mindset that read my story, they will either say that my advice is “too much work, and women are not worth it” OR that somehow my wife is flawed, that she’s a woman of low character…or that I’m being “fake” or “putting on an act.”
You can lead a horse to water…
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My mum’s advice boiled down to (a) be yourself, and (b) love her unconditionally. My dad’s advice boiled down to, women want to be looked after.
Your mother’s advice was an F, and your father’s advice was a D+ or D (the best case being that by ‘looked after’ he meant ‘the man should stay in charge’).
However, you are receiving A+ advice now, if you care to implement it.
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I’m so grateful to know about feministx’s remembered childhood masturbation fantasies. That’s the kind of hard-hitting, public-interest intellectual content that I come to the Spearhead for.
Ferdinand: Great analysis. Very striking the intersection of Devlin’s analysis and Flaubert’s. It’s been ten years since I read Madame Bovary, and that was well before I had understood the true nature of women. I remember being horrified at the character of Emma, but I think at the time — proper little goose-stepping liberal that I was — I chalked it up more to their booshy materialism than to sexual dynamics. Time to read it again! Thanks!
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“too much work, and women are not worth itâ€
Some (but certainly not all) MRA/MGTOW people take that position. But at least they are being honest (unlike socialcons). Lazy people can still be nice people, though.
OR that somehow my wife is flawed, that she’s a woman of low character…or that I’m being “fake†or “putting on an act.â€
THAT is the socialcon/mangina position. This is quickly followed by the ‘misogynist’ slur (which is predictably being overused just like the term ‘racism’ is).
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“What I’ve found out is that those of the Socia-Con mindset that read my story, they will either say that my advice is “too much work, and women are not worth it†OR that somehow my wife is flawed, that she’s a woman of low character…or that I’m being “fake†or “putting on an act.â€
You can lead a horse to water…”
That’s quite a set-up there Dave. Does this mean that if I don’t accept you’re theorizing (which is different from your experience), then I’m a SocialCon, Beta or – horror of horrors – mangina?
I don’t question your experience. I don’t doubt your sincerity. And I think you’re probably right to ascribe whatever change in direction your marriage has taken to changes in your own attitude and your courage in applying them.
It’s the jump from there to the all-encompassing absolutism of Game that bothers me. I can hear “you’re either with us or against us” under the breath of so many game converts. I find it too much of a stretch to believe that every man whose wife loses interest in him is a chump beta. Going back to the game parallel between men being attracted to beauty and women being attracted to alphaness (which I have no quibble with), the fact is, I’ve had beautiful gfs, I’ve tired of them and moved on. Plenty of men have. So it’s not so unreasonable to assume that women who have men who tick all the boxes as far as natural attraction goes, also tire and leave them for reasons which game isn’t really brave enough to admit to.
I’m fine with the general ideas. I don’t have too much of a problem with the myth-making either, if the new myths are displacing older, worse ones. We’ve got to leave room for dissent though, because without it thinking dies on the vine.
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I find it too much of a stretch to believe that every man whose wife loses interest in him is a chump beta.
Really? Given all of the cultural conditions of our modern world…in which masculinity is demonized, and all of mass media is dominated by gyno-centric ideas, is it really that hard to believe that many many many men ‘beta-ize’ without even thinking about it over time?
I find it entirely believable, and NOT just based on my own experience.
After having realized a full understanding of the concepts underlying “Game” and can also quite clearly see how the dynamics of male female relationships play out in all of the friends and families relationships I observe.
I now see it so clearly, I’d be willing to say it’s basically a universal truth. Women’s base sexual nature is based on hypergamy…to find dominant genes she for her offspring.
If she dominates the relationship on every front (which is the modern married man’s typical lament), she CAN’T maintain her attraction for you…and that’s when she “falls out of love” or “I feel like we’re just roomates” or “I need to find myself” or “I can’t do THIS anymore,” or “I’m Bored.”
These are all various expressions of women who’s boyfriends/husbands no longer satisfy her hypergamous imperative.
But thanks to modern day feminist culture, on a conscious level, women are supposed to want “equality” and are in fact indoctrinated into seizing the role of dominant spouse…so they cannot even recognize on a conscious level WHY they no longer feel attracted to their husbands…so they try to justify their fantasies and or actions by citing “feelings” they cannot consciously describe because of the cognitive dissonance created by cultural conditioning that is contrary to their base hypergamous nature in just about every way conceivable.
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It’s the jump from there to the all-encompassing absolutism of Game that bothers me. I can hear “you’re either with us or against us†under the breath of so many game converts.
That’s because the entire presumption of “GAME” rests on recognizing the basic truth of female sexuality and it’s desire for hypergamy.
You either appeal to her hypergamous instinct or you don’t.
You either have “game” or you don’t.
It really IS black in white, because it’s based on TRUTH.
Either it’s true, or it’s not.
Just because you refuse to see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
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>Lukobe October 12, 2009 at 1:04 pm
“MEN ARE BETTER THAN WOMEN. We always have been. We always will be.â€
So you’re not just an anti-misandrist, which is fine, you’re an active misogynist. Good luck with that, but I don’t think that’s what this site is about, nor do I think that is the solution to readers’ ills.
>>>>>
Men ARE better than woman; and it’s genetic. Only idiot males aren’t. (Idiots kept alive by the false dichotomy of liberalism, capitalist growth and christian sentiment (anti darwinism). The evidence has always been “in” for this _fact_.
And also there is no such thing as “misogyny” or ‘sexism’ or any that made up drivel. People who recite it actually mean “accurate interpretation of female character and society is ‘immoral’ ” (according to the latest religion).
Liberals –like lukobe– have low IQs and it is genetic. Sterilize the dumb and etc (the chemically ‘odd’) in childhood (also organize socialization syndromes/”nurture” differently) and we as a species won’t have to debate them about their latest religious beliefs* every couple centuries.
[*feminism is a religion; it appeals to the stupid; it is similar to creationism. Indeed feminism is creationism infused with marxism (marxism=modern liberalism, very adept at tactics).]
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As Ferdinand pointed out, the content of the novel flew in the face of Victorian idealization of women.
No, I think people are reading back their own preoccupations back in time. The reason the novel was prosecuted is much simpler: it dealt sympathetically with adultery.
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Thanks for giving me a good laugh there, SM.
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I find it too much of a stretch to believe that every man whose wife loses interest in him is a chump beta.
I have a post coming up where I deal with the game theory of divorce and find it badly wanting as a universal explanation for the breakup of marriages.
However, game theory does come close to having a universal explanation for female adultery. There may be a few tiny subsets of female adultery, such as revenge adultery, which don’t have anything to do with a loss of attraction, but they are rare exceptions.
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Okay that’s fair enough. Not all adulteries lead to break-ups. It is true, though, that once a woman has lost respect for her husband (which is what tends to happen with female adultery, as she tends to bond emotionally and sexually with her lover), that almost never comes back. It rarely can, I will grant that, but it’s rare.
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Men are better than women.
I find statements like this idiotic. The combination of the male propensity for violence combined with the male propensity for rational organization has resulted in things like World Wars I and II, the Holocaust, the Gulag etc. Men rightly should get credit for being the builders of civilization, but one should never forget that masculinity has a massive dark side.
As for adultery, the matter at hand, it take two to tango.
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BTW – while I did say I would almost claim it is a universal truth…nowhere did I say “EVERY” man whose wife loses interest in him is a chump beta. But I would guess a hell of a lot of divorces can certainly be traced to female dissatisfaction with their spouse…as all MRA know by now, 70+% of divorces are filed by women.
And, as globalman’s story here attests, men can do everything “by the book” and be fantastic providers, and come home and be great fathers, and help with the housework, and make themselves “emotionally available” and the wife is still dissatisfied, and still files for divorce and breaks up the home. Why? Because hypergamy makes her contemptuous and un-attracted to a man that she can dominate in every sphere of life.
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Not all adulteries lead to break-ups.
Not sure if you are referring to me, but that isn’t my point. I would agree that if the woman commits adultery, the relationship is pretty much doomed. A few couples may stay together for the children etc., but the relationship will be a shell of its former self.
What I meant is that factors other than loss of attraction/respect are more likely to result in a female initiated divorce. More to come.
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Thursday:“I have a post coming up where I deal with the game theory of divorce and find it badly wanting as a universal explanation for the breakup of marriages.
However, game theory does come close to having a universal explanation for female adultery. There may be a few tiny subsets of female adultery, such as revenge adultery, which don’t have anything to do with a loss of attraction, but they are rare exceptions.”
I look forward to reading that Thursday. Just why people are attracted to some and not others, and why they lose that attraction is something that could do with more perspective. The same thing goes on with platonic relationships as well, both same-sex and opposite-sex friendships.
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Okay — I look forward to your post on this, in that case.
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Novaseeker“Bovary is better than Karenina on this point, in my view. because it’s less sympathetic — Tolstoy took sides a bit too much in Karenina, I think, but of course there are other themes in that novel.”
Good point Novaseeker. It’s the other themes in A.K. that make it such a good read, particularly how women deal with loss of standing amongst other women, and how central it is to their sense of self. The parallel development of the masculine character Levin (who has virtually no contact with A.K. throughout the novel, if I recall correctly), is what Tolstoy uses to contrast the very different natures of the masculine and feminine, and all other characters seem to lie somewhere in between these two gender profiles – both of whom are extremely intense, but the extremism manifests itself in uniquely masculine and feminine ways.
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“too much work, and women are not worth itâ€
I don’t take this position. I take the position that women are too much work for any benefit you might get so women aren’t worth it.
Knowing game doesn’t mean that you use it at all.
What is puzzling is why it is often so difficult to convince men that women have an equal ability to succumb to temptation, or pettiness, or the desire for revenge, as men do.
No kidding. All I have to do is watch female behavior to OTHER FEMALES to know that this is true, much less female behavior to men.
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>one should never forget that masculinity has a massive dark side.
Already addressed.
Men don’t invent Nature. Nature invented men.
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Also thursday demonstrates my contention above:
“[Sexism is when a man says something factual about female aptitude or character and society that is deemed immoral by the latest profiteers/religion.]“
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What is puzzling is why it is often so difficult to convince men that women have an equal ability to succumb to temptation, or pettiness, or the desire for revenge, as men do.
Equal? I would say MUCH MORE.
I don’t agree with the blanket statement that ‘men are better than women’. But I do think it is fair to say that men are far more likely to be responsible adults, than women. Particularly unmarried women.
Men are undoubtedly morally superior to women. Whenever there is genuine mistreatment of women (Afghanistan under the Taliban), there is no shortage of men willing to sign up to right this wrong, whether on the battlefield or in the media. But when there is genuine injustice towards men, I can count on one hand the number of women who even voice disapproval, let alone take real action.
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The problem is that the culture has forgotten that femininity does as well. The ancient mythological archetypes of wicked witches, the Gorgons, the Harpies, etc. had their foundations in the observations of the real behavior of real women.
We have had nothing but the dark side of masculinity rubbed in our faces for the past 5 decades.
One should also never forget that masculinity has an equally massive light side to balance its dark side.
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once again, Thursday has got it. well said.
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DFH:
I now see it so clearly, I’d be willing to say it’s basically a universal truth. Women’s base sexual nature is based on hypergamy…to find dominant genes she for her offspring.
And once she has those offspring? What then?
I’ll tell you: Hypergamy continues unabated (assuming a functioning sex-drive on the female’s part).
Game can amerliorate, and in some cases contain the female savage, but it is Pollyanna to think that Game comes anywhere close to taming those instincts. Just read Sperm Wars for more info.
The inclusion of Game in one’s long-term relationships is wise and fitting, but once children are involved, other forces take precedence…
Thursday:
I find statements like this idiotic. The combination of the male propensity for violence combined with the male propensity for rational organization has resulted in things like World Wars I and II, the Holocaust, the Gulag etc.
World Wars also stuck a pitchfork in the ass of various civilizations to spur them on to greater technological achievements. The “dark side” of men’s competitive nature should never overshadow the very real benefits accrued from such. How else would we have gotten to the moon?
Civilization and technological progress are bathed in blood, literally or figuratively. While the dark side of men has a silver lining, womens’ doesn’t.
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Great! Nice points Dave! The problem is with civilization.
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“Civilization and technological progress are bathed in blood, literally or figuratively. While the dark side of men has a silver lining, womens’ doesn’t.”
Well technically the dark side women also has a silver lining. If you think about how evolution works, there can’t be an “everybody gets laid” outcome otherwise evolution can’t pick the winning gene mutations from the losing ones.
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Shortly before Madame Bovary was written, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont visited America and contrasted the behavior of American women of the time to women in France. The difference explains why America became a great power, while France never really amounted to anything. Here are Beaumont’s comments:
The morality of a population may be judged by that of its women, and one cannot observe the society of the United States without marveling at the respect in which the married state is held. This respect never existed to so high a degree among any of the ancient peoples, and European society, corrupt as it is, cannot conceive of such moral purity.
In America they are no severer than elsewhere toward the irregular life and toward even the debauches of a bachelor; many young men can be found here whose dissoluteness is well known, and whose reputations do not suffer thereby; but their excesses, to be pardoned, must be committed outside the circle of family and friends. While indulgent concerning the pleasures obtainable from prostitutes, society condemns without pity those who obtain them at the expense of conjugal fidelity; it is as inflexible toward the man who incites the transgression as toward the woman who acquiesces. Both are banished from society; and to incur this punishment it is not even necessary to have been guilty; to have aroused the suspicion suffices. The domestic hearth is an inviolable shrine which no breath of impurity must besmirch.
The morality of American women, fruit of a serious and religious upbringing, is protected further for other reasons.
Completely engrossed in practical matters, the American man has neither the time nor the temperament for tender sentiments or gallantry; he is gallant once in his life, when he wishes to marry. He is undertaking a business affair, not a love affair.
He has no leisure to love, still less to make himself loved. The taste for fine arts, which is so closely allied to the pleasures of the heart, is forbidden him. If, emerging from his industrial sphere, a young man displays a passion for Mozart or Michelangelo, he loses public esteem. Fortunes are not made by listening to sounds or looking at colors. And how chain to the accountant’s stool one who has once known the charms of a poetic life?
Thus doomed by the traditions of the country to confine themselves to practicality, young Americans are neither preoccupied with pleasing women nor skillful at winning them.
Moreover, there is a corrupt element, influential in European society, which is not to be met with in the United States: this is the idle rich and the soldiers in garrison. The wealthy without professions and the soldiers without glory have nothing to do; their sole pastime is the corruption of women–impetuous, open-handed youth, in need of space and action; comparable to the flood waters of the Mississippi: beneficial when flowing freely, deadly when stagnant.
In America, everyone works, because no one is born rich, (It does happen, by accident, that a few young people are conditioned by an inherited fortune and a polite education to gallantries and social intrigues, but they are too few in number to be a nuisance, and if they give the least indication of troubling the peace of a family, they find the American world leagued solidly against them to oppose and crush the common enemy. This explains why American bachelors of wealth and leisure do not stay in the United States but come to live in Europe, where they find men of intellect and corrupt women.) and the dreary idleness of the garrison is unknown here, because the country has no standing army.
Thus, the women escape the perils of seduction; if they are pure, one cannot tell if it is due to their virtue, for this has not been put to the test.
The extreme ease of becoming rich also comes to the aid of upholding morality; money is never an essential consideration in marriages; commerce, industry, the practice of a profession, assure young people of a living and a future. They marry the first woman they fall in love with; and nothing is rarer in the United States than a bachelor of twenty-five. Society thereby gains more married men in place of licentious bachelors. Finally , the condition of equality protects marriages, while difference in rank obstructs them in our country. In the United States there is only one class; no barrier of social distinction separates the young man and young girl who agree to become united. This equality, propitious to legitimate unions, is highly embarrassing to those which are not. The seducer of a young girl necessarily becomes her husband, whatever the difference in their economic position, because while superiority of fortune exists, there is no difference at all in rank. The rectitude of tradition, which applies less to individuals than to socity as a whole, gives a serious cast to all American society.
This country is dominated by a public opinion, from whose rule no woman can flee… [it] condemns all passion without pity, and authorizes calculation alone; indifferent to sentiment, it is exacting concerning moral obligation.
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Puma:
Well technically the dark side women also has a silver lining. If you think about how evolution works, there can’t be an “everybody gets laid†outcome otherwise evolution can’t pick the winning gene mutations from the losing ones.
This would be true if the dark side of female sexuality and hypergamy was such that they *only* craved higher-status, high-achieving, high-IQ, Masters of the Universes. It is not true when they crave reckless, sociopathic, knuckle-dragging bad-boys who leave a trail of broken lives in their wake, incurring a dysgenic cost on society.
The road of female hypergamy has a fork in it: one road leads upwards and one road leads downwards.
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Lukobe October 12, 2009 at 1:04 pm
“So you’re not just an anti-misandrist, which is fine, you’re an active misogynist.”
Ha, ha, ha Lukobe….you give yourself away. I love women. Not many misogynists love women, after all the definition is misgynist is a man who hates women…though the Illuminati are changing that to be ‘distrust’ women. And since women are not trustworthy they are trying to label all men as misogynists. The Illuminati are using mind control through language techniques. If you have studied these things, as I have, they are quite obvious. Just as obviously, you have not studied much of anything.
You try to denigrate me for stating a fact. Men are better than women. Well dude, good luck with your credibility around here…;-)
Thursday October 12, 2009 at 6:14 pm
“I find statements like this idiotic. ”
And you have some evidence for this? The ‘evidence’ (and that is taking that word to extremely liberal use) you posted demonstrates a low level of intelligence coupled with no research and no facts.
The Illuminati organised all the wars….an extremely small number of dominant men. A few thousand at most. To then brand ALL men as having this ‘massive darker side’ is ignorant, stupid, incorrect and idiotic.
Grow up. Do some research. Find out just how good the majority of men are. The vast majority of men are ‘salt of the earth’ kind of guys and they will do pretty much anything to help out their mates. Remember, men died for women all through history. That bump in the night? It has been the mans job for 10,000 years to find out if it was a sabre tooth tiger, jack the ripper, or just the cat.
Women are crap. They do not give men the respect men have earned across 1,000 generations. If a woman was being raped in the street in front of me I would laugh and walk on by calling back to her to get ‘big sista guvment’ to help her out. I will never again lift a finger to protect a western woman because they are such crap. If David Rockefeller came to my office and held a gun to the head of some hapless female I’d say “Go ahead dude, she’s nothing to do with me.” THAT is how a LOT of men feel about western women. We are not going to injure them ourselves but we are not going to lift a finger to protect them because when we asked their help they laughed at us. Paybacks a bitch.
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A few thousand at most.
What planet are you from? Whipping up war fever among men is as easy as walking out the door.
The vast majority of men are ’salt of the earth’ kind of guys
Bwhawhawhawha. The vast majority of men, like the vast majority of women, are more or less crap human beings. (I happen to have known a few men in my times.) Not that that excuses injustice.
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“Liberals have low IQs and it is genetic. Sterilize the dumb and etc (the chemically ‘odd’) in childhood (also organize socialization syndromes/â€nurture†differently)….”
What do you mean by the chemically odd? Be careful how you answer, because I was born with a few mental “defects” that turned out to be benifits in the long term. I have Aspergers and depression. I pride myself on my “chemical ” oddness. My depression allowed me to see many of the mistakes, hypocrisies, and contradictions in the world around me long before wisdom could be more naturally attained. My asperger gave me late developing language skills, but superb visual-spatial abilities. My ability to look at things from different and unusual perspectives is invaluable. Creativity cannot be measured like IQ. Many geniuses were/are quite odd by standard cultural definitions. Many geniuses were thought to be slow or lacking self control because of their “odd” behaivor by their teachers, parents, and peers.
And men aren’t better than women. We are different. I believe based on the structure of the female brain that it possesses a natural synergy of mental schemas that could potentially allow it to achieve amazing mental feats of systemizing and organizing data, even though in raw processing power, it will never be able to “crunch numbers” as effeciently as a male brain, it still has a wonderous potential to see the big picture if it was programmed right. Bad data in equals bad data out. Lets not underestimate our opponent. Thats how we got this deep in the shit hole were in now. Women are brilliant, they just can’t make decisions not tinged with emotions because they’ve been taught that their emotions are always valid.
Sorry if I misinterpreted you. Sometimes I miss stuff that is obvious to normal people. Like I said, I think differently. Not better, not worse….differently.
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In regards to Madame Bovary theme, it is vastly important to understand the social history of France at the time and the extremely important literary (and cultural) theme of “social climbing”.
Emma Bovary was a wanton social climber eager to escape the provinces and work her way up the social ladder. In the beginning, Charles represented a rung upward on that ladder. It turned out it was not nearly enough of a climb for Emma who sought to go ever higher up the social food chain and find herself with the idle, wealthy aristocracy of the France at the time.
Social climbing is usually a vice attributed to women and for good reason. Hypergamy fits quite well into social climbing and a clever, modern, and amoral woman can climb that social ladder with a series of marriages, affairs, divorces, and remarriages.
In the realm of Game, “social proofing” is all about a woman’s social climbing. In consideration of the “Alpha/BadBoy and Beta/NiceGuy meme, social climbing also fits but only when the vagina tingle does not trump the hypergamous urge. There is sometimes conflict there but the amoral woman marries the provider, has affairs with the BadBoy, much like Emma Bovary.
The ultimate catch for a woman is the Alpha/BadBoy who is also further up the social ladder. He is pursued by most women so this type of man merely picks and chooses at his leisure and his desire.
I spend a fair bit of time in Palm Beach, Florida – the haven for the ultra wealthy. In that socially isolated community, everything I have described plays out like a predictable and well rehearsed dance of sex, money, marriage, and divorce. It’s always funny to see hordes of desperate young woman cross the bridges onto the island to attend social events where rich, available men are attending. These men pick the best (and hopefully least batshit insane) of these women to marry. Some of these men simply seduce their way through a score or more of sales girls, marketing assistants, waitresses, and their ilk. Note to the girls wanting to break in to this society and find themselves a man – no single moms may apply and the men will likely be at least 25 years older than you. Oh, and the younger guys (in their 40s, mind you) will likely trade you in when your first wrinkles appear or your bad attitude shows.
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Well, fuck me.
Great article.
I think a shout out should go out to Darwin. After all, it was his work (and his understanding of sexual selection) that paved the way for all the stuff I read about today on sites like Roissy etc.
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Your article could become a classic. I have read Madame Bovary when I was a teenager but your comment brings new lights to this classic work of litterature.
The comparison between Madame Bovary’s behavior and cheating women’s behaviour as described by Michelle Langley (http://www.womensinfidelity.com) and gathered by F. Roger Devlin is pure genius.
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Great post Ferdinand. I’m halfway through the novel and I’ve noticed the main key takeaway is DON’T BE CHARLES. If you consider Emma, Leon, and Rodolphe as ‘externalities’ then the only way to hedge against the impact of ‘externalities’ is to not be a sucker. If given the choice or knowledge, be anything except a Charles.
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