There but for the grace of God
When
I was in the last year in high school, there was a student in another
class who was physically disabled so that he had to use a wheelchair
and his legs and arms were contorted to unnatural angles. There wasn't
anything wrong with his mind, though, as far as I could tell. Whereas
some other students were mocked for being fat or slow, of course nobody
ever mocked him for his appearance. I found the whole thing pretty
illogical. I remember wondering why it seems to be socially acceptable
to mock someone who is a only little bit defective in some area but
otherwise essentially normal citizen and a good consumer, but it is
completely unacceptable to mock people who really are significantly
worse than others in certain respects that are important in life. In
fact, mockery paradoxically seems to be more acceptable the less applicable it is in reality. But then again, I didn't know then what I know now.
One day last summer, as I was walking around on a nice warm day, I saw a severely retarded twentysomething man sitting in a wheelchair. Looking at him, it was immediately obvious that he didn't dress himself, but seeing the T-shirt he was wearing at the time, I would have to say that whoever buys his clothes and dresses him clearly had a pretty wicked sense of humor. His T-shirt said "Your girlfriend thinks I am sexy". As I kept walking, I chuckled a little, not to mock the poor retarded man but to laugh with the unintentional effect that I realized that the shirt has on the women who see it.
Women, on average, are more far more nurturing than men and thus more willing to support social systems based on wealth redistribution. They are more sympathetic and protective towards people who don't pull their weight but need other people to support them. As moral and commendable as this may be in the world where morality is essentially defined to follow women's sociobiological goal structure, it would be evolutionary disastrous for a woman to possess such attitude unconditionally. Women who would be as generous with their own bodies as the average woman tends to be with other people's money have disappeared a long time ago from the human evolutionary tree. As strong as women's nurturing instinct is, the Egg Protection Prime Directive is at least equally strong in the women alive today.
Because of this, women have to mentally divide the loser men around them in two categories for whom two very different sets of rules apply. (Similarities with the ladder theory might not be entirely coincidental.) The men who objectively really are losers and therefore not perceived as repreductive threats get women's sympathy, especially if they trigger the women's baby recognition mental circuits. However, the "loser" men (that is, men whom women actually describe as "losers") who activate the woman's subconscious Egg Protection Prime Directive due to her blink gut-level feeling that in the future, these men might realistically attempt to hit on her receive absolute zero sympathy from the women. These men are a threat to women's reproductive existence, so as far as women are concerned, nothing bad that happens to these men could in fact ever be too bad. It would actually be a great relief if these men just... disappeared, or something.
The rules really are completely different for the men in these two tracks. To see this, simply consider the words "loser" and "defective", which I bet many women would find extremely offensive if used to describe a mentally retarded man. Yet, these same women would happily use the same words about men who offend them by simply existing as vague genetic threats, even though by any objective measure, the latter group of men is significantly less "defective" and "loser" than the former group, the only negative difference here being women's emotions towards these men. (As a side note, I am sure it's just a coincidence that the word "loser", that is, someone who doesn't know how to play some game very well, is used by women to mean an unattractive man.)
Women's minds have evolved to enlist winner men to reveal and punish loser men, since women are too weak to do this on their own. This is why women encourage men to ruthlessly compete against each other in various socially relevant competitions and form hierarchies based on the results. But only to the extent that helps women to identify the "loser men": this competition is not needed where the women already know a man to be on the sympathy track and thus bound to lose and get hurt in any real competition. For this reason, using dominance behaviour and mockery to put down a severely retarded person would be a social suicide, whereas putting down a "loser man" the same way is virtually guaranteed to gain him popularity among women. For example, I am sure most women can remember the mysterious tingle in their pants when they first saw the nerds being violently put down in junior high. (At that age, the ability to make the computer say "beep" or draw a bunch of rectangles doesn't translate in girl's subconscious mind to ability to gather resources to women and their expensive offspring.) In our older age, some profeminist man could score big points by putting me down for writing this (hint, hint), the snarkier the better.
The T-shirt worn by the severely retarded young man creatively mixes up these two tracks, at least for a split second. I can easily imagine a woman seeing the retarded man and first thinking all the awww-fuzzy-wuzzy nice ideas about how the retarded man is just as good and valuable as everyone else and how we should all be more understanding and increase the social spending so that this man would have a better life. Suddenly, the message in the T-shirt registers, the two tracks mix, and for a split second the woman sees him with the goggles applied to the men in the second track, through which he looks about as horrifying to women as, say, the Fat Bastard character in the Austin Powers movies when he boasted how sexy and attractive he is. The cognitive dissonance gets too big, and to silence it, woman's mental thoughtcrime alert starts blaring. The doublethink that the woman has been socialized to obey then takes over, and eventually the woman comes up with effective rationalizations to take care of the realization of how she was tricked.
I might be wrong, of course. I can't see into women's minds and observe the above chain of mental events happening, so I can only conjecture. Perhaps some of my female readers could comment on to how much I am right or wrong here. The ideas presented above may provide some useful advice to men, though, especially if they are losers in the objective sense of this word, or also in the subjective sense that women use it in.
One day last summer, as I was walking around on a nice warm day, I saw a severely retarded twentysomething man sitting in a wheelchair. Looking at him, it was immediately obvious that he didn't dress himself, but seeing the T-shirt he was wearing at the time, I would have to say that whoever buys his clothes and dresses him clearly had a pretty wicked sense of humor. His T-shirt said "Your girlfriend thinks I am sexy". As I kept walking, I chuckled a little, not to mock the poor retarded man but to laugh with the unintentional effect that I realized that the shirt has on the women who see it.
Women, on average, are more far more nurturing than men and thus more willing to support social systems based on wealth redistribution. They are more sympathetic and protective towards people who don't pull their weight but need other people to support them. As moral and commendable as this may be in the world where morality is essentially defined to follow women's sociobiological goal structure, it would be evolutionary disastrous for a woman to possess such attitude unconditionally. Women who would be as generous with their own bodies as the average woman tends to be with other people's money have disappeared a long time ago from the human evolutionary tree. As strong as women's nurturing instinct is, the Egg Protection Prime Directive is at least equally strong in the women alive today.
Because of this, women have to mentally divide the loser men around them in two categories for whom two very different sets of rules apply. (Similarities with the ladder theory might not be entirely coincidental.) The men who objectively really are losers and therefore not perceived as repreductive threats get women's sympathy, especially if they trigger the women's baby recognition mental circuits. However, the "loser" men (that is, men whom women actually describe as "losers") who activate the woman's subconscious Egg Protection Prime Directive due to her blink gut-level feeling that in the future, these men might realistically attempt to hit on her receive absolute zero sympathy from the women. These men are a threat to women's reproductive existence, so as far as women are concerned, nothing bad that happens to these men could in fact ever be too bad. It would actually be a great relief if these men just... disappeared, or something.
The rules really are completely different for the men in these two tracks. To see this, simply consider the words "loser" and "defective", which I bet many women would find extremely offensive if used to describe a mentally retarded man. Yet, these same women would happily use the same words about men who offend them by simply existing as vague genetic threats, even though by any objective measure, the latter group of men is significantly less "defective" and "loser" than the former group, the only negative difference here being women's emotions towards these men. (As a side note, I am sure it's just a coincidence that the word "loser", that is, someone who doesn't know how to play some game very well, is used by women to mean an unattractive man.)
Women's minds have evolved to enlist winner men to reveal and punish loser men, since women are too weak to do this on their own. This is why women encourage men to ruthlessly compete against each other in various socially relevant competitions and form hierarchies based on the results. But only to the extent that helps women to identify the "loser men": this competition is not needed where the women already know a man to be on the sympathy track and thus bound to lose and get hurt in any real competition. For this reason, using dominance behaviour and mockery to put down a severely retarded person would be a social suicide, whereas putting down a "loser man" the same way is virtually guaranteed to gain him popularity among women. For example, I am sure most women can remember the mysterious tingle in their pants when they first saw the nerds being violently put down in junior high. (At that age, the ability to make the computer say "beep" or draw a bunch of rectangles doesn't translate in girl's subconscious mind to ability to gather resources to women and their expensive offspring.) In our older age, some profeminist man could score big points by putting me down for writing this (hint, hint), the snarkier the better.
The T-shirt worn by the severely retarded young man creatively mixes up these two tracks, at least for a split second. I can easily imagine a woman seeing the retarded man and first thinking all the awww-fuzzy-wuzzy nice ideas about how the retarded man is just as good and valuable as everyone else and how we should all be more understanding and increase the social spending so that this man would have a better life. Suddenly, the message in the T-shirt registers, the two tracks mix, and for a split second the woman sees him with the goggles applied to the men in the second track, through which he looks about as horrifying to women as, say, the Fat Bastard character in the Austin Powers movies when he boasted how sexy and attractive he is. The cognitive dissonance gets too big, and to silence it, woman's mental thoughtcrime alert starts blaring. The doublethink that the woman has been socialized to obey then takes over, and eventually the woman comes up with effective rationalizations to take care of the realization of how she was tricked.
I might be wrong, of course. I can't see into women's minds and observe the above chain of mental events happening, so I can only conjecture. Perhaps some of my female readers could comment on to how much I am right or wrong here. The ideas presented above may provide some useful advice to men, though, especially if they are losers in the objective sense of this word, or also in the subjective sense that women use it in.
You had a fairly original idea and took it in an unfunny and pointless direction in an attempt to be controversial. Your ultimate thesis, that a woman's genetic need to procreate causes her to undergo some sort of psychological crisis when beholding a retard in a suggestive t-shirt, is stupid. I'd bet a dollar you've been dumped recently.
Posted by Anonymous | 12:49 AM