As you can probably tell, I was feeling pretty gloomy during my last blog post. Taking some time to really get into my feelings though, I’ve realized that it’s not exactly fear that I’m feeling. It’s a healthy respect for men, manhood, and the possible damage they can do to me and that I could do to them.
I’m avoiding having sex for the same reason one should avoid being a pushover. When you sacrifice too much for people who haven’t really earned your trust, you teach them a bad lesson about yourself and about the world. There’s a point you should go to, being a civil person, on good faith, but there should be a clear limit. Sex is something that could cost a sensitive woman dearly both physically and emotionally, so a guy should have to earn a woman’s trust to get it.
A woman, by the same, should earn a man’s trust in her honor and integrity before she can hope that he’ll see her as more than a shag. It’s not just about honor though, but about naturalness. He needs to know she values her stuff and isn’t self hating and self destructive, and by extension and implication, destructive to him and any offspring or family they may have.
I’m not saying that a woman should surround herself with a wall of bullshit. Quite the contrary. She should be as free of bullshit as she is old or far from the reductivist graphical ideal. It’s just that she should be aware of natural bonding cues, and not have sex with anybody who isn’t signalling.
The higher testosterone girls who like to do it for pure fun, keep doing what you’re doing. You’re a rare treasure. The rest of us who still blush a little when we cuss and fantasize about the grocery store manager in the Rockports with the cellphone with buttons you actually have to press because he’s old fashioned like that, need to not teach guys bad lessons. What you do will affect what he expects and how he treats the next girl.
So what has happened to me at this point is that I’ve internalized the lessons. I’m no longer just trying to be a respectable yet sassy older woman because I understand this makes the most sense to me. I have become that because it is the natural way to be at this phase of my life.
At my age, and in my situation, it’s normal for a woman to be reserved. It’s actually abnormal for a woman to be cougarish. So nothing’s wrong with me in that department. It was just all kind of heavy on my mind because I had to learn in three years what most women in past generations accumulated slowly over a lifetime.
‘It’s not fear. It’s respect’
I can see why you’d lose respect for men from reading Roissy. He does have that ‘male Kathy Pollit’ streak. When I read a lot of feminists in high school -I was reading every science fiction writer and their sources, so I read feminist science fiction and their sources- well, my consciousness re: broads wasn’t raised.
I had to get out a little, meet some real girls. No big. In hindsight.
And it’s not that Roissy and Kathy Pollit aren’t smart.
People can be intelligent but still ignorant or overly limited in perspective. It makes them vulnerable in ways they can’t see.
If they can recognize that and compensate for it in a constructive way, it’s good. If they can’t, they’ll spend their lives attempting to plug leaks with pins.
I didn’t lose respect for men by reading Roissy. It’s just that I didn’t realize the extent and depth of the damage that has been done to men and manhood before. As I mentioned before, I’ve been kind of spoiled but didn’t know it. Now, I look around and I wonder if my actions and those of the few clued women I know are just a small drop in a very large bucket with a heater blowing over it.
>’I didn’t lose respect for men by reading Roissy’
>’It’s a healthy respect for men. . .”
Pick one. Or, expound.
>’Now, I look around and wonder if my actions and those of the few clued women I know are just a small drop in a very large bucket of water with a heater blowing over it. . .’
“In every age there have been civilized people. They have always been outnumbered. . .”
Bruce, I understand the confusion, I think. What I was trying to say is that if I stayed too deep at Roissy’s I was going to lose something I value in myself, which is a respect for men. I noticed a loss of mystery that made me overly sensitive to things men try to and probably need to be able to hide in order to have relationships on Earth and not just with paper or screens.
There is such a thing as too much information. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy for the knowledge. It’s helped me a lot. It’s just that sometimes I feel like that cat on YouTube who can’t un-see the horror.
This is not a criticism of Roissy or any of the commenters there. It’s just like not being as wowed by a sunrise after you’ve learned astronomy as you were when you first saw it as a child.
It’s good to learn science, but bad if you ever get to the point that it takes away the wonder. I don’t want to lose my wonder for men.