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Stand Your Ground Forums => Main => Topic started by: K9 on May 14, 2007, 06:07 PM

Title: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: K9 on May 14, 2007, 06:07 PM
Video: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=1532990
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: Mr. X on May 14, 2007, 07:27 PM
I saw this before. Very cool. One thing I found interesting was the assumption women have that we men chat about them ie we say raunchy things about them. In reality she found we either don't talk about women or we mostly have nice things to say. And the acceptance thing is another aspect. I think men truly do accept more than women do.
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: Garak on May 14, 2007, 07:32 PM

I saw this before. Very cool. One thing I found interesting was the assumption women have that we men chat about them ie we say raunchy things about them. In reality she found we either don't talk about women or we mostly have nice things to say. And the acceptance thing is another aspect. I think men truly do accept more than women do.


Men are not as gossipy as women are for certain. We don't usually look for problems so we will have something to gossip about.

So yes, more accepting we are.
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: Assault on May 15, 2007, 01:03 AM
Good thing she didn't make it to one of the "Patriarchy" meetings.   Whew, that was a close one.  :greener:
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: brian44 on May 15, 2007, 02:42 AM
Does that mean I'm not a piece of scum then?
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: cootewards on May 15, 2007, 04:13 AM

Does that mean I'm not a piece of scum then?


Sadly no. We're all still scum, it's just that she's obviously been gotten to by the "Patriarchy", or maybe see has a some mental disorder.

The sisterhood won't be pleased either way.
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: stands2p on May 15, 2007, 07:09 AM
The book she wrote: Self-Made Man is actually pretty interesting and worth a read.  Norah Vincent is considered a traitor by the militant feminist lesbian bloc because she is not in favor of recreational abortion.

Anyone who ticks off the banshees at Pandagon is okay in my book, here is what they have to say:
Quote
I'm in the middle of Norah Vincent's book right now and it's outrageously misogynist on about a million levels. Vincent describes (and uses) strippers and sex workers as dead-souled, revolting, hostile zombies -- she actually calls them "not real women" -- while being a giant apologist for men. The dating chapter was just as bad as the titty bar chapters - check out this scream-worthy paragraph: "Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I supose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no." God forbid women should say "no" to any random dude who wants to have sex with them. What a load of shit! A lot of the book is interesting and I enjoyed (with some horror) the few insights about male bonding and friendship. Unfortunately there wasn't a whole book's worth of them and they were surrounded by stuff that ... really someone needs to take that book apart piece by piece and explain why it sucks so bad. Even more horrifying - the gushingly positive reviews of this book that praise its insight and say how they'll change how you see yourself as a woman. What, to make you hate yourself even more?! Just what we needed.


The book and her experiment do have some weak spots.  From my review on Amazon:
Quote
...she limits her adventures in ways that show more about class distinctions than gender. Vincent's choices throughout the book show she is disdainful of the workaday world and the things ordinary people do to have fun and earn a living. Some of her experiments could have been done without the masquerade but they would have been called "slumming."


Assault, you mentioned her making it into a meeting of the "The Patriarchy."  In a way, she did; she went to a Robert Bly style weekend retreat where guys beat drums etc.  I think this is hands-down the best chapter. 
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: dr e on May 15, 2007, 07:23 AM
Stands2P said: 

Quote
Assault, you mentioned her making it into a meeting of the "The Patriarchy."  In a way, she did; she went to a Robert Bly style weekend retreat where guys beat drums etc.  I think this is hands-down the best chapter.


I'd be curious to hear a little bit about that chapter.  Would you mind just summing it up?  Was she positive towards the men there?
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: Mr. X on May 15, 2007, 07:41 AM
Well she didn't find the volcano hideout with the giant laser. That's all I was worried about.
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: stands2p on May 15, 2007, 08:06 AM
I will try to sum up:
In the final chapter she attends a Bly-esque men's weekend retreat.  The point of these is to allow men to get out of the "earn a paycheck, watch sports, die miserable" cycle; give men a place to emote with other men.  Women, obviously, can emote like nobody's business.  When no women are around, men can do a fine job of attending to each other emotionally. 

Vincent obviously wants to stay in character at the retreat but the effects of what is going on around her, and inside her is overwhelming.  She sees men crying and hugging each other and commiserating in the fact that they have no emotional connection with their children and the people in their lives and I think she herself realized at that moment that everything she thought she knew about men was not just wrong but a lie. 

I don't know how widespread this is but when I was in high school in the early 80's, some of the girls got into self-mutilation.  They would lay a burning cigarette on their forearm and let it burn all the way down, leaving a nasty and obvious wound.  These girls were fairly popular and reasonably successful in school.  It was their way of dealing with the pain of adolescence.  Vincent's reaction to the intensity of the men's retreat was to ask one of the men to hurt her.  She suffers a nervous breakdown and ends her experiments.

In this chapter more than any other, Vincent set out to learn about male privilege but wound up learning more about female privilege.

I don't mean to gush over this book; it does have some serious flaws and I found some parts offensive but it is interesting.
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: gwallan on May 15, 2007, 09:04 AM

Well she didn't find the volcano hideout with the giant laser. That's all I was worried about.


Is that the one with the mind control thingy that makes women go on starvation diets and inject plastic into their tits?
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: Mr. X on May 15, 2007, 09:25 AM


Well she didn't find the volcano hideout with the giant laser. That's all I was worried about.


Is that the one with the mind control thingy that makes women go on starvation diets and inject plastic into their tits?




SSHHHHH!!!!! We'll talk later.... at the "meeting".
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: Renegade on May 16, 2007, 11:27 AM
Holy crap! That was a great article. I especially liked the ending part:
Quote
"Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better," she said. "They need our sympathy. They need our love, and maybe they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."

Ironically, Vincent said, it took experiencing life as a man for her to appreciate being a woman. "I really like being a woman. ... I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege."


Those 2 paragraphs alone say so much.
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: mens_issues on May 16, 2007, 11:51 AM



Well she didn't find the volcano hideout with the giant laser. That's all I was worried about.


Is that the one with the mind control thingy that makes women go on starvation diets and inject plastic into their tits?




SSHHHHH!!!!! We'll talk later.... at the "meeting".


See you all at that location for the next meeting of "The Patriarchy."  It shall be full of Tom Fullery's.  :toothy9:
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: Renegade on May 24, 2007, 07:48 PM
I thought that I would point this out, since I don't think anyone else has:

What would happen if (a MRA favorite point), the genders were reversed ? ? ? ?

First, presume that a man could pull off disguising himself as a woman for a long period of time, and "infiltrated" women's community in order to learn more first hand. How would these, full of nothing but love, generosity, understanding and compassion, women react when they find out that someone they thought was a fellow woman all along, was really a man?!!! Would these, full of sugar spice and all things nice, so angelic and innocent that the universe weeps whenever one gets hurt , women warmly welcome someone who hid their identity from them?  :dontknow:
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: CG9603 on May 25, 2007, 01:53 PM
I read this book about 6 months ago, and it made me think that finally there is one woman in the media "elite" who is seeing some sort of light.  While I have not had her share of experiences in the work world, it just feels good to see someone getting some enlightenment.  I enjoyed the bokk, and did not find it woman-hating at all like the Feministing.com statements have said.  One statement that stood out to me was on pages 105 - 106:
"A lot of the women I met didn't know, didn't understand or didn't appear to care what a lot of the men in their lives wanted.   . . . .Perhaps women have been guilty of hubris in this regard.  We think of ourselves as emotional masters of the universe.  In our world, feelings reign.  We have them.  We understand them.  We cater to them, Men, we think don't on all counts.  but as I learned among my friends in the bowling league and elsewhere, this is absolutely true and absurd.  Of course men have a whole range of emotions, just as women do - it's just that many of them are often silent or underground, invisible to most women's eyes and ears.   . . . Just as men have failed us, we have failed them.  It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn't there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech."   
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: Mr. X on May 25, 2007, 02:52 PM
Her statement is BS. Its not that women don't notice men's feelings. Its that women choose NOT TO notice men's feelings because that would require them to give as much as they recieve. They over expose their feelings to gain attention without having to give it out. Men have not failed women. We fought for their freedom, hundreds of thousands of men died for women's freedom. But women spit on this, laugh at it. Treat it like its a coupon handed out on a street corner and toss it aside.

Nah men haven't failed women... women failed men. When we need them, when our boys need protection instead of pumped up on ritalin, when they need fathers instead of greedy mothers, women have let men down. Face it guys, if you were on fire very few of them would ever open a cel phone to call an ambulance for you. 
Title: Re: Men Are Actually NICE! Lesbos 2 yrs as a Man
Post by: CG9603 on May 26, 2007, 08:28 AM

I thought that I would point this out, since I don't think anyone else has:

What would happen if (a MRA favorite point), the genders were reversed ? ? ? ?

First, presume that a man could pull off disguising himself as a woman for a long period of time, and "infiltrated" women's community in order to learn more first hand. How would these, full of nothing but love, generosity, understanding and compassion, women react when they find out that someone they thought was a fellow woman all along, was really a man?!!! Would these, full of sugar spice and all things nice, so angelic and innocent that the universe weeps whenever one gets hurt , women warmly welcome someone who hid their identity from them?  :dontknow:


Point taken, Renegade.  IOW, he would be hounded and ostracized.