Our recent troll infestation—which was conducted, as many are, by trolls who wait until a Friday night because they know that the moderators, unlike themselves, are probably offline socializing and maybe even having sex—was an unpleasant reminder that a lot of the angry, entitled dudes described in the post blame feminism because they can’t get all the sex they think they deserve. The recent Facebook page threatening-by-pretending-not-to-threaten sex positive atheist blogger Miri Mogilevsky demonstrated a similar obsession. In particular, there was a weird obsession with Miri’s sex life, the usual “jokes” about how a woman who is sex positive must be fucking everyone (but the person angrily freaking out about this, of course) and the suggestion that the penalty for being sexually liberated, for a woman, should be death. (The page appears to be down now, but there was, unfortunately, the initial tendency to take the side of angry dudes over feminists in the Facebook response at first.*) The sexual resentment of Miri is particularly noteworthy in this case. Since her online presence is optimistic and cheerful, even the most aggressive protests that it’s about her personality are going to fall flat.

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Per usual, I am perplexed by the entire hobby of freaking out on feminists because your own repulsive personality makes obtaining sexual attention difficult. I get that feminists sometimes make an attractive target: Having been told your whole life by conservative forces that feminists are haggard man-haters who are bitter because they can’t get a man, finding out how many are actually well-adjusted people who are certainly doing better in the sex department than you can be disconcerting. However, that doesn’t make the feminist hate rational, and since so many of the haters clearly think of themselves as rational men here to tell the little ladies, the fact that they don’t even pause to consider how irrational it is to dump all their bitterness on feminists is particularly comical. Feminists aren’t the problem. Feminists aren’t plotting to keep the hot young women of OK Cupid from responding to your emails explaining that you are a Nice Guy® and if they don’t respond, it’s clearly because they, like most women, are shallow, money-grubbing bitches. It’s not like, prior to 1964, men were just assigned a woman and she had to be nice to him and have sex with him whenever he wanted, no matter what. Even then, women were free to notice that you are repulsive and unattractive and move on. In fact, because of the forced economic dependency that was created by the cult of housewifery, a lot of women put more emphasis on men having the money that the haters believe is the sole reason they aren’t elbow deep in 22-year-old pussy right now. Feminism, if anything, made it so that men who don’t necessarily have money but have other attributes—charm, good looks, a sense of humor, intelligence, all sorts of stuff—have more of a chance, because women are more free to follow their hearts if they pay their own bills.

As I’ve pointed out over and over again while wielding the banhammer, if the haters took the time they spent hating feminists and creating threatening anti-feminist Facebook pages, and instead put that time towards self-improvement, they might actually find their sexual prospects brightening. Probably not with 21-year-old club girls, but there are a lot of women out there! Simply not being a repulsive choad and take you a long way. But the message isn’t sinking it.

I realize that part of the reason is that I, because of my desire not to ‘splain things that I think you already know, have never articulated what kind of self-improvement project that misogynists could take on instead of trolling feminists online. But their rising levels of hate and frustration have made it clear that they may just not know! So, in interests of making life more pleasant for everyone around, I compiled a list of self-improvement projects to turn you from a bitter asshole who repels women to someone who can get a date and is less interested in blaming feminism for all your problems. Next time you feel the urge to waste time trolling feminists online, try one of these projects instead!

Attitude Improvement

You believe women are supposed to be compliant fuckbots with no inner motivations and desires besides pleasing you specifically. Women, understandably, find that attitude to be gross and stay away. But learning that women are people and that’s okay isn’t as hard as it seems!

Read books written by female authors. Try to do it in a non-defensive pose. Instead of flipping through the pages, trying to find what’s wrong with it and why she’s clearly an overrated writer whose reputation was created by desperate women trying to prove something, read the book like you would a man’s book. If it helps, pretend the author’s a man until you’ve calmed down and started to enjoy the book. Start with Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, and work up to your Alice Munros and Margaret Atwoods. Comedy is a good way to relax, have a laugh, and stop being such an uptight whiner. There are a lot of female comedians out there who can make you laugh and realize that women are diverse people, and some have brilliant, weird senses of humor. Get some DVDs of Maria Bamford, Sarah Silverman, and Amy Schumer. Go classic with Roseanne Barr. In the immortal words of George Clinton, free your mind and your ass will follow. Putting on some great tunes by female musicians and dancing around with the curtains drawn can help you relax, learn not to take yourself so seriously, and, of course, start understanding that women can be creative, interesting people instead of just sex appliances broken by feminism. Janelle Monae and Charli XCX have fun new danceable records out. Here’s a new Angel Haze song. Then there’s the classics: Blondie, Le Tigre, the Raincoats, Sleater-Kinney and so on and so forth. Read some feminist bloggers and really try to listen to what they’re saying instead of reading two sentences and then going to the comments to make it All About You. You’re just going to end up proving whatever point you think she’s wrong about by being a repulsive, whining dickwad. Practice liking things generally, instead of rushing to establish how you’re superior by crapping all over everything you see, especially from women. I know that’s your initial instinct when you see a woman say or create anything that isn’t explicitly about flattering misogynists, but try something new!

Self-care

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I know a lot of you think that if a man isn’t an “alpha” (whatever that means) or swimming in cash, he’s basically hopeless on the dating market. You think this because you’re hopeless on the dating market, and instead of reasonably realizing it’s your sour attitude, misogyny, and seething bitterness that’s the problem, you think women have X-ray eyes and can see into your wallet. You’ve also convinced yourself that while you deserve to have someone with a tight ass and a nice wardrobe, if you make any gesture towards being more attractive, you’re just feeding women’s evil shallowness. They should love you the way you are, and to prove that, you’re going to live in filth!

Well, I’m here to say that you can’t convince people to care about you if you don’t care for yourself. Start holding yourself to the care and grooming standards you hold women to, and you might actually find women don’t recoil from you at first sight.

Exercise! Next time you want to sit on your ass for hours, arguing with feminists about how your loneliness proves women are the worst, go hit the gym instead. People like to focus on the weight control aspects, but even if that doesn’t work for you, exercise can make you look stronger and healthier. It also makes you feel better, which comes across when other people are looking at you. Hair/skin care. As you expect them to, women put a lot of time and effort into making sure their hair and skin look nice. As a man, the expectation is that you will spend a lot less time doing these things. Instead of trying to take that privilege as far as you can, why not be humble and grateful and step up your game a little? Use a nice soap and moisturize. Get regular haircuts. You may think your straggly, unkempt hair broadcasts a devil-may-care confidence, but it actually makes you look like you don’t get out very much and is a big turn-off. Clothes that fit. I’m not going to get into the fedora debate this time around, but by god, man, don’t walk around in clothes that are swimming around you like you’re trying to hide something. You’d hate it if women did it…. Yes, I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but seriously, so many of your problems will get better if you start thinking of women as people, just like you! Home care. Clean things. Have art hanging on the walls. Try to spruce things up. Have a real bed, instead of a mattress on the floor. The soulless, dirty bachelor pad says one thing to women: “I’m waiting for a mommy to take care of me.” That’s kryptonite to sexual desire.

Social skills

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I realize a lot of you read “pick-up” manuals and blogs and think that you’ve developed social skills, but most of the time, the answer is no. The “pick-up” community is based on a single, false premise: That women are non-human animals that have to be understood as a separate species. It’s closer to the philosophy of dog training and less about learning how to be a genuinely skillful social person. True social skills start with understanding that other people—even women!—have desires and feelings just like you, and behaving accordingly.

Don’t be boring! Have some hobbies and interests outside of hating feminism for your incorrect perception that it ruined your life. (In fact, ditch that terrible hobby altogether, since it’s just going to unnerve people.) There’s a reason that sports are so popular. Not only are they fun to watch, but people who enjoy the same sport can talk about it for hours. It doesn’t have to be sports, but having a variety of interests means meeting people who share them and having something to talk about. Make your interests actually interesting, not just “tricks”. PUA guides want you to have a few tricks to appear interesting without actually being interesting. Why, I don’t know. So you can have more time to troll feminists blogs, I guess. Why not actually learn how to be interesting instead? Read some books. Learn about something important. Do not mistake a willingness to hold forth endlessly on any topic, no matter how little you actually know about it, for being interesting. If a lady knows more than you on a topic, treat that like an exciting opportunity to learn, not a threatening experience that needs to be addressed with condescension and pomposity until she retreats in irritation and disgust. Other people are also interesting. Ask questions. Listen to the answers. Double check for comprehension when you’re alone later by trying to recall some stuff they told you. Not so you can fake interest in order to trick them into bed. Learn to actually consider that people, even women, have interesting things to say. Often especially women—they may have perspectives you haven’t considered before. Develop a sense of humor. So few—if any!—of you have one. “Feminists suck” and “women who have sex but not with me should die” aren’t really jokes, even if your fellow haters seem think they’re awesome sentiments. “Make me a sandwich” wasn’t funny the first time, and everyone who repeats it is also not funny but also a rip-off artist of non-humor. It’s like a black hole where fun goes to die. I’m not saying you have to be funny yourself. Frankly, I think that’s well beyond most of your abilities, though a few years down the line of learning to relax and enjoy life might change things. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a sense of humor. You know how you like it when you say something intended to be funny and other people laugh? Other people—even women—like that, too! Women particularly often find that they don’t get as much positive feedback, especially from men, for their jokes. Laughing at a woman’s smart ass remarks like you would if she were male is a great way to stand out from the crowd.

These are all good alternatives for your free time for your hobby of hating on and trolling feminists. And unlike your current obsession, practicing these skills will actually help get you to a place where the problem that drives you to hate on feminists so much will actually start to go away. Being a fun, interesting, likeable person is so much better than being a misogynist bore, both for your soul and for your prospects on the dating market.

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Of course, if you main interest is coming up with as many ways as you can to let rapists off the hook for raping and to find reasons to blame the victims, well, you have problems that run much deeper than anything on this list will probably help you with.

*What I don’t get and will never get is why is it so hard for moderators in this situation to apply the simple “What if this was being said about my wife/sister/mother/daughter?” test. There’s a lot of problems with that test, of course, as many feminists have pointed out that it still defines women’s worth as in relation to men, as opposed to intrinsic to ourselves. But as a rough test to keep men honest and keep them from overly sympathizing with horrible people just because they share a gender with them, I do think it’s useful. It should be Moderation 101 to ask yourself this question before you blow off deleting the offensive content.