HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
11hr ago
Given the entire account, and if she's telling the truth, innocent explanation for physical attacks seems less likely.
HereAndGone2
11hr ago
Depends. Women can be psycho. Guys can be abusive. When all her friends and family were warning her off before ever she got involved with him, I think that's more on the side of "yeah he was bad news".
HereAndGone2
11hr ago
Kicking in sleep for nightmares is indeed something that happens. Slaps and kicks that only happen infrequently, and work as disciplinary methods, and the guy never has nightmares otherwise? Yeah, I'm believing her not him.
I still think she's a fool for sticking with him, but abusers are very clever about inventing plausible stories. He has you believing that maybe it was an innocent explanation, for one.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Yeah. That's what I'm getting at here. And to address the follow-up comment, no it's not victim-blaming. Dousing yourself in barbecue sauce and jumping into a pool full of piranha is not an action where, if someone says "why the hell did you do something this stupid?", it is blaming the victim.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
I find it really quite interesting in that a story about a really terrible abusive man, the question posed is "what is wrong with women?" for her mistake of being with him.
Generally I'm the one going to bat for women against all the "bitches be ridin' the cock carousel and friendzoning the decent guys" commentary on here, but in the interests of fairness I had to acknowledge that women too do have agency and make shitty choices.
This woman walked, with full knowledge, into that situation. She put herself in it. She got pregnant twice, and that too was by her own volition - you don't just happen to get pregnant, especially if as in the second time they were barely having sex. Her family warned her off this guy, her friend warned her off, she had bad experiences when dating him - and she still went right ahead and got married, had kids, moved abroad, supported the family with her money, until eventually she finally got to the point where her fear motivated her to end the marriage.
Nobody was tricking her, forcing her, or trying to persuade her she was mistaken about this guy. It was all her own bad choices and her own agency. That's the story. That's the question: "what was wrong with her that she deliberately closed her eyes and jumped off that cliff?"
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Yeah, but everyone around was telling her "he's bad news" and she knew it by demonstration when for the first date he turned up drunk, then on a later date slapped her. She kept quashing her doubts up to the point of marriage, then after marriage she still didn't or couldn't bring herself to leave. She was afraid of him, afraid that he'd kill her.
That's not "figure out your place in the narrative and fit into it", that's "this is how you end up a story on the six o'clock news", though in this case it wasn't the woman's partner who set her on fire, it was because disgruntled drug dealers were trying to get her partner. There are men who do threaten to set their ex-partners on fire.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
He kicked her a few times while sleeping.
No, what he used to do was hit or kick her while she was asleep, then when she woke up panicked and scared, it was all "oh gosh, I had a nightmare". Controlling her and conditioning her that what he did wasn't abusive. Sneaky, nasty stuff.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Is he a drunk but intelligent? Good athleticism?
Drunk who slapped her around, lived off her money while not giving a penny towards upkeep of the house and his kids, isolated her from family and friends and was big dreamer who couldn't follow through. He seems to have had a shallow, facile charm that impressed people on the surface level until they got to know him better.
She should have walked away the first time he hit her, even before they were married, but she didn't. That's what I don't understand, but it seems to happen. Women will put up with shit and explain it away. Maybe it was partly her pride (she didn't want to admit her family were right about him) but that's a very weak excuse when put against "for years he controlled me, hit me, abused me verbally, wasn't a husband and father".
HereAndGone2
1d ago
If you submit, your odds of going from a glorified concubine or sex slave to a genuine wife (with whatever degree of protection and in-group endorsement that implies) goes up.
Not really. See the Trojan women. They're not going back to be wives, even secondary wives; they're going to be household slaves (and if young/attractive enough, bed slaves as well).
Where that did happen was with the Sabine women, because (1) the Romans had no other women back home to be legitimate wives and (2) certainly after being raped (in the sense of "carried off" and also in the sexual sense) the Sabine women had little choice but to make the best of it with their new husbands. The Sabines did attack Rome to regain their wives and daughters, but the returned women would not have had good lives back home. The unmarried girls likely couldn't ever find husbands, and the married women would have found themselves put aside.
Look at one entire sub-plot in the Mahabharata, where a princess who has been carried off in an abduction marriage and manages to convince the abductor to let her go (who was, in fact, seeking wives for his half-brothers) on the grounds that she was engaged/pre-contracted to another man and loved him.
What happens next? Boyfriend dumps her on the grounds that she's been formally taken as another man's wife. She tries to get various warriors to take up her cause but they all refuse due to fear of the original guy, and eventually she gains the boon that in her next life she will be born as a man and kill him.
That's not "lie back and think of England and you have a good chance of being Mrs. Ugg", because that's not generally how it went.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
I've been asked by a mod to repost this here, so here goes!
What Is The Problem With Women?
We've often discussed, and it seems we will continue to discuss, what is going on in the Battle of the Sexes. I have to hold my hands up and admit that very often in such dispatches, I am the one defending women and criticising the behaviour and the attitudes of men.
But it is also undeniable that some women are fudging stupid. Or at the very least, so it appears. We've argued over "women prefer the Bad Boys to the Nice Guys" but there comes a point where it seems to be sheer self-destruction at work, because how could anyone stick with a guy like the one in this story?
So, to do justice to the gentlemen here with whom I have argued, here is the sorry story of a woman who apparently had not a brain in her head. Her family warned her off, her friends warned her off, even on a first date she knew this was a bad idea - and she still ended up marrying him and having two children with him while he was irresponsible, controlling, and abusive.
Why? I can't explain it to you in any way that makes sense. Even she doesn't know why, looking back. There are some hints that, in line with theories of such behaviour, she was drawn (for whatever reason) to abusive men, like a typical victim who keeps going back to the same kind of relationship after getting out of the last one. But as to what was at work here, who knows? I can't imagine any evo-psych explanation for this that makes any sense at all, not even the "women evolved to tolerate rape because women who resisted rape got murdered when the barbarian horde over-ran the village and killed all the men and took all the women" kind of thing.
An Irish divorce story.
In our Divorce Diaries series, we speak to people in Ireland about their experience of marriage and divorce. This week, a woman in her early 40s with two children under 10 years old tells her story
My sister knew my ex-husband slightly through a friend of a friend, and they actually warned me about him straight away, as in he’s a messer.
On the very first date, I should have walked away. He was very drunk and a mess from the very start.
I was in my late 20s, I don’t know where my head was at. I had been single for a very long time. I was kind of like, Jesus, will I ever meet anyone? I suppose I must have been desperate. That’s the only thing I can think of. And also, biological clock and all the rest.
We had a few dates and when I think back, I was always going against my gut. I had this weird feeling, but yet he was a very outgoing, funny kind of guy. You’d always have the craic on a night out. And all the girls were like: “Oh God, he’s so nice.”
And then – and this is what embarrasses me so much – he actually slapped me across the face on a night out, very early in, and I let it slide stupidly. I so regret that.
Also, my best friend told me not to go near him, that she didn’t like him. I said: “You just don’t know him.” I never really told anyone what he did to me – my parents, my sister – that he’d hit me across the face. I kind of felt silly.
It gets worse from there, until finally she won't put up with it anymore and leaves. Why she didn't run a mile after the first date, I have no explanation. This is a stupid (and indeed, dangerous) choice she made of her own free (so it seems) will. Nobody was urging or forcing her to take up with this guy, indeed it was the opposite. She had plenty of chances, and plenty of warning signs. She got pregnant, of her own accord again, (I strongly suspect the first pregnancy was the usual hope around 'a baby will fix this' and the second time, what, she had no access to contraception? highly unlikely) and brought two kids into an unstable situation where the father had no interest in contributing to the family. It was only when things finally became intolerable that she left.
And I genuinely, honestly can't blame men or The Patriarchy or anything else for this. The guy in question was a shithead but she knew that from the immediate start. There's nothing in her story, as told, about her family pressuring her to get married or settle down with anyone, much less this guy. She did it all herself.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Thanks, I didn't post it in CW in case it wasn't suitable there (it's not really arguing for or against X or Y, just an example of 'yeah guys, women make stupid choices that are not the fault of men').
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo
Of these, I have read Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity's Rainbow. The others simply didn't appeal to me (Catch-22) or there is no way in hell I'd read them (Infinite Jest, White Noise). Vonnegut is Vonnegut, he's nearly always good. I did manage to make it through Gravity's Rainbow and came out the other end agreeing it's a great novel. About a third of the way through, I was "yeah it's fine", half-way through I was "what the hell" because it just about had hit me over the head by then, but I staggered on to the end and was glad I did.
Skill Issues? Eh, maybe. Some books just don't work for some people, and I have no problem with that. The problem I do have is sneering, if a book doesn't work for someone then it's because the book is terrible (to be fair, some books are terrible) and not because the person reading it doesn't want to put the work in/expected it to agree with their preferences.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
I'd recommend the Olivier Lear. TV version, stage-bound, and it started off (to me) slow. But when Lear hit "Come not between the dragon and his wrath" it just revved up and kept going from there on.
You can see why Edmund might have a grudge against his father, since Dad keeps insisting on introducing him as "Do you know my bastard son? Yeah, he's illegitimate. I have a proper born in wedlock elder son, but I never married this kid's mom." Yeah, thanks Dad!
HereAndGone2
1d ago
For me, anyway, it's the beauty of the language. I first tackled a Shakespeare play, "Hamlet", when I was about fourteen-fifteen expecting it to be a hard slog because it was Great Literature and more than that, Great Poetry, and all the Great Poetry I had encountered up till then was difficult to understand because of what seemed to be deliberate obscurantism and excessive verbiage.
So I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and expected to have to hack my way through the undergrowth. But it wasn't like that at all. First, I suspect, because I was reading a schools edition of the play which was in modern English and meant for idiot school kids to be able to follow. Second, because a lot of the terminology was recognisable to me as idioms still current in Hiberno-English (e.g. the bit about "walking abroad", I didn't need a note telling me this meant 'outside' because this was how it was used in my locale as well).
I ended up with bells ringing in my head because the words all struck against one another and chimed. When I finished, I understood why Shakespeare was considered a great.
Maybe you're not as susceptible to the mere sound-music of words, but yeah. The plays are meant to be performed and not just read, but even Iago's little speech here is just so hypnotising because of the slurring, murmurous repetition of the syllables if you read it aloud:
Look where he comes. Not poppy nor mandragora
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
People often scorn LOTR because it lacks moral complexity (somewhat unfair criticism).
Which is what Rings of Power tried to do with their family man Orc (to great mockery). So what happens to our morally complex, it's a grey area, family guy Orc? Happily (to all appearances) engages in the siege of Eregion where priceless cultural artefacts are destroyed, literally engages in back-stabbing of (the new) Adar (the triggering incident apparently being "Daddy doesn't love me?") and ends up getting murderated himself in about five seconds by Sauron for daring to be "but what about all the Orc footsoldiers you are sending out as cannon fodder?" which, ironically, was the reason he initially switched loyalties from Adar to Sauron.
So much for moral complexity.
And from the selected letters, notes from 1956:
Of course in ‘real life’ causes are not clear cut – if only because human tyrants are seldom utterly corrupted into pure manifestations of evil will. As far as I can judge some seem to have been so corrupt, but even they must rule subjects only part of whom are equally corrupt, while many still need to have ‘good motives’, real or feigned, presented to them. As we see today.
Still there are clear cases: e.g. acts of sheer cruel aggression, in which therefore right is from the beginning wholly on one side, whatever evil the resentful suffering of evil may eventually generate in members of the right side. There are also conflicts about important things or ideas. In such cases I am more impressed by the extreme importance of being on the right side, than I am disturbed by the revelation of the jungle of confused motives, private purposes, and individual actions (noble or base) in which the right and the wrong in actual human conflicts are commonly involved. If the conflict really is about things properly called right and wrong, or good and evil, then the rightness or goodness of one side is not proved or established by the claims of either side; it must depend on values and beliefs above and independent of the particular conflict. A judge must assign right and wrong according to principles which he holds valid in all cases. That being so, the right will remain an inalienable possession of the right side and Justify its cause throughout.
(I speak of causes, not of individuals. Of course to a judge whose moral ideas have a religious or philosophical basis, or indeed to anyone not blinded by partisan fanaticism, the rightness of the cause will not justify the actions of its supporters, as individuals, that are morally wicked. But though ‘propaganda’ may seize on them as proofs that their cause was not in fact ‘right’, that is not valid. The aggressors are themselves primarily to blame for the evil deeds that proceed from their original violation of justice and the passions that their own wickedness must naturally (by their standards) have been expected to arouse. They at any rate have no right to demand that their victims when assaulted should not demand an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.)
Similarly, good actions by those on the wrong side will not justify their cause. There may be deeds on the wrong side of heroic courage, or some of a higher moral level: deeds of mercy and forbearance. A judge may accord them honour and rejoice to see how some men can rise above the hate and anger of a conflict; even as he may deplore the evil deeds on the right side and be grieved to see how hatred once provoked can drag them down. But this will not alter his judgement as to which side was in the right, nor his assignment of the primary blame for all the evil that followed to the other side.
...In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about ‘freedom’, though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour. The Eldar and the Númenóreans believed in The One, the true God, and held worship of any other person an abomination. Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world. So even if in desperation ‘the West’ had bred or hired hordes of orcs and had cruelly ravaged the lands of other Men as allies of Sauron, or merely to prevent them from aiding him, their Cause would have remained indefeasibly right. As does the Cause of those who oppose now the State-God and Marshal This or That as its High Priest, even if it is true (as it unfortunately is) that many of their deeds are wrong, even if it were true (as it is not) that the inhabitants of ‘The West’, except for a minority of wealthy bosses, live in fear and squalor, while the worshippers of the State-God live in peace and abundance and in mutual esteem and trust.
That last - the 'good' side do bad things, but those bad things do not take away from the rightness of their position - probably would be a leetle too morally complex for the critics!
HereAndGone2
1d ago
That quote from the Godfather movie which I've never seen, but which everyone seems to know, applies here!
I make up my mind "Okay, all I'm doing is getting into stupid fights and collecting warnings from the mods like empty bottles, I am not learning anything, I am not doing anything, quit and stay gone".
And it lasts for a while.
And then I have something I want to discuss, but nowhere else to discuss it. Or someone makes a post or comment that is so misinformed on something I do know about - and off we go again 🤣
HereAndGone2
3d ago
I'd estimate that anyone in the 100-110 IQ range or higher would be able to solve most or all of them.
Well then I'm officially dumber than the AI because I hadn't a clue what to do. I've never played any puzzles like these and the retro arcade game style completely confused me because, again, never played games like that. I'm assuming I'm supposed to move the square to the exit, but who the hell knows?
A lot of these puzzles are indeed culture dependent, the culture being "yeah I grew up playing video games, console games, etc."
HereAndGone2
4d ago
a notion that you could escape the discomfort by becoming the opposite sex
When you are told "you can't do this because you are a girl", it is not unreasonable to think "so if I were a boy, I could do this? maybe things would be easier if I were a boy!"
See all the comments on here about how easy women have it in modern society which is set up to cater to their every whim. Someone any bit malleable might well think "so I can live my entire life on easy mode just by being a girl, and I'll get everything I want handed to me on a plate?"
HereAndGone2
4d ago
I am neither lefty nor progressive, but I too have flounced off in my time (and then got dragged back in again). Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
Do you know what she told her parents? Did she lie about going to a friend's house, or that she was meeting Teacher Jones for extra tuition, or just going to the library/other activity where she could plausibly be out of the house for a few hours?
People can also be very trusting of motives, and if they had no idea in their heads that "my 14 year old daughter is being sexually active", then her meeting up with respectable older men where she's explaining it as "that's Janey's dad, Janey is a girl in my class, he's just driving me over to Janey's house" can work. Or they could have known and have been trying to control her but not able to, that happens as well. Locking a teenager in their room might not be illegal but it could be presented (especially if she was manipulative) as a pattern of abusive behaviour by the parents.
HereAndGone2
5d ago
HereAndGone2
5d ago
If anything I'd expect autists to be stubbornly sceptical of transgenderism's manipulation of the categories.
Never formally diagnosed so can't speak for proper autists, but sufficiently weird and isolated that I can throw my tuppence worth in here.
Back at puberty, I was very ignorant (these were the days before easily accessible information was everywhere and society was nowhere near as openly sex-soaked as now) and so it took me by surprise when my body started changing in ways I did not want! did not like! had not agreed to! So straight away that hits the "rigid psychological orthodoxy that gets agitated by change and unexpected, unexplained divergence from a familiar and accustomed situation/routine" buttons.
Second, suddenly all these limitations started popping up via my mother, mostly but not solely: "you can't do this thing you used to do before anymore now/you have to do that thing" and the only explanation, so far as I got one, was "well now you're a girl". But.... wasn't I a girl before? Why did these changes of "becoming a young woman" mean now all these new things I could not/had to do?
Third, I was never a 'girly girl' so never fit very well (physically or mentally, in what I was interested in) into the categories of "girls are like this". Take all those things on board and I was very much at times feeling "Gosh, it would be so much easier if I were a boy".
I grew out of that, eventually, but I can see how if nowadays there is the push for "kids can be trans! transgender is a thing that exists! make sure kids know all about all the options and don't restrict them to two sexes and one sexuality!" information and treatment, somebody who feels the way I did might conclude (because again, being on the spectrum, you go by your intelligence as your main strength and that is how you make decisions and once you convince yourself this is the right solution it's nearly impossible to budge) that they were indeed 'not the right gender'. Particularly for MtF getting the messaging that "wow, women have it so much easier in today's society, we are all forced to agree Women Are Wonderful, everything is set up for them".
If your body already feels alien to you, not really 'you' (that's your brain and your mind and your intelligence), and Science Has The Answer, then why not change to an easier model with clear(er) definitions that you can fit, simply by dressing this way, growing out your hair, wearing makeup, and taking medication to change the vehicle you have been saddled with? If you're already acting/masking to fit 'normie' perceptions, what's a bit more acting along with that?
HereAndGone2
5d ago
Maximal charity, transhumanist Catholic is probably anticipating the glorified body after the Resurrection a bit too early and too mechanically 😁
But, uh, regarding transgenderism (or indeed other bodily alterations of a drastic kind) "letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies" would not be in line with current teaching, no.
HereAndGone2
6d ago
Nobody gave a rat's ass when girls were distributing pictures of 5-year-old me naked in high school, using them to openly sexually harass me.
They should have done and the adults around failed you.
Culture War or not, I don't know.
I've finished watching the Good Friday service from the Vatican and I want to quote this part of the service, sections of Psalm 21 (which includes the famous "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" quotation which is part of the Seven Last Words from the Cross).
Something which Nietzsche would despise, at least going by the discussions about this we've had on here before. The triumph of the weak. Slave morality. "I am a worm and no man" is not what the Strong, the Aristoi, say of themselves, such types are the ones trampled underfoot and rightfully so, pity being wasted on them.
And yet. And yet. This is the God of all Creation, the Maker of the Universe, the ground of all being, the Power beyond power, the True, the Beautiful and the Good who emptied Himself out, who became a slave and lower than a slave, to die a criminal's death.
Maybe true power is not trampling all others underfoot. The wretch who died the slave's death is venerated and remembered in the most gorgeous, opulent setting. Maybe the Strong look tawdry by comparison in their tinsel crowns.
Something, something. Tickling at my brain, to think about it.
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