Ugh. He segues from the tired old friend-zone cliché to the friend-zone somehow being a part of the feminist idea of rape culture. He then goes on to assume de facto blame for a crime (i.e., he looks in the mirror and sees a monster) that neither happened nor would've had anything to do with him in the first place even if it had happened.

All because he was a guy who made the horrible mistake of wanting to have sex with girls.

I agree that sex shouldn't be "owed," but... having known plenty of guys like this, they're just looking for more ways to game the system. They snivel and they prostrate themselves and they only ever say the things they imagine women would like them to say and they never say anything that they imagine a woman wouldn't want them to say, and they do all this because they want women to throw them a bone. They imagine that if they do everything right, if they follow every rule in the book and never ask any questions and never take issue with anything the women around them say, they will finally become worthy of sex.

What inevitably happens is that only the most insecure (and usually crazy, too) of their female friends will bother with the guy while the rest of them find guys who don't spend their time crawling at their feet and calling themselves evil disgusting rape culture-supporting perverts just because they think it's what they're supposed to do.

There's nothing heroic about what this guy said. If anything, it's tragic that he should feel that he almost raped a girl when all he did was feel betrayed because she wouldn't sleep with him, but would sleep with her next boyfriend. As if he's somehow sick and evil just because he has emotions.

@Procrastinatron

You make your point beautifully

I didn't take his poem as being literal. I didn't assume he was actually talking about himself but making a point that you should treat every woman (person) with the respect they deserve and never assume in the first place that that gives you any hold over them. But it's perfectly possible I'm just being naive.

He should just resort to being ten again and go back to the playground tactic of pushing girls he likes over and calling them a poohead, just to be on the safe side

@alien_concept

I'm used to people just getting incredibly angry at me whenever I take a position that is in some way in opposition to some facet of feminism, so thanks for not doing that.

And yeah, it's possible that I'm taking it way too literally. It just feels like I've heard this stuff so many times, and it always makes me sad. I mean, I'm Swedish, and here in Sweden, radical feminism is essentially ubiquitous. A bit less than half of all the female teachers I've ever had have been so aggressively feminist that they've made their ideology part of their curriculum no matter what their subject has been, and have passed off doctrinal truths as scientific fact.

And... it wears down on you. Not the stuff about equality or treating women like people because all of that stuff is just FANTASTIC. Rather, it's all the stuff people either won't talk about, or will attribute to some insane radfem groups they'll claim are so small that they almost can't be said to exist at all. In other words, it's all the stuff people usually don't want to admit is there.

@Procrastinatron

I love that name by the way. Procrastination is my middle name!

As a female I of course deplore sexism in any form, but I do feel that a lot of it is perceived sexism and I can't be doing with anyone who takes political correctness to the extreme. Of course it exists and women need to fight against what can still be a man's world... but I truly believe that for the most part, men get it. Well I say get it... they are probably even more confused as to what is and isn't acceptable to think and say than ever before.

My son asked me the other day why women say that men don't understand them. He's 10. God knows where he's heard it, but it was a very amusing question and one that is difficult to respond to a young boy. I told him that essentially men and women work on very different emotions and while neither is wrong or right, that difference can be very confusing to guys because women are often driven by their emotions and men are often more logical in their approach.

I also told him that women find men just as hard to understand because they assume that guys don't get them because they don't care enough and that this isn't necessarily the case. We're just very different creatures. People are people, sometimes men are crap and sometimes women are crap, don't ever listen to "All women are/all men are..." He said, "Oh I understand." The poor kid lives with just me and his raging hormonal 14 year old sister, haha.

Interesting about Swedish women in your experience. Sounds like Assange is hiding out for very good reason. Wonder what that was all about, eh?

@alien_concept

Thanks! I was struggling to come up with a username, and then I just decided to accept my true nature.

And this is a timeless issue that I think we've all run into at times. A woman comes to a man to talk about her emotions. The man sees that she has a problem, and tries to help her solve it. This frustrates the woman - she only wanted to share her troubles with him, and she feels insulted that he would assume she is incapable of solving her own problems. This, in turn, frustrates the man; after all, why would she come to him if she won't accept his help? He's sincerely doing his best, and he feels that she is being unfair and overly emotional.

A fight ensues, and neither party understands how it even happened, or how to find a way out of it.

And as I have a VERY emotional mother and VERY rational father, I've been on both sides, as well as in the middle, of this conflict many times.

As for Assange, he once said that Sweden is the "Saudi Arabia of feminism," and having grown up here, I can vouch for the veracity of that statement.

It has gotten to the point here that most guys are just too afraid to stand up to even the most obvious acts of bigotry because the one-way sexism has become so widely accepted. We're only left with three choices; we either accept the abuse and join in it ourselves, or we simply give up and take it with a sort of hopeless resignation.

Since I can't stand to be victimized, I favour the third option; pointing out the bullshit and then riposting with facts, logic and righteous anger.

But I've had some utterly INSANE examples of sexism happen in the classroom, including a teacher derailing a lecture right at the beginning of it and instead spending her entire hour to essentially claim that all men are either rapists or potential rapists, and as a guy, it's just difficult to know what to do in that situation.

It's also very hurtful, as I find rape to be one of the most despicable acts imaginable.

And... that's why my reaction to this guy's poem was so strong. It's like he's been abused for so long that he's begun to think that it's actually true.

You gave your son a very good answer! Men and women are different from one another (though this isn't entirely set in stone), and I think that anybody who claims otherwise simply prefers ideology or fantasy (same thing, really) over reality.

And for what it's worth, I think those differences are pretty freaking valuable. I love women, and part of the reason for that is the fact that they aren't men.

Moving this video to alien_concept's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.