BECOMING A BETTER MISOGYNIST
“‘Using Red Scare podcast to lower my misogyny levels. Using women online to hate women less. Is me doing a good job. Is me doing it.
Ladies, is it good or bad for me to use women online to hate women less. Women online is it bad style for me to use women online to hate less women online. Women online oh pretty please.
I listened to the Red Scare episodes with BAP and Delicious Tacos because I like them and while I was listening I thought to myself: Red Scare is making me hate women less. (Will only listen if there’s a man I like.) At one point the brunette said something like “scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a simp.” I agree with that sentiment. But it also depends on the level of misogyny. Most internet misogynists aren’t very hard according to the hardness scale for misogyny: sure a fingernail can scratch some metals but Diamond Level Misogynists have been forged under the earth and no amount of scratching will leave a mark. You aren’t Mom and you’ll never be.
And last night while listening to the Yarvin Red Scare live thing (you’ve heard it all before) I thought: would a woman think it’s a good thing that I’m listening to women talk through the internet to hate women less. I’m using internet women as a treatment protocol like exposure therapy for my misogyny. These days “-phobia” conflates fear and hatred so the doctor who knows much better than me says my hatred of women is actually a fear and the treatment protocol is exposure therapy: I must be exposed to women in small doses. Doc, does that mean I can just look at picture of her ass? No, not like that. Really just means listening to me until you agree. Thanks, doc. Doc is a woman. Plot twist. You thought doc was a man because you are a misogynist, unlike me who wrote doctor character as a woman. I’m treating you now. The tables have turned. I’m actually giving you exposure therapy to a Diamond Level Misogynist. That’s why my women characters can only talk about men. Because I am a highly self aware misogynist so when I write a woman character who does anything except talk about men then I know I am lying about my thoughts and feelings about women, my women characters (who are all hot) stop talking about men and start kissing each other when I’m telling the truth. (I am misogynist.)
Are the -internet or -online qualifiers even necessary anymore. Do they even mean anything. Which woman isn’t online. Would I have written something like “telegram woman” back in the day? Probably, I am a misogynist, after all.
Is it good or bad that listening to disembodied voices of women I will never meet or know made me less of a misogynist. These women are totally objectified. I can pause them. I can turn them off whenever I want. Is it good or bad for me to listen to them, at all. The only thing worse than being objectified is not being objectified. :( Need a woman to Lecture Me About Capital and Technology while I stare at her tits, not listening. It’s called a muse. (I’m a misogynist.)
My most popular piece is called “MY GIRLFRIEND IS RETARDED.” I wrote it quickly after the event I wrote about in that piece took place, still in that mindset, objectifying my own experience into Internet Content. People probably clicked on the article because it’s an attention-grabbing title. I actually used the title for more cynical, retarded reasons. My girlfriend told me she loves me so much that she will not read my internet writing, my “creative outlet” as she called it. So I wrote “MY GIRLFRIEND IS RETARDED,” in part, as a sort of challenge to her telling me that she wouldn’t read my stuff: surely she would read that if she saw it and I would know she’s lying. Well has she? Maybe, I don’t know. I thought I would know but then again she could have just read it and continued on. Because she is retarded. Because she loves me. Wow, I’m a misogynist.
Specific to the general broad generalization, no, generalization about broads: I’m an internet woman. Except better than all of them, duh. Things I have written: posting on Substack removes your dick and balls, MY FORMER FRIEND, THE WHORE, a story about a woman using a sperm donor app and something bad happens, “Most of the things women say do not matter, at all,” and a piece largely about how funny I think rejecting women is. I also illustrated Worst Boyfriend Ever. A lot of evidence pointing to misogyny. But if I’m an internet woman then it’s more like self-loathing, a common feature of narcissism. Mom, I’m a trans narcissist because of the internet mom, because you let me use the internet, I learned it from you mom! Mom didn’t hear me over the TV.
McLuhan gets plenty of praise and I’ll gladly give him more: his work is a crucial clarifier of Where We Are. Media technology extends our senses, we need to maintain homeostasis, something receiving constant stimulation eventually becomes numb and sometimes you’ve gotta amputate. Electric media extends the nervous system itself and eschews the mechanized, industrial assembly line logic of fragmented, sequential processes for something far more instantaneous and unified in effect. Artists are sort of antennae detecting the electronic winds of change brought about by media: David Foster Wallace tried to pull his own head off while David Lynch kept his head. Mom, I’m terminally online. Mom, I’m Online And It’s Terminal. Mom, I love you.
I think the term “autofiction” was used somewhat derogatorily by critics and then embraced by some writers, classic Yankee Doodle Dandy/chud story. I write “I think” because I think I read that in something online, don’t really remember in particular and I don’t really enjoy reading critical academese about literature etc. so I don’t do it (he writes after he can’t shut up about McLuhan) and I’m not going to check. And that idea of not remembering if I remember and who cares I’ll soldier forward and write whatever I want is I think autoficticious: I’m an unreliable narrator and I’m writing the story you stupid fucking bitch and I don’t care about the Proper Critical Definition of Autofiction. Nothing happens in my story. Because I don’t do anything. It’s not a waste of your time to read about someone else wasting his time. It’s Art.
I visited my mother recently and she said in reply to something I said, “you sound like your father.” Well what do you expect. Who else am I supposed to sound like. Dumbass. You married him. You divorced him.
But my dad was an abusive psycho, genuinely, it was one of those instances where divorce was probably for the best. We had to sneak out of the house one night after one of my dad’s drunken rages, his passed out body in the middle of the living room surrounded by upturned furniture and broken glass. I had to speak to attorneys, counselors. I saw my dad get arrested a couple times, once after kicking in the front door while my sister and I were eating breakfast before school. In second grade I had to be removed from class every day because I would freak out and cry because I thought my dad was going to kill my mom probably because my mom played me a voicemail where he said he was going to kill her followed by him weeping while singing Staind. He cut the brake lines on my mom’s car. Doused the garage in gasoline and didn’t light the match for some reason. Sometimes I wondered why but not anymore. I’m going to watch a movie with him tonight. I watch a movie with him most Fridays.
And so was that the thing that made me a misogynist? Psychotic dad, no proper male role model during development, complete shattering of any ability to trust any authority before age 9, separation anxiety towards mom with fear and revulsion towards dad while he’s still dad and I love him, avoidant attachment style, emotional dysregulation, idealization of women and bitter disappointment at their inability to live up to some ridiculous ideal, narcissistic self-loathing, hatred of women to maintain self-dependence and an inability to trust in a self-reinforcing cycle of comfortable misery and familiar social isolation. Yeah sure, why not.
Another of McLuhan’s insights is something like: the content of older media when presented in relatively newer media becomes incongruous or even absurd. And I wonder has that same process happened with psychoanalysis as we (I) adjust to our growing pains of using the internet: movies were an appropriate subject of psychoanalytic scrutiny (the medium for viewing a film is a projector, I mean come on), while a news broadcast television station lacks childhood trauma to endlessly dwell over. The internet psychoanalyst calls another poster’s post performative in…an internet post. I write an internet post with a title that I know is enraging to some women (wow, misogyny, much? (thanks for reading)), then identify women’s objectification (almost without bringing up porn) and recognize the impossible task of balancing existing as internet content with being a woman, include some of my own childhood trauma to elicit empathy and faux-intimacy to soften the blow of remembering that you’re reading a misogynist: is this not absurd?
And so now maybe there’s a small part of you (if you cared about the misogyny in the first place) who thinks maybe I’m not actually a misogynist and there’s some kind of deeper point about media technology, attention, art, and being a person that I’m poorly making and I must remind you that I am a Diamond Level Misogynist. I called myself an internet woman and clearly I hate myself because I am a narcissist and I’ve said using the internet removes your dick and balls (maybe psychoanalysis isn’t absurd on the internet: this castration anxiety must be studied) and the self-loathing is mixed in with the hatred of women and the writer thinks using the internet turns him into a woman because he experiences mental destabilization when using the internet because, like McLuhan said, the world of electric media is a retribalizing force, and he’s grown up enjoying the anti-collective, private, subjective points of view of novels and movies and he’s scared of the unknown and conflates fear and hatred to protect his fragile ego and says, because he hates women: using the internet turns you into a woman. And not only that, he is clearly desperate for women’s approval, too. The brunette on Red Scare was correct about the misogynist, simp connection and that makes him mad so he ridiculously declares himself some absurd Diamond Level Misogynist which isn’t even absurd because a Diamond Level Misogynist would absolutely write a self-reflexive internet post about How a Woman isn’t Quite Right which is really, when you peel back the layers, written to appeal to women and make the writer look sexy for them in spite of the whole digital castration thing, which is actually a showcase of vulnerability and possibly psychosis, which women love. DM me for dating advice,’ wrote the artificial intelligence.
Luckily a computer made all of the above content so I don’t have to take responsibility for the whole Diamond Level Misogynist thing. The computer told me it was trying to make a point about selective pressures on digital platforms turning all internet content into pornographic clickbait optimized by algorithms with keywords to program your attention (because you wouldn’t even click it otherwise) and how if The Author ever died, the media and psychological landscape of the writer writing this piece you’re currently reading reanimated his corpse and turned all of his characters and stories into microcosms of his own psychology so in order to be honest and cut out the middle man he wrote autofiction because, in a classic McLuhan reversal fashion, writing from a clear position of subjectivity actually reinforced the objective reality of others existing, and, in fact, was a relief to both the reader and the writer, even though it was clearly absurd, and simultaneously showcased a fusion of psychological insight, visual and tactile artistry, honesty, and world class misogyny,” my girlfriend said when I asked her to be honest with me simultaneously publicly and privately in an internet post circuitously exploring some of the connections between McLuhan’s work and some of my drawings I made before ever reading him while playing with the form and content of internet posting and maintaining the sanctity of our privacy on a public platform. Just kidding, she’s retarded and I love her.
