Seeing Yourself as Worthless in the Eyes of Others

"There are the Outsiders, and then are those who are even more Outside than they are."

In college I lived in a studio apartment attached to a house of 12 girls. Once I was in one's room when she started telling me, right out of the blue, how she was ostracized in seventh grade because he was chubby and wore clunky glasses. She showed me a picture.

She had been gawky but not unattractive, but certainly didn't look like that at 21. Now she verged on being beautiful and had a great body. But at 12 she was ostracized.

She said over the summer she blossomed from an ugly ducking into a swan, and when she came back to school for the eighth grade all the kids who had ostracized her were all over her wanting to be her friend. She told me she ignored them, especially the boys, who had gone from "ew!" to "ah!"

Since that traumatic time she said had been only attracted to usual-looking men, especially men who looked like Peter Noone, who was the lead singer for "Herman and the Hermits." That surprised me a little, since she was about four when he was popular.

She even married a guy who looked like Peter Noone.

Her story always stayed with me. For one thing, it's about revenge. The desire for revenge is created when a person is humiliated - ostracized, insulted, treated with contempt and scorn. It's an attempt to replace humiliation with pride.

Originally the word Hubris meant to humiliate someone in public, and the Greeks considered it so obscene they banned it from the theater. Hubris is followed by Nemesis, which means "revenge." Humiliating someone in public leads to revenge - replacing humiliation with pride.

In order to understand the Hubris/Nemesis dynamic it helps to understand that people are mirrors. That is, you see yourself in the ways people look at you and treat you. They reflect it back to you.

To use myself as an example, my large extended family thought I was just about the funniest thing they had ever seen. I always have remembered the ones for whom I was their favorite, mostly because they thought I was funny.

The woman in college, who I'll call Kathy, saw herself as low-value, perhaps even no value, in the treatment she received from others. Low value means poor self-image (which means anxiety, depression and anger), and she replaced her feelings of humiliation with pride by revenge on the kids who ignored her - by ignoring them. "Since they ostracized me I will give them a taste of their own medicine."

I try to keep those concepts in mind, since they apply to everyone. When someone feels humiliated by seeing themselves reflected back as a low-value/no-value person, they, in one way or another, will try to raise their self-image by some sort of revenge.

Sometimes, like Kathy, it will be "what goes around comes around," sometimes it will be "living well is the best revenge," and sometimes it will be murder.

I've said this before, but I consider the Manosphere to be mostly about revenge. Feminism was never about equality, since a lot of it was founded by man-hating lesbians, and a lot of its evil has percolated down to the average woman, who has only the vaguest idea what happened to screw up her life.

Feminism was always about humiliating men - seeing them as worthless. It appears to be getting even worse, with every man a rapist or sexual harasser. The Manosphere is not only about justice, but in large part about revenge, which is why a lot of it is about humiliating women. Men try to raised their self-image by creating inaccurate concepts such as Alpha and Sigma, try to humiliate men who disagree with their mistakes by calling them everything but an Alpha and Sigma, and very few have a clue as to what they are doing.

Humiliation has been implicated in the pathogenesis of (take a deep breath) low self-esteem, school-related difficulties, pernicious child-rearing practices, delinquency, poverty, social phobia, anxiety, depression, paranoia, marital discord, domestic violence, sexual aggression, rape, other forms of violence, serial murder, and suicide.

I'd go so far as to say any man who truly believes in Alphas/Sigma/negging to show you're high value/"alpha fux, beta bucks"/etc, is a man who has been humiliated by women, doesn't know how to talk to them, and in fact doesn't have much of an idea of what a man is supposed to be.

That kind of man is the end result of feminism, and it is a perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

There is a lot of good in the Manosphere, since it is a needed corrective to the evils of feminism, but the wheat will have to be separated from the chaff. As always.