EOTM: How It All Fell Apart

In 1992 Canadian journalist Wendy Dennis came out with a book entitled "Hot and Bothered, Sex and Love in the 90s". In her introduction she became the first woman I'd ever heard actually admit that men had a side of the story too. She promised to try to tell it fairly, and certainly did a better job of that than any woman I've heard before or since. She still showed some distinct feminist and feminine biases, particularly in some of her choices to illustrate male anger about the treatment they had been receiving from women, but, as I have included certain male biases in my writing with more forethought and intent than I'm sure she showed, I can hardly fault her too severely for that. The mere fact that she admitted that men have a right to have their point of view considered put her into not just a different category, but an entirely different species, than other women authors who have written on this subject. Please read her book. Please give copies of it to all your friends. For, in the 5 years since its publication, things only seem to have gotten worse. There is no other single topic that I hear discussed even half as frequently as how miserable both men and women are as a result of the lack of any sort of satisfying sexually intimate relationship in their lives.

She begins with the questions "How are women doing?" and "How are men doing?". In both cases the answer is not well. With only rare exceptions, men and women everywhere are confused, angry, alone, suspicious, often downright hostile, and, underneath it all, terribly terribly hurt. In some states the divorce rate has reached 75%. More and more single people have simply quit dating. For quite some time it has been very chic for women to proudly announce that they are quite happy without a relationship. Now men are beginning to take the same position. As I have talked to members of both genders, the story that I get is that this is mostly true but not quite with the spin of satisfaction that it is usually presented. A little probing will reveal that, instead of "quite happy", "less miserable" sitting on the sidelines watching the emotional brawl instead of participating is closer to the truth.

What is most surprising to me is the number of young men, in their early 20s, who have dropped out of the mating game. For a 30 year veteran in the army-of-occupation left behind by the sexual revolution with the scars to prove it, like myself, this is easy to understand. But for someone at an age when I still considered that dreaded Hawaiian disease, Lakanooki, certainly fatal if left untreated for a year and would tolerate almost any level of abasement to convince some woman to share my bed, it is amazing that a young man would make the choice to sit out. Their reasons for doing so are quite informative.

Feminism has transformed the social climate in this country as thoroughly as the Bolsheviks transformed the former Russia. Which is of course what it set out to do: thus is a rousing success as a social movement. But, like the collectivist thinking on the economic level, the collectivist thinking on the social level which drives feminism did not have quite the results promised. After 75 years, the grand socio-economic experiment of the Bolsheviks was abandoned because it was too contrary to the nature of human beings. For those 75 years, however, citizens had to contend with economic deprivation and hardship as they struggled to change that nature to conform to a grand ideal. Not just human nature, but the natural world as well. Crops were planted according to 5 year plans, not according to weather, harvests, and needs of the population. In the same way, feminists have demanded that the factors and forces which drive attraction conform to a plan, a FEMinine plan.

Males have simply been dropped out of the picture as serious elements of consideration, except to regard them as agricultural crops which fruit love, support, and sperm. Author Dennis herself says it - "For one of the implicit, if unadmitted, tenets of feminism has been a fundamental disrespect for men." When the Bolsheviks fundamentally disrespected the fact that a crop ripens dependent on rainfall, sunshine, and a host of other factors, demanding instead that it be planted on a certain date and harvested on a certain date according to a grand idealistic plan laid down 5 years earlier, they could invest all the hours, fuel, and seed in planting and still have nothing to eat when it was all done. Not just no result, but an incredible waste of resources which were already in short supply. And people end up hungrier as a result of wasting the seed which could have more productively been eaten than thrown away in an attempt to force nature to conform to a human ideal. Fortunately for them, in the States farmers still understood that a crop ripens according to natural laws and did not attempt to play GOD, so had surpluses which allowed the Bolshevik plan followers to purchase grain to keep from starving to death. Unfortunately, no one is growing a surplus of male attraction to women these days, particularly not one which meets the complex, contradictory, and completely impossible requirements of the feminist agenda, so women are emotionally starving to death.

The most repugnant statement in the entire book, repugnant both because it illustrates the fallacy which caused the whole house of cards to fall and because it highlights the fact that women are still blind to the fact that men are human beings at all and illustrates that a fundamental disrespect for men is basic not just to feminism, but to all women, is this (quoted in lengthy entirety):

"In the end, the hard lesson women take from the apparent man shortage is this: by trying to live up to the lofty ideals of feminism, by elevating their expectations of themselves and of men, they set themselves with a collision course with loneliness. Men will punish them for their ambitions, and they will punish them in the cruelest way imaginable: by not wanting them any more." (emphasis added)

Let me express the message in this statement another way:

"In the end, the hard lesson the Bolsheviks take from the apparent food shortage is this: by trying to live up to the lofty ideals of Bolshevism, by elevating their expectations of themselves and the crops which provide them food, they set themselves with a collsion course with starvation." (True so far, the penalty for that level of denial in the natural world has always been death.) "The crops will punish them for their ambitions, and they will punish them in the cruelest way possible: by dying."

I still cannot fathom the incredible self-absorbtion, self-centeredness, self-OBSESSION, that can allow anyone to overlook how intensely and determinedly women have pursued making themselves unwantable and destroying and stamping out every last bit of desire for them a man could possibly have. And the determination to be the victim to the very end. The fact that men have quit wanting women couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that women have been viciously attacking men for being attracted to them and every instance of its expression for years. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that expressing it has been thoroughly criminalized and wanting a woman and making it known can land a man in prison these days. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that everything a man might find attractive that doesn't fit the feminst ideal is slammed with a sledgehammer of shame. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that men have believed women who have told men how little they or their attention could possibly mean to women, and in fact they find them both highly offensive and completely irrelevant. No, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with women or their actions, it is entirely due to the universal quality of men to spend their lives thinking up nasty things to do to women. To "PUNISH" them.

It makes me sick.

In what I call the "Holocaust of Desire", men's desire for women has been being systematically murdered for the past 30 years. By women. Now men are "punishing" women by being dead to them. The murder weapons have been maleness-bashing and the criminalization of male sexual expression through the expanded definitions of sexual harassment and rape and the constructivist fallacy of making all men equally guilty for the acts of any individual man.

The sad truth is that I'd rather eat Drano than try to love a woman, only to find that my every act and intent was viciously and maliciously twisted into a victim's melodrama which I might spend the next several years in prison paying for. The entire purpose of the criminal justice system is to control and attempt to eradicate deviance. Now that men desiring women has been declared deviant, the eradication efforts are having their effects.

In the end, the hard lesson that women really need to take from the real man shortage is this: by denying and negating our needs, by making wanting you into a criminal act, by being so self-centered that you cannot see any act in the world as being motivated by anything other than intent to frustrate your needs and desires, you have proven to us that what feminists began saying 30 years ago is equally true in reverse. Not only is a woman without a man like a fish without a bicycle, a man without a woman is like a bicycle without a fish.

Male Bashing
The Criminalization of Male Sexuality - Harrasment and Rape