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I still remember the first time I saw the feminist slogan "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." It was clearly intended to be a gesture of spitting in my face and telling me how useless and irrelevant I was as a male. I was offended, angry, and hurt.
Now, nearly 30 years later, I have reluctantly resigned myself to the truth of that statement, if not its wisdom. For my entire adult life, the women I have known have been, without exception, selfish, self-centered and, in fact, word, and deed: self-obsessed. Over time, my intial generousity and tolerance have been all used up by the women who have used, exploited, and burned me in order to pursue their own personal short-term gratification. And, it certainly has not been limited to women with whom I have had supposedly "romantic" relationships: the women who have called me "friend" have actually used me in often far more unfair ways by expecting the same deference and pandering to their whims that they would expect in "romance", without the rewards of deep connection and intimacy which a male would reasonably expect in a romance.
The fictions of male power and privilege, and the paranoid delusions of "oppression", seem to have left most women with the attitude that men of today have some debt to pay off for all the mythological "advantages" that other men have "enjoyed." They have upped the bar on what they "demand" from man in order to have a "relationship" that even when a man has the ability to meet a woman's demands, he often has run out of motivation to do so. As a woman correspondent of mine put it "Women have forgotten how to treat men decently."
The ironic final outcome is that men who still put up with all the hostility and exploitation routinely practiced by women today probably deserve the contempt that women express toward them. Any fool who will keep putting up with it forever certainly deserves to be called and thought of as a *major* fool.
An increasing number of men my age are reaching the point where their own real needs have been denied and exploited for so long that relationships with women, of any kind, no longer seem worth the trouble. Who needs all the harassment and all the bashing?
It is a strange transition to go through. While I was brought up to show great respect and deference to women, and expected to pamper them, over the years I have had to adopt the attitude out of self-defense that the question is not *whether* a woman is going to burn me, but *when* and exactly *how*.
I have been preaching for years that this will be the inevitable result of all the misandry floating around in our culture. And, peculiar resistance of women to waking up to the fact that they can NOT hate men into loving them has left me with a very poor impression of the intelligence of the female of the species. I am particularly deaf to the laments of women who claim that they can't find good partners, as a result of years of watching women throw away one good relationship after another as they chased the chance to "trade up", and be so excessive in their demands and so unwilling to give that they just used up one man after another.
The fact remains that no amount of special laws can really affect the way that people feel and view things. Once men begin turning off to women in large numbers, which the fact that nearly 1/3rd of US men have never been married shows has already begun to happen, there will have to be a major shift in social attitudes to bring them back.
As it stands now, I have never had a woman bring anything really positive and rewarding into my life since I was a teenager. The personal, emotional, and financial costs of the relationships I have had, have been exhorbitant. Letting a woman into my life now seems like nothing so much as an invitation to tragedy and emotional chaos. There are no rewards, nothing but costs and they are quite excessive.
Invariably, when I express these views, women become defensive and start to demand recognition that "... not ALL women are like that..." Of course, it is to women's best interest to keep men willing to seek them out in the vain hope that they will eventually find a woman who is capable of thinking of something or someone besides herself. And here is where so-called "normal" women seem no less selfish than any other. If men turn away from women, then women will be left without relationships because they, as a group, have refused to budge from their power position and give up the power that the structure of courtship gives them as a result of the circumstances of their birth.
Men must still take all the risks, even though those risks now include jail time and complete loss of career, reputation, and everything a man might have worked his entire life to achieve. The older a man gets, the less worth taking all those risks a potential relationship becomes because the post-feminist attitude of "oppression" leaves them with the attitude that a man starts out owing them a debt he has to pay off.
After many years of this, women's emotional bank accounts get closed and their credit lines cancelled. At the first sign of unrelenting selfishness, women will usually find a man suddenly absent from their lives. Of course, women never look at the role their own selfishness played in all this. They simply continue to refuse to take any responsibility for the consequences of their own actions and blame everything on some shortcoming of the male.
The problem lies in the fact that motivation requires an occasional success to maintain. Over time, continued experience with such unrelenting users convinces a man that such self-obsession is simply characteristic of women and he is left with the choice of tolerating it if he wants to have women in his life. If he isn't willing, sooner or later he makes the mental transition from seeing women as potential allies to seeing them as likely enemies. Once this transition has occurred, changing back is unlikely. It is simply not possible to turn a pickle back into a cucumber.
I don't even have any compassion left for the women who claim to be "normal" because they have sat around in silence and enjoyed the perks that feminism has brought all women while cheering on their sistas with "You go, grrl" and refusing to speak out on behalf of the things that men do for them that they still enjoy. Yet, they are unwilling to budge on traditional female prerogatives of power. So, they still seem like users to me by expecting that men will still do all the work to make a woman comfortable and give her what *SHE* needs while his own needs are denied and negated.
Having reached the point where well into mid-life I have yet to meet a woman who understood the concepts of give-and-take, reciprocity, respect, and understanding, I have developed the skills to live far more comfortably without them. Just like a bicycle, the gears of my life can function smoothly for long periods with minimal maintance. As long as I don't have to clean off the slime left behind by some fish, life is on the whole, far less unpleasant.
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