Friday, January 04, 2002

Zenpriest #4 - The Two Faces of Masculinity


Masculinity, like every other force and characteristic in the world, has two sides - a dark side to that force and a light side. What I "hear" [people] talking about is defending the honor of masculinity, particularly the positive side of it.

We've all heard about the heroics of the firefighters and police on 9/11. That's the heroic side of masculinity. The guy who listens to his wife nag and berate and wear him down day after day and doesn't black both her eyes is also being "heroic", simply because he doen't knock the $#$% out of her. And, when the day used to come that he fought back and did knock the $#$% out of her and let her know where the limits were - that was being masculine too.

Marc LePine and the boys at Columbine HS were acting in a masculine manner - they were fighting back against a culture out to destroy them in any way they knew how. They were POWs in the gender war, brainwashed and tortured. They didn't cave in - they attacked back.

There is an aspect of masculinity that I can best summarize as: "Hit me in the face, I will break your nose. Hit me in the chest, I will break your ribs. Leave me alone, and we can live in peace."

Women really do need to start standing up for masculinity - not because men need them to defend it, but because the relentless attacks on it are only going to destroy the heroic side of it and push all its energy and power into the dark side.

You may remember Alicia's statement on SYG about how she got groped one night by a drunk in a bar and bunch of guys came to her rescue. She tossed a bit of lip service at the guys "Hey, keep on rescuing us, we really do appreciate it, even if we say we don't." My response to her was "too little, too late."

You're right, christianj, that force of masculinity can never be stamped out because it is born again in every new generation of boys. But in order for it to be the positive force you describe, it must be channeled, shaped, guided, by older men. We know how to bring a boy's masculinity out as a positive force, not try to beat it down and suppress it until it explodes in a destructive outburst. I have no doubt that Gary Ridgeway was raised by either a single mom or an overbearing mother in the presence of a weak father. Two dozen corpses of pretty young females later - the rage he still feels at the attacks on the core of his being is a danger to all women.

It would have been "nice" if women had had the sense to call off their attacks on us before men started to turn against them, and to really step up to the defense of men and masculinity - but they didn't, and you are seeing the price that their daughters and granddaughters are going to pay for that &%^&*&^% in the attitudes of young men here. Some guys here still like women a little bit, and are willing to try to love them. As NK put it, he loves the hell out of women, but he doesn't like them.

A whole 'nother group here no longer either loves or likes women, and are not even willing to f**k them. What they are doing is taking their masculinity away from those who would destroy it and them, and away from those who stood idly by and let the femin$%#@!# try.
.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
“In their book Raising Cain, psychologists Dan Klindon and Michael Thompson point out that the Bible story of Cain and Abel is about a man who kills his sibling because he feels his parents love, respect, and appreciate his sibling more than they do him.

If females can be thought of as males’ siblings, males have a lot of reason to feel like Cain these days. And that’s not good for anyone.”
– Jack Kammer in If Men Have All The Power How Come Women Make The Rules? p89
.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Previous Zenpriest Index Next