"There Ain't No Way Out, but OUT. "
With these words, my counselor put his finger on the heart of the essential dilemma and conflict which I was spending $65/hour seeking his help to resolve. For close to 18 months I had been "trapped" in a "relationship" with the most horrible destructive woman I had ever had the misfortune to encounter. I detested her. She disgusted me. But for a lot of reasons so subtle that they almost defy explanation, I was still seeking and requiring sanction and permission to dump her and walk away. And most insanely of all, I was seeking it FROM HER. While my intellect KNEW this was nuts, my emotions still fought me.
At one point the counselor, whose name was Bob, pointed this out. "You are in the middle of an internal civil war. Your intellect and emotions are at war with each other." For years, I had fought to subjugate my emotions to my ideals and attempted to feel like my ideal of myself dictated that I would feel. That was the reason I had gotten myself into this situation in the first place, and why I was having such a hard time giving myself permission to leave. In going back and seeking to understand the forces that drew me into such a destructive relationship, and undermined my resolve to leave it, I had to sort through an immense and convoluted mixture of traditional and feminist notions about relationships, sexuality, and how one treats the people who are close to you.
Like most others of my age cohort, the "boomers", a durable satisfactory pair-bonding with a member of the opposite sex has escaped me. Unlike many of them, I don't have one or more failed marriages which more often than not leave the combatants hostile and embittered toward the opposite sex. It's curious that our culture which loves to put a label in everything does not have a widely used label for my experience. "Serial monogamy" comes close, but that usually carries the connotation of serial marriage. In order to come closer to my exact experience, I would have to qualify it as "serial non-marital non-cohabiting monogamy." Out of a string of more than a dozen "relationships" with women, covering nearly 3 decades, I only lived with one of those women for a period of slightly less than 2 years.
I fully understand the social purpose served by the old tradition of long courtships. It used to be well understood by this culture that marital compatibility over the long term has little to do with sexual attraction. Older style courtship allowed the couple to get to know each other and either establish a firm foundation for a durable pair-bond before throwing the volatile and confusing issue of sexuality in the mix or find out that there was no compatibility and move on to someone else. The sexual revolution and the fiction of sexual freedom destroyed this useful social custom and produced two hybrid customs, neither of which worked very well.
The first hybrid was to put the wedding night at the beginning of the courtship rather than at the end of it. This idea was very much in line with men's stereotypical notion of "sexual freedom." Men could get their sexual needs met in the short term, as well as have some insurance against getting trapped in a marriage to a "bum fuck." However, a few dozen centuries of cultural values which also incorporated some basic biological predispositions were not to be dispensed with overnight. Deeply imbedded in our cultural values, and our thinking about them, are notions about the relative value and meaning placed on sex by the two genders. Many writers have pointed out the cultural perception that sex is a FAVOR that women do for men, and that men OWE women something in return for sex. And, while descriptions of what is "owed" may vary widely they all boil down to "THE RELATIONSHIP." Not "A" relationship, "THE RELATIONSHIP". And, of course, the fundamental defining characteristic of "THE RELATIONSHIP" is "THE commitment": which is always presented as " *a* COMMITMENT."
When vomiting the mindless man-bash so common today that "men CAN'T make a commitment", the wimmin-as-total-victim-and-therefor-totally-superior-to-men crowd, put several mean spins on the ball that make it almost impossible to field. First, the word "can't" which presents it as a constitutional deficiency rather than a choice. Simply replace "can't" with "WON'T" and see how the meaning changes. A man who "WON'T" make a commitment is an empowered man who is exercising his right to make choices about his own life. If he WON'T "make a commitment", it is because he sees that he has more to lose than to gain by doing so. Men who WON'T make commitments to women are men who demand reciprocity and fairness as a pre-requisite and WON'T allow themselves to be trapped into a situation where this doesn't exist. It is essential that the spin-doctors keep presenting this as a FAILING rather than a CHOICE.
Second, we have to look at the use of the non-specific "A commitment", as opposed to the very specific "marriage commitment." Virtually all men make and keep thousands of commitments in their lives. But this knowledge must be ruthlessly suppressed and denied in order to obscure the reasons why men make these commitments. Understanding those reasons would immediately point out that the reasons men are so slow in making THE marriage commitment is because marriage values and practices are so heavily stacked against men in this culture. When getting ready to risk one's entire life work, the potential custody of his children as hostages in a child-support extortion scheme, and even potential incarceration, only the most foolish of men will proceed without serious deliberation. But NONE of this can ever be acknowledged if women are to be able to continue to use the commitment issue to guilt-trip men into marrying them before the men are ready.
The net cultural effect of putting the wedding night, and "consummation" of the relationship, at the beginning of the courtship rather than at the end was the de facto elimination of courtship and its social benefits. Both sexes, in reality, make short-term choices regarding people to sleep with on very different criteria than they make long term choices regarding who to marry. The "Sexual Revolution" and "Sexual Freedom" were in fact monstrous hoaxes perpetrated on the culture as whole. Both sexes just assumed that the other would begin to make similar choices to the ones their own made. Both made mistaken assumptions about the portions of the old cultural values that the "other" sex would abandon and about the ones they would hold on to.
Women absolutely refused to turn loose of their old cultural prerogative to be compensated in some way for "giving" the man some sex. Even though the night before she may have actually been the aggressor and more interested in having sex than he was; in the light of day she could always fall back onto female stereotypes and demand that he "owed" her something, even if it was just the symbolic post-coital call. Men who assumed that the women wanted the same thing they did - good, satisfying, no-strings-attached sex - invariably incurred the wrath of women who felt "used." While the specific, but quaint and archaic, term "cad" has dropped out of common usage, the type of man it describes is alive and well in the cultural stereotypes of men. As one of the feminist writers on the web, Lizard Amazon, observed:
"In fact, even without getting a Relationship Contract, women with a "good reputation" can easily get a man to fuck them (because it's assumed that men will want to fuck any available pussy) and then expect the man to treat them AS IF THERE WERE SUCH A CONTRACT. After they have fucked, then the good reputation, high value pussy woman can assume that the man will treat her with respect, he will not fuck anyone else, and he'll maintain the highest standards of truthfulness- and also share his privileged status with her, i.e. she gets to be introduced into his public and private social kinship circles as His Girlfriend, or she gets to begin sharing his material wealth and goods.
"If he doesn't do these things, then the high value pussy woman has society's permission to be outraged and to tell everyone possible that the man has treated her badly. She is now justified in most people's eyes, in wreaking revenge upon the man in any way available to her. She can slap him, hit him, enact public melodrama, slash his tires, sleep with his best friend, destroy his possessions, and slander his character."
- not to mention poison his dog.
In all respects, this first hybrid of old traditions and sexual freedom has been a disaster for everyone concerned: women, men, children, and the culture as a whole. In general women had a great deal of difficulty with the idea of "uncommitted" sex, although far more men also had difficulty with it than the cultural stereotypes suggest.
The second hybrid of the old and new cultural values of sexual freedom, or the lack thereof, was in many respects far more destructive. In most respects, it is identical to the first hybrid in that it attempts to continue to cast new and different behaviors in the old cultural mold, despite the fact that these behaviors are antithetical to the old set of cultural values. This second hybrid continues to give women all the prerogatives of women under the traditional set of values as well as the ability to have sex without having to wait until all that tedious "courtship" is done, but it adds the twist that the woman can be the aggressor. Shrouded by the denial of women's sexual agency by rape and sexual harassment laws, women can seek and even demand sex as active agents; then the moment it has occurred they can invoke whichever of the old sets or new hybrid sets of rules that suits them.
Under this scenario, not only do men OWE women something for sex once they have had it, they also OWE IT TO THE WOMAN who wants to have sex with them TO HAVE SEX WITH HER. This goes far beyond the classic "bait and switch" tactic of the first hybrid. It is one thing for a woman to "allow" a man to bed her then expect "A commitment": it is entirely another for a woman to DEMAND that a man do so, then invoke the "you OWE me A commitment" rule.
Over the past several years, I have encountered and been involved with several women who pursued this strategy. While in some cases there was marginal sexual interest on my part, in most there was none. One of the horribly destructive results of the false confusion of sex with intimacy, which is nearly universal among women, is that many of them confuse a simple warm friendship with something more and do not respect the boundaries of the friendship. The false equivalence of passion and love leads to the erroneous conclusions "since you care about me, you must be turned on by me" and "since you are turned on by me, that means you MUST love me."
Men who are clear on their own internal distinctions between the two may often fall prey to hybrid strategy # 1 - getting trapped into owing a woman a commitment because you have slept with her. But; men who have fallen for and internalized the silly notions of romantic love, soulmates, the missing "other half" that will complete us, and the rest of the social nonsense regarding sex; can often fall into the trap of hybrid strategy # 2 - finding that they OWE a woman "A commitment" for what turns out to have been little more than a mercy hump.
Going into all the reasons why men often find it difficult to turn down a woman who clearly communicates the fact that she WANTS to have sex with him will require a whole 'nother article. But most men will understand them without explanation, so merely mentioning them should be sufficient: chronic sexual deprivation, chivalry, not wanting to "hurt her feelings" by giving the message that you find her unattractive, personally held stereotypes about men and their sexual responses, as well as their own maverick bodies' tendencies to respond physically in situations where they do not respond emotionally.
All of these, and more factors were at work in a relationship with a woman I will call "Pam." Over the years I have developed the practice of designating the women of my ex-relationships with names that summarize the causes of the failure of the relationship. This woman, I refer to as "Pam Fuckaboot" after her practice of humping the side of my leg, exactly like a similarly named dog of my acquaintance would be spurred to humping frenzy by the sight/smell of a pair of boots.
Once I was psychologically and emotionally entrapped in a "relationship" with this woman, I endured months of spending nights with her that began with listening to two hours of her screaming at her mother and two daughters over how much she did for them and how little she got in return. After the nightly family soap-opera-cum-Jerry-Springer-show wound down, we would retire to her room where I would listen to another hour or so of her complaints about work and all the "assholes" she worked with and how she "got them back." Somewhere in the midst of all this, often punctuated by observing how cute her neurotic little dog was for just shitting on the floor, she would roll over on me and begin to grind her crotch into the side of my leg, while her mouth was still running 90 miles/hr. This was her idea of "foreplay." Needless to say, or at least needless to explain to any man, I found this not just UNexciting, but as destructive to any feeling of real sexual interest as anything could be.
In retrospect, all the signs were there from day one. I was just too optimistic, idealistic and, on some issues, guilty and ashamed, to admit it. A retrospective analysis and understanding of the factors which got me into that relationship, and kept me in it long after I knew it was poisonous to me, has served me in good stead in dealing with the women I have encountered since who have sought to entrap me into the same kind of nightmare. I think that perhaps other men may find something of value, as well, in what I learned.
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The Saga of "Pam Fuckaboot" -
We were childhood friends. We went to kindergarten and first, 2nd, and 3rd grades together. She was the proverbial "little red-headed girl" to my Charlie Brown. My family moved right after I completed the third grade, and I only saw her once in the next 32 years. If I had been a little smarter, I would have learned all I needed to know from that one encounter, because she barely had the time of day for me. Like I said, the proverbial "little red-headed girl" on whom I had an innocent childhood crush while she was barely aware that I existed - until her life circumstances changed in a way that I might be "useful" her, that is.
We met again the year we both turned 40. It was at the site where all those rosy memories of bygone times had been written: our grade school. I had been informed by another classmate from that era that the school was about to be torn down and that there was a "party" or reception for all the students who had gone there to get one last look at the old place. And that SHE ( the "little red-headed girl" ) was going to be there.
If I had not been so mislead by fond memories, the warning sirens would have gone off the moment I laid eyes on her. Her wardrobe and demeanor screamed "High Maintenance" ( a term she was fond of using to describe herself ) and "BITCH." But, hey, this was the 90s and "real men" aren't afraid of "strong women." Besides, I had superglued rose colored glasses to my head.
We were both only about 30 days out from breakups of relationships which had more than passing significance, but of course we both withheld that information from the other. No need to scare her/him off. As long-term footsoldiers in the Army of Occupation left behind by the sexual revolution, we both knew that unless we hated each other as we had grown up to be that we would end up in bed together.
I was a lot less anxious to see this happen than she was. From the very beginning there was something seriously off-key - I just couldn't put my finger on it. I hated the way she dressed. It was ugly as hell and had a very middle-aged matronly look about it: kinda like the stuff that Bea Arthur always used to wear. You know what I mean: bulky stuff and long tops to hide how fat she was. I was so determined to overlook this part of it that I also overlooked an even more significant part: it wasn't just the style that put me off - her color sense was atrocious. I certainly wouldn't have bought a couch covered with the patterns and colors she chose, it still bewilders me to this day that I nearly bought a woman covered in it. But, hey, you GOTTA remember that this was THE "little red-headed girl".
The first time I went into her room, a kind of mini-suite in the house she shared with her mother and two daughters, I saw a sign on her door:
"Warning !!!!
You are looking at a HIGH PERFORMANCE woman.
I go from zero to BITCH in 0.2 seconds.
Caution: The BITCH switch sticks."
( "DANGER, DANGER, Will Robinson!" )
I "shoulda" heeded that warning signal. Any woman who takes such great pride in her emotional viciousness and aggression will inevitably turn that weapon on you if you hang around long enough. I did feel a deep sense of fear, which my own denial led me to deal with by confronting her on the implicit message. Of course, I got back her denial in the form of "It's just a JOKE. I'm ONLY TEASING. Lighten up." I was to receive the same answer almost verbatim more than a year later when she waved a knife at me and said menacingly "Remember John Bobbit."
From the outset, she began weaving her little spiderwebs of guilt around me. "I am the Goodbye Girl. Men ALWAYS leave me." Again, if I had had ANY sense, I would have thought "hm? There must be a reason for that." But, hey, you GOTTA remember that this was THE "little red-headed girl".
For the guys only - quick, what is the demanded response when you are fed the cue "men ALWAYS leave me."? Of course, "Well, *** I *** WON'T LEAVE YOU." Boom, there you are - suckered into making "a commitment".
And speaking of commitments, that was the next spiderweb: "Are YOU one of those men who CAN'T make a commitment?!!!!!" ( lessee, oh yeah, the script says that here I say ) "Of course not! I CAN TOO make commitments." Fortunately I'd seen this movie before - "When "Hairy Met Salacious" or something like that - and I still hadn't SLEPT with her, so this one didn't stick. "I have made lots of commitments in my life. The question always is 'commitment to what'?" Unfortunately, I was soon to lose this clarity.
Soon after the two-month mark, during which I was quite content to go out for an occasional bite to eat or other shared activity devoid of ponderous overtones of "romance", she started in on the tactic of "Don't you find me attractive? YOU are MAKING ME FEEL so BAD by not finding me attractive." Over the next several months this "YOU MAKE ME FEEL" battle would be fought many times. In many respects, her co-dependency was the root of all her woes. She could and would never even once take responsibility for her own feelings and instead always blamed them on someone else. The killer blow which freed me from any sense of being bound to treat this woman fairly in any respect came a few days after the xmas when I had blown over $1500 on her, her daughters, and her mother; when she nailed me to the wall with "YOU don't MAKE ME FEEL SPECIAL ENOUGH."
But, I didn't know or understand all that when I still remembered her as THE "little red-headed girl", when I was still hoping that our old friendship would provide a better foundation for a relationship than purely sexual attraction had done, and when I still naively believed that 2 people could work just about anything out if they talked about it fairly and honestly.
A "relationship" is a lot like a train - once you get on board, it takes an act of leaving to get off before the train reaches its destination. Inertia is a powerful force, and guilt an even more powerful one. On any given day, Pam Fuckaboot's tactics of emotional terrorism were not quite enough to warrant leaving and having to endure the all-out emotional war I knew she would begin to wage the moment I left. Like the old principle of the boiled frog, which shows that a frog put in already hot water will sense something wrong and jump out but a frog put in warm water will adjust to gradually increasing temperature until it boils to death, the emotional abuse that Pam Fuckaboot was capable of dishing out only became apparent over time. Each incident was not incrementally THAT MUCH worse than the one which came before it and I survived the previous one so I could no doubt survive this one.
Due to her family obligations of taking care of her mother and 2 dependent daughters, spending the night with her always meant spending it at her house. I would go there 2 or 3 nights per week, tuning out her bitching at her mom and kids as many a man has learned to tune out the bitching of some female in order to achieve some semblance of domestic harmony. Then we would go to her room, go to bed, and I would pray that she was tired and wouldn't be interested in sex. Usually, pretending to be tired and fall immediately to sleep would do the trick and once I turned my back on her she would leave me alone. But there were those times when she demanded my attention and the argument over why I didn't find her attractive would invariably ensue.
Over and over again I would explain the circumstances and how I needed some inclusion of things that I found interesting and exciting to dredge up any interest whatsoever. Over and over again I would hear everything I said denied and refuted and myself blamed entirely for my lack of interest. On one particularly ugly occasion, she told me to go get a shot of testosterone. That was the moment I began to hate her.
As things went from bad to worse, I got to the point where I couldn't stand any physical contact at all. It was during one of the many attempts to bridge the horrible gap of understanding that I got one of the first bits of insight which allowed me to unravel the mystery. She had offered me a backrub, a nice safe non-threatening way to make physical contact. We were in her office where she was printing something off her computer on her dot-matrix printer. As always, her touch was simply UNPLEASANT. I had long been confounded by women whose hands seemed to be dead and incapable of receiving feedback. The whole notion of women being the more sensual sex was still a persistent fiction which I had been unable to overcome. Rather than being pleasant in any way, this "backrub" felt like being poked and prodded. Several times I took her hands and showed her what would feel good and as soon as I let go she went back to poking me in time with the noise of the printer.
In a moment of revelation, I understood that her life was driven so much out of her head that she was simply incapable of ever being able to receive and interpret sensory data. Quite the contrary of the myth that women are sensual, more often than not they are playing out some script out of some stupid chick flick or romance novel and don't have a fucking clue what they are doing. Being someone who can tell the emotional state of someone by just touching them with my fingertips, and trained in massage, it had taken me a very long time to realize that NOT EVERYONE did that or even knew how to.
Over the next several months many battles ensued over the issues of what I needed to feel erotic, her refusal to take responsibility for her own feelings bound up in her repeated use of "YOU MAKE ME FEEL" and my refusal to take on responsibility for her feelings, and her guilt-trip attacks of taking a gaffer-hook of guilt and shame and shoving it in my gut by saying "I just wish that you knew how bad YOU MAKE ME FEEL, lying there night after night, wanting you so badly and knowing that you don't want me. I just hope that someday YOU WILL FEEL THAT BAD."
That gave me my exit cue. The key to our relationship was not how GOOD she wanted to "make me feel" as a result of being associated with her, but rather how BAD she could "make me feel." Even with all this, I STILL felt guilty about leaving her and was trapped by the sense of wanting her to understand WHY I was leaving. I still hadn't grasped that it was the fact that she was COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of this. In retrospect, it became easy to see that if she had shown the characteristic I wanted in order to make it EASY to leave, then it wouldn't have been impossible for me to do anything BUT leave.
In a culture which beats the hell out of men every day for being "bad guys" - rapists, abusers, bunglers, abandoners - I was getting ready to really be a "bad guy" and dump this crazy bitch. And I knew that when I did she would go nuts and try to extract whatever revenge she could and that she would get approval from society at large, and particularly from other women, when she did.
So, when I was recounting all this to my counselor, he looked at me and said - "There Ain't No Way Out, but OUT. "
I got the message. There wasn't going to be an easy exit. It was going to be war and war is hell. And I was going to have to take some lumps. And only when staying in the relationship became more offensive than leaving it, would I make the decision to walk.
She handed me the opportunity very shortly after this. On Christmas day, she waved a knife at me and said "Remember John Bobbit." This was one of her favorite tactics, make a horrible veiled threat and later pass it off as humor. I realized that someone so incapable of any concern or regard for a "significant other" that she could make such a threat was also likely capable of carrying it out, so I never went to sleep in her presence again. This started the ball rolling on the "final confrontation."
When she confronted me on the fact that I had stopped even sharing her bed, I tried one last time to confront the emotional terrorism and abuse which she heaped on everyone around her. Of course she denied any part in it and came back with "When two people are IN LOVE, then they SHOULD feel passion for each other." I pointed out that there was nothing resembling "IN LOVE" in the feelings I felt for her, at which point she went psychotic and began spewing accusations. Among them was the now famous, "YOU don't MAKE ME FEEL SPECIAL ENOUGH."
I realized then that I was staring into the bottomless maw of a black hole that would consume everything which was thrown into it and never be one bit less empty. I realized that I was looking at pure evil and that the "little red-headed girl" was nothing, and never had been anything, but a childish fantasy. I realized that this woman would consume and destroy me, IF I ALLOWED HER TO.
And self preservation kicked in and I said "So be it." and left.
The epilogue lasted many months and included countless screaming matches over the phone with her saying "I FEEL ( this ) and I FEEL ( that )" and every damn thing in the world revolving completely and only around what she did or did not feel. ( Which definitely still included not special ENOUGH. ) In the end, I was forced to do almost what Winston Smith did at the end of the novel "1984" when he betrayed his former lover, Julia. When I had finally had enough of being abused and beaten with this woman's feelings, I finally responded "I DON'T GIVE A SHIT, what or how YOU FEEL."
And there it was: only by complete disconnection, only by achieving absolute and complete disregard for her precious fuckin' "feeeeeelings", was I able to free myself from their tyranny.
From that point on, it reads like a good-news/bad-news joke. The good news is that I don't give a shit about the feelings of a woman like that, so I am now immune to that form of emotional abuse and terrorism. The bad news is that so many women turn out to be exactly like that, that I don't give a shit about the feelings of any woman any more, so a close warm and loving relationship with a woman is now outside my capacity.
Of course, Pam Fuckaboot didn't accomplish this alone. She got help from the woman who destroyed a 20 year friendship by refusing to take "no" for an answer and harassing me for 3 years to turn our friendship into a sexual relationship. Her accusations of "you said I was fat, you said I was ugly" fell on deaf ears because I had never said anything like that. In the end, what killed the friendship was her vicious manipulation of trying to get revenge by implying to her husband that we WERE in fact having such a relationship in order to make him jealous enough to pay to her the kind of attention which I refused to pay. The night he showed up at my door at 1:00 am threatening to kill me, ended that "old friendship" as well.
Since those experiences, and many other similar experiences too numerous and lengthy to include here, my relationships with women have been much simpler, much more rewarding, and far less unpleasant. I DEMAND, not "ask", not "beg", not "hope", not even "expect", but DEMAND that my needs are respected or I show them my ass.
Having learned the depths of viciousness of which women are capable, I no longer make the naive assumption that women are the "fairer" sex so that if they behave abominably that there must be some "good excuse." Having learned that women are every bit as capable of being as abominable as the most abominable man, I go into every encounter with my eyes wide open and an attitude of zero tolerance.
I am no longer a nice man, a "sweet" man, or even a "gentle" man, but I have learned that those qualities make men sitting ducks for predatory women. In the gender war, I have made the decision that it is better to be a dis-honorable survivor than an honorable casualty.
Monday, March 14, 2005
EOTM: Equal Time - Tales of Offensive and Obnoxious Women
Today, meaning at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, western culture is saturated by awful tales of destructive men and by the notion of unversal female victimhood. The pervasive fiction of the moral superiority of women, perfectly illustrated by the term "the FAIRer sex", has led to a cultural view of men that is unrealistically and destructively negative. The flip side is that the view of women is unrealistically and destructively positive.
In order to give men "equal time", this page will be dedicated to the stories of men who have had to contend with, and surivive, dealing with horribly dark and destructive women at the same time they are trying to deal with a culture in absolute denial that women can be that way. The stories will be anonymous because it is the very fact that it could be ANY woman or ANY man around you that render the results so tragic.
There Ain’t No Way Out But Out
The Woman who couldn’t cope with NOT being lied to
In order to give men "equal time", this page will be dedicated to the stories of men who have had to contend with, and surivive, dealing with horribly dark and destructive women at the same time they are trying to deal with a culture in absolute denial that women can be that way. The stories will be anonymous because it is the very fact that it could be ANY woman or ANY man around you that render the results so tragic.
There Ain’t No Way Out But Out
The Woman who couldn’t cope with NOT being lied to
Sunday, March 13, 2005
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
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
Saturday, March 12, 2005
EOTM: Confronting Matriarchy
All of western culture is ruled by a vast and invisible matriarchy operating from the shadows so its actions are nearly invisible. The foundations of this Matriarchy are maternal authority and women’s Superiority Complex. From the moment of birth, men are taught to defer to maternal authority. As soon as they enter public school, they confront almost exclusively female teachers whose absolute authority over the classroom is enforced by what few men are part of the public education system. In high school, young males are usually exposed to a few male teachers whose own exercise of authority is quite different from their female counterparts. Male teachers often handle discipline problems in the classroom at a much lower level than female teachers, who tend to escalate matters to male administrators if their hegemony is challenged.
Men who marry usually find their wives expecting the mantle of maternal authority to be simply handed over to them by and from the man’s mother without missing a beat. It sometimes takes many battles for a man to make the point to a new wife that she is his spouse and equal, not his mother. Women who stubbornly insist on being slow learners on this issue set up oppositional and adversarial positions which often will poison the marriage over time. Women expect to be able to make the rules and simply expect men to obey them. Men who assert themselves and demand some degree of regard and consideration for their point of view will often have to fight the battle for recognition over, and over, and over.
When feminists realized that they were about to overthrow women’s own matriarchal power base with their initial anti-marriage and anti-motherhood stances, they did an abrupt about-face and embraced motherhood even more fervently than they had rejected it just a few years before.
Matriarchy has now taken over the court system as feminist "jurisprudence" has replaced objective facts with female feelings as the relevant criteria for determining guilt or innocence. A woman’s emotional state has even become adequate defense against charges of murder, and women have a multitude of emotional defenses, ranging from the abuse excuse to PMS, which literally allow them to get away with murdering men, children, and other women.
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Shadow Power
Matriarchy depends on shadow power. It must deny its power and function from the shadows. All matriarchal power stems from the maternal role and maternal authority, and the power to grant or deny sex.
Foundations of Female Power
1 - The Mating Dance - Sexual Power
2 - Maternal Authority - Moral Power
3 - Control of the Education/Socialization system - Indoctrination Power
4 - The Male Protector Role - The Power of Weakness
5 - The Rescue Reflex - Victim Power
6 - Unfair Fighting - Confusion Power Tantrum Power,
7 - Emotional Terrorism and Violence - Intimidation Power
8 - Betrayal - Shock and disappointment Power
Foundations of Male Powerlessness -
1 - Denial of Fear
2 - Fear of Isolation
3 - The need to convince, have credibility, be acceptable, receive validation.
As boys, men are separated from other males, fathers particularly, terrorized and isolated, and told that the only source of emotional sustenance and intimacy for was with women and in sexual union. This places a great deal of power in the hands of women, which is difficult to resist the temptation to abuse.
As men confront the totally changed male and female roles that are the legacy of feminism, women are going to lose a lot of their historic moral power. Confronting the Matriarchy involves shedding light on its workings - naming the vague purpose behind the behavior intended to confuse and obfuscate.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Men who marry usually find their wives expecting the mantle of maternal authority to be simply handed over to them by and from the man’s mother without missing a beat. It sometimes takes many battles for a man to make the point to a new wife that she is his spouse and equal, not his mother. Women who stubbornly insist on being slow learners on this issue set up oppositional and adversarial positions which often will poison the marriage over time. Women expect to be able to make the rules and simply expect men to obey them. Men who assert themselves and demand some degree of regard and consideration for their point of view will often have to fight the battle for recognition over, and over, and over.
When feminists realized that they were about to overthrow women’s own matriarchal power base with their initial anti-marriage and anti-motherhood stances, they did an abrupt about-face and embraced motherhood even more fervently than they had rejected it just a few years before.
Matriarchy has now taken over the court system as feminist "jurisprudence" has replaced objective facts with female feelings as the relevant criteria for determining guilt or innocence. A woman’s emotional state has even become adequate defense against charges of murder, and women have a multitude of emotional defenses, ranging from the abuse excuse to PMS, which literally allow them to get away with murdering men, children, and other women.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shadow Power
Matriarchy depends on shadow power. It must deny its power and function from the shadows. All matriarchal power stems from the maternal role and maternal authority, and the power to grant or deny sex.
Foundations of Female Power
1 - The Mating Dance - Sexual Power
2 - Maternal Authority - Moral Power
3 - Control of the Education/Socialization system - Indoctrination Power
4 - The Male Protector Role - The Power of Weakness
5 - The Rescue Reflex - Victim Power
6 - Unfair Fighting - Confusion Power Tantrum Power,
7 - Emotional Terrorism and Violence - Intimidation Power
8 - Betrayal - Shock and disappointment Power
Foundations of Male Powerlessness -
1 - Denial of Fear
2 - Fear of Isolation
3 - The need to convince, have credibility, be acceptable, receive validation.
As boys, men are separated from other males, fathers particularly, terrorized and isolated, and told that the only source of emotional sustenance and intimacy for was with women and in sexual union. This places a great deal of power in the hands of women, which is difficult to resist the temptation to abuse.
As men confront the totally changed male and female roles that are the legacy of feminism, women are going to lose a lot of their historic moral power. Confronting the Matriarchy involves shedding light on its workings - naming the vague purpose behind the behavior intended to confuse and obfuscate.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Friday, March 11, 2005
EOTM: Surviving a Culture of Singleness: Choosing Unmated Lifestyles
"In the beginning, there was the "Battle of the sexes", and it was bad enough. Then, on the end of the 2nd millenium, man and woman made "Gender War", and they looked at it, and it was worse. "
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Surviving a culture of singleness: choosing unmated lifestyles.
You would have to have been living under a rock for the past 30 years to have been unaware of the major social shifts occuring in the structure and function of marriage, the family, and child rearing.
Ethical, caring, progressive men have few palatable choices in the mating game today. Culturally, fathers have been reduced to walking wallets. Men who want a real role in raising their children are confronted with the growing acceptance of single motherhood, with its inescapable implication of single fatherhood. As the battle for "wage parity" continues, gains in women's income are often offset by the reduced numbers of men who outearn them and are thus considered "eligible."
Resource competition is reaching levels never even dreamed before. The entire notion of "necessity" has been redefined in two generations and very little which is regarded as essential today was even dreamed of by the generation that spanned the great depression and WW II. The notion of entitlements introduced during the 1930s to pull the nation out of the depression has fossilized into making the government the parent of all. Fathers are disposable as long as the mother has income from somewhere. Mothers are disposable because now we have "day care" and "quality" time.
I believe that Charlie Chaplin's vision in "Modern Times" has become reality. Human beings have been mechanized just like industry and standardization has become the rule of success. Individuality, individual variation, and uniqueness have all succumbed to mass culture.
Since the 1960s, the focus in the realignment has been women's roles and women's issues. The movement which has spearheaded this effort has even had a feminine name. In fact, feminism literally is the ideology of the feminine.
Despite all the changes in women's roles, the expectations within the culture were that men would continue to fulfill all their old duties. And, since the generation of men entering into the gauntlet that the mating years were to become were brought up expecting to do just that, the boomer generation for the most part tried to comply. However, the change in women's roles has had such profound and lasting changes that men's roles are in transition whether anyone likes it or not.
As the provider role falls by the wayside on the pilgrimmage to wage parity, and the disciplinarian role falls to the relentless efforts to uncover victims of abuse, men are faced with being criticized for what they were brought up to do. There has been deep and long standing bitter resentment of that by men. And the net effect on men raised after this vast social change will take decades to fully assess.
However, one effect is already beginning to become apparent and that is an awareness of just how expensive fertility has become. Particularly in the US, people accustomed to the highest living standard in the world are ripping and tearing at each other over the belief that the share of the wealth which they are receiving is not large enough. Having children and taking on the providing role means you have to take on the responsibility for providing them with ENOUGH. Remember, everyone wants to "HAVE IT ALL" these days. It's not just "men against women", children are turning on their parents these days. Remember the Menendez brothers?
With so many obstacles and burdens to raising children, as opposed to simply becoming pregnant, it is something that men will begin to avoid with the same fervor that women have pursued birth control and such radical tactics as abortion. C4m, choice for men, is the legal equivalent to abortion. Male birth control pills are being tested. Men are challenging in court the rights of women to conceive and stick them with the bill.
We have reached the stage in polarization between the genders where the user of birth control now has to warrant its effectiveness.
The disruption in fertility patterns will soon shift from the generalized right to NOT reproduce, to certain more fundamental questions about the right TO reproduce. Based on cost alone, many will have to make the decision to not have children because they can't afford them.
The primary question will end up being whether the sex drive can be successfully defined completely away from its history-long biological purpose - continuation of the species - into a new "social" mold. Can everything about us, from our bodies to our most basic drives, be simply redefined in semantic terms and become, like feminism, whatever we say it is?
I contend not.
The legal and cultural situation is forcing a reversal in some of the responsibilties of relationship initiation and maintenance. Men are being forced to take on the role of gatekeeper and deal with women who are very aggressive in pursuing sex. The crushing burdens of the current idealized father role and the legal risks posed by Sexual Harassment and Rape laws take a great deal of the attractiveness out of women in general.
Maleness, liking women, wanting to have sex with them, and fatherhood have all been criminalized. It is easy to tell what a culture is trying to stamp out by what it criminalizes. How boys and young men will respond is hard to predict. But they will doubtless react very differently from their fathers whose actions were criminalized after they commited them.
For the near future, at least, it seems that both men and women will need to adjust to unmated and childless lives. It is highly doubtful that government subsidies will be extended to children conceived through a sperm bank, at least not for very long if women continue to take on increased tax burdens as their income increases. As hard as the conservatives have fought to preserve it, the nuclear family looks like it is going into mothballs like nuclear arms.
What will replace it is anybody's guess. And everybody is guessing. And the stakes for a wrong guess just keep getting higher.
The boomers were the straddle generation. They were born and socialized under the old ideas of family, even though they were already breaking down, then tried to make the transition to living under the new ones. The results were wildly mixed.
Now, the boomers are increasingly adopting singleness as a lifestyle and retiring from the gender armies to let the younger ones fight it out. The question is whether the young will keep on fighting it, or reject the gender war just like the boomers rejected the Vietnam war. Interestingly, I saw a boomer post on an NG titled "They're turning on us." Well, that's what we taught them.
I hope this turns out to be the case. Young men and women have inherited a legacy of hatred and distrust that will be hard to overcome. They have all been fed a lot of propaganda. I'm glad I grew up before all this started to happen. I don't envy them the task.
One thing seems certain - that both genders will need to approach fertility in more cautious and planned ways. But certainly for men, exploration of alternatives to fatherhood will definitely need to be considered.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Water Gets Deeper
In the wake of radical feminism, it seems like it has taken a very long time for an equally radical and forceful masculism to develop. Both sides are now dealing from positions of defensiveness and anger.
Below are some essays on what such a radical masculism might look like. In effect, it is nothing more than actual implementation of the fish and bicyles concept which has been the slogan of womanism since the early 70s. And the sad truth is that, once out of the gauntlet of the child-bearing years, men and women DON'T really need each other for much of anything. The interdependency which has characterized the human race since its beginnings, whatever creation myth you subscribe to, between men and women has been severed. Young men are talking about their need to have "reproductive independence" from women.
I believe that the mere fact that the sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from each other is clear indication that the human race is either getting ready to completely unravel, or follow Huxley's model of the "Brave New World" and grow kids in test tubes and indoctrinate them in government run centers. Will humans make the next leap toward becoming machines? And over time will the distinction between human being and machine break down?
Some Radical Notions on biological and social processes and the future of culture
The Feralization of Culture – Building better predators
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Surviving a culture of singleness: choosing unmated lifestyles.
You would have to have been living under a rock for the past 30 years to have been unaware of the major social shifts occuring in the structure and function of marriage, the family, and child rearing.
Ethical, caring, progressive men have few palatable choices in the mating game today. Culturally, fathers have been reduced to walking wallets. Men who want a real role in raising their children are confronted with the growing acceptance of single motherhood, with its inescapable implication of single fatherhood. As the battle for "wage parity" continues, gains in women's income are often offset by the reduced numbers of men who outearn them and are thus considered "eligible."
Resource competition is reaching levels never even dreamed before. The entire notion of "necessity" has been redefined in two generations and very little which is regarded as essential today was even dreamed of by the generation that spanned the great depression and WW II. The notion of entitlements introduced during the 1930s to pull the nation out of the depression has fossilized into making the government the parent of all. Fathers are disposable as long as the mother has income from somewhere. Mothers are disposable because now we have "day care" and "quality" time.
I believe that Charlie Chaplin's vision in "Modern Times" has become reality. Human beings have been mechanized just like industry and standardization has become the rule of success. Individuality, individual variation, and uniqueness have all succumbed to mass culture.
Since the 1960s, the focus in the realignment has been women's roles and women's issues. The movement which has spearheaded this effort has even had a feminine name. In fact, feminism literally is the ideology of the feminine.
Despite all the changes in women's roles, the expectations within the culture were that men would continue to fulfill all their old duties. And, since the generation of men entering into the gauntlet that the mating years were to become were brought up expecting to do just that, the boomer generation for the most part tried to comply. However, the change in women's roles has had such profound and lasting changes that men's roles are in transition whether anyone likes it or not.
As the provider role falls by the wayside on the pilgrimmage to wage parity, and the disciplinarian role falls to the relentless efforts to uncover victims of abuse, men are faced with being criticized for what they were brought up to do. There has been deep and long standing bitter resentment of that by men. And the net effect on men raised after this vast social change will take decades to fully assess.
However, one effect is already beginning to become apparent and that is an awareness of just how expensive fertility has become. Particularly in the US, people accustomed to the highest living standard in the world are ripping and tearing at each other over the belief that the share of the wealth which they are receiving is not large enough. Having children and taking on the providing role means you have to take on the responsibility for providing them with ENOUGH. Remember, everyone wants to "HAVE IT ALL" these days. It's not just "men against women", children are turning on their parents these days. Remember the Menendez brothers?
With so many obstacles and burdens to raising children, as opposed to simply becoming pregnant, it is something that men will begin to avoid with the same fervor that women have pursued birth control and such radical tactics as abortion. C4m, choice for men, is the legal equivalent to abortion. Male birth control pills are being tested. Men are challenging in court the rights of women to conceive and stick them with the bill.
We have reached the stage in polarization between the genders where the user of birth control now has to warrant its effectiveness.
The disruption in fertility patterns will soon shift from the generalized right to NOT reproduce, to certain more fundamental questions about the right TO reproduce. Based on cost alone, many will have to make the decision to not have children because they can't afford them.
The primary question will end up being whether the sex drive can be successfully defined completely away from its history-long biological purpose - continuation of the species - into a new "social" mold. Can everything about us, from our bodies to our most basic drives, be simply redefined in semantic terms and become, like feminism, whatever we say it is?
I contend not.
The legal and cultural situation is forcing a reversal in some of the responsibilties of relationship initiation and maintenance. Men are being forced to take on the role of gatekeeper and deal with women who are very aggressive in pursuing sex. The crushing burdens of the current idealized father role and the legal risks posed by Sexual Harassment and Rape laws take a great deal of the attractiveness out of women in general.
Maleness, liking women, wanting to have sex with them, and fatherhood have all been criminalized. It is easy to tell what a culture is trying to stamp out by what it criminalizes. How boys and young men will respond is hard to predict. But they will doubtless react very differently from their fathers whose actions were criminalized after they commited them.
For the near future, at least, it seems that both men and women will need to adjust to unmated and childless lives. It is highly doubtful that government subsidies will be extended to children conceived through a sperm bank, at least not for very long if women continue to take on increased tax burdens as their income increases. As hard as the conservatives have fought to preserve it, the nuclear family looks like it is going into mothballs like nuclear arms.
What will replace it is anybody's guess. And everybody is guessing. And the stakes for a wrong guess just keep getting higher.
The boomers were the straddle generation. They were born and socialized under the old ideas of family, even though they were already breaking down, then tried to make the transition to living under the new ones. The results were wildly mixed.
Now, the boomers are increasingly adopting singleness as a lifestyle and retiring from the gender armies to let the younger ones fight it out. The question is whether the young will keep on fighting it, or reject the gender war just like the boomers rejected the Vietnam war. Interestingly, I saw a boomer post on an NG titled "They're turning on us." Well, that's what we taught them.
I hope this turns out to be the case. Young men and women have inherited a legacy of hatred and distrust that will be hard to overcome. They have all been fed a lot of propaganda. I'm glad I grew up before all this started to happen. I don't envy them the task.
One thing seems certain - that both genders will need to approach fertility in more cautious and planned ways. But certainly for men, exploration of alternatives to fatherhood will definitely need to be considered.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Water Gets Deeper
In the wake of radical feminism, it seems like it has taken a very long time for an equally radical and forceful masculism to develop. Both sides are now dealing from positions of defensiveness and anger.
Below are some essays on what such a radical masculism might look like. In effect, it is nothing more than actual implementation of the fish and bicyles concept which has been the slogan of womanism since the early 70s. And the sad truth is that, once out of the gauntlet of the child-bearing years, men and women DON'T really need each other for much of anything. The interdependency which has characterized the human race since its beginnings, whatever creation myth you subscribe to, between men and women has been severed. Young men are talking about their need to have "reproductive independence" from women.
I believe that the mere fact that the sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from each other is clear indication that the human race is either getting ready to completely unravel, or follow Huxley's model of the "Brave New World" and grow kids in test tubes and indoctrinate them in government run centers. Will humans make the next leap toward becoming machines? And over time will the distinction between human being and machine break down?
Some Radical Notions on biological and social processes and the future of culture
The Feralization of Culture – Building better predators
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Thursday, March 10, 2005
EOTM: Hard Analysis
Hard Analysis Sites:
All around the net, and to some small degree of print media, current social conditions are being subjected to some very hard analysis.
While I do not necessarily agree with every little thing said on these sites, I do agree with a lot of it, and particularly with the principle of gathering information and coming to one's own conclusion rather than just accepting what the media and the government force feed us.
Andy Turnbull – “The Cassandra Papers”
Backlash.com - The name says it
Kack Kammer: rulymob.com If Men Have All the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules?
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Exceptional Hard Analysis Articles:
Here is a collection of articles which clearly and unambiguously describe one aspect or another of current social conditions.
David Shackleton:
The War Against Men
Feminism Exposed: Our blindness to feminine evil
Erin Pizzey:
How the Women’s Movement Taught Women to Hate Men
Jean Sonmor:
Feminism Led to Masculine Rage
All around the net, and to some small degree of print media, current social conditions are being subjected to some very hard analysis.
While I do not necessarily agree with every little thing said on these sites, I do agree with a lot of it, and particularly with the principle of gathering information and coming to one's own conclusion rather than just accepting what the media and the government force feed us.
Andy Turnbull – “The Cassandra Papers”
Backlash.com - The name says it
Kack Kammer: rulymob.com If Men Have All the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exceptional Hard Analysis Articles:
Here is a collection of articles which clearly and unambiguously describe one aspect or another of current social conditions.
David Shackleton:
The War Against Men
Feminism Exposed: Our blindness to feminine evil
Erin Pizzey:
How the Women’s Movement Taught Women to Hate Men
Jean Sonmor:
Feminism Led to Masculine Rage
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Feminism Deconstructed: Nothing but a Hate Movement
."I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." -- Robin Morgan - former president of the National Ourganization for Women (NOW) and editor of MS magazine
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Feminism is nothing but a hate movement pure and simple. From the opening shot of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, to today's endless man-bashing, feminism has been first and foremost, predominantly and overwhelmingly, about hating men and all things male.
The remarkable peristence of the credibility of feminism as movement of so-called "equality" does not speak well of the intelligence of the public at large. A growing body of dissenting voice to the anti-reality dogma of feminism is finally beginning to make itself heard.
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.Tuesday, March 08, 2005
EOTM: In a Male Voice
These articles are written in a male voice. This means a male focus on the issues, male experience and values reflected, and sometimes "strong" language. If any of it offends you, go away - you don't have to read it.
Men have had 30 years of having women's versions and descriptions of their experience shoved down their throats. Even a major writer on men's issues, Warren Farrell, takes men to task for it. What no one seems to acknowledge is that men have been speaking out for a long time, and often when men do - they are shouted down. Time and again, I have seen men try to say what what their experience was like, only to have it denied and they be told what it was or "should" be instead.
The concerns of women have become so numerous, dramatic, and filled with suffering that it seems the only way men can possibly avoid victimizing them is to avoid them as completely as possible.
Models of Man
Men have had 30 years of having women's versions and descriptions of their experience shoved down their throats. Even a major writer on men's issues, Warren Farrell, takes men to task for it. What no one seems to acknowledge is that men have been speaking out for a long time, and often when men do - they are shouted down. Time and again, I have seen men try to say what what their experience was like, only to have it denied and they be told what it was or "should" be instead.
The concerns of women have become so numerous, dramatic, and filled with suffering that it seems the only way men can possibly avoid victimizing them is to avoid them as completely as possible.
Models of Man
Monday, March 07, 2005
EOTM: The Nature of Things
Foremost among the foundations of femimism is the need to deny nature. The separation of the sex act from the bearing of the children that it produces has produced a culture which devalues all human life: male, female, and child.
The old "mating dance" between men and women has taken an ugly turn. Our bodies are natural creations and our desires do not much listen to "shoulds".
Whether human beings can totally be redefined socially, as the grand socialist experiment has been trying since the late 1800s, or whether their natural origins will continue to assert themselves is still up for questioning.
Biological Basics
It’s About Reproduction and Status: Why Men Go For “The Look” (or seem to think with our genitals at times)
Some Radical Notions on Biological and Social Selection Processes and the Future of Culture
The Feralization of Culture: Building Better Predators
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Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
The old "mating dance" between men and women has taken an ugly turn. Our bodies are natural creations and our desires do not much listen to "shoulds".
Whether human beings can totally be redefined socially, as the grand socialist experiment has been trying since the late 1800s, or whether their natural origins will continue to assert themselves is still up for questioning.
Biological Basics
It’s About Reproduction and Status: Why Men Go For “The Look” (or seem to think with our genitals at times)
Some Radical Notions on Biological and Social Selection Processes and the Future of Culture
The Feralization of Culture: Building Better Predators
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Sunday, March 06, 2005
EOTM: A Simple, Brief, Rationalist Alternative to Feminist Theory
"Once upon a time..." as so many stories begin -
Most people did NOT live in the suburbs. They did not have running water, gas furnaces, electric lights, dishwashers, televisions, garbage pickup, laundry facilities in the basement or utility room, fast-food joints on every corner, access to amazing medical techology, germ-free water, or a zillion other things which modern women and men simply take for granted. Life in general was a lot of work and, well, that is or was "life." It was pretty much the only game there was unless you chose death, which the world stood ready to deal you in thousands of different ways.
Rather than being made in "god's" garage with his power tools, humans have spent at least a couple of million years developing tool using capacity, so-called "intelligence", and that form of social organization we euphemistically call "civilization" despite the fact that it becomes less "civil" with each passing year.
Fairly early on, our clever ancestors learned that some ways of going about things worked better than others in assuring the surival of the tribe by maximizing the survival potential of the individual members - things like organization, cooperation, and division of labor. Being a species pretty poorly physically adapted to most environments, a fairly large percentage of our time and energy went into adapting the environment to our needs. Like everything alive, individuals valued their own lives pretty highly, but also recognized a certain value in survival of the tribe as a whole over any individual. The central survival factor of the tribe was fertility, and archeological evidence suggests that fertility was worshiped by every pre-technical people.
Like any good resource manager, our ancestors based their resource management strategy on the scarcest resource, not the most abundant. Therefore, the female contribution to fertility was considered far more valuable than the male contribution. As long as starvation was not emminent, the female ability to bring forth life was the most mystical and valuable thing possible. People worshipped it, and protected it at almost any cost. It made so much sense to leave any dangerous activity to men and protect the women from danger that these peoples would have likely regarded as insane or very evil the suggestion that anyone would do otherwise.
The best description of the development of culture that I have ever seen is by Anne McCaffrey in what has developed into the standard boilerplate introduction to her hugely successful "Dragonriders of Pern" series of novels.
"... people went about their separate tasks, and each developed habits that became custom, which solidified into tradition as incontrovertible as law."
Over time these traditions did, indeed, become codified into law as population density increased and the fact that human beings are not always perfect and sometimes act in selfish and destructive manners forced groups into adopting formal codes of conduct and punishing those who strayed too far outside of them. The conservationist oriented approach to protecting the groups future by protecting its fertility led to a natural and informal division of labor with women extending and continuing the natural role of bringing forth and nourishing children to caring for them until they gained a reasonable measure of self-sufficiency, and men generally undertaking the more strenuous and risky activities required to provide for survival of the group.
Given the immense body of knowledge that must be transmitted to the young of the human species, and the limited ability of the young to understand the full reasoning behind it ( which is why the young are called "immature") it was a lot more practical and efficient to simply tell the junior members of the culture what to do than it was to argue with them over why it was a good idea to do it that way. Frequently, the reasons would never be explained and the practical considerations underlying the choice of behavior were lost as cultural knowledge. Then, if the environment changed such that the dictated behavior was no longer really necessary, it was still continued because people had forgotten the reason why they did it in the first place.
In human history, there are 2 great revolutions which created a distinct and abrupt discontinuity in the environment. The first revolution was the agricultural revolution which occurred perhaps 10,000 years ago. Agriculture stabilized the food supply and made both possible and necessary permanent encampments and domiciles. ( For more on this aspect, click here.)
The second revolution can be viewed many different ways, but I call it the "Scientific and Technological" revolution which began with the smelting of metal and continues to this day in the form of industrialization and technology based mass culture. This revolution gave homo sapiens a degree of control over their environment that the race had dreamed about for all time. A degree of control over, and certainty about, the future which had been the secret wish of all peoples became reality. With the advent of Pasteur's germ theory, the last great restraining force on human population levels, disease, was removed and the population of humanity exploded. About 1850, the human population of the world was about 1.5 billion. Now, 150 years later it is 4X that: about 6 billion.
Despite all the changes in the environment which made the survival of the species no longer so dependant on fertility, ten thousand years of social history, custom, and law do not go away overnight. Codified into almost every aspect of law, and deeply embedded in all social customs and values, is the notion that women (meaning their fertility) MUST be protected and that men are highly expendable. The primary value of male life has always been measured by how much he produced to contribute to the group as a whole. Before the vast consolidation of durable wealth in the hands of a small percentage of the population, and before men were forced off the land which was the source of their sustenance by enclosure and the need to drive them into the cities to provide the workforce for the Industrial transformation, this productivity was measured directly in terms of production of food. Post-enclosure, this value was transferred directly to the ability to provide food by buying it, i.e. wages.
Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, and you find men's value still being determined by their earning capacity, and women still choosing their mates based to a large degree on this.
Far from there being ANY sort of world-wide and history-long conspiracy by men to do awful and nasty things to women, to "OPPRESS" them, the male attitude has been driven by a deep and inherent appreciation of women's value and a desire to protect and take care of them.
However, our culture has never come to terms with the impact which death control must inevitably have on our social customs and value structure. The desire of women to free themselves of their biological role as producers of babies is understandable given the many burdens that role creates for them. But, in order for women to be free of that role, men must also be free of the role of providing care and maintenance for those babies as the only means to social identity.
The monstrous lie and hoax perpetrated by feminism, i.e. that it is MEN who have fought any gains or progress toward the re-balancing of the power relationships between men and women should be immediately obvious in the fact that so many men were early supporters of feminism and that the lament heard from women from the mid-1970s on was NOT that men were seeking to "OPPRESS" women into traditional marriage but rather EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. Men weren't badgering women to marry them, they were REFUSING to "commit" to marriage themselves.
Were it not for the elements of man-hating and victimism which were integrated into feminist thought from very the beginning by early feminist theorists and writers like Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Valerie Solanas, and Robin Morgan; then carried on in fine style by Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolfe, Sally Miller-Gearhart, and a host of others; the radical shift from woman-as-strong to woman-as-total-victim as the core message of feminism would have been obvious.
It is still fascinating to read the works of such new-wave feminists as Rene Denfield and Robin Blumner who point out the Victorian attitudes of female fragility, sensitivity, and moral superiority pushed by contemporary feminism, but do not take the next logical step. If WOMEN are the ones most aggressively pushing these notions today, end of the 20th century, has any woman raised the question whether women might (now just consider the possibility) just have been the driving force in promoting those notions the last time around. Just maybe, the paternalistic attitude of culture toward women has been promoted and nurtured by women all along, in order to gain the special protections and treatment that women get from a culture which has those attitudes. Special treatment like first grabs on the lifeboat seats when the Titanic goes down, or special "Violence Against Women Act" laws.
Hmmmm? Do you think that perhaps women could have been an active and major driving force all along in promoting the notion of how weak, capricious, and in need of special treatment women are?
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Most people did NOT live in the suburbs. They did not have running water, gas furnaces, electric lights, dishwashers, televisions, garbage pickup, laundry facilities in the basement or utility room, fast-food joints on every corner, access to amazing medical techology, germ-free water, or a zillion other things which modern women and men simply take for granted. Life in general was a lot of work and, well, that is or was "life." It was pretty much the only game there was unless you chose death, which the world stood ready to deal you in thousands of different ways.
Rather than being made in "god's" garage with his power tools, humans have spent at least a couple of million years developing tool using capacity, so-called "intelligence", and that form of social organization we euphemistically call "civilization" despite the fact that it becomes less "civil" with each passing year.
Fairly early on, our clever ancestors learned that some ways of going about things worked better than others in assuring the surival of the tribe by maximizing the survival potential of the individual members - things like organization, cooperation, and division of labor. Being a species pretty poorly physically adapted to most environments, a fairly large percentage of our time and energy went into adapting the environment to our needs. Like everything alive, individuals valued their own lives pretty highly, but also recognized a certain value in survival of the tribe as a whole over any individual. The central survival factor of the tribe was fertility, and archeological evidence suggests that fertility was worshiped by every pre-technical people.
Like any good resource manager, our ancestors based their resource management strategy on the scarcest resource, not the most abundant. Therefore, the female contribution to fertility was considered far more valuable than the male contribution. As long as starvation was not emminent, the female ability to bring forth life was the most mystical and valuable thing possible. People worshipped it, and protected it at almost any cost. It made so much sense to leave any dangerous activity to men and protect the women from danger that these peoples would have likely regarded as insane or very evil the suggestion that anyone would do otherwise.
The best description of the development of culture that I have ever seen is by Anne McCaffrey in what has developed into the standard boilerplate introduction to her hugely successful "Dragonriders of Pern" series of novels.
"... people went about their separate tasks, and each developed habits that became custom, which solidified into tradition as incontrovertible as law."
Over time these traditions did, indeed, become codified into law as population density increased and the fact that human beings are not always perfect and sometimes act in selfish and destructive manners forced groups into adopting formal codes of conduct and punishing those who strayed too far outside of them. The conservationist oriented approach to protecting the groups future by protecting its fertility led to a natural and informal division of labor with women extending and continuing the natural role of bringing forth and nourishing children to caring for them until they gained a reasonable measure of self-sufficiency, and men generally undertaking the more strenuous and risky activities required to provide for survival of the group.
Given the immense body of knowledge that must be transmitted to the young of the human species, and the limited ability of the young to understand the full reasoning behind it ( which is why the young are called "immature") it was a lot more practical and efficient to simply tell the junior members of the culture what to do than it was to argue with them over why it was a good idea to do it that way. Frequently, the reasons would never be explained and the practical considerations underlying the choice of behavior were lost as cultural knowledge. Then, if the environment changed such that the dictated behavior was no longer really necessary, it was still continued because people had forgotten the reason why they did it in the first place.
In human history, there are 2 great revolutions which created a distinct and abrupt discontinuity in the environment. The first revolution was the agricultural revolution which occurred perhaps 10,000 years ago. Agriculture stabilized the food supply and made both possible and necessary permanent encampments and domiciles. ( For more on this aspect, click here.)
The second revolution can be viewed many different ways, but I call it the "Scientific and Technological" revolution which began with the smelting of metal and continues to this day in the form of industrialization and technology based mass culture. This revolution gave homo sapiens a degree of control over their environment that the race had dreamed about for all time. A degree of control over, and certainty about, the future which had been the secret wish of all peoples became reality. With the advent of Pasteur's germ theory, the last great restraining force on human population levels, disease, was removed and the population of humanity exploded. About 1850, the human population of the world was about 1.5 billion. Now, 150 years later it is 4X that: about 6 billion.
Despite all the changes in the environment which made the survival of the species no longer so dependant on fertility, ten thousand years of social history, custom, and law do not go away overnight. Codified into almost every aspect of law, and deeply embedded in all social customs and values, is the notion that women (meaning their fertility) MUST be protected and that men are highly expendable. The primary value of male life has always been measured by how much he produced to contribute to the group as a whole. Before the vast consolidation of durable wealth in the hands of a small percentage of the population, and before men were forced off the land which was the source of their sustenance by enclosure and the need to drive them into the cities to provide the workforce for the Industrial transformation, this productivity was measured directly in terms of production of food. Post-enclosure, this value was transferred directly to the ability to provide food by buying it, i.e. wages.
Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, and you find men's value still being determined by their earning capacity, and women still choosing their mates based to a large degree on this.
Far from there being ANY sort of world-wide and history-long conspiracy by men to do awful and nasty things to women, to "OPPRESS" them, the male attitude has been driven by a deep and inherent appreciation of women's value and a desire to protect and take care of them.
However, our culture has never come to terms with the impact which death control must inevitably have on our social customs and value structure. The desire of women to free themselves of their biological role as producers of babies is understandable given the many burdens that role creates for them. But, in order for women to be free of that role, men must also be free of the role of providing care and maintenance for those babies as the only means to social identity.
The monstrous lie and hoax perpetrated by feminism, i.e. that it is MEN who have fought any gains or progress toward the re-balancing of the power relationships between men and women should be immediately obvious in the fact that so many men were early supporters of feminism and that the lament heard from women from the mid-1970s on was NOT that men were seeking to "OPPRESS" women into traditional marriage but rather EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. Men weren't badgering women to marry them, they were REFUSING to "commit" to marriage themselves.
Were it not for the elements of man-hating and victimism which were integrated into feminist thought from very the beginning by early feminist theorists and writers like Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Valerie Solanas, and Robin Morgan; then carried on in fine style by Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolfe, Sally Miller-Gearhart, and a host of others; the radical shift from woman-as-strong to woman-as-total-victim as the core message of feminism would have been obvious.
It is still fascinating to read the works of such new-wave feminists as Rene Denfield and Robin Blumner who point out the Victorian attitudes of female fragility, sensitivity, and moral superiority pushed by contemporary feminism, but do not take the next logical step. If WOMEN are the ones most aggressively pushing these notions today, end of the 20th century, has any woman raised the question whether women might (now just consider the possibility) just have been the driving force in promoting those notions the last time around. Just maybe, the paternalistic attitude of culture toward women has been promoted and nurtured by women all along, in order to gain the special protections and treatment that women get from a culture which has those attitudes. Special treatment like first grabs on the lifeboat seats when the Titanic goes down, or special "Violence Against Women Act" laws.
Hmmmm? Do you think that perhaps women could have been an active and major driving force all along in promoting the notion of how weak, capricious, and in need of special treatment women are?
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Saturday, March 05, 2005
EOTM: The Secret of Life: Shut Up and Shovel the Fuckin' Gravel.
.The entire secret of life, of power, of everything, was taught to me when I was a teenager, by a man, a farmer. And he taught it to me in the way that is so typical of men: three sentences, no more. I contend that the real conflict today is not male versus female, but urban versus agrarian values. When people forget where their food and fiber comes from, when they forget the natural processes and timetables that produce them, when they start looking for someone else to "hand over" what they want and stop taking the responsibility for producing it themselves, when they replace hard work with belligerence and aggression, they lock themselves into downward spirals of helplessness, powerlessness, and anger.
I taught this same lesson to a woman "friend" of mine. It took me two years. During the entire time she was doing her best to manipulate and harass me into a "romantic" relationship that I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in allowing to happen. It took many screaming matches and finally the threat to throw her out of my life for her to "get it", but she finally "got it" and today she credits me with saving her life, her soul, and her sanity, and has become a friend.
The farmer's name was Griff. I was a "townie" (population 300) and made good money for a teenager as a "hired hand". One day when I showed up for work he said "We're going to pick up a new truck." We got in his car and the entire 40 minute ride to the dealer passed without either of us saying a word: One of those easy comfortable silences that men often use to communicate more than words ever can. We picked up a new 4-wheel drive ¾ ton pickup and headed back to the farm. When we got back, he pointed to a large gravel pile by the barn and told me to fill the truck bed with gravel and go fill in a hole in the entrance to one of his fields.
I said "But that gravel will ruin the paint on the bed of this brand new truck." He looked at me silently for about a minute, his expression eloquently saying that I was the worst idiot he'd ever been burdened with having to tolerate in his life. Without saying another word he picked up the shovel and, with a swing that would be the envy of every major league baseball hitter, he swung it around and smacked the side of the truck sending paint chips flying in every direction and leaving a huge dent. He looked at me again with that same "I can't believe you are such an idiot" look and said: "City boy this is a FARM truck. I didn't buy it to look pretty, I bought it to DO WORK, same reason I'm payin' you. Now it ain't new no more, so shut up and shovel the fuckin' gravel." Then he turned around and walked off, leaving me to feel foolish and gain wisdom.
Of course it took the entire context and circumstances for me to understand the full significance of the lesson: not with my head but with my spirit. In the same way, cultures world wide and throughout history have used ritual space to teach the great lessons to the young. Complexity and too many words destroy the lesson, because the very heart and soul of the lesson is that words accomplish nothing. Words do not put in crops. Words do not harvest them or get them to market or prepare them or put them on our plates. No one eats unless someone shuts up and shovels the fuckin' gravel.
The entire secret of male power is that men do, men have, shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel. Men shoveled the gravel that built all the hydroelectric dams which provide the electric power which everyone today takes for granted; some of that "Patriarchal technology" that some women are so fond of sneering at. Men put their sweat and, about 50 of them, their very bodies into Hoover dam. Then they "handed over" the result to women to make their lives more comfortable. The millions of tons of gravel which went in to building the transcontinental railway were shoveled by men. And hundreds of their bodies went into it as well. Women and men living today would have none of the conveniences which make their lives so comfortable if millions of men had not shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel. All the lawsuits and affirmative action programs in the world could not have built them. Those men did not wait for someone to "hand over" those dams or that railroad to them, they shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel and built them. Hoover dam is "male dominated", the transcontinental railroad is "male dominated" because men put their time, their work, their sweat, and their very bodies into building them. Everything that we see in the world today, from business to the military, that is "male dominated" is so because men died to build it.
That is both men's power and their powerlessness.
They shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Friday, March 04, 2005
EOTM: Life
Human beings are part of the natural world. They are part of a group of a great many things that have a characteristic in common which we call life.
Life is a chain - an endless cycle of birth, growth, and death. Every individual living thing is part of a long genetic heritage and the purpose if it's life is to carry on that heritage, lest the species vanish from the earth. The purpose of an individual's life is create more life.
Life is not a static "thing" to be acquired in quantity, but an experience to be lived. That means living through all the cycles - birth, growth, and death. Each living thing has a cycle unique to its species.
Because the individual survival takes a back seat to species survival, the drive to reproduce supercedes all other drives. A great many species only mate once at the end of their lifecycle: salmon, moths and butterflies, and a great many insect species. All crops and fruits have a one year life cycle.
Those who see humans as apart from the natural world, cannot see the how the manifestations of the daily business of carrying on life fit into broad patterns. For those who do see these broad patterns, all of life makes perfect sense. It may not always be exactly the way we like it, but it makes sense.
I don't know whether humans can learn to adapt to a totally un-natural world. Sense gets surrendered to force of will or of argument. Without sense, the world turns into a very hostile place.
I don't know whether an understanding of the natural basis of life will be useful or adaptive in the future. Perhaps science will erase the distinction between humanity and machines. Perhaps people will get to design their own children.
I don't like the idea, but tides have a way of overcoming all resistance. Humanity more than ever before has the ability to choose its own future. I hope that wise choices get made. I am not optimistic.
Personally, I am glad that I lived in a time when neither air nor water could kill you. I am glad to have walked in a forest and seen different forms of life everywhere I looked and know that every one of them was a close cousin. We all had the same needs - food, shelter, the company of others of our kind. I am glad to have been able to tune in to a forest and understand it as a form of life that lives in very slooooowwwww time. A forest may take 200 years to twitch its finger, but it is every bit as much a living entity as a human being or a butterfly.
I hope that humanity does not lose track of what it is to be alive.
He who dies with the most toys - still dies.
There is far more to life than how many sport-utility vehicles you can buy - how much stuff you have. Humans are consuming the earth with how much stuff they have. We are stamping out other species at the rate of 17,000/yr in our relentless pursuit of stuff. As a culture, we are obese, addicted to television and the stuff it sells us, and glued to the couch. Life in a box.
The fracture between men and women is a war over stuff, over competition for the financial power to buy stuff. The fundamental cooperation between men and women to accomplish the tasks of staying alive and raising more of their kind, has been severed. I believe this is because humans have forgotten that they are alive and their role in the continuation of life.
As humans move into ever more un-natural and artificially constructed worlds, they may indeed diverge from other forms of life and cease to have anything in common with them. I see humanity becoming more like the borg every year.
What used to be thought of as family and community has been replaced by the marketplace. Both families and communities have been destroyed and the functions they formerly served have been "outsourced" at less cost. The family has succumbed to the market pressures of competition.
It will be some time before we really know whether modern technological civilization is a viable adaptation or not. I don't think it's going to be. There are simply too many people consuming too much. At some point we have to run out of things to consume. When that happens, life will change drastically.
But the fascinating thing about life is that it always does go on. Young people today are trying to sort out new roles for men and women from the rubble of the old roles which the boomers left as their legacy. Roles which were appropriate in a pre-technical agrarian environment are no longer appropriate in a marketplace dominated urban environment. Children, who used to be considered assets, are now an expense item. The duties to the children for the first 25 years or so have become so onerous that men and women are at each other's throats over who is going to carry the load. In a pre-techical society, kids began to contribute directly to the household before age 7. Now they tend to be a drain on their parents for at least 3X that long, often longer. The entire meaning of kids has changed. Now everything in the world is "for the children." Only, we now have a whole lot of children that nobody wants.
In her wonderful series about pre-technical culture, Jean Auel in "The Mammoth Hunters", has an old shaman saying that you can learn everything you need to know about life by observing for one year. Anyone with an agricultural background will understand that completely. The basic life cycle of nature is one year. Everything blooms about the same time every year, and everything gets harvested at the same time, year after year. There are some great patterns and timetables which dictate people's actions and choices. It takes a woman nine months to have a baby. You cannot get nine women together and get it done in one month.
I am not at all sure that humanity can long survive the generalized loss of this knowledge, because subjective fundamentalism always substitutes ego and the will to power for understanding and getting in line with natural processes and timetables.
I agree with the shaman that one can learn everything one NEEDS to know about life by watching a field of corn, for example, for one year and understanding the analogues of each part of the corn's life cycle in the human experience.
In the spring, the farmer tills and prepares the ground, the substrate from which the nourishment for the crop comes. This is analogous to the community, the values and skills of the parents, their choice of where to live and what it provides, and their social networks. A child will only grow well when planted in fertile ground.
Next the farmer plants the seed. You know what the analogue of that is.
The young plant sprouts, and sends its roots into the ground to draw nourishment. The plant becomes an analogue of the marriage, which has a male part, the tassel, and a female part, the ear and silks. But notice that the marriage is also an entity of itself. IT is what sinks the roots, not the male or female parts by themselves. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in "The Divorce Culture", speaks of the loss of "social capital" as social networks are torn apart by divorce. If the plant stays rooted in its initial spot, the roots grow deep and strong. If it is ripped out, chances are it will never grow enough of a root system to produce healthy fruit. Prior to a high level of geographic mobility, a child would have social networks built over many generations to draw upon as it started life. In many communities, the folk would help the marriage get a quick start on its root system by building the newlyweds a house and barn. More young men starting their "careers" have gotten a boost from old established friends of their parents and grandparents than have not.
Except in the cases of the very wealthy, geographic mobility severs the connection to long standing social networks. Divorce virtually always destroys access to half of the potential social capital of one of the social networks, almost always the father's.
Once the plant has a strong root system, it begins to bear fruit. The ripening of the female part, the ear and silks, brings out the male part, the tassel, with a fervor to fertilize that defines its very existence. For a few days it sheds massive amounts of pollen ( sperm ), on the order of millions of pollen grains per potential kernel of corn ( ova ), in an attempt to achieve its ONLY purpose - fertilization.
Once the sexual phase of the plant ( marriage ) has passed, all nutrition coming from the root system ( community ) is shunted to the offspring ( ear of corn kernels ) to make them as strong and vital as possible for their job next year of producing the next generation. The plant itself ( the marriage ) outlives the male and female parts, but not by much. All those parts are programmed to die once their job of carrying on the chain of life unbroken is done.
Next year, the cycle begins anew.
The modern world has nothing of the natural world in it. An understanding of life is only necessary to people for the purpose of understanding themselves. They no longer need to understand where their food and fiber comes from - there are people who specialize in bringing it to them and that is all they really need to know. More and more of what they need is being produced in factories anyway. Everything is highly processed these days. That is the only way the economy has been able to expand the numbers of jobs while the numbers it takes to produce most things have been falling for years.
As young people try to figure out new gender roles, economics takes precedence over life in the decision making. This has the makings of a very hard new world.
It makes me want to admonish people - remember, you are alive.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Life is a chain - an endless cycle of birth, growth, and death. Every individual living thing is part of a long genetic heritage and the purpose if it's life is to carry on that heritage, lest the species vanish from the earth. The purpose of an individual's life is create more life.
Life is not a static "thing" to be acquired in quantity, but an experience to be lived. That means living through all the cycles - birth, growth, and death. Each living thing has a cycle unique to its species.
Because the individual survival takes a back seat to species survival, the drive to reproduce supercedes all other drives. A great many species only mate once at the end of their lifecycle: salmon, moths and butterflies, and a great many insect species. All crops and fruits have a one year life cycle.
Those who see humans as apart from the natural world, cannot see the how the manifestations of the daily business of carrying on life fit into broad patterns. For those who do see these broad patterns, all of life makes perfect sense. It may not always be exactly the way we like it, but it makes sense.
I don't know whether humans can learn to adapt to a totally un-natural world. Sense gets surrendered to force of will or of argument. Without sense, the world turns into a very hostile place.
I don't know whether an understanding of the natural basis of life will be useful or adaptive in the future. Perhaps science will erase the distinction between humanity and machines. Perhaps people will get to design their own children.
I don't like the idea, but tides have a way of overcoming all resistance. Humanity more than ever before has the ability to choose its own future. I hope that wise choices get made. I am not optimistic.
Personally, I am glad that I lived in a time when neither air nor water could kill you. I am glad to have walked in a forest and seen different forms of life everywhere I looked and know that every one of them was a close cousin. We all had the same needs - food, shelter, the company of others of our kind. I am glad to have been able to tune in to a forest and understand it as a form of life that lives in very slooooowwwww time. A forest may take 200 years to twitch its finger, but it is every bit as much a living entity as a human being or a butterfly.
I hope that humanity does not lose track of what it is to be alive.
He who dies with the most toys - still dies.
There is far more to life than how many sport-utility vehicles you can buy - how much stuff you have. Humans are consuming the earth with how much stuff they have. We are stamping out other species at the rate of 17,000/yr in our relentless pursuit of stuff. As a culture, we are obese, addicted to television and the stuff it sells us, and glued to the couch. Life in a box.
The fracture between men and women is a war over stuff, over competition for the financial power to buy stuff. The fundamental cooperation between men and women to accomplish the tasks of staying alive and raising more of their kind, has been severed. I believe this is because humans have forgotten that they are alive and their role in the continuation of life.
As humans move into ever more un-natural and artificially constructed worlds, they may indeed diverge from other forms of life and cease to have anything in common with them. I see humanity becoming more like the borg every year.
What used to be thought of as family and community has been replaced by the marketplace. Both families and communities have been destroyed and the functions they formerly served have been "outsourced" at less cost. The family has succumbed to the market pressures of competition.
It will be some time before we really know whether modern technological civilization is a viable adaptation or not. I don't think it's going to be. There are simply too many people consuming too much. At some point we have to run out of things to consume. When that happens, life will change drastically.
But the fascinating thing about life is that it always does go on. Young people today are trying to sort out new roles for men and women from the rubble of the old roles which the boomers left as their legacy. Roles which were appropriate in a pre-technical agrarian environment are no longer appropriate in a marketplace dominated urban environment. Children, who used to be considered assets, are now an expense item. The duties to the children for the first 25 years or so have become so onerous that men and women are at each other's throats over who is going to carry the load. In a pre-techical society, kids began to contribute directly to the household before age 7. Now they tend to be a drain on their parents for at least 3X that long, often longer. The entire meaning of kids has changed. Now everything in the world is "for the children." Only, we now have a whole lot of children that nobody wants.
In her wonderful series about pre-technical culture, Jean Auel in "The Mammoth Hunters", has an old shaman saying that you can learn everything you need to know about life by observing for one year. Anyone with an agricultural background will understand that completely. The basic life cycle of nature is one year. Everything blooms about the same time every year, and everything gets harvested at the same time, year after year. There are some great patterns and timetables which dictate people's actions and choices. It takes a woman nine months to have a baby. You cannot get nine women together and get it done in one month.
I am not at all sure that humanity can long survive the generalized loss of this knowledge, because subjective fundamentalism always substitutes ego and the will to power for understanding and getting in line with natural processes and timetables.
I agree with the shaman that one can learn everything one NEEDS to know about life by watching a field of corn, for example, for one year and understanding the analogues of each part of the corn's life cycle in the human experience.
In the spring, the farmer tills and prepares the ground, the substrate from which the nourishment for the crop comes. This is analogous to the community, the values and skills of the parents, their choice of where to live and what it provides, and their social networks. A child will only grow well when planted in fertile ground.
Next the farmer plants the seed. You know what the analogue of that is.
The young plant sprouts, and sends its roots into the ground to draw nourishment. The plant becomes an analogue of the marriage, which has a male part, the tassel, and a female part, the ear and silks. But notice that the marriage is also an entity of itself. IT is what sinks the roots, not the male or female parts by themselves. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in "The Divorce Culture", speaks of the loss of "social capital" as social networks are torn apart by divorce. If the plant stays rooted in its initial spot, the roots grow deep and strong. If it is ripped out, chances are it will never grow enough of a root system to produce healthy fruit. Prior to a high level of geographic mobility, a child would have social networks built over many generations to draw upon as it started life. In many communities, the folk would help the marriage get a quick start on its root system by building the newlyweds a house and barn. More young men starting their "careers" have gotten a boost from old established friends of their parents and grandparents than have not.
Except in the cases of the very wealthy, geographic mobility severs the connection to long standing social networks. Divorce virtually always destroys access to half of the potential social capital of one of the social networks, almost always the father's.
Once the plant has a strong root system, it begins to bear fruit. The ripening of the female part, the ear and silks, brings out the male part, the tassel, with a fervor to fertilize that defines its very existence. For a few days it sheds massive amounts of pollen ( sperm ), on the order of millions of pollen grains per potential kernel of corn ( ova ), in an attempt to achieve its ONLY purpose - fertilization.
Once the sexual phase of the plant ( marriage ) has passed, all nutrition coming from the root system ( community ) is shunted to the offspring ( ear of corn kernels ) to make them as strong and vital as possible for their job next year of producing the next generation. The plant itself ( the marriage ) outlives the male and female parts, but not by much. All those parts are programmed to die once their job of carrying on the chain of life unbroken is done.
Next year, the cycle begins anew.
The modern world has nothing of the natural world in it. An understanding of life is only necessary to people for the purpose of understanding themselves. They no longer need to understand where their food and fiber comes from - there are people who specialize in bringing it to them and that is all they really need to know. More and more of what they need is being produced in factories anyway. Everything is highly processed these days. That is the only way the economy has been able to expand the numbers of jobs while the numbers it takes to produce most things have been falling for years.
As young people try to figure out new gender roles, economics takes precedence over life in the decision making. This has the makings of a very hard new world.
It makes me want to admonish people - remember, you are alive.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Thursday, March 03, 2005
EOTM: The Warning Label: 90 degrees from everywhere and the language ain't pretty.
The gender dialogue has been entirely unbalanced since the 1960s. Men have been demonized, hated, and told to eradicate themselves. Opportunists of both sexes have jumped on the bandwagon of anti-male sentiment and misandry and have been incessant and extreme in their demands that men remodel themselves according to a new social ideal which amounts to nothing more than personal biases and self-centered ideology. Culturally, we have suffered greatly from a glut of worthless opinions and a severe shortage of worthwhile efforts.
Elsewhere on the web, you can find a site entitled "All Men Must Die". There is no link to it from here because I refuse to gratify this immature little harridan's ego any further by boosting the traffic to her site which promotes arrogant hatred and sexism. Nor will you find links to sites talking about the inevitability of "patriarchy", celebrating misogyny, or calling for the repeal of women's right to vote.
What you will find here is intense criticisms of a wide variety of ideologies which underlie the conflicts which have now been elevated to the status of war. You will find contrarian opinions which do my level best to make hamburger out of the sacred cows of both the Right and the Left. If I don't manage to seriously piss off at least one conservative and one liberal each day, I consider the day a total waste. On a good day I also manage to chap the asses of a moderate or two.
My language is plain spoken, blunt, and often profane. If that offends you, don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. A site called "All Men Must Die" is clearly a hate-motivated site, but is allowed to continue to promote its message of hate. I claim the same right to publicize my hatred of stupidity.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Elsewhere on the web, you can find a site entitled "All Men Must Die". There is no link to it from here because I refuse to gratify this immature little harridan's ego any further by boosting the traffic to her site which promotes arrogant hatred and sexism. Nor will you find links to sites talking about the inevitability of "patriarchy", celebrating misogyny, or calling for the repeal of women's right to vote.
What you will find here is intense criticisms of a wide variety of ideologies which underlie the conflicts which have now been elevated to the status of war. You will find contrarian opinions which do my level best to make hamburger out of the sacred cows of both the Right and the Left. If I don't manage to seriously piss off at least one conservative and one liberal each day, I consider the day a total waste. On a good day I also manage to chap the asses of a moderate or two.
My language is plain spoken, blunt, and often profane. If that offends you, don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. A site called "All Men Must Die" is clearly a hate-motivated site, but is allowed to continue to promote its message of hate. I claim the same right to publicize my hatred of stupidity.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
EOTM: Gender War, Sexuality, and Love - Overview
With all the thousands of books published on the topic of relationships, trying to say something meaningful, and hopefully new, about the topic in the context of the gender war seems nearly impossible. And trying to say it briefly or concisely or succinctly seems even more impossible. However, it is even still more impossible to sit idly by and say or do nothing.
As the 20th century draws to a close, it is hard to imagine a time when relationships between men and women have ever been worse. Sandy Close, writing for the Pacific News Service, quotes a veteran teacher in her article, "Gender War Among Youth -- At the Heart of America's Calamity", that among young people today - "Male-female relations these days aren't love-hate. They're pure hate."
Like World War I, which the naively optimistic called "The War to End ALL Wars", the gender war has become a trench war with the various sides dug in and surrounded by barbed wire. And, like that war, the frontier has moved very little in the past few years. (During the entire first World War, the frontier never advanced or retreated more than 7 miles.) But, unlike that war, this one has dragged on for 35 years. Two generations have been born, grown up, gone to college, and entered the cold hard world of adulthood while the war has dragged on. One almost has to wonder whether this gender war is going to become the "Hundred Years Gender War."
Like the American Civil War, and I suppose really like ALL civil wars, this one is tearing apart families, turning former friends and allies (like spouses) into bitter enemies, consuming a huge portion of the available resources, time, and energy of the citizens, and leaving nothing but bitter destruction and scorched earth in its wake. Marriages are more likely to fail than to succeed. Both sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from the other. Young people of both sexes hate the other sex.
This isn't about equality. Equality has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Equality never has had anything to do with it.
It is about the intrusion of marketplace values into personal relationships, the purchase of love, and the devastating effects of inflation as the "price of love" has spiraled upward out of control. It is about how sex, love, and people have been turned into commodities and objects. And it is about the clash between socialism and capitalism in the realm of personal relationships.
And it is about hate.
It is about a small group of mentally and emotionally ill women who have been able to sell their personal hate-filled pathology as a universal cultural condition. It is about making women fear and distrust men and men fear and distrust women, more than they already had reason to.
It is about denial of real biological differences which do exist, at the same time it is about denial of the real nature of those differences.
It is about turning would-be allies into enemies, and majoring in minors to turn petty differences into war.
It is about a bunch of disgruntled would-be princesses throwing a fit because life isn't carrying them around on a satin pillow. And it is about men getting sick of dying and being sacrificed for trying to satisfy the aspiring princesses that these men are trying to love.
It is about distorting the entirety of human history which was not particularly kind to anyone, and was full of challenges to survival, and painting the strategies used to insure the survival of the greatest number of people in the revisionist light of victimism.
It is about insanity being sold as sanity.
It IS insanity.
eye of the mind [EOTM] is a male friendly, feminidiocy unfriendly, site dedicated to a real and constructive approaches to bringing an end to the gender war.
In the end, the future will boil down to the answers to two questions:
1) Just how much hate do women expect to be able to dump on men without men beginning to hate back - bitterly?
2) Are there enough women willing to stop hating, and start cooperating with men and taking a realistic look at the actions of women and how they directly contribute to the creation and perpetuation of the complaints of feminism, to turn back the tide of hate and make a difference?
You tell me.
As the 20th century draws to a close, it is hard to imagine a time when relationships between men and women have ever been worse. Sandy Close, writing for the Pacific News Service, quotes a veteran teacher in her article, "Gender War Among Youth -- At the Heart of America's Calamity", that among young people today - "Male-female relations these days aren't love-hate. They're pure hate."
Like World War I, which the naively optimistic called "The War to End ALL Wars", the gender war has become a trench war with the various sides dug in and surrounded by barbed wire. And, like that war, the frontier has moved very little in the past few years. (During the entire first World War, the frontier never advanced or retreated more than 7 miles.) But, unlike that war, this one has dragged on for 35 years. Two generations have been born, grown up, gone to college, and entered the cold hard world of adulthood while the war has dragged on. One almost has to wonder whether this gender war is going to become the "Hundred Years Gender War."
Like the American Civil War, and I suppose really like ALL civil wars, this one is tearing apart families, turning former friends and allies (like spouses) into bitter enemies, consuming a huge portion of the available resources, time, and energy of the citizens, and leaving nothing but bitter destruction and scorched earth in its wake. Marriages are more likely to fail than to succeed. Both sexes are talking about "reproductive independence" from the other. Young people of both sexes hate the other sex.
This isn't about equality. Equality has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Equality never has had anything to do with it.
It is about the intrusion of marketplace values into personal relationships, the purchase of love, and the devastating effects of inflation as the "price of love" has spiraled upward out of control. It is about how sex, love, and people have been turned into commodities and objects. And it is about the clash between socialism and capitalism in the realm of personal relationships.
And it is about hate.
It is about a small group of mentally and emotionally ill women who have been able to sell their personal hate-filled pathology as a universal cultural condition. It is about making women fear and distrust men and men fear and distrust women, more than they already had reason to.
It is about denial of real biological differences which do exist, at the same time it is about denial of the real nature of those differences.
It is about turning would-be allies into enemies, and majoring in minors to turn petty differences into war.
It is about a bunch of disgruntled would-be princesses throwing a fit because life isn't carrying them around on a satin pillow. And it is about men getting sick of dying and being sacrificed for trying to satisfy the aspiring princesses that these men are trying to love.
It is about distorting the entirety of human history which was not particularly kind to anyone, and was full of challenges to survival, and painting the strategies used to insure the survival of the greatest number of people in the revisionist light of victimism.
It is about insanity being sold as sanity.
It IS insanity.
eye of the mind [EOTM] is a male friendly, feminidiocy unfriendly, site dedicated to a real and constructive approaches to bringing an end to the gender war.
In the end, the future will boil down to the answers to two questions:
1) Just how much hate do women expect to be able to dump on men without men beginning to hate back - bitterly?
2) Are there enough women willing to stop hating, and start cooperating with men and taking a realistic look at the actions of women and how they directly contribute to the creation and perpetuation of the complaints of feminism, to turn back the tide of hate and make a difference?
You tell me.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
EOTM: Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Gender War
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Say the words "gender war"to someone these days and likely you will get one of two reactions. Either they will look at you like you have just said something totally incomprehensible, as most people would have before the 1990s, or they will launch into a personal perspective on the battle lines, battlegrounds, and battle tactics which they have observed from personal experience. With each passing day, more people move from the first category into the second as they somehow become a casualty of this incomprehensible war.
And war it certainly has become.The older term for the essential conflicts between the interests and needs of men and women - the more benign "Battle of the Sexes" - has taken a mean and ugly turn. A wedge has been driven right down the middle of the human race which deprives the combatants of the only solace available to them in all other wars: respite from hostilities in the presence, or the arms, of someone they love.
As with any war, propaganda is being used to demonize the enemy. Men and women, who should be the most natural of allies because they have so much to offer each other that they both need, are instead seeing their interests as being mutually exclusive, not interdependent and complementary. The tragedy of this is beyond words.The tragedy is human loneliness, and the scope is almost universal.
Men, in general, have been slow to respond to all the terrible charges leveled against them. There have been many reasons for this. Foremost among these has been the difficulty which men have had in believing that so much of womankind would turn so thoroughly and viciously against them. Twenty-five years ago, no one could have predicted that the entirety of human history would be completely re-written by the time that the newborns of the day graduated from college. Or that the actions and lives of so many men, great and obscure, would be stripped of every shred of human decency and generosity and distorted into a world-wide and history long conspiracy of and by men to do nasty things to women - called "Patriarchy."
Like observers of the events leading up to each of the world wars, there were many of us who expected sanity to re-enter the dialogue at any time and the hostility and hatred to cease rather than continue to grow. In the end, we turned out to be just as foolish and naïve as those who put off joining the world wars until forced to do so. By the time we realized that THEY had declared war on US, it was too late to avoid it and we were left with no choice but to fight for the basic rights and freedoms in which we believed.
This "barely civil" civil-war has fragmented our culture and balkanized interest groups in a way that will take years for us to recover - if we can recover at all. As soldiers who fought the Japanese in the early 1940s had a very difficult time later adjusting to the idea of Asians as friends and neighbors, those of us who have lived out our entire adult lives in the midst of this war will likely not be able to heal from the wounds it has caused and be able to see our former enemies as anything other than enemies.
Overview
The Warning Label: 90 degrees from everywhere and the language ain’t pretty.
Life
The Secret of Life: Shut Up and Shovel the Fuckin’ Gravel.
A Simple, Brief, Rationalist Alternative to Feminist Theory
The Nature of Things
In a Male Voice
Feminism Deconstructed – Nothing But a Hate Movement
Toward a Culture of Singleness
Equal Time: Tales of Offensive and Obnoxious Women
The Lies: Propaganda Used to Demonize a Non-Existent “Enemy”
The Rocky Road to True Equality
Double-THINK, Double, Triple and Quadruple Messages
”Can’t We All Just Get Along?” “Can’t We Just Go On A Date?”
Rape and Sexual Harassment: The Pearl Harbor of the Gender War
The Sexual Harassment Battlefield
The Opening Shot: The S.C.U.M. Manifesto
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Presenting Feminism! A Coming Out
The Feralization of Culture – Building Better Predators
Turning Away from Women: Fish without Bicycles
Feminism Deconstructed - A Vast Social Deconstruction (Demolition) Project
False Premises, False Promises
The Ultimate Hypocrisy: An Alleged Movement for “Gender Equality” with a Gendered Name
Feminism in the Context of U.S. Social History, 1890-1999
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Sexuality and Relationships
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We live under many illusions about the nature of the world and relationships. There are a great many "shoulds" that many feel compelled to live up to. There is much made of the NEED for dishonesty and lies. All this is sadly untrue.
There are very few forums for a sane and healthy approach to sexuality. This wonderful net is filled with the commercial exploitation of unfilled sexual need. Anyone who stood back,without value judgements, and looked at the sheer volume of activity and $$$ spent would see the vast volume of it. Yet all that is "sold" here is the objectification of human beings. It is this objectification which is the disease of the industrial consuming society. Everything works best when everyone is an identical producing consuming consumed unit. Yet without individuality there is no passion.
Sexual Psychology – Part One – Working Class Heroes - Puberty
Sexual Psychology – Part Two – Puberty to 40
Sexual Psychology – Part Three – 40 to Closing Time
The Socio-Cultural Context of Sexuality and Marriage
The Biological Foundations of Sexuality
The Biological Context of Sexuality and Mating
The Nitty Gritty of Male Sexuality
The Destruction of Little Girls’ Sexuality
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Love
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The question of love has been much discussed throughout history. Several of the viewpoints I express will, no doubt, offend some people. Yet, no matter how much one hears or reads about love, it is only in the actual loving that one gets love's rewards.Many think that they want to be loved, but being loved is something that happens from the outside. It can't be felt, so the lovee still feels empty.Love is really a verb, not a noun. The lover is filled with love. All major religions have this somewhere in their teachings. Sexuality is NOT love. Sexuality is sexuality. It is mother nature's little trick for making surethere are more little species running around. Sexuality is a need, a drive,a hunger, and as such is not under conscious control. Loving well is the achievement of a mature spirit, and while it may have its elements of lust (from luster - to shine), passion, it is always creative, never destructive. Being destructive in the name of love is sacriledge which merits burning at the stake.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
EOTM: The Goddess
The Goddess represents all that women are, might be, and hope to become: as the God represents the same things for men. When there were many gods and goddesses, each of them represented a separate face of what we have now come to call "the human condition". There was one for each of the best and worst, and the sometimes simply mundane, characteristics of women and men.
The many faces and incarnations of these beings, as well as the ease with which they could change shape or name, testified to a deep intuitive understanding of human nature which was passed from generation to generation by the oral tradition of myth and legend. Within each person lies the potential to be creative or destructive, as well as the potential to understand which of their acts contribute to creation and which to destruction. The process of social maturation is the gradual development of these abilities and the increasingly conscious choice applied to selecting one's own actions based on the probable consquences of that act.
For the past several hundred years the Goddess has been under siege. The empire that the Romans began and eventually spread to span the entire globe under the reign of their students, the British, set out to destroy her because she interfered with empire building. Now the the god, too, is under siege: for the same reasons and in the same manner.
In every woman dwells some of the goddess, as in every man dwells some of the god. As each child makes the torturous journey from helplessness and dependency to the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood, the god and the goddess represent the collected wisdom gained by thousands of generations of observation of how people can and do act. In the stories called myth and legend are the lessons learned regarding how each action we choose affects the lives of others, what its consequences will likely be. Using these lessons we can apply the force of consciousness to creating the world we desire by selecting our acts based on what we wish to create.
Most religions of the common era have lost sight of this. As humanity has become more densely packed and often cannot tolerate the slow process of maturation, guidelines for action have become externalized in the form of rules or commandments. Over time, people stopped teaching the understanding of why one "should" or "should not" do a particular thing and substituted compliance for understanding. The goddess and the god were moved outside of each person. Without internalizing the divine, both the sacred and the profane aspects of it, humans remain eternal children: forever dependant on the understanding of others to inform their actions. Yet, when those they look to have not internalized it either, they place themselves in slavery to the power of other unmatured children who will pass along their own helplessness and dependency, but call it wisdom.
In the dark ages before the Renaissance, compliance was enforced by a reign of terror called "The Inquisition". Dark and angry children in grown-up bodies tortured and killed all who did not bow to their so-called "wisdom". Learning itself was considered dangerous and vigorous attempts were made to stamp it out. Heirs of an empire begun hundreds of years before sought to consolidate their power, all power, by destroying all who opposed it. Because their one and only god was male, they attempted to destroy and discredit the idea of the divine feminine. Millions died for refusing to accept the moral authority of these self-appointed masters.
Much of the world today still lives in the shadow of those murderous times. Colonialism spread across the globe, confiscating ancestral lands, destroying entire cultures, and wiping out entire peoples. By first separating themselves from the divine then claiming to understand and represent it exclusively, these empire builders have set themselves against life and become a cult which worships death. In their view there is no meaning in life except to prepare for death and what happens afterward. They worship death, not life.
The Goddess was gravely injured, but she did not die. Deep within millions of women she waited out the dark times until her wisdom was again needed to heal the world. The God, as well, came close to death because the divine was confiscated from all human beings to be placed in the hands of a parental figure. No human was allowed to look inside for answers. All answers were to come from outside ourselves: from the empire builders, the enslavers. Now those answers are failing completely, and women and men are turning back to the Goddess and God within themselves.
Marianne Williamson speaks of "glorious Queens" as opposed to "slave girls" in "A Woman's Worth" and Robert Bly speaks of the need to find and reclaim the "inner King" in "Iron John". The King and The Queen are the earthly manifestations of God and Goddess. They represent the highest level of spiritual achievement available to us mere mortals. Most people tend to think of kings and queens in terms of the power that they have over the "common folk". Those who think of it in those terms have it backwards. The only power a true king or queen has is the power of self-mastery and the realization that we all serve a power greater than ourselves. Whether this power be called by the name of some particular god or goddess, or simply by the name "life", only those who dedicate their lives to its service will be able to find meaning, and unity, and purpose in their lives. Those who master this find people compellingly drawn to them. Which is why those people make them into kings and queens.
Many current worshipers of the goddess have fallen into the same pattern as the old Inquisitors. Dark, angry, and twisted children; they hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him. Under the lie of "equality", they seek superiority, power, and mastery of everything except themselves. They have come to worship only one face of the goddess: the dark and destructive face of Kali: the destroying face of ”The Bitch”. Men, having lost the god within themselves, no longer understand how Shiva uses his own power to balance the power of Kali. Instead, they cave in and supplicate to her. As a result, all that is good in them gets burned away and they become empty of all goodness, all godness, within. Some come to worship the dark power as well, and resort to violence to save themselves.
These men, as well as the men who hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him, are fools: dangerous fools. As the goddess must remain strong to balance the destructive power of the dark faces of the god, so must the god remain strong to balance the dark and destructive faces of the goddess. When either grows too powerful, many die and are lost.
George Lucas gave us a modern day version of the myth about this eternal struggle. Luke-who-walks-the-sky battles Darth Vader: literally "Dark Father". Rage and hatred are very powerful forces. Women's claim that "women+rage = power" is the cry of wounded and angry children lost in the dark. Anything + rage = power: rage = power. But it is a destructive power, not a creative one. The hate-intoxicated zealots who worship the dark and destructive face of the goddess are as much to blame for her loss of respect as those who hate all her faces. Men and women alike need to reclaim the light faces of the goddess and the god as well as the dark: if we, their children are ever to be freed from the darkness to walk again in the light of love for each other.
The best all round site I know for the many aspects of the goddess is:
http://www.yoni.com/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
The God
Male Sexuality
The many faces and incarnations of these beings, as well as the ease with which they could change shape or name, testified to a deep intuitive understanding of human nature which was passed from generation to generation by the oral tradition of myth and legend. Within each person lies the potential to be creative or destructive, as well as the potential to understand which of their acts contribute to creation and which to destruction. The process of social maturation is the gradual development of these abilities and the increasingly conscious choice applied to selecting one's own actions based on the probable consquences of that act.
For the past several hundred years the Goddess has been under siege. The empire that the Romans began and eventually spread to span the entire globe under the reign of their students, the British, set out to destroy her because she interfered with empire building. Now the the god, too, is under siege: for the same reasons and in the same manner.
In every woman dwells some of the goddess, as in every man dwells some of the god. As each child makes the torturous journey from helplessness and dependency to the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood, the god and the goddess represent the collected wisdom gained by thousands of generations of observation of how people can and do act. In the stories called myth and legend are the lessons learned regarding how each action we choose affects the lives of others, what its consequences will likely be. Using these lessons we can apply the force of consciousness to creating the world we desire by selecting our acts based on what we wish to create.
Most religions of the common era have lost sight of this. As humanity has become more densely packed and often cannot tolerate the slow process of maturation, guidelines for action have become externalized in the form of rules or commandments. Over time, people stopped teaching the understanding of why one "should" or "should not" do a particular thing and substituted compliance for understanding. The goddess and the god were moved outside of each person. Without internalizing the divine, both the sacred and the profane aspects of it, humans remain eternal children: forever dependant on the understanding of others to inform their actions. Yet, when those they look to have not internalized it either, they place themselves in slavery to the power of other unmatured children who will pass along their own helplessness and dependency, but call it wisdom.
In the dark ages before the Renaissance, compliance was enforced by a reign of terror called "The Inquisition". Dark and angry children in grown-up bodies tortured and killed all who did not bow to their so-called "wisdom". Learning itself was considered dangerous and vigorous attempts were made to stamp it out. Heirs of an empire begun hundreds of years before sought to consolidate their power, all power, by destroying all who opposed it. Because their one and only god was male, they attempted to destroy and discredit the idea of the divine feminine. Millions died for refusing to accept the moral authority of these self-appointed masters.
Much of the world today still lives in the shadow of those murderous times. Colonialism spread across the globe, confiscating ancestral lands, destroying entire cultures, and wiping out entire peoples. By first separating themselves from the divine then claiming to understand and represent it exclusively, these empire builders have set themselves against life and become a cult which worships death. In their view there is no meaning in life except to prepare for death and what happens afterward. They worship death, not life.
The Goddess was gravely injured, but she did not die. Deep within millions of women she waited out the dark times until her wisdom was again needed to heal the world. The God, as well, came close to death because the divine was confiscated from all human beings to be placed in the hands of a parental figure. No human was allowed to look inside for answers. All answers were to come from outside ourselves: from the empire builders, the enslavers. Now those answers are failing completely, and women and men are turning back to the Goddess and God within themselves.
Marianne Williamson speaks of "glorious Queens" as opposed to "slave girls" in "A Woman's Worth" and Robert Bly speaks of the need to find and reclaim the "inner King" in "Iron John". The King and The Queen are the earthly manifestations of God and Goddess. They represent the highest level of spiritual achievement available to us mere mortals. Most people tend to think of kings and queens in terms of the power that they have over the "common folk". Those who think of it in those terms have it backwards. The only power a true king or queen has is the power of self-mastery and the realization that we all serve a power greater than ourselves. Whether this power be called by the name of some particular god or goddess, or simply by the name "life", only those who dedicate their lives to its service will be able to find meaning, and unity, and purpose in their lives. Those who master this find people compellingly drawn to them. Which is why those people make them into kings and queens.
Many current worshipers of the goddess have fallen into the same pattern as the old Inquisitors. Dark, angry, and twisted children; they hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him. Under the lie of "equality", they seek superiority, power, and mastery of everything except themselves. They have come to worship only one face of the goddess: the dark and destructive face of Kali: the destroying face of ”The Bitch”. Men, having lost the god within themselves, no longer understand how Shiva uses his own power to balance the power of Kali. Instead, they cave in and supplicate to her. As a result, all that is good in them gets burned away and they become empty of all goodness, all godness, within. Some come to worship the dark power as well, and resort to violence to save themselves.
These men, as well as the men who hate the god and seek to elevate the goddess above him, are fools: dangerous fools. As the goddess must remain strong to balance the destructive power of the dark faces of the god, so must the god remain strong to balance the dark and destructive faces of the goddess. When either grows too powerful, many die and are lost.
George Lucas gave us a modern day version of the myth about this eternal struggle. Luke-who-walks-the-sky battles Darth Vader: literally "Dark Father". Rage and hatred are very powerful forces. Women's claim that "women+rage = power" is the cry of wounded and angry children lost in the dark. Anything + rage = power: rage = power. But it is a destructive power, not a creative one. The hate-intoxicated zealots who worship the dark and destructive face of the goddess are as much to blame for her loss of respect as those who hate all her faces. Men and women alike need to reclaim the light faces of the goddess and the god as well as the dark: if we, their children are ever to be freed from the darkness to walk again in the light of love for each other.
The best all round site I know for the many aspects of the goddess is:
http://www.yoni.com/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
The God
Male Sexuality
Saturday, February 05, 2005
EOTM: The God
The god is under siege in most cultures around the world, particularly western culture. Fundamentalism, mistaking the finger for the stars that the finger is pointing to, mistaking the messenger for the message, has impoverished most religions. Now they function more as social controls than as a way of providing spiritual meaning to the day to day lives of human beings.
Humanity has been divided against sacredness, and against itself. People see themselves as separate from any sort of divinity, anything sacred. They are also totally estranged from nature. They see themselves as un-natural beings and, to a large extent, have become unnatural.
The penalty for this is that the ecosystem is being depleted and destroyed. We have been playing like spoiled children on this paradise planet that the creator has provided for us. We have been so ego-centric in our view of the creator that we regarded ourselves as the ultimate creation and aspired to be as gods ourselves. We believed that we were destined to have dominion over this earth and eventually control the very forces that create matter from energy. We have done all this, yet the cockroach will certainly outlive us as a species.
Every religion believes that it understands and worships a power that is above all other powers. This "above" includes the petty distinctions of the name to use and the method of worship. Yet they so humble their gods that they believe such a powerful being could care about such a small thing.
The sad truth is that "worship" or "faith" are used like "love" to cover up and justify unspeakable acts. One tribe who slaughters another to fulfill the will of their god apparently thinks their god is so puny that an earthquake or storm or plague or simple starvation is beyond their god's power.
No, unfortunately the truth is that often religion is simply one more power group competing for market share of the faithful and their tithes. All the dire consequences of not following the vocal messiah's preferred path are to intimidate people into compliance.
Modern Wicca has done much to salvage the concept of the sacred feminine. We all owe a major debt of gratitude to all the witches who burned and died, as well as those who survived to keep the traditions from being exterminated.
Yet we are still lacking in a deep understanding of the sacred masculine.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
The Goddess
Male Sexuality
Humanity has been divided against sacredness, and against itself. People see themselves as separate from any sort of divinity, anything sacred. They are also totally estranged from nature. They see themselves as un-natural beings and, to a large extent, have become unnatural.
The penalty for this is that the ecosystem is being depleted and destroyed. We have been playing like spoiled children on this paradise planet that the creator has provided for us. We have been so ego-centric in our view of the creator that we regarded ourselves as the ultimate creation and aspired to be as gods ourselves. We believed that we were destined to have dominion over this earth and eventually control the very forces that create matter from energy. We have done all this, yet the cockroach will certainly outlive us as a species.
Every religion believes that it understands and worships a power that is above all other powers. This "above" includes the petty distinctions of the name to use and the method of worship. Yet they so humble their gods that they believe such a powerful being could care about such a small thing.
The sad truth is that "worship" or "faith" are used like "love" to cover up and justify unspeakable acts. One tribe who slaughters another to fulfill the will of their god apparently thinks their god is so puny that an earthquake or storm or plague or simple starvation is beyond their god's power.
No, unfortunately the truth is that often religion is simply one more power group competing for market share of the faithful and their tithes. All the dire consequences of not following the vocal messiah's preferred path are to intimidate people into compliance.
Modern Wicca has done much to salvage the concept of the sacred feminine. We all owe a major debt of gratitude to all the witches who burned and died, as well as those who survived to keep the traditions from being exterminated.
Yet we are still lacking in a deep understanding of the sacred masculine.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
The Goddess
Male Sexuality
Friday, February 04, 2005
EOTM: The Goddess and The God of the Wicca
Each of the major religions of the world recognizes a duality in the divine. Dividing the darkness from the light of the judeo/christian bible, the yin & yang of eastern philosophies, many other examples. Because there is an inherent duality in humanity based on gender, it is easy and tempting to think of that divine duality as being male or female. Even more so, people tend to want to divide another duality, good vs evil, along gender lines. Thus we have seen created theologies in which the SACRED is either male or female, and the PROFANE is the other.
Wiccan theology recognizes that the sacred and the profane exist in everyone. There are dark and light sides to both male and female, just as there is to duct tape. How those dark and light sides get expressed is the work of the individual soul to decide. If you believe in Kharma, then you see that each soul gets to keep doing it wrong until it gets it right.
Unlike the arid theologies of the single male god at the top of a hierarchy, generated in the deserts of the middle east and carried worldwide by the european empire builders, pantheistic earth-based religions have always cast their deities in both genders. Mark Twain said it: "God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor." Since we cannot really imagine the infinite, we turn to what we know for an understanding. We turn to humans. All myths, all legends, have their roots in fact. The personalities these gods and near-gods (heros) exhibit are based on real people who at some point in history exhibited this personality. Humans still do today.
What Wicca offers is sacredness for both genders. There is a sacred masculine and a sacred feminine. Because they are both sacred, sexuality between them cannot be anything but sacred. It is the joining of these two energies which creates life. That's what we all worship: the creative force.
Of course, both genders also have a profane side, a destructive side. In myth and legend we have the stories of how this side has been expressed. When one gender demonizes the other they provide the perfect smokescreen for evil. Since they are good and the other bad, all their acts are "good" or justified. Thus real evil comes to be called by the name of good. A perfect example is the incredibly destructive things done by parents to children and lovers to each other in the name of love. As Luke Skywalker had to struggle with the dark side of the force, so must we all.
Inherent in the spiritual foundation of wicca is an equality between the genders. This is what has made it so attractive to feminists and those influenced by them. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to follow the trends set by worshippers of dead jews and elevate the sacred feminine above the sacred masculine or forget about the sacred masculine altogether.
Wicca is also known as the way of the wise. It is in this sense that I use it here. In that light there is no difference from the way of zen, which you will find elsewhere on these pages.
There is an old zen koan about the teacher who points to the stars and the student fixes on the finger. The teacher slaps him.
Often ritual, which is designed as grand theatre for the subconscious and intended to facilitate a spiritual experience, becomes bogged down in details and loses its meaning in the trappings. The colors of the altar candles become more important than the acts of the particpants before or after.
Let us focus back on the stars. Let us change our sense of time so that we begin thinking in terms of "deadlines" of a year and a day. Let us see the year as we now see 2 weeks and see that it certainly looks like "magic".
Let us all reclaim the sacredness of ourselves and all others.
Blessed be.
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