Lie # 1: Men are inherently violent, abusive, and exploitive. Women are universally passive victims who take no active role in violence. If a woman engages in violence, it it because she herself was abused.
Below is a rough summary of Domestic Violence studies and statistics. It is posted in raw form as I received it.
Hopefully, over time I will be able to put it in summary form and provide links to the sources.
Citations for scientific studies of domestic violence
Gelles, R.J. The violent home: A study of physical aggression between husbands and wives In 1974, a study was done which compared male and female domestic violence. In that study, it was found that 47% of husbands had used physical violence on their wives, and 33% of wives had used violence on their husbands (Gelles 1974). Half of the respondents in this study were selected from either cases of domestic violence reported to the police, or those identified by the social service agency. Very few men report being assaulted by their wives. This accounts for the lowered statistic for violent females, however it would be foolish to ignore 33% of the problem even if this was the only study available. Later studies are more accurate.
Chesanow, Neil, Violence at Home New Woman, February 1992, pg. 96-98. [Note: This is a very interesting article which appeared in a women’s magazine, and argues that women are equally violent towards men in intimate relationships. One of the bases for Chesanow’s arguments is that domestic violence among lesbian intimates is as common as domestic violence among heterosexual intimates—based on crime statistics.]
Curtis, L.A. Criminal violence: National patterns and behavior Lexington Books Lexington MA, In 1974, a study was released showing that the number of murders of women by men (17.5% of total homicides) was about the same as the number of murders of men by women (16.4% of total homicides). This study (Curtis 1974), however, showed that men were three times as likely to assault women as vice-versa. These statistics came from police records.
Wolfgang, M. Patterns in Criminal Homicide Wiley, New York, 1958
Mercy, J.A. & Saltzman, L.E. "Fatal violence among spouses in the United States, 1976-85" American Journal of Public Health 79(5): 595-9 May 1989 Curtis’s murder statistic (above study) was no big news. In 1958, an investigation of spousal homicide between 1948 and 1952 found that 7.8% of murder victims were husbands murdered by wives, and 8% were wives murdered by husbands (Wolfgang 1958). More recently, in a study of spousal homicide in the period from 1976 to 1985, it was found that there was an overall ratio of 1.3:1.0 of murdered wives to murdered husbands, and that "Black husbands were at greater risk of spouse homicide victimization than black wives or white spouses of either sex." (Mercy & Saltzman 1989)
Steinmetz, Suzanne K. The cycle of violence: Assertive, aggressive and abusive family interaction Praeger Press, New York, 1977
Steinmetz, Suzanne K. The Battered Husband Syndrome Victimology 2, 1977-1978 In 1977, Suzanne Steinmetz released results from several studies showing that the percentage of wives who have used physical violence is higher than the percentage of husbands, and that the wives’ average violence score tended to be higher, although men were somewhat more likely to cause greater injury. She also found that women were as likely as men to initiate physical violence, and that they had similar motives for their violent acts (Steinmetz 1977-78).
Nisonoff, L. & Bitman, I Spouse Abuse: Incidence and Relationship to Selected Demographic Variables, Victimology 4, 1979, pp. 131-140 In 1979, a telephone survey was conducted in which subjects were asked about their experiences of domestic violence (Nisonoff & Bitman 1979). 15.5% of the men and 11.3% of the women reported having hit their spouse; 18.6% of the men and 12.7% of the women reported having been hit by their spouse.
Straus, M.A., Gelles, R.J., and Steinmetz, S.K. Behind closed doors: Violence in American families, Doubleday, NewYork, 1980 In 1980, a team of researchers, including Steinmetz, attempted to address some concerns about the earlier surveys (Straus, Gelles & Steinmetz, 1980). They created a nationally representative study of family violence and found that the total violence scores seemed to be about even between husbands and wives, and that wives tended to be more abusive in almost all categories except pushing and shoving.
Straus, M.A. & Gelles, R.J. "Societal change and change in family violence from 1975 to 1985 as revealed by two national surveys" Journal of Marriage and the Family 48, po. 465-479, 1986 Straus & Gelles did a followup survey in 1985, comparing their data to a 1975 survey (Straus & Gelles 1986). They found that in that decade, domestic violence against women dropped from 12.1% of women to 11.3% while domestic violence against men rose from 11.6% to 12.1%. The rate of severely violent incidents dropped for both groups: From 3.8% to 3.0% of women victimized and from 4.6% to 4.4% for men.
Sexuality Today Newsletter "Violence in Adolescent Dating Relationships Common, New Survey Reveals" December 22, 1986 In 1986, a report appeared in Social Work, the journal of the National Association of Social Workers (Nov./Dec. 1986) on violence in adolescent dating relationships, in which it was found that girls were violent more frequently than boys.
O’Leary, K. Daniel; Arias, Ilena; Rosenbaum, Alan & Barling, Julian "Premarital Physical Aggression" State University of New York at Stony Brook & Syracuse University Another report on premarital violence (O’Leary, et al) found that 34% of the males and 40% of the females reported engaging in some form of physical aggression against their mates in a year. 17% of women and 7% of men reported engaging in severe physical aggression. 35% of the men and 30% of the women reported having been abused.
Daly, M. & Wilson, M. "Parent-Offspring Homicides in Canada, 1974-1983" Science v. 242, pp. 519-524, 1988Nagi, Saad Child Maltreatment in the United States Columbia University Press, New York,
Statistical Abstract of the United States 1987 table 277 The idea of women being violent is a hard thing for many people to believe. It goes against the stereotype of the passive and helpless female. This, in spite of the fact that women are known to be more likely than men to commit child abuse and child murder (Daly & Wilson 1988 report 54% of parent-child murders where the child is under 17 were committed by the mother in Canada between 1974 and 1983, for instance. The Statistical Abstract of the United States 1987 reports that of reported child maltreatment cases between 1980 and 1984 between 57.0% and 61.4% of these were perpetrated by the mother. Nagi 1977 found 53.1% of perpetrators were female, 21% male and 22.6% both.
Nisonoff, L. & Bitman, I "Spouse Abuse: Incidence and Relationship to Selected Demographic Variables" Victimology 4, 1979, pp. 131-140 found that men and women reported quite similar instances of violence both by them and by their partner.
"The Battered Husband Syndrome" Victimology 2, 1977-1978, p. 499
Steinmetz, Suzanne K. The cycle of violence: Assertive, aggressive
and abusive family interaction Praeger Press, New York, 1977 found that wives were "more" violent than husbands. Steinmetz later left the field of domestic violence studies after alleging that infuriated feminists had made death threats against her children.
Wolfgang, M. Patterns in Criminal Homicide, Wiley, New York, 1958
Mercy, J.A. & Saltzman, L.E. "Fatal violence among spouses in the United States, 1976-85" American Journal of Public Health 79(5):595-9 May 1989 Two studies, 30 years apart, showing that on average wives kill husbands at a similar rate to that at which husbands kill wives.
Straus, Murray, Gelles, R.J., and Steinmetz, S.K. Behind closed doors: Violence in American families, Doubleday, New York, 1980 addressed earlier methodological problems, shows spousal abuse to be almost gender-neutral in almost all categories of violence.
Straus, Murray" & Gelles, R.J. "Societal change and change in family violence from 1975 to 1985 as revealed by two national surveys" Journal of Marriage and the Family 48, po. 465-479, 1986 shows that domestic violence by women is increasing and violence by men is decreasing. A more recent study, reported at a conference by Straus, shows the trend is continuing
Jurik & Gregware 1989 and Mann 1990. You will find that much fewer than half the female murderers have history of being beaten. Most women who murder their husbands are impulsive, violent, and have criminal records. Jurik (1989) and Jurik and Gregware’s (1989) investigation of 24 cases in which women killed husbands or lovers found that the victim initiated use of physical forces in (40%) of the cases. Jurik and Gregware’s Table 2 shows that only 5 out of the 24 homicides (21%) were in response to "prior abuse" or "threat of abuse/death." Mann’s (1990) study of the circumstances surrounding partner homicides by wives shows that many women who murder their spouses are impulsive, violent, and have criminal records. Jurik (1989) and Jurik and Gregware (1989) also report that 60% of the women they studied had previous arrests.
Jurik, N. C. (1989 November).Women who kill and the reasonable man: The legal issues surounding female-perpetrated homicide. Paper presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Reno, NV.
Jurik & Gregware (1989) "A method for murder: An interactionist analysis of homicides by women. Tempe: Arizona State University, School of Justice Studies.
Mann, C. R. (1990). Black female homicide in the United States, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 5, 176-201.
O’Leary KD. Barling J. Arias I. Rosenbaum A. Malone J. Tyree A. April, 1989. Prevalence and stability of physical aggression between spouses: a longitudinal analysis. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology. 57(2):263-8. Community couples (N = 272) were assessed in a longitudinal study of early marriage. More women than men reported physically aggressing against their partners at premarriage (44% vs. 31%) and 18 months (36% vs. 27%). At 30 months, men and women did not report significantly different rates of aggression (32% vs. 25%). However, using either the self-report or the partner’s report, the prevalence of aggression was higher for women than men at each assessment period. Modal forms of physical aggression for both men and women were pushing, shoving, and slapping. Conditional probability analyses indicated that the likelihood of physically aggressing at 30 months given that one had engaged in such aggression before marriage and at 18 months after marriage was .72 for women and .59 for men. Furthermore, 25-30% of the recipients of physical aggression at all three assessment periods were seriously maritally discordant at 30 months.
Spousal Abuse Rates - Stats from UCR and Straus, Gelles The data from the US National Crime Survey (NCS) states that 84% of the victims of "intimate" violence were female. ("Highlights from 20 years of Surveying Crime Victims", NCJ-144525.) It also puts the occurrence of this violent crime (from "intimates only") at 5.4 female victims per 1000 women per year - this is all crimes, some of which did not involve injury. For comparison, the rate for "Accidental injury, all circumstances" is given as 220 per 1000 adults per year - a figure 40 times higher. If one ac-cepts data such as that from the NCS, one must (at least if one is consistent and intellectually honest) admit that such violence is rare. The picture changes, though, when different techniques of investigation (methodologies) are used, such as those by "Straus, Murray" and Gelles. This data shows that domestic violence is MUCH more common. In fact, some degree of violence (NOT injury, however) occurs at a rate of 113 incidents per 1000 couples per year (hus-band on wife) and 121 incidents per 1000 couples pr year (wife on husband)! This is 20x the rate that the NCS reports.
Family Homicides - rates by gender - DoJ, 94 In July 1994 the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice released a Special Report detailing the results of a survey of family homicides in 33 urban U.S. counties. The report covered ONLY convictions, which should respond to any contention that female-on-male family violence is almost always reactive. The report said: "A third of family murders involved a female as the killer. In sibling murders, females were 15 percent of killers, and in murders of parents, 18 percent. But in spouse murders, women represented 41 percent of killers. In murders of their offspring, women predominated, accounting for 55 percent of killers."
"Among black marital partners, wives were just about as likely to kill their husbands as husbands were to kill their wives: 47 percent of the victims of a spouse were husbands and 53 percent were wives." U.S. Department of Justice
Conflict Tactics Scales To give a little background on how the rates of violence were determined, by "Straus, & Gelles", we include the following question from the published survey for the CTS methodology:
Question 35: No matter how well a couple gets along, there are times when they disagree, get annoyed with the other person, or just have spats or fights because they’re in a bad mood or tired or for some other reason. They also use many different ways of trying to settle their differences. I’m going to read some things that you and your spouse might do when you have an argument. I would like you to tell me how many times in the last 12 months you:
a. Discussed the issue calmly
b. Got information to back up your side of things
c. Brought in or tried to bring in someone to help settle things
d. Insulted or swore at the other one
e. Sulked and/or refused to talk about it
f. Stormed out of the room or house (or yard)
g. Cried
h. Did or said something to spite the other one
i. Threatened to hit or throw something at the other one
j. Threw or smashed or hit or kicked something
k. Threw something at the other one
l. Pushed, grabbed, or shoved the other one
m. Slapped the other one
n. Kicked, butted, or hit with a fist
o. Hit, or tried to hit with something
p. Beat up the other one
q. Threatened with a knife or gun
r. Used a knife or gun
To summarize, Straus & Gelles, using the CTS methodology described above, found that rates for total (including less severe violence, such as pushing and shoving) between husbands and wives are quite close for husbands and wives, with one survey showing husbands as more violent and the other with wives as more violent .
Other data, however indicates that the gender of the striker of the first blow is fairly uniform. Jan. E States and Murray A Straus, "Gender Differences in Reporting Marital Violence and It’s Medical and Psychological Consequences", ch 9 in Straus & Gelles Physical Violence in American Families quote the following: Men claimed they struck the first blow in 44% of the cases, their female partners in 44% of the cases, and "couldn’t remember" in 12% of the cases. The women claimed men hit them first in 43% of the cases, that they struck the first blow in 53% of the cases, and "couldn’t remember" in 5% of the cases. However, data for injury rates based on these studies shows women seeking treatment for a doctor much more often than men did. In a study of 8145 families 7.3% of 137 women severely assaulted (i.e. 10 out of 137) and 1% of 95 men severely assaulted (i.e 1 out of 95) men needed a doctor.
(All figures are rates per 1000 couples per year, and the CTS figures are based on two national surveys of a representative population sample)
Recent Trends in Spousal Violence - Dept of Justice The U.S. Department of Justice released a study on domestic violence and spousal homicides on July 11, 1994. In this study it is reported that women kill men at approximately the same rate as men kill women in "spousal" homicides. (A "spousal" homicide is a husband or wife killing the other or a homicide perpetrated by a common-law marriage partner on the other partner.) In addition this study also reported that children were killed by mothers in 55% of all parental homicides. The 13th World Congress of Sociology, on July 19, 1994 revealed the average of spousal violence reports by males and females: Husband on wife severe assault occurred at a rate of 2.0%, whereas wife on husband severe assault occurred at a rate of 4.6%, and Husband on wife minor assault occurred at a rate of 9.9%, whereas wife on husband assault occurred at a rate of 9.5%. A rate of 2.0% means that during 1992 there were 20 instances of severe husband on wife assault for every 1000 couples.
Also reported at the conference was the fact that although male on female violence has been slowly decreasing over the last decade, female on male violence is now increasing sharply.
Various Spousal Violence Stats In 1975 and again in 1985, Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles and others conducted one of the largest and most respected studies in family violence ever done. What they found confounded conventional wisdom on the subject: Not only are men just as likely to be the victims of domestic violence as women, the study showed that between 1975 and 1985, the overall rate of domestic violence by men against women decreased, while women’s violence against men increased. Responding to accusations of gender bias, Straus re-computed the assault rates based solely on the responses of the women in the 1985 study and confirmed that even according to women, men are the ones more likely to be assaulted by their partner.
There is no question that while men on average are bigger and stronger than women, they can do more damage in a fistfight. However according to Professors R.L. McNeely and Cormae Richey Mann, "the average man’s size and strength are neutralized by guns and knives, boiling water, bricks, fireplace pokers and baseball bats."
A 1984 study of 6,200 cases found that 86% of female-on-male violence involved weapons, contrasted with 25% in cases of male-on-female violence. McLeod, Justice Quarterly (2) 1984 pp. 171-193. Of every 100 families, 3.8 experience severe husband-to-wife violence, but 4.5% experience severe wife-to-husband violence. (Straus, Gelles, Steinmetz , Behind Closed Doors: Violence in American Families (1980). A 1985 study of Texas University students, Breen found that 18% of men and 14% of women reported a violent act by a romantic partner. In the same study, 28% of married men reported that their wives had slapped, punched or kicked them. (Shupe, Stacey & Hazlewood). "Violent Men, Violent Couples (1986) Chapter 3. In another study, 15.5% of men and 11.3% of women reported having hit a spouse while 18.6% of men and 12% of women reported been struck by a spouse. Nisnoff & Bitman, Victimology 4, (1979), pp. 131-140.
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Tuesday, March 15, 2005
EOTM: The Lies: Propaganda Used to Demonize a Non-Existant "Enemy"
Lie #1: Men are inherently violent, abusive, and exploitive. Women are universally passive victims who take no active role in violence. If a woman engages in violence, it it because she herself was abused.
Lie #2: Feminism is about equality, anyone who opposes feminism is therefore about equality
Lie # 3: Feminism represents ALL women, and ONLY the best interests of women.
Lie #4: One out of four women are victims of rape
Lie #5: Women make on $0.76 for every dollar men make
Lie # 6: Mothers are inherently better parents and nurturers than men.
Lie #7: Heterosexuality is socially constructed, there is no biological foundation to it whatsoever
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MGTOW Library Articles on Feminist Propaganda
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Lie #2: Feminism is about equality, anyone who opposes feminism is therefore about equality
Lie # 3: Feminism represents ALL women, and ONLY the best interests of women.
Lie #4: One out of four women are victims of rape
Lie #5: Women make on $0.76 for every dollar men make
Lie # 6: Mothers are inherently better parents and nurturers than men.
Lie #7: Heterosexuality is socially constructed, there is no biological foundation to it whatsoever
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MGTOW Library Articles on Feminist Propaganda
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Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Monday, March 14, 2005
EOTM: Road Trip '97
Prologue -
My "somewhat" Significant Other (sSO) had made a very, *very*, big deal over how threatened she had felt by the images of other women "in" our relationship. There was something very subtly shaming in the way she approached sex which manifested itself in many ways. In bed she was a master of the go-stiff-as-a-board "don't touch me there. no, not there either" erotic technique. She didn't like receiving oral sex, and giving it was *entirely* out of the question. After she had voice the first "you might be a serial rapist" fear, I had stopped sleeping with her until we could get the whole mess sorted out. It really is not a very good idea to sleep with a woman who harbors the suspicion that you "might" be a rapist.
I attempted to convey the resentments that men feel over being required to jump through hoops in order to "try" to have a sexually intimate relationship with a woman. Clearly, when it comes to sex it is most men's perception that women do indeed "make the rules." Like so many women, Ms Playboy as I have come to call her, was conditioned in childhood to withhold sexual and emotional intimacy until her demands were met. It is fascinating, sad, and somewhat frightening to watch a middle-aged woman continue to try to use this strategy even after it has gone bankrupt. I attempted to bridge the chasm between us when it came to sexual intimacy; by trying to get her to understand that the key element of the appeal of men's magazines is not the beauty of the models, but rather the elements of willingness and availability. The imagery that sells these magazines has far less to do with perfect faces and figures than it has to do with stimulating erotic interest and imagination that the women might actually *like* to have sex with you and be willing to do so without presenting a list of pre-requisite conditions as long as your arm and considering that once she has done so that you have incurred a debt toward her.
This strategy of demands and conditions is quite effective from puberty through middle-age, but after age 40 men slow down a lot and the urgency of their sex drive diminshes significantly. Up until that point they are fairly self-starting and often will do or agree to almost anything in order to have an outlet for their drive to engage in the act that continues the species. However, about the same time that women start facing menopause, men also contend with changes in their reproductive (sexual) drives. They begin to need significantly more participation on the part of the woman to develop an interest, and an erection. This is completely antithetical to having the woman be too excessive in her demands.
Of course, it turned out that I might as well have been talking to a stone wall. Not only did she never get any of it; she persisted in the rigidity of her conditions, even escalated them despite the fact that I had already chosen not to sleep with her based on the conditions already on the table. In one of the most surreal conversations I have ever had, she tried to entice me to begin sleeping with her again; as long as it was "nothing but 'straight' sex." I didn't even bother to ask her to define what that meant because it was obvious that whatever she did mean was going to be so confined, restricted, and devoid of excitement that wicked willie was not likely to be interested in coming out to play. She, of course, attempted to shame me for this but I didn't fall for it.
The relationship was quite dead by this point: we were just waiting for the coroner to pronounce it so. Two weeks after I got fired we went for a scenic drive up the Missouri river valley. Somewhere mid-drive she popped out the news that there was "this other guy" she wanted to "check out".
Huh?
She had met him twice, and the second time they met he started talking about where they were going to live when they got married and how many kids they were going to have. "He's lying", I told her. Men simply do not say such things the second time they meet a woman. "He's just trying to be what he thinks you want him to be."
Her ex-husband had done the same thing. After 17 years of "pretending" to be exactly as she wanted, because that is what men of that age were conditioned and trained to do, he lost the ability to keep up the pretense and began to resent it and to hate her for demanding that he do so. He began to fantasize that she was dead. This was where her pathological fear of magazines featuring female nudity came from. Her ex-husband had read such magazines and she was sure that his emotional bail-out came from the fact that she just didn't measure up to the airbrushed perfection portrayed there.
"Didn't you fall for this once before?" I asked. "Didn't your marriage fall apart because your husband could no longer keep up the facade of the 'perfect husband' and begin to hate you because everything about the marriage was dictated by your needs and desires?" She replied: "No! This is different. This guy is going to give me everything I want and I am not going to have to leave my comfort zone in order to get it. I just can't change enough to deal with you."
At that moment all the frustration I had been feeling, and all the conflict between acting ethically or selfishly, transformed into a single, clear, and unconflicted emotion: hate. I have always detested and held in utter contempt any person who expects or even tries to get something for nothing. I have always believed that the most fundamental rule of life is TJANSTAAFL: There Just Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
I was struck absolutely speechless. It took several years for me to get over the monumental self-obsession of that statement and identify the visage of the evil behind the depths of the horror that I felt. In one of the many email "arguments/discussions" on the topics of gender relations, sexual relationships, and male/female roles in which I engage, a delightful Australian woman gave me the simple phrase that summed it all up: "She was REFUSING to be human." Not just choosing not to, not just failing in a good faith attempt: but being given the opportunity and flatly refusing.
Now the epilogue is what makes the whole story read like a tragedy from the "victim's" point of view, and like poetic justice from mine. About 2 years later I ran into her again. She had let the guy move into her house from Arizona. When I asked her how things were going, she got this pathetic look on her face and began a tale of woe about how things had gone fine for a couple of months then he "began to exhibit about 87 different personalities." She was so "traumatized" by the whole ordeal that she was still on Prozac 18 months later. "You told me so" she said. "Yes, I did." I replied then let it go at that and turned my attention elsewhere.
When she got up to leave, as she walked away she said "I'll give you a call." "Don't bother" I said. Either she heard or was at least smart enough to know that she would get no receptive ear to bend with her "Victim's Lament": she never called.
Now, was this one of those "Smart women who make foolish choices" as the title of the ultimate women-cannot-be-responsible book puts it? Or was this was an incredibly stupid woman who kept making the same incredibly stupid choices, was insensitive and exploitive to a degree impossible to imagine, had no regard for the feelings of others, and was so immature that she not see her hypocrisy in having two such monumentally disparate standards of behaviour for herself and for others.
Having found all these characteristics present to a lesser degree in virtually all the women I had met over the past 20 years, this overload on my "ability to give a shit about women and their concerns" circuit blew out my "relationship" fuse and left me in the state of mind where given a choice between a "relationship" and a root canal without anesthetic, I would choose the root canal.
Ms Playboy did not do it alone. She simply inherited and capitalized on years of history of finding it impossible to get either respect or reciprocity in my relationships with women: even women friends. The vast disparity between the public relations notions of relationships and the experiences of myself and virtually all my male friends make it seem that for years all of us have been taken in by a vast hoax.
There is a persistent cultural fictionalizing and idealization of women. Just a few days ago I heard a man mindlessly spout the old cliche that women were the "fairer" sex. I'm not sure what definition of "fairness" he was using, since the notion of "fairness" has vanished under the myth of male power and "patriarchy." Most women seem to subscribe to the methods advocated by Nora Fox in her editorial piece on fair fighting.
Certainly this is nothing like most men have in mind when they try to wade through that quagmire called today by the interesting euphemism "a relationship." Increasingly, "a relationship" seems to have become an ordeal to be endured more than a potential source of anything positive in a man's life. So why do we seek them so persistently? One answer, of course is sex. Sexuality to a man is in many respects the sole purpose of a man's life from the time puberty hits until "middle" age, and throughout history few men have lived much longer than that. The highly-paid advertising gurus would have us believe that the real reason we are alive is to see how many sport-utility vehicles we can buy. But deep within us lies the knowledge that the only reason we are alive is to carry on the species: the human race. Everything else is means, methods, and trappings.
About 90% of the reason than most men get up and go to work in the morning is so they can provide for their wives and children if they have them, or to make themselves attractive to a woman as a potential mate if they don't. With the divorce rate over 2/3, and with 40% of the current generation in the schools cut off from contact with their fathers, we have experienced an odd sort of cultural inversion of means and ends. The seeking of material wealth has become an end in itself rather than the means by which a man is able to provide comfortably with his family. And the pair-bonded relationship of marriage has become and end itself, with women becoming obsessed with getting on the fast track to wifehood. They seek sex with men they wouldn't marry as those men are, relying on the age-old principle that sex is the best way to jumpstart "romance". In the aftermath of the "sexual revolution" the essential process of courtship - getting to know one another and grow comfortable with the idea of spending the rest of one's life with that person - gets bypassed in the rush to get through the preliminaries without getting derailed. As a result, people who barely know each other end up in bed together and lock both of themselves into a set of vaguely defined and unrealistic expectations.
With the failure rate for first marriages at 68%, and with 3/4 of the divorces intiated by women; it turns out that slightly over half, 51%, of all women who get married will find the reality of the result so distasteful that they will endure the legal carnage of a divorce in order to end it. Clearly the reason that women find it so much easier than men to "make a commitment", is that women in general find it 3 times easier to break a commitment once made. The seeds of the permission that women need to give themselves to do so are seen in the attitude of Nora Fox: “Why be fair?” The answer, of course, is that a "relationship" cannot survive without essential fairness. Without it, all you have is a power game. The old so-called "battle of the sexes" has taken a very ugly turn and escalated into the ”Gender War”.
Like the Wopper computer learned in the old movie "War Games" by playing tic-tac-toe, the old children's game which cannot be won and always ends in a draw or stalemate unless one player makes a really stupid mistake, the only winning move is NOT to play. Having encountered no other kind of woman in the past 30 years than the kind who wants/expects to get everything she wants "without having to leave her comfort zone", having been ruthlessly exploited by a long string of money obsessed employers in my attempts to make the "good living" which would make me attractive as a potential mate to women whom I no longer had any faith that I would find attractive as a mate, there didn't seem to be any point to any of it anymore.
So, I went for a long motorcycle ride.
My "somewhat" Significant Other (sSO) had made a very, *very*, big deal over how threatened she had felt by the images of other women "in" our relationship. There was something very subtly shaming in the way she approached sex which manifested itself in many ways. In bed she was a master of the go-stiff-as-a-board "don't touch me there. no, not there either" erotic technique. She didn't like receiving oral sex, and giving it was *entirely* out of the question. After she had voice the first "you might be a serial rapist" fear, I had stopped sleeping with her until we could get the whole mess sorted out. It really is not a very good idea to sleep with a woman who harbors the suspicion that you "might" be a rapist.
I attempted to convey the resentments that men feel over being required to jump through hoops in order to "try" to have a sexually intimate relationship with a woman. Clearly, when it comes to sex it is most men's perception that women do indeed "make the rules." Like so many women, Ms Playboy as I have come to call her, was conditioned in childhood to withhold sexual and emotional intimacy until her demands were met. It is fascinating, sad, and somewhat frightening to watch a middle-aged woman continue to try to use this strategy even after it has gone bankrupt. I attempted to bridge the chasm between us when it came to sexual intimacy; by trying to get her to understand that the key element of the appeal of men's magazines is not the beauty of the models, but rather the elements of willingness and availability. The imagery that sells these magazines has far less to do with perfect faces and figures than it has to do with stimulating erotic interest and imagination that the women might actually *like* to have sex with you and be willing to do so without presenting a list of pre-requisite conditions as long as your arm and considering that once she has done so that you have incurred a debt toward her.
This strategy of demands and conditions is quite effective from puberty through middle-age, but after age 40 men slow down a lot and the urgency of their sex drive diminshes significantly. Up until that point they are fairly self-starting and often will do or agree to almost anything in order to have an outlet for their drive to engage in the act that continues the species. However, about the same time that women start facing menopause, men also contend with changes in their reproductive (sexual) drives. They begin to need significantly more participation on the part of the woman to develop an interest, and an erection. This is completely antithetical to having the woman be too excessive in her demands.
Of course, it turned out that I might as well have been talking to a stone wall. Not only did she never get any of it; she persisted in the rigidity of her conditions, even escalated them despite the fact that I had already chosen not to sleep with her based on the conditions already on the table. In one of the most surreal conversations I have ever had, she tried to entice me to begin sleeping with her again; as long as it was "nothing but 'straight' sex." I didn't even bother to ask her to define what that meant because it was obvious that whatever she did mean was going to be so confined, restricted, and devoid of excitement that wicked willie was not likely to be interested in coming out to play. She, of course, attempted to shame me for this but I didn't fall for it.
The relationship was quite dead by this point: we were just waiting for the coroner to pronounce it so. Two weeks after I got fired we went for a scenic drive up the Missouri river valley. Somewhere mid-drive she popped out the news that there was "this other guy" she wanted to "check out".
Huh?
She had met him twice, and the second time they met he started talking about where they were going to live when they got married and how many kids they were going to have. "He's lying", I told her. Men simply do not say such things the second time they meet a woman. "He's just trying to be what he thinks you want him to be."
Her ex-husband had done the same thing. After 17 years of "pretending" to be exactly as she wanted, because that is what men of that age were conditioned and trained to do, he lost the ability to keep up the pretense and began to resent it and to hate her for demanding that he do so. He began to fantasize that she was dead. This was where her pathological fear of magazines featuring female nudity came from. Her ex-husband had read such magazines and she was sure that his emotional bail-out came from the fact that she just didn't measure up to the airbrushed perfection portrayed there.
"Didn't you fall for this once before?" I asked. "Didn't your marriage fall apart because your husband could no longer keep up the facade of the 'perfect husband' and begin to hate you because everything about the marriage was dictated by your needs and desires?" She replied: "No! This is different. This guy is going to give me everything I want and I am not going to have to leave my comfort zone in order to get it. I just can't change enough to deal with you."
At that moment all the frustration I had been feeling, and all the conflict between acting ethically or selfishly, transformed into a single, clear, and unconflicted emotion: hate. I have always detested and held in utter contempt any person who expects or even tries to get something for nothing. I have always believed that the most fundamental rule of life is TJANSTAAFL: There Just Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
I was struck absolutely speechless. It took several years for me to get over the monumental self-obsession of that statement and identify the visage of the evil behind the depths of the horror that I felt. In one of the many email "arguments/discussions" on the topics of gender relations, sexual relationships, and male/female roles in which I engage, a delightful Australian woman gave me the simple phrase that summed it all up: "She was REFUSING to be human." Not just choosing not to, not just failing in a good faith attempt: but being given the opportunity and flatly refusing.
Now the epilogue is what makes the whole story read like a tragedy from the "victim's" point of view, and like poetic justice from mine. About 2 years later I ran into her again. She had let the guy move into her house from Arizona. When I asked her how things were going, she got this pathetic look on her face and began a tale of woe about how things had gone fine for a couple of months then he "began to exhibit about 87 different personalities." She was so "traumatized" by the whole ordeal that she was still on Prozac 18 months later. "You told me so" she said. "Yes, I did." I replied then let it go at that and turned my attention elsewhere.
When she got up to leave, as she walked away she said "I'll give you a call." "Don't bother" I said. Either she heard or was at least smart enough to know that she would get no receptive ear to bend with her "Victim's Lament": she never called.
Now, was this one of those "Smart women who make foolish choices" as the title of the ultimate women-cannot-be-responsible book puts it? Or was this was an incredibly stupid woman who kept making the same incredibly stupid choices, was insensitive and exploitive to a degree impossible to imagine, had no regard for the feelings of others, and was so immature that she not see her hypocrisy in having two such monumentally disparate standards of behaviour for herself and for others.
Having found all these characteristics present to a lesser degree in virtually all the women I had met over the past 20 years, this overload on my "ability to give a shit about women and their concerns" circuit blew out my "relationship" fuse and left me in the state of mind where given a choice between a "relationship" and a root canal without anesthetic, I would choose the root canal.
Ms Playboy did not do it alone. She simply inherited and capitalized on years of history of finding it impossible to get either respect or reciprocity in my relationships with women: even women friends. The vast disparity between the public relations notions of relationships and the experiences of myself and virtually all my male friends make it seem that for years all of us have been taken in by a vast hoax.
There is a persistent cultural fictionalizing and idealization of women. Just a few days ago I heard a man mindlessly spout the old cliche that women were the "fairer" sex. I'm not sure what definition of "fairness" he was using, since the notion of "fairness" has vanished under the myth of male power and "patriarchy." Most women seem to subscribe to the methods advocated by Nora Fox in her editorial piece on fair fighting.
Certainly this is nothing like most men have in mind when they try to wade through that quagmire called today by the interesting euphemism "a relationship." Increasingly, "a relationship" seems to have become an ordeal to be endured more than a potential source of anything positive in a man's life. So why do we seek them so persistently? One answer, of course is sex. Sexuality to a man is in many respects the sole purpose of a man's life from the time puberty hits until "middle" age, and throughout history few men have lived much longer than that. The highly-paid advertising gurus would have us believe that the real reason we are alive is to see how many sport-utility vehicles we can buy. But deep within us lies the knowledge that the only reason we are alive is to carry on the species: the human race. Everything else is means, methods, and trappings.
About 90% of the reason than most men get up and go to work in the morning is so they can provide for their wives and children if they have them, or to make themselves attractive to a woman as a potential mate if they don't. With the divorce rate over 2/3, and with 40% of the current generation in the schools cut off from contact with their fathers, we have experienced an odd sort of cultural inversion of means and ends. The seeking of material wealth has become an end in itself rather than the means by which a man is able to provide comfortably with his family. And the pair-bonded relationship of marriage has become and end itself, with women becoming obsessed with getting on the fast track to wifehood. They seek sex with men they wouldn't marry as those men are, relying on the age-old principle that sex is the best way to jumpstart "romance". In the aftermath of the "sexual revolution" the essential process of courtship - getting to know one another and grow comfortable with the idea of spending the rest of one's life with that person - gets bypassed in the rush to get through the preliminaries without getting derailed. As a result, people who barely know each other end up in bed together and lock both of themselves into a set of vaguely defined and unrealistic expectations.
With the failure rate for first marriages at 68%, and with 3/4 of the divorces intiated by women; it turns out that slightly over half, 51%, of all women who get married will find the reality of the result so distasteful that they will endure the legal carnage of a divorce in order to end it. Clearly the reason that women find it so much easier than men to "make a commitment", is that women in general find it 3 times easier to break a commitment once made. The seeds of the permission that women need to give themselves to do so are seen in the attitude of Nora Fox: “Why be fair?” The answer, of course, is that a "relationship" cannot survive without essential fairness. Without it, all you have is a power game. The old so-called "battle of the sexes" has taken a very ugly turn and escalated into the ”Gender War”.
Like the Wopper computer learned in the old movie "War Games" by playing tic-tac-toe, the old children's game which cannot be won and always ends in a draw or stalemate unless one player makes a really stupid mistake, the only winning move is NOT to play. Having encountered no other kind of woman in the past 30 years than the kind who wants/expects to get everything she wants "without having to leave her comfort zone", having been ruthlessly exploited by a long string of money obsessed employers in my attempts to make the "good living" which would make me attractive as a potential mate to women whom I no longer had any faith that I would find attractive as a mate, there didn't seem to be any point to any of it anymore.
So, I went for a long motorcycle ride.
EOTM: There Ain't No Way Out But Out
"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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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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.
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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
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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