I have noticed a distressing tendency in writings by men circulating in the border clashes of the gender war to engage in arguments over who has it worse: men, or women. I have resisted for years the notion of a men's movement which is mostly reactive to, and in imitation of, the feminist movement. The movements must necessarily reflect the nature of the participants, and as feminism reflects the whiny and victim focused nature of women, masculism needs to reflect the action orientation of men.
Men will never be able to be better women than women can be. They will always be able to out-whine us. It is indicative of the permeation of feminine values that as the men's movement seeks a voice, it first speaks in the plaintive tones of the victim.
I thought that it was the 60s again, or that I had stumbled on my long-lost stash of Purple Haze, when I read the argument about whether men or women suffered worse from the Holocaust. How dead can dead be? How high is up? How painful can death be, and is there a yardstick that can have any meaning at all? Of course death is more painful for women than for men: after all women feeee-yul more than men. They are more in touch with those precious feeeeee-lings.
The argument over who lives longer is meant as an argument over power, with lifespan being a measure, but it misses one important point. Everyone actually lives exactly the same amount of time: one life. If you understand Einstein's theory of relativity, you can see that men actually live *longer* than women because the fewer years really *seems* longer because men have to listen to women running their yaps the entire time. If you only had 6 months to live; you should divorce your wife, marry your mother-in-law, and move to Wichita KS. That six months would seem like 100 years.
If we think things are bad being a men today, we would do well to reflect on an old account of a battle about 3000 years ago. All the losers had their penises cut off. The accounting of foot soldiers, officers, etc. who suffered the unkindest cut numbered about 14,000. And we sit around and cringe when women make Lorena Bobbit jokes. It is offensive, crude, and stupid yes, but instead of sitting there with panicked grins on our faces we should be telling them so and walking the hell out.
Life has never come with a guarantee to be easy, unless one was born female. All men's power has come from the fact that they didn't expect it to be, and didn't wait around for someone else to make it so. If we sit around whining waiting for someone to make it better for us, who is going to? Women?
The dialogue of power has made many men embarrassed to have power, and they have tried to escape the blame by abdicating their own power. What we have today is a result. We have become a nation of victims. And men are losing that competition because we are rank amateurs at it.
Time to get back to what we do best: something. Anything. But arguments over who has the worse deal, or who suffers more, will just lead us into the ground. Ok, women told us we had to get in touch with our feelings and learn to express them. We have.
Do they like us any better for it? No.
Do *we* like us any better for it? *HELL* no!
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Friday, March 25, 2005
Thursday, March 24, 2005
EOTM: Fair Fighting
Fair Fighting
It is impossible to overstate the significance of this issue. Men generally have a deep, intense, and abiding sense of fairness and honor. Women, in general, seem to have no such unwanted restrictions on their behavior. ( I know there are exceptions, but like the "Mars & Venus" cliches, there is enough truth to justify the stereotypes. Simply note the gender of the person quoted below. I've never seen a man say such things.)
Trust is a lot like virginity, all it takes is one penetration and it is gone forever. The first time a woman hits below the belt she removes herself forever from the category of someone who will get unreserved cooperation, and instantly transforms herself into a creature of far less status and significance.
Here is one of those articles that the media is using to keep pouring gasoline on the flames of the gender war. This woman's attitude is inconceivably vicious. She basically says draw as much blood as possible by any means possible. If I ruled the world, this woman would be hanged for writing this article, because there is nothing that will destroy any possibility of a relationship *ever* working more completely than even a single incident of the type she suggests.
I like to hope that someday more women will understand how they destroy their own relationships and happiness. It would be worth the time for any woman to do some deep and honest soul searching to answer the question whether she has fights the way this woman suggests. If she has, then the man has every right to get back at her with any means at his disposal.
This is how women turn themselves into the moral equivalent of pond scum in men's eyes.
Nora Fox on Fair Fighting
Verbal fights are inevitable. Show me a woman with a saccharin smile who insists, "We never fight," and I'll show you the next bitter divorcee who will end her days working the phones at Century 21.
Women don't fight fair. Why should we? Faced with opponents who outweigh us, out earn us and whose community standing is undiminished with age, my sisters and I are forced to turn to underhanded tactics.
Being the superior sex, women long ago learned the surefire way to get our way is to withhold sex. It's the same way we train dogs. Good behavior merits a treat; bad behavior puts you in the conjugal doghouse for the night. Men never seem to catch on. After all, by the time we reach our sexual peak, men are running on fumes. How many times does one have to watch The Three Stooges to predict the outcome? Screw with Moe and get a poke in the eye, right? It's a sad commentary on Darwinism that sexual withholding still works after all these millennia. While it does, though, we'll keep turning our backs, thank you. It's the war-between-the-sexes equivalent of Biblically turning the other cheek.
Another useful strategy is the withering glance. Begin with eye contact; move own to the zipper. After making sure no camcorders are present. I often combo this with move with a disgusted snort followed by a teeth-clenched snarl. (Mirror work is helpful when perfecting this. There's one in your car. Go drive around the block and practice.)
I resist yelling. It causes fever blisters and gives the neighbors too much conversational material. Other tactics worth noting include; Crying. How lame. Come on, we can all be mom creative than this. Stick to what we do best. Mix & match logic. IF what you are doing isn't working, change the subject. Leave em' in the dust; not holding Kleenex.
Hold your partner financial hostage. Information is the gold of the 90s. Threaten to rat to the IRS. It's good insurance ‘til you decide to move on.
Remember fight or flight. Flight works. It's that distance/pursuit thing. My friend Victoria specializes in hanging up and jetting off to Hawaii. Her opponent was so mesmerized, he tracked her down and married her. 'They' re currently separated and living 500 miles apart...and still hanging up and building those frequent flier miles. Finally, taboos. If you ever want to see this person again, do not attack immutable parts of his anatomy And never, EVER, admit that you were faking it.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
It is impossible to overstate the significance of this issue. Men generally have a deep, intense, and abiding sense of fairness and honor. Women, in general, seem to have no such unwanted restrictions on their behavior. ( I know there are exceptions, but like the "Mars & Venus" cliches, there is enough truth to justify the stereotypes. Simply note the gender of the person quoted below. I've never seen a man say such things.)
Trust is a lot like virginity, all it takes is one penetration and it is gone forever. The first time a woman hits below the belt she removes herself forever from the category of someone who will get unreserved cooperation, and instantly transforms herself into a creature of far less status and significance.
Here is one of those articles that the media is using to keep pouring gasoline on the flames of the gender war. This woman's attitude is inconceivably vicious. She basically says draw as much blood as possible by any means possible. If I ruled the world, this woman would be hanged for writing this article, because there is nothing that will destroy any possibility of a relationship *ever* working more completely than even a single incident of the type she suggests.
I like to hope that someday more women will understand how they destroy their own relationships and happiness. It would be worth the time for any woman to do some deep and honest soul searching to answer the question whether she has fights the way this woman suggests. If she has, then the man has every right to get back at her with any means at his disposal.
This is how women turn themselves into the moral equivalent of pond scum in men's eyes.
Nora Fox on Fair Fighting
Verbal fights are inevitable. Show me a woman with a saccharin smile who insists, "We never fight," and I'll show you the next bitter divorcee who will end her days working the phones at Century 21.
Women don't fight fair. Why should we? Faced with opponents who outweigh us, out earn us and whose community standing is undiminished with age, my sisters and I are forced to turn to underhanded tactics.
Being the superior sex, women long ago learned the surefire way to get our way is to withhold sex. It's the same way we train dogs. Good behavior merits a treat; bad behavior puts you in the conjugal doghouse for the night. Men never seem to catch on. After all, by the time we reach our sexual peak, men are running on fumes. How many times does one have to watch The Three Stooges to predict the outcome? Screw with Moe and get a poke in the eye, right? It's a sad commentary on Darwinism that sexual withholding still works after all these millennia. While it does, though, we'll keep turning our backs, thank you. It's the war-between-the-sexes equivalent of Biblically turning the other cheek.
Another useful strategy is the withering glance. Begin with eye contact; move own to the zipper. After making sure no camcorders are present. I often combo this with move with a disgusted snort followed by a teeth-clenched snarl. (Mirror work is helpful when perfecting this. There's one in your car. Go drive around the block and practice.)
I resist yelling. It causes fever blisters and gives the neighbors too much conversational material. Other tactics worth noting include; Crying. How lame. Come on, we can all be mom creative than this. Stick to what we do best. Mix & match logic. IF what you are doing isn't working, change the subject. Leave em' in the dust; not holding Kleenex.
Hold your partner financial hostage. Information is the gold of the 90s. Threaten to rat to the IRS. It's good insurance ‘til you decide to move on.
Remember fight or flight. Flight works. It's that distance/pursuit thing. My friend Victoria specializes in hanging up and jetting off to Hawaii. Her opponent was so mesmerized, he tracked her down and married her. 'They' re currently separated and living 500 miles apart...and still hanging up and building those frequent flier miles. Finally, taboos. If you ever want to see this person again, do not attack immutable parts of his anatomy And never, EVER, admit that you were faking it.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
EOTM: Sexual Harassment
I don't think anyone has any problem with the provisions of Sexual Harassment law which relate to Quid Pro Quo, making the provision of sexual "favors" a condition of continued employment or advancement. And the "Hostile Work Environment" provisions were certainly positive in intent. In many respects it is simply an extension of the thinking underlying the Occupational Safety Hazards Act, OSHA, into the less clearly defined areas of emotional reactions and response. However, like OSHA, the attempt to eliminate all discomfort and risk from the work environment cannot operate independently of the realities of that environment.
I have worked in a great many "hostile environments", meaning those where there was a significant risk of "discomfort", mostly in terms of unpleasant working conditions and risk of injury or death. As a teenager, I saw a friend of mine lose his arm to a piece of equipment without proper safety shielding. In at least one respect, he was lucky. By the time I graduated from high school, at least a dozen people I knew had died in mishaps which were directly due to risks inherent in the industrial or agricultural environment. One man I knew suffocated in a grain bin. Another was drawn into a hay baler, along with his wife who tried to rescue him. Several died when tractors overturned on them. One died when a tank of ammonia fertilizer blew its seal and filled the shed he was in with alkaline gas. Three others died when dust around a grain elevator exploded and caught fire.
The risks and discomforts involved with many jobs were simply so inherent in the nature of those jobs that it never occurred to men to expect or demand that those risks and unpleasantness be removed. Phrases like "part of the job", "goes with the territory", and "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen" embodied a certain common sense folk wisdom that one's choices were limited by circumstance and that the only real choice one had was whether to take the job or not. Taking the job meant accepting the risks and conditions. If the risks or conditions were intolerable, one was always free to take another job.
It was for this very reason that an informal and natural division of labor took place. The presumption that men would simply perform the more dangerous jobs, while women would have the opportunity to stay with the safer ones, was a cultural protocol as deeply ingrained as the act of shaking hands as a method of greeting. No one ever thought of it as "oppression" OR privilege, but rather as common sense. In an environment where muscle power, physical agility, and a certain degree of ability to ignore discomfort were not merely requisites for the job itself, but also a key element in a person being able to make an active contribution to his own safety, those characteristics were considered basic qualifications for the job. Persons lacking them were simply not considered. The very concept of a free market for labor implied that the job requirements were fixed and that if ANY adaptation were to be made that it would be on the part of the worker and not of the job itself. The concept of a "worker friendly" job would have been considered an oxymoron, had anyone brought it up.
Balancing the degree of risk, or discomfort, was the fact that as either of those two factors went up, so did the wages or compensation of the job go up. Borrowing a phrase from the military, the more hazardous the job, the more of a "hazardous duty pay" incentive went with it. When I was a teenager, some practical-joker hung a pair of long underwear at the top of the local radio station's tower. The station advertised in the paper for someone to climb up and get them down. They paid $1/foot of the height of the tower. For slightly less than an hour's "work", I went home with $400 in my pocket. The seemingly "high" rate of my compensation was more than offset by the simple economics of the task at hand. It certainly would have made no economic sense whatsoever to pay such a high rate for simple labor if it was going to be a repetitive job. Installing safety nets or some kind of mechanized lift which would have eliminated or reduced the risk would have vastly increased the number of people willing to take that reduced risk. As the danger inherent in the job went down, so would its value. The economics of capital investment dictate that available funds, profit, can be expended either on capital OR labor, but not both. Had the climbing of the tower been a weekly event, the labor+capital cost of $400/week, or $20,000/year, would have eventually shifted the advantage to allocating more money for capital and less for labor. While a great many of the factors are different, this example illustrates the same business principle as replacing skilled labor with robots in manufacturing. The less inherent danger, or skill, that is required for any particular type of work, the less value that work will have in the marketplace.
So, you are probably asking, "what does all this have to do with sexual harassment?" Simply that the notion of a "woman friendly" workplace is antithetical to the historic notions of the workplace itself. The "workplace" has NEVER before been conceived as a "friendly" place - not to women, not to men. The requirement that the workplace be redefined as a place of "comfort", and particularly one of "emotional" comfort, requires a radical change in the very nature of how we conceive work itself.
In the 1930s, while the US was in the midst of the great depression which eventually spread throughout the world economy, the scarcity of jobs of any kind put employers in the situation of having to have absolutely no regard whatsoever for the comfort and safety of their workers. Each morning, hundreds of hopeful and hungry men, with families to feed, would show up hoping to be given a day of work. Any question or complaint about the conditions, their danger or "hostility" would have been met with "Go home. NEXT!" These conditions dictated the attitudes toward work of an entire generation: the parents and grandparents of the boomers, who then passed these attitudes along to their children to some degree.
Under the old ethic of achievement, overcoming adversity was considered an essential element of success. Attributes like persistence, endurance, and exceptional effort were highly valued and were in fact considered to be essential elements for high degrees of success. The long standing ideological conflict between American freedom, capitalism, and free markets; versus the collectivism, central planning, and entitlements of Communism or Socialism; made the ability to succeed DESPITE adversity into an essential American ideal. Publications for male audiences stressed that the road to business success involved working 60+ hour weeks and never taking vacations. Men whose skins were a little too thin, or their committment and drive a little too weak, to survive the essentially hostile nature of the workplace were told that these characterisitics would place them forever among the ranks of the "also rans." Men were told that the most significant attribute for success, was their very ability to survive hostile environments.
When "work" got redefined from an activity essential to survival to "career" as a means of "self-fulfillment" or "self-expression", and the ethic of achievement replaced by an ethic of entitlement, those new social values were slow to penetrate and have an impact on the marketplace. The natural sorting out of the weak and unsuited which is an inherent part of competitive business got personalized.
However, recourse against practices of an employer which were offensive and intended to make success difficult, thus insuring that the best of the best would prevail, became only available to women and only around an issue which is unavoidable in any environment where the sexes mix. The biological realities of the ways that men and women interact, as MEN and WOMEN, clashed with the social fictions of feminism. A previously self-regulating system which was never intended to be "fair", but rather to encourage excellence by seriously punishing anything less, now requires significant government intervention and regulation.
Initial resistance to wide scale integration of women into the workplace was based on an instinctive belief that such essential redefinition of business would not work. Perhaps the best example of how trivial personal reactions can get turned into major issues came when Sportscaster Lisa Olson barged into the locker room of the New England Patriots. The double standard which has emerged to give women this mythical "equal footing" in careers is nowhere better illustrated than by the expectation of a woman sportscaster expecting to be allowed in a male locker room with males in various states of undress.
The simplest way to detect sexism is to reverse the sexual roles and see if the situation changes. In Olson's case, I seriously doubt that anyone would expect a male sportscaster to enter a female locker room for the opportunity of gawking at naked or semi-naked members of the opposite sex and be met with ANYTHING except extreme hostility. Yet when the athletes made their displeasure over Ms Olson's voyeurism clearly known, she attempted to play victim and paint them as being in the wrong. The hostility shown by the athletes is simply indicative of the normal resentment that men have shown when women invade an environment which has been traditionally segregated and DEMAND that the code of conduct be changed to suit the whims of the woman.
At its very heart, this boils down to an essential battle for control and consistency. It is the same battle that is being fought over physical qualifications for occupations like fire fighters and law enforcement officers. Where previously the nature of the job dictated the qualifications of those who would be considered potential candidates, the candidates now have taken it on themselves to dictate that the nature of the job to suit their needs and whims. In the process, the basic concepts of achievement, accomplishment, and excellence have been thrown out the window.
However, that is not the most destructive effect of the way that Sexual Harassment law has been implemented. More than any other area of law, SH law runs contrary to the principles of the American justice system, and by itself does more to give credence to stereotypes of female incompetence than anything else which has occurred in the past 30 years. SH law replaces any sense of objectivity with complete self-centered subjectivity, and places the female point of view as the reference standard. It places feelings above facts and rewards those with the thinnest skins and the weakest performance.
In all respects, it is reminiscent of the old fairy tale of the princess and the pea. The exquisite and finely tuned "sensitivity" of the princess kept her tossing and turning all night from a single pea placed under 18 mattresses. The princess simply cannot function unless EVERYTHING is constructed to her comfort and tastes. Hiring a princess involves making the job serve her, rather than the other way around.
Employers do not seek liabilities when they hire, they seek assets. If they are faced with a situation analogous to climbing the radio tower I mentioned above, the greater the amount of investment required to make the employee able to do the job, the less that employee's work will be valued. Thus, SH law rather than decreasing the general hostility of the workplace toward women is actually increasing it. And it is increasing the general hostility of men in the population toward women as well.
When I worked for the security department of a large corporation, I was harassed and discriminated against because I was not an ex-cop and didn't have a lot of office political connections. Contrary to what most women believe, simply being a white male did not automatically make me part of this particular "good old boys network." However, I had no paternalistic federal law on my side to guarantee that that I could demand changes to make it a "non-cop friendly" workplace. My choice was to endure the hostile environment and find a way to succeed despite those disadvantages, or to fail. I chose to succeed - which involved putting up with a lot of discomfort and offense.
The people who discriminated against and harassed me did not do so because of sex, obviously, but because they were abusive power-mad jerks who would abuse anyone they could get away with abusing. I was left to my own devices to find ways to cope with it. My experiences in seeking recourse through Human Resources and management were identical to those described by women seeking recourse, except that I didn't have the strawman of sex to blame it on.
The simple existence of SH law is tacit admission that women can NOT compete with men on their own merits and need special protections from the offensiveness of men in order to survive in the workplace at all. It is an indirect form of validation of the original resistance to wide scale integration of women into the workforce on the grounds that they were too fragile to withstand the rigors of the workplace. By its very existence, SH law is a complete refutation of the equality of competence of women, as is Affirmative Action, because of its underlying presumption that women require special protections and the assistance of the federal government in order to be able to compete in an atmosphere where men thrived even without such government support.
While some women certainly benefit in the short term from this governmental and legal big-brother-ism, it simply perpetuates the view of women generally weak and incapable. The workplace becomes a sort of special olympics which no one confuses with the real Olympics. The message to men is clear - women are only able to compete with men whose hands are tied.
As if those effects are not destructive enough, the intrusion of such vague and ill-defined law into the already confusing dynamics of male/female attraction in the post-feminism era simply invites both abuse and further polarization. Anyone who naively persists in believing the simplistic mantra that "no means no" is either a fool or a liar, or both. Playing "hard to get" is a standard item in the behavioral repertoire of women, and one which has classically functioned to the advantage of the female.
As long as women flatly refuse to share in the burdens of the "shit work" of initiating potential relationships, they will be faced with having their selections limited to only those males aggressive and thick-skinned enough to keep approaching them despite all the normal and inherent risks plus the new risks posed by SH law.
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The extreme one-sidedness of SH law, with its inherently anti-male stereotypesand assumptions, far from creating a "woman friendly" workplace, in fact guarantees the opposite. As women have been fond of labeling all men as "potential" rapists, it becomes simply pragmatic self-preservation to for men to regard all women as potential Sexual Harassment lawsuits waiting to happen.
To men, the mere fact that the structure of the mating dance requires them to make the first move is regarded by men as a form of female power. Women can wait passively for something to happen and there are enough aggressive men around that sooner or later something will. Interestingly, women see this as a form of powerlessness, not power. This difference in perception underlies a great deal of gender conflict. Women, of course, can increase the possibility of this happening by advertising their availability and interest through provactive dress and/or actions.
The widespread denial by women of this female ploy is the source of much animosity between the sexes. While a woman wearing a low-cut blouse and a wonderbra is not asking to get raped, or harassed, she certainly is asking to get her breasts looked at. The contradictory behaviors of women who solicit men's attention in this manner then pretend offense, along with the widespread denial by women that it is intentional, contribute greatly to men's distrust and dislike of women and contempt for their mental abilities. If you don't want the peaches, then don't shake the tree.
Without objective standards, Sexual Harassment turns on nothing but individual perception. No one who is even marginally literate can have escaped the knowledge that it is not only common for people to perceive events differently, it is virtually impossible for it to be otherwise. Ask any police officer whether they have ever had two eyewitness accounts of an event agree completely and you will find the answer to be "no." The entire history of human culture and politics is nothing besides mechanisms for balancing and adjudicating these differing perceptions, but SH law denies any part of this. The elevation of the perceptions and interests of one group of citizens over all others is antithetical to the concepts of democracy, on which most western governments are founded.
Incidents like Lisa Olson's hissy-fit when the athletes objected to her gawking, and even worse the whole Tailhook scandal, produce a de facto adversarial position and conflict of interest and power. There is a fundamental denial of certain realities on the part of women, certainly not the least of which is the role of their own actions in contributing to the outcomes, which make cooperation with them by men simply impossible.
At Tailhook, women were allowed in to a previously all male enclave. It was a highly selected group of jet-jockeys for which the primary and most sigificant job requirements are the highest possible degree of aggression and fear of nothing. Only a brave man, or a damn fool, would climb into those jets knowing that they may never come back. It is only supreme confidence in their own abilities and willingness to take exreme risks that gives them what Tom Wolfe termed "The Right Stuff." These young men in their sexual prime, when in the presence of women who gave every impression of welcoming the men's sexual attentions, responded in exactly the manner of confident and aggressive young men. The very characteristics for which they were chosen for those jobs, became revised after-the-fact into harm done to those women. It is precisely instances like this which have undermined any positive benefit from SH law for those women who really are subjected to indefensible offense.
Despite the efforts of the extremists to deny and redefine biology, the mechanics of attraction between women and men remain unchanged. There do remain a few women who enjoy, and actively seek to be the center of, male attention. The criminalization of men's expressions of interest in women have these women who seek it in the position of having to engage in ever more extreme measures to attract it.
In the context of the workplace, a woman who wears a short skirt, plunging neckline, or carefully applied makeup is herself engaging in Sexual Harassment by creating an environment which is hostile toward men. Women who do this, then complain about the attention they receive are among the most detested by men. They are regarded to be nothing but manipulative liars. Men's business attire is designed for the purpose of minimizing individuality and the attention it attracts. Any woman who dresses otherwise is clearly intending to capitalize on the benefits that such attention will bring them.
An excellent example of this is the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas case. Most men consider that Hill's right to be offended by her bosses behavior ceased to exist when she followed him from one job to another. Whether Hill was competent in her own right, or trading on Thomas's interest in her to gain favored treatment, can never be known at this point, but the fact that she preferred to follow him rather than stay in her current position and compete on her own merits suggests otherwise. It is not just that Hill refused to take action on her own behalf, but that the path of least resistance would have taken no action at all and that following her harasser was the course which actually took initiative on her part, which leads to the conclusion that she was perfectly happy to exploit her sexuality to further her career. No one will likely ever know exactly what it was that led her to cry "foul."
The entire foundation of SH law is predicated on what Betty Friedan took women to task for in "The Feminine Mystique." What may or may not be considered harassing is hidden behind the mystique and is only revealed when some man runs afoul of it. The good news for men is that women are increasingly becoming the targets of frivolous charges of sexual harassment. It appears that only as women begin to experience the fundamental losses of rights of due process of law, and the ability to confront one's accuser, will they begin to approach the issue as one of principles rather than feelings. The mystique of female moral superiority falls when the confrontation is between two women.
I have frankly been amazed at the persistence with which women have promoted the lie that "women don't lie about these things." That statement alone is an obvious and bald faced lie which strengthens the impression that not only do women lie, that ALL women lie and will continue to do so at every opportunity. Aligning themselves with dishonest and opportunistic women, and condoning the use of dishonest and unethical tactics, works against all women. Those few who are actively speaking out against such abuses, like Cathy Young and Kathleen Parker among others, are voices lost in a cacophony of liars.
Any law serves a useful purpose if and only if, when and only when, it allows effective discrimination between socially constructive and socially destructive behaviors. While there are many who question whether the traditional family is a viable institution any longer, the majority of women still seek the stability it provides them.
In a recent correspondence with a young college woman, she spoke of her difficulties in overcoming the essential distrust of a man her age in whom she was interested. For all the compassion one might be tempted to feel for difficulties of such a young woman trying to establish a relationship with a man forced to treat all women as potential date-rape charges or sexual harassment lawsuits waiting to happen, a jail term, possible loss of career, or being put under the jurisdiction of a criminal justice system with a clear anti-male bias make the costs of such compassion prohibitively high.
The biggest tragedy of SH law is that it is neither serving the needs of those it was intended to help, nor does does it have sufficient protections from abuse. It has become the modern day equivalent of an accusation of "Heresy" which puts all power in the hands of the accuser, which means that the accuseds will often resort to dirty tactics to fight it. In the meantime, now that it has become the discretion of the woman to declare whether being asked for a date is romance or a crime, young women should not be surprised that they are not being asked.
In most men's minds there is a clear distinction between sexual interest and sexual harassment. A great many men I know have discovered that after middle age they often find themselves the target of sexual harassment by women in whom they have no sexual interest. These men can sympathize with how obnoxious the experience truly is.
I wonder if there are any women who can sympathize with the men's side of this battleground issue.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Bonecrker #13 - DV Myths = Cold War
I have worked in a great many "hostile environments", meaning those where there was a significant risk of "discomfort", mostly in terms of unpleasant working conditions and risk of injury or death. As a teenager, I saw a friend of mine lose his arm to a piece of equipment without proper safety shielding. In at least one respect, he was lucky. By the time I graduated from high school, at least a dozen people I knew had died in mishaps which were directly due to risks inherent in the industrial or agricultural environment. One man I knew suffocated in a grain bin. Another was drawn into a hay baler, along with his wife who tried to rescue him. Several died when tractors overturned on them. One died when a tank of ammonia fertilizer blew its seal and filled the shed he was in with alkaline gas. Three others died when dust around a grain elevator exploded and caught fire.
The risks and discomforts involved with many jobs were simply so inherent in the nature of those jobs that it never occurred to men to expect or demand that those risks and unpleasantness be removed. Phrases like "part of the job", "goes with the territory", and "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen" embodied a certain common sense folk wisdom that one's choices were limited by circumstance and that the only real choice one had was whether to take the job or not. Taking the job meant accepting the risks and conditions. If the risks or conditions were intolerable, one was always free to take another job.
It was for this very reason that an informal and natural division of labor took place. The presumption that men would simply perform the more dangerous jobs, while women would have the opportunity to stay with the safer ones, was a cultural protocol as deeply ingrained as the act of shaking hands as a method of greeting. No one ever thought of it as "oppression" OR privilege, but rather as common sense. In an environment where muscle power, physical agility, and a certain degree of ability to ignore discomfort were not merely requisites for the job itself, but also a key element in a person being able to make an active contribution to his own safety, those characteristics were considered basic qualifications for the job. Persons lacking them were simply not considered. The very concept of a free market for labor implied that the job requirements were fixed and that if ANY adaptation were to be made that it would be on the part of the worker and not of the job itself. The concept of a "worker friendly" job would have been considered an oxymoron, had anyone brought it up.
Balancing the degree of risk, or discomfort, was the fact that as either of those two factors went up, so did the wages or compensation of the job go up. Borrowing a phrase from the military, the more hazardous the job, the more of a "hazardous duty pay" incentive went with it. When I was a teenager, some practical-joker hung a pair of long underwear at the top of the local radio station's tower. The station advertised in the paper for someone to climb up and get them down. They paid $1/foot of the height of the tower. For slightly less than an hour's "work", I went home with $400 in my pocket. The seemingly "high" rate of my compensation was more than offset by the simple economics of the task at hand. It certainly would have made no economic sense whatsoever to pay such a high rate for simple labor if it was going to be a repetitive job. Installing safety nets or some kind of mechanized lift which would have eliminated or reduced the risk would have vastly increased the number of people willing to take that reduced risk. As the danger inherent in the job went down, so would its value. The economics of capital investment dictate that available funds, profit, can be expended either on capital OR labor, but not both. Had the climbing of the tower been a weekly event, the labor+capital cost of $400/week, or $20,000/year, would have eventually shifted the advantage to allocating more money for capital and less for labor. While a great many of the factors are different, this example illustrates the same business principle as replacing skilled labor with robots in manufacturing. The less inherent danger, or skill, that is required for any particular type of work, the less value that work will have in the marketplace.
So, you are probably asking, "what does all this have to do with sexual harassment?" Simply that the notion of a "woman friendly" workplace is antithetical to the historic notions of the workplace itself. The "workplace" has NEVER before been conceived as a "friendly" place - not to women, not to men. The requirement that the workplace be redefined as a place of "comfort", and particularly one of "emotional" comfort, requires a radical change in the very nature of how we conceive work itself.
In the 1930s, while the US was in the midst of the great depression which eventually spread throughout the world economy, the scarcity of jobs of any kind put employers in the situation of having to have absolutely no regard whatsoever for the comfort and safety of their workers. Each morning, hundreds of hopeful and hungry men, with families to feed, would show up hoping to be given a day of work. Any question or complaint about the conditions, their danger or "hostility" would have been met with "Go home. NEXT!" These conditions dictated the attitudes toward work of an entire generation: the parents and grandparents of the boomers, who then passed these attitudes along to their children to some degree.
Under the old ethic of achievement, overcoming adversity was considered an essential element of success. Attributes like persistence, endurance, and exceptional effort were highly valued and were in fact considered to be essential elements for high degrees of success. The long standing ideological conflict between American freedom, capitalism, and free markets; versus the collectivism, central planning, and entitlements of Communism or Socialism; made the ability to succeed DESPITE adversity into an essential American ideal. Publications for male audiences stressed that the road to business success involved working 60+ hour weeks and never taking vacations. Men whose skins were a little too thin, or their committment and drive a little too weak, to survive the essentially hostile nature of the workplace were told that these characterisitics would place them forever among the ranks of the "also rans." Men were told that the most significant attribute for success, was their very ability to survive hostile environments.
When "work" got redefined from an activity essential to survival to "career" as a means of "self-fulfillment" or "self-expression", and the ethic of achievement replaced by an ethic of entitlement, those new social values were slow to penetrate and have an impact on the marketplace. The natural sorting out of the weak and unsuited which is an inherent part of competitive business got personalized.
However, recourse against practices of an employer which were offensive and intended to make success difficult, thus insuring that the best of the best would prevail, became only available to women and only around an issue which is unavoidable in any environment where the sexes mix. The biological realities of the ways that men and women interact, as MEN and WOMEN, clashed with the social fictions of feminism. A previously self-regulating system which was never intended to be "fair", but rather to encourage excellence by seriously punishing anything less, now requires significant government intervention and regulation.
Initial resistance to wide scale integration of women into the workplace was based on an instinctive belief that such essential redefinition of business would not work. Perhaps the best example of how trivial personal reactions can get turned into major issues came when Sportscaster Lisa Olson barged into the locker room of the New England Patriots. The double standard which has emerged to give women this mythical "equal footing" in careers is nowhere better illustrated than by the expectation of a woman sportscaster expecting to be allowed in a male locker room with males in various states of undress.
The simplest way to detect sexism is to reverse the sexual roles and see if the situation changes. In Olson's case, I seriously doubt that anyone would expect a male sportscaster to enter a female locker room for the opportunity of gawking at naked or semi-naked members of the opposite sex and be met with ANYTHING except extreme hostility. Yet when the athletes made their displeasure over Ms Olson's voyeurism clearly known, she attempted to play victim and paint them as being in the wrong. The hostility shown by the athletes is simply indicative of the normal resentment that men have shown when women invade an environment which has been traditionally segregated and DEMAND that the code of conduct be changed to suit the whims of the woman.
At its very heart, this boils down to an essential battle for control and consistency. It is the same battle that is being fought over physical qualifications for occupations like fire fighters and law enforcement officers. Where previously the nature of the job dictated the qualifications of those who would be considered potential candidates, the candidates now have taken it on themselves to dictate that the nature of the job to suit their needs and whims. In the process, the basic concepts of achievement, accomplishment, and excellence have been thrown out the window.
However, that is not the most destructive effect of the way that Sexual Harassment law has been implemented. More than any other area of law, SH law runs contrary to the principles of the American justice system, and by itself does more to give credence to stereotypes of female incompetence than anything else which has occurred in the past 30 years. SH law replaces any sense of objectivity with complete self-centered subjectivity, and places the female point of view as the reference standard. It places feelings above facts and rewards those with the thinnest skins and the weakest performance.
In all respects, it is reminiscent of the old fairy tale of the princess and the pea. The exquisite and finely tuned "sensitivity" of the princess kept her tossing and turning all night from a single pea placed under 18 mattresses. The princess simply cannot function unless EVERYTHING is constructed to her comfort and tastes. Hiring a princess involves making the job serve her, rather than the other way around.
Employers do not seek liabilities when they hire, they seek assets. If they are faced with a situation analogous to climbing the radio tower I mentioned above, the greater the amount of investment required to make the employee able to do the job, the less that employee's work will be valued. Thus, SH law rather than decreasing the general hostility of the workplace toward women is actually increasing it. And it is increasing the general hostility of men in the population toward women as well.
When I worked for the security department of a large corporation, I was harassed and discriminated against because I was not an ex-cop and didn't have a lot of office political connections. Contrary to what most women believe, simply being a white male did not automatically make me part of this particular "good old boys network." However, I had no paternalistic federal law on my side to guarantee that that I could demand changes to make it a "non-cop friendly" workplace. My choice was to endure the hostile environment and find a way to succeed despite those disadvantages, or to fail. I chose to succeed - which involved putting up with a lot of discomfort and offense.
The people who discriminated against and harassed me did not do so because of sex, obviously, but because they were abusive power-mad jerks who would abuse anyone they could get away with abusing. I was left to my own devices to find ways to cope with it. My experiences in seeking recourse through Human Resources and management were identical to those described by women seeking recourse, except that I didn't have the strawman of sex to blame it on.
The simple existence of SH law is tacit admission that women can NOT compete with men on their own merits and need special protections from the offensiveness of men in order to survive in the workplace at all. It is an indirect form of validation of the original resistance to wide scale integration of women into the workforce on the grounds that they were too fragile to withstand the rigors of the workplace. By its very existence, SH law is a complete refutation of the equality of competence of women, as is Affirmative Action, because of its underlying presumption that women require special protections and the assistance of the federal government in order to be able to compete in an atmosphere where men thrived even without such government support.
While some women certainly benefit in the short term from this governmental and legal big-brother-ism, it simply perpetuates the view of women generally weak and incapable. The workplace becomes a sort of special olympics which no one confuses with the real Olympics. The message to men is clear - women are only able to compete with men whose hands are tied.
As if those effects are not destructive enough, the intrusion of such vague and ill-defined law into the already confusing dynamics of male/female attraction in the post-feminism era simply invites both abuse and further polarization. Anyone who naively persists in believing the simplistic mantra that "no means no" is either a fool or a liar, or both. Playing "hard to get" is a standard item in the behavioral repertoire of women, and one which has classically functioned to the advantage of the female.
As long as women flatly refuse to share in the burdens of the "shit work" of initiating potential relationships, they will be faced with having their selections limited to only those males aggressive and thick-skinned enough to keep approaching them despite all the normal and inherent risks plus the new risks posed by SH law.
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The extreme one-sidedness of SH law, with its inherently anti-male stereotypesand assumptions, far from creating a "woman friendly" workplace, in fact guarantees the opposite. As women have been fond of labeling all men as "potential" rapists, it becomes simply pragmatic self-preservation to for men to regard all women as potential Sexual Harassment lawsuits waiting to happen.
To men, the mere fact that the structure of the mating dance requires them to make the first move is regarded by men as a form of female power. Women can wait passively for something to happen and there are enough aggressive men around that sooner or later something will. Interestingly, women see this as a form of powerlessness, not power. This difference in perception underlies a great deal of gender conflict. Women, of course, can increase the possibility of this happening by advertising their availability and interest through provactive dress and/or actions.
The widespread denial by women of this female ploy is the source of much animosity between the sexes. While a woman wearing a low-cut blouse and a wonderbra is not asking to get raped, or harassed, she certainly is asking to get her breasts looked at. The contradictory behaviors of women who solicit men's attention in this manner then pretend offense, along with the widespread denial by women that it is intentional, contribute greatly to men's distrust and dislike of women and contempt for their mental abilities. If you don't want the peaches, then don't shake the tree.
Without objective standards, Sexual Harassment turns on nothing but individual perception. No one who is even marginally literate can have escaped the knowledge that it is not only common for people to perceive events differently, it is virtually impossible for it to be otherwise. Ask any police officer whether they have ever had two eyewitness accounts of an event agree completely and you will find the answer to be "no." The entire history of human culture and politics is nothing besides mechanisms for balancing and adjudicating these differing perceptions, but SH law denies any part of this. The elevation of the perceptions and interests of one group of citizens over all others is antithetical to the concepts of democracy, on which most western governments are founded.
Incidents like Lisa Olson's hissy-fit when the athletes objected to her gawking, and even worse the whole Tailhook scandal, produce a de facto adversarial position and conflict of interest and power. There is a fundamental denial of certain realities on the part of women, certainly not the least of which is the role of their own actions in contributing to the outcomes, which make cooperation with them by men simply impossible.
At Tailhook, women were allowed in to a previously all male enclave. It was a highly selected group of jet-jockeys for which the primary and most sigificant job requirements are the highest possible degree of aggression and fear of nothing. Only a brave man, or a damn fool, would climb into those jets knowing that they may never come back. It is only supreme confidence in their own abilities and willingness to take exreme risks that gives them what Tom Wolfe termed "The Right Stuff." These young men in their sexual prime, when in the presence of women who gave every impression of welcoming the men's sexual attentions, responded in exactly the manner of confident and aggressive young men. The very characteristics for which they were chosen for those jobs, became revised after-the-fact into harm done to those women. It is precisely instances like this which have undermined any positive benefit from SH law for those women who really are subjected to indefensible offense.
Despite the efforts of the extremists to deny and redefine biology, the mechanics of attraction between women and men remain unchanged. There do remain a few women who enjoy, and actively seek to be the center of, male attention. The criminalization of men's expressions of interest in women have these women who seek it in the position of having to engage in ever more extreme measures to attract it.
In the context of the workplace, a woman who wears a short skirt, plunging neckline, or carefully applied makeup is herself engaging in Sexual Harassment by creating an environment which is hostile toward men. Women who do this, then complain about the attention they receive are among the most detested by men. They are regarded to be nothing but manipulative liars. Men's business attire is designed for the purpose of minimizing individuality and the attention it attracts. Any woman who dresses otherwise is clearly intending to capitalize on the benefits that such attention will bring them.
An excellent example of this is the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas case. Most men consider that Hill's right to be offended by her bosses behavior ceased to exist when she followed him from one job to another. Whether Hill was competent in her own right, or trading on Thomas's interest in her to gain favored treatment, can never be known at this point, but the fact that she preferred to follow him rather than stay in her current position and compete on her own merits suggests otherwise. It is not just that Hill refused to take action on her own behalf, but that the path of least resistance would have taken no action at all and that following her harasser was the course which actually took initiative on her part, which leads to the conclusion that she was perfectly happy to exploit her sexuality to further her career. No one will likely ever know exactly what it was that led her to cry "foul."
The entire foundation of SH law is predicated on what Betty Friedan took women to task for in "The Feminine Mystique." What may or may not be considered harassing is hidden behind the mystique and is only revealed when some man runs afoul of it. The good news for men is that women are increasingly becoming the targets of frivolous charges of sexual harassment. It appears that only as women begin to experience the fundamental losses of rights of due process of law, and the ability to confront one's accuser, will they begin to approach the issue as one of principles rather than feelings. The mystique of female moral superiority falls when the confrontation is between two women.
I have frankly been amazed at the persistence with which women have promoted the lie that "women don't lie about these things." That statement alone is an obvious and bald faced lie which strengthens the impression that not only do women lie, that ALL women lie and will continue to do so at every opportunity. Aligning themselves with dishonest and opportunistic women, and condoning the use of dishonest and unethical tactics, works against all women. Those few who are actively speaking out against such abuses, like Cathy Young and Kathleen Parker among others, are voices lost in a cacophony of liars.
Any law serves a useful purpose if and only if, when and only when, it allows effective discrimination between socially constructive and socially destructive behaviors. While there are many who question whether the traditional family is a viable institution any longer, the majority of women still seek the stability it provides them.
In a recent correspondence with a young college woman, she spoke of her difficulties in overcoming the essential distrust of a man her age in whom she was interested. For all the compassion one might be tempted to feel for difficulties of such a young woman trying to establish a relationship with a man forced to treat all women as potential date-rape charges or sexual harassment lawsuits waiting to happen, a jail term, possible loss of career, or being put under the jurisdiction of a criminal justice system with a clear anti-male bias make the costs of such compassion prohibitively high.
The biggest tragedy of SH law is that it is neither serving the needs of those it was intended to help, nor does does it have sufficient protections from abuse. It has become the modern day equivalent of an accusation of "Heresy" which puts all power in the hands of the accuser, which means that the accuseds will often resort to dirty tactics to fight it. In the meantime, now that it has become the discretion of the woman to declare whether being asked for a date is romance or a crime, young women should not be surprised that they are not being asked.
In most men's minds there is a clear distinction between sexual interest and sexual harassment. A great many men I know have discovered that after middle age they often find themselves the target of sexual harassment by women in whom they have no sexual interest. These men can sympathize with how obnoxious the experience truly is.
I wonder if there are any women who can sympathize with the men's side of this battleground issue.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
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Further Reading:
Bonecrker #13 - DV Myths = Cold War
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
EOTM: The Pearl Harbor of the Gender War: Rape and Sexual Harassment
When the history of gender war gets written, the attack on normal heterosexuality will be viewed in retrospect as the event which signaled the start of the war and divided people into mutually hostile camps for which there would be no easy form of settlement. When Susan Brownmiller declared all men to be enemies of all women with her damning and unproven accusations in "Against Our Wills", she established the notions of structural power and power relationships which would eventually drag the political into the most personal aspects of everyone's lives. The declaration "all men are in collusion with rapists" soon became "all men ARE rapists" (or harassers) and "all sex is rape." I can't imagine women not getting enraged over being told that they were such simpletons that they didn't know that they were being oppressed and that their desire for men was proof of their oppression, but they didn't.
It is mind-boggling to think that something so basic as the attraction mechanisms between men and women, which are the foundation processes of the continuation of our species and which have persisted for thousands of years, could have been completely re-defined in the space of only one generation. Yet, this is exactly what has happened. Somewhere in there is a chilling disregard for life based on a lack of awareness of what life is and how it is perpetuated.
Erasing any distinction between normal male-female sexuality and criminal behavior has devastated the ability to have and sustain stable mated relationships. The simple existence of the ambiguous laws and lack of legal standards put women as well as men into completely undefined territory filled with landmines. There are so many ways that a woman can use the legal system to clobber a man these days that men are more and more lapsing into wary silence and distance. Of course, this feeds right into women's complaints about male emotional withdrawal.
Never before in history has it been so hard for men and women who want to get together to do so. And never before has the incentive for persistence through an occasional hard time been so low.
The war which began with Pearl Harbor ended with the Atomic bomb.
The only possible outcome when neither side will back off their commitment to war is total defeat of one side or the other. When the battle is between men and women, total defeat of one side is not possible without the destroying the victorious side as well. All wars are insane to some degree, but a gender war is the most insane anything could possibly be. No one can tell their enemies from their allies any more, and often spend more time and energy supporting their enemies rather than their allies.
The frontline battle for men's rights to be attracted to women, and let women know that, will have to be fought by women. They have been the ones whose behavior the extremists have been out to change anyway. It's just that men make easier targets and if you change the behavior of the men then the women will be forced to change their behavior.
The drive to stamp out heterosexuality and marriage waged by the extremists, capitalizing on the "victory" of Brownmiller's surprise attack, is directly a war against women who would like those options. Both men and women have come to fear marriage and fear members of the other sex. There have always been forces in the culture which hated sex and were constantly obsessing over the possibility that some of their fellow citizens could be having too much or the wrong kind of sex. Most states have had laws on the books prohibiting certain kinds of sex. It has long been widely accepted that men in general liked sex more than women in general, many of whom did not like it at all. The famous Ann Landers' survey, which showed that 70% of women would be perfectly happy never to have sex again, made it clear to men what women think of us as lovers. And where Landers was dismissive, Shere Hite was absolutely brutal toward men.
Men have long been waiting for a voice of peace from women saying in effect "We like men, we like men's attention. We don't think it is a crime." Since we now have to deal with the "reasonable woman" standard, where are the reasonable women speaking out saying "This is NOT sexual harassment." or "This is NOT rape." ?!
Without female voices speaking this message, it is likely that the war will continue to rage on.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Bonecrker #13 - DV Myths = Cold War
Bonecrker #20 – Rape Fantasies
Bonecrker #65 – The Repeating Patterns of Women Who Cry Rape
.
It is mind-boggling to think that something so basic as the attraction mechanisms between men and women, which are the foundation processes of the continuation of our species and which have persisted for thousands of years, could have been completely re-defined in the space of only one generation. Yet, this is exactly what has happened. Somewhere in there is a chilling disregard for life based on a lack of awareness of what life is and how it is perpetuated.
Erasing any distinction between normal male-female sexuality and criminal behavior has devastated the ability to have and sustain stable mated relationships. The simple existence of the ambiguous laws and lack of legal standards put women as well as men into completely undefined territory filled with landmines. There are so many ways that a woman can use the legal system to clobber a man these days that men are more and more lapsing into wary silence and distance. Of course, this feeds right into women's complaints about male emotional withdrawal.
Never before in history has it been so hard for men and women who want to get together to do so. And never before has the incentive for persistence through an occasional hard time been so low.
The war which began with Pearl Harbor ended with the Atomic bomb.
The only possible outcome when neither side will back off their commitment to war is total defeat of one side or the other. When the battle is between men and women, total defeat of one side is not possible without the destroying the victorious side as well. All wars are insane to some degree, but a gender war is the most insane anything could possibly be. No one can tell their enemies from their allies any more, and often spend more time and energy supporting their enemies rather than their allies.
The frontline battle for men's rights to be attracted to women, and let women know that, will have to be fought by women. They have been the ones whose behavior the extremists have been out to change anyway. It's just that men make easier targets and if you change the behavior of the men then the women will be forced to change their behavior.
The drive to stamp out heterosexuality and marriage waged by the extremists, capitalizing on the "victory" of Brownmiller's surprise attack, is directly a war against women who would like those options. Both men and women have come to fear marriage and fear members of the other sex. There have always been forces in the culture which hated sex and were constantly obsessing over the possibility that some of their fellow citizens could be having too much or the wrong kind of sex. Most states have had laws on the books prohibiting certain kinds of sex. It has long been widely accepted that men in general liked sex more than women in general, many of whom did not like it at all. The famous Ann Landers' survey, which showed that 70% of women would be perfectly happy never to have sex again, made it clear to men what women think of us as lovers. And where Landers was dismissive, Shere Hite was absolutely brutal toward men.
Men have long been waiting for a voice of peace from women saying in effect "We like men, we like men's attention. We don't think it is a crime." Since we now have to deal with the "reasonable woman" standard, where are the reasonable women speaking out saying "This is NOT sexual harassment." or "This is NOT rape." ?!
Without female voices speaking this message, it is likely that the war will continue to rage on.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Bonecrker #13 - DV Myths = Cold War
Bonecrker #20 – Rape Fantasies
Bonecrker #65 – The Repeating Patterns of Women Who Cry Rape
.
Monday, March 21, 2005
EOTM: The Chain of Violence
4/22/99-
In the wake of the Littleton CO shootings, once again the issue of violence in the culture comes up for debate. Everyone has leapt on this tragic event as evidence for their pet theory of utopianism. Most pathetic and ridiculous are the gun-control fanatics who ignore the fact that there are already pipe bomb and other explosive device control laws which did nothing to prevent such a pre-meditated act of mayhem.
Overt violence is like the volcanic eruption which is the result of the buildup of stresses over a long period of time. Isolating the violent act itself from the events and forces which created it, make it impossible to understand.
Our culture's relationship with violence is schizophrenic. As long as we don't have to confront it directly in reality, it is fine. But when it happens in our faces we act shocked. US culture, and any culture which imports US entertainment, is saturated with a steady diet of violence. Movies are violent, television commercials are violent, comedy and cartoons are violent. Yet, when real violence instead of fantasy violence erupts in our culture, some people act shocked. "Where could this have come from? HOW could this have happened?"
Those people will never find the answers to those questions until they confront the issue that violence is a chain. Any overt act of violence will have been preceeded by a long slow buildup of pressures which finally erupt in the same way that a volcano erupts to let off the immense tectonic pressures which have built up. Attempting to deal with the eruptions alone, while ignoring the forces which preceed them, assures that understanding of violence will be limited to assessing the carnage after the fact. These people will become very good at assessing carnage, and will be quick to offer solutions which "could" have prevented this particular eruption, but they will offer nothing to prevent any other eruption in the future.
Violence does not just suddenly come from nowhere. Violence is passed along from person to person in many forms until it reaches such a concentration in one person that it erupts. Two people prone to violence can dance each other into it in no time. Culturally we live in a sea of violent images and still seem surprised when those same images are turned into reality in front of us. We seem to deny violence until it escalates past any ability of denial, then to get angry at those who forced us to recognize it.
One characteristic of the Littleton shootings distinguishes it from the other school shootings: it was obviously suicidal in intent. The primary focus of the violence turned out to be themselves: they just decided to take a few of those who had acted violently toward them along with them.
Until the cultural denial is broken regarding just how much violence had been poured onto and into these two boys, they will just be another in a series of pressure relief valves which allow the pressure cooker to keep simmering without blowing up. As the picture of these boys emerges, the word "marginalized" continuously comes to mind. These boys are inheritors of the legacy of marginalizing men which has been going on since the late 1960s. More than a society of haves and have-nots as many have been predicting, there is also a division brewing between what might be termed "ins" and "outs". The boys in CO were definitely "outs".
What will compound this tragedy is if no one points out that these boys were acting like lenses and focused the violence in this culture to the point of ignition, like a magnifying glass can focus the sun to start a fire. Why should people be surprised when these boys take all the "You have no place in this world" messages and believe them? The term "War on boys" is constantly being used for the wholesale medicating and berating of boys which happens in the public education system. Maybe these boys didn't have all that happen directly to them, but they saw it all the time everywhere. They lived and grew up in an environment which was hostile to them because they were boys. That is cetainly Sexual Harassment. It seems remarkable to have to point out to someone who has talked about the "War on boys", the simple fact that this is what it looks like when boys fight back.
The answer is so simple that I'm not surprised that it has escaped the bureaucrats: decrease the violence against boys and men, if you want to decrease the violence BY boys and men. Men have been saying for years that hate bounces. Yet, men today get man-hatred shoved in their faces no matter where they look. All popular entertainment, and particularly the commercials that support it, reek of man-hatred.
Breaking the chain of violence will involve quitting expecting anyone to absorb constant and focussed hostility for a long period of time without returning in kind. It involves seeing the assassination of men's characters as a form of violence and understanding that violence can be hidden and covert just as well as it can be overt. Until all involved take the responsibility for their own participation/contribution to violence, each violent act will contribute to eventual retaliatory violence.
In order to break the chain, ALL parties must stop.
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The issues of men's anger and men's violence have become central to the angry rhetoric of the gender war. Men face an absolute seemingly unbreakable wall of denial regarding female violence and participation in feeding events of violence.
The answer to everything seems to be for men to suppress their anger even more. All that will do is assure that the next time an eruption occurs to let off pressure that it will be even more explosive.
On one of the discussion lists, the one maintained by backlash.com, there is a great deal of discussion of male anger and violence. How and why men are suppressed in their expressions of anger, and how and why this makes the problems worse, are frequent topics - as is what form the "backlash" will take if there ever is one.
One man stated the situation particularly eloquently. I have his permission to quote it here.
"And now there's Littleton, Colorado to add to the list of American towns where the end result of this has brought death and violence. Janet Reno and the gun control lobbiests are already preaching tighter restrictions, etc. Why don't we ask if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold gave a FUCK about gun control laws? I'm not much one way or the other on the issue of gun control, but I do know that people have been killing each other for a lot longer than guns have been around.
"The current body count is 15 total -. 11 males, including 1 adult and the two shooters, and 4 females. One of the victims was black. I wonder how long it will take the VAWA promoters and the Hate Crime people to draw on this tragedy to promote their agendas ? Will we just bury the other 11 victims and call them "Colaterial Damage" in the war on women and minorities ?
"You all are probably sick of hearing me rant about the Socially Forced Supression of male anger, and how we are taught from day one to "Be a MAN, and EAT it.". Then when it explodes, ALL men become violent murdering wife beating rapists. These young men were pushed over the edge, and no less victims of the same urge to kill that drove them to commit this atrocity.
"Goddammit, we need to face this issue of anger ourselves. As Fathers and male role models, our children NEED US to teach them how to deal with it by example. That's why I put my web page back online after it disappeared two years ago, although sometimes even I think it's a pathetic cry in the wilderness. If we who know and feel the pain don't start to deal with it, NOBODY WILL !
"The "authorities" were alerted a full year before these two kids decided to self-destruct, and take 15 innocent souls with them, now they're wondering how they missed it. I see it every day in every person I meet, and it scares the shit out of me."
Another man tossed in:
"The state says my kids only need their mother. They don't need me for anything but money."
To which the first man responded:
"I understand how you feel, and God knows that there are thousands of other men just like you who are just as angry and have every right to be. I think it's time we made an issue of this, a BIG issue. It may be too late for us, but maybe we can shake some sense into the future leaders of our children's world. I've already decided that anyone who even mentions this story to me is going to get my "WELCOME TO THE BACKLASH !' speech. 'The Fun has just Begun...'
"Welcome to the Backlash. This is the direct result of the legacy of socially surpressed anger that men in Amerca have been sitting on for the past three generations. I call it the "Big Boys Don't Cry" syndrome. If greater effort is not put forth to encourage men to deal with their inner hostilities, and to allow them to become the Fathers and positive role models that our children need, it's going to get a lot worse. "
Stu-
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
In the wake of the Littleton CO shootings, once again the issue of violence in the culture comes up for debate. Everyone has leapt on this tragic event as evidence for their pet theory of utopianism. Most pathetic and ridiculous are the gun-control fanatics who ignore the fact that there are already pipe bomb and other explosive device control laws which did nothing to prevent such a pre-meditated act of mayhem.
Overt violence is like the volcanic eruption which is the result of the buildup of stresses over a long period of time. Isolating the violent act itself from the events and forces which created it, make it impossible to understand.
Our culture's relationship with violence is schizophrenic. As long as we don't have to confront it directly in reality, it is fine. But when it happens in our faces we act shocked. US culture, and any culture which imports US entertainment, is saturated with a steady diet of violence. Movies are violent, television commercials are violent, comedy and cartoons are violent. Yet, when real violence instead of fantasy violence erupts in our culture, some people act shocked. "Where could this have come from? HOW could this have happened?"
Those people will never find the answers to those questions until they confront the issue that violence is a chain. Any overt act of violence will have been preceeded by a long slow buildup of pressures which finally erupt in the same way that a volcano erupts to let off the immense tectonic pressures which have built up. Attempting to deal with the eruptions alone, while ignoring the forces which preceed them, assures that understanding of violence will be limited to assessing the carnage after the fact. These people will become very good at assessing carnage, and will be quick to offer solutions which "could" have prevented this particular eruption, but they will offer nothing to prevent any other eruption in the future.
Violence does not just suddenly come from nowhere. Violence is passed along from person to person in many forms until it reaches such a concentration in one person that it erupts. Two people prone to violence can dance each other into it in no time. Culturally we live in a sea of violent images and still seem surprised when those same images are turned into reality in front of us. We seem to deny violence until it escalates past any ability of denial, then to get angry at those who forced us to recognize it.
One characteristic of the Littleton shootings distinguishes it from the other school shootings: it was obviously suicidal in intent. The primary focus of the violence turned out to be themselves: they just decided to take a few of those who had acted violently toward them along with them.
Until the cultural denial is broken regarding just how much violence had been poured onto and into these two boys, they will just be another in a series of pressure relief valves which allow the pressure cooker to keep simmering without blowing up. As the picture of these boys emerges, the word "marginalized" continuously comes to mind. These boys are inheritors of the legacy of marginalizing men which has been going on since the late 1960s. More than a society of haves and have-nots as many have been predicting, there is also a division brewing between what might be termed "ins" and "outs". The boys in CO were definitely "outs".
What will compound this tragedy is if no one points out that these boys were acting like lenses and focused the violence in this culture to the point of ignition, like a magnifying glass can focus the sun to start a fire. Why should people be surprised when these boys take all the "You have no place in this world" messages and believe them? The term "War on boys" is constantly being used for the wholesale medicating and berating of boys which happens in the public education system. Maybe these boys didn't have all that happen directly to them, but they saw it all the time everywhere. They lived and grew up in an environment which was hostile to them because they were boys. That is cetainly Sexual Harassment. It seems remarkable to have to point out to someone who has talked about the "War on boys", the simple fact that this is what it looks like when boys fight back.
The answer is so simple that I'm not surprised that it has escaped the bureaucrats: decrease the violence against boys and men, if you want to decrease the violence BY boys and men. Men have been saying for years that hate bounces. Yet, men today get man-hatred shoved in their faces no matter where they look. All popular entertainment, and particularly the commercials that support it, reek of man-hatred.
Breaking the chain of violence will involve quitting expecting anyone to absorb constant and focussed hostility for a long period of time without returning in kind. It involves seeing the assassination of men's characters as a form of violence and understanding that violence can be hidden and covert just as well as it can be overt. Until all involved take the responsibility for their own participation/contribution to violence, each violent act will contribute to eventual retaliatory violence.
In order to break the chain, ALL parties must stop.
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The issues of men's anger and men's violence have become central to the angry rhetoric of the gender war. Men face an absolute seemingly unbreakable wall of denial regarding female violence and participation in feeding events of violence.
The answer to everything seems to be for men to suppress their anger even more. All that will do is assure that the next time an eruption occurs to let off pressure that it will be even more explosive.
On one of the discussion lists, the one maintained by backlash.com, there is a great deal of discussion of male anger and violence. How and why men are suppressed in their expressions of anger, and how and why this makes the problems worse, are frequent topics - as is what form the "backlash" will take if there ever is one.
One man stated the situation particularly eloquently. I have his permission to quote it here.
"And now there's Littleton, Colorado to add to the list of American towns where the end result of this has brought death and violence. Janet Reno and the gun control lobbiests are already preaching tighter restrictions, etc. Why don't we ask if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold gave a FUCK about gun control laws? I'm not much one way or the other on the issue of gun control, but I do know that people have been killing each other for a lot longer than guns have been around.
"The current body count is 15 total -. 11 males, including 1 adult and the two shooters, and 4 females. One of the victims was black. I wonder how long it will take the VAWA promoters and the Hate Crime people to draw on this tragedy to promote their agendas ? Will we just bury the other 11 victims and call them "Colaterial Damage" in the war on women and minorities ?
"You all are probably sick of hearing me rant about the Socially Forced Supression of male anger, and how we are taught from day one to "Be a MAN, and EAT it.". Then when it explodes, ALL men become violent murdering wife beating rapists. These young men were pushed over the edge, and no less victims of the same urge to kill that drove them to commit this atrocity.
"Goddammit, we need to face this issue of anger ourselves. As Fathers and male role models, our children NEED US to teach them how to deal with it by example. That's why I put my web page back online after it disappeared two years ago, although sometimes even I think it's a pathetic cry in the wilderness. If we who know and feel the pain don't start to deal with it, NOBODY WILL !
"The "authorities" were alerted a full year before these two kids decided to self-destruct, and take 15 innocent souls with them, now they're wondering how they missed it. I see it every day in every person I meet, and it scares the shit out of me."
Another man tossed in:
"The state says my kids only need their mother. They don't need me for anything but money."
To which the first man responded:
"I understand how you feel, and God knows that there are thousands of other men just like you who are just as angry and have every right to be. I think it's time we made an issue of this, a BIG issue. It may be too late for us, but maybe we can shake some sense into the future leaders of our children's world. I've already decided that anyone who even mentions this story to me is going to get my "WELCOME TO THE BACKLASH !' speech. 'The Fun has just Begun...'
"Welcome to the Backlash. This is the direct result of the legacy of socially surpressed anger that men in Amerca have been sitting on for the past three generations. I call it the "Big Boys Don't Cry" syndrome. If greater effort is not put forth to encourage men to deal with their inner hostilities, and to allow them to become the Fathers and positive role models that our children need, it's going to get a lot worse. "
Stu-
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Sunday, March 20, 2005
EOTM: Why Are Men So Angry?
"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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One of the most common men's issues I see discussed on NGs is men's anger. Everybody is obsessing about men's anger, characterizing it as uniting force among men - "male" anger, telling men how to manage it, and express it and suppress it.
What no one is doing is acknowledging WHAT IT IS that men are getting angry about. And every time some man brings up all the man bashing in the culture, or how shittily men are treated, everybody tries to "hush him up", so he gets angrier and keeps getting angrier until he feels like he has been HEARD or SEEN JUST AS HE IS. Instead, he keeps getting told how he "should" be and, even when the prescription is impossible or completely nuts, having people ANGRY AT him for living a life of reality rather than their fantasies of what they want him to be.
.
The anger you see in a man is directly proportional to the anger which he has absorbed over the years. Letting that anger out is essential to ever being able to let go of it and leave it behind. But it is very takes a very long time to learn how to be focussed and articulate with anger. It is a mature skill and takes lots of practice. It is something older men could teach younger men, except that younger men distrust older men these days.
Men are expressing a lot of anger these days. It comes from 25 years of having their collective character assassinated in the public consciousness. Men have been turned into criminals for trying to be good fathers. Everything has been turned upside down for them. Where they expected recognition and appreciation, they received blame and hatred.
The extent of men's anger can easily be seen in their withdrawal, not their violence. Boys are bailing out of schools because the schools hate boys so much. Men of all ages are quietly going against the impossible demands and expectations placed on them. Silencing them did not immobilize them and they have found ways to express that anger even if they couldn't win a semantic word game about how they expressed it vocally. They are expressing it by their absence.
The men still arguing with women are the ones still trying to reach understanding. They are the ones who still believe in women. The rest have quit talking to women completely. Or rather, they have quit listening to women while they rag on incessantly.
Anger is a natural reaction to a feeling of being attacked. Anyone who doesn't see how men are under attack every day just isn't looking. The cultural role and contributions of men have been "deconstructed" into rubble during the course of the past 30 years. Men have been tarred with the broad brush of "the enemy" and women have refused to let men be their allies. Everything men do has been under attack, and people still wonder why men are so angry. No one ever acknowledges that the culture decimates any man who quits doing that which the culture also ridicules them for doing.
The notion of benign intentions on the part of men has been replaced by universal suspicion of malice. The very valuable social asset of a reputation has been destroyed culture wide. The social fracturing which has resulted in migration of large percentages of the population into urban areas makes it harder to get to know people individually and leads directly to the formation and use of stereotypes. Social transgressions like lying, which would reflect so badly on an entire family with long standing social ties that the individual lives with an awareness that his/her actions can harm other people indirectly, go undetected when the only thing that people know of each other is what they see in front of them. The entire notion of internal controls of behavior, what one might call a sense of ethics, has been discredited by radical feminist theory.
Thus we have moved into an era where there are no ethics, no internalized cultural controls and substituted an massive snarl of government regulations and the much touted RULE of LAW. Except the laws are so incredibly biased against men that men have lost faith in the both the justice system and the government.
And when a man expresses anger about any of this, he is essentially told to shut up.
The more trapped a man is in situations which are eating him alive, the angrier he will be. The more verbal abuse and criticism he takes for his efforts, the angrier he will be. The more he has had his own needs used to manipulate and exploit him, the angrier he will be. The more condesending bullshit he has had to put up with from women, the angrier he will be.
The key to resolving the anger which comes from being under attack is to take oneself out of the line of fire, if possible. If you are not called upon to do battle several times per day, over time the battle reflex will die away. All the arguing with women is counter-productive in two ways. First, it just keeps the frustration level high because the arguments fall into such stereotyped patterns. Second, it reinforces the stereotype of angry men which women already have.
A better solution is turning one's back on the source of the anger. Anger is like an animal that needs to be fed. It is far easier than most people realize to starve it to death. At a certain point of not being heard, it is best to unhook from the attempt and accept the fact that this other person is simply never going to accept the truth about you. Cut that person loose immediately.
This is not to say don't speak out. When someone says or does something incredibly offensive to you, point it out and point out how obnoxious it was. DON'T get into an argument over the other person's "right" to have done it. They will always feel righteously justified in their bigotry.
But, speak out and then turn your back. Don't waste your time on these people.
Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time. And it ANNOYS the pig.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the most common men's issues I see discussed on NGs is men's anger. Everybody is obsessing about men's anger, characterizing it as uniting force among men - "male" anger, telling men how to manage it, and express it and suppress it.
What no one is doing is acknowledging WHAT IT IS that men are getting angry about. And every time some man brings up all the man bashing in the culture, or how shittily men are treated, everybody tries to "hush him up", so he gets angrier and keeps getting angrier until he feels like he has been HEARD or SEEN JUST AS HE IS. Instead, he keeps getting told how he "should" be and, even when the prescription is impossible or completely nuts, having people ANGRY AT him for living a life of reality rather than their fantasies of what they want him to be.
.
The anger you see in a man is directly proportional to the anger which he has absorbed over the years. Letting that anger out is essential to ever being able to let go of it and leave it behind. But it is very takes a very long time to learn how to be focussed and articulate with anger. It is a mature skill and takes lots of practice. It is something older men could teach younger men, except that younger men distrust older men these days.
Men are expressing a lot of anger these days. It comes from 25 years of having their collective character assassinated in the public consciousness. Men have been turned into criminals for trying to be good fathers. Everything has been turned upside down for them. Where they expected recognition and appreciation, they received blame and hatred.
The extent of men's anger can easily be seen in their withdrawal, not their violence. Boys are bailing out of schools because the schools hate boys so much. Men of all ages are quietly going against the impossible demands and expectations placed on them. Silencing them did not immobilize them and they have found ways to express that anger even if they couldn't win a semantic word game about how they expressed it vocally. They are expressing it by their absence.
The men still arguing with women are the ones still trying to reach understanding. They are the ones who still believe in women. The rest have quit talking to women completely. Or rather, they have quit listening to women while they rag on incessantly.
Anger is a natural reaction to a feeling of being attacked. Anyone who doesn't see how men are under attack every day just isn't looking. The cultural role and contributions of men have been "deconstructed" into rubble during the course of the past 30 years. Men have been tarred with the broad brush of "the enemy" and women have refused to let men be their allies. Everything men do has been under attack, and people still wonder why men are so angry. No one ever acknowledges that the culture decimates any man who quits doing that which the culture also ridicules them for doing.
The notion of benign intentions on the part of men has been replaced by universal suspicion of malice. The very valuable social asset of a reputation has been destroyed culture wide. The social fracturing which has resulted in migration of large percentages of the population into urban areas makes it harder to get to know people individually and leads directly to the formation and use of stereotypes. Social transgressions like lying, which would reflect so badly on an entire family with long standing social ties that the individual lives with an awareness that his/her actions can harm other people indirectly, go undetected when the only thing that people know of each other is what they see in front of them. The entire notion of internal controls of behavior, what one might call a sense of ethics, has been discredited by radical feminist theory.
Thus we have moved into an era where there are no ethics, no internalized cultural controls and substituted an massive snarl of government regulations and the much touted RULE of LAW. Except the laws are so incredibly biased against men that men have lost faith in the both the justice system and the government.
And when a man expresses anger about any of this, he is essentially told to shut up.
The more trapped a man is in situations which are eating him alive, the angrier he will be. The more verbal abuse and criticism he takes for his efforts, the angrier he will be. The more he has had his own needs used to manipulate and exploit him, the angrier he will be. The more condesending bullshit he has had to put up with from women, the angrier he will be.
The key to resolving the anger which comes from being under attack is to take oneself out of the line of fire, if possible. If you are not called upon to do battle several times per day, over time the battle reflex will die away. All the arguing with women is counter-productive in two ways. First, it just keeps the frustration level high because the arguments fall into such stereotyped patterns. Second, it reinforces the stereotype of angry men which women already have.
A better solution is turning one's back on the source of the anger. Anger is like an animal that needs to be fed. It is far easier than most people realize to starve it to death. At a certain point of not being heard, it is best to unhook from the attempt and accept the fact that this other person is simply never going to accept the truth about you. Cut that person loose immediately.
This is not to say don't speak out. When someone says or does something incredibly offensive to you, point it out and point out how obnoxious it was. DON'T get into an argument over the other person's "right" to have done it. They will always feel righteously justified in their bigotry.
But, speak out and then turn your back. Don't waste your time on these people.
Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time. And it ANNOYS the pig.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Saturday, March 19, 2005
EOTM: Boycott VD (Valentine's Day)
Each year, the majority of men in this country (USA) are forced under threat of dire personal consequences to participate in the largest most meaningless orgy of purposeless consumption and empty demonstrations of "love." Meaningless because they are contrived, forced, and are in no way real and spontaneous expressions of authentic affection, but are rather the worst and most hypocritical form of tokenism.
Last year the local paper carried an article on VD entitled "Instructions to men: DON'T FORGET." The article covered many aspects of the tradition of male->female gift giving in the "romantic" setting and cited such analogues from other species as male bears giving female bears fish and male chimps giving female chimps pieces of fruit as inducements to copulation.
However, the real agenda of the day was shown in the quote from one woman who said "It's no thrill standing by watching some friend's arms pile up with flowers, candy, and teddy bears while you stand there empty handed." The purpose of the day is not demonstrations of affection, but competition between women to show off who has been able to capture the attentions of the highest status ( read: wealthiest ) males.
The article also covered the resentment many men feel over being coerced into these insincere, contrived, and meaningless displays of affection. A direct quote from the article - "Women's response: 'TOO BAD! Do it anyway.' " The article went on to make it clear that there would be hell to pay for any man who failed to comply - including being exiled to the couch.
Given how obnoxious the choices facing men are these days when it comes to "romantic" involvements, it is a pretty good time to ask whether making a stand against the female defined and enforced "rules" about this day would really make things enough worse that putting up with them might not be worth making a position statement here. If enough intrepid "Rosa Parkses" of gender refuse to give up their seats on their position that coerced displays of "love" are meaningless, who knows where it might lead?
Think of it as a sit-down strike against being pressured to pump more money into the pockets of the jewelry store and flower shop owners, so THEY can use it to shower meaningless tokens of affection on their "one and only beloved."
Just say no.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Last year the local paper carried an article on VD entitled "Instructions to men: DON'T FORGET." The article covered many aspects of the tradition of male->female gift giving in the "romantic" setting and cited such analogues from other species as male bears giving female bears fish and male chimps giving female chimps pieces of fruit as inducements to copulation.
However, the real agenda of the day was shown in the quote from one woman who said "It's no thrill standing by watching some friend's arms pile up with flowers, candy, and teddy bears while you stand there empty handed." The purpose of the day is not demonstrations of affection, but competition between women to show off who has been able to capture the attentions of the highest status ( read: wealthiest ) males.
The article also covered the resentment many men feel over being coerced into these insincere, contrived, and meaningless displays of affection. A direct quote from the article - "Women's response: 'TOO BAD! Do it anyway.' " The article went on to make it clear that there would be hell to pay for any man who failed to comply - including being exiled to the couch.
Given how obnoxious the choices facing men are these days when it comes to "romantic" involvements, it is a pretty good time to ask whether making a stand against the female defined and enforced "rules" about this day would really make things enough worse that putting up with them might not be worth making a position statement here. If enough intrepid "Rosa Parkses" of gender refuse to give up their seats on their position that coerced displays of "love" are meaningless, who knows where it might lead?
Think of it as a sit-down strike against being pressured to pump more money into the pockets of the jewelry store and flower shop owners, so THEY can use it to shower meaningless tokens of affection on their "one and only beloved."
Just say no.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
EOTM: Boycott the Bashers
Fight back. Just say no to products that bash men in their advertising.
Boycott VD (that’s Valentine’s Day)
Boycott makeup and jewelry (ie woman who wear them)
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We all know what matters most in the good old U$A these days. Bucks. Moolah. Cash. Capital. The high and holy "quarterly earnings." Commericalism has been drifting for years into a increasing use of anti-male imagery in order to pander to its primary consumer base: women. Men are portrayed as stupid, targets of violence, subhuman, and often reduced to the status of walking wallets to be emptied for the gratification of women. Fighting the relentless anti-male juggernaut is often beyond the means of the average working stiff trying to earn a decent living. The most organized and motivated resisters are the Father's Rights Groups, but they require time, money, and often lawsuits which drain and overtax both.
But there is something any and every man can do to penalize and hurt the companies, and industries, which profit from defaming men: JUST SAY NO to their products. Boycott both individual companies which use man-bashing ads - ones which portray men as stupid, dehumanized, or the target of violence, particularly sexual violence like a kick in the balls - and entire industries which exploit men directly, like the jewelry and florist industries, or indirectly like the makeup and fashion industries. (By this I mean boycotting WOMEN who wear them. No, I'm not asking you to give up your eyeliner, guys.)
I would also heartily endorse staying the hell away from rogaine and propecia, but that is always an individual choice.
Boycott Steven Spielberg
"The Color Purple" is one of the most man-hating movies ever made. The black male lead is portrayed as maliciously lording what little power he has over the only person(s) with less "power" tha he has. The character of men is portrayed as universally vicious until they are overcome and "humbled" by women.
Spielberg has grown quite rich providing "popular" entertainment, but abuses the male portion of his audience by ruthlessly exploiting cheap sensationalism to fuel anti-male sentiment. In a culture where women view make-up and fashion advertisements as "society telling" them how to act and look, we must realize that anit-male propaganda hidden in entertainment will be interpreted as "society telling" women that men are violent, abusive, and exploitive.
Do not support anyone who pushes these messages by making them richer.
Boycott VD (that’s Valentine’s Day)
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Bonecrker #9 - Boycott Those Who Disrespect Men
Boycott VD (that’s Valentine’s Day)
Boycott makeup and jewelry (ie woman who wear them)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We all know what matters most in the good old U$A these days. Bucks. Moolah. Cash. Capital. The high and holy "quarterly earnings." Commericalism has been drifting for years into a increasing use of anti-male imagery in order to pander to its primary consumer base: women. Men are portrayed as stupid, targets of violence, subhuman, and often reduced to the status of walking wallets to be emptied for the gratification of women. Fighting the relentless anti-male juggernaut is often beyond the means of the average working stiff trying to earn a decent living. The most organized and motivated resisters are the Father's Rights Groups, but they require time, money, and often lawsuits which drain and overtax both.
But there is something any and every man can do to penalize and hurt the companies, and industries, which profit from defaming men: JUST SAY NO to their products. Boycott both individual companies which use man-bashing ads - ones which portray men as stupid, dehumanized, or the target of violence, particularly sexual violence like a kick in the balls - and entire industries which exploit men directly, like the jewelry and florist industries, or indirectly like the makeup and fashion industries. (By this I mean boycotting WOMEN who wear them. No, I'm not asking you to give up your eyeliner, guys.)
I would also heartily endorse staying the hell away from rogaine and propecia, but that is always an individual choice.
Boycott Steven Spielberg
"The Color Purple" is one of the most man-hating movies ever made. The black male lead is portrayed as maliciously lording what little power he has over the only person(s) with less "power" tha he has. The character of men is portrayed as universally vicious until they are overcome and "humbled" by women.
Spielberg has grown quite rich providing "popular" entertainment, but abuses the male portion of his audience by ruthlessly exploiting cheap sensationalism to fuel anti-male sentiment. In a culture where women view make-up and fashion advertisements as "society telling" them how to act and look, we must realize that anit-male propaganda hidden in entertainment will be interpreted as "society telling" women that men are violent, abusive, and exploitive.
Do not support anyone who pushes these messages by making them richer.
Boycott VD (that’s Valentine’s Day)
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Bonecrker #9 - Boycott Those Who Disrespect Men
Friday, March 18, 2005
EOTM: "Can't We All Just Get Along?" "Can't We Just Go Out On A Date?"
"The Feminists -v- The Marriage License Bureau of the State of New York...All the discriminatory practices against women are patterned and rationalized by this slavery-like practice. We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage." -- From Sisterhood Is Powerful, Morgan (ed), 1970 p. 537.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been in Bob's shoes. Progressively thoroughout the 80s and 90s "dating" seems to have become an endurance test to see just how much offensiveness and contempt a man will put up with from a woman and still come back for more. Particularly when juxtaposed against the claim that women are the "feelings experts" and the "relatitionship experts", or against any of the concepts of "love" or even affection prevalent in our culture, the actual behavior of women has become so bizarre that it almost defies explanation and understanding.
USA Today, 3/3/99, citing the US Census Bureau, reported that the number of people currently married has fallen to an all-time low. While not specifying the age at which one is considered an "adult", the paper showed a graph comparing the various marital statuses in 1970 and 1998. Since 1970, the percentage of married adults has fallen from 68% to 56%. One might say that the feminists are well on their way to accomplishing their objective of destroying marriage.
Against the backdrop of the Great Impeachment Circus of 1998-99 with its revelations of the marital infidelities of the US president, and all the hypocritical moralistic posturing that went with it as moral paragon after moral paragon bit the dust after past maritial lapses came to light, no small amount of dialogue has been generated on the subject of marriage. One must wonder whether the institution of marriage is a robust enough vessel to contain all the bitterly conflicting expectations and demands placed on it. Face it, any company that put out a product that self-destructed over 50% of the time would not remain in business for long.
A phrase that began to be used repeatedly during the 13 month long nightmare of the Bill-and-Monica show was "culture war." Either our culture seems to be a war with itself, or we have two or more separate and distinct subcultures within the larger culture. This is certainly true on the topic of marriage. The website http://www.cyberparent.com/women/marriage.htm has a whole list of articles on women's view of marriage. One of these Marriage: Why are women leaving marriage in droves? goes into some depth about the expectations that "society" creates in the minds of both men and women regarding WOMEN'S role in marriage. I found the whole thing rather banal and cliche-ridden. Sadly, the author claimed to be a male:
Oh, my, my, my," says Society with a capital "S," while wringing its hands and shaking its head, "If we could just get those women back to the farm... If we could just get that genie back in the bottle..."
Is it true?
If we could just get these women back to the farm; if we could just get women to stay home again, would they be afraid to leave marriage because the kids might starve?
If we could just get those women under control again, reverse those child support laws, and go back to the old ways, would everything be better?
If we could just return to the "good ol' days" when men were men and women were women and everyone knew their place in marriage, would marriage work again?
Obviously, we do have two totally different cultures around here somewhere. I keep wondering where these alleged "independent" women hang out. Unlike the women represented in these articles, I have yet to actually meet one in person for whom marriage, and "true love", and "happily ever after" was not the ultimate goal. The myth of the "independent woman" is compellingly attractive, but so far I have yet to find a confirmed sighting of one. And "independence" is a very relative term. On one web site I ran across the statement by a woman that men were "nice to have around -- sometimes." So are Mariachi bands -- sometimes. Maybe these 3rd wave feminists have gotten over the spit-in-your-face independence of "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle", but being regarded as a marginally useful household appliance seems hardly worth all the effort that goes into a relationship.
Then there's the grisly gauntlet of dating. And here is where I find the situation portrayed in the article cited above to be exactly reversed. All the women I've ever encountered in a "dating" context had been told a whole lot by "society" about what she "should" want and what I was like, and none of it rang true.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been in Bob's shoes. Progressively thoroughout the 80s and 90s "dating" seems to have become an endurance test to see just how much offensiveness and contempt a man will put up with from a woman and still come back for more. Particularly when juxtaposed against the claim that women are the "feelings experts" and the "relatitionship experts", or against any of the concepts of "love" or even affection prevalent in our culture, the actual behavior of women has become so bizarre that it almost defies explanation and understanding. Despite the best efforts of the heterophobes and the lesbian separatists, men and women are still attracted to each other and women, at least, still seem to regard "THE Relationship" as a kind of holy grail. But somewhere along the line any notion of mutuality or reciprocity seems to have gotten lost in the fiction of historic male power and privilege. The old Victorian notions of female sexual disinterest and male sexual depravity recycled into the legal mechanisms of Sexual Harassment, Date and Marital Rape, and pornography-as-violence-against-all-women have further suppressed the expression of female sexuality and pathologized and criminalized male sexuality. And millions of women sit around and wonder why they can't get a date.
Hardly a day goes by that I don't see more evidence, another example, of how women have completely lost touch with any sense of men as human beings, and with any notion about what is or might be attractive to men. Apparently, many women believe that men thrive on abuse and that the more abrasive and unpleasant a woman can be toward a man the more he will "Love" her. Such thinking does not impress men with women's general level of intelligence. The female method of talking feelings and situations to death is in direct conflict with men's tendency to deal with things as simply as possible. Having to explain to a woman why the situation depicted in the above cartoon is so incredibly obnoxious, offensive, demeaning, and infuriating to men seems ridiculous to most men. How in the world ANYONE could expect someone to listen to this kind of crap and not begin to detest the person putting it out is simply incomprehensible. The only possible conclusion is that the woman is completely devoid of social graces, arrogant and contemptuous of men to a degree which is almost impossible to believe, cruel and sadistic in many respects, and none too bright.
Thousands of examples of this kind of immature, self-centered and narcissistic world view can be found on the web. For Valentine's Day 1999, msnbc.com posted an article entitled "Dating Myself: Remembering how to date again is not like riding a bike". After the obligatory modern-woman/single-mom assertion that she was perfectly happy being single and raising her daughter alone, the woman went on to describe her desire to "reinvigorate the date."
"About a year ago, someone I met at a dinner invited me out on a date." ...
"This is how it went: We met at a dinner and talked to each other and then we talked to other people. I thought he seemed nice and attractive though he did not inspire that breathless, pheromone-filled instant response. (Those are usually reserved for men I discover are either happily married or homosexual.) Three days later, he called, I answered, we chatted and he asked if I wanted to go out for dinner. Just like that. I even accepted and we were on for Thursday night. This is strategically a good night since it is not burdened by the significance of a weekend or an unencumbered next day, Thursday is a sincere night without being an officially romantic one. " ...
She then went on to describe her preparations for "the date" which included lying to her 6 y/o daughter about why she was dressing up and putting on makeup to spare her daughter the "complications" of "Introducing an insignificant man into the picture..."
"I kissed her goodbye and drove to my date. Let me say this again, my dinner date. At a fancy restaurant downtown. For one panicky moment I wondered if I would actually remember what this date of mine looked like. He had a mustache I think. I assume he will remember me."...
"We met at the bar. He recognized me which was a good thing because I only half recognized him. I wanted to feel the rush of flirtation inspired by chemistry, but only felt the rush of exhileration inspired by getting acquainted — less with him, as it turned out, than getting reacquainted with myself as a datable woman. "...
"THE OUTCOME "
"Nothing much came of that date. We went out a few times. He even kissed me. He wanted things to move much quicker than I, not sexually which I can handle, but in terms of “life integration."...
"Many single mothers have no interest in a Big R relationship but would love to go on a date. Here are some rules for dating a single Mom:
1) Don’t push for meeting the kids.
2) Pay for the date.
3) Make the plan. One option, as with children, is to give a choice — would you like to go to Paris or would you like to see a movie? — and let me decide.
4) Single mothers are pathetically grateful for small gestures but since we are so constrained by the circumstances of our lives, you don’t have to worry that we will leap to conclusions and assume that a flower means a marriage proposal.
5) Offer to pay for the babysitter. Even though the offer will be refused, it is a lovely gesture.
6) Limit your own expectations about her availability — twice or three times a month is a big deal."
Again, from the male point of view it is unfathomable that this woman, or any woman, could be so self-centered and narcissistic that she would regard the entire purpose of a "date" as being "...getting reacquainted with herself as a datable woman." And women complain about men turning WOMEN into objects!!!! Do women REALLY have to have it explained to them that the ENTIRE REASON a man would ask them out on a "date" is because that man has the desire to become something MORE than an "insignificant man" in that womans life?!!!! If so, no wonder "relationships" are going down the tubes.
What is fascinating about this woman's account is the strange mixture of traditional expectations of gallantry, generousity, and take-charge attitude from a man ( pay, plan the date, offer to pay for the babysitter) combined with her new-age attitudes of liberation ( being perfectly satisfied with her life as a single mom, being able to "handle" sexual "intimacy" but NOT "life integration" ). Particularly offensive in light of women's constant harping on wage parity and supposed male obsession with money, is the suggestion in the plan-the-date "rule" that the type of man this woman would consider a "datable man" is one with the financial resources to be able to offer a trip to Paris with the same ease that most men could offer a movie.
This woman's attitude is a perfect example of a very significant and destructive disconnect between the way men view "dating" or "a date" and the way women view dating. Again, from the male point of view, it seems rather amazing to have to explain that any activity which meets the needs and expectations of only one of the participants while frustrating the needs and the expectations of the other is going to be regarded as a "bad deal" by the one whose needs are being treated with contempt and is going to raise some very realistic resentment and animosity.
Men generally regard "a date" as a mechanism for getting to know someone with whom they have more than a passing interest in developing more of a relationship. If the woman makes the fact known that she considers the male to be nothing more than "an insignificant man", most men have have no shortage of other things to spend their money on and will no doubt choose to do just that. So, from there very beginning, there is a sense that the woman is behaving in a fraudulent manner: she is taking advantage of the man on false pretenses. It is clear from this woman's description that she regards "a date" as an opportunity to dine on expensive meals, or take expensive trips, at someone else's expense. A very fundamental conflict in male/female relationships is that where women seem to see this as an entitlement which is nothing more than their just due, men see it quite differently.
The much lamented lack of available "dates" for women stems directly from this phenomenon. She herself wants to be treated as somehow significant, as a "datable woman" ( whatever that means ), yet at the same time does not see the need for this regard to be reciprocal. Of course, we all know what this perceived differential in the value of companionship is based upon: the unspoken, or nearly so, implicit possibility of sex.
Another great example is from a singles ad posted on the web by a woman from Georgia, USA.
Okay, so I went to the "tips on writing ads". That helped! I am a divorced 46 year old FEMALE, 5'4", 120lbs. (give or take 5lbs. [constantly]). I always thought that was what "The Battle of the Bulge" meant. I know you will want my measurements so I'll go where no woman has ever gone before and tell you. Just had them taken last week. 36-26-35. I was told that I was one inch from being perfect. The person who said this, you have to understand, did not know of my sharp tongue, at the time. I work for a Periodontist as an assistant. If I had but one wish in life, it would be for happiness. I am seeking to find someone out there who is honest to a fault, not too hard to look at, rather tall, great personality, loves to pamper women, opps, erase that, I meant, loves to pamper a woman, knows how to give and take, will understand that most women will, one way or the other, get in that last word, understands that sex is not everything (I realize that will exclude 90% of you guys), understands that sex is an important part of things, (what can I say, I'm a woman, you're not suppose to understand what that meant), likes to stay home and watch movies and cuddle, would rather walk in the rain than weed the garden, knows plenty of GOOD jokes, can listen as well as talk, have most of their own teeth, knows how to hold up there end of an intelligent conversation and has great come backs. I know, I sound like an awful person, but I'm really not. I'm a very giving and caring person. Sometimes to a fault. And I will end this application with one old saying. Which is "When I'm good, I'm good, but when I'm bad, I'm real good." Now, name that tune. ;->
Now first of all, let's look at the fact that a woman who places an ad in an INTERNATIONAL forum might be realistically classified as "desperate." However, like the narcissist only interested in dating herself described above, she feels the need to obscure this fact. Let's "deconstruct" this woman's ad and list the things that she is demanding of a potential relationship versus the things she is offering in return. Her "conditions" or "rules" are:
1. Her one wish in life is for "happiness" ( Wow! That makes her unique. Sure glad she told me that. Tells me a WHOLE lot about her.
2. Honesty to a fault. ( nothing wrong with that )
3. "...not too hard to look at, rather tall, great personality..." ( Wow! Another unique revelation. Since most women are looking for repulsive short trolls, she obviously won't have much competetion for those remaining tall, good looking men with great personalities.)
4. Loves to pamper women. No. Wait. ONE woman - her. ( Hey, this woman is getting more "special" and unique with every condition. Since so few women want to be pampered and instead would rather knock themselves out pampering a man, all those guys out there seriously suffering from lack of a woman to pamper will surely trample each other beating down this woman's door. )
5. Will just accept the fact that she is always going to have "...that last word."
6. Understands that sex is not everything. "( I realize that will exclude 90% of you guys. )" ( Can we say "men think with their penises"? )
7. Understands that sex is an important part of things. "(what can I say, I'm a woman, you're not suppose to understand what that meant)" ( Can we say "feminine mystique". )
8. "likes to stay home and watch movies and cuddle, would rather walk in the rain than weed the garden, knows plenty of GOOD jokes, can listen as well as talk, have most of their own teeth, knows how to hold up there end of an intelligent conversation and has great come backs." ( Can we say "yadda, yadda, yadda"? )
Ummm. Makes ME want to offer her the choice — between a trip to Paris or a movie — and let her decide. Some good samaritan needs to suggest to this woman that she retake her "tips on writing ads" course. Even she, herself, realizes how bad her ad sounds when she says "I know, I sound like an awful person, but I'm really not. " A poor dumb male, thinking only with his penis and not with "both sides of a female brain", would ask WHY, if she knows that her ad makes her sound like an "awful person" she went ahead and POSTED IT. However, all this proves is that men REALLY DON'T understand women at all.
Now let's look at the list of what she is offering in return for all these sterling male qualities:
1. divorced ( and likely bitter about it ) 46 year old ( high milage ) FEMALE, (why all capital letters? ) 5'4", 120lbs. (give or take 5lbs. [constantly]). I always thought that was what "The Battle of the Bulge" meant. ( Great, so hanging around with her will mean constantly having to field the question "Do you think I look fat?" ) I know you will want my measurements so I'll go where no woman has ever gone before and tell you. (Oh, you daring and mischievious devil, you. ) Just had them taken last week. 36-26-35. I was told that I was one inch from being perfect.
2. a sharp tongue ( can be vicious and emotionally abusive if "provoked" by the suggestion that anything about her is NOT "perfect")
3. contempt and dismissal of 90% of men because they like sex - A LOT (more than she does) .
4. demand for sex that meets HER needs, despite the fact that she has already made it clear that she has no intention of respecting or meeting the MAN'S needs or at least any of the 90% of men who place a different level of importance on sex than she does.
5. being a very "caring and giving person" ( Fooled me. )
6. being "very good" when she is being "bad". ( An obvious sexual innuendo promising much which the entire rest of her ad makes it clear that she has no intention to deliver, plus indication of a shame-based view that sex is "bad". )
If this is an example of a woman thinking with both sides of her brain, it's really scary to contemplate how stupid she might be if she wasn't using her capabilities to the fullest extent possible.
These two women are examples of the "rear guard" of the gender war. Each of them illustrates some of the paradoxes which now poison male-female relationships. What they have in common is that they are both seeking and want to exercise a uniquely female form of power: sexual power. The younger woman, the single mother, views having a man ask her out as confirmation of her sexual power as a "datable woman": i.e. one who can set the "rules", regard a man as insignificant, demand that he pay and do all the work involved in dating, and expect nothing in return except perhaps sex. I'm sure it would be impossible to get this woman to see how her attitude guarantees that the only type of man she will encounter will be of the "buy her dinner or a trip to Paris - get laid" mentality. Or how women like her reinforce all the most negative stereotypes which men hold of women.
Even more disturbing is the fact that this image is being promoted by very influential media- MSNBC.COM, the partnership between Microsoft and NBC - as the idealized "new woman." Her contention that "Many single mothers have no interest in a Big R relationship but would love to go on a date. " reinforces the old stereotypes of divorcees as somewhat "loose women" who will spread their legs for a man for the price of a meal. And she is very clear in warning off men who might want to integrate themselves into her life. The man who did her the great favor of reaffirming her sexual power to attract men and be able to demand money and gifts from them with the hint of possible sexual favors given in return may have been a much better candidate for the type of husband that women claim to want than the woman's ex-husband was. However, she reverses the situation shown in the cartoon above. While he wants to meet her kid and integrate himself into her life, she is looking for "...that breathless, pheromone-filled instant response..." and "... that rush of flirtation inspired by chemistry..."
One could very accurately say here that this woman is "thinking with her pussy" while the man is "thinking with both sides of his brain."
This would be tolerable and probably not even annoying in a world where the cartoon above did not exist. However, the negative stereotyping of males and the blaming of men for the choices of women are what has made this into a gender WAR. This woman would like to be treated with respect and regard for her feelings and circumstances, yet the notion of reciprocity seems beyond her ability to grasp. Again, from the male point of view it is impossible to understand why women cannot see how it would only take a very few encounters with women like this to convince a man that women generally view sexual and intimate relationships in the same way that a prosititute does: sex in exchange for money or gifts or trips to Paris. Then when he treats the next woman he encounters as these women literally demanded that he treat them, that woman gets hurt and offended.
The middle-aged divorcee presents an even more confusing mix of modern and traditional values. The only things she offers in her ad are related to her sexuality - her measurements, her contention that they are "almost" perfect, a picture of herself in an evening gown ( or lingerie ) showing an ample portion of cleavage, and the promise to be "very good" for the man who could entice ( bribe ) her to be "bad." She makes it clear that sex will be on her terms, not his; that she will ALWAYS expect to get her way ( the last word ); makes a veiled threat of verbal and emotional abuse ( sharp tongue ); and tries to belie the desperation which is obvious in her placing an ad in an international venue when only thousanths of a % of the potential readers are in her geographic vicinity. All in all, it is a very sad picture of a woman trying desperately to hold onto her sexual power and avoid having to face the realization that she has essentially none.
Thus is the face of womanhood of the 1990s and beyond which men must confront. And it's a picture which will turn the stomach of any decent man. More that any other gender related "gap" of the gender war, these women are the primary agents in creating what might be termed "the compassion gap." To use the phrase which has now become "fighting words" in any conversation about the relationships between the sexes, when it comes to their isolation and loneliness these women did indeed "ask for it."
The last time I found myself in Bob's situation, I didn't just regret not having gone bowling with the guys. I asked for the check, threw the money on the table, and walked out. Men indirectly give women permission to bash them, and keep on bashing them, by putting up with it. If an ad or article like the ones I've quoted above annoy me enough and there is a means of responding which doesn't cost me any money, I "deconstruct" what they've said and challenge them on it. I am one male who does NOT give women permission to keep on being unbearably obnoxious and offensive toward me either directly, or indirectly by bashing ALL men.
In many respects, I hold ALL women accountable for the excesses of feminism because, while they may not have actively participated, they have been quite content to ride along on the coattails of the feminist extremists while men were being beaten down with shame and guilt. The clear and direct benefit to women has been to make men even more pliable, apologetic, and willing to sacrifice their own wants and needs in order to "please" women. Bell Hooks nailed this phenomenon on the head.
"A lot of women want to use feminism as a means for success in their careers and power in public life, then when they go home, they want to re-enter the space of traditional femininity. The personal will always be political,"
Women have had a few golden years during which they have been able to have it both ways. They have been able to gain economic and political power without relinquishing one bit of their traditional sexual power in relationships. A fascinating example of this was reflected in the attitudes of recent female graduates from one of the eastern Ivy League colleges. While they expected to make as much money as any of their male classmates, they also expected to marry men who were both older and more successful than they were.
This is a perfect example of how the absolute untruths in feminist theory have set women up for some bitter disappointments. The absolute blind faith in the mystical power of men to generate income rests on the absolute denial of the way in which the entire culture was structured to provide income to men FOR THE PURPOSE OF SUPPORTING FAMILIES.
My college roomate provided the perfect example of this about 25 years ago. He went to work for a major insurance company as a computer programmer trainee. In those days all computer training was OJT - the experienced programmers did all the teaching. One day my roomie's trainer told him to send a message addressed to the trainer's console. What he had done was to render his console ineligible to receive any messages. My roomie, being a real smart ass and none-too-bright, sent a message regarding the sexual habits of the president of the company with dead bears. The message showed up on the main operator's console as an error msg. When my roomie went to work the next day, first thing he was called into his supervisor's office. There was a stack of printouts on the guy's desk with line after line of roomie's smart-assed mistake.
His boss told him: "IF you had a wife and children to support, we would give you another chance. But you don't, so hit the road."
Before this whole social transformation took place, it was clearly understood in all segments of society that men were responsible for protecting and providing for women and children. Some percentage of a man's wages was therefor dependent to the degree to which he was living up to this responsibility. What the wage-parity hysterics will scream down immediately is any attempt to compare the wages of NEVER-MARRIED men and women. Even as long ago as the 1950s, never-married career women made as much or more than their male counterparts. It was also a well known fact that married men made more than single men. This was in the days when most businesses considered themselves part of the community and that they also bore some responsibility for community stability.
ALL this has changed in the past quarter century.
As the "men's movement" has stumbled around in the dark seeking a voice, it has done so in the complete shadow of feminism. Caught off-guard by the unexpected vehemence of the man-hatred which has always been an integral part of feminism, but from which many women who call themselves "feminists" are seeking to distance themselves today by adding qualifiers like "equity feminism" or "gender feminism", men have waivered between the "not guilty" and "mea culpa" positions. The rising tide of anti-male sentiment, man-bashing, and culture-wide character assassination of men has kept men off balance for the past 35 years.
Finally there does seem to be a rising backlash against feminist extremism. Not the kind depicted in the paranoid rantings about delusions of persecution contained in Susan Faludi's "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women", but a more directed and fact-based examination of the disastrous consequences to society of allowing a bunch of spoiled little would-be princesses run loose unchecked in their demands.
The results of the denial of female sexual power and the biological underpinnings of it are beginning to come home to roost. As this first generation of this "second wave" of feminism reaches the mid-point of its life-cycle, women like the middle-aged divorcee above are having to confront the fact that they have no real sexual power any more. Men who have achieved the financial success and have all those desirable personality attributes which she demands are becoming fully aware that they are just as desirable to 25 y/o women as they are to 45 y/o women, and that the 25 y/o women are a lot more attractive to THEM.
By destroying the essential foundation of courtesy and respect formerly part of "dating" relationships, women have invited men to treat them with the same contempt that women have been showing to men for the past 3 decades. Men like R. Don Steele, author of "Steel Balls", are promoting an approach to women which is equally ruthless and exploitive to the one which women have been pursuing toward men since the late 1960s. Men like myself, who have fought long and hard against the exploitation and counter-exploitation cycle which has created the gender war, are beginning to say "You GO, guy." to such men.
To those bleeding hearts who say "Yes, but two wrongs don't make a right", I simply point to every woman who justifies her man-hatred of today by pointing to historic "oppression" of women. As I learned from dealing with alcoholics and their families, those who tolerate sick and intolerable behavior are, to that extent, responsible for it. Men's tolerance and willingness to not "fight back" have not so far resulted in lessening the attacks on men one bit.
The failures of feminism are far less due to the inability of the feminists to convince men to change their behaviors than to the fact that WOMEN have not changed theirs. The gender war is therefor an indirect attack on women by attacking men for the very things that most women still want. The more that men's ability and willingness to give women what the majority of women still want is destroyed, the more frustrated and willing to attack men those women become. Thus, men are under attack from both sides.
Thus, the sexes are trapped in the paradox created by the fact that men have traditionally done women's dirty work for them. The people most harmed by the runaway abuse of Sexual Harassment law, expanded rape definititions, and the finding of Domestic Violence and abuse in every unkind word or gesture or even in coming home late to dinner, are not the men sitting in prison, but the women who men are beginning to avoid: women who might like to see themselves as "datable women", or middle-aged divorcees desperate to hide their desperation.
Attempts to shame men over their loss of sexual interest, play on their insecurities, and Viagra prescriptions aside, men who have successfully cast off the old macho male stereotypes, as women have been demanding that we do, are discovering some major unexpected benefits. Now we are free of having to put up with offensive and obnoxious women simply because they hold sexual power over us. They don't anymore.
Women who have completely bought into the fictional notion of men's insatiable sexual appetites, and the denial of any role that women play in the sexual dance made necessary by wiping the notion of "she asked for it" out of the cultural knowledge bank, are finding that they have forgotten HOW to "ask for it" and as a result aren't getting any of "it." There has even been a clinical term coined for it - ISD, Inhibited Sexual Desire. As male sexuality has been criminalized, and hatred of sexuality become ever more of a cultural institution, the hard work necessary to maintain a level of libido has become increasingly unworth the effort.
The net effect for women has been two-fold. As long as they continue to rely entirely and exclusively on the passive strategy of attraction and abuse the sexual power they have, they are automatically sorting out all but the most aggressive males. Thus their attitudes become self-fulfilling prophesies as they make themselves so obnoxious that any man who is capable of sensitivity and warmth cannot stand to be around them. Thus, in order to attract men AT ALL, even the most aggressive ones, they have to resort to more and more extreme measures of emphasizing and calling attention to their sexual attributes. The real "Beauty Myth", just like all other feminist myths which absolutely refute any role that women take with their own decisions in shaping the outcomes of their lives, is that ANY of these standards are imposed from the OUTSIDE, by PATRIARCHY or by the culture as a whole. The truth is that they are the primary methods which WOMEN USE TO COMPETE for that commodity so desired by women - MALE ATTENTION.
By the absolute denial of sexual power which the feminists have demanded, and by denigration of this power by worshipping men's traditional economic and political power and elevating it over sexual power and literally forcing women out of the homes to seek it, feminists have stripped women of their traditional power base. The society which would have given my old college roomie another chance if he had "a wife and family to support" no longer exists. Women's choices to stay at home and raise their children have been essentially destroyed. And women are now saddled with BOTH sets of traditional role expectations, they do indeed have to be both beautiful AND successful in careers or business because FEMINISM HAS "OPPRESSED THEM" into HAVING to "have it all" before FEMINISM GIVES THEM PERMISSION TO BE HAPPY.
About all I can do is look on these poor fools who have fallen for this hoax with a mixture of bemusement and contempt. My pity has all been used up because these people have aggressively and viciously pursued these ends. They are NOT helpless VICTIMS, but the active agents and authors of their own unhappiness.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
EOTM: Double-THINK, double, triple, and quadruple messages
" 'No' means 'no' ", except when it it doesn't, in which case it means "maybe", or maybe it means "yes", or maybe it means "yes, but...", or maybe...
Aw, the hell with it. Who knows what the hell it means?
Always interested in keeping up with what the enemy is thinking and up to, I regularly pick up Cosmo to see what kind of drivel women are being fed about men. In the current issue (today being 3/2/99) there is an article about a couple of things women do to keep men from saying "I Love You", plus some other useful advice to women which explains certain male behaviors that they love to bash. I was pleasantly surprised when the first topic dealt with was a woman asking:
"Even when I am giving him the 'yes' signal, he still won't make a move. Why?"
Instead of the stupid male-bashing gark which is usually dished out in that rag, I found the very realistic response "WHAT SIGNAL" in the male's reply. Hmmmmm? Does this question about "yes" signals and why men don't pick up on them mean what I think it means? Is this even the barest hint that sometimes women do, indeed, "ask for" men to "make a move" on them? Is this a tiny break in the wall of denial that sometimes women do, indeed, "ask for it"?
Horrors! Alert the feminazi thought police! BURN THOSE BOOKS! We CAN'T let that statement go UNPUNISHED!!!!!!
Here, we confront one of the most pervasive, and for men destructive, double messages which they get from women, and the most dangerous example of the double-THINK which our culture is permitting among women. For, in fact, we DO KNOW that women still rely almost entirely on passive strategies to attract male attention, and still absolutely refuse to stick their necks out and be as clear and explicit in their interest as the "Antioch Rules" would require.
It also explains why women are more and more going for the most aggressive and marginalized males: because they are the only ones who will still take the risk to interpret an ambiguous signal as a possible "yes" instead of a possible "no".
Daphne Patai, in her "Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism" tackles the nightmarish atmosphere of academia today. The "sex police", driven to find victims under every rock, "harassers" in every office not occupied by a woman, and make heterosexuality a thing of the past; aided and abetted by a vast army of opportunistic women ready and willing to retire on the several million bucks they can get for having to "suffer" just about any off-color comment; have certainly managed to put men in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" postion. Or perhaps more accurately: "sued if you do, slammed if you don't."
Do women appreciate the diffculty of men's position when it comes to the runaway abuse of SH law? HA! Dream on, guys. Female enticement and male intiation have been the basic steps of the mating dance since we were on all-fours and sniffing women's butts, instead of looking at their actions, to determine sexual receptivity. (A practice to which I heartily endorse returning.) Giving away the tactical advantage of being able to deny that it IS something SHE WANTS would totally undermine women's traditional power base. Hell, just look at Bill and Monica. How in the world a self-serving power groupie can manage to be seen as everyone's niece "used and abandoned" by a man "old enough to be her father" is beyond me. But, hey, that's why they call it "The Feminine Mystique."
It's a tough choice for guys these days. Either they can act within the socially positive values with which they were brought up, and watch while the scumbags walk away with a girl on each arm, or they can try to ignore all that and just go for it, in which case they will end up having their asses sued off if they have have any ass to sue for. It's enough to turn you into a misogynist.
What pisses me off more than anything else is the number of these little whiners who say "I GAVE him the 'yes signal', why didn't he take me?" and ALSO show up at "Women Take Back The Night" rallies. Coming close in the piss-off hierarchy are the males who are doing their best to continue to let these women have it both ways.
The sooner men start implementing " 'No' REALLY DOES mean 'no', and unless you say a clear, explicit, and unambiguous 'yes', you aren't gonna get the time of day", the sooner we will start striking an effective blow against the runaway abuse of Sexual Harassment and false claims of SH and rape.
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Aw, the hell with it. Who knows what the hell it means?
Always interested in keeping up with what the enemy is thinking and up to, I regularly pick up Cosmo to see what kind of drivel women are being fed about men. In the current issue (today being 3/2/99) there is an article about a couple of things women do to keep men from saying "I Love You", plus some other useful advice to women which explains certain male behaviors that they love to bash. I was pleasantly surprised when the first topic dealt with was a woman asking:
"Even when I am giving him the 'yes' signal, he still won't make a move. Why?"
Instead of the stupid male-bashing gark which is usually dished out in that rag, I found the very realistic response "WHAT SIGNAL" in the male's reply. Hmmmmm? Does this question about "yes" signals and why men don't pick up on them mean what I think it means? Is this even the barest hint that sometimes women do, indeed, "ask for" men to "make a move" on them? Is this a tiny break in the wall of denial that sometimes women do, indeed, "ask for it"?
Horrors! Alert the feminazi thought police! BURN THOSE BOOKS! We CAN'T let that statement go UNPUNISHED!!!!!!
Here, we confront one of the most pervasive, and for men destructive, double messages which they get from women, and the most dangerous example of the double-THINK which our culture is permitting among women. For, in fact, we DO KNOW that women still rely almost entirely on passive strategies to attract male attention, and still absolutely refuse to stick their necks out and be as clear and explicit in their interest as the "Antioch Rules" would require.
It also explains why women are more and more going for the most aggressive and marginalized males: because they are the only ones who will still take the risk to interpret an ambiguous signal as a possible "yes" instead of a possible "no".
Daphne Patai, in her "Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism" tackles the nightmarish atmosphere of academia today. The "sex police", driven to find victims under every rock, "harassers" in every office not occupied by a woman, and make heterosexuality a thing of the past; aided and abetted by a vast army of opportunistic women ready and willing to retire on the several million bucks they can get for having to "suffer" just about any off-color comment; have certainly managed to put men in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" postion. Or perhaps more accurately: "sued if you do, slammed if you don't."
Do women appreciate the diffculty of men's position when it comes to the runaway abuse of SH law? HA! Dream on, guys. Female enticement and male intiation have been the basic steps of the mating dance since we were on all-fours and sniffing women's butts, instead of looking at their actions, to determine sexual receptivity. (A practice to which I heartily endorse returning.) Giving away the tactical advantage of being able to deny that it IS something SHE WANTS would totally undermine women's traditional power base. Hell, just look at Bill and Monica. How in the world a self-serving power groupie can manage to be seen as everyone's niece "used and abandoned" by a man "old enough to be her father" is beyond me. But, hey, that's why they call it "The Feminine Mystique."
It's a tough choice for guys these days. Either they can act within the socially positive values with which they were brought up, and watch while the scumbags walk away with a girl on each arm, or they can try to ignore all that and just go for it, in which case they will end up having their asses sued off if they have have any ass to sue for. It's enough to turn you into a misogynist.
What pisses me off more than anything else is the number of these little whiners who say "I GAVE him the 'yes signal', why didn't he take me?" and ALSO show up at "Women Take Back The Night" rallies. Coming close in the piss-off hierarchy are the males who are doing their best to continue to let these women have it both ways.
The sooner men start implementing " 'No' REALLY DOES mean 'no', and unless you say a clear, explicit, and unambiguous 'yes', you aren't gonna get the time of day", the sooner we will start striking an effective blow against the runaway abuse of Sexual Harassment and false claims of SH and rape.
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