QUOTE: "Rob has written a lot about the pitfalls of inviting even more government intrusion into and control of your life."
“Free men” don’t beg for a piece of the pie from “the master.”
Free men bake their own damn pies, and tell everyone else to “fuck off!”
If you think the government will solve your problems with shared parenting, you are begging for your piece.
If you think the government will solve your DV problems with DV Shelters for men, you are begging for your piece.
I prefer to associate with men who don’t realy upon government to solve their problems.
Government is only preferable because it is removed from the imperfections of “mankind” and transformed into some entity nobody really understands, called “government.” It's because government is abstract from most human thinking that people believe they can foist their personal problems off onto some “generic” entity called government which we can imagine in our minds should be perfect. History has shown is this exactly the wrong approach – over and over again! And yet, because government is removed from the “personal” and thus also, “personal responsiblity”, it's easy for us to blame all of our problems upon this impersonal “entity” which does not represent us personally, but is in the abstract, and thus, “perfectable” in our minds.
No wife thinks her husband is perfect. But she thinks the abstract of government, which she doesn’t understand by nature, is somehow “perfect” because it is abstract.
Government “permission” is not the answer.
In fact, it is THE PROBLEM!
---
QUOTE: "I hear you Rob, but how does that pertain to men’s rights? For example, most fathers are awarded custody about 7% of the time. Women obtain custody 93% of the time. And of course there are a whole host of other men’s issues. Do you have any position on these at all? That’s cool if you don’t; I’m just curious."
OK, But I am bit going to write out a big explanation – however, I am going to ask you to answer me.
Almost every shared parenting activist cannot manage to write about their goals without decelaring… “except in cases of Abuse!!!!” Now, if you want to follow that route, and say that women will recieve less custody, and less money from a non-abusive father than from an abusive one (which will be the case), should I believe there will be less or more men falsely accused of abuse, as a result of shared parenting?
Second question,
Do you think those people who advocate for Shared Parenting, despite knowing the increased amount of fathers that will be falsely charged with abuse… should they be let off the hook and be allowed to blame this increase in false abuse cases on the government – or are the Shared Parenting advocates also directly responsible for their actions, and the results?
Is only the government accountable, or also those MRA’s who will be sticking more innocent men into prison for their own personal benefit… and yet, blaming it all on the abstract, impersonal, “government?”
So far, in my time in the MRM, I have not yet ONCE seen a Shared Parenting activist address these issues:
1 – They are increasing the motivation for women to NOT have an amicable divorce. In fact, they are trying to SOCIALLY SANCTION divorce, by coming to a “consensus.” (Rob pukes up a bit of Marxist bile).
2 – They are increasing the motivation for wives to make false accusations of abuse in order to gain money.
3 – They are increasing the motivation for wives to make false accusations of abuse in order to gain sole-custody.
4 - They totally wish to sidestep that shared-parenting will automatically restrict the right to freely move about the country. As in, if you are divorced and in a shared parenting situation, you will have to go to court and beg a judge to allow you to relinquish your shared parenting responsibility (which will eventually become mandatory) should you need to relocate to another city to find employment or whatnot - and so will your ex, and so will the person who remarries your ex. What a great way to bring in "papers please" type of totalitarianism into our society when we travel/move about the land. It's all for the children, after all.
The advocation of this “issue which we can all agree upon” will do enormous damage to “men.” Just not currently divorced fathers, I suppose – who seem quite willing to fuck over the fathers that will come in the years after them, in order that they may get their piece of pie today.
But, some of those fathers that come later will be their sons!
---
QUOTE: "Perhaps, as F. Roger Devlin says, it is time to initiate full custody."
You are certainly right about Devlin – he gets it! Especially when you see him at the end of his “Rotating Polyandry & It’s Enforcers” essay. Of course, “It’s Enforcers” was written by Baskerville – yet another shared parenting advocate, and yet another academic “leader” that is “acceptable.” Devlin notes, at the end, that indeed it appears that a system of sole father custody is most likely what is needed – and I applaud his courage in seeking truth. For, as he notes, as far as Baskerville goes, while he might agree with sole father custody in theory, he doesn’t believe it is acheivable, it is too fringe and therefore some form of shared parenting… yada yada… equality… yada yada… I have no brains… yada yada… because I have a Ph D … yada yada… and I have been brainwashed… yada yada…
Devlin asks a very poignant question after this (paraphrasing): “How ridiculous was it for gay activists 30 years ago to talk of same sex marriage, until today where it is talked of without a smirk on people’s faces? Surely, it is not a stretch for fathers to reinstate that which has always been in the face of what we have today!”
Yet, this is the wimpiness what we hear today.
Devlin makes a point after that, which I also fully agree with, that most of these shared parenting activists seem to miss – the point of activism is to move the fringe. The fringe controls the middle of the road.
Those of you who have been following along with my posts over the past while must know what I think about the “Absolute Truth” and the need to “take a stand.”
This is exactly the same thing, you guys.
Shared parenting is 1 + 1 = 2.3
We all know reality is 1 + 1 = 2
I don’t support living in a world where the math doesn’t work – and shared parenting doesn’t work.
Short term solutions = long term problems.
It is not responsible for parents of today to foist their problems onto kids of tomorrow… the way the parents of my generation dropped the ball and foisted no-fault-divorce the next generations… this is our no-fault-divorce. I just cannot imagine absolutely any benefit that shared parenting will add to humanity in the future.
What the hell are people thinking?
Involving government into the family even more????
Even Baskerville – a man whose fame is made upon being screwed by government doesn’t seem to get it.
Everyone sees the government as some abstract “perfectable entity” rather the faulty individuals in front of them. That’s why they run to them asking for their piece of the pie, along with the other serfs.
I guess the thing what gets me so hopped up about things like Shared Parenting and DV Shelters… or rather “me too Mra-ism” is, this is exactly the reason I have been shrieking about Marxism for years! And while people certainly understand when they see the word Marxism that looks like, and sounds like, that thing called Marxism – not enough of us seem to get it, what it is about, and it is crucial that we do.
Look, this isn’t a fight between men and women so much as it is a fight against our freedom.
Women are simply the best way to start the machine to self-destruct.
But, they only start it!
We finish it!
It will be us who closes the barn door – the backlash consolodates the gains.
They said they wanted to remove children from their parents… obviously, it is easier to remove fathers than mothers… and if you follow the Marxist line further, it should be obvious that upon “the backlash” that the fathers will remove the mothers from their children.
When might this happen?
I don’t know… maybe they will wait until around 50% or more of children aren’t raised in homes with fathers. Whenever that may be.
Feminism is toast… this bus is turning our way. You can tell me if you think it is an accident or not. According to the agenda’s stated goals themselves, it is about time for them to discard feminism and allow a “backlash.”
So far, all I see is “Marxist approved Backlash.”
So far, this hasn’t worked out well for anyone in the world.
But every one of the people who fell for it thought that it would.
And so do we.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
The Feminization of Christianity
QUOTE: “Do not think it is different from other philosophies.
Zen monks, Jesus’ offer the other cheeck, Gandhi no violence way are all the same. Like it or not.”
Jesus beat the shit out of people with a braided rope too. He also flouted the authorities and humiliated religious leaders. And his principles stood above all else.
In other words, Jesus was no Ned Flanders, and had many masculine qualities.
It has only been recently that Christianity has come to be synonymous with “wimp.” For much of history it wasn’t that way, because Christianity celebrates the masculine. In fact, much of the “struggle” of the Israelites wandering through the desert is about a struggle of the masculine over the feminine – if you understand that many of the cultures they encountered were the same matriarchal descendents which Abram left behind when he went his own way after making a covenant with God.
And the Israelites were not nice about it either.
Take Moses’ wife. (Btw, philosophically speaking – when looking at the “message” of the Bible from a metaphorical sense, Adam = Noah = Abraham = Moses = Jesus. They all metaphorically refer to the same “message.”) Anywho, back to Moses’ wife. When they encountered the tribe she came from (The “M”-something or others), they showed no mercy – even though before they were more or less allies, and after defeating them they killed every man, woman and child, and wiped them from the face of the earth. God commanded them to do this with many cultures they encountered – in fact, the Israelites in the Old Testament under Moses were a warring bunch of nomadic barbarians more than anything else.
The war between the Masculine and the Feminine in the Bible is something which seems to be carefully covered up, but if you were to get into the old texts and the old cultures, and understand that the Hebrew often clearly refers to their greatest threats in the feminine (like in languages such as French), as well as the gods they were fighting against were most often pure sex goddesses or their male consorts…
Further, “God” himself existed in the first civilization of Sumeria. The Sumerian civlization knew of ”El” – the God of the house of Shem, the son of Noah. (Noah’s other son disappeared somewhere, while the other rejected El because El was the God of the Flood, and his son was the ancestor of Gilgamesh who swore vengeance upon him for killing his ancestors.) Anyway, the Sumerians worshipped all gods – and “El” – the god of Shem, existed in those times and in that culture. The plural of “El” is “Elohim.” This is the God that Abram took with him as he left this multi-god (multi-truth = feminine) culture and Went His Own Way into the wilderness.
Now, here is where is gets kinda interesting. Apparently, what the Sumerians loved to do with their gods was “play soap opera” with them. (Abram’s father was an idol maker, remember). Every “god” that they had also had an opposite sex counterpart, and within the culture, these goddesses/gods (goddesses came before gods in those cultures) were constantly marrying and divorcing, cheating on eachother and so on. Some of the ancient stuff they have found are so pornographic they would make a hardcore internet porn surfer blush, I understand. Many ancient rituals, of course, also include elements of sexual acts in them.
However, “El” was very unpopular in this culture.
Why?
Because El had no wife. (A Marriage Striker!!!) He was pretty much the only god in Sumerian culture that had no opposite sex counterpart, and the people didn’t like that all.
“El/Elohim” of the House of Shem/House of Abraham, was a God that did not include sex worship.
‘Elohim” is the repudiation of the rule of the feminine principle (sex worship = the feminine = animalness) over the masculine principle (reason – a covenant with one Truth).
It is very telling about what has happened to our culture in that Christianity used to represent something very masculine, whereas today the first thought when you hear Christian is “Ned Flanders.”
Do you picture Ned Flanders in knight’s armour when you think of “Christian?”
Whatever one believes of Christianity, to note how this once masculine religion which founded our civilization has become so thoroughly feminized is, well, noteworthy.
---
QUOTE: With respect for the quality and helpfulness of your posts and for what your OT sermon just now was trying to teach, it might be worth considering that a sizeable portion of your audience probably doesn’t know what all those biblical references mean. Of course, many have probably heard of Moses and Noah and even Elohim, but how many know what characteristic they represent? Equating Adam with Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jesus is courageous OT character exegesis, even for an OT scholar, but the average Joe would find this fundamentally confusing, right-headed though it may be. You’ve also covered a lot of ground – can you break your main points down into easily digestible portions?
Yeah, this is something which has been percolating inside of me for a long time – it is directly related to my views about Absolute Truth’s struggle with Relative Truth. I think I have been trying to write about this in one way or another for at least 5 years or more now… slowly on it is coming clearer into focus for me. This is not strictly “Bible,” btw, but also includes a hobby of mine which is studying ancient cultures etc. – often in regard to religions/myths and “The Fall of Man.” So, being raised in a religious environment when I was younger, plus having a “hobby” of sometimes delving into ancient cultures just for fun (where I regrettably don’t save links as, lol, religiously as for the MRM), plus what I have learned over the past few years from being involved with MRM… studying Marxism… Relative Truth vs. Absolute Truth… The Power of Female Sexuality… Game…
Well, if we were ever getting into “Book of Rob” stuff, I guess this is it, because I don’t know another person I’ve ever read who shares my views – but I’ve never found an O/T scholar, minister, or layman who wasn’t apologizing for the Bible’s misogyny or trying to downplay it, either. But I am Fedrz, the great misogynist!
.
.
It was when I started to learn “other things” that I started thinking, “Instead of downplaying or apologizing for these things, why doesn’t anyone ask why they felt it was so important?” Then with realizing the nature of other cultures that surrounded the O/T, and what their culture was like… it starts to become clear that Adam and Eve were struggling with Absolute Truth vs. Relative Truth in the Garden, and Abram, for instance, was making a covenant with God (Absolute Truth) and leaving a culture filled with Multiple Gods (Relative Truths). In Marxism, one of the features I keep talking about is how they abolish Absolute Truth and live solely by Relative Truth. And also, when I discuss “thought patterns” of males and females, I am often trying to point out that men have the ability “to find Absolute Truth” because of their patterns, while females are mired in Relative Truth because of theirs.
Almost all religions/myths follow one simple over-riding theme: There once was a paradise, man screwed up, and because he screwed up he now has to struggle on this earth… and one thing they all offer at the end is a return to the paradise lost. (Hope – like in Pandora’s Box).
The Old Testament figures are the same general theme.
Adam lived in paradise but fell from grace because he ignored the Absolute Truth and let Eve convince him to follow Relative Truth. God kicked him out of the Garden for it, but also made a promise to Adam after that if Adam followed God’s ways (Absolute Truth), he would find salvation and Eternal Life (Return to the Garden/Paradise/Hope).
During the days of Noah, he was the only one who followed the ways of God (Absolute Truth). Everyone else was living in falseness (Relative Truth). Noah followed God’s ways and he was saved. After the flood, God again makes promises to Noah – it is basically the Garden Story over again, except that Noah followed the Truth and was saved… death to the Relative Truth (the drowned civilization of pre-flood earth) and Noah again is told that following the Truth is “the way.”
During the days of Abram/Abraham, he leaves the corruptness of the Sumerian Culture or its descendent cultures – depending on your biblical timeline – Sumerian culture is the oldest civilization; I think the stories are about the times after the end of the great flood that occurred at end of the Pleistoscene Ice Age some 12,000 years ago - "the post-deluge world/culture" - if you were to follow the Bible literally, Abram was 50 years old when Noah died, and Noah died around 300 years after the great flood. However, if you follow backwards from the timeline of Christ, Abram lived much later in history, and should come from around 2000 B.C. Which is it? Who cares – the “theme” is what is trying to be conveyed – Post Sumerian Cultures like Babylon are related in the way that Britain is related to America, or “The West” – the one directly birthed the next. This place was much like ours is today – lots of sex worship etc. etc. which, as what we know about men and women, leads to a lot of women leading men into falseness (Relative Truth over Absolute Truth – the Garden Story). Once he leaves, God makes a covenant with Abraham, which is again, the same thing: Follow me! Leave Relative Truth behind (animalness = living in the moment, or living in Relative Truth). Follow the Absolute Truth, this is “The Way.”
During the days of Moses, he leads the Israelites out of Egypt – again, an exodus (Adam out of the Garden, Noah out of pre-flood civilization, Abram out of post-flood civilization, and now Moses out of Egypt). And… what are the Israelites marching in front of them? Why, the Ark of the Covenant. (God’s Truth is leading them – and defending them).
Jesus is “The Fulfillment of the Covenant” – The “theme” of the Old Testament is completed by the coming of the Messiah. In fact, this is also the reason for the genealogies in the Old Testament – to show that Jesus is indeed, a descendent of Adam, and Abraham, and thus, a “fulfillment of God’s Covenant.” The “metaphorical purpose” has become complete with Jesus.
- Adam falls from the graces of Truth and gets kicked out of Paradise.
- Noah struggles and follows the Truth and is saved.
- Abram struggles and follows the Truth and is saved.
- Moses/The Israelites struggle, and following the Truth saves them.
- Jesus also struggles, and defeats them completely (ie. The Temptations of Satan – Jesus defeats the struggles of the flesh, including death – the fulfillment of God’s Word to Adam).
Jesus finally “wins” the struggle of Adam/Noah/Abram/Moses (Mankind) and is restored to Paradise.
Heh, heh, of course, Jesus also makes a new covenant – known as the New Testament, but that is a different subject.
As for “El,” well, this comes from Sumerian Culture. This is the “first” culture – so, let’s just call it Post Deluge/Flood Civilization, really. There were eight people who stepped off of Noah’s Ark: Noah, his sons Japeth, Shem, and Ham and their wives. Japeth buggered off somewhere (I’ve heard speculations of Europe or Africa – who cares, if it is metaphorical story), and Ham was the one who “fell out” with Noah – remember, Ham found Noah naked in his drunkenness and called his two brothers to show them their father’s pathetic state. When Japeth and Shem see Noah’s state, they avert their eyes and cover his nakedness, and when Noah awakes and finds out what Ham had done, he curses him. Ham/Ham’s descendents end up leaving – and it is Ham’s descendents that found the “post-deluge culture,” and it is Ham’s descendents that try to build the Tower of Babel in rebellion against God, in response to the flood. In Sumerian legend as well, there is mention of Noah (he was a semi-god), and Ham is also mentioned as the son of Noah, and the great-grandfather of Nimrod (Gilgamesh?) of the Sumerians/Post-Deluge Civilization. The Bible and Sumerian culture are intricately linked – and Sumerian culture and the Biblical story are continually warring with each-other. (It is fairly well acknowledged by now that the early Genesis stories come from Sumerian Culture, btw – I believe even the Catholic Church has acknowledged this – it doesn’t really discredit the Bible).
Now, the way the Sumerians became “the first” civilization was based upon their military techniques, but the success of their civilization were based upon two things: Every time they conquered another “tribe,” they simply adopted them into their culture and accepted their way – including their gods. And the second is, there was no “competing culture.” It truly was a “one world order.” It was totalitarian in the way Marxism wishes to be – when there is only “one order” and no competing one to destroy it, then there will be heaven on earth – the Marxist mantra. (This is where you get the “Masons” – who build the Tower of Babel, and other various occult crapola that all the way-out tin-foil hatters keep yacking about. It is pure speculation even beyond the speculation of ancient history, and quite frankly, it pisses me off they obfuscate things so much with that garbage, while leading people away from THE TRUTH!). So, anyway, the people that were conquered by the culture didn’t really object too much with it, because the conquering culture simply adopted the gods of the conquered into their own culture. The conquered didn’t really much care, as it were.
So, as Sumerian culture developed, so did the amount of gods they had. In fact, they had gods for everything. The god of wind, the god of sun, the god of rain, the god of harvest… and so on. You name it, there was a god for it.
Of course, each “god” represents a particular “truth.” This became a culture that followed multiple truths because they had multiple gods. This is the exact same “philosophy” as the female mind produces – Relative/Multiple Truths. Guess what following “multiple truths” lead to? You guessed it: Totalitarianism. The first civilization was not “free.” Nothing that lives by Relative Truth/The Female Principle can be “free.” (Only the TRUTH will set you free!). We all know this – the more we live by the female, the less freedom we have.
Anyway, in this culture as well, was the god “El.” In Sumerian culture, the god of the flood was “El.” And when they refer to it in the plural, it becomes Elohim. Think of it this way – Abram’s father was an idol maker in this culture, and one single idol of the god of the flood would be called “El,” whereas a table full of “El idols” would be called “Elohim.” Don’t forget, being forbidden to worship idols did not happen until much later, when Moses showed up on the scene and wrote the Pentateuch (The first books of the Bible). It is possible that Noah and his son Shem, and Abram, actually did worship idols that represented God.
El, being the god of the flood, was also therefore, the god which brought Noah and his sons through the flood. This is “God” in the Bible. In the beginning of the Bible, God is called “Elohim,” as well as in other various Hebrew texts. That is where it comes down from Sumerian culture into the Judeo culture.
Now, something that is significant here is that Abram left a culture with multiple gods which represent multiple truths and he rejected it all in favour of monotheism and one Truth.
This is the basis of the Ten Commandments, when in the first part, God establishes that he IS the truth (put no other gods before me = put no other truths before me = Absolute Truth), and the next parts are dictating to behave opposite of animals – Do not kill/steal/commit adultery/covet… yada yada. If you live under the female principle, you are living under sex worship, which is animalness, which leads to multiple truths and falseness. This is what Abraham rejected and instead, went into the wilderness, with his covenant with the Absolute Truth leading the way.
In the ancient Hebrew texts, the worst of demons are always female. In the Hebrew language, Sodom and Gomorrah are referred to in “the feminine,” and in fact, are the only two cities in the entire region which are denoted as such. Both were wicked – and very much wicked in sexuality – or, the female principle.
When Moses is walking around in the desert, they are always fighting against “false gods” or according to Fedrz, “false truths.”
Baal, for example, is mentioned often throughout the Bible – Baal is a male god who is associated with the goddess Ashtaroth. Baal was under the influence of the female principle – a kitchen bitch, adhering to Relative Truth. In the Bible, all of the names of the female goddesses are removed from the scriptures, but, it is likely that if there was Baal worship, there was also Ashtaroth worship, and so on.
God/El had no wife – it was the repudiation of the female dominating the male.
When you strip things back and classify the Old Testament as a Patriarchal Religion, you will see that they were surrounded by Matriarchal Religions and goddess/sex worship.
Given all the other things which we know about the problems of male/female, and the way we see how easily females lead males astray from the Truth – even here in the MRM, much of Christianity’s ancient anti-feminine stance makes an awful lot of sense… and has an awful lot of relevance to the modern day and the sorry state that so many men find themselves in.
Zen monks, Jesus’ offer the other cheeck, Gandhi no violence way are all the same. Like it or not.”
Jesus beat the shit out of people with a braided rope too. He also flouted the authorities and humiliated religious leaders. And his principles stood above all else.
In other words, Jesus was no Ned Flanders, and had many masculine qualities.
It has only been recently that Christianity has come to be synonymous with “wimp.” For much of history it wasn’t that way, because Christianity celebrates the masculine. In fact, much of the “struggle” of the Israelites wandering through the desert is about a struggle of the masculine over the feminine – if you understand that many of the cultures they encountered were the same matriarchal descendents which Abram left behind when he went his own way after making a covenant with God.
And the Israelites were not nice about it either.
Take Moses’ wife. (Btw, philosophically speaking – when looking at the “message” of the Bible from a metaphorical sense, Adam = Noah = Abraham = Moses = Jesus. They all metaphorically refer to the same “message.”) Anywho, back to Moses’ wife. When they encountered the tribe she came from (The “M”-something or others), they showed no mercy – even though before they were more or less allies, and after defeating them they killed every man, woman and child, and wiped them from the face of the earth. God commanded them to do this with many cultures they encountered – in fact, the Israelites in the Old Testament under Moses were a warring bunch of nomadic barbarians more than anything else.
The war between the Masculine and the Feminine in the Bible is something which seems to be carefully covered up, but if you were to get into the old texts and the old cultures, and understand that the Hebrew often clearly refers to their greatest threats in the feminine (like in languages such as French), as well as the gods they were fighting against were most often pure sex goddesses or their male consorts…
Further, “God” himself existed in the first civilization of Sumeria. The Sumerian civlization knew of ”El” – the God of the house of Shem, the son of Noah. (Noah’s other son disappeared somewhere, while the other rejected El because El was the God of the Flood, and his son was the ancestor of Gilgamesh who swore vengeance upon him for killing his ancestors.) Anyway, the Sumerians worshipped all gods – and “El” – the god of Shem, existed in those times and in that culture. The plural of “El” is “Elohim.” This is the God that Abram took with him as he left this multi-god (multi-truth = feminine) culture and Went His Own Way into the wilderness.
Now, here is where is gets kinda interesting. Apparently, what the Sumerians loved to do with their gods was “play soap opera” with them. (Abram’s father was an idol maker, remember). Every “god” that they had also had an opposite sex counterpart, and within the culture, these goddesses/gods (goddesses came before gods in those cultures) were constantly marrying and divorcing, cheating on eachother and so on. Some of the ancient stuff they have found are so pornographic they would make a hardcore internet porn surfer blush, I understand. Many ancient rituals, of course, also include elements of sexual acts in them.
However, “El” was very unpopular in this culture.
Why?
Because El had no wife. (A Marriage Striker!!!) He was pretty much the only god in Sumerian culture that had no opposite sex counterpart, and the people didn’t like that all.
“El/Elohim” of the House of Shem/House of Abraham, was a God that did not include sex worship.
‘Elohim” is the repudiation of the rule of the feminine principle (sex worship = the feminine = animalness) over the masculine principle (reason – a covenant with one Truth).
It is very telling about what has happened to our culture in that Christianity used to represent something very masculine, whereas today the first thought when you hear Christian is “Ned Flanders.”
Do you picture Ned Flanders in knight’s armour when you think of “Christian?”
Whatever one believes of Christianity, to note how this once masculine religion which founded our civilization has become so thoroughly feminized is, well, noteworthy.
---
QUOTE: With respect for the quality and helpfulness of your posts and for what your OT sermon just now was trying to teach, it might be worth considering that a sizeable portion of your audience probably doesn’t know what all those biblical references mean. Of course, many have probably heard of Moses and Noah and even Elohim, but how many know what characteristic they represent? Equating Adam with Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jesus is courageous OT character exegesis, even for an OT scholar, but the average Joe would find this fundamentally confusing, right-headed though it may be. You’ve also covered a lot of ground – can you break your main points down into easily digestible portions?
Yeah, this is something which has been percolating inside of me for a long time – it is directly related to my views about Absolute Truth’s struggle with Relative Truth. I think I have been trying to write about this in one way or another for at least 5 years or more now… slowly on it is coming clearer into focus for me. This is not strictly “Bible,” btw, but also includes a hobby of mine which is studying ancient cultures etc. – often in regard to religions/myths and “The Fall of Man.” So, being raised in a religious environment when I was younger, plus having a “hobby” of sometimes delving into ancient cultures just for fun (where I regrettably don’t save links as, lol, religiously as for the MRM), plus what I have learned over the past few years from being involved with MRM… studying Marxism… Relative Truth vs. Absolute Truth… The Power of Female Sexuality… Game…
Well, if we were ever getting into “Book of Rob” stuff, I guess this is it, because I don’t know another person I’ve ever read who shares my views – but I’ve never found an O/T scholar, minister, or layman who wasn’t apologizing for the Bible’s misogyny or trying to downplay it, either. But I am Fedrz, the great misogynist!
.
.It was when I started to learn “other things” that I started thinking, “Instead of downplaying or apologizing for these things, why doesn’t anyone ask why they felt it was so important?” Then with realizing the nature of other cultures that surrounded the O/T, and what their culture was like… it starts to become clear that Adam and Eve were struggling with Absolute Truth vs. Relative Truth in the Garden, and Abram, for instance, was making a covenant with God (Absolute Truth) and leaving a culture filled with Multiple Gods (Relative Truths). In Marxism, one of the features I keep talking about is how they abolish Absolute Truth and live solely by Relative Truth. And also, when I discuss “thought patterns” of males and females, I am often trying to point out that men have the ability “to find Absolute Truth” because of their patterns, while females are mired in Relative Truth because of theirs.
Almost all religions/myths follow one simple over-riding theme: There once was a paradise, man screwed up, and because he screwed up he now has to struggle on this earth… and one thing they all offer at the end is a return to the paradise lost. (Hope – like in Pandora’s Box).
The Old Testament figures are the same general theme.
Adam lived in paradise but fell from grace because he ignored the Absolute Truth and let Eve convince him to follow Relative Truth. God kicked him out of the Garden for it, but also made a promise to Adam after that if Adam followed God’s ways (Absolute Truth), he would find salvation and Eternal Life (Return to the Garden/Paradise/Hope).
During the days of Noah, he was the only one who followed the ways of God (Absolute Truth). Everyone else was living in falseness (Relative Truth). Noah followed God’s ways and he was saved. After the flood, God again makes promises to Noah – it is basically the Garden Story over again, except that Noah followed the Truth and was saved… death to the Relative Truth (the drowned civilization of pre-flood earth) and Noah again is told that following the Truth is “the way.”
During the days of Abram/Abraham, he leaves the corruptness of the Sumerian Culture or its descendent cultures – depending on your biblical timeline – Sumerian culture is the oldest civilization; I think the stories are about the times after the end of the great flood that occurred at end of the Pleistoscene Ice Age some 12,000 years ago - "the post-deluge world/culture" - if you were to follow the Bible literally, Abram was 50 years old when Noah died, and Noah died around 300 years after the great flood. However, if you follow backwards from the timeline of Christ, Abram lived much later in history, and should come from around 2000 B.C. Which is it? Who cares – the “theme” is what is trying to be conveyed – Post Sumerian Cultures like Babylon are related in the way that Britain is related to America, or “The West” – the one directly birthed the next. This place was much like ours is today – lots of sex worship etc. etc. which, as what we know about men and women, leads to a lot of women leading men into falseness (Relative Truth over Absolute Truth – the Garden Story). Once he leaves, God makes a covenant with Abraham, which is again, the same thing: Follow me! Leave Relative Truth behind (animalness = living in the moment, or living in Relative Truth). Follow the Absolute Truth, this is “The Way.”
During the days of Moses, he leads the Israelites out of Egypt – again, an exodus (Adam out of the Garden, Noah out of pre-flood civilization, Abram out of post-flood civilization, and now Moses out of Egypt). And… what are the Israelites marching in front of them? Why, the Ark of the Covenant. (God’s Truth is leading them – and defending them).
Jesus is “The Fulfillment of the Covenant” – The “theme” of the Old Testament is completed by the coming of the Messiah. In fact, this is also the reason for the genealogies in the Old Testament – to show that Jesus is indeed, a descendent of Adam, and Abraham, and thus, a “fulfillment of God’s Covenant.” The “metaphorical purpose” has become complete with Jesus.
- Adam falls from the graces of Truth and gets kicked out of Paradise.
- Noah struggles and follows the Truth and is saved.
- Abram struggles and follows the Truth and is saved.
- Moses/The Israelites struggle, and following the Truth saves them.
- Jesus also struggles, and defeats them completely (ie. The Temptations of Satan – Jesus defeats the struggles of the flesh, including death – the fulfillment of God’s Word to Adam).
Jesus finally “wins” the struggle of Adam/Noah/Abram/Moses (Mankind) and is restored to Paradise.
Heh, heh, of course, Jesus also makes a new covenant – known as the New Testament, but that is a different subject.
As for “El,” well, this comes from Sumerian Culture. This is the “first” culture – so, let’s just call it Post Deluge/Flood Civilization, really. There were eight people who stepped off of Noah’s Ark: Noah, his sons Japeth, Shem, and Ham and their wives. Japeth buggered off somewhere (I’ve heard speculations of Europe or Africa – who cares, if it is metaphorical story), and Ham was the one who “fell out” with Noah – remember, Ham found Noah naked in his drunkenness and called his two brothers to show them their father’s pathetic state. When Japeth and Shem see Noah’s state, they avert their eyes and cover his nakedness, and when Noah awakes and finds out what Ham had done, he curses him. Ham/Ham’s descendents end up leaving – and it is Ham’s descendents that found the “post-deluge culture,” and it is Ham’s descendents that try to build the Tower of Babel in rebellion against God, in response to the flood. In Sumerian legend as well, there is mention of Noah (he was a semi-god), and Ham is also mentioned as the son of Noah, and the great-grandfather of Nimrod (Gilgamesh?) of the Sumerians/Post-Deluge Civilization. The Bible and Sumerian culture are intricately linked – and Sumerian culture and the Biblical story are continually warring with each-other. (It is fairly well acknowledged by now that the early Genesis stories come from Sumerian Culture, btw – I believe even the Catholic Church has acknowledged this – it doesn’t really discredit the Bible).
Now, the way the Sumerians became “the first” civilization was based upon their military techniques, but the success of their civilization were based upon two things: Every time they conquered another “tribe,” they simply adopted them into their culture and accepted their way – including their gods. And the second is, there was no “competing culture.” It truly was a “one world order.” It was totalitarian in the way Marxism wishes to be – when there is only “one order” and no competing one to destroy it, then there will be heaven on earth – the Marxist mantra. (This is where you get the “Masons” – who build the Tower of Babel, and other various occult crapola that all the way-out tin-foil hatters keep yacking about. It is pure speculation even beyond the speculation of ancient history, and quite frankly, it pisses me off they obfuscate things so much with that garbage, while leading people away from THE TRUTH!). So, anyway, the people that were conquered by the culture didn’t really object too much with it, because the conquering culture simply adopted the gods of the conquered into their own culture. The conquered didn’t really much care, as it were.
So, as Sumerian culture developed, so did the amount of gods they had. In fact, they had gods for everything. The god of wind, the god of sun, the god of rain, the god of harvest… and so on. You name it, there was a god for it.
Of course, each “god” represents a particular “truth.” This became a culture that followed multiple truths because they had multiple gods. This is the exact same “philosophy” as the female mind produces – Relative/Multiple Truths. Guess what following “multiple truths” lead to? You guessed it: Totalitarianism. The first civilization was not “free.” Nothing that lives by Relative Truth/The Female Principle can be “free.” (Only the TRUTH will set you free!). We all know this – the more we live by the female, the less freedom we have.
Anyway, in this culture as well, was the god “El.” In Sumerian culture, the god of the flood was “El.” And when they refer to it in the plural, it becomes Elohim. Think of it this way – Abram’s father was an idol maker in this culture, and one single idol of the god of the flood would be called “El,” whereas a table full of “El idols” would be called “Elohim.” Don’t forget, being forbidden to worship idols did not happen until much later, when Moses showed up on the scene and wrote the Pentateuch (The first books of the Bible). It is possible that Noah and his son Shem, and Abram, actually did worship idols that represented God.
El, being the god of the flood, was also therefore, the god which brought Noah and his sons through the flood. This is “God” in the Bible. In the beginning of the Bible, God is called “Elohim,” as well as in other various Hebrew texts. That is where it comes down from Sumerian culture into the Judeo culture.
Now, something that is significant here is that Abram left a culture with multiple gods which represent multiple truths and he rejected it all in favour of monotheism and one Truth.
This is the basis of the Ten Commandments, when in the first part, God establishes that he IS the truth (put no other gods before me = put no other truths before me = Absolute Truth), and the next parts are dictating to behave opposite of animals – Do not kill/steal/commit adultery/covet… yada yada. If you live under the female principle, you are living under sex worship, which is animalness, which leads to multiple truths and falseness. This is what Abraham rejected and instead, went into the wilderness, with his covenant with the Absolute Truth leading the way.
In the ancient Hebrew texts, the worst of demons are always female. In the Hebrew language, Sodom and Gomorrah are referred to in “the feminine,” and in fact, are the only two cities in the entire region which are denoted as such. Both were wicked – and very much wicked in sexuality – or, the female principle.
When Moses is walking around in the desert, they are always fighting against “false gods” or according to Fedrz, “false truths.”
Baal, for example, is mentioned often throughout the Bible – Baal is a male god who is associated with the goddess Ashtaroth. Baal was under the influence of the female principle – a kitchen bitch, adhering to Relative Truth. In the Bible, all of the names of the female goddesses are removed from the scriptures, but, it is likely that if there was Baal worship, there was also Ashtaroth worship, and so on.
God/El had no wife – it was the repudiation of the female dominating the male.
When you strip things back and classify the Old Testament as a Patriarchal Religion, you will see that they were surrounded by Matriarchal Religions and goddess/sex worship.
Given all the other things which we know about the problems of male/female, and the way we see how easily females lead males astray from the Truth – even here in the MRM, much of Christianity’s ancient anti-feminine stance makes an awful lot of sense… and has an awful lot of relevance to the modern day and the sorry state that so many men find themselves in.
Monday, January 02, 2006
The History of Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW)
The History of the Men’s Rights Movement According to Fedrz
Ferdinand Bardimu says: "A few days ago, Chuck, David Brandt, and I asked Fedrz to fill us in on the history of the men’s rights movement as he knew it. Here’s what he had to say":
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, I don’t know if I am perhaps the best guy to give a complete history of the MRM. I have only been around online for about 5 or 6 years now. After fooling around on forums for a while, I started becoming an activist by spamming porno forums with my yahoo group. I was pretty low-class back then (not much has changed, eh?). For ancient history, you’d have to get Zed to talk of all his experiences, because he’s been around since before fire was invented. Ragnar as well has been around for a while, and is one of the original MGTOW guys. From what I understand from Zed, many of the “smarter” people in the MRM used to have to talk in sort of a “code” with eachother, and much of the more intellectual things were actually passed from man to man via e-mail rather than publicly on a forum.
I was around for perhaps a year or two before MGTOW made their debut, and it was sorely needed. I had pretty much abandoned the MRM already by that point – although, I am a bit of a hothead with a big mouth, so it is perhaps not fair to blame everything on others… lol, not everything.
It was not very intellectual though. Making generalizations would get you the boot. Making even the slightest un-PC argument would get you the boot – unless you could back everything up with ”peer reviewed research.” That was about the only way you could make any case that went against the general views of society. It was silly, actually. Kind of like asking a Jew to defend himself in a Nazi court, and only allowing him to use peer-reviewed arguments approved by a Nazi University. Of course, for every peer-reviewed study you could find supporting your argument, there were 25 more opposing your argument. Everybody would sit around pissing their pants, worrying about what people would think about us, so writing a few opinioned paragraphs on a forum would require quite a bit of effort, finding links and of course, an out had to be given several times during your spiel – ie. "Not ALL Women Are Like That…" Mostly, I found MRM forums to mainly consist of people finding articles from the MSM and posting them on a forum, followed by a long string of PC one-liner comments such as “Good Article! Great Find!” or “Tsk, tsk, how misandric!” It was really about the only thing that would keep in good standing. Certainly asking questions like, “but why are things this way?” and trying to explore such notions, would get you into hotwater in a hurry.
Also, the MRM consisted of many people who didn’t want open criticism of feminism, because feminism represented “equality,” and that would make us look bad. Many of the more prominent people within the MRM were openly identifying themselves to be feminists, and actually defending the whole hate movement. ”Not ALL feminists are like that! Some of us are ‘Equity-Feminists!’”
So, as I remember the MRM when I first found it, MRA’s called themselves “egalitarians,” and what was politically correct to ask for was “our piece of the equality pie.” Basically, trying to show that men were victims too, asking for sympathy. That the sympathy never came, and we were obviously getting our asses handed to us time and time again, could never be properly examined, in my opinion.
Another feature that became evident time and time again, was that the women that showed up “to help” were a complete disaster. They would shut down any conversation they didn’t like, often by befriending forum members and then pitting one against the other. We had to walk on eggshells, and several times, a woman would get all emotional and threaten to leave and no longer support us… and then the Captain Save-a-ho’s would come out of the phone booth and chastise the evil bastard who upset everyone’s favourite woman.
Many women were there making sure we knew that “there were still good women out there – look at me! I treat my husband with respect, and love him to bits, and he is always happy with me.” In other words, “It’s sad that you’ve gotten kicked in the balls by the past 25 women you’ve met, but you are just picking the wrong women – don’t give up hope, and certainly don’t stop trying to find that tootsie roll in the big pile of turds that is society!”
Others would show up and and talk about their big tits, or what kind of panties they were wearing… tantalizing men to be their allies through their sexuality.
Others would convince men that nothing was worth doing unless all the women agreed… if the women didn’t agree, then we certainly would never be able to sell it to society. So, if a woman opposed you, that was that. Time to shut it Mister!
Another womanly feature in the MRM was Sorenstam Syndrome, where a woman who merely voiced support for men, and did a few minor things to support “the cause,” was automatically highlighted as a fierce warrior, far and above more valuable than the men who were doing much more. Nobody knew who the 5th place guy was, but we certainly knew the woman who was 95th out of 115 – and she was extremely valuable, and her voice would be given much more weight than it was worth.
Once the women showed up “to help,” you could pretty much set an egg-timer to watch the destruction that followed.
Like Angry Harry says, “Having a woman help with the MRM is like having a 5 year old help you put up wallpaper. No thanks!”
And, worst of all, everyone only hung out on these forums. It was totally impotent, and certainly things were not moving forward intellectually.
So, a few guys – like Zed and Ragnar, got together – they even travelled to meet eachother, and they discussed what could be done about the situation. One thing they apparently observed was that men were so pigheaded and stubborn, and undermined eachother so much, that it was like each Man was Going Their Own Way. And thus, the term MGTOW was born. It is left as “MGTOW” on purpose, so that it is unpronounceable – slicksters that they were!
MGTOW did not neccessarily mean “marriage strike” in the beginning, although it certainly had large elements within it that supported that. What I understood it more to mean was “Go your own way! Get off these restrictive forums! Start your own blog! Say what you want to say, and don’t give a shit about the rest!”
And, that’s how I entered into the fray with MGTOW.
We were just a few ragtag bloggers, and we were quite under-educated in many ways, coming out of the PCness that had been bashing us up the side of the head. There was quite a bit of anger in the beginning, and we were certainly not the nicest of people – we spent a lot of time telling people who didn’t like what we had to say to simply “fuck off!” Fred X called everyone a femcunt about 60 times in each article, and Eternal Bachelor was a good writer who skewered people left and right… and we all basically supported a free speech policy, even to our enemies… but… that also gave us free speech, and man did we use it to attack anyone so stupid to come and white knight us. There were a lot of pissed off guys out there!
But, what we did agree to was to link to eachother, and to support eachother. And we did. Anyone who started up a MGTOW blog instantly got a shout-out from us to the rest of the community, and recieved a link on the sidebar.
This “each man for himself” mode made a “free market of ideas.” Some bloggers made it, and others didn’t. But, the result was that our intellectual ability went through the roof (after we calmed down a bit). Many politically incorrect things started to be examined and researched. The whole notion of “equality” began to be examined, and so on. History began to get talked about sometimes, and politics questioned. We began to form our own “Studies of the Sexes.”
And then “Game” entered into the picture, and it supported many of the observations and arguments we had been making… namely, rather than asking for sympathy and begging for a few scraps from the table of equality, things began to come together in an explainable way of why things had developed the way they did, and how this whole sordid mess was created, and why so many of the earlier arguments were completely useless – such as demanding male equality in the home and family being a complete fantasy due to biological circumstances like hypergamy. If you had tried that argument before, you would have found yourself under quite a bit of attack for not being an “egalitarian.”
And, well… that’s the way I seen it develop since I’ve been involved. In my opinion, the two neccessary ingredients that were missing, have now been provided. The first was MGTOW turning men’s weakness of pigheadedness into a strength instead of a hindrance, and the second is the introduction of Game’s knowledge of Sexual Dynamics, which supported so many of our own ideas and observations.
In fact, I think we now have what is neccessary to create a serious body of intellectual work that will stand the test of time. Now we just have to keep building it… and we will… because we are men!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additional Comment Made by Ragnar:
Just stumbled upon this blog and thanks Fedrz for writing the History of MGTOW. Allow me to correct a minor thing. It was Meikyo and I who got together in Hickory N.C. in October 2004. Zed was invited and supposed to come also, but was unable due to illness. The MGTOW manifest was written by me according to the notes Meikyo took on our meeting. It was originally posted on the now defunct “Our Board” as “My Way” or “Men Going Their Own Way”.
Today it has been revised several times. Basicly the wording (spelling, my errors) and a few additions were made. Jadedguy did a lot of rewriting and commenting. We moved to a board set up by Zed, we actually had several boards which all seem to be defunct by now, but MGTOW lives on in the minds of men.
-
A small comment to some ideas presented here. The talk was about womens rights. Basically men make society by bonding and standing shoulder by shoulder to defend it. This means that men have all the negative rights as they are the makers of civilisation. We give women some positive rights in order to make society function better.
These rights can clearly be discussed and changed by men. Women can leave our society if they do not like it. This is the only negative right women have. When they stay in Our Society they must abide by Our rules!
Don’t ever forget that we, the men, are the makers of civilisation.
We, the Men are “We the People” – period!
Ferdinand Bardimu says: "A few days ago, Chuck, David Brandt, and I asked Fedrz to fill us in on the history of the men’s rights movement as he knew it. Here’s what he had to say":
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, I don’t know if I am perhaps the best guy to give a complete history of the MRM. I have only been around online for about 5 or 6 years now. After fooling around on forums for a while, I started becoming an activist by spamming porno forums with my yahoo group. I was pretty low-class back then (not much has changed, eh?). For ancient history, you’d have to get Zed to talk of all his experiences, because he’s been around since before fire was invented. Ragnar as well has been around for a while, and is one of the original MGTOW guys. From what I understand from Zed, many of the “smarter” people in the MRM used to have to talk in sort of a “code” with eachother, and much of the more intellectual things were actually passed from man to man via e-mail rather than publicly on a forum.
I was around for perhaps a year or two before MGTOW made their debut, and it was sorely needed. I had pretty much abandoned the MRM already by that point – although, I am a bit of a hothead with a big mouth, so it is perhaps not fair to blame everything on others… lol, not everything.
It was not very intellectual though. Making generalizations would get you the boot. Making even the slightest un-PC argument would get you the boot – unless you could back everything up with ”peer reviewed research.” That was about the only way you could make any case that went against the general views of society. It was silly, actually. Kind of like asking a Jew to defend himself in a Nazi court, and only allowing him to use peer-reviewed arguments approved by a Nazi University. Of course, for every peer-reviewed study you could find supporting your argument, there were 25 more opposing your argument. Everybody would sit around pissing their pants, worrying about what people would think about us, so writing a few opinioned paragraphs on a forum would require quite a bit of effort, finding links and of course, an out had to be given several times during your spiel – ie. "Not ALL Women Are Like That…" Mostly, I found MRM forums to mainly consist of people finding articles from the MSM and posting them on a forum, followed by a long string of PC one-liner comments such as “Good Article! Great Find!” or “Tsk, tsk, how misandric!” It was really about the only thing that would keep in good standing. Certainly asking questions like, “but why are things this way?” and trying to explore such notions, would get you into hotwater in a hurry.
Also, the MRM consisted of many people who didn’t want open criticism of feminism, because feminism represented “equality,” and that would make us look bad. Many of the more prominent people within the MRM were openly identifying themselves to be feminists, and actually defending the whole hate movement. ”Not ALL feminists are like that! Some of us are ‘Equity-Feminists!’”
So, as I remember the MRM when I first found it, MRA’s called themselves “egalitarians,” and what was politically correct to ask for was “our piece of the equality pie.” Basically, trying to show that men were victims too, asking for sympathy. That the sympathy never came, and we were obviously getting our asses handed to us time and time again, could never be properly examined, in my opinion.
Another feature that became evident time and time again, was that the women that showed up “to help” were a complete disaster. They would shut down any conversation they didn’t like, often by befriending forum members and then pitting one against the other. We had to walk on eggshells, and several times, a woman would get all emotional and threaten to leave and no longer support us… and then the Captain Save-a-ho’s would come out of the phone booth and chastise the evil bastard who upset everyone’s favourite woman.
Many women were there making sure we knew that “there were still good women out there – look at me! I treat my husband with respect, and love him to bits, and he is always happy with me.” In other words, “It’s sad that you’ve gotten kicked in the balls by the past 25 women you’ve met, but you are just picking the wrong women – don’t give up hope, and certainly don’t stop trying to find that tootsie roll in the big pile of turds that is society!”
Others would show up and and talk about their big tits, or what kind of panties they were wearing… tantalizing men to be their allies through their sexuality.
Others would convince men that nothing was worth doing unless all the women agreed… if the women didn’t agree, then we certainly would never be able to sell it to society. So, if a woman opposed you, that was that. Time to shut it Mister!
Another womanly feature in the MRM was Sorenstam Syndrome, where a woman who merely voiced support for men, and did a few minor things to support “the cause,” was automatically highlighted as a fierce warrior, far and above more valuable than the men who were doing much more. Nobody knew who the 5th place guy was, but we certainly knew the woman who was 95th out of 115 – and she was extremely valuable, and her voice would be given much more weight than it was worth.
Once the women showed up “to help,” you could pretty much set an egg-timer to watch the destruction that followed.
Like Angry Harry says, “Having a woman help with the MRM is like having a 5 year old help you put up wallpaper. No thanks!”
And, worst of all, everyone only hung out on these forums. It was totally impotent, and certainly things were not moving forward intellectually.
So, a few guys – like Zed and Ragnar, got together – they even travelled to meet eachother, and they discussed what could be done about the situation. One thing they apparently observed was that men were so pigheaded and stubborn, and undermined eachother so much, that it was like each Man was Going Their Own Way. And thus, the term MGTOW was born. It is left as “MGTOW” on purpose, so that it is unpronounceable – slicksters that they were!
MGTOW did not neccessarily mean “marriage strike” in the beginning, although it certainly had large elements within it that supported that. What I understood it more to mean was “Go your own way! Get off these restrictive forums! Start your own blog! Say what you want to say, and don’t give a shit about the rest!”
And, that’s how I entered into the fray with MGTOW.
We were just a few ragtag bloggers, and we were quite under-educated in many ways, coming out of the PCness that had been bashing us up the side of the head. There was quite a bit of anger in the beginning, and we were certainly not the nicest of people – we spent a lot of time telling people who didn’t like what we had to say to simply “fuck off!” Fred X called everyone a femcunt about 60 times in each article, and Eternal Bachelor was a good writer who skewered people left and right… and we all basically supported a free speech policy, even to our enemies… but… that also gave us free speech, and man did we use it to attack anyone so stupid to come and white knight us. There were a lot of pissed off guys out there!
But, what we did agree to was to link to eachother, and to support eachother. And we did. Anyone who started up a MGTOW blog instantly got a shout-out from us to the rest of the community, and recieved a link on the sidebar.
This “each man for himself” mode made a “free market of ideas.” Some bloggers made it, and others didn’t. But, the result was that our intellectual ability went through the roof (after we calmed down a bit). Many politically incorrect things started to be examined and researched. The whole notion of “equality” began to be examined, and so on. History began to get talked about sometimes, and politics questioned. We began to form our own “Studies of the Sexes.”
And then “Game” entered into the picture, and it supported many of the observations and arguments we had been making… namely, rather than asking for sympathy and begging for a few scraps from the table of equality, things began to come together in an explainable way of why things had developed the way they did, and how this whole sordid mess was created, and why so many of the earlier arguments were completely useless – such as demanding male equality in the home and family being a complete fantasy due to biological circumstances like hypergamy. If you had tried that argument before, you would have found yourself under quite a bit of attack for not being an “egalitarian.”
And, well… that’s the way I seen it develop since I’ve been involved. In my opinion, the two neccessary ingredients that were missing, have now been provided. The first was MGTOW turning men’s weakness of pigheadedness into a strength instead of a hindrance, and the second is the introduction of Game’s knowledge of Sexual Dynamics, which supported so many of our own ideas and observations.
In fact, I think we now have what is neccessary to create a serious body of intellectual work that will stand the test of time. Now we just have to keep building it… and we will… because we are men!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additional Comment Made by Ragnar:
Just stumbled upon this blog and thanks Fedrz for writing the History of MGTOW. Allow me to correct a minor thing. It was Meikyo and I who got together in Hickory N.C. in October 2004. Zed was invited and supposed to come also, but was unable due to illness. The MGTOW manifest was written by me according to the notes Meikyo took on our meeting. It was originally posted on the now defunct “Our Board” as “My Way” or “Men Going Their Own Way”.
Today it has been revised several times. Basicly the wording (spelling, my errors) and a few additions were made. Jadedguy did a lot of rewriting and commenting. We moved to a board set up by Zed, we actually had several boards which all seem to be defunct by now, but MGTOW lives on in the minds of men.
-
A small comment to some ideas presented here. The talk was about womens rights. Basically men make society by bonding and standing shoulder by shoulder to defend it. This means that men have all the negative rights as they are the makers of civilisation. We give women some positive rights in order to make society function better.
These rights can clearly be discussed and changed by men. Women can leave our society if they do not like it. This is the only negative right women have. When they stay in Our Society they must abide by Our rules!
Don’t ever forget that we, the men, are the makers of civilisation.
We, the Men are “We the People” – period!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Further Reading:
.
.
.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
Not All Women Are Like That! (NAWALT)
"Meanwhile, as long as there's one honest woman living at the temple atop Mount NAWALT in Tibet..." -- White Knight
"...while I was still searching but not finding - I found one upright man among a thousand, but not one upright woman among them all." -- Ecclesiastes 7:28
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Mathieu of Boulogne (1295) on NAWALT
From “The Lamentations of Matheolus”
Yet one might disagree with me, criticize my conclusion. and, putting forward the opposite point of view, suggest that my words are completely untrue. For, if some women are evil and perverse and abnormal, it does not necessarily follow that all of them are so cruel and wicked; nor should all of them be lumped together in this general reproach. A speech is badly composed if one's general conclusion is only partly valid. Logic hates this type of argumentation. Nevertheless, this present work, which expresses the pain in my heart, wishes me to exclude nothing, but commands me to push my argument to its logical, if extreme, conclusion, which is that no good woman exists. Solomon, in his works, makes an amazing comment, which supports my case, for he exclaims, "Who could find a virtuous woman?" The implication here is, of course, that this would be impossible. Since he says this, who am I to disagree? Why should I be shocked? What's more, he says that a base and broken man is worth more than a woman when she's doing good. Thus there is no woman worth anything at all; I don't need to look for further proof. That's enough logical demonstration.
My exposition is clearly valid, for woman has - and there is ample evidence of this - deceived all the greatest men in the world; I shall be basing myself on rational argument. If the greatest are deceived, then the lesser naturally fall. In the street where I live they say that what applies to the greatest amongst us applies even more to lesser mortals. Who were the greatest lords? Who has ever heard of greater men than Solomon or Aristotle? Yet good sense, riches and reason were not worth a dung-beetle to them; all were made to look as if they had gone out of fashion; these men were both outmanoeuvred by women, deceived, vanquished, and tamed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Belfort Bax on NAWALT
It seems not much has changed in a century, but this is a beautiful reply (Notice how he only responds to male feminists? Lol!):
The Fraud of Feminism - Belfort Bax, 1913 pp24-26
At the time of writing, the normal person who has no axe to grind in maintaining the contrary, declares the sun to be shining brightly, but should it answer the purpose of anyone to deny this obvious fact, and declare that the day is gloomy and overcast, there is no power of argument by which I can prove that I am right and he is wrong. I may point to the sun, but if he chooses to affirm that he doesn't see it I can't prove that he does. This is, of course, an extreme case, scarcely likely to occur in actual life. But it is in essence similar to those cases of persons (and they are not seldom met with) who, when they find facts hopelessly destructive of a certain theoretical position adopted by them, do not hesitate to cut the knot of controversy in their own favour by boldly denying the inconvenient facts.
One often has experience of this trick of controversy in discussing the question of the notorious characteristics of the female sex. The Feminist driven into a corner endeavours to save his face by flatly denying matters open to common observation and admitted as obvious by all who are not Feminists. Such facts are the pathological mental condition peculiar to the female sex, commonly connoted by the term hysteria; the absence, or at best the extremely imperfect development of the logical faculty in most women; the inability of the average woman in her judgment of things to rise above personal considerations; and, what is largely a consequence of this, the lack of a sense of abstract justice and fair play among women in general.
The afore said peculiarities of women, as women, are, I contend, matters of common observation and are only dis-puted by those persons--to wit Feminists--to whose theoretical views and practical demands their admission would be inconvenient if not fatal. Of course these characterisations refer to averages, and they do not exclude partial or even occasionally striking exceptions. It is possible, therefore, although perhaps not very probable, that indi-vidual experience may in the case of certain individuals play a part in falsifying their general outlook; it is possible--although, as I before said not perhaps very probable--that any given man's experience of the other sex has been limited to a few quite exceptional women and that hence his particular experience contradicts that of the general run of mankind. In this case, of course, his refusal to admit what to others are self-evident facts would be perfectly bona fide.
The above highly improbable contingency is the only refuge for those who would contend for sincerity in the Feminist's denials. In this matter I only deal with the male Feminist. The female Feminist is usually too biassed a witness in this particular question.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Bonecrcker #71 – Not All Women Are Like That (NAWALT)
Bonecrcker #151 – The Woman Who Is The Exception Phenomena
"...while I was still searching but not finding - I found one upright man among a thousand, but not one upright woman among them all." -- Ecclesiastes 7:28
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
From “The Lamentations of Matheolus”
Yet one might disagree with me, criticize my conclusion. and, putting forward the opposite point of view, suggest that my words are completely untrue. For, if some women are evil and perverse and abnormal, it does not necessarily follow that all of them are so cruel and wicked; nor should all of them be lumped together in this general reproach. A speech is badly composed if one's general conclusion is only partly valid. Logic hates this type of argumentation. Nevertheless, this present work, which expresses the pain in my heart, wishes me to exclude nothing, but commands me to push my argument to its logical, if extreme, conclusion, which is that no good woman exists. Solomon, in his works, makes an amazing comment, which supports my case, for he exclaims, "Who could find a virtuous woman?" The implication here is, of course, that this would be impossible. Since he says this, who am I to disagree? Why should I be shocked? What's more, he says that a base and broken man is worth more than a woman when she's doing good. Thus there is no woman worth anything at all; I don't need to look for further proof. That's enough logical demonstration.
My exposition is clearly valid, for woman has - and there is ample evidence of this - deceived all the greatest men in the world; I shall be basing myself on rational argument. If the greatest are deceived, then the lesser naturally fall. In the street where I live they say that what applies to the greatest amongst us applies even more to lesser mortals. Who were the greatest lords? Who has ever heard of greater men than Solomon or Aristotle? Yet good sense, riches and reason were not worth a dung-beetle to them; all were made to look as if they had gone out of fashion; these men were both outmanoeuvred by women, deceived, vanquished, and tamed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Belfort Bax on NAWALT
It seems not much has changed in a century, but this is a beautiful reply (Notice how he only responds to male feminists? Lol!):
The Fraud of Feminism - Belfort Bax, 1913 pp24-26
At the time of writing, the normal person who has no axe to grind in maintaining the contrary, declares the sun to be shining brightly, but should it answer the purpose of anyone to deny this obvious fact, and declare that the day is gloomy and overcast, there is no power of argument by which I can prove that I am right and he is wrong. I may point to the sun, but if he chooses to affirm that he doesn't see it I can't prove that he does. This is, of course, an extreme case, scarcely likely to occur in actual life. But it is in essence similar to those cases of persons (and they are not seldom met with) who, when they find facts hopelessly destructive of a certain theoretical position adopted by them, do not hesitate to cut the knot of controversy in their own favour by boldly denying the inconvenient facts.
One often has experience of this trick of controversy in discussing the question of the notorious characteristics of the female sex. The Feminist driven into a corner endeavours to save his face by flatly denying matters open to common observation and admitted as obvious by all who are not Feminists. Such facts are the pathological mental condition peculiar to the female sex, commonly connoted by the term hysteria; the absence, or at best the extremely imperfect development of the logical faculty in most women; the inability of the average woman in her judgment of things to rise above personal considerations; and, what is largely a consequence of this, the lack of a sense of abstract justice and fair play among women in general.
The afore said peculiarities of women, as women, are, I contend, matters of common observation and are only dis-puted by those persons--to wit Feminists--to whose theoretical views and practical demands their admission would be inconvenient if not fatal. Of course these characterisations refer to averages, and they do not exclude partial or even occasionally striking exceptions. It is possible, therefore, although perhaps not very probable, that indi-vidual experience may in the case of certain individuals play a part in falsifying their general outlook; it is possible--although, as I before said not perhaps very probable--that any given man's experience of the other sex has been limited to a few quite exceptional women and that hence his particular experience contradicts that of the general run of mankind. In this case, of course, his refusal to admit what to others are self-evident facts would be perfectly bona fide.
The above highly improbable contingency is the only refuge for those who would contend for sincerity in the Feminist's denials. In this matter I only deal with the male Feminist. The female Feminist is usually too biassed a witness in this particular question.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Bonecrcker #71 – Not All Women Are Like That (NAWALT)
Bonecrcker #151 – The Woman Who Is The Exception Phenomena
NO MA'AM Article List
The History of MGTOW
The Feminization of Christianity
The Philosophical Difference Between Capitalism and Marxism
The First Thing To Go Out Of Your Buddy’s House When He Gets Married Is…
Make Me a Sandwich!
TBA’s Request: Rob’s Farewell Post
(Lol! The second time I "quit," back in 2007. Curses!)
Women and Children
In The Beginning
Collective Projection
Divide and Conquer
Feminism and Cults
The Almighty All-Encompassing Power of the Pussy
The Women’s Vote Question
How to End Domestic Abuse
A Woman’s Right to Choose
A Sexist Commenter Sets Me Straight
Women’s Studies 101A, Winter Semester - Professor Rob Fedders
The Big Lie
A New Kind of Bigotry
Dear John, It’s All Your Fault
From the Comments
I’ve Got a House! (in fembot bingo)
Lest We Forget: The Super Bowl Sunday Hoax
Amorality
Have Women Invented Anything?
OK, Winston, Start Your Two Minutes of Hate N.O.W.!
The Tao of God, The Way, And Its Power
Achilles Heel
Foundational Arguments
Nihilistic Newspeaking Nitwits
The Thing You Have to Remember about the Will of the People is that Ten Years Ago We Were All Crazy for the Macarena
Reviewing an Old Article
Feminists Are Cat Lovers
The Multi-tasking Pink Proletariat
The Jiggly Room
The Fine Art of TV Repair
Which Came First? Dishonesty or Dissimulation?
Peer Reviewed Research – The Holy Grail of Truth?
WMG’s (Weapons of Mass Governments = Western Matriarchal Governments)
Rob for Prime Minister!
Patriarchy 1.0
Men Harmed by Relationships More Than Women
Marriage Staggering
The Feminization of Christianity
The Philosophical Difference Between Capitalism and Marxism
The First Thing To Go Out Of Your Buddy’s House When He Gets Married Is…
Make Me a Sandwich!
TBA’s Request: Rob’s Farewell Post
(Lol! The second time I "quit," back in 2007. Curses!)
Women and Children
In The Beginning
Collective Projection
Divide and Conquer
Feminism and Cults
The Almighty All-Encompassing Power of the Pussy
The Women’s Vote Question
How to End Domestic Abuse
A Woman’s Right to Choose
A Sexist Commenter Sets Me Straight
Women’s Studies 101A, Winter Semester - Professor Rob Fedders
The Big Lie
A New Kind of Bigotry
Dear John, It’s All Your Fault
From the Comments
I’ve Got a House! (in fembot bingo)
Lest We Forget: The Super Bowl Sunday Hoax
Amorality
Have Women Invented Anything?
OK, Winston, Start Your Two Minutes of Hate N.O.W.!
The Tao of God, The Way, And Its Power
Achilles Heel
Foundational Arguments
Nihilistic Newspeaking Nitwits
The Thing You Have to Remember about the Will of the People is that Ten Years Ago We Were All Crazy for the Macarena
Reviewing an Old Article
Feminists Are Cat Lovers
The Multi-tasking Pink Proletariat
The Jiggly Room
The Fine Art of TV Repair
Which Came First? Dishonesty or Dissimulation?
Peer Reviewed Research – The Holy Grail of Truth?
WMG’s (Weapons of Mass Governments = Western Matriarchal Governments)
Rob for Prime Minister!
Patriarchy 1.0
Men Harmed by Relationships More Than Women
Marriage Staggering
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
EOTM: Tribute to my Mother
.My mother, Goldie, died on Sunday, May 16th, 1999.
She was a remarkable woman.
From the springtime of her life, as a remarkably beautiful and vivacious young woman, to the final days of her autumn, spent with her body and mind slowly failing her, Goldie lived a life of quiet strength, determination, and bountiful love.
She was the kindest, gentlest, and most loving person I’ve ever known. What a wonderful statement to be able to make about one’s mother.
But, as a result of talking to the many people who had known her in her life, I found that my perception was universal among anyone who had met her even once. Everyone experienced Goldie as a kind, gentle, warm, and most loving person. Her final gifts to her family were the many expressions of deep love that people offered when they heard of her death. At the end of life, she taught a great lesson in being able to turn around and accept people loving and taking care of her when she needed it most.
The end of my mother’s life was a long one. In circumstances it was soft at the end, but the experience was made hard by long slow deterioration of her abilities. It was a frustrating end to a life characterized by vigor and purposeful activity.
In tribute to her, and her unfailing consistency in living by and for her values and convictions, I want to tell the story of my mother. She had an exceptionally full and wonderful life, and that was of her own making. It was a just harvest for all the love she gave so generously.
When I hear some woman today sneer at how "men don't like strong women", I think of Goldie, and just marvel at how obtuse some people can be.
This woman was as strong as any person who ever lived, but she never once confused belligerence with strength. Marriage and children, and grandchildren, etc, were the central core of her life. She loved life and knew how to nurture it as well or better than anyone.
Goldie's secret was that she innocently and genuinely loved life and everything about it, and enthusiastically wanted to share it. A perfect illustration of how Goldie's love of life came out as caring for it, was the time we had a late winter storm after some of the calves had been born. Mom enlisted a neighbor lady's help and went out into the pasture and picked up the calves in a handcart and carried them down to the basement where she made a tent out of old sheets and warmed up the calves with an old hair dryer. She was in her late 60s.
On the night she died, I got out an old photo album with pictures of her going back to about age 10. In every picture, was that same smile with the same near dimples and the same twinkle in the eye. These were Goldie's trademarks, and everyone who knew her remembered these about her.
I had arrived late in Goldie's life, two days before she turned 40, thus I missed all the years of her as young woman and mother. But I could guess what they were like from the way that Goldie was in the years I did get to know her.
Simply put, Goldie was the best person I've ever known in my life.
The loss of women like Goldie, from the culture as a whole, will result in it being a far more hostile and uncomfortable place. Her speciality was comfort and she saw absolutely nothing to gain from being needlessly belligerent.
The loss of mothers like Goldie will change the family world that most of us live in most of the time. From an atmosphere of loving cooperation, we are moving culturally into a world of suspicious competition.
One of the first things I was struck with as I looked at photos from her younger life, the part I had missed, was the consistency of the smile across her ages, and being able to see the gradual transitions she went through as she moved from that freshness of youth, through a long and productive middle age, to as graceful an old age as she was able to accomplish. At the end, all her physical and mental capabilities just slipped away and she lay in one curled up position waiting to die for years.
But she did not turn loose of them readily or easily. Goldie's commitment to life can actually be seen in her last years as well as in her earlier more fruitful years. She was determinedly optimistic even the day she moved from her house to a nursing home. She was going to be out by that very afternoon and bake my brother's wife a cake. It was that kind of determination which had brought her through raising a family through a depression and world war, building a family business while in her 50s and early 60s, then retiring to an on-the-whole very gentle and gradual end to her life. Her children and their children were with her to the very end. She had been an extremely generous person throughout her long lifetime, and when it came time for her to receive, no one who loved her could hold back anything she wanted or needed. Her needs were always simple, and she was very respectful when asking, but if she did ask - you knew it was something she really wanted and you just wanted to give it to her.
Her ending was hard on all 3 of her children, and they divided up the tasks of organizing their mother's last party. There was a lot of gaiety to Goldie, and she loved a good party, particularly one where she was the guest of honor. Two took the logistics, and one took the difficult job of eulogizing their mother. It was both an easy and a difficult task. The ease lie in how much there was that could be said about Goldie, and the challenge was to make it an accurate portrait of our mother and why we all looked up to and loved her so: long enough to do her justice, but short enough not to lose people's attention. I wanted very intensely to give an accurate portrait of this lady and her sterling qualities.
Below, are selected portions of the eulogy I delivered at her funeral, 5/20/99. Goldie practiced the arts of wifehood, motherhood, and loving life in general, well into her 8th decade. Her children were widely seprated in years, her youngest being born two days before her 40th birthday. She always said that her children kept her young, and to see how her greatest pleasures lie in feeding people and taking care of them, you can understand how.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She was a remarkable woman.
From the springtime of her life, as a remarkably beautiful and vivacious young woman, to the final days of her autumn, spent with her body and mind slowly failing her, Goldie lived a life of quiet strength, determination, and bountiful love.
She was the kindest, gentlest, and most loving person I’ve ever known. What a wonderful statement to be able to make about one’s mother.
But, as a result of talking to the many people who had known her in her life, I found that my perception was universal among anyone who had met her even once. Everyone experienced Goldie as a kind, gentle, warm, and most loving person. Her final gifts to her family were the many expressions of deep love that people offered when they heard of her death. At the end of life, she taught a great lesson in being able to turn around and accept people loving and taking care of her when she needed it most.
The end of my mother’s life was a long one. In circumstances it was soft at the end, but the experience was made hard by long slow deterioration of her abilities. It was a frustrating end to a life characterized by vigor and purposeful activity.
In tribute to her, and her unfailing consistency in living by and for her values and convictions, I want to tell the story of my mother. She had an exceptionally full and wonderful life, and that was of her own making. It was a just harvest for all the love she gave so generously.
When I hear some woman today sneer at how "men don't like strong women", I think of Goldie, and just marvel at how obtuse some people can be.This woman was as strong as any person who ever lived, but she never once confused belligerence with strength. Marriage and children, and grandchildren, etc, were the central core of her life. She loved life and knew how to nurture it as well or better than anyone.
Goldie's secret was that she innocently and genuinely loved life and everything about it, and enthusiastically wanted to share it. A perfect illustration of how Goldie's love of life came out as caring for it, was the time we had a late winter storm after some of the calves had been born. Mom enlisted a neighbor lady's help and went out into the pasture and picked up the calves in a handcart and carried them down to the basement where she made a tent out of old sheets and warmed up the calves with an old hair dryer. She was in her late 60s.
On the night she died, I got out an old photo album with pictures of her going back to about age 10. In every picture, was that same smile with the same near dimples and the same twinkle in the eye. These were Goldie's trademarks, and everyone who knew her remembered these about her.
I had arrived late in Goldie's life, two days before she turned 40, thus I missed all the years of her as young woman and mother. But I could guess what they were like from the way that Goldie was in the years I did get to know her.Simply put, Goldie was the best person I've ever known in my life.
The loss of women like Goldie, from the culture as a whole, will result in it being a far more hostile and uncomfortable place. Her speciality was comfort and she saw absolutely nothing to gain from being needlessly belligerent.
The loss of mothers like Goldie will change the family world that most of us live in most of the time. From an atmosphere of loving cooperation, we are moving culturally into a world of suspicious competition.
One of the first things I was struck with as I looked at photos from her younger life, the part I had missed, was the consistency of the smile across her ages, and being able to see the gradual transitions she went through as she moved from that freshness of youth, through a long and productive middle age, to as graceful an old age as she was able to accomplish. At the end, all her physical and mental capabilities just slipped away and she lay in one curled up position waiting to die for years.
But she did not turn loose of them readily or easily. Goldie's commitment to life can actually be seen in her last years as well as in her earlier more fruitful years. She was determinedly optimistic even the day she moved from her house to a nursing home. She was going to be out by that very afternoon and bake my brother's wife a cake. It was that kind of determination which had brought her through raising a family through a depression and world war, building a family business while in her 50s and early 60s, then retiring to an on-the-whole very gentle and gradual end to her life. Her children and their children were with her to the very end. She had been an extremely generous person throughout her long lifetime, and when it came time for her to receive, no one who loved her could hold back anything she wanted or needed. Her needs were always simple, and she was very respectful when asking, but if she did ask - you knew it was something she really wanted and you just wanted to give it to her.Her ending was hard on all 3 of her children, and they divided up the tasks of organizing their mother's last party. There was a lot of gaiety to Goldie, and she loved a good party, particularly one where she was the guest of honor. Two took the logistics, and one took the difficult job of eulogizing their mother. It was both an easy and a difficult task. The ease lie in how much there was that could be said about Goldie, and the challenge was to make it an accurate portrait of our mother and why we all looked up to and loved her so: long enough to do her justice, but short enough not to lose people's attention. I wanted very intensely to give an accurate portrait of this lady and her sterling qualities.
Below, are selected portions of the eulogy I delivered at her funeral, 5/20/99. Goldie practiced the arts of wifehood, motherhood, and loving life in general, well into her 8th decade. Her children were widely seprated in years, her youngest being born two days before her 40th birthday. She always said that her children kept her young, and to see how her greatest pleasures lie in feeding people and taking care of them, you can understand how.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
Goldie
I want to extend welcome, on behalf of Goldie, since she is not able to welcome you herself, although we all know she would if she were able. If Goldie were in charge right now, we'd be bustling around getting you something to eat and drink. Feeding people was a big part of the way that Goldie showed love. Even if you stopped by for only a couple of minutes, Goldie saw to it that you never went away hungry or thirsty.
Anyone who has had the experience of losing a beloved knows that words cannot touch the meaning of that loss. When the beloved is a parent, part of our link in the chain of life is severed. While we experience death many times in our lives, and become accustomed to it, the death of a mother or father are events which only happen once in a lifetime.
One of the things my siblings and I have experienced as we’ve gone through the process of letting mom go is the realization that what we feel for Goldie goes beyond the love of a child for a parent. In addition to loving her, we also admired, respected, and, above all, trusted her.We discovered that almost everyone felt the same way about Goldie. Somehow the frame of reference shifted from a perception of Goldie as mom, to Goldie as Goldie and how her entire life from beginning to end reflected a constant dedication to her values. While some degree of self-sacrifice was part of it, it was really far more a case of everyone simply sharing generously. Through Goldie's tutelage, we learned how it really is better to give than to receive: the delight in the eye of the recipient is an equal gift to the gift itself. In many respects, I envy those who
knew my mother longer than I did. My brother and sister both experienced her as a young woman. I saw her only at middle age and after.
Her passing once again drives home the lessons she determinedly tried to teach throughout her life - teaching in the best way possible: by living them.Goldie enriched the lives of everyone she touched, and she touched a lot of people. It was basic to Goldie’s nature that she reach out to others and touch them with a gentle, calming, and loving touch.
We will be known by our works, and I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to remark on the lessons of Goldie’s works, as a final chance to give thanks to her for her works on my behalf.
Goldie was a great teacher, in her quiet and unassuming way. She taught by being - by simply living what she believed - not really for the intentional purpose of serving as an example, but because she believed that was the way one should live one’s life. As one experienced and observed the results and Goldie’s effect on people, you realized she was right.
Even at the end of life, Goldie keeps teaching.This latest lesson is a repetition of the lesson that there are many phases of life that we go through. And, while our role may change, it doesn’t mean that who we are changes. As Goldie’s physical and mental faculties progressively shut down on her, the kind and loving nature of her basic person kept shining through. A word I have heard over and over again to describe Goldie is "sweet."
In speaking with the minister preparing for Goldie's service, I learned something about Goldie that was both something I knew about her as well as seeing what I thought I knew in a new light. She said that the members of the church would often go to minister to my mother, and would come away feeling like they had been ministered to.
This was the essence of Goldie.
So there is more to it than just the child’s love for mother, which is what my sister and brother and I now feel, there was something in Goldie which just made people love her, and that something was the fact that she loved them.
Simply put, Goldie, mom, was the best person I ever met in my life.
When people tell me that they’re sorry to hear that my mother died, while it is meant in kindness, the circumstances of her passing make the joy outweigh the sorrow. All I can say is to them is that if they had known Goldie, they wouldn’t be sorry at all.
About a year and half ago, my uncle died. Suddenly thrust into the role of the elder of that family, my cousin, Don, said one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard. In speaking of his dad, Don said "We’re not here to mourn his death, but celebrate his life."
So, I welcome you here to join us in celebrating Goldie’s life.
And what a life it was. It was a life to be celebrated.
She lived through world wars and world economic depression. She saw more fundamental technological change in one generation than any other generation ever saw before or ever will see hence.
Goldie always had a lot of friends and made friends easily. It wasn't totally conscious on her part, although she did want to please, she was just so full of life that people felt good being around her. As a young girl, she was always laughing and bubbly and full of life. Her joyous smile was infectious.
Goldie had a rich and full life, with many dimensions to it. Goldie was first and foremost - wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.
Family was the foundation for mom on which everything else was based. And on this foundation she built a 52 year partnership with a man who was not always the easiest to live with, gave herself to 3 generations of children, then turned around and graciously accepted their support when it came time for her to receive and for them to give back a little of the great gifts they had received from her.Mom gave gracefully because she never thought of herself as "owning" love - to her, love meant passing it around. Holding onto it lest she somehow have "less" simply would never occur to her.
Goldie was an adventurer. As a teenager, she had a boyfriend who had a biplane, the photo of Goldie looking out of the cockpit shows her delight. Sixty years later, Goldie went on a cruise to Alaska and through the Panama Canal. Nothing ever daunted Goldie. The word "can’t" wasn’t in her vocabulary. She didn’t expect immediate results, Goldie’s secret weapon was persistence. Another perfect Goldie story happened on one of the many adventures she shared with her husband. They went fishing up in Minnesota. This was at a stage in their lives when money was scarce. They still enjoyed life itself without any need for a great many trappings to make it enjoyable. They could only afford fishing tackle for dad, so the guide fixed my mother up with a hook and a bobber and she wrapped the line around her finger. She caught the biggest fish of the trip.
Throughout Goldie’s life, she made many promises to people, and she kept them. While I am not aware of her ever breaking a promise to anyone, I think it is perhaps the promises that Goldie made to herself that she kept the best.
So, one of the things which I would most like to celebrate today is how Goldie’s promises to herself were the essence of who she turned out to be. And how her work is now done, and well done, and how she needs and deserves a rest.
We are well-wishers, seeing Goldie off on the next exciting part of her adventure. Goldie was never one to be tied down, but over the past 10 or 11 years, all her abilities gradually failed. Goldie was in there, but trapped - yearning to be free. Today she is free. I’m very happy for you mom.
In order to understand the wholeness and fullness of Goldie's life, no better words have ever been written than Ecclesiastes 3.
"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
- There is a time to sow, and a time to reap,
- a time to live, and a time to die."
There is indeed a time to sow, and a time to reap. All things do and must pass. Each generation must pass through all phases of life and learn its lessons.
Goldie understood this. During the time when it was her time to plant, she did so generously. She tended what she had sown, and made sure that her own never knew real lack. And when she grew old and infirm, she began to reap the harvest of what she had sown and tended so carefully. There is a time for that, and when it came for Goldie, she did it as gracefully as she did everything else.
Goldie was an artist, and while she used and mastered many media, from drawing to oils, her favored medium was life. Goldie was an accomplished artist in that subtle art of life. She imparted to her children that love of life which defined her, and a set of values that does not include ever doing harm. To the very end, Goldie retained a sense of innocence, awe, and wonder. The picture to the right is one of the many home-made christmas cards she made over nearly 40 years of carrying on that tradition. She drew the cover and composed the verse inside which was always news of the family's year.
Goldie loved life, and lived life, and lived love.
Goldie’s death was not unexpected. The family had years to prepare, and went through more than a few dry runs. Goldie had lived a full life, experienced a bountiful harvest, and now it was October for her. In the last of her seasons, she reaped a graciousness about receiving that she had always had about giving.
What was remarkable about Goldie, I will not use the word special because it has become so cheapened, was that from beginning to end she lived her life consistently, living a set of values that she passed on. That is a part of Goldie that you will find in every child and every grandchild. We hope that it will continue to be seen in great-grandchildren and their children.
These two pictures represent Goldie at each end of her adult life.
.The picture on the right, is the way Goldie looked 3 years ago, 1996. However, if you had looked at Goldie through her own eyes, you would have found that in her own heart and mind, she looked a lot more like the picture on the left. Ever in Goldie’s heart was the world young and bright and new and full of promise. In the young girl, were the seeds of the promise of what Goldie was to become. While the changes were many, and the years relentless, I believe that you can still see that the smile is the same, and behind the glasses and the glare, the same twinkle is still in her eyes.
I’d like you to take a moment to look at the young Goldie on her way to becoming and see if you can imagine what dreams lurked behind those bright young eyes. Then I’d like you to look at the old Goldie, and see how all those dreams played out and how deeply satisfied she was. While it is easy to see the remarkable beauty and promise fresh and bursting into bloom in the picture of the young Goldie, it takes knowing her to see even greater beauty in the face of the old Goldie.Goldie knew, when she was a teenager, exactly how she wanted to live her life. Not the details of the plans, but by which values. In the time interval which separates these two photos, close to seventy years, not once, not one single time, did Goldie ever act contrary to those values.
The most cherished legacy Goldie left her descendants, is one of absolute and perfect trust. Goldie understood the importance of keeping faith as few still do.
What some people did not see under Goldie’s kindness, was her grit and determination. This, too, is a legacy she leaves her family. "Can’t" wasn’t in Goldie’s vocabulary until about 10 years ago. While she accepted it with grace, she hated it. The reason I feel such joy for Goldie today, is because she is finally free of the prison her body had become.
The weeping that Goldie’s children have done for our mother, is not from sadness that our mother now is getting her well-earned rest, but tears of joy over having known her.
And I’d like to tell you a bit about the path that Goldie followed on her way between the beginning and end of her life.
Goldie was born July 26th, 1912 in small central Missouri town. Her mother's maiden name was Holt, and the town was named Holt Summit. There were ties here for her that went back to the town's founding. She had two sisters and a brother. Goldie was 7 years old when the armistice ended WW I. She was a teenager during the roaring 20s. Now, if that isn’t enough to give a father sleepless nights. On new years eve, 1932, Goldie married Woody, the man with whom she was going to spend most of her life. Many times mom told the story of saying the first time she laid eyes on my dad - "That’s the man I’m going to marry." Knowing mom, it’s very easy to believe. Determination was a character trait that Goldie had in good measure. Once she made up her mind to do something, there wasn’t much that could stop her.
Being a wife and mother was so central to Goldie, that her life can only be seen in its wholeness by seeing how these roles both defined her, and were her greatest passion. Woody was her partner, and they were in it for the long haul. It was on that framework that all the rest of the experiences of Goldie’s life were built.
In 1935, at the height of the depression, they had a daughter. In 1942, with the war raging, they had a son. While times were thin, Goldie still made sure somehow that her children never lacked anything they really needed. As young marrieds and parents, Goldie and Woody learned to lean on each other and to be partners. Goldie took care of Woody until the day before he died, and only gave in when the family ganged up on her because she was exhausted from caring for him. But, all the time it mattered, Goldie was there when Woody needed her.
Two days before her 40th birthday, Goldie had a third child, a son. Goldie experienced motherhood for a far greater portion of her life than many women. In 1960, Woody and Goldie bought a small business, a country bank, and for the next 14 years they worked six-day weeks. They built the business well, and it provided a comfortable retirement for both of them. To the end of her days, life was as gentle and tender to mom as she had been toward it. The nursing home where she spent her last days provided nothing but the finest care. Her church was a great comfort to her.
The years at the bank were good years for them. With only one chick left in the nest, they traveled, not widely but well. They began to be able to have the things they had worked for all their lives. This was their early harvest. The picture on the left was taken in Hawaii. Together they created many adventures for themselves.When Goldie and Woody retired, they returned to the country. Goldie the artist, took up oil painting and one of her paintings hangs in the nursing home where she spent the last 5 years of her life. They both had a few good years, then Woody’s health failed. At ages 66 and 68, Goldie had the pluck to climb on the tractor, and keep up the "genteel farming operation" until it became clear that Woody would not recover enough to take it over again. In 1982, they moved to a retirement center, and Woody died about a year and half later.
The years since then, were Goldie's harvest years - for mom, the months of September and October. I first noticed that mom was failing, eleven years ago. Dear Goldie could drive 30 miles from her home to my house in the city, but I couldn’t get her to understand how to get to the Quick Trip at the other end of the block. The time since then has been watching her slip away so gradually that it was tough to see, except when you compared year to year. In her life, Goldie had never encountered a real obstacle, merely temporary setbacks. When we could no longer maintain her in her home and brought her to the center, she planned to get out that afternoon and make a cake for my brother's wife. Goldie was always looking ahead to the future, and was never without plans for it.See, I told you that in Goldie’s eyes, the world was still as full of promise to her as it ever was.
In the end, Goldie’s body simply failed on her. But never her spirit.
It is that which we love most about her, and something she gave to all her descendants. That is her legacy - a legacy of spirit.
So, in the end, Goldie accomplished exactly what she set out to do.
Thank you mom. Thank you Goldie. No finer job has ever been done.
Rest well and easy. You’ve earned it.
.
.
7/26/12 - 5/16/99
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
EOTM: The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm, 1956
In the 1950s, there was a significant amount of social criticism of the "American way" of life. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the "Military-Industrial Complex", books like "The Organization Man" and "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" questioned life in corporate America, and thousands of books both fiction and non-fiction questioned the ways that American's pursued personal relationships, marriage, and love. Erich Fromm, in particular, questioned whether love was something to be acquired, as most Americans seemed to think, or something to be practiced - an art, a skill - and whether the experience of love was gained by loving or by being loved.
I agree with Fromm's formulation that love is a verb, not a noun. Here is the first chapter of his 1956 work on the subject. Since this is a non-commerical site, I think reproduction of this comes under fair usage and does not violate copyright laws, particularly since I encourage everyone who wants more love in their lives to buy this book.
Chapter 1 - "Is love an Art?"
IS LOVE an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one "falls into" if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.
Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love--yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.
This peculiar attitude is based on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one's position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one's body, dress, etc. Other ways of making oneself attractive, used both by men and women, are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be helpful, modest, inoffensive. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make one- self successful, "to win friends and influence people." As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem Of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love--or to be loved by-is difficult. This attitude has several reasons rooted in the development of modern society. One reason is the great change which occurred in the twentieth century with respect to the choice Of a "love object." In the Victorian age, as in many traditional cultures, love was mostly not a spontaneous personal experience which then might lead to marriage. On the contrary, marriage was contracted by convention--either by the respective families, Or by a marriage broker, or without the help of such intermediaries; it was concluded ~n the basis of social considerations, and love was supposed to develop once the marriage had been concluded. In the last few generations the concept of romantic love has become almost universal in the Western world. In the United States, while considerations of a conventional nature are not entirely absent, to a vast extent people are in search of "romantic love," of the personal experience of love which then should lead to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function.
Closely related to this factor is another feature characteristic of contemporary culture. Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favor- able exchange. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl --and for the woman an attractive man--are the prizes they are after. "Attractive" usually means a nice pack- age of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious--today he has to be social and tolerant-- in order to be an attractive "package." At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.
The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of "falling" in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of "standing" in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being "crazy" about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
This attitude--that nothing is easier than to love--has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure, and to learn how one could do better--or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of love--to examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love.
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.
What are the necessary steps in learning any art?
The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one--my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art--the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry--- and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
I agree with Fromm's formulation that love is a verb, not a noun. Here is the first chapter of his 1956 work on the subject. Since this is a non-commerical site, I think reproduction of this comes under fair usage and does not violate copyright laws, particularly since I encourage everyone who wants more love in their lives to buy this book.
Chapter 1 - "Is love an Art?"
IS LOVE an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one "falls into" if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.
Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love--yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.
This peculiar attitude is based on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one's position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one's body, dress, etc. Other ways of making oneself attractive, used both by men and women, are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be helpful, modest, inoffensive. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make one- self successful, "to win friends and influence people." As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem Of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love--or to be loved by-is difficult. This attitude has several reasons rooted in the development of modern society. One reason is the great change which occurred in the twentieth century with respect to the choice Of a "love object." In the Victorian age, as in many traditional cultures, love was mostly not a spontaneous personal experience which then might lead to marriage. On the contrary, marriage was contracted by convention--either by the respective families, Or by a marriage broker, or without the help of such intermediaries; it was concluded ~n the basis of social considerations, and love was supposed to develop once the marriage had been concluded. In the last few generations the concept of romantic love has become almost universal in the Western world. In the United States, while considerations of a conventional nature are not entirely absent, to a vast extent people are in search of "romantic love," of the personal experience of love which then should lead to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function.
Closely related to this factor is another feature characteristic of contemporary culture. Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favor- able exchange. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl --and for the woman an attractive man--are the prizes they are after. "Attractive" usually means a nice pack- age of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious--today he has to be social and tolerant-- in order to be an attractive "package." At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.
The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of "falling" in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of "standing" in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being "crazy" about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
This attitude--that nothing is easier than to love--has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure, and to learn how one could do better--or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of love--to examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love.
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.
What are the necessary steps in learning any art?
The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one--my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art--the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry--- and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Gender War, Sexuality, and Love
Monday, May 02, 2005
EOTM: Love: The Real Kind
Forget "Romeo and Juliet" and its modern day clone "West Side Story". Forget "Sleepless in Seattle", "When Harry Met Sally", and all the rest of the commercial Hollywood tripe. If you want to see a real love story, rent a small budget film by the Montana Historical Commission called "Heartland".
Set in Montana (surprise!) around the turn of the last century, this beautiful little film shows mature love at its mundane but substantive best. There are no roses, Valentines, jewelry, or hankie waving declarations of love. There are simply two people who grow to respect, care for, and trust each other with their lives. Neither could hardly be farther from a Hollywood stereotype. No cover material for GQ or Cosmo here. Just people of substance and character who learn to depend on each other and support each other as they face the common challenges of survival.
The modern notions of "romance" and "romantic love", peddled in the forms of mindless mass market entertainment called romance novels and "chick flicks", have created such unrealistic and destructive expectations in the minds of so many people, mostly women but also a large number of men, that ordinary relationships which fall short of the simplistic perfection of idealized "love" are no longer considered satisfactory to most. There are never any stopped-up toilets, nor unpaid bills. Everything is "perfect", idyllic, utopian: the modern day version of the garden of eden myth. Gone is the concept of "for better or worse" which was the foundation that made marriage so successful historically.
When one can depend on someone year in and year out to be a partner and a support, to lend a helping hand when one falls, to nurse one through the occasional sickness or misfortune that is part of the real human condition; over time a deep respect and caring grows. This is real love. This is what will make a marriage work.
Romance is the most transitory and ephemeral thing in the world. One of the stupidest statements possible in the English language is "I still love you, but I'm not in love with you." We can be "in" a bathtub, or "in" deep shit, but we cannot be "in" love. Love is a verb, not a noun. One experiences love by loving, not by having love poured on them.
The emotions associated with romantic love are based entirely on the drive to reproduce which is built into the cells of every living thing. The thrills, the headiness, the euphoria, are all part of the mechanisms which serve the purpose of inducing us to take risks which may endanger ourselves in order to engage in the reproductive act. For most of their lives, human beings today are not active in reproduction. Basing relationships solely on reproductive mechanisms leaves them no foundation when reproduction is not the purpose of the relationship. This is why the vast majority of marriages are failing at the end of the 20th century.
Modern relationships tend to be like the old Greek myth of Procrustes, the robber who kept an inn to lure unwary travelers. He demanded that they fit perfectly into the only bed he had and chopped off parts which were too long or streched parts which were too short to fit. The ubiquitous nature of modern media has created "ideals" of what and how people "should" be which are so rigidly fixed in many people's minds that the first thing they do in a relationship is set out to transform the other person into the closest facsimile of the ideal which is possible given the nature of the raw material.
This is particularly true of women. Dozens of authors, women and men, have used the phrase "men are projects", i.e. remodeling projects. Folk wisdom on this issue abounds. "Women are always surprised when their husbands do not change after marriage. Men are always surprised when their wives do." Women who consider their mates projects instead of partners will always end up in a power struggle and control battle which, for the man, amounts to fighting for his life. The implicit message is "I have the right to, and intend to, destroy who you are so that I can make you into who I want you to be." Not surprisingly, this message does not thrill many men.
Mistaking the feelings which fuel the reproductive drive for love, and the false confusion of sex with intimacy and love, creates relationships which cannot be anything but short term and disappointing. In rural America, many a kitchen has a plaque on the wall that reads: "Kissin' don't last, cookin' do." This folk wisdom reflects the fact that a marriage is essentially a partnership formed for the purpose of helping the partners and their offspring survive. A natural division of labor based on the differing roles in the reproductive process made it wonderfully good sense for the male to spend proportionately more time in the outside world doing the work of feeding and clothing the family, while the female spent proportionately more time in the home using the produce of the male's work to create an environment which was conducive to survival for both of them and their children. Romance does not feed you when you are hungry, nor keep you from freezing to death when the temperature is below zero.
Only when all basic survival needs have been met, do people have the luxury of pursuing activities purely for pleasure, entertainment, recreation, or self-fulfillment. Technology, urbanization, and modern production/distribution systems have moved most life sustaining activities outside the bounds of the typical family today. Basic survival needs are seen as "entitlements", which is far different from conditions which prevailed in this country only a few decades ago, and which still prevail in most of the world. Survival is NOT an entitlement to most people. People who stand balanced on the precarious edge of survival understand this all too well. In such conditions, someone who shares their own resources to help another survive is commonly understood to be doing so because they are acting out of the emotion of love.
Therefor, a realistic definition of love is sharing one's resources to help another survive or even prosper. This is so central to men's intuitive understanding of what love really is, that when this is NOT seen as love, when it is rejected as love and they are told that love is objects given, they refuse to accept than definition and get confused and angry. They fall into the trap of believing that the more safe and comfortable they can make a woman feel, the more she will feel that he loves her. Modern men have been slow to realize that the sense of entitlement of the emotionally arrested adolescents, which modern women have become, makes them consider this to be the zero point. It is not the result of their labors, simply the minimum entrance requirements to get men to the starting line.
Comfort, safety, freedom from hunger, are all assumed by women today. And like the proverbial complaint of every generation about the next, they have no idea what it took to create it. They assume that they are entitled to it, and are wounded and oppressed if they do not have it given to them. Now that material expectations have escalated to the point where it takes years of 60+ hour weeks to accumulate enough experience and wealth (plus social connections and a lot of good luck) to be able to provide that, the vast majority of loving men are simply invisible to most women.
Today, the idea that a woman be a partner and expend a equal amount of effort to creating the comfortable environment they share has given way to the dogma of victimhood which asserts that a man who asks, or worse has the audacity to expect, that a woman make an equal contribution is considered guilty of oppression. Most women throw away more real love than most men get in their lifetimes.
Sadly, this fiction has been so well promoted and publicized that the majority of women have fallen for it: not just the extremists. Nothing is more indicative of the paradox of today's notions of love than the woman who complains bitterly about all the shortcomings of men, makes her hostility and contempt for them clear on a regular basis, dismisses their attempts to show love in the way that they know best, then cannot figure out why she cannot get one of these awful creatures to fall head over heels "in love" with her. Watching such a woman it is easy to take the equally hostile position that; even if the distorted claims of the feminists were true regarding how men consider women's mental capacity to be limited, they were apparently not without justification: women do not exhibit much intelligence when it comes to recognizing how their own behavior contributes directly to their circumumstances.
The most bewildering thing to men today, is how women expect them to take this outpouring of hostility and hatred and magically transform it into warm feelings for those women. Women seem to believe that they can bully men into loving them by hating us. It doesn't work that way. Hate breeds hate. LOVE breeds love, and any woman willing to love men, or one specific man, will find herself well loved in return. As long as she does not mistake jewelry and sport utility vehicles for love.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Set in Montana (surprise!) around the turn of the last century, this beautiful little film shows mature love at its mundane but substantive best. There are no roses, Valentines, jewelry, or hankie waving declarations of love. There are simply two people who grow to respect, care for, and trust each other with their lives. Neither could hardly be farther from a Hollywood stereotype. No cover material for GQ or Cosmo here. Just people of substance and character who learn to depend on each other and support each other as they face the common challenges of survival.
The modern notions of "romance" and "romantic love", peddled in the forms of mindless mass market entertainment called romance novels and "chick flicks", have created such unrealistic and destructive expectations in the minds of so many people, mostly women but also a large number of men, that ordinary relationships which fall short of the simplistic perfection of idealized "love" are no longer considered satisfactory to most. There are never any stopped-up toilets, nor unpaid bills. Everything is "perfect", idyllic, utopian: the modern day version of the garden of eden myth. Gone is the concept of "for better or worse" which was the foundation that made marriage so successful historically.
When one can depend on someone year in and year out to be a partner and a support, to lend a helping hand when one falls, to nurse one through the occasional sickness or misfortune that is part of the real human condition; over time a deep respect and caring grows. This is real love. This is what will make a marriage work.
Romance is the most transitory and ephemeral thing in the world. One of the stupidest statements possible in the English language is "I still love you, but I'm not in love with you." We can be "in" a bathtub, or "in" deep shit, but we cannot be "in" love. Love is a verb, not a noun. One experiences love by loving, not by having love poured on them.
The emotions associated with romantic love are based entirely on the drive to reproduce which is built into the cells of every living thing. The thrills, the headiness, the euphoria, are all part of the mechanisms which serve the purpose of inducing us to take risks which may endanger ourselves in order to engage in the reproductive act. For most of their lives, human beings today are not active in reproduction. Basing relationships solely on reproductive mechanisms leaves them no foundation when reproduction is not the purpose of the relationship. This is why the vast majority of marriages are failing at the end of the 20th century.
Modern relationships tend to be like the old Greek myth of Procrustes, the robber who kept an inn to lure unwary travelers. He demanded that they fit perfectly into the only bed he had and chopped off parts which were too long or streched parts which were too short to fit. The ubiquitous nature of modern media has created "ideals" of what and how people "should" be which are so rigidly fixed in many people's minds that the first thing they do in a relationship is set out to transform the other person into the closest facsimile of the ideal which is possible given the nature of the raw material.
This is particularly true of women. Dozens of authors, women and men, have used the phrase "men are projects", i.e. remodeling projects. Folk wisdom on this issue abounds. "Women are always surprised when their husbands do not change after marriage. Men are always surprised when their wives do." Women who consider their mates projects instead of partners will always end up in a power struggle and control battle which, for the man, amounts to fighting for his life. The implicit message is "I have the right to, and intend to, destroy who you are so that I can make you into who I want you to be." Not surprisingly, this message does not thrill many men.
Mistaking the feelings which fuel the reproductive drive for love, and the false confusion of sex with intimacy and love, creates relationships which cannot be anything but short term and disappointing. In rural America, many a kitchen has a plaque on the wall that reads: "Kissin' don't last, cookin' do." This folk wisdom reflects the fact that a marriage is essentially a partnership formed for the purpose of helping the partners and their offspring survive. A natural division of labor based on the differing roles in the reproductive process made it wonderfully good sense for the male to spend proportionately more time in the outside world doing the work of feeding and clothing the family, while the female spent proportionately more time in the home using the produce of the male's work to create an environment which was conducive to survival for both of them and their children. Romance does not feed you when you are hungry, nor keep you from freezing to death when the temperature is below zero.
Only when all basic survival needs have been met, do people have the luxury of pursuing activities purely for pleasure, entertainment, recreation, or self-fulfillment. Technology, urbanization, and modern production/distribution systems have moved most life sustaining activities outside the bounds of the typical family today. Basic survival needs are seen as "entitlements", which is far different from conditions which prevailed in this country only a few decades ago, and which still prevail in most of the world. Survival is NOT an entitlement to most people. People who stand balanced on the precarious edge of survival understand this all too well. In such conditions, someone who shares their own resources to help another survive is commonly understood to be doing so because they are acting out of the emotion of love.
Therefor, a realistic definition of love is sharing one's resources to help another survive or even prosper. This is so central to men's intuitive understanding of what love really is, that when this is NOT seen as love, when it is rejected as love and they are told that love is objects given, they refuse to accept than definition and get confused and angry. They fall into the trap of believing that the more safe and comfortable they can make a woman feel, the more she will feel that he loves her. Modern men have been slow to realize that the sense of entitlement of the emotionally arrested adolescents, which modern women have become, makes them consider this to be the zero point. It is not the result of their labors, simply the minimum entrance requirements to get men to the starting line.
Comfort, safety, freedom from hunger, are all assumed by women today. And like the proverbial complaint of every generation about the next, they have no idea what it took to create it. They assume that they are entitled to it, and are wounded and oppressed if they do not have it given to them. Now that material expectations have escalated to the point where it takes years of 60+ hour weeks to accumulate enough experience and wealth (plus social connections and a lot of good luck) to be able to provide that, the vast majority of loving men are simply invisible to most women.
Today, the idea that a woman be a partner and expend a equal amount of effort to creating the comfortable environment they share has given way to the dogma of victimhood which asserts that a man who asks, or worse has the audacity to expect, that a woman make an equal contribution is considered guilty of oppression. Most women throw away more real love than most men get in their lifetimes.
Sadly, this fiction has been so well promoted and publicized that the majority of women have fallen for it: not just the extremists. Nothing is more indicative of the paradox of today's notions of love than the woman who complains bitterly about all the shortcomings of men, makes her hostility and contempt for them clear on a regular basis, dismisses their attempts to show love in the way that they know best, then cannot figure out why she cannot get one of these awful creatures to fall head over heels "in love" with her. Watching such a woman it is easy to take the equally hostile position that; even if the distorted claims of the feminists were true regarding how men consider women's mental capacity to be limited, they were apparently not without justification: women do not exhibit much intelligence when it comes to recognizing how their own behavior contributes directly to their circumumstances.
The most bewildering thing to men today, is how women expect them to take this outpouring of hostility and hatred and magically transform it into warm feelings for those women. Women seem to believe that they can bully men into loving them by hating us. It doesn't work that way. Hate breeds hate. LOVE breeds love, and any woman willing to love men, or one specific man, will find herself well loved in return. As long as she does not mistake jewelry and sport utility vehicles for love.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
