Friday, March 25, 2005

EOTM: Masculism, Not Me-Too-ism

I have noticed a distressing tendency in writings by men circulating in the border clashes of the gender war to engage in arguments over who has it worse: men, or women. I have resisted for years the notion of a men's movement which is mostly reactive to, and in imitation of, the feminist movement. The movements must necessarily reflect the nature of the participants, and as feminism reflects the whiny and victim focused nature of women, masculism needs to reflect the action orientation of men.

Men will never be able to be better women than women can be. They will always be able to out-whine us. It is indicative of the permeation of feminine values that as the men's movement seeks a voice, it first speaks in the plaintive tones of the victim.

I thought that it was the 60s again, or that I had stumbled on my long-lost stash of Purple Haze, when I read the argument about whether men or women suffered worse from the Holocaust. How dead can dead be? How high is up? How painful can death be, and is there a yardstick that can have any meaning at all? Of course death is more painful for women than for men: after all women feeee-yul more than men. They are more in touch with those precious feeeeee-lings.

The argument over who lives longer is meant as an argument over power, with lifespan being a measure, but it misses one important point. Everyone actually lives exactly the same amount of time: one life. If you understand Einstein's theory of relativity, you can see that men actually live *longer* than women because the fewer years really *seems* longer because men have to listen to women running their yaps the entire time. If you only had 6 months to live; you should divorce your wife, marry your mother-in-law, and move to Wichita KS. That six months would seem like 100 years.

If we think things are bad being a men today, we would do well to reflect on an old account of a battle about 3000 years ago. All the losers had their penises cut off. The accounting of foot soldiers, officers, etc. who suffered the unkindest cut numbered about 14,000. And we sit around and cringe when women make Lorena Bobbit jokes. It is offensive, crude, and stupid yes, but instead of sitting there with panicked grins on our faces we should be telling them so and walking the hell out.

Life has never come with a guarantee to be easy, unless one was born female. All men's power has come from the fact that they didn't expect it to be, and didn't wait around for someone else to make it so. If we sit around whining waiting for someone to make it better for us, who is going to? Women?

The dialogue of power has made many men embarrassed to have power, and they have tried to escape the blame by abdicating their own power. What we have today is a result. We have become a nation of victims. And men are losing that competition because we are rank amateurs at it.

Time to get back to what we do best: something. Anything. But arguments over who has the worse deal, or who suffers more, will just lead us into the ground. Ok, women told us we had to get in touch with our feelings and learn to express them. We have.

Do they like us any better for it? No.

Do *we* like us any better for it? *HELL* no!

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