Breaking Beta: “Because I am afraid. And he gives me Courage.”

I looked forward to the release of Peter Jackson’s first part of The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journeywith far more anticipation than most mortal men.  That’s because when I was 8 years old I pulled a dusty old hardback library edition of the book off of my elementary school library shelves at the direction of the librarian (Thank you, Mrs. Small!), and I started reading. 

I went to Middle Earth.  And I never really came back.

As much as I admire and love the breadth and majesty of The Lord of the Rings, and approve of Jackson’s brilliant adaptation, there will always be a special place in my heart for The Hobbit.  It’s the book that started me on my personal adventure in many, many ways.  So when Jackson’s movie came out, I went in with high expectations, which (I’m happy to say) were for the most part exceeded.  Lovedthe movie.

The critics, not so much.  Especially those who want to bitch about the fact that the moviedoesn’t have enough boobs in it.  Or this one.

I work in porn, so I’m pretty partial to boobs on the worst of days.  But the plain fact of the matter is that there just weren’t any boobs in the book, The Hobbit, and the boobs that were in the movie, while of exceptional quality, were indeed a re-write.  The Hobbit just didn’t have any female characters to speak of.

That’s not because J.R.R. Tolkien was a misogynistic bastard tool of the Patriarchy, as some would suggest.  There aren’t any women in The Hobbit because, quite frankly, girls just don’t do that sort of thing.

Think about it: if you’re familiar with the story of the book/movie, then you know that it revolves around a quest . . . not just any quest, but a quest for fortune and glory with a dragon at the end.  It’s a quest to re-establish a great legacy, to re-conquer that which had been wrongfully taken, a quest to redress old wrongs and change the landscape of the world and ensure the legacy of a long and distinguished line.

And the plain fact of the matter is that groups of women just do not congregate toward dragon-slaying operations as a rule.

As has often been noted, groups of women never did really get together and build a boat just to see what was on the other side of the ocean the way men did.  They didn’t travel to distant lands to seek their fortune the way men did.  They didn’t pursue decades-old vendettas involving lost fortunes and missing legacies the way men did.  The impetus for exploration and adventure (and exploitation and fortune) are soundly male traits.  Women just take advantage of them, and are occasionally taken advantage of by them.

The criticism of the movie (and, by extension, the book) revolving around the lack of female characters isn’t just indicative of the typical knee-jerk reaction toward anything positive and all-male these days; it demonstrates the utter lack of understanding of basic differences in how men and women think, plan, and act.  At the risk of making a “sweeping generalization” (or, for those addicted to the opium of reason, an “observable fact”), going off on a quest with an axe in your hand in search of fame and fortune is traditionally and historically a “dude” thing, not a “chick” thing.  Sterling exceptions to that rule notwithstanding (they’re exceptions, remember), it is men, not women, who undertake such adventures.  Men get together and slay dragons.  Women get together and trade pants.

You can ascribe the reason for that to many things, depending on your politics: the inability of men to commit, the inability of women to agree on just how a boat should be built, the male fascination with getting-out-of-town-fast, the female desire for a comfortable night’s sleep and tasty carbohydrates, the male capacity for violence and the female dislike of the same, you name it and you can find a sure-fire genderized reason that will float positive or negative, as you see fit.

But the reason that the thirteen dwarves, one hobbit and a wizard were all men was because men, as a rule, adventure in dangerous enterprises.  Women, as a rule, do not.  It’s as simple as that.  Trying to change the gender of a dwarf or throw in an extra chick somewhere along the line would ruin the story because it is, in effect, a male story, about masculinevalues.  Even including Galadriel was a stretch, and while I approve of the inclusion I also feel it departed somewhat from the intended narrative feel.  Thorin & Company was a stag affair for a reason.

Of all the races Tolkien revalorized from old Northern European pagan myths, the Dwarves of Durin’s Folk were by far the most overtly masculine.  We get intriguing glimpses of their culture from the books, and it is decidedly male-oriented by nature.  Short and strong, and possessed of great flowing beards (even, as legend says, the women), Dwarves were the epitome of several key masculine virtues: ingenuity, craftsmanship, strength, courage, and indomitable will.  The Dwarves were delvers under the earth, wresting iron, silver, gold and other minerals from deep mines and forging them into artifacts of exquisite craftsmanship, from toys to weapons of war. 

They were naturally aloof, some preferring not to marry at all so devoted they were to their craft (consider them Dwarves Going Their Own Way).  Yet they were passionate, with strong ideas about kinship and family.  The entire War of the Dwarves and Goblins was over a vile, fatal insult delivered to Thorin’s grandfather.  Dwarves also epitomize some of masculinity’s less-stellar traits, from quick anger to rash behavior to intractable stubbornness to insensible greed.  Dwarves are men with the softer, feminized elements of our culture stripped away (and added to that of the stylishly-dressed Elves).  Even Dwarven art is blocky and masculine, utterly unlike the curves and arches of the home of Elrond the Half-Elven.

Complaining that The Hobbit has too many males involved is like complaining lesbian porn doesn’t have enough women.  It might be true, but it misses the point. 

The Hobbit is an adventure tale, a “buddy movie” in which the main character is forced out of his comfortable, civilized, feminized existence into the rough and dangerously masculine world.  Bilbo Baggins is a comfort-loving hobbit who gets all but Shanghaied from his comfy country subterranean manor home.  Indeed, their entire culture emphasizes the Beta traits of comfort-building, predictability and social propriety to extremes. Hobbits are terribly civilized and don’t see much use for adventures at all.  It takes Gandalf’s friendly boot on his ass to get Bilbo out the door and committed to the quest – but that’s what wizards do.  Wise Old Men are in charge of initiating the boy into manhood.

The ensuing quest reads like a Joseph Campbell book: Bilbo and the motley assemblage of Dwarves take a while to learn to work together.  Like any quasi-military unit, the screw-ups and inadequate leadership inevitably cause problems at first, and much of the movie involves the party getting sorted out.  Gandalf and Thorin duel for leadership, with Balin mediating, while the rest of the company finds their roles.  Bilbo is constantly underfoot or otherwise lagging behind, yet even at this early stage of the adventure (as his role in the troll episode demonstrates) his utility is clear.   Still, the ultra-masculine Dwarves are skeptical of his usefulness and chances of survival – even those most sympathetic with him.  

Despite being smaller than the smallest Dwarf, and very differently-natured, Bilbo persists on the quest often for no better reason than he committed himself.   At several points he expresses regret at leaving his comfortable Beta existence behind.  But he made a commitment, he signed a contract, he pledged his nascent masculine honor – no matter how small his contribution to the effort – to the completion of the quest.  At the end of the movie he even verbally abandons his comfort-seeking life and re-commits himself to helping the Dwarves recover their stolen home. 

The masculine themes throughout the movie are strong: not just the powerful narrative of Thorin and the Dwarves, but the struggles Gandalf faces on the White Council, in the face of his inferior superior, Saruman, are just as dramatic and just as instructive.  Most of us have been at a place where our boss was kind of an idiot, and possibly even plotting with the Evil Dark Lords behind your back.  It happens.  Gandalf does what men traditionally do: kiss just enough ass to get by, and proceed with your own plan anyway.

The story of The Hobbit is particularly timely, in Red Pill terms.  We stand now at what might be the beginning of the Revolt of the Betas, an opportunity for the meek-hearted, timid hobbits among us to cast off their waistcoats, forget their pocket handkerchiefs, and pick up swords they didn’t know they had in an effort to strive toward regaining their masculinity in a hostile wilderness of feminism and anti-male sentiment.  

Bilbo is Beta, at the beginning of the story, and the remainder of it is really about how any man finds his Alpha: in the company of other men, guided by the Wise,  a clear quest ahead, through danger and hardship, and – eventually – finding a dragon at the end.

(Notice the utter lack of princesses involved.)

The Dwarves are a mixed-bag of embodied masculine traits, from the majesty of kingly Thorin to the youthful exuberance of Fili and Kili to the family-man Gloin building a legacy, to the wisdom and experience of old Balin.  Dwalin epitomizes the battle-hardened Warrior, and Dori is dedicated to the sophisticated tastes of the finer things in life. Each of them has something to contribute to Bilbo’s education, and each of them is naturally sympathetic to the out-of-place hobbit . . . but that doesn’t keep them from doing what is necessary to temper him. 

The doubts, the teasing, the constant remarks about how different Bilbo is seems almost cruel to feminine sensibilities.  But they are vital elements to how a boy becomes a man.  You don’t gain strength by catering to sensitivity and weakness, but by challenging it and overcoming it.  The good-natured hazing the Dwarves offer Bilbo is designed to toughen him, not break him.  They want him stronger, not broken.

The Dwarves act in good faith.  Even when things look the grimmest, they do not seriously consider abandoning Bilbo.  He signed a contract.  He committed himself.  He pledged his masculine honor– what little he had – for the common goal and the common good, and even when things went bad he and his companions did not break faith.  That's an essential masculine value, and a vital lesson of manhood.  

But the most shining example of masculine themes is in Gandalf’s expository discussion with Galadriel, after the council, in which she questions the wisdom (which is a big thing for a Wizard) of including Bilbo on the Dwarves’ desperate quest. 

His answer may sound like a generic, vainglorious throw-away line for a sappy action-adventure fantasy, but under further study it becomes something more . . . something much more.  Something intrinsic to and glorious about the masculine soul.

Gandalf and the Dwarves may have needed a 14^th member, a burglar, and a well-stocked host when they hired Bilbo to join them (and convinced him to go of his own accord).  The inclusion in the party seems almost an after-thought, especially to the doubtful Dwarves of Thorin & Company.  But upon reflection, Gandalf reveals that what first appears to be a dumb-ass move (including a very killable hobbit among the far-tougher Dwarves) is not just for his nimble utility and cleverness . . . it was actually designed to improve his own stewardship of the enterprise:

“Why Bilbo Baggins?  Perhaps it is because I am afraid.  And he gives me courage” is what he admits to the aloof, immortal and impeccably-manicured renegade ring-bearing Noldoran Elvenqueen.  And that sentence is telling, a roadmap to the masculine conception of duty and honor. 

No matter how doughty and dedicated the warrior, without a worthy task or precious vulnerability to protect, bravery is a shallow thing.  The warrior who fights for survival is honorable.  The warrior who fights for gain is bold.  The warrior who fights for others even as they fight for him, is noble.  And the warrior who can admit his fear and his dependence on others is wise.

Honorable, bold, noble and wise – these are the elements the Beta hobbits of our post-industrial Shire need, but they can’t get them online and they can’t get them from women.  Only in the company of men, guided by the wise, through hardship and adversity will they shed their fear, find their strength, and become the men their ancestors intended them to be.

This was recently brought home in my own personal life.  My oldest son is 13, nearing the cusp of manhood.  He’s at the age in which toys are fading in importance and girls are starting to be more than an annoyance.  You remember how difficult, strange, and wonderful that time was in your life.  We each seem to get some seemingly-insurmountable challenge around that age, one which forces us to take the first steps toward adult responsibility, whether we want to or not.

We’re not Christian, so we don’t do confirmation camp and such, and our Pagan equivalent is a private family matter.  But the rites of adulthood are an important if not essential element of our sacraments, and we spend a lot of time discussing and preparing for his future.  As a symbolic part of his initiation into manhood I bought him a sword. 

Not just any sword, but a replica of Bilbo’s sword (which will be named “Sting” in the next movie, if you were curious).  It’s the lower-end replica, unadorned by Elvish script on the blade, by design.  I shall have it engraved, when the time comes, with a new name and a new legend.

Why a sword?  Because for ten thousand years our ancestors acknowledged a young man’s maturity and adulthood by granting him arms for the defense of his village/tribe/family, and a sword is a defensive as well as an offensive weapon. 

But I’m not just giving it to him – he has to earn it.  As he goes through the unexpected trial the Fates have granted him, and he has to face up to adult responsibilities and the consequences of adult actions for the first time, he will – like Bilbo – discover new reservoirs of strength, tenacity, cleverness and – yes – courage within his boyish heart.  He will learn to walk away from the comfort and safety of childhood and venture into the Wilderness of adult masculinity.  He will learn the sweet masculine thrill of knowing that you are strong and you are powerful and you are wise in a hostile world.

He will learn, as he grows into his man’s body, that even at his meager age and slight build, with a sword in his hand he can take a man’s life, and that is a heady responsibility.  He will learn that his masculinity will be a burden and a blessing, a reason to be despised and a reason to be prized, a thing to be carefully cultivated like the finest strain of pipeweed and to be proud of, as if it was the most intricate jewel ever wrought.  He will be taught that the comfort and security of the Beta – while valued – lays lighter on the scale of masculine worth than his Alpha contributions: leadership, dedication, loyalty, trustworthiness, competence. 

The goal, you see, is to keep him from sliding into that Betatized state our society so favors prematurely, and instead push him into the grand adventure (“nasty disturbing uncomfortable things, adventures.  Make you late for dinner.”) ahead.  My job of ensuring his happy childhood has all but come to a close, and the just-as-important job of ushering him into manhood lies ahead. It scares me, this responsibility.  If I screw it up, I’m not just messing up my son’s life, I’m releasing an untrained Ironwood on the unsuspecting world. 

I could just slack-off and let television and the internet raise him, as his peers’ parents seem to be doing.  But the last thing I want is for him to be a 28 year-old Bilbo in a one-bedroom apartment, his only devotion to a game console and his only adventures virtual.  He’s an Ironwood: he can make it big or screw up big, but mediocrity is not in our DNA.

I’m hopeful.  I’ve done a good job so far, else he wouldn't have made it through his recent ‘adventure’.  It doesn't really matter what it was -- he was challenged, and despite taking a hammering, he rose to it and did what needed to be done, like the man he aspires to be.

And when he arrives at that point where I can look him in the eye and see a man grown, not a boy, then and only then shall he be presented with his cadet blade (he’ll get a full-sized sword when he’s 18), it shall be inscribed and engraved (in actual Sindaran Tengwar, ‘cause I’m a nerd like that) with this legend:

“Because I am afraid.  And he gives me Courage.”

If you are a Beta dad and you're reading this, spend the next month reading The Hobbit out loud to your boys every night until you finish.  Watch the expressions on their faces.  Share in their delight and fear and surprise and adventure.  Look into their eyes, see the eager boys they are and the strong men they can become, and realize - if you haven't yet - that the only person in the world who has the responsibility for them becoming men is not your wife, your ex-wife, their teachers, their neighbors, the government, society, or any particular village . . . it's you.  Only you.  

And if that scares you . . . good.  It's a scary thing.  It should be.  Look at your sleeping son's face some night and try to imagine the unforeseen challenges he will be forced to face in his life, and understand that you alone can prepare him for them. 

But take heart, if you don't feel up to the task ahead.  If you're afraid you'll screw up, you have all the courage you need, right there in front of you.  You'll discover reserves of strength and patience that you didn't know you had while you do it.  In the process of helping your son become a man, you yourself will become a much better man.  

If that's not a good enough reason to break your Beta and go forth into the world like a conquering hero, then there isn't one.

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Free To Be . . . A Man.

I can pinpoint, almost to the day, when I started chugging Blue Pills in my youth.  It was the day I saw Free To Be You And Me in elementary school, back in the 1970s.  It was the pro-feminist brainchild of Marlo Thomas, a project of the Ms. Foundation for Women, and it was designed to make everyone feel it was okay to be different things: girls could be construction workers, boys could be nurses and carry dolls, black kids and white kids could play together, etc.  The basic concept was to encourage post-60s gender neutrality, promoting values such as individuality, tolerance, and comfort with one's identity (as long as you were a girl or a gay guy). A major thematic message was that anyone—whether a boy or a girl—can achieve anything.  But mostly girls.  It was notable for catchy pop tunes and lyrics, and for having the (young and black) Michael Jackson, Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Diana Ross, and Rosey Grier, among other stars.  Rosey told us "it's all right to cry".  I was cool with that.

I was also cool with the emphasis on boys looking forward to being fathers, and encouraging them to think of child care and interaction with their future kids as positive male things (okay, "positive things", they essentially downplayed the whole "male" idea).  But the subtext was clear: dudes will enjoy being good fathers to their kids, and it's something that you should look forward to.  And I did.  It made me use fatherhood as one of my prime motivating factors in searching for a bride, and I had and continue to have a very close relationship with all of my kids, just as my Dad did with his sons.  That's not where I take issue with the program.

I take issue with the program because it was loaded with anti-masculine imagery and took the approach that, basically, all things patriarchal were evil and oppressive, and all things feminist were inherently good.  It told me, in other words, that I was Free To Be pretty much anything in the world I wanted . . . except a masculine Man.

I can see trying to move past Agricultural Age stereotypes that no longer fit the socio-economics of the post-War period, much less the coming Post-Industrial period.  I mean, after Rosie the Riveter it was damn hard to make a case that women were incapable of working most of the same jobs as men, and the post-war need for expansion and industrialization almost required a doubling of the existing pre-war workforce, just to keep the paper moving.

But Free To Be You And Me fucked me up.  Bad.  It taught me that it WAS NOT OKAY to be a "boy", that MEN were universally overbearing and insensitive jerks whose only role was to dictate and oppress, and that my ONLY HOPE for moral and social acceptance in this brave new plastic world was to hand my testicles over to Marlo and forget I ever had them.

Because that's what FTBYAM represented to me: a clear choice between whether to become a feared and hated MAN, or a gentle and caring boy who eschewed violence and oppression in favor of fat-free yogurt and kittens.  FTBYAM probably contributed the most to my fucked-up ideas about women and men.  Because while Marlo And Friends were singing about how you could be anything you wanted when you grew up, I was looking around me at the time (mid-70s) and seeing that what most boys and girls apparently wanted to be when they grew up was DIVORCED.

FTBYAM made me ashamed of my gender, ashamed of my culture, ashamed of my history.  It made me ashamed of my father for not deferring to my mother in all things.  It gave all the credence the young feminist teachers in charge of me needed to castigate me for the slightest boyish infraction.  It gave all my young feminist peers all the ammunition they needed to not just reject me, but call me "creep" and other male-bashing tripe, and the sad fact was that if I reported them, it was I who got sent to the Principal's office.

Any attempt at asserting any kind of "traditional" masculinity was stomped on (by the younger teachers -- the older ones still remembered Segregation, they had other issues).  The younger teachers, the ones with feminist fervor in their eyes, seemed to delight in correcting a boy if he said he wanted to be a fireman or a policeman or a soldier or a race car driver, telling him instead that it was perfectly okay to be a nurse or a daycare provider instead.  Funny, she didn't mention the wonderful starting salaries of those perfectly okay positions, or how to raise a family on them.  The subtext was clear: such passively Beta, overly-feminized career choices were the only ones they were going to promote.  To boys.

The fact is, FTBYAM may have promoted "freedom", but in the process to make children who were "unencumbered by stereotypes", FTBYAM ended up merely creating new ones: the timid Beta (and soon to be divorced) dad, the overbearing Alpha (soon-to-be-step) dad, the successful marital "partnership" that was about as useful a guide to actual marriage as a bicycle manual is to a carp, the "empowered" young woman who could do anything, the "understanding" young man who was expected and obligated to let her do anything, and absolutely no room within the feminist pantheon for a dude who wanted to be free to be a dude.  You took the Blue Pill or you got kicked out as a troublemaker.  Period.

I bring this up today because I read over at HuffPo a lovely little post from Marlo about bullying.

You see, bullying is what happens when one kid is mean to another kid, and it really is a bad thing.  My son has been bullied.  My daughter has been bullied.  Both have witnessed severe bullying.  And it's clear that, for some individuals, the emotional strain of bullying is too much.  Pointless suicides or runaways have resulted from bullies and inattentive parents.  I have to agree with Marlo, this is a majorly important topic to discuss with our kids.

But the irony is killing me.

Thanks to FTBYAM and its clones, adherents, and attitudes, I and thousands of boys like me were institutionally bullied by feminists throughout our childhoods.  Our schools and our teachers were working with the intention of removing the dangerous "masculine" characteristics that might interfere in the feminist paradigm -- say, like getting married and wanting your wife to stay at home with the kids, or pursuing a "typical" and "traditional" male career path that might block some enterprising young woman from having that job.  FTBYAM epitomized feminism's subtextual message to men: YOU ARE USELESS AND EVIL AND IN OUR WAY.  

Not "equality", not "level playing field", regardless of their intentions the result was a generation of self-loathing boys who resented girls and women for their perceived privileges  even as we felt powerless and at the mercy of the whims of the adult women in our lives.  Moms who didn't give a damn what you thought about your new step-dad after a hypergamous divorce.  Teachers who -- no lie -- told my six-year-old brother Lester in kindergarten that "it doesn't matter if your mommy and daddy love each other, they're just going to end up divorced".  (That fucked Lester up for decades.) Neighborhood ladies, mostly divorced themselves, who kept trying to give my mother good reasons to leave my dad even though they admired his fathering skills (he was the only intact father in the neighborhood) and discouraged her from getting us boys involved with Scouting because it was "sexist".

And then there was school.  Female, feminist teachers who "lost" my applications for special programs, or failed to recommend me or other male students for honors in favor of girls.  If it hadn't been for my History teacher, bless her heart, I never would have won my first essay contest.  My English teacher was a feminist who told me, to my face, that despite the fact that my essay was chosen blindly (no names or other identifying characteristics) that the school didn't feel comfortable submitting so many boys and not enough girls.  So out of the five boys and two girls who were selected locally, one boy and two girls were recommended by her.  But my History teacher didn't like her, she did like me, and she recognized talent.  She submitted me on her own and I won.

And then there was the feminist guidance counselor in high school who desperately tried to use my boyish teenaged angst as leverage to get me to go to a small private liberal arts college instead of the local, internationally-known public research university nearby I favored because (as I found out later) her gender-based numbers were off: she had too many boys were going to big State and technical universities, while too many girls were going into the small liberal arts colleges and "traditionally female" schools.  She went so far as to call my folks and try to persuade them that I'd be "better off" someplace less challenging.  Of course, if that meant that another woman could take up my spot at the university, that was just gravy, but . . .

The upshot is that between my third grade year, when we had a school-wide assembly featuring FTBYAM, and my first year of college, I and my brothers were subjected to what can only be described as pervasive, gender-based institutional bullying.  And we did tell our parents.  And they did complain.  And no one cared one bit, because we were merely male.

FTBYAM was followed up with Free To Be A Family, which took the anti-masculine bias of FTBYAM and mixed it with some massive rationalizations about how much fun it was to be a kid from a divorced household.  In Marlo's own words, "I also wanted to dispel the idea that there is such a thing as a "broken" family. A family is a place that you come home to where people love you and support you and miss you and can’t wait to find out what you did today."

Well, that's great . . . except it was directly counter to the experiences we were having in the 1980s, when she was promoting the Murphy Brown, UMC Professional divorcee ideal of family and we were seeing kids our age becoming alcoholics because of the stress divorce, hypegamy, infidelity, and all the other wonderful hallmarks of feminism brought us.  Oh, what bounty!  My friend Marty shot himself at 17 because his mother had refused to let him even lay eyes on his father in three years.  My friend Chris had four step-dads in five years and eventually got into heroin.  My friends Mark and Tony were exiled to the shed in the back yard so their new stepsisters could each have their own room (in defense, it was a very nice shed).  Their sisters went to college, their mom and step-dad paying for it all.  Tony went to one semester of community college his grandmother paid for, and then joined the Army, and Mark ended up working retail for decades because their step-dad didn't want to pay for some other man's kids' college . . . and didn't think his wife should either (she felt it was more important to give the girls a head-start, since life was "against them" just because they were women).

Families in the 1980s were a post-apocalyptic disaster, and worrying about whether or not a kid felt "accepted" by his peers for his family life was laughable.  We were all just trying to survive the feminist-inspired wave of "I'm not HAAAApppy!" divorces, or the mid-life crises-inspired cheating that wrecked our families.  Kids in general, to the Baby Boomers who fueled the idealistic and unrealistic FTBYAM and FTBAF, were accessories and status symbols, mere points of contention in a divorce settlement and a useless and ungrateful waste of child-support money -- believe me, we knew that.  We got told that by our culture every day.

Especially if you were a boy, the consensus opinion of the women in your life (and in popular culture) was that you were either effeminate and ineffectual to the point of terminal Betatude (which they despised but accepted) or that you were an angry, violent male chauvinist intent on perpetuating the oppressive nature of the Patriarchy and therefore merited their disgust.  And if you tried to claim to be the former, they did everything but demand you castrate yourself before they'd admit it.

FTBYAM and FTBAF taught two generations of boys to loathe themselves and hate their own gender.  It taught us that that women were smarter than men, women were better than men, that women had better promise and better sense than men, and -- most importantly -- women were just more important than men . . . and particularly young men who weren't even cute boys anymore.  Yech.

By the time my generation hit our teenage years, crawling into a popular culture of disaffected youth and wailing androgyny was all we could do to survive this pervasive, intentional attack on masculinity.  The institutional bullying by "tough, smart, independent women" in our public and private institutions, not to mention the culture at large, taught us to fear women, not trust them in the slightest, and it didn't do a damn thing to make us less resentful.  It just showed us that, for men, feminism was about revenge and suffering, not about equality and fair play.  We could take a look around at the social carnage of divorce and hum a few bars of one of the songs with tragic irony and KNOW that it was bullshit . . . but bullshit that was Industry Standard.  The families we saw were chaotic messes who mostly just argued, drank, fought, and went to counseling until it was time for a divorce.  Few of the kids I knew ever had a place that you come home to where people love you and support you and miss you and can’t wait to find out what you did today."  That was a sick fantasy, compared to what was actually happening to "family" in America in the 1980s.  Mostly their parents yelled at them about homework, asked them pointless questions and didn't wait to hear the answer, and then went off on their own little head-trips about their own failing relationships.

Of course there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then.  We've had two generations of catastrophic hypergamic divorce to look back on, two generations of weekend-or-absent dads, two generations where men didn't feel comfortable trying to talk to their sons at all, lest they be accused of "spreading sexism".  The original children of divorce have overcome the stigma enough to rack up three or four divorces and step-families of their own, now.  The Patriarchy has well and truly fallen, and now only the Puerarcy remains.  Two generation of anti-social Betas too battered by feminist combat dating and no firm social rules has had an effect someplace other than the Glass Ceiling.  I have seen Scout troops filled with boys from single-mom homes, and gosh, they didn't look nearly as happy, secure and fulfilled as those from two-parent households.

Because almost thirty years after Free To Be, we can measure its results, and those results are mixed at best.  While it's true that you have empowered, intelligent, highly-motivated young women willing to devote a decade and a half of their best reproductive years to climbing the corporate ladder, at the end of that climb they discover that their reproductive options (what we use to call "husbands") don't want a thing to do with them.  Feminists may make decent bosses and great co-workers, but they make cruddy wives and mediocre mothers, with a few notable exceptions.

You can chalk up at least a bit of the "marriage gap" (the age at which couples get married for the first time -- it was about 19 in 1960, it's 28 and rising here and now) to women focusing more on career interests . . . but you can explain a lot more of it if you consider that the dudes out there just don't want to get married at all, anymore, and particularly not to women who are more concerned with corporate bonuses than childcare.  Dads (and potential dads) are, indeed, a lot more involved and sensitive to their reproductive issues today (thanks, feminism!), and because of that those men who do put thought and effort into their fatherhood, including good wife selection, wouldn't marry a feminist on a bet.  The likelihood of catastrophic failure is just too high, especially when there are plenty of better options out there.  Foreign brides, "traditional" girls, or women who see themselves as mothers and (gasp!) wives rather than employees or competitors are all better bets than your average feminist, for the men of America.

(Free To Be . . . A Spinster!)

As for me, I'm going to take Marlo's advice: I'm going to be Free.  To be.  Free to be . . . a Man.  A big, hairy, thoughtful, considerate Patriarch far more concerned about my children's emotional welfare than whether or not my daughter can make partner before she's 30.  A Man, unafraid of women and disdainful of feminist shaming rhetoric.  A Man who understands that violence, power, money, and ingenuity are all tools at my disposal, not reasons to loathe who I am.  A Man who feels no shame at looking and lusting at women for fear of offending their "rights" not to feel afraid of me.

I was afraid of women for thirty years.  Female fear is just not a high priority for me.

But, thanks to Marlo, I'm Free.  Free to Be.

I'm free to be a Man who takes a wife (who knows and understands that "wife" doesn't mean "equal and temporary domestic partner", but WIFE) and raises his kids without fearing Marlo's ire.  A Man who feels no pity at the struggle of young women trying to find a job in this economy because there was damn little pity demonstrated to me during the last economic recession    I'm free to be a Man who can stick his tongue out at the gigantic shit test that is feminism and ignore it, because it just isn't working for me anymore (and, I see, it never really was).  I'm free to be a Man who doesn't feel compelled to sacrifice the futures of my sons in order to elevate my daughter's.  Sure, they're free to be whatever the hell they want . . . but they also understand that that freedom is dependent, partially, on their accepting my guidance, or they'll be free to slug it out on their own. I'm free to be a Man who delights in the sight of naked boobs and the hum of precision machinery, who doesn't consider the expression of my sexuality an attack on femininity, who demands respect -- yes, demands it -- or I won't play anymore.

And that's where Marlo And Friends really went wrong for half of the audience they were shooting for.  They managed to inject the idea of gender-free economic and social empowerment, but they did so in such a way that promoted the active and willful disrespect of masculinity and male authority.  And while that would make any real feminist cream her jeans just hearing about, the sad, Red Pill fact is that when you promote disrespect for masculinity in a culture, you do not automatically increase respect for femininity.  You just get a lot of sullen, pissed-off, uninvested men who can't wait until the feminists are out of the room so that they can tell that joke.

And a lot of strong, independent, empowered women who can't get two dates in a row with the same dude, much less a commitment, a ring, or a family.  Women who traded in their reproductive future and betrayed their genetic destiny for the promise of a respect that never was fulfilled.  Those poor women, thanks to feminism, are Free To Be single for the rest of their lives and die alone, childless, and unloved by men.  They get to stamp their feet in rage as the dudes they once dated and tried for years to get to commit end up getting married to much younger women (often in a matter of months) from the Philippines or Korea or Brazil or Siberia and start popping out kids like it's double coupon day.  These strong, independent women who were told there would be PLENTY of dudes waiting for them when they were done Being Free To Be are now realizing, to their horror, that they've been sold a bill of goods.  They're Free To Be a corporate drone with a vagina that's increasingly losing the attention she craves and increasingly getting frustrated at all of the guys who are just not real damn impressed with how well they've done.

But that's okay, Ladies.  Because it's all right to cry.  We should know.  We've been doing it behind your backs since 1974.

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The Real "Happily Ever After"

It’s rare that I run across anything Red Pill friendly over at HuffPo, but  the other day I came across a very telling post from a blogger, Martha Lyles.  She is essentially writing a letter to herself, from her modern perspective as a wife and mother and grandmother to the 20 year old woman she was, who was so excited about her Big Party.  Ironically, this was in the “Religion” section, not the “Women”, “Weddings” or “Divorce” sections (and note there is no “Men” section...and the Democrats wonder why more men don't vote for them...) It’s entitled “Letter To A Young Bride After 43 Years Of Marriage”, and it’s a wonderful retrospective on her marriage (as opposed to her “wedding”).

 I’ll let you read the whole thing – it’s quite poignant – but there is one quote I want to hone in on:

“...The same goes for being a wife. You'll marvel at Dick's unswerving commitment. You'll learn to put him first and -- believe it or not -- you'll delight in doing so. You'll see your role as his helpmate and cheerleader. You'll pack his bags for business trips, tucking love notes under ties. You'll view all the joys in your life as gifts from above, like the six wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked grandkids who clamor for your cookies and your kisses. And you'll sense, time and again, the grace conferred in your wedding Mass sustaining you as husband and wife.”

Religious sentiment aside for a moment, consider the perspective: “You’ll learn to put him first and – believe it or not – you’ll delight in doing so.”

This is not, as you might think, a “see, I toldya so!” about male dominance in a relationship.  This is a “see, I toldya so!” about how you don’t get divorced.

It's also a glimpse into the real, Red Pill reality of Happily Ever After (HEA), the romantic nirvana that inspires romance novels, mommy porn, and soap operas.

When you want to study how to do something, the two areas you focus on are “successes” (to establish a base-line metric) and “failures” (to determine how deviations from protocol derail successes).  Athol spent a considerable time in marriage forums preparing for his book, and if you have to then you can see how learning from other people's failures can be valuable for avoiding hasty divorce.  However, if you want to know how to keep your marriage going, it's a good idea to not just focus on the failures but spend some time looking at successes to inform your marital toolkit.

After all, what is a “successful marriage”?  Certainly, one in which you aren’t getting divorced has to be held as a basic standard.  That doesn’t mean that your marriage is a success if you aren’t divorced, it just means that it’s “failing”, not “failed”.

When women in their youth begin to form their True Love inspired Happily Ever After fantasy, it rarely includes things like packing suitcases for their husband’s business trips or struggling through childbirth alone while your husband is on deployment.  Or the ugly reality that is early childhood development.  For many modern young women, the idea of “having kids” is so abstract and glamorized and sanitized for them by our culture that they don't understand the level of involvement necessary to keep them from becoming willfully ignorant drains on society.



To young women today, it's as if children were a status symbol, not a new life, merely an option like a new car with leather interior, and not a life-long personal commitment.  They are allured by the feminist ideal of “equality” and "equal opportunity", which means that they see family and children (and eventual divorce and remarriage) as part of the expected checklist -- and their dedication to "equality" means they expect that whatever poor Beta chump they marry will handle all the details.  (Or, conversely, that she will marry well enough to have servants to care for them like her favorite celebs.)  "Happily Ever After" is a gauzy  vague cloud of ill-defined bliss that follows the Honeymoon to them, the natural and inevitable conclusion to "True Love".

But True Love, Red Pill style implies a host of boring, mundane, petty little compromises that do little to empower you as a woman or see you reach “your full potential” in the feminist sense.  I recently read another screed at HuffPo (not important enough to hunt down the quote) about how Michelle Obama shouldn’t have said “Being a Mother is my most important job”, because that put too much pressure on everyone to reproduce and emphasize their children over their career elements.   She offered instead “Being a Woman is my most important job”, with motherhood and relationships and such secondary to her solipsistic “all about me” perspective.  She didn’t even mention a husband, except as an annoyance that got in her way.  Motherhood, to feminism, is a bother, a needless distraction away from the self-indulgent achievement-based Matrix climb for fame, cash and prizes. 

And the term “wife” is anathema to feminists.  When a feminist reflexively uses the term, it’s almost apologetic.  “Husband” is often used with a proud sense of ownership, like she just got a great lease on a car, but a feminist woman rarely describes herself as a “wife” unless she’s in trouble.  And a feminist has very little, if any, ideological instruction on being a wife save how to end the practice.   Feminism celebrates divorce and punishes success when it comes to marriage.

Now, if you’re a long-term carousel rider with a fat trust fund, then sure, a string of wealthy ex-husbands while you assert your feminist privilege doesn’t hurt anyone but those poor chumps.  Such childless, often sexless unions in the UMC have been a social bloodsport for decades.  But once you start getting kids involved, shit gets real.  You aren’t just splitting up the CD collection when you divorce, you’re splitting up a family with people who depend on you, and that’s got jack to do with your self-important career goals.  The feminist approach to "family" in general is little better than their approach to "marriage".  Gentlemen, you are warned.

But back to the successes.  As I was saying, it’s important, if you want to avoid divorce, to study what goes right, as well as what goes wrong.  This wonderful article is by a woman with a 43 year track record willing to impart some cosmic wisdom on you, ladies.  Listen up.  This is what Happily Ever After looks like, not three ex-husbands and a lonely condo full of cats in Miami.

Feminists can often manage to get married . . . they can rarely manage to stay married.  And very, very few can be said to be in "happy" marriages (marriages in which both parties can consistently say that they are happy with the way things are going).  And part of the reason has nothing to do with ideology -- it's because they don’t know how to be married.  In attempting to re-write the social rules of marriage, feminism's built-in escape hatch made the effort to work on a marriage a lot harder than ending it.  Feminists can become brides pretty easily, thanks to the power of pussy.  They can just as easily become ex-wives, with a stroke of a pen.  They rarely become "wives" (under the Rectification of Names).  So for all of their vaunted empowerment, it seems that feminism insists that an empowered feminist woman can do ANYTHING . . . except be a good wife.

That, of course, fuels hypergamy and divorce and other crap, but the plain fact is that feminism has rejected the Happily Ever After in favor of the EPL divorce, and now we have a nation of women bellyaching that they STILL aren't happy, despite getting everything their heart desired for 40 years.  They want their Happily Ever After, but they aren't willing to do the work required.  And Happily Ever After requires a lot of work.  Just ask Martha Lyles.

This woman was a wife.  She had a husband.  She didn’t have a co-equal partner in her relationship, she had a captain of her ship to whom she was loyal and respectful.  She did things for him that a feminist considers demeaning: packed his suitcase, quit school, ended her career aspirations for his benefit, raised his children, cooked his meals.  She deferred to him in important ways, and often in unimportant ways, not because the custom or religious rite demanded it, but because that’s how successful marriages work.

She doesn't write about the sacrifices her husband may have made -- that's his story, not hers.  She doesn't write about how hard it was and how regretful she is of her missed opportunities.  She writes of the sacrifices of a woman in her marriage, but she also writes of the rewards.  The Happily Ever After.  Grandchildren, a big happy family, and a great husband she adores and looks up to.  And she doesn’t just mention he’s a “great husband”, she describes an important attribute of his greatness in his devotion and thoroughness in helping her fight cancer.  No mere domineering chauvinist is likely to do that.  He repaid her sacrifice and devotion with his loyalty and steadfastness, not merely providing practical support during her struggle, but being her unwavering rock to which she clung as she wrestled with her own mortality.


Any of your weak-willed Beta future ex- husbands going to do that, feminists?  Good luck.

The important thing to take away from this success story is simple: the author was not merely extolling the virtues of marriage, but she was demonstrating the necessary dedication to fulfilling Happily Ever After.

You don’t ever plan to get cancer in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong and resilient Prince Charming willing to stand over your wounded body with a sword, keeping the monsters at bay.  You don’t imagine that you’ll get piles of diapers and bills and bad report cards and problem children in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong, disciplined father to keep order and enforce policy among your children until they can do it on their own.  You might conceivably envision grandchildren in your Happily Ever After, sitting around rosy-cheeked and respectful of you.  But you probably don’t understand how to get to that point – and truly appreciate it – because you have to first raise your own brood to adulthood and steer them toward their own productive relationship before you get rosy-cheeked grandbabies.

 For those feminists who feel they can have a “co-equal partnership” with a man, while secretly exerting feminine privilege as a means of manipulating and controlling your husband until you lose all respect and desire for him, you are forever denied this Happily Ever After.  Because you refuse to do the work and be a wife to your husband.  You get the EPL version, in which you marry a billionaire after spending your ex-husband’s money on eating, praying, and loving.  Oh, and good luck with that billionaire – I hear there are simply scads of them around.

(Or was that cats?)

But it's not just a bust for single feminist career gals.  It works both ways.

For those men who have eschewed the possibility of marriage in the pursuit of a permanent ticket to the Puerarchy, letting your bad experiences and fear of rejection give you a rationalization why you shouldn’t be required to invest in a 50-50 shot at success, please believe me when I tell you sincerely that I appreciate your willingness to Go Your Own Way.  But you, too, are exempt from this Happily Ever After.  In truth, you may change your mind at some point, when you are older and your perspectives change.  Our sperm is viable into our 70s, and a mid-life family has a lot of advantages.  But if you are committed to being uncommitted to a woman, then expect a long, slow decline with fewer friends alive every year, until you are alone, babbling incoherently to robots in some distant future retirement community.


Marriage is by no means for everyone.  But it is not, as some would contend, not for anyone.  It’s a trade-off, an exchange of commitments and obligations and sacrifices and dedications and courtesies and fears and delights and secrets and trusts and weaknesses and power and – yes – financial considerations and sex, and if you are not prepared to indulge in that kind of personal commitment and dedication (and few 20 year olds of this generation are) then I encourage you to avoid the issue entirely.  Believe me, it will take the pressure off to not have to worry about marriage and family.

So put “Happily Ever After” away in your mind not as "mythical" but merely as forever out of reach.  Substitute some government-subsidized retirement plan at a tropical resort where you’ll expire on the golf course or in your sleep . . . alone.  Imagine a world in which you are by yourself at age 50 and the doctor mentions cancer and you realize that since your sister died you have no one in the world to call and talk to about it.  That’s the "swinging single" alternative to Happily Ever After.  When you’re writing up your last will and testament, and you realize that everything you own and collected and cared for will go to your niece in nephew who live in another state and who might pass you in the grocery store without recognizing you, that’s what you get when you’ve lost Happily Ever After.  The real Happily Ever After.

Because Happily Ever After doesn’t mean a blissful paradise of champagne and strawberries and anniversary dinners in four-star restaurants.  It doesn’t mean kinky hotel sex and romantic walks on the beach as a matter of course.  There are few diamonds in for-real HEA.  You want the truth?  Happily Ever After can be brutal, as anyone’s life can be brutal.  But Happily Ever After softens the brutality with a thick protective layer of humanity, wherein the love you pledged at the altar has grown between the two of you and expanded and transformed until it supports a web of such love that echoes across generations. 

When you’re surrounded by your wife and your children and their spouses, all deeply concerned about your well-being and quality of life when your body betrays you, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your sons, grown men all, and your grandsons drop everything in their busy lives to rush to your bedside and then spring into action to build a wheelchair ramp you didn’t think you’d need, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your daughter-in-law enlists the aid of experts and researches the furthest reaches of medical science on your behalf, motivated by love and pure, unadulterated respect for the only father she has left, that’s Happily Ever After.

When an entire community floods your house with calls assuring their support, based on their deep respect for who you are and what you’ve done to touch their lives, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your wife holds your hand and cries so you won’t have to when you tell the doctor to go ahead and take the leg, that’s Happily Ever After.

This month, Papa Ironwood got an up close and personal look at the stark nature of Happily Ever After . . . and compared to the alternative, he considers himself a very blessed man.  I think it made the decades of sacrifice and effort and toil to keep his marriage and his family a going concern worthwhile.  Whether or not you agree with him, well, let's just say that he's got the benefit of experience to support his position.

But then, he's always been wiser than the rest of us.  He wanted Happily Ever After . . . so he built it for his wife and kids, one hug, one kiss, one drop of sweat and one tear at a time.

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Is It Really A Win When The Other Team Doesn't Show?

Two other manosphere pieces converged with something I'm currently writing for the book, and at the risk of blowing some of the freshness out of it I thought I'd chime in.

Specifically, Badger's excellent Educated Women's Contempt For Men, in which he follows the feminist attempt to mainstream the war on masculinity and how it's not exactly working out the way they expected, and Dalrock's How The Destruction of Marriage Is Strangling The Feminist Welfare State, in which he examines the demographic fallout from the smoking crater feminism created at the center of the social state.

Why are these two articles particularly interesting, when taken together?  Well, part of it is the third blogger Dalrock riffs on, The Social Pathologist, when he quotes this:

The social, sexual and economic liberation of women in the latter half of the 20th Century has meant that for the first time women were able to compete with men in society without restriction. The result has been spectacular if not particularly beneficial to the happiness of women. Whilst not all degrees are created equal (men still overwhelming dominate the "hard" fields of knowledge) the fact that there are now more degree credentialed women than men is simply astonishing. As income is broadly correlated with economic well being,  its safe to assume that women have been able to achieve a economic parity with men. The manosphere may not like this result but the fact is that women have been able to effectively compete with men when the shackles of social convention have been removed.

Emphasis mine.  I reprint the quote because it underscores my point (and the point I'm currently trying to make in the book): that women cannot declare this a true "victory" of feminism over the patriarchy, or even women over men, or even realistically as "economic parity", because while the fact is that women have been strongly incentivized toward college both culturally and bureaucratically with four decades of feminist affirmative-action and aggressive anti-male policies. The "shackles of social convention" have been transformed into the "shackles of anti-male sentiment", and the "level playing field" is a sham, as Dalrock points out:

Feminism didn’t demolish a barrier between two seas and let the water levels adjust;  it is a massive pumping operation.  Turn off the pumps even for a little bit and reality will come flooding back.

That is, the economic system that allows women economic advantage (industrialism and post-industrialism -- which was, coincidentally, invented and developed by men) exists in a network of social governance and a vast government bureaucracy (also, invented and developed by men) in which the taxpayer (heretofore majority male) provides social and economic support for the impoverished, particularly single mothers and their children (mostly female, of course) while artificially fiddling with the "rules of the game" to favor one particular side while punishing the other side.

That's the "level playing field" that they are "winning" on.








So what happens when one team just fails to show up?  Is that still a "win"?

One thing that the smug little "end o' men" articles we've been seeing so many of lately love talking about is how the fact that more women having advanced degrees than men means that women have finally "out-competed" men in the workplace.  Now that they have declared where they are "the top" of the social and economic structure men created and developed, they are quick to dismiss the men who can't seem to compete successfully on the "level playing field" as losers or worse.  Badger amply demonstrates the dripping contempt that educated women feel about their male professional peers, much less their mates and males in general.  

Only, is it fair to judge the "success" of women competing in the workplace when the dis-incentives provided to their male peers are so severe as to discourage competition?

One point I'm making in my book is that the "success" of women in advancing careers has to be seen in the context in which men who would ordinarily have been competing for those positions have effectively "dropped out".  They didn't get on the bus to begin with.  The women "won" by default, because the best possible person for the job never interviewed for it in the first place.  

Feminists will bridle at the suggestion, but it's true.  MGTOW didn't precisely begin with Freedom Twenty Five; men have been walking away from societally-prescribed ambitions for almost two decades now, in the face of penalties and disincentives relating to their unfortunate ownership of a penis.  

There's a case I cite in the book, anecdotal, of course (I also make the point that you can't hang a metric on the lack of someone's ambition, which is pesky from a statistical perspective) of my neighbor, Sid.  Sid was a business-school graduate and an RN, and had spent ten years and a marriage climbing the ruthless corporate ladder of the American pharmaceutical industry.  He was good at what he did, and consistently out-performed his peers, male and female, and seemed to have a lock on a solid middle-management position with stock options and bells and whistles, every MBA's dream.  His last year was his most productive, and he logged millions of dollars worth of business for his company (now bought out by an even bigger company -- Sid would have been loaded).  

But when Sid looked at the competition he faced, he realized he was doomed.  Women were getting special seminars on leadership, mentoring opportunities, and other career-advancing perks.  Sid was getting assigned diversity training courses and being set up to fail by being assigned a "mentor" who had a pronounced dislike of men and especially manly men like Sid, who refused to kiss her ass just the way she wanted.  He was boxed in: he couldn't proceed further in the company without getting this woman's approval, and he couldn't get this woman's approval while still maintaining his Y chromosome. 

So Sid . . . dropped out.

He "Went His Own Way" long before it was called that.  Sid turned his back on his advanced degree and his education, his ex-wife and his expensive car, and Sid found a third-shift job working in a county hospital ER that paid him just enough to survive comfortably upon.  He turned his back on a decade of learning one of the most intricate businesses and regulatory systems ever invented, on the lucrative prospects that could have made him a millionaire, and he walked away.  The "level playing field" contains a fifteen-yard penalty for having a penis, so Sid walked away from it and accepted -- for now -- a far lower status job in return for personal happiness and fulfillment.  He didn't drop out because he couldn't hack it, he dropped out because the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.  

Now, someone got that next management spot Sid walked away from.  Sid could have had it, had he stayed on and fought for it.  Did the person who get it (it was, indeed, a woman) get it because she was the best qualified for the job?  Or did she get it because she was the most qualified candidate (under the adjusted rules) who was willing to show up and interview?  Did she get that office and that name plate and the parking space and the "Director" title because she was superlative?  Or did she get it because the other team just didn't get off the bus?

It's been over a decade since Sid dropped out -- close to two, actually.  But in the early 1990s, when feminism was throwing its weight around with reckless abandon, it knocked a lot of highly talented men out of the way in its quest for a "level playing field" that ensured no real competition.  Feminism's attempt at "fairness" in the corporate world became a hymn to mediocrity as the men who would have competed against them decided to resign the game rather than subject themselves to unfairness, emasculation, and professional humiliation in the name of "equality".  

Sid wasn't the only one who left back then -- as feminist-inspired corporate cultures sought to punish men and traditionally masculine endeavors, plenty of dudes dropped out and pursued other interests.  Sid enjoyed the fast pace of a late-night Emergency Room to the prison of an office, and so his vast talents and knowledge about the business end of the pharmaceutical industry never got put back on the table.  The women at Sid's company who survived their flight might gloat at their "victory", their high earning potential, their wealth and power.  But they'll never be "the best" because Sid didn't come back and give them real competition.  

Sid was smart, educated, and very astute -- you don't follow nursing school with an MBA and land a high five figure entry-level job by being cute -- and he was smart and astute enough to know that his career options in a corporate world where Personnel regulations overcome fair competition is a losing proposition.  No future in it.  Why bother?

This isn't just a few isolated losers, disheartened by competition in general and angry at their loss of "male privilege  -- this is a talented group of men who have no real social or financial incentives to pursue the societal roles that feminism desires for them.   The female insurance executive may very well be there because she worked hard, did her job, and made money for the company.  But she may also be there because the dude who would have been even better in her position decided that being an insurance executive really just didn't sound like a lot of fun, after his divorce, so why stuff his wife's alimony check with extra dough when he can take a job at half the pay that can support a lifestyle that suddenly doesn't include fancy suits and shoes designed to impress female insurance executives?

In a way, I almost feel sorry for these feminist "winners".  What they have won is what men in their positions have earned in the past, earned in earnest competition against the best their industry had to offer.  If you were the top salesman in your district, you knew that it was because all the other sharks weren't quite as hungry as you.  Now if you're the top salesman in your district, you have to wonder if it's because you really are the best . . . or if the competition just decided to forfeit because there were five-foot breakers at the beach that day?

I'm not just blowing smoke rings here.  I used to work in the personnel industry (bargain-basement headhunter and temporary placement), and I still keep in touch with some of my old colleagues.  One of whom just had a boy graduate from a decent college . . . and demonstrate not a lick of ambition, despite a lifetime of being primed for it.  Meanwhile, his younger sister (who was always a little slower academically than he was) was already lining up summer internships a year in advance.  My former colleague was despairing about his utter lack of ambition and angrily confronted her son when he revealed he hadn't even bothered to apply to graduate schools this summer.  

He gave a litany of damned good reasons why pursuing his chosen professional career path (including a graduate degree and another four years of student loans) was a losing proposition for him.  Why kill yourself to get to the top of your class when your female colleagues are just going to cut your knees out from under you with affirmative action and such?  So he can find a good ex-wife who can bleed him dry and not let him see his kids someday?  

At 22, this young man is jaded and bitter and unambitious . . . and there's not a damn thing my friend can say to him to dissuade him from a life spent working part time and playing Disc Golf professionally (slightly more lucrative than playing WoW professionally) and NOT preparing for a life as a husband and father . . . because she knows everything he is complaining about is exactly true.  She can't deny it.  She's in Personnel, where the rules that punish male performance and push female mediocrity are forged.  She's pushed underqualified female candidates in with overqualified male candidates into interviews herself -- and was fiercely proud of it . . . when her son wasn't involved.

But her son is absolutely right.  There's just no good future in it for men.  "Climbing the corporate ladder of success" only makes sense if there's a reward at the top, not a punishing ex-wife, a battleaxe of a feminist boss above you and a constantly-eroding sense of your own masculinity.  Better to throw little plastic discs around and enjoy life for a decade or so in the beer-soaked bosom of the Puerarchy, than subject yourself to that kind of punishment.

Is it a "waste" of good masculine intellectual capital?  That depends on whom you ask.  To women, of course, these men are "losers" because they have withdrawn from the competition they cannot win.  They have made the conscious effort to make themselves the men they want to be, not the men women want to be, and feminists in particular can't allow that to have positive social standing.  

But there is a silver lining to this, for dudes.  As more and more women assume the tax burden required to fund a female-oriented husband-replacing welfare state, their sensitivity to the unfairness of such things will rise.  What happens when the 40 year old spinster has to write a tax check in the thousands before trudging her way to the office, no hope for romance or reproduction in sight, while watching the 20 year old single mom down the street take her three kids to the park through the window?  What happens when men drop out to the point where it is busy, single female workers who are left holding the bulk of the welfare bag . . . while being denied the benefits of romance and motherhood that they are subsidizing in their sisters?

Had Sid stayed in his career-track, he could be senior management by now making in the high 6 or low 7 figures -- your Viagra dollar at work.  He didn't.  He makes just over fifty grand as the senior nurse on shift at his hospital, and spends the weekends he doesn't work hunting, fishing, or (if his neighbors don't shoot him first) zipping around the neighborhood at 4:00 am blasting Skynnard from the radio of his vintage 1974 VW microbus.  Instead of paying tens of thousands in taxes, he gets a refund.  Instead of working for his ex-wife, he works for himself.  Instead of spending thousands and thousands a year on new suits and shirts and ties, he spends a couple of hundred on scrubs he wears both on and off the job.  

Meanwhile, the woman who got the job he could have had, he tells me, is getting her second divorce, is being sued by a competitor for unfair practices, and is miserable with her "success".  

That's what happens when the other team just doesn't show, ladies.  You end up holding a trophy devoid of meaning.  A forfeit isn't a real win, no matter how you rationalize it.

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