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Showing posts with label Misandry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Misandry. Show all posts
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.
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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Of Gynocentrism and Genocide
Some people wonder why I do this – and formulate all sorts of wrong-headed, misinformed opinions about the subject. My motivations are actually fairly simple: I’m a father in the 21st century, trying to protect and prosper for his family. Because I’m a word nerd, I try to influence the culture around me in a way I find beneficial to that end. That’s it. That’s my whole secret plan: to make the world a better place for my children. According to what I see as “better”.
Now some might see this as temerity, the arrogance of yet-another Straight White Male ™ railing against his declining social and financial importance and trying to turn back the inevitable march of Progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways, I remain a Progressive, politically: that is, I think like a Progressive when it comes to doing the most good for the most people, when it comes to the environment and global climate change, when it comes to basic human rights for all – including the right to marry and control one’s own reproductive freedom. I'm pro-Civil Rights. I'm pro-Gay Rights. I’m pro-Choice.
But I’m also pro-Second Amendment. And pro-First Amendment. Pretty big fan of most of the others, to the point where I once was an active Libertarian, until I got sick of the whiny anti-tax stance of many of the other Libertarians. Those things alone get me branded as “conservative” by some of my Progressive friends. My “liberal” social attitudes get me dismissed by my conservative friends. I’ve listened extensively to both Rush Limbaugh and NPR. I’m comfortable with neither the liberal or the conservative label, and usually take shelter as an “independent” and vote on the basis of the candidate. My politics follow my own consistent internal logic, and I rarely see fit to explain them to others.
But when it comes to this blog, and some of my other efforts, I can pinpoint precisely where my strong counter-feminism stance comes from.
You see, I have two young, vibrant, highly intelligent boys, and a similarly brilliant and robust daughter. I’m not worried about my daughter. She’ll do fine in the coming century, the way that things have shaken out for girls of her generation. But my boys . . . I’m preparing them for the struggle ahead to the best of my ability, like any good father, but it’s hard to prepare them for something like this:
“…What I do have is an ongoing intolerable experience that this life I and other women live is blighted by male oppression, and that this blight diseases the trunk of our species’ existence, not just the branches, not just the leaves. Every moment of our existence, this blight injures us. It kills our spirits, ruins our bodies, destroys our happiness, twists our children.”
Of course, half of those children are MALE, but she doesn’t dwell on that unpleasant truth. Later on, she continues:
“As Sheila Jeffreys has put it, and I think we all agree, it has to start with this: there is something wrong with men. It is a pathology with both physical and psychological features. I personally think it is as old as our evolution as hominids. I think it’s a biological adaptation which is now rotten, dangerous, and vestigial. I think we have to force the scientific establishment to take a clear look at this colossal sick old mammoth taking up all the space in the living room, and make it stop distracting itself with sexy cosmologies and particle accelerators. I don’t quite have a name for this pathology. Let’s give it a real name together.”
The “pathology” that the author Vilet Tiptree speaks of is pretty much anything with an XY chromosome: Men, in other words. Not Straight White Men ™, not the Patriarchy, but the “System” run by . . . men. ALL men.
This one little radfem paragraph is calling for no less than the soft genocide of half of the human race. That includes my boys.
That’s a problem for me.
Take a look at the same paragraph, slightly altered, and see how it strikes you:
As Sheila Jeffreys has put it, and I think we all agree, it has to start with this: there is something wrong with Jews. It is a pathology with both physical and psychological features. I personally think it is as old as our evolution as hominids. I think it’s a biological adaptation which is now rotten, dangerous, and vestigial. I think we have to force the scientific establishment to take a clear look at this colossal sick old mammoth taking up all the space in the living room, and make it stop distracting itself with sexy cosmologies and particle accelerators. I don’t quite have a name for this pathology. Let’s give it a real name together.
Let me be clear, the author didn’t say “Jews”, she said “Men” . . . so it’s okay. In fact, substitute any other group in place of “Men” and what you are looking at is something more apt for a sinister eugenics program than the “ideology of equality” known as feminism – but there it is.
Now, “mainstream” feminists argue that the radfems are extremists, theoreticians providing valuable perspective from the margins of the movement. That they are moved by great political passion, and their outrageous positions are born of necessity, the inevitable result of centuries of institutional male oppression and female suffering. Radfems of the 1970s and 1980s like Dworkin and McKinnon, who famously condemned all heterosexual sex as “rape”, were among the first to use their influence within the Feminist Female Social Matrix to heat up the war on masculinity.
The attacks against male sexuality were transformed, over the years, into attacks on men in general, and eventually evolved into genocidal screeds like the above. When you start calling into question the necessity of the existance of half of the human race and start agitating for its eventual extinction, regardless of whether you are leading your movement or are on the fringes you have tainted any other possible argument you could make. And any movement that does not do its best to separate itself from such vileness and reproach the authors has to be called into question as well.
Sure, the radfems are a bunch of crackpots – who takes them seriously? Well, a lot of feminists do. This is misandry at the most fundamental level, a hatred for men that stretches the term “pathological” as inadequate. Yet this radfem and her spiritual sisters are a respected voice within the greater feminist community, and are eagerly looking forward to participating in the upcoming gathering of feminists that has sprungas an outgrowth of the Occupy movement. The “fringe” of feminism is going to do its best to push for an even harsher war against masculinity and men – I can’t see them softening their tone – and as we have learned, in the Female Social Matrix, controlling the conversation is tantamount to controlling the Matrix.
The only good thing about this level of pure hatred is that it keeps shooting itself in the foot over and over again, tripped up by the rules of the very Matrix it tacitly tries to control. Radical feminism’s own ideology is also it’s biggest hobble towards effective action. Why? Because feminism (especially after it’s adoption of key Marxist principals – you remember Marxism, don’t you? Founded on the latest bleeding edge scientific principals . . . of the 19th century?) is committed to non-heirarchical organizational structures. Consider this strong push in the movement, the adoption of the “progressive stack” method of organization:
"We urge that the Assembly recognize the concept of stepping back: that dominant voices and identities recognize privilege and power in the room and in themselves, and 'step back' from monopolizing a conversation in the interest of hearing a diversity of voices and experiences on the topic. We are not here to reproduce the same monopolization of voice and power as the '1%', we are here to diversify spaces for radical inclusion, and to name centuries of privilege and exploitation of particular demographics of the population, including but not limited to: women, people of colour, members of the LGBTQ populations, non-status individuals, differently-abled persons, the very young and the very old...all these voices are regularly marginalised in our societies. In devising alternate modes of being and redistribution of power in the world, it is our duty and responsibility to listen and learn from prioritising these voices that are traditionally and systemically silenced in our dominant culture. Let us be accountable to our own declarations of values – let us put these principles into practice in order to devise alternate ways of being in the world."
In other words, all of those who show any shred of leadership are forced to abandon it –officially – in favor of a chorus of diverse voices. This is the oft-observed press for “consensus” that is so valuable to the
Which is why I’m not terribly concerned about the vitriol from the Radfems doing more than moderately influencing the opinions of other feminists, an increasingly divided group, about as much as Andrew "Dice" Clay influenced the development of masculinity. You see, in abandoning “hierarchical power structures” the radfems are essentially abandoning “power”. By including everyone’s voice, the possibility for a truly effective consensus on a particular topic is lost in favor of a bland list of petty issues that will stand as a testament to their commitment to their ideals . . . but probably not much else.
Because ten thousand years have proven to my satisfaction that “non-hierarchical power structures” don’t accomplish anything more complicated than a quilting bee. Oh, there have been plenty of examples of de-centralized hierarchies accomplishing things such as literacy programs, health education, and missionary conversions . . . but “non-hierarchical power structures” are almost an oxymoron. And they damn sure don’t get anything done. They just make more people feel better. They’re an organized bitchfest, a cathartic therapy session that raises self-esteem and encourages empowerment . . . and erodes any real potential for powerful action. What the feminists and the radfems don’t understand is that the “power” comes fromthe hierarchy – when individuals cede a portion of their personal power in the form of submission and obedience (“submitting to authority” implies imbuing that authority with the power of your willingness to obey it) they enrich that authority’s ability to Get Shit Done. Whether the shit they’re doing is worthy or not is immaterial: the way to establish an effective organization is through hierarchy, not chaos.
Hierarchies work. And over the centuries, they've been refined to be more and more efficient. From construction crews to military unitys, hierarchical power structures accomplish things. Non-hierarchical structures write a lot of poetry.
In fact, when you look at the great feminist-inspired movements of the past, from Abolition to Temperance to Suffrage to Woman’s Rights, it was only when large groups of women organized into male-style hierarchical structures that they accomplished any meaningful change. That is, they could not effectively fight against the power of the hierarchy without building a corresponding hierarchy. This modern tendancy towards inclusion and consensus and away from hierarchy and actual power to accomplish anything is doing far, far more to keep the radfems harmless genocidal, gynocentric nuts on the fringe instead of leaders of castrating legions of angry women.
So when I see bullshit like this, and the recent inclusion of certain Manosphere sites as “hate groups” by theincreasingly-irrelevent Southern Poverty Law Center, I feel like I can relax – a little – about my boys’ future. After all, self-imposed dissarray among the self-declared enemies of your gender is a good thing. But the fact that they have any influence at all within the greater feminist movement more than justifies my vigilence on behalf of my boys. It also more than justifies my unwillingness to see feminism, in general, as anything less than a gynocentric, misandrous attempt to grab power (but with little conception of what power is – and what to do with it), a culture-wide Shit-Test for our collective masculinity.
Radical Feminists freely admit that their views are not shared by the majority of feminists, much to their dismay. But they do enjoy influence within the movement far out of proportion to their numbers, thanks to the
Mainstream feminism proports to be about fairness and equality – those are the first words out of a feminist’s mouth when they explain the ideology – but if it includes bile like the above, then counter-feminism and the Manosphere have all the justification it needs to exist in defense of our gender’s right to exist. When they start threatening my boys, I’m going to defend my family just as ardantly as I would if someone threatened my daughter. It might be all "patriarchy-y" of me, but I can live with that.
PSA: Tawkify, A New Opportunity To Be Judged And Rejected By Entitled Princesses!
Seriously, dudes. You don't have to put up with this. Have some self-respect. And don't give this woman a dime of your money.
UPDATE: Good posts about the evils of Tawkify here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Oh, and feel free to go over and leave a comment on the original Elle article: http://www.betabeat.com/2012/01/26/elle-advice-columnist-e-jean-carroll-dating-startup-tawkify-01262012/
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