Manning Up or Wimping Out: Men Don’t Exist to Serve Women’s Desires
I read Kay Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys
Hymowitz does acknowledge that women have made great strides in our society mainly due to advances in technology and the knowledge economy that gives better jobs to those with degrees, degrees that “take years.” Hymowitz has a good chapter titled “The New Girl Order” in which she admits that Americans now like girls better than boys. She does a fair job of describing some of the biases against boys, though she does little to rectify them.
Now a couple of bad points:
Hymowitz talks to very few actual men for this book. If males are included, it is through a book or blog written by a woman or a chivalrous man. Or Hymowitz invokes a blog written by a male blogger such as “Roissy” to prove how “misogynist” these male bloggers are. However, her definition of “misogynist” seems to be any male who dares complain about a female. The book would have been better if Hymowitz had included more actual male voices, and if she had demonstrated a bit more psychological understanding of the male perspective. (But then, maybe that is a book I should write).
I do believe Hymowitz tried to be sensitive to the plight of today’s men, but the book presents as being more concerned about how men fit into the world of women rather than how men actually feel themselves.
Hymowitz makes little or no mention of the discrimination going on in today’s college culture against men. She sees men as a bunch of goofballs who just can’t cut it in comparison to women. Hymowitz gives an example of how women work harder than men in college. Women, according to studies:
… contribute more to class discussion and have more frequent communication with faculty including discussions about career plans. … Overall, men are less engaged in college life.
She mentions the work of Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail
The men come into class with their backward baseball caps and the “word processor ate my homework” excuses. Meanwhile the women are checking their day planners and asking for recommendations to law school.
If women were showing disinterest or not engaging in conversation at college, the big question would be: “what are we doing wrong, and how can we get them engaged?” When men tune out, they are good-for-nothing slackers. Perhaps if men were welcomed into this conversation, they wouldn’t need to sit back in stony silence.
What would happen if a regular Joe, not an alpha male, came into class and gave his true opinion about the topics at hand, say in a psychology or sociology class? What if that opinion was non-PC, such as: “I think that men should not have to pay child support if women can have abortions,” etc.? How far would that man get in school? Would he graduate? Would he even pass the class? Even if men won’t admit it to themselves and women like Hymowitz overlook the problem, it exists.
After 45 years of being told they are pigs, sexist, and good for nothing, men have quit trying to please others, so they slap on a baseball cap and don’t talk much. And with good reason.
Newsflash for Miss Hymowitz:
Her WSJ article “Where Have All The Good Men Gone?” does indeed answer the question the title poses, just not as she suspects. The seething contempt for men which weaves throughout her article – climaxing in her concluding paragraphs – expresses that of any frustrated woman of whom any sane man would rightly steer clear. Sifting through her invective however, one can clearly make out the unifying chant of today’s embittered, spoiled females who seem to have lost sight of a simple truth: kvetching about the way a single man behaves is no way to persuade him to become a married man.
Everyone with any interest in this subject needs to read :
The Misandry Bubble.
It blows away anything Kay Hymowitz could write, and is just about the most condensed piece of education around.
Read ‘The Misandry Bubble’, and you will never be the same again.
Here is yet another awesome rebuttal to Kay Hymowitz’s yeoman efforts to prove that women are unworthy of having voting rights.
While I am sympathetic to the basic premise of the Mysandry Bubble, let me warn you that the historical/global take on marriage history and primates is so laughable that I didn’t even bother reading the rest. Why take it seriously after that? I study polygamy and marriage in other cultures for the past 15 years or so, and few Westerners are up to the task of examining it or understanding it properly in the context of these discussions. Even the basic facts escape most.
Really?
What specifically and were can we read more about it?
I’m sure the Futurist would be happy to know of any weaknesses in his hypotheses.
Thanks,
Poester99
John,
If you ever read this, I want to thank you. From The Misandry Bubble, I went to Roissy and discovered Game. I’ve been happily married for 11 years, but Game increased my understanding of my wife, friends and coworkers. My life has improved in almost every way.
Thank you.
Everyone needs to read ‘The Misandry Bubble’, which is far more profound than any garbage Kay Hymowitz could ever write :
http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
Read it and be enlightened.
News flash, there is no such a thing as a good man. It is a total illusion cooked up by women to describe their ideal man (mate). On the other hand, there is no perfect woman either. The problem being that most women think they are perfect. Its hard for a man to live in a world where women put on make-up, have their hair and nails done, wear clothes that are not utilitarian and are unavailable for one quarter of the time you know them. We as men don’t ask much: a good meal, occasional beer, and a romp in the hay. Most of the time we are content to just be left alone. Ladies, we are never going to be perfect so there is no use in complaining.
On the other hand, when you need have somebody to snuggle next to, a shoulder to cry on, some help with the children, a hand to fix things, and just somebody that will listen to you, we are there. Too bad we have so many flaws.
I can sometimes get away with being un-pc and speaking on behalf of men’s outlooks… assuming there is the time for greater depth. It always comes down to dispelling all the female-centric views which form the underlying foundation of the dismissing of men’s values.
Women dismiss men in our culture. They are regarded as inferior, their values primitive and obsolete. Society emasculates men, then the women are unhappy because there are no “real men”.
PC has become the new cultural taboo, Western-world Sharia. Men say little, because no one wants to hear what they have to say. Speaking up will only get them shunned, or worse.
The good thing is, men do not need women as much as women need men. More and more men become confirmed bachelors. Single life for a man now is far preferable to a married life for him. The only miserable men are married or living with a woman.
Western women are unhappy, and it is their own danged fault.
I think I will sleep in tomorrow… because I can.
Really? Women need men more than men need women? On what do you base that statement on? Do you have the stats to back it up? If married men are miserable, perhaps it is because they married the wrong woman. The bottom line is that humans need each other and we have screwed things up so badly, that neither sex seems to trust or respect each other anymore. If sleeping in because “you can” is more important to you than being in a loving and mature relationship, I would say that it is no loss to womankind.
His point, proven.
His point proven: yes she proved it!
WOW !!! TORONTO GIRL you certainly remind me of a whole lot of women I’ve dated and left behind, what a man really wants most is peace of mind and women like you really don’t get it.
My eyes must be crazy. She must’ve planned to so willing fall into the trap right?
Projection, pure and simple. It is women who want “loving and mature” relationships; not to say that men couldn’t do without it, but men as a rule are much more self-sufficient.
Too predictable.
THE biggest problem is the one simple fact that irritates women to no end, but is TRUE.
Women are equal to men (in the west) because of Air Conditioning, and Power Steering….
Two metaphors that capture the truth…without “technology” that negates the physical advantage, and then men ACCEPTING women as “equals” within this new standard, women otherwise need protection FROM men, BY men, whenever the “real, ugly regular old world” returns, sans the artificial equating technology
Like in earthquakes..or Power Outages…or during Civil Disorders, or just living under primative tyranny (think: taliban). In those “natural” places, its going to be the brother, father or husband that must protect women from OTHER MEN…unless they have TECHNOLOGY (like firearms) to protect themselves.
Morally, spiritually, and intellectually are women equal (or even superior?) to men? Yes! But overall, they can never hold their ground when the beast is at the door, and they know it.
So to radical feminists, and the mainstream left in general, this is such a deep and festering humilliation, that even when social and mechanical technology have (mostly) erased that reality from their daily lives, they continue to imasculate all men, everywhere they can, with additional “administrative technology” from the campus to the workplace, to soothe the wound.
Now then, imagine the ideas in THIS essay submitted by a male student to a leftie female “womens studies” professor for a grade, and see how much “administrative technology’ would be exercised against him for being so rude (but truthful).
Women SHOULD be treated equally, because morally its the right thing to do.
But they aint equal by a longshot, and THATS the rub.
Excellent points. Women have developed a feeling of power, largely due to the willingness of men to allow them to. Forty years ago, women were complaining about the “Patriarchal Society” so men backed off and let them do things their way. Now they are unhappy about that.
I would not be too impressed by the number women in college taking “studies” courses. Much of that will be wasted but it keeps them busy and makes them think they are accomplishing something.
You forgot guns and cops.
Groups of strange young men used to inspire real fear (still do in someplaces) because they could rape and rob to their hearts’ content. And there was nothing to stop them until soldiers – at least the local militia showed up. Guns equalized the whole person safety issue.
Or the legalization of abortion ended the lives of a generation of neglected and abused children that would have grown up to repeat the cycle.
“Morally, spiritually, and intellectually are women equal (or even superior?) to men? Yes!”
Superior? No. In fact, hell no.
I agree. What the hell is that pedestalizer thinking?
I would bet real money that if you randomly select a group of adult women to go against a group of 12-year-old boys, in ANY contest of intelligence (be it chess, math, scrabble, etc.), the two teams would be evenly matched.
That is right, adult women are about as capable as 12-year-old boys.
Anyone who disagrees is welcome to organize a FAIR contest between adult women and 12-year-old boys.
You beat me to it.
“Morally, spiritually, and intellectually are women equal (or even superior?) to men? Yes!”
What a load of crap.
There’s another aspect to the “technology advance” phenomenon.
Decades ago cars were difficult to drive, requiring brute force to manhandle and drive aggressively. Ergo, wild drivers were almost always male. Today, with all the power assists available to every piece of tin on the road, one sees far more “sweet young things” swooping suddenly during wild passes or rudely cutting others off in traffic.
It’s not only that driving is more equal, but many young men have learned by experience to conserve their driving privileges by dialing it back a bit. Young ladies? Not so much. “Live dangerously” seems to be their motto. Strange reversal.
Your general point, echoed by the other commenters, is undoubtedly true: culture and technology have combined to create for women the illusion that they do not need men. But of course men created the modern world–and they are the ones who keep it running, in the trenches. This is a larger point than Hobbesian concerns about physical safety: men are on the “business end” of the industrial production of natural resources, and they are also the ones engineering the enabling technology. If all the men disappeared tomorrow, could women keep the various industries underpinning the modern economy running? Maaaaaybe, but certainly not as well as men can. And especially note too the central role played by the government in removing men from the family equation on the culture side.
In this way, the comfortable, low-value-add, office jobs in which women proliferate are made possible by the difficult labors of men. There is much more that can be said about this, but I don’t want to write a book in this comment…
A point of disagreement. Women are not intellectually superior to men, no matter how much the culture struggles to convince us otherwise. There is an evolutionary (i.e. genetic) basis for men’s greater abilities, and hormonal (testosterone) differences combined with greater brain mass give men the advantage in certain areas. There is also some research which indicates that men have a greater variation in intelligence (flatter bell curve), meaning they are overrepresented at the high and low ends of the curve relative to women. Hence there are many more very smart men than very smart women (same on the dumb side as well); hence men have been and continue to be responsible for the vast majority of critical theoretical and applied breakthroughs in science and technology that have spawned the modern world–leading to women fooling themselves into thinking they are masters of the universe. For anyone who doubts the difference in intellectual abilities between the sexes: explain why there is a Women’s World Chess Champion.
In short, men have done such a good job taming nature (and Western men in particular, with women’s help, have arranged the culture in such a way) that women can be forgiven for thinking men are obsolete.
(Shiver down spine) I’ve heard that ‘loving and mature’ relationship crapola so many times, and what TG means is that her money is her money, your money is her money, kids are hers, house is hers, friends are hers and she drove yours away. If you have a problem living with a female sargeant-major with strong views on discipline, the problem is yours, because you are too immature to understand that you were put on this planet to happily take care of some female with a princess complex.
Don’t get me started on sex… or lack thereof as soon as the ring gets on Her Majesty’s finger…
Thank you Jeff. They could have published your response to TG and the article would have been complete.
Jeff:
Have you met my ex-wife before? You just hit the nail on the head. I worked 15 years, and allowed her to stay home with the kids. One of her famous quotes was “I was not put on this earth to do housework”.
Thank you Oprah, Cosmo Magazine, and the burn your bra generation. You have distroyed a system that had worked for thousands of years.
You “allowed her” to stay home? Good grief. I’m a conservative who doesn’t like feminism, and am not a man hater, but that’s pretty sexist.
OUCH!
Sounds familiar.
Best revenge in my case? “Her” friends became my friends and they ditched her.
QED
lol, Toronto girl, you and others like you are the reason I prefer solitude over female companionship
Many men do not need women; we are rather content going our own way
Toronto Girl,
The existence of the problem is so obvious that even women are starting to see it, which means that it is all around them, affecting them personally.
Of course, the implication from the (Toronto) woman on the street, that it can’t be them, they’re all perfect, got it all together, they’re better men than men.
Why would they lower themselves to be date men that are not man enough?
Problem, is with more and more men going MGTOW, the remaining available “manly” men in the field have THEIR choice of the new empowered entitlement princesses.
The whole point is there HAS to be something in it other than old-fashioned duty and emotional and financial risk for men before they will consider “manning up” and putting their future stake into a (unnecessary risky) wife and family.
Women (even mothers of boys) think it’s fine that men take most of the risk in relationships but most men are calling that BS and giving it a pass.
Women got their women’s liberation but men have not been allowed theirs.
They die sooner, kill themselves 4 times more than women, die in 90%+ of all workplace accidents, comprise 89% of homeless AND the top men in power (.01% of all men, who women point to as their prime example of discrimination as if these are ALL men), will TAKE CARE OF WOMEN before any of their FELLOW MEN.
It may seem I’m bitter, but I’m not. Just have seen too much.
Typical Torontonian female.
I can see a number of good replies already, but I think I should add fuel to the fire: why would any of us care what you think? Should we care? More importantly, it is clear that you project a belief that whatever you say, we should just lock in step with you and believe it. Could it have to do with a perception that you are superior in some way? Might I ask what way that is, exactly? Just having more legal rights does not make you superior, it just makes you a babysat child.
Human Nature is Human Nature — innate and immutable. So what men or women think about any social phenomenon doesn’t matter. This is the rule in human societies: whatever men do is high-status; and whatever women do is low-status. There are a million examples — chef/cook; farmer/gardener; Marine/BAM, etc. Leftism has put a major kink in the picture because it is a mass-movement that is based on anti-normal prejudice. Parties of the Left are always the parties of the criminal, the pervert, the malcontent, the mentally-ill, the butch woman, and the femme man. That’s why the Left always hates soldiers, cops, white athletes, child-bearing, and normal men and women in general. You’re going to see high-status activities in this society become sports, computer engineering, math, and hard sciences, logging, manual labor, among other male-dominated professions. Just as in the USSR, making most doctors women simply reduced the status of doctors in general, and their pay. That’s why this whole thing is to be welcomed. All the newly-conquered Leftist/women/gay activities are becoming low-status, especially academia. Men will learn OJT or go to tech schools; they won’t go to college because that’s the world of women — and to hell with it. Men are status-seekers and women don’t have status, and can’t bestow status. High social status for women is like the horizon — you can see it, but no matter how fast you run you never get there. If this be misogyny, make the most of it.
The status of a profession goes down ONLY if the women that are now are majority of the members of it are doing less work, or not doing it as well, OR if the flooding affects economic supply and demand, misogyny/misandry has very little if anything to do with it.
A “funny” thing is with woman constantly (and successfully) pumping up their status they are seriously shrinking the pool of men of the same or greater status available to date and/or marry. Men tend to care a lot less about social status in their choice of women than women do, men.
The typical university now is now skewered 60/40 women to men. Where are future young women going to find enough men of “quality” (same or greater status) to consider marrying once their biological clocks start ticking louder?
Here’s a simple solution. Find a woman who grew up in Asia. American women are fine for friends or casual sex, but when it’s time to marry, find an Asian woman. They will treat you much better and won’t be constantly thinking about how they can take everything in a divorce whenever they please.
Sure, but in the Asian divorces, there’s a greater risk of women taking the family jewels. Be careful of where you sow your seed, Bobbitizing is not as sensational in Asia as in the West for a reason.
“Single life for a man now is far preferable to a married life for him. The only miserable men are married or living with a woman.”
Really? Then why are divorced men so much more likely to remarry than divorced women? Too stupid to learn a lesson in one pass? But I’ll be the first to admit: I had the good fortune to marry a wonderful woman, a partner, rather than a frivolous twit — so maybe I’m biased. Regardless, I’d be amused by all of the invective and resentment that this debate has provoked from so many men — it can only make me look better — were it not for the fact I’ve eventually got to send two daughters out into a dating market full of so many childish whiners.
“Then why are divorced men so much more likely to remarry than divorced women?”
Masochism? Triumph of hope over experience?
What, are you 70?
You’re either lucky or old, probably old, cause you seem so closed minded to other’s experiences.
I won’t comment on your daughters, cause I have one as well, except to say I think you’re not serving them well by only giving such a limited old-fashioned prospective.
In today’s society, if you don’t “whine” for inalienable rights, you slowly lose them. Every downtrodden group in history had to “whine” for rights (which included fighting).
What’s the point of parents except to give an old-fashioned perspective? Kids get a new-fangled perspective from TV and friends in school. That being said, I’d be interested to hear what less “limited” lessons you think a young woman needs to be taught. So far the only thing you’ve mentioned is the virtue of whining, and judging from most of the men complaining on this site that’s the one lesson they think most women already know.
Well, there is a reason I put “whining” in quotes, the purpose of which obviously, entirely escapes you.
And it’s better learning it most of it (accurately) from you than learning the hard way, out there.
Regardless, do as you will, you’ll learn if it served you and yours in good time.
Tell your girls that the way to a man’s heart is not his stomach, and not his zipper, but by treating him with common respect. I don’t mean you put him on a pedastal, but you treat him with the respect you treat other adults. Far too many women make a living from giving the big put down.
Male ego? Yes, it is, but then we’re ok with female ego, so why can’t men be treated well too? Men don’t need the same things women need – they need to be respected and appreciated. If your girls treat their men with respect they will be in a position to demand being treated with love. If they constantly try to fix or correct their men they will eventually run them off.
Men live for affirmation -its why little boys show off, its why men seek the applause of their fellow man. We often get that itch scratched in different ways, but the feeling of affirmation is what fuels us.
Most men I know don’t understand women, but they know they don’t. Many women I know don’t understand men, but they think they do. Its sad.
Reading this thread is heartbreaking. So many sad and inadequate men, reveling in their inadequacy. Rather than, say, attempting to engage women and find out what they want, they moan on and on about how the icky girls aren’t giving them what they need and are demanding too much from them.
By all means, go gender Galt. You won’t be missed any more than you are now, I’m quite sure. Better yet, order up a bride from abroad, with the expectation that she will be demure and cater to your dull desires, and moan afterward about how she wants nothing to do with you now that she’s got her green card.
Monasteries, guys. Look into them.
It might make you feel good to scoff at gender-Galting men. Before you congratulate yourself though, you might want to look at what happens to girls at colleges where there are substantially more women than men (you can read that as not enough “desirable” men too). Its not pretty.
We’re wise to the shaming tactic. Won’t work.
Ad hominem arguments are inadmissible. Deal with the actual issue or STFU.
Hey some shaming language! I was wondering when it would start.
Nice try but we`re wise to that trick.
The rise of women is due to the advances made by men in protecting and projecting freedom, building civil and mostly secular societies, and designing and employing technology that has negated the physical advantage once enjoyed by men. Combine this with the rise of state power, that has relegated men to second class status, and you have the recipe for modern society.
These modern societies however, especially those that are more socialist, are essentially suicidal since wealth generation tends to taper off, populations fall, and the inevitable collapse or slow de-evolution, as men tire or simply can no longer pay for a protected class of citizenry-be they women, minorities or the unemployed. When this happens, men will “man up” again, as the rewards for doing so…as well as survival…will depend on the qualities that have defined men in the past.
Well said. When my wife suggests that I am not doing my share of the “housework” (actually, she means cleaning), I point out that it is my job to keep us both from being eaten by bears. So far, I have a perfect record.
I read an interesting tidbit one time: women count “work” by tasks. Men count by time consumed. Ask a woman what she did that day, and she’ll say something on the order of “I washed the dishes, did the laundry, cleaned the floor, ……”. No matter that they all took 5 hours cumulative, there were N discrete tasks. Now she talks to her husband, and he says “I worked on project X”. Which took 9 hours. Now she thinks that he’s lazy because he “only” did one thing that day, he thinks that she’s lazy because she only worked for 5 hours and spent the rest of the time watching Jeopardy. Women also tend to see “work” as only those things that she does routinely; any thing that men do is automatically classified as a hobby.
Ask her sometime (assuming that she doesn’t) who changes the oil on the car, mows the lawn, does basic home repairs, is willing to respond to burglars (and bears) with violent force (if necessary), and is responsible for seeing that their are sufficient funds available for feeding and maintaining the children.
Paul – that is brilliant – thank you so much for that information. That explains the housework deficit that I constantly have with my wife.
Now that I know how the “banker” thinks, I can reduce or eliminate that deficit. This makes perfect sense.
It also reinforces the situation between men and women – we are different, with neither one being superior or inferior. When society gets that, when combined with true capitalism, look out – Jetsons lifestyle here we come! Flying cars for everyone!
All I can say is “Yay”! If my husband came to me with this logic I have to admit I would agree that he had kept up his end of the bargain and love him fully! I think the reality is our current cultural paradigm has perverted the perception of what it means to be truly masculine and truly feminine. Both sides no longer know where or how to stand in integrity as a gender. The truth is there is no such thing as “equality” between the genders in the way many people are discussing it in this blog or in the social structure at large (sorry all you hardcore feminists, but I don’t want to be “equal” to a man) anymore than there is “equality” between an apple and an orange. Men and Women are different. We will always be different. We are however the same species and as the same species we are two sides of a whole. We are chemically designed to complement each other not compete with each other. Basic neuroanatomical structure and biochemistry demonstrates our differences. Unfortunately, we have a created a culture where “different” means one has to be better and one has to be worse…but I don’t believe that is the case. Wouldn’t it be lovely to let men be men, in the truest sense of the word and let women be women, in the truest sense of the word, and see how wonderfully we complement and support each other? In an earlier post someone mentioned basic biology as a way to determine that men were actually more intellectually superior, but I say that is faulty reasoning and a cultural construct as so many of the things being discussed on this blog. Men are better at many things, their ability to stay focused and be linear and compartmentalize is amazingly more fine tuned than a woman’s… as it should be. Women are better at spatial reasoning and orientation, and big picture thinking, and conceptualizing. Imagine if you put both of those amazing qualities together and allowed them both to be fully supported without competing?!?!? But that can only happen when both women and men are willing to put aside our cultural constructs and come to the table cleanly.
On other words, women need to quit trying to fix their men. Men don’t want to be mothered, we want to be appreciated as we are. If we do something wrong, that’s one thing,but to be constantly corrected is insufferable. You wouldn’t tolerate that from a friend, why tolerate it from your spouse?
My guess is that “limitations imposed by their bodies” phrase refers to the fact that fertility runs out pretty early for women [as does attractiveness, compared to men], so perhaps they should stop pissing their 20s away in careerism and other frivolity if they want babies. [Yes, you can have babies and a career, but the point is that many of the career-driven college women put off marriage and motherhood til a bit too late to do it without extra medical assistance.]
By the way, I read the excerpt of this book that the WSJ ran last weekend, and what gets me is that it never seems to occur to the younger women to go after older men if the men their age are too childish for their tastes. What’s wrong with that?
I asked a couple of Career Mothers about that;
They said that it is possible to have a career
and raise a family, but it is impossible to do
both well; Getting a baby from birth to bacca-
laureate is a full-time 20+ year commitment.
Well said, Meep. I too, am counfounded by the younger gals’ lack of interest in “vintage wood”.
I read an article not too long ago that the old-hag-femi-nazi’s were beside themselves because the young college girls were getting their degrees and then marrying to have children – choosing motherhood over career.
I thought it was great because that told me they (the femi-nazi’s) are losing.
Well, there’s several reasons. For one thing, I think it’s a prescription for social disorder: if you tell young men, “The girls you grew up with can have relationships and families now, but you have to wait another twenty years”, you’re going to wind up with something that resembles, well, sharia. But the other reason is that I doubt that many older men would really be interested. When you’re in your ’40s or ’50s, nearly every 22-year-old of either sex is pretty immature. I’m a man in my early ’50s and, yeah, I know some young women that are pretty cute and all, and if I were single maybe I wouldn’t mind a fling or two. But a relationship with one of them? No way! They’d drive me crazy.
“When you’re in your ’40s or ’50s, nearly every 22-year-old of either sex is pretty immature.”
OK, but isn’t there a flip side: An emotionally mature 22-year-old woman who might be rejected by her male peers for rather minor reasons — she’s a bit stout, has a face with a lot of character, has flawed ears or nose, whatever — can look truly beautiful to a man in his 40s or 50s?
to meep: attractiveness runs out earlier for women than men? Says who? I don’t agree.
I’m a female who has never felt comfortable with dating anyone more than five years older than me (some people have a larger comfort zone of ten years age difference).
To a woman, dating a guy older than her would be gross, like dating your big brother or your grandfather.
This was true for me in my 20s when guys in their 40s would hit on me and flirt with me, and it remains true for me now that I’m over 35, and guys who are over 50 flirt with me (and they do). I even get 65 year old white haired grandpas who hit on me – no thanks.
Example #513,298 of “Woman Good / Man Bad”
The future will not be female. It will be male, and his name will be Abdullah. And Feminism will die gasping on the bathroom floor along with the rest of Western Civilization just because the modern woman learn only to hate men.
—just because the modern women learn only to hate THEIR men.
The half century of indoctrination you refer to is probably a significant factor in the gay male, as well.
It all gets too much. So why bother?
There is a better way, of course.
A voice falling in the forest, Helen, but thank you for it.
A much more reality-based article :
Where have all the Good Women gone?
Once you realize that just about everything women say about men is projection, a lot of things make perfect sense.
TO: John
RE: On ‘Projection’
True. True…..
Whenever someone starts making really ‘odd’ pronouncements about another persons behavior, and there is no evidence to back those accusations up, I start looking at the accuser’s behavior. And nine-times-out-of-ten, I see them behaving the way they accuse others.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Why do you complain about the speck in your brothers eye, when you have a clod of dirt in your own? Take that clod out of your eye first and then you can see clearly to help your brother.]
“(But then, maybe that is a book I should write)”
Dr. Helen, if you’re up to writing such a book, I would like to read it.
The only criticism I have of your post is that I think you are way too easy on Hymowitz. It appears that she has learned nothing from her essay, “Love in the Time of Darwinism”. Once again, she barely spoke to any men on this topic.
I think you’re right when you say that there are men who are going John Galt. Too bad for the women who have to deal with the fallout from this.
I was wondering when someone would allude to that article. Her followup article to it was quite balanced and mentioned many of the points Helen brings up, but her book is missing them? Odd.
Good review, insightful, and Dr. Helen…please, please, “disinterested” and “uninterested” are not synonyms.
I also think, at least where I live, public schools have gone all “touchy/feely” in their upbringing of kids. When I was growing up, boys were expected to work A LOT of things out on their own. They also had to be a lot more independent at an earlier age. If there was a bully in school, deal with it. Stand up to the bully. You either “cleaned his clock” in a fight after school or you were constantly picked on for the rest of your days. Cruel? Sure it was. But tell me how “nice” the outside real world is and how “forgiving” or “tolerant” it is for people who don’t stand up for themselvse. Now there is “conflict resolution” in public schools and “grief counselors” if something goes wrong. Talk about needing to “man up” if there is a problem in your life.
Played on a baseball team? Well, back then, there were winners and losers. The winners got the trophy, the losers went home to practice harder and then maybe next time, if they worked hard enough, THEY became the winners. Not today. Today EVERYBODY is a winner, whether you deserve it or not, because we would never want to hurt Johnny’s precious self confidence. Try selling that idea when applying for a job that EVERYBODY is a winner.
Or how about TV? Gone are they days when you had westerns like Gunsmoke or “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” that promoted rugged individualism and justice. There were good guys and bad guys and the kids could easily see the difference between the two. Today? Have any of you recently seen the prime time line up on Nickelodeon? Well, if you have kids like I do, you’d better. It’s all about Wizards, or teenage singing groups, or high school students dealing with their inane “problems.” Rugged individualism? Forget that. Let’s all get in touch with our feelings and feel sorry about how rotton life is while we live in our nice houses and play expensive video games on our flat-screen TVs. Yep, life sure is tough for kids today when compared to the pioneers.
And girls? At least when I was growing up, girls took boys as they were. Some were good, some were bad, but they had to find out on their own which was which. Today, everybody has to be a mix between Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Teenage girls and college girls are expecting a perfect fit in an off-the-rack world. Or, worse, young women today, emboldened by their “independence,” breeze through “relationships” and toss men aside while pursuing their own careers and then are shocked, shocked, to find out that they have nobody to raise a family with, let alone spend their lives with. In short, these women are taking all of the worst characteristic traits of selfish males and making them their own, and then wondering where life went wrong.
All of life, in one way or another, is based on give-and-take, compromise, and accepting an individual in their totality, good points and bad points included. But, so long as one sex, either male or female, demands that they have a life based only on their own terms, then you will have a lot more single mothers, delinquent fathers, and, in general, a bunch of selfish children posing as adults.
Well said. Our differences are OUR strength. We must say, as in olden days, “Via la difference,” or some such wisdom. Care about each other and each other’s gifts, then you will earn each other’s love and strengths.
Children need to have both parents participate in their lives! I am divorced from my 15 year old daughters dad since she was 4. Although I have custody, my daughter prefers to spend alternating weeks with us. The judge made it mandoratory that we live in the same county until she is 18 so we live about 2 miles apart. She has her same friends, activities, etc.
She will only have one “daddy” and they adore each other. What mother would deny her child that? Moms who deny their children their fathers are punishing the children not their ex husbands.
The courts should do everything possible to make it less difficult for divorcing dads to continue their parenting of their children.
Alternating weeks is good. Both parents are respected.
I only got every other weekend. My (only) kid is 18 now & I will be able to see him more.
Thanks Doc. I am a 51 year old male, divorced. The NY courts treat you like a criminal when it comes to child support. I asked for my kids half the time but could not get that. My life focus now is my career and my kids and grandchild. I could care less if I ever found a woman again.
Walter, I hear you. I’m in my late 40′s, married for nearly 10 years now (second marriage after early brief marriage that was a mistake for both from the start), and I’d thought I’d done all I could to protect my family from the perils large, small and possible – but I hadn’t imagined in any scenario that my wife would, out of the blue to me (admittedly, however, after a few difficult years (economically)) ask for a divorce four months ago. The shock, well – I’m sure many here know it. I took my marriage vows seriously, especially the “for better or worse” part, and yet here I am. I don’t care if and frankly don’t want to ever get married again. I’m done when it comes to marriage.
Walter, the courts have only favoured women in the few decades. As the child of divorced parents in the 1970′s, I can tell you it was the exact opposite for women. My father initiated the divorce and my mother was left with NOTHING. As a divorced woman, she could not even get a credit card! It was 100 times worse for women then than it is for men now, I am a witness to that. Blaming women is not going to help.
Sorry to hear about your bad experience, Toronto girl. While total fairness is probably impossible in divorces, there ought to be a “least-unhappy medium” and we are far from that today.
Only bad “for the last couple of decades?” That’s almost a generation. A little long to be so dismissive of these men’s real heartache.
It won’t hurt. They’re the ones who insisted not on parity, but supremacy.
That doesn’t matter much to men who are dealing with the situation now. The reality is that the current situation is punitive to men — it is simply way too risky to get married.
@Toronto Girl: past is past. Present is present.
You can not justify the favoritism of the courts for the women with the past, alleged, favoritism for the men.
I don’t know the particular on the divorce of your parents, but no fault divorce with alimony and child support (with children given to the woman near always apart from sentenced serial killers and likes) is simply wrong.
In the old roman code of law, the emperor put a law that allowed women to don’t fulfill their contractual obligations (because they were considered weak minded). The point was to protect them. The effect, as usual, was to scare males from dealing with women. At the detriment of women.
When the deal is not fair and become too burdensome it is not a surprise if people bail out of it. Marriage, in the US (and large part of the Western World) is no more a fair deal and it is no more a gainful deal all risk included, for men.
So, it is not a surprise if they stop accepting the deal or react badly when they are unfairly treated.
Should I assume you think it’s proper to punish all men today for an event 50 years ago? And am I to assume your mother played no role in his action? You, ma’am, are part of the problem and I hope you realize it someday soon and begin to tackle the profoundly damaging ethos millions like you have unleashed on this world.
I call BS Toronto Girl! I have a close and unfortunately very close example, and this story is NOT fiction:
My wife’s parents divorced in the early 70s due to her mother’s continued infidelities and abuse towards her father. Her mother did not hold a job or any education beyond high school whereas her father was (and still is) a mild mannered and college educated computer engineer. Basically, this “woman”…girl really, masquerading as a woman…picked someone to marry with whom she could get away with abusing until my father in law’s family moved to intervene and force a divorce when the situation became unbearable and a very public embarrassment. During the divorce proceedings, even with huge amounts of evidence of drug abuse and mental abuse on the part of the mother as well as mental instability, including no showing of outward affection towards her only child, the courts at that time–as they do now–without question gave custody of my wife to her mother! I would like to say, “Unbelievable!”, but cannot as this crap of double standards and favoritism is a common occurrence.
After the divorce, since her mother had no real reason to stick around, she took off taking my wife with her against the court visitation rulings. However, no court would enforce such rule breaking if the mother went elsewhere. This is still a popular media meme! Oh the poor mom running from the always abusive ex husband…never a good man, they don’t exist! My wife spent her younger years going from town to town and drug den to drug den. Here “mom” used money from child support for money all while claiming and stylishly wearing the mantle of “victimhood” and “single mother” in the 80s when this seemed to be in high fashion, while constantly lying about her background. As you can imagine, my wife suffered horribly (WE still deal with some of this very real trauma)!
It wasn’t until that horrible excuse of a woman who gave birth to my wife was actually placed in jail that my father in law was able to even petition the court to freaking re-try the case for custody, which he finally got after 8 years of being held liable for every spurious claim imaginable leveled at him through courts from the various different locales “mom” managed to stagger into in order to squeeze more money for child support out of him. Upon release from jail, my wife’s mother joined a cult, and that was the only reason the court granted custody to the ever cursed and maligned father. “Mom” didn’t return inquiries or even have any real contact with my wife for almost 15 years! Again, it wasn’t until “mom” went to jail for drugs and joined a cult that the court even agreed to look at the custody case again.
In closing, Toronto Girl, I think you’re full of crap! The courts have now (as you admit) as they have had then, a bias against men in favor of women during divorces. I will add that this bias now extends to claims of violence, abuse in all it’s various and ever changing forms and furthermore, holds a double standard against men. If I were to claim abuse or violence in anything short of a gunshot or stab wound, I would not be able to bring a successful case to court. That’s the reality today and why so many men find it simpler to be quiet and not marry. BTW, my marriage is tough, but we stick through things and work them out because we are adults, not petulant children in grown bodies!
You’re entitled to your opinion, however I can assure you that what I wrote is fact. I lived a childhood without a father….he got everything and my mother got nothing. I cannot speak of what is happening today, which is why I commented about how it was for women in the 1970′s. I am not angry, nor do I hate men, on the contrary..but to accuse me of being “full of crap” is unjust and juvenile.
“He got everything.”
That’s what your mother told you, at least.
Let me just say this; as a child of divorce from the 1970s, your example is so opposed to what happened to me I find it difficult to believe. I’ll also say that I found out a whole lot of interesting things about what really occurred once I became an adult–like, for example, the true amount of money that was provided for my sister and myself and where it actually went (hint, not us).
The divorce decree for your folks is a public document. You ought to go see what it says.
TO: Toronto Girl
RE: Uuuuhhhh…..
Being accused of being a ‘liar’, whether it be in a polite manner or vulgar, is hardly ‘unjust’ or ‘juvenile’. It could well be the truth, as far as anyone can tell. And since all we have is YOUR word on it, and what little else we can glean from your presentation, some of their opinions about you hold considerable weight.
Personally? I don’t think you’re being very truthful. And it may be that you’re really ignorant of what transpired between your mother and your father.
Based on personal experience, I give that a fair amount of credence, having been raped in ‘family dissolution court’ on two occasions. And that includes watching my first wife’s SECOND husband being ‘raped’ in the same manner she raped me. But that time she got a LOT more money out of it. After all, I was a mere company-grade infantry officer when she divorced me. When she divorced HIM, not too long after having a child by him, she got half of a successful CPA firm in a decent-sized city.
Hope that helps….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. Back when such divorce stats were published in my local newspaper, womens’ filings outpaced mens’ 2-to-1. That was the early 1980s. I understand the gap has widened since then.
Conrad:, I really don’t appreciate your inference that I am lying. I was a child in the 1970′s, I witnessed what my mother went through at the hands of the divorce courts. It was hell for her…just like I’m sure it is now for some men.
Zeit Trash: My mother “was up to” raising 4 children and being a housewife when my father decided he wanted a more glamorous woman. I am not full of crap nor am I BS-ing. I simply reported my experience of how it was for women 30+ years ago.
My parents also divorced in the ’70′s. Dad left. Why? Because Mom was an incredibly mean, selfish nut case. Since he was gone, I was the only one left in the house for her to tee off on. She got the house, half his pension, some of his social security, child support, the newest of the two cars, and alimony.
The ’70′s favored men? Bulls—. I wonder what your Mom was up to that created the situation.
My mom “was up to” raising 4 children and being a housewife. I was a child in the 1970′s so I know how it was. Why are all you people purporting that I am lying?
Because you’re telling us, “When I was a kid, the sky was green! Everywhere and all the time! And it still is, some times and some places!”
Toronto girl,
We believe that you are lying because you probably are. Even if we accept that your mother got nothing, which is possible, but not likely, you have omitted (yes, lies can be omission as well) any sort of explanation for why that would be the case. It stretches credulity to imagine that she would end up empty handed for going to church…
ZeitTrash, when you say your mom got “some of his social security” that’s not true. Social security is based on income; if they were married over 10 years, she may have qualified for benefits based on your fathers earnings if she was over 62, divorced for at least two years, single and not eligible for an equal or higher amount of money based on her own work or that of another husband to whom she was married at least 10 years.
As to the rest? That was normal in the 70′s; the difference today would be that equity in the house is likely to be split with the party keeping the house owing the other party their half. Alimony isn’t generally awarded and spousal maintenance is typically short-term. The ones getting spousal maintenances are usually stay-at-home wives of executives of a certain age and income bracket. The objective is to keep them in the style to which they were accustomed during marriage, assuming they haven’t worked and wouldn’t be able to go back to school and reasonably achieve a similar lifestyle on their own.
Lest we forget, even in the early 1900s, back when women and children were considered property, a divorced woman owned nothing, not even her clothing, not even if she had brought it to the marriage, rarely got custody of the children (see above, father’s property) and if she did, it was because they were under 8 and they reverted to the father’s custody at age 8. The woman became the object of her family’s charity.
Chip on the shoulder, T Girl, chip on the shoulder.
Grow up and stop justifying the grotesquely hateful behavior of others on your past.
Bovine Excrement! Divorcing women in the ’70s were not treated as quasi-criminals by the courts. Nor were they virtually guaranteed to lose their children. IF you want to say that divorcing women today are treated better by the courts than divorcing women then, well, I’ll agree with that. Back then it WAS rough parity.
Today? The “family “”"”justice”"”"” ( do y’all think four scare quotes on justice are enough there? ) system today is destroying men and enriching women.
I went through MORE than my share of divorces as a kid, and saw the “injustice” you seem to think was visited on my mom by virtue of being a woman. (btw, every divorce was her choosing). And I went through one as an adult. I would bear every one of those injustices simply to have had my children with me.
So TG, I’ve seen it from both sides, and you can take your “oh, it was so much worse for women then than men today” and shove it were the sun don’t shine. Don’t worry, ’cause even though your head is already there, your brain is small enough that there should still be plenty of room for your next asinine idea.
Excellently well put, from first to last.
I’ve attempted on many occasions to capture the outrage and contempt female denigration of men and male preferences inspires in me. Expository prose doesn’t really allow it, at least if we omit profanities and onomatopoetic howls of outrage. But I did manage to capture it in a fictional setting:
I get a lot of feedback about that story. So far, all of it has been positive.
Civilization was built by men to specifications
provided by, and insisted upon, by women.
The current crisis is caused by children, of both
genders, who never grew up.
The primary problem of sustaining a civilization
is finding a way to maintain a majority of mature
adults; The classic solution is a catastrophic
decline in the population of tall children.
Too true. Without the demands of women and children, would any male have bothered to move past the nomadic hunter stage? Nah, too much trouble.
Only too true. What reason to improve on perfection. From a man’s perspective, what’s not to like about camping out EVERY NIGHT, spend days hunting and fishing, moving around a lot, fighting the losers in the next tribe when they think they can move in on our territory…the only thing it lacks to be perfect is video games.
Civilization exists to permit women to gather together and complain about men.
DEAD ON!!! Fantastic article! Too much freedom?? what is that lady thinking? She has no idea if she thinks too much freedom is the problem.
Men today dont wont to be mocked, belittled or yelled at by a woman for their opinions or thoughts. Which is what happens all too often when a male has an opposing view, so they tune out and say the heck with it and not worth it.
Yes, younger men are more child like and disengaged. Much of this is due to society AND women(its both in my OP) treating men like children because we have different views and thoughts. So as the author said “As you sow, so shall you reap.”.
Fantastic article? Sure is. But the comments are truly fantastic!
Incidentally, I’m a woman who, as a youngster, bought the bill of goods that is capital “F” Feminism. Came to my senses after much reflection, a little growth, and not a little unhappiness. Vive la différence, indeed!
Thank you, thank you for an eloquent response. And please write that book, it’s needed.
Why do men create families? Not for the same reason as women do. Not at all. In fact all the deep seated reasons that men might want a family are gone in western culture and have been for most of the industrial age.
At the core of a man is an empire builder. Large or small. Children for a man are extensions of himself and an aid to enlarging and securing his empire. But in this culture they are only liabilities and add nothing. They only take.
Most men go ahead and take the plunge because ‘it is what is done’ and his wife wants kids. Sometimes two or three times with two or three different women. We need to teach men to think things through.
Yes, Dr. Helen, it is a book you should write! I work in the K-12 public education system and from the age of 5 and up, the system tries to turn boys into a male version of girls. Often it is subtle, but it is there.
Most of the people attempting to turn boys into male versions of girls, are from the female dominant education field. Why shouldn’t they do that? They have already turned themselves into bad versions of men.
Suzy, the book has already been written. And from another angle written again. And again. And again.
Take and read.
It’s peculiar. Many women have a blinkered view of men. They relate to men as means rather than as ends-in-themselves. Men are tools to be used for the purposes of women. Those men who agree to be used as tools are called ‘mature,’ the others ‘immature.’ It’s a ridiculously obvious nominalistic fallacy.
Thank goodness there are women who will call out these crypto-misandrists. Thanks for writing this review, Helen.
“What would happen if a regular Joe, not an alpha male, came into class and gave his true opinion about the topics at hand, say in a psychology or sociology class? What if that opinion was non-PC, such as: “I think that men should not have to pay child support if women can have abortions,” etc.? How far would that man get in school? Would he graduate?”
From experience, the male is in deep ****, and will spend endless amounts of time being yelled at, lectured like an idiot, denigrated, and kicked out of class.
I actually have a story about that…
But first, thanks for the article. I’ve appreciated your work for a long time. Sanity is very hard to come by in modern America.
I was in education college, attempting to drag my life back together after my last divorce. In an evening sociology class, (four hours straight!) my young female instructor was waxing extatic about the invitro fertilization rate in Britain. What this had to do with sociology was unclear. She asked for class feed back and I said, “It just goes to show, some women can’t stand to see a man having a good time.”
I never got higher than a “D” in the rest of that class. None of the other five males ever spoke a word in that class. The kids were obviously smarter than I. True Story, $60,000 in the hole, no degree, no job. (To add to my two masters in sciences)
Six years later, let me tell you about the good life. I work when I want, at what I want. I have most of anything I want, and a way to get most of the rest. The reason that I’m not taking a nap right now is that I have a boston butt smoking in apple wood and it needs watching. It will go very nicely with the savory bbq sauce I have simmering on the stove. After I write this, I’ll go solve some work problems that just came up. Then I’ll watch my lake while the butt finishes, with a nice dark beer I made a month ago. I’d go fishing, but it’s still too cold.
Yeah, I need women so bad I could plotz. Maybe a dog. A big dog.
The happiest, most natural acting men I’ve ever seen – serving in all male combat units or sports teams. As soon as we get into a mixed gender setting, it’s back to pretending to be what society has told us we should be.
My mask never comes off at work unless behind closed doors with men I trust (I can think of 4 in my building, 3 are Vets).
TO: Old Soldier
RE: Naturally
The happiest, most natural acting men I’ve ever seen – serving in all male combat units…. — Old Soldier
Here! Here!
I’ve 27 years in the infantry: enlisted and commissioned. And you’re absolutely on target with that statement. Mix women in and everything goes ‘sideways’.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[If you had a life in the first place, you'll never have a mid-life crisis.]
Old Soldier, Chuck, and USMC Conservative as a former sailor I can’t help but agree.
Some of my happiest times happened while stuck in a metal tube without sunlight for weeks on end with not a woman in sight. But it was filled with a bunch of great guys who I could trust with my life (and did plenty). Interesting a lot of talk was about girls.
Women are a lot like food from other cultures: they’re great to look at but once you try them they often leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Old Soldier,
As a former Marine I must say I completely agree with you. I did 4 in the corps and am now out going to a state university, guess which one brought out the best in me and let me act like myself. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the school.
It sucks that you got one of the hardass teachers that would actually boot you out for voicing an opinion. As much as I hated the idea of having to shell out my money for “Ethnic Studies” to graduate, it was a lot of fun demolishing a whole classroom of lefties every few days.
So she uses a blogger, Roissy, whose online name is conveniently the same as the Chateau in the Story of O and is surprised that his writings might be a tad bit misogynistic? I guess we’re lucky she didn’t find a blogger whose handle was He-Man-Woman-Hater.
And, she diagnoses the problem herself. Men tend to be loners, as in not needing others. As in not having an innate need to group in the absence of compelling advantage for themselves. But somehow this doesn’t occur to her in her “critical thinking”
It takes a woman to make this point, because, quite frankly, people like Hymowitz, Parker, and Dowd (Are Men Necessary?) would dismiss our complaints as childish whining. Any rebuttal would be taken as validation of their thesis. So we adjust our baseball caps, keep silent, and live our lives in the manner we so choose.
Of course we keep quiet – even at very high executive levels; if Larry Summers could be that easily pushed out for even raising the issue, why would any of us be dumb enough to make any statement that a woman could screech about. I figure my best defense, if I’m ever accused, is the fact I’ve spent my life supporting my wife’s high powered career – but somehow, I suspect, the fact I’ve spent decades supporting her career still wouldn’t overcome raising an issue like Summers did.
Hymowitz and thousands of other women publish articles and books describing men as feeble minded, inferior, bigoted children and they are applauded. Summers makes an observation backed by hard data about the female mind and he’s run out of his position.
Our society is very, very deeply irrational, anti-male, and f-ed up. There are very serious, wide ranging consequences to this, some of which are just beginning to be felt.
I am a woman and I agree with you totally that what happened to Larry Summers was despicable. Personally, I think what he said about fewer women in math/science/engineering and why that was so was absolutely correct. Please don’t think all women are like the Femi-Nazis at Harvard — because we are NOT.
I once read this in a book:
“The unvarnished truth is this: You could eliminate every woman writer, painter, and composer from the caveman era to the present moment and not significantly deform the course of Western culture.”
And as a woman, I TOTALLY agree with that. We women are not all bad. And many, many of us love men just as they are.
Katie,
I will say that one female author has had and I hope continues to have significant impact on society. That woman is Ayn Rand.
MS. Hymowitz must surely be a superior being even among the superior gender. Perhaps she is so magnificient as able to be the ultimate judge in ALL things ie. race, age, nationality, etc etc. The ultimate judge of any and all classes. No more of this silly acknowledging fellow human beings on their own merits. Perhaps you could provde us with a photo of her in a bikini. This poor misguided soul is certainly overcompensating for for some very ugly physical traits, personality traits, or historical trauma . She has obviously been hanging around the wrong men. But any men willing to be around her would by definition be wrong.
If you had ever seen a picture of her, you wouldn’t ask to see her in a bikini.
Wow, I can’t believe a woman wrote this article. Thank you.
“But then, maybe that is a book I should write”
I’ll be looking forward to it. The analysis you provide is largely spot on.
I think what you have outlined, is precisely the reason men today would rather marry a latin or asian girl rather than an american, who was taught from preschool days to hate men (white men especialy).
It appears that feminism in the classroom leads to multiculturalism in the bedroom.
^^^^^ WINNER!!!
FTW!
As I have often noted, feminists are actively encouraging genocide by the destruction of race.
I have a younger brother that had two American ex-wives before he was 40. Then he started looking elsewhere, dating only immigrants, and (through the miracle of the internet) met a woman from the Philipines working in Hong Kong. Ten years later they couldn’t be happier. They work as a partnership and unlike his previous wives, and though they both have careers, she doesn’t try to put her career needs above his. They work together.
My wife’s career choice was raising children and taking care of the house. She worked when we needed some extra income (actually she works part time in the oil field right now), yet her career is at home. There are things that she insist on doing, and there are things that she expects me to do as the husband.
But as we watch our children struggle with marriage and careers, we see what she refers to as the pussification of the American male as the primary problem with our society. Like it or not, men and women are different and have different strengths to bring to a relationship by nature. And if you don’t follow nature, you get chaos. That’s not to say that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, equal opportunity in education and career is essential to personal growth. But there things that women do better than men by nature, and there are things that men do better than women by nature.
I saw a story on F&F the other day that some university did a study that found that women get up with babies more than men. Did we really need to spend money on a study to figure that out?
Does this remind you of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady? Why can’t a woman be more like a man? sang Henry. Now we have women lamenting the male response to decades of emasculation by women. Why can’t a man be more like a woman? Sorry, it’s not going to happen.
I am concerned about the lack of male leadership that we see in the political arena. Even the males that we have as leaders are effiminate (Harry Reid, Obama), and yes that is a bad thing. More importantly, I see men surrendering their leadership role in the family, in the community, and in the churches. I am not at all surprised to see men stepping away from responsibility, when accepting responsibility offers so few rewards and not accepting it offers so many.
We need to return to competitiveness and challenge. We need to make things harder, not easier. College for example should not be so easy to get in. We need to put an end to the coddling of young boys and let them get out there and struggle. Then we will have boys turning into men.
THIS.
I certainly hope your hubby realizes how lucky he is, I have a feeling that he does.
As a man who has more or less “gone Galt” in the gender economy I can tell you its a liberating thing. I’m free to truly succeed because I have the time to get to everything I need to accomplish. I’ll be launching a .com based around using the scope of todays social media for group buys (where for example, 200 people pool their money to buy 200 of something at lower than retail), and truthfully I wouldn’t have time or energy for this if I had a girlfriend or wife.
The fact of the matter is, that all the “good guys” in Kay Hymowitz’s are tired of having dead weight attached to them and their goals. So we stop being “good” and we start getting ahead in life.
Darn straight! As a dad of two boys, and a ‘survivor’ of an M.Ed. program which I finished in the mid-90′s, I can vouch that it’s pretty hostile out there…probably worse now than it was then. This cross-references nicely with Mark Steyn’s view’s on perpetual adolescence and how society perpetuates it.
Also (my take)- boys need a clear view of what to aspire to be as men, since we’re hard-wired goal-achievers and ‘conquerors.’ God help us all as we untangle this mess.
“since we’re hard-wired goal-achievers and ‘conquerors.’”
I know more than a few who have dropped out of the gender economy for that very reason. Women have been treating us as a means to an end (comfortable life, husband who’s never around, etc…) that most of us have decided to go pursue and conquer other things. Success in the business world, personal achievement, a solid career.
Women like Ms. Hymowitz screech about this because it is they who are a means to an end (procreation) with a limited shelf-life (about 35, men don’t have risks for anomalies such as Down’s till 45) and they see the writing on the wall.
A man can always date a latin girl that’s 10-15 years younger than him (it IS considered somewhat normal in their culture). Can a white women pull that off?
Helen, I have not read the book nor intend to. But from the title and your description, it sounds more like a victory lap than a dissection of the male psyche.
Bravo!
Thanks for saying this out loud. I am the mother of two boys, 11 and 15. We have tried from a young age to raise them to be hard-working, responsible young men. Shockingly, many of the traits that we try to teach – empathy, respect for women, faith, clean language, for example – are mocked by their peers. And we’re at private schools in a major urban area. It astounds me that the very qualities women whine about wanting in adult men are mocked in adolescent males. And, I’m sure some of these whining women are raising these young men that give my kids a hard time. Don’t cry for us, my kids will be fine and there are many wonderful parents out there raising lovely young men. But, fellow “boy moms”, you need to man up and teach your sons to be men and gentlemen. It’s hard and it’s too early to tell whether my children will be successful adults, but I believe we’re on the right path.
Debbie E. writes: “It astounds me that the very qualities women whine about wanting in adult men are mocked in adolescent males.”
I’m not enamored of the whole “Game” philosophy which manifests itself so often as an un-Christian use-’em-and-dump-’em mindset, but there are valid lessons to be learned from it. These other adolescent boys you mention have probably internalized those lessons better than either you or they themselves realize. The primary lesson of Game is this: what women claim to value in men’s behavior is not what they actually reward in men’s behavior. How to behave toward women as a Christian and a gentleman, and not in so doing be despised by them as a doormat or a chump, is the real problem for which society has not yet formulated an answer.
Back in the day, before the feminization of men, that is what men did. And it was accepted by women. Men went hunting for a mate and then there was the ‘interview’. If she passed the ‘interview’, things proceeded. If not, you kept hunting. Men are simple, women make things complicated.
Do you know the difference between a ‘good’ girl and a ‘bad’ girl? A ‘good’ girl doesn’t get caught.
To be fair, “faith” deserves to be mocked. It is hardly a virtue like empathy or respect for women.
The book would have been better if Hymowitz had included more actual male voices, and if she had demonstrated a bit more psychological understanding of the male perspective. (But then, maybe that is a book I should write).
Please do. I have three young grandsons aged 2, 4 and 6 and I’m worried about their future. Between what the political class is doing to the economy and the mess that’s our educational system, I don’t see good things in store for them.
“What would happen if a regular Joe, … came into class and gave his true opinion about the topics at hand…? What if that opinion was non-PC, such as: “I think that men should not have to pay child support if women can have abortions,” etc.? … Even if men won’t admit it to themselves and women like Hymowitz overlook the problem, it exists.”
I know what happens. I and a few other libertarian/conservative students did just that in graduate school, and the result was we were talked about as though we were Jerry Falwell-loving, hate-filled, white supremecists.
Even the professors viewed us as subjects of curiousity, as though our breed was a failed, dying species. One even asked during a lecture, as though he needed to provide a zoological study of a conservative, “are there any conservatives here who can present the opposing viewpoint?” Apparently, he could not or would not. Very revealing.
You touched on two very good points – opting out of the discussions and opting out of committed relationships. Men do talk seriously with other men about these issues, there is a lot of bitterness, and the young guns have paid attention. There are also quite a few men who have taken on committed relationships with women from other countries. Maybe the title should be “Wised Up and Manned Out.” Let’s just say the source of money for women on the take is drying up since Santa Baby morphed into a state supported scam artist.
“Men tend to be loners.”
Yeah, and how is being a loner in this day and age not manning up? Both the legal and social card decks are stacked against us, so the manly thing to do is to wash your hands of the entire affair – nice pun placement, no? – and live alone. I’ve grown positively hostile toward women who come on to me. As soon as I hear, “Do you have a girlfriend?” I respond, “No wife, no kids, no pets, no girlfriends: Those are the keys to my happy and simple life.” That usually has the desired effect.
When I come home I come home to a nice house that is paid for, that is arranged exactly as I want it, and that is QUIET and PEACEFUL. Why would I want to spoil that with some whiny woman who has nothing except, “But what about ME?” on her mind? For sex? Not likely, because I don’t wish to give up half of my inheritance for a piece of @$$.
The problem is that there’s no such thing as a woman who isn’t more trouble than she’s worth!
A wise man once said “If you ain’t no punk, holla we want pre-nup, we want pre-nup ya”.
In all reality if they balk at the idea of a pre-nup you can instantly cut them loose because they are of such weak moral character that they assume ownership of property and money they have NO right to. You wouldn’t want that raising your kids right?
Pre-nup agreement… keep everyone’s property their own, require “fault” for any divorce (i.e., if not by mutual agreement then the cheater waives custody, house and otherwise “half”) and mandatory paternity testing (fair’s fair, prove both Mom and Dad relate genetically to the baby).
Whoa, a little difficult to “not be sure’ who the mother is.
TO: Hucbald
RE: Actually….
The problem is that there’s no such thing as a woman who isn’t more trouble than she’s worth! — Hucbald
….you’re very wrong.
It’s just that they are VERY difficult to find.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Who can find a good woman. Her worth is greater than rubies. -- Proverbs]
A wise (and funny) man once compared it, tongue in cheek, to
“looking for a tootsie roll, in a pile of turds”
I’m going to comment without reading the book, so forgive me, but I’ve got the relationships, so we’ll run with it.
Women are hierarchical creatures that need to bond with men they perceive to be of superior status to themselves. When they are younger, women perceive status in looks, popularity, displayed talent, wit; but as they get older, screw it, its about money.
Society has raised women’s economic status. A heavily regulated society raises the economic value and status of risk-free and pleasant jobs, favored by women. So women have gained in status and money, but now have a smaller perceived mating pool.
Women are also self-referential. They could look in the mirror at 45 and say its their own fault they are single and childless, that they spent their youth and looks on men who were not going to marry them or raise their kids. They also could have picked up the age-old burden of taking the men they liked in their 20′s and turning those men into more marriagable material by, for example, withholding sex. But they don’t. So they are single and childless.
Sorry, but very little of this rings true for me. Yes, on the whole, society is unfair to men and there is much dismissal of our priorities and concerns. Yes, it’s hypocritical for women to insist on being treated like equals while still expecting us to pick up the check. But we’re no shrinking violets with fragile psyches and most women, at least on a one to one basis, respect us just fine. These issues relating to education, paternity, etc. are real, but they don’t have much effect on most of our day to day lives.
Thank Goodness! I’m a happily married mother of two and I like men. I like that men’s brains operate differently from mine, the energy level is different, and emotional responses are different. I’ve always been that way, but after raising a son, I feel even more strongly about valuing the differences.
I suppose part of that is being raised by parents who genuinely liked each other as well as loved each other. A large part too is that my teenage years were fraught with nasty girls undermining each other. I really appreciated that guys played it pretty straight with each other. They didn’t pretend to be friends and then stab each other in the back, so I enjoyed hanging out with them and just being part of a nice group that cut some jokes and played pool.
TO: Kevin
RE: And….
….Feminism will die gasping on the bathroom floor along with the rest of Western Civilization just because the modern woman learn only to hate men. — Kevin
….because these feminazis hate men, they won’t raise up or allow men to be what they’ll need to be to resist Abdullah. Then they’ll all have go through female circumcision as a result.
Stupid women…..
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. -- C. S. Lewis]
P.S. Based on that quote, I suspect this war against men has been going on for quite some time. At least since women got the vote. And aggressively since about the time C.S. Lewis died.
Another way of framing the question is what is it about contemporary women that makes them, from what we can observe, less interesting to males, to the point where men are no longer doing things to obtain life-long mates among such females?
When customers stop showing up at the window, you shouldn’t berate the customers for their poor choices. And whatever you may want to be the case, men and women are, at some level, consumers in the love market, as well as suppliers. If the men are not buying the offered goods, well, maybe the goods are not a good deal.
Also, there are, as far as I can tell, equal numbers of men and women. If women claim there are not “good men” left, the real problem, I suspect, is they are setting their expectations too high, given their own charms offered. If 10 women all want–without any compromise–the same high level man in a monogamous, family-oriented marriage, then at least 9 women are going to be disappointed. That 9 can either lower their expectations or hold out. It seems to me that they do more of the latter than the former.
I have met few women with the poswer of introspection. Few seem to ask the question – “Would you want to come home to this?”
And yet, believe it or not, there are those who do…
As the mother of three boys, I’ve been saying for years that our culture has turned way too far in the feminine direction, to the point that it has become more and more difficult for boys and men. Even the way that young boys play has become ‘unacceptable’. Boys like loud noises and powerful things, like guns and trucks. I live in a very liberal area, and there were other boys who weren’t allowed to play with mine because we allowed toy guns. Small boys are always being told to “use your words”, something that is difficult if not impossible for some boys. Just making noise has become something that is not okay–because the girls didn’t like it.
It felt as though my boys were always being pushed to behave more like girls. That is inherently denigrating–being a boy wasn’t good enough. They were supposed to be more like the girls, with their inherent superiority.
I worry about the future of our society.
Not allowed to play with guns?
When my son was 2 years old he stacked his Duplos in a straight tower, pointed them at Mom and said, “Patchu! I have a kill!” (Talking about his weapon, not what he did to Mom.) He recognized the power of weapons from his cartoons and made a gun without us buying him one.
I was very proud of him that day.
Don’t worry, the die is already cast.
In 1993, I was getting my Executive MBA at the University of Texas. I took a class on Negotiations which was open to the EMBA folks as well as the ‘day-care kids’ (as we referred to the younger and non-Executive students).
The professor was discussing distributive negotiations (winners and losers) and I had a question (paraphrase): “In my experience, men are more aggressive than women. How do women fare in these type of hard-nosed negotiations?” Immediately, over half of the women in the class rose up and started to shout at me as sexist. I was quite surprised and looked at the Prof for guidance, but he just smirked. I defended my question as based on my personal observations and experiences, but that didn’t matter to them. After about 5 minutes, the Prof took control again and said he would address the issue in a later class. After the class ended, one of the women walked up to me and informed me that women are superior to men because they have an extra link between each side of the brain. When I said that seemed sexist to me, she cursed at me and walked away.
When we got to gender issues, guess what? It seems men do better with distributive negotiations and women do better in integrative negotiations. After this class, I asked the Prof why he never said anything about that the day I was pilloried. He laughed and said “You were doing find and we weren’t at that point yet”.
Ride on, ride fast, ride safe.
What did you expect? You were at one of the leading institutions for the emasculation of men.
A man being honest is “sexist.” A woman being sexist is “honest.” (At least, that’s how empowered women see it today. Integrity? What, that’s “oppressive.”)
Very nice review, Helen.
I think it can be hard to get male perspectives in the context of being “on the record” due to the massive retaliation that exists both in the workplace and in the education culture. Men actually have a lot of opinions about the situation, as the massive, massive number of comments on her WSJ article over the weekend clearly indicates. But expressing these opinions in a non-anonymous setting is downright dangerous for many men.
And that fact is rather telling of the world we live in today — far from being “free”, as Hymowitz thinks, it’s an incredibly restricted environment in terms of freedom of expression for men in particular. Given that context, it is very unsurprising that large numbers of men are simply retreating from that context into their own private worlds. It makes perfect sense as a personal strategy for dealing with the situation.
Good review and analysis.
A few years ago I accepted employment at a small electronics manufacturing firm. Our receptionist was a slovenly young man whose appearance and performance did not properly represent our company to clients. He also had the trait of crying at the slighest rebuke or difficulty. I commented on this to his supervisor (our HR manager), herself a nasty woman who incessantly clashed with men. She defended her effeminate pet citing his tough life being raised by a lesbian mother and her lover. This convinced me of the importance of a strong male role model.
Didn’t stay with the company long.
Now, that’s one owner of a high-performance Rationalization Hamster you describe!
I “went Galt” on women about 5 years ago. My attitude can be summed up as: “If your damned if you do and damned if you don’t, you might as well do as you damned well please”. And I am much happier and more at peace with myself now.
All one needs to do is watch an episode of the original Flipper, then watch the “new” Flipper.
Check it out on Hulu.
It’s not a ridiculous conclusion. Your libertarianism runs into reality when you say that.
Women do try to cheat on their biology. Men do need shaping, and to man up.
Where you’re right is when you ask why men should man up? One answer is they should because they should. But by the same token, a man should quite explicitly explain to his wife to be how the relationship works. And a man should fight back when oppressed.
But perhaps most people are not of sufficient personal honor to live right regardless of the surrounding culture’s attempt to tear them down. To as Buckley put it, ‘stand athwart history, and shout ‘Stop’.’
We need to revive the feminine side of chivalry. We need to get rid of no-fault divorce.
We need to revive may I suggest the idea of a dowry. Let the young teenage girl spend her money on buying expensive towels and furniture for her home to be rather than five hundred dollar blue jeans.
We need to encourage abstinence until marriage (and then encourage youthful marriages cause waiting for sex until you’re thirty iis cruel. The current schemes of ‘sex whenever’ or ‘Wait a decade’ are both deeply messed up.)
Girls need to have their children first, and then once 1-4 are in college or at a trade (most should be at a trade), they can go get that career (or if hubby is really doing well, then they can be his social back up as he moves them into the higher strata of society).
We need to de-credentialize from College degrees in a massive way which will help guys, and also help teenage guys support their sixteen year old brides.
An unstructured mess is better than the woman’s domination we have now, but better still would be a true rebirth of chivalry which is not just obligations on the man.
This comment is strictly for the boys:
As the father of college age young women who are the apples of my eye, I hope I have taught my daughters correctly by example. Neither sex is superior – both are complimentary. My expectations for my daughters were no different than if I would have happened to have two sons. The expectations were high. Their wonderful mother taught them to appreciate their god-given femininity.
I have witnessed the glaring double standard of girls good, boys bad.
So I have a question for the men. Actually, it’s a suggestion for men to toughen up in dealing with the misandrists of the world.
—–
George Patton and John Wayne are rolling over in their graves.
Why are you allowing yourselves to be emasculated? Why are you not fighting like hell for your sons? You mean to tell me you can crawl through the muck killing jihadis who would chop of your head, but you’re not capable of telling some man-hating shrew to kiss you *ss?
You want to start correcting the problem? Start by telling these sissified, Phil Donuhue academician and effeminate Human Resource Manager types to pack sand and do it eyeball to eyeball.
Don’t give me the excuses about the problem being systemic. Hell, I know that. So, some nag or eunuch, and they are legion, accuses you of misogyny in the work place and calls you a Neanderthal. You can take that. I’ve had it happen to me and I know better. Scorn them, mock them and treat them like the hags and wienies they are. These idiots can’t stand to have their politically correct sensitivities mocked. Let them haul you to H.R. and don’t be a wimp when you get there. Toughen up boys. Remember, real women who appreciate masculinity disdain these shrews. You think Dr. Helen is the only woman out there who thinks this way? The silent majority are on your side.
Some miserable harpy dresses you down in college class? Give it back to them in spades, and if the weak-kneed administration helps to propagate the double standard in behavior and judgment, start naming names loudly. Some duplicitous schmuck in a robe screws your parental rights? Take out an advertisement in your local paper calling them out by name, write a letter to your editorial board, start a blog advertising these bullies globally, band together. Put their picture right beside your complaint so other men know it. Quit treating these judges like kings and queens and start treating them like public servants who are damn lucky they are where they are.
This country is upside down right now, and that’s why the country is so screwed up. Many of you give your sons mixed messages. You put them in football pads, but you act the feather pillow. And you wonder why your boys sit in the corner with their thumbs in their mouths with their ball caps on backwards? They learned it from daddy.
Put these detestable people in their place who created this chaos and restore a sense of balance men. Your wife will appreciate you for it. The nation will appreciate you for it.
It is a good set of instructions. Thought I see many men fear losing theirs jobs, careers, or being expelled if they take some of these acts. I think that is why you are seeing a general withdraw from society instead of standing up to these abuses.
During dating a man can tell his girlfriend to kiss off and walk away. If he is married and dresses her down then he can be pulled into court for domestic violence.
All in all it makes it much easier to just withdraw instead of actively fighting it.
No doubt about it, when it comes to a fight you have to be of the mind-set that you are willing to lose it all. Without that, you’re a puppet on someone else’s strings.
Of course, we must choose our fights carefully!
I started a personal policy of not working for or with women five years ago. I’ve been wildly successful, very pleased and have more peace of mind than I ever had.
Try just rejecting the obvious problems. I started when a sour faced prospective client couldn’t tell me a joke in an interview. The look on her face was priceless when I told her I wasn’t interested.
Unfortunately I think you’re right in principle but wrong in reality. Most HRs will reprimand/punish you irregardless of right or wrong, due to legal concerns. Men are learning to disrespect women on an enormous scale. Your daughters are probably being gang banged by frat guys and everyone thinks that’s A-OK.
I don’t think you got my drift “Marv.” Trust me, there is no disrespecting the women at my house from “frat boys”, because it’s not tolerated by daddy. If it were true and daddy got wind of it, it would be the last time the frat boys dipped their wick in anything but their own mouth.
See Marv, you’re the kind of effeminate girly man I’m talking about – and the reason politically correct flakes are ruining the corporate America environment. Whether the bowl-headed hairdo, man hating misandrists ranting at the sexual harassment classes about the evils of marriage, or the men named “Marv” who never kissed a girl quivering the entire 20 years in the H.R. cubicle, we’ve allowed this to happen.
And men are not only having to do battle with man-hating shrews with bad haircuts, but worse having to go around the Pee Wee Herman types like you in the process.
Nice insults. Girlie man, I don’t think so. I think you missed my points (because I basically agree with you).
Right and wrong don’t matter in the corporate world. HR will do whatever they want (normally this will be in the companies best interest, not yours). If you work somewhere that exhibits some sort of moral code, keep quiet about it otherwise the lawyers will fix that for you. How many moral victories can your career take? If you watch one of your male co-workers take one for the team, you learn to not bother because companies today will not tolerate it. Yeah it’s wrong but it can’t be won in the workplace.
As far as the whole gang bang comment I assumed since you have college aged daughters that they’d be off at college not at home where you have them under 24 hours surveillance. My point was that young men (in large numbers) would have no problem gang banging (someone’s daughter, might as well be yours), because society continues to sink to new lows, day by day. Respect for each other seems to be pretty low.
Really? Like mentioning somebody’s daughters being gang banged at the frat house, insinuating my daughters happily volunteered? Had you said that to my face, you would have taken one for the team – and the last time you took one with a mouth full of teeth…
TO: Marv
RE: You Are One….
Your daughters are probably being gang banged by frat guys and everyone thinks that’s A-OK. — Marv to Tex Taylor
….sick puppie. And by puppie, I have to agree with Tex on your nature and how it relates to this topical thread. Having two daughters of my own, the youngest just out of college, you’re the kind of character I warn them about.
And by the way, got any proof against Tex’s allegation of your being a ‘girly man’? How about some active service as an Airborne-Ranger?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out....]
HR will punish you…
No. They won’t. Not if you are still employable. Because, in this climate, to be employable you have to have essential skills in the workforce. When the budget gets tight, staff positions will go, but line positions will remain.
I once had a woman from HR @ my university come to the ward because partner was a patient of mine. Said that she would have never employed me because of my private comments on blogs. But… at my level (I have a medical speciality that is in short supply worldwide) she does not control hiring. HR is the servant, not the master. Because, in the end, if they piss me off, I’m registrable as of right in a neighbouring country where I can double my salary.
We should not live in fear and be lying weasels. And the people at the top need to model this for the younger generation.
Human Resources (HR) folk like to think they’re God… now that it’s become an industry unto itself that cuts across all others, they usually know only politcally correct theories and nothing about what the company they work for actualy does (one is very much like another, big deal, you see). (Back in the day, it just used to be “Personnel” and peculiar to its own company with people from said company.) HR trolls tend to be female, worse-educated than Education majors and the sort the brag how they handled something without knowing anything about it.
How the hell did she know about your private comments on blogs? I hope you used a pseudonym. If so, how did she figure out who you were? Did she hack into your computer?
Oh, that’s not rocket science, corporations monitor *everything* going in and out.
Messing with and destroying families is reserved for the thugs of the family court, we’re better than that.
Don’t mess with a man’s family, rhetorically or otherwise, online or off.
The truth is, men don’t need women, and they don’t need to get married. At this point it is not a good deal, and it usually does not guarantee the happy family life where you grow old together with your kids around you like it did in the time of the Cleaver family. That choice doesn’t exist any more.
Men have two new choices. If they are hard working and good students, they can make a lot of money and live the life of Hugh Hefner on a smaller scale. If they are slackers they can work out, learn pick up skills, get a low pay, low responsibility job, and basically party a lot, get laid a lot, and watch three football games on Sunday while drinking beer and eating junk food and not get bitched at, while living in a cheap apartment and driving a crappy car.
Either of those choices is far more appealing to most young men than to work hard like the first guy, get married, lose their independence, not get laid anyway, have a whiny complaining wife who can never buy enough stuff to satisfy herself, and then end up divorced and be required under penalty of jail to support this same woman in the house they bought and are still paying for, while they live in a cheap apartment and drive a crappy car like the second guy.
The wheels are coming off this system, and when they do it likely will be impossible to return to the old family lifestyle that was the foundation of Western civilization. It is much easier to wreck something than to repair it.
And telling guys to man up like their fathers before them is just shaming talk from women trying to hitch the reluctant mule back to the plow after he realized that he is not going to get his half of the bargain. No one is telling girls to woman up and get back in the home to be real moms like their mothers before them. Until that happens, why should guys man up? Why pay for the cow if you aren’t getting the milk?
Two web sites:
This will make men laugh and women **** bricks. All you ladies, this is what Feminists look like to men. I am sure you won’t get the humor, but it will be educational.
http://www.menarebetterthanwomen.com/
And this long blog entry about the Feminist Bubble and the horrible end that is coming soon.
http://www.singularity2050.com/the-misandry-bubble/
Amen, sir. I just turned 30 yesterday and I feel thrilled that my life is just beginning. I too have “Gone Galt” on women and it is the most liberating feeling in the world. There really isn’t any need for me to “man up.” I’m not selling my soul when there is nothing to buy.
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too. -H.L. Mencken-
Hi all,
Thanks so much for the comments so far. I appreciate them. I have asked my own blog readers if I should write a book using men’s voices (not mine or other women’s) to give the male perspective on topics such as marriage, sex, relationships, work and life and many said “yes.” So, for PJM readers, would you buy such a book? and if so, what topics would you like it to cover?
About Helen’s book: 1) Important authored by a woman as otherwise just whining; 2) History of change important- When I was in school in the ‘60s, women were called silent and the diagnoses incorrect common wisdom such as women more concerned about hair, boyfriends, or upcoming prom. Now it has changed to boys are silent and the diagnoses incorrect common wisdom such a spouted by Hymowitz and her compatriots. 3) Provide the correct diagnoses for then and now; 4) Propose potential solutions to create independent men and women unfazed by incorrect and destructive common wisdom. 5) This book will be very important.
Since you asked:
1. Is the experiment to politicize biology a success?
2. Is the idea that two heads are better than one obsolete?
3. Is marriage punitive and should be abolished?
4. Do you believe the educational system has short changed you, and if so, why?
5. Are you comfortable being a resource for a partner?
6. Can you accept the justification of the belief that contemporary men should be made to pay for real or imagined oppression of decades past?
7. Is beer better than sex? Why?
8. Can you define “partnership?”
9. Do you feel guilty not crying at movies?
10. Should men and women negotiate the terms of a relationship in advance or make it up as they go along? What does this mean to the spontanaity that is important to a relationship?
Wow. These are great questions Gary! I would love to hear the answers to all of these. Especially the partnership one. How do men and women differ in defining partnership?
in the realms of dating and marriage, one question I would love to have answered by other men…
Do you feel more like a person or a tool/resource to your wife/girlfriend? In other words do you feel that your female wants you there for yourself. Your personality, values, ect. OR could you be replaced by any other man as long as he could provide the same money, house, ect. Are you a collection of resources for her or are you a person?
I can only speak for myself and my experience. My wife and I met in college. We were both older (non-traditional) students. We married while still in college. It was a financial struggle but we worked together, pooling our money and labors to get ahead. We started with almost nothing and today, almost 28 years later, we’ve built a good life together. During many of those years, her income was greater than mine but it didn’t matter because it was never a case of “her money” verses “my money.” We discuss things and come to agreement before making major decisions because we’re partners. She doesn’t work for me and I don’t work for her. We work for each other.
Now, my wife was born and raised in the Philippines and that may make a difference. I shutter to think of what might’ve happened had I married one of the American girls I dated before meeting my wife. When my wife got her US citizenship, she joked, “I used to do that for you but now that I’m an American woman, you can do it yourself!” She was just kidding.
The bottom line is that neither of us thinks we can get everything we want all of the time. That just isn’t realistic in any relationship between two people. Anyone who thinks otherwise is destined for a very rude awakening.
If you’re ever foolish enough to date a single mother, sooner or later you’ll realise almost every conversation or interaction is about you either A) Doing something for her, or B) Paying for something for her.
Its kind of flattering at first to have someone that thinks you’re awesome for just paying the pizza guy or changing a lightbulb. But after a little while you realise she doesn’t want to know a damn thing about you, and that she’d be just as happy with any guy, with a wallet and a toolbox. It’s about then that you realise you may as well be having a relationship with a hooker.
Not only that, but you’ll behind anything bad her kids do in priority of importance to her.
PLUS, under Canadian Law, you will be forced to pay child support for any child you supported in any way within the relationship, when and if you break up.
I guess single mothers didn’t have enough against them in the relationship market, and the feminist Canadian jurisprudence juggernaut rolls on.
Dr. Helen,
I think you should definitely write a book (at least one), for both men and women. What you have to say can help both.
Absolutely I’d buy that book. And if you’re looking for subjects to interview, I’d be willing.
You should write a book for men and women because men need permission in this day and age just to be themselves. A book like you are talking about would go a long way to helping fix the problem.
The author either has a window into the male existence that few women have, or this was written by a man and edited. I love women and don’t know where the disconnect came from, but its there allright.
Strong, powerful, talented women, who want to have children, have to become more pro-active. They shouldn’t have to wait around for a man. Stop looking! Move forward! Don’t wait. Don’t put your life on hold for a man! Most of the men I know have no desire to get married or start a family. Women have to start planning for a family earlier and get their financial nest egg in order. They also need a strong support group to help them raise their child or children. Just take complete control! Take the reins in the boardroom and in the home. This is the 21st Century! Just Do It.
…and wish in one hand while you cr*p in the other. See which piles up first.
You go grrrl! Have it all, do it all, be it all, and die of coronary before your time.
It’s all question of values.
Anyone who imparts traditional values to their children, whether they are boys or girls, has nothing to worry about.
Respect for others, love of country, fear of G-d, are values that transcend common current societal blather and produce good human beings.
When parents live up to those values themselves the results are, for the most part, assured. Todays culture is a throwback. We have seen it before and know what the results will be.
Healthy men and women have no need to to rely on the insights of the sexually deviant and morally corrupt that festoon Americas intellectual life like ticks on a dog. We are not interested in their opinions howl though they may.
For us they are irrelevant. We know who we are.
“Anyone who imparts traditional values to their children, whether they are boys or girls, has nothing to worry about.”
True. And this is why our country is in such lousy shape. (Not only that, but riff-raff gives you flak and will treat you and your as worthless for doing that.)
The irony is that there are plenty of manly men out here in the heartland. However, it is unlikely that Kay Hymowitz or Kathleen Parker would be interested in most of us–not that most of us would give them the time of day–even if they were to summon the courage to step outside the Upper East Side.
Why? Because they don’t want just manly men. They want wealthy manly men, who are conversant with Manhattan culture. Since most of us are just middle class, in Hymowitz’s world we are unpersons.
Kay, life involves tradeoffs. You can have your Manhattan life of coffee klatsches and salons, or you can have the kind of men you say you like. You can’t have both.
…they don’t want just manly men. They want wealthy manly men…
As Warren Farrell once pointed out, the higher her income, the higher her expectations for her man’s income become.
Also, Farrell directs our attention to the open secret that 90% of the females are chasing the 10% of the men with the best prospects. He could have explicitly added that all other men are worse than invisible to most females, they’re not even considered fully human – but he habitually softens his points so as not to offend delicate female sensibilities. When females complain about men – e.g., “roving eyes”, “won’t commit”, “womanizer” – they’re complaining about the worst behavior of some of the few men who are targeted by most females! That is surely a warped persepctive females have.
Farrell’s explains-it-all cartoon of the female and male binoculars at the end of Part 2 of Why Men Are the Way They Are is blanked-out by Amazon’s Look Inside This Book feature. It’s worth buying the book to see it. Consider all the other good stuff in his book a bonus.
Great review. I’ll read the book, but with a skeptical eye.
Hymowitz posits that men aren’t engaged in class discussions. When Mary Pipher had this same complaint about adolescent girls in “Reviving Ophelia” in the 1990s, school systems scrambled to be more “inclusive” when it came to girls.
Why are schools not scrambling now for boys?
As men are not a unified front like women, it will no change until there is bloodshed. I don’t mean the minor incidents we have seen – I mean predictable, repeatable violence that would turn most people’s stomachs, carried out by sane, otherwise rational people (men, most likely), who actually DO have something to lose.
That’s when you’ll know to run.
That is when things will change.
Now, on to a more constructive criticism of men in America.
Having pointed out that the heartland of America has no shortage of manly men, I should point out that Hymowitz is doing America a disservice by focusing on this non-problem. What is a problem with men is that their aggression is often poorly focused.
Go to any working class bar, and you’ll find no shortage of men who are very “manly” about someone bumping into their pool table. Nor will you have to look very far to find men “manly” enough to get into your face when your dog craps in their yard.
Meanwhile, these same men are doing nothing to stop environmentalists from ending modern technological civilization, beginning by making gas too expensive for people to drive. They are not being “manly” about gun-control freaks who want to deny men and women the right to defend themselves. They will not expend one bit of machismo to fight the Obama machine’s Cloward-Piven plan to destroy the country through debt and turn it into a Communist dictatorship. They will stand up to 250-lb studs who ogle their wives, but they won’t stand up to 98-lb weaklings with education degrees who want to increase their salaries by driving their states bankrupt and not doing the teaching of children that they are paid to do.
To all you manly men: I don’t advocate violence. But if you ever do feel a burning rage, at least know who your real enemies are.
TO: Ken
RE: About Your Doggie Doo
Pick it up and then you won’t have men getting ‘manly’ in your face about the s— you leave behind you as you go through your ‘life’ in HIS yard.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. -- Proverbs]
Sorry “Ken” ol buddy. Real me don’t spend much time in bars. Losers do though, I can understand how you could make the mistake.
Easy, they’re too ignorant because of the feminized education system about what is wrong with the zeitgeist and where to fight back. So they only direct their aggression at their peers.
A country whose men are no longer valued nor relied upon to defend and uphold its culture it is a country that will disappear or be consumed and destroyed. That is a historical fact. Which is why homosexuality, feminism, and male bashing, particularly the straight white Christian male, has taken hold in the past half century. The Gramscian Marxists are winning. Men have to be destroyed because they were the pillars of the creation of America. I am waiting for a book which reveals the genesis of the war against males. That would tell the REAL STORY. And how women were enlisted in the destruction of their fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands. And why many stay unmarried, childless, and are still searching into their mid lives looking for a “good man”. You crushed him honey.
God’s Little Joke on reflexive feminists is to sentence them to be the mothers of boys, and to then watch what they thought was the greatest thing since sliced white bread be aimed at their little darlings.
I’ve seen this happen so often, (and it happened to me), that its a cliche by now.
And the above poster’s point about bedroom multi-culturalism is well-taken.
A western woman has NOTHING, (except maybe a clitoris…depends where a fella “shops”), that a woman from anywhere else on the planet does not also have.
OTOH, a western man is a winning lottery-ticket for the native females in much of the rest of the world.
We’d all get along better if we all kept those facts in mind.
My son is 32 and single and not likely to marry any time soon – and no – he ain’t gay. His opinion on the women he dates is that they are all looking for someone to take care of them. The most common reason for this attitude? “Cause I’m worth it” they say. Where the hell do they get the idea that they are ‘worth it’? Sweat equity is a foreign concept to them I suppose.
He recognizes a one-way relationship for what it is – a load (responsibility) on him and a free-loading (no responsibility) girl clinging to him – until the next guy comes along. I call this ‘island hopping’ and it is the main difference between the sexes when the breakup comes. 90% of the time a woman already has the next ‘island’ (another guy) – 90% of the time when the man ends the relationship there is no ‘island’ – he’s had enough and he’s gone. Women display their insecurity by lining up the next ‘island’ before burning the bridge. These percentages are my own WAG but I think they are close.
Still fresh in his mind is the teachers (all women!) that did their best to ‘break the male spirit’ as he puts it. Happily I can report that they failed in his case. Too often the teacher was successful with her efforts – as seen by my son’s male friends today. One ‘teacher’ went so far as to suggest to me that my son should be put on Ritalin. I asked the teacher for her Doctors degree – her only response was a disapproving snort. Mine was to call her a Quack – both as an educator and as a Doctor. That ended the conversation. I protested her ‘diagnosis’ to her boss – the school principal – also a woman – who suggested I take my son to a Dr…
Sadly these are the people who are in charge of our schools. There is no flexibility with these women when it comes to dealing with males. EVER.
Some years ago while on a camping trip I was sitting with my older sister and a few of the gals – the guys had gone fishing and I didn’t feel like going. The conversation turned to men – no surprise! – and to a woman they expressed their disappointment over men on a wide variety of subjects. But mainly they wanted to know “where did the ‘real’ men go”? This went on like I wasn’t even there since I hadn’t said anything – just sat back and listened. I finally had had enough and piped up “what did you women expect since you women raise all the boys to men”? Crickets were heard off in the distance as they digested this bit of ‘news’.
The long and short of it? Be careful of what you ask for.
I really liked your post, especially your last paragraph. You are right on. I have used the same rebuttal, “what do you expect, women raised them” which brought a few stoney replies……………. Something else I find interesting. In most Child Support Agencies they refer to male absent fathers as “Defendants” regardless if he was or is paying child support. The woman is referred to as “complaining witness” and has been promoted to queenly status by virtue of the fact she is a “mother” and a single mother at that. Somehow sperm flies through the air and nails her, the poor victim, who is now a career government breeder.
Know a lot of young men is this situation. The women complain about the men never realizing that it is THEY who are the problem. Before Marxism-feminism had the controlling narrative the elder generations of women KNEW WHO HAD THE POWER. And they kept it by pretending otherwise. The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world. Remember that one? It became perverted in the 60′s but what it really meant was that women were the biggest influence in a polite, gentle, civilized society. And if their behavior could be so influential throughout the ages, did they think they could change it and still achieve enviable results? Does anyone remember the book The Rules which became a sensation back in the 90′s? Two women wrote a book which was only a revival of received wisdom women passed down to each generation as a way of having a valuable relationship with a man. This advice and admonitions were tossed out the window during the takeover of feminism by the Marxist front groups posing as those who spoke for women. THE AUTHORS DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING NEW that someone’s grandmother could not have said. But the feminist movement took all those old ideas and tossed them to the side and in the reality of the new Socialist Man (Woman)a manufactured fictional model of the perfect robot for the state, women were just as sexually predatory as men and could have casual sex, just like men and would feel about it just like men. Women did not really want families but wanted to work at jobs like men and really didn’t want to stay home and raise a family. that was just a model of oppression forced on women victims in a patriarchy. In fact women were encouraged to act just like men and men..well they were supposed to get all girly. The feminists howled about this book. Why? What’s wrong with someone giving advice about relationships? BECAUSE THEY WORKED. The feminists don’t want strong lasting relationships between men and women. That might mean marriage and children, families, the enemy of Marx and Engels. The object has always been to make women and men unappealing to one another, and reduce children growing up in stable two parent families. Propagandize women and tell them to act like and antagonize men and tell men they must be more in touch with their “feminine” side. Women and men have been used, abused, and violated by the left and the more people can sit down and figure out what poison they have been steadily fed for over 40 years, then perhaps we can see the liars for what they are and reveal their agenda and warn others. Young men are only reacting to the New Socialist Man (Woman) the way they have programmed to do.
Ah, the oft-invoked “I’m worth it” justification. As a point of fact, most young ladies aren’t “worth it.” But most of them think that they are anyway.
As somebody who grew up in the late 80′s and 90′s — when Madonna was considered a roll model of female “empowerment” for girls — yours truly spent high school through early adulthood in the trenches as a revolution changed young white females’ attitudes and behavior. Your son’s observations ring all too familiar. An generation of girls who came of age between the late 80′s and early 2000′s (spanning from late Gen X’ers through Millennials) were raised by affluent boomer parents to be princesses. And as most people slept through the 90′s and early 2000′s, the P.C. movement, the riot grrl movement, the “girl power” movement, the “bitch” movement, the “goddess” movement and any number of other solipsistic “movements” coalesced into 3rd Wave Feminism. 3rd Wave Feminism is a simultaneously raunchy, aggressive, hyper-sexual, anti-white male, anti-masculine, anti-feminine, anti-family, pro-stripper, pro-porn, pro-boozing, anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, anti-Western, hyper-materialist, female-supremacist orthodoxy. If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is … until you begin to understand it. 3rd Wave Feminism is essentially a coterie of grievances mixed with heavy doses of entitlement and female supremacy that appeals strongly to upper middle class girls who were raised as princesses.
Read Jezebel or the Frisky to see the thought processes of mainstream, mild 3rd wavers. Read Jessica Valenti’s Feministing to see the real dead-enders.
The tentacles of 3rd wave feminism extend throughout the culture and influence most young women (and many young men) to varying degrees. But they’re always there. The following will be an overly sweeping generalization, but long story short, a generation of urban, single, educated, professional princesses, who otherwise view males as inferiors and enemies, spend their single “party years” using their adversaries (exciting “alpha male” variants only–boring nice guy “beta males” need not apply) as for-fun “boy toys,” the conquest of whom is said to deliver “empowerment.” But without fail, when the Carrie Bradshaw-inspired fun starts to get boring (i.e., when the clock starts ticking), the princesses expect that a funny, charming, successful, ambitious, (very) financially secure alpha male — acceptable careers: hedge fund manager, i-banker or neurosurgeon — who looks like a young George Clooney and has an exciting bad boy streak will suddenly drop out of the sky, sweep her off her feet, marry her — despite her rapidly-diminishing reproductive viability/looks and years of promiscuity — and provide her with a fabulous life.
As stated, that’s an overly sweeping generalization and a caricature–to be sure–of a certain type of single princess in the city, and her 3rd Wave-inspired attitudes and attendant unrealistic expectations. But a lot of girls (many of whom aren’t exactly anything to write home about) will wait for a fairy tale like that to happen. Why? Because they think they’re “worth it.” Kay Hymowitz thinks they’re worth it too.
If that scenario sounds dystopian, it is. Many of us have encountered enough of those girls to know all too well that we don’t want to marry them. It sounds like your son has too. But it’s not all bad — there’s an endless supply of raunchy single girls in their mid 20s who are hell-bent on “having fun” (translation: bed-hopping) throughout their “bad girl party years.” A 20-something or 30-something year old guy who keeps himself in shape, has his sh*t together and doesn’t mind being a “boy toy” can have the world by the balls, so to speak. He just can’t let himself truly “connect” with anyone, or get caught up in anyone in particular. If he wants to keep taking advantage of the oversupply of boozy single girls sowing their Sex and the City oats, he has to remind himself to treat women as objects, not as girlfriends.
So 3rd Wave hyper-feminism has brought about the ultimate irony: the re-objectification of women.
Good times.
Meant to type “role model,” as in “when I grew up, Madonna was held up as a role model for girls.” But due to a typo, it reads as “roll model” instead. That’s among the worst possible typos because it spells out a different word with a different meaning that’s, nevertheless, pronounced the same as the intended word. How the hell does that happen!?! It makes the commenter (yours truly) look like a freakin’ high school moron.
Some day if I run for office, reporters will be dispatched to search through all tweets, blog postings, blog comments, etc. to look for “Palin-esque” typos. Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann (he’ll be back at MSNBC for the 14th time by then) will seize on the typo to prove that I’m illiterate, as Matthews has done at various times with Palin. AOL/Huffington and the Daily Show will use it as a running joke for weeks, maybe even months (a la “refudiate”). It will eventually work its way so far through every corner of the zeitgeist that every smart azz on the internets (regardless of political orientation) will knowingly use my Feb. 2011 typo spelling in place of the actual term “role model” (like the ubiquitous use of George W. Bush’s “internets”).
My only recourse will be to switch my party affiliation and run as a Democrat, at which point the entire meme will immediately go away for good.
Come to think of it, I should scrub the Brett Favre-inspired, naked from the waist down self-taken pics from my facebook page and twitpic profile.;-)
TO: T.S.
RE: ‘Typos’?!??!
Meant to type “role model,” as in “when I grew up, Madonna was held up as a role model for girls.” But due to a typo, it reads as “roll model” instead. That’s among the worst possible typos because it spells out a different word with a different meaning that’s, nevertheless, pronounced the same as the intended word. How the hell does that happen!?! It makes the commenter (yours truly) look like a freakin’ high school moron. — T.S.
Actually….
….this particular ‘typo’ makes you look like a very clever pundit. Madonna as a ‘roll model’. I took it to imply she was a girl with well-rounded heels and rolls over readily into the supine position. Which, as it turns out, she does.
If it was ‘unintentional’ for you to write that in your original comment, I’ll chalk it up to a ‘Freudian Slip-up’.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[I've studied abnormal behavior for years and I still don't understand women. -- Dr. Sigmund Freud]
TS:
“A 20-something or 30-something year old guy who keeps himself in shape, has his sh*t together and doesn’t mind being a “boy toy” can have the world by the balls, so to speak. He just can’t let himself truly “connect” with anyone, or get caught up in anyone in particular.”
News you can use, mate…”le bon temps roulez” well into the 40′s and 50′s for men.
I have a buddy who married himself a “pre-fab family”, (a dame and her bastard daughter), and for years did the right and honorable thing by them both. Bud was an adopted child(by thoroughly decent folks by all accounts), so he might have been charged on the “Daddy Thing”.
The dame two-timed the poor guy, to the point where mutual friends put him wise to her scam.
I was around for that part…some bimbo who doesn’t even know me owes me her life, to be honest.
His divorce would make a Spike TV Movie of the Week in that sometimes, the Good Guy DOES Win. Not only did the Holmes keep his home, his paycheck, his pension and the friends,(as well as the beach town where they lived), but he also set legal precedent in his state for stripping her of her medical records privacy because by flat-backing for her “Jody”, she had exposed him to potential STD’s.
He got her “Jody” violated on his parole, (dude was REAL winner!), and sent back to the State Man-Pound, where he gakked it of his Hepatitis a few weeks later, was cremated by the state, and mailed home to his Momma in a plastic carton.
And the Ex- lit out for parts unknown, last heard from living in a Carolina or Kentucky trailer park and awaiting her official induction into the Bag Ladies of America.
How cool is THAT?
But it gets better for my buddy.
See, he’s now entering his late 40′s, owns his own beach home, makes six figures a year,(and works about 6 months for the swag), and has a collection of ’60′s Pontiac GTOs that he restores, and is a heterosexual Caucasian without a prison record.
Almost literally, the Holmes has to beat the dames away with a stick. It’s almost sad, seeing all the 35-45ish “Buccaneers” tie up to his pier,(so to speak), and try to make him their “home port”.
He himself marvels at how the “bottom rail be on the top now”:
“When did THIS happen?”, says he,
“These women wouldn’t have even spit on me when I was younger, and now they’re having fist-fights with each other to perform acts on me that I would be ashamed to do to a farm animal!”.
As long as he can still work and he can score a Viagra scrip when his derrick needs assistance, I reckon that my pal is gonna be “doin’ the Hefner” until he’s “Finished With Engines”.
Bilge….
….you DO have a way with spinning a yarn.
Did you develop this skill of late? You should become a screen writer.
Keep up the good work….
Chuck(le)
[Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson]
Cunnel:
Good to see you, hope all is fine.
As to my yarn-spinning skills, a lot of it is apparently genetic:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090710/
Highly recommended.
TO: Bilgeman
RE: Belizaire the Cajun
Good freak’n Heavens!!!! They want $180 for it on DVD. And they only have 2 available.
Can I borrow your copy?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. They want even more for some of the titles I’m interested in getting….but haven’t until they lower their price.
Women, beginning in the 1960′s have been working hard to become the best men they can be. My question to them as been the same for years now — How’s that been workin’ out for ya?
The answer is invariably either a stony silence, or tears. Sowing what you reap is not always pretty.
TO: KB
RE: Uuuuhhhh
Shouldn’t that be ‘reaping what you sow’?
But it is the truth. They’ve made their ‘bed’ and now they are mightily ‘un-satisfied’ with sleeping in it….with one dud after another after another ad nauseam.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[There's a price for too much arrogance, a price for too much greed, and in complacent ignorance they have sown the whirlwind seed.]
TO: JB
RE: Uuuuhhhh
Shouldn’t that be ‘reaping what you sow’?
But it is the truth. They’ve made their ‘bed’ and now they are mightily ‘un-satisfied’ with sleeping in it….with one dud after another after another ad nauseam.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[There's a price for too much arrogance, a price for too much greed, and in complacent ignorance they have sown the whirlwind seed.]
Is the word “pretentious” one that you hear a lot, Chuck(les)?
Only from blahsé characters like you….
There are millions of stories in the gender wars, and we have heard a few of them. My two sons and I have some scars, but are still standing. Twenty years ago, I got custody of them by having a good lawyer and playing hardball with my wife after she left. The fact that she was not exactly a clear thinker helped. The older son got divorced less than a year after a big marriage, and it was her fault, not his, but we all make choices, and sometimes we see too late that they were not the right ones. Second chances happen, especially if we look in the right places. My sons are now part of an extended family of three males, three females and nine grandchildren.
There are so many societal factors at play, mixed in with so many individual differences, that most of the generalizations come from people looking to affirm their particular story. Obviously, society is still sorting out the change in the role of the female in our society, but as with anything, one had best figure out the hand that one is dealt, sooner rather than later.
It must be a blue moon in that I more or less agree with Tex Taylor. I might not go about it exactly as he describes (he makes it sound as if it is more brash than reasoned, but I think that he is exaggerating to make an effect), but one should do one’s own equivalent of that.
Hymowitz misdiagnoses what’s happening. Men’s “new” behavior is not a new phase on the way to good old adulthood. It’s a symptom of the fact that men are mostly obsolete.
Women used to need men to take care of them, leading society to spend enormous amounts of energy “civilizing” them into provider/protectors. Fewer and fewer men now fill that role. We still need men as soldiers and to take other big risks, such as starting companies, but women are increasingly showing up in those roles, too.
It’s not a coincidence that assisted pregnancies are turning out 3 girls for every boy. Yes, we need a few men to fertilize the next generation of ova, but it doesn’t take many men to take care of that.
People cannot be obsolete. Only tools can be.
Ken has it right. In the “Heartland” and fly over country, there are plenty of men and women who are not confused about who they are and how they fit together. Men and women are meant to compliment and complete each other both in a physical and spiritual sense.
These hand wringing angst ridden books are written by women who live in an insular bubble of elitism and who rarely come into contact with ‘real’ men and I have to say with ‘real’ women either.
Anybody who reads my posts knows what I’m going to say.
First, I hate to see anybody talk down men or women in any way. What a gift different sexes are. What can possibly bring more joy one to another, than genders do?
Where was this hatred of men for millenia? Where was this festering resentment that men filled one set of roles, and women another? Where was the anger because boys played different games than girls. Boy oh boy was THAT one well hidden from public view.
Yet, since about 1960, this has become a major major issue, hasn’t it? It permeates world culture, to the point where it is reframing virtually every aspect of life. All in 40 to 50 years, after hundreds of thousands of years of almost uniformly blissful co-existance.
But beyond that, how is it that so many of the “insurmountable” problems that we face today have all cropped up in the last 50 years. Man, that is sure a lot of massive life-changing problems randomly popping up in the most recent .00001% of the existance of homo sapiens.
I just can’t figure out how it has all happened. It’s almost, almost as if there is some group out there that is like sticking little knives in our culture, little knives of racism, little sabers of gender hatred, little needles of religious discontent, little daggars of class envy, and and and and and and. What on earth could possibly drive a wedge between two groups of people who are attracted to each other with an intensity that is radiant in its glory, with a force that is unsurpassed in animals of any kind. It just blows my mind.
Men used to fulfill a purpose. Society has invalidated that purpose. Men are responding fairly rationally to their new circumstances.
To title above: Um, yes they do. As we exist for each other, and for future generations.
Men are put here at least PARTLY to be fathers and to take care of the families they sire. Yes, in action how like an angel, in form and moving, how like a god – people are amazing creatures who seek knowledge and control of natural forces. These traits, however, are at their root survival traits, and immortality of the species is had only through creation of new people who are likely to survive and do it all over again.
This utter selfishness of men may be rational, but it doesn’t bode well for future generations, and it means women must be unhappy too.
“This utter selfishness of men may be rational, but it doesn’t bode well for future generations, and it means women must be unhappy too.”
I posit that women will be unhappy one way or the other. As a man I prefer to let women be unhappy while I am happy, instead of sharing in their misery.
Way too much manly posturing here. I would submit that there is not and never will be a genie-back-in-the-bottle solution to any of the problems of modernity. At minimum, someone needs to respond cogently to Toronto Girl and to explain why any woman in her right mind today would rationally put herself in a situation in which she would trade (actual or potential) financial independence for marriage and child-bearing with little or no guarantee that she will be adequately compensated if the marriage fails. Strangely enough, “it’s your bed, lie in it,” isn’t an adequate policy answer.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we can somehow go back to divorce only in case of adultery, with straying sposes sentenced to supporting their former household, paying the mortgage, supporting the kids and supporting the ex-spouses for the rest of their days? Essentially, divorce will once again become the prerogative of the wealthy, or of those whose situations are just so miserable that penury is more endurable. Sound good?
No.
spouses sentenced to supporting their former household, paying the mortgage, supporting the kids and supporting the ex-spouses for the rest of their days?
Umm. That’s today. Where do you live?
“At minimum, someone needs to respond cogently to Toronto Girl…”.
You mean, like, slap her upside her embittered, hate-filled head?
What kind of moron would allow his wife to NOT work while married to him?
If a woman feels that she is giving up so much by getting married to a man to have a child then she should just stick to her cats and buy sperm to quench her biological clock.
And why does the vow till death do us part, only apply to the man, not the women, as in alimony. Supporting children is a separate question, but again sometimes it is used as alimony through the back door. Given the opportunity I would like to stay at home, to take care of my kids, and have my wife work. With it switched does it make any sense that she has to support me, in the style I’m used to, after a divorce for some long stretch because I didn’t want to work (even part time).
We don’t need the perpetual entitlement crap. Women continue to be treated as children by the system and seem perfectly fine with it.
Hmi,
Nobody here is trying to convince Toronto Girl to get married.
Thus, there is no need to convincer her that it is a good deal.
Quite the contrary, I would recommend that she not.
I would not wish to inflict her upon an otherwise non-miserable man.
Yesterday I was speaking to a woman whose daughter is traveling around South America with a male friend.
She said she didn’t really like the guy that much, but commented, “All I care about is that he’s a good bodyguard for her.”
To which an appropriate reply would have been, “And maybe all he cares about her is that she cooks his food and does the laundry?”
I just despise any kind of anti-freedom screed, whether it comes from either the left or the right. I just read on a blog this morning about how Robert Heinlein described communists as red fascists, as compared to the brown fascists of the far right, and how he had contempt for both groups. Kay Hymowitz is a brown fascist. This is precisely how I feel. Both the right (non-libertarian) as well as the left are interchangeable versions of fascism. I have no truck with any of it.
Marriage is like any other contractual relationship between individuals. It has to be beneficial to both parties in order for it to be rationally considered. Besides, Kay’s definition of adulthood is fascist to boot. Adulthood means to accept responsibility for your own actions and to have some level of self-reliance. Thats it, period. Adulthood is not defined by the entry into any kind of contractual relationships, although it is defined by the ability to enter into and to maintain such contractual relationships.
My grandmother taught me to be a man’s man, that is, to be a Gentleman at all times, to all people.
The problem is quite simple, really.
There are too few Ladies.
Yes.
Speaking as a mother of a 29 year-old single,well educated, straight, male I agree, totally!!!
After a rather confusing episode many years ago during the rise of feminism I opened a door for a woman (I thought) where she remarked in a biting tone – “I can do that myself”. Something clicked in me – I was more than a bit mad about that. It took me many years to begin opening/holding a door for strange women again. In the meantime I had thought of several replies that I might use if I do have that same occurrence. Should the opportunity ever present itself again my remark would be: “I thought I was holding the door for a lady – my mistake – sorry”. If she’s real nasty I might let go of the door too.
Its mostly little kindnesses.
Just this afternoon, as the elevator reached the ground floor, I stepped aside, slightly nodded and motioned a professionally-attired younger woman to exit before I would.
She hesitated for the briefest moment, then stepped firmly out, saying as she went by me, “Thank you. It’s so rare to be treated nicely.”
I rest my case.
@K.T. — 2nd:
You didn’t open the door for her. You opened the door for you. It was a gift freely given – a small kindness, with no expectation of return.
Responding to her boorishness in kind diminishes you. A Gentleman is kind – regardless. In that is his strength.
I am not sure mention has been made of the negative results of 40 years of discrimination against white males in the work place. For my entire career as an engineer women were given preferential treatment in promotions as we men were constantly lectured about the “Glass Ceiling”. Women were given most of the promotions during my career, inserted at all levels of management, not because of experience or qualifications, but because of Federal Law. The most egregious case was when we males were placed in a room an lectured by a huge HR minority woman about how the next promotions would be female only. When a hapless male stated: “That does not sound fair!” She replied, “that is the way is at the City of —–, and if you don’t like it, Quit!”
In that atmosphere, it does not take long to become apathetic and to resent women in the workplace and women in general. Also, all Government contract work during that period contained minority preferences, including woman. Why would white men not begin to give up in such a distorted work environment?
Because giving up is giving up.
And it’s also completely rational in some circumstances to do precisely that.
And not work at all? That’s what I hear in “giving up.”
The men Paul is speaking about are not quitting their jobs. But fighting that particular system is an exercise in futility in the cases of many companies. You can go looking for a new job, but many other places are not very different, really.
Wally on Dilbert is John Gault. We are all Wally now.
Where have all the good men gone? They’re running like hell away from women like Ms. Hymowitz.
I know of two marriages right now dissolving where the the wife is leaving a perfectly good, hardworking husband (kids involved) because the husband is boring and the wife has found a new, more exciting man (of a different race in each case, too.).
Men should never marry before they are 40. Then, most would pass up the honor in today’s society. There are just too many things to do for fun to burden yourself with marriage.
A woman who tells a man to “man up” is simply complaining to the man that he is not being useful enough to her. Well, those guys who get divorced because they are too boring might have a thing or two to tell her.
I know many women who are single mothers because that “jerk a*hole” of a father left her or she kicked him out, finally. Women get the kind of man they deserve. If they get an a*hole, hey, that’s what they wanted. If they don’t get any man, well, that says it all.
“I know of two marriages right now dissolving where the the wife is leaving a perfectly good, hardworking husband (kids involved) because the husband is boring and the wife has found a new, more exciting man (of a different race in each case, too.).”
That’s “romance” for you. It’s “I do, until I don’t feel like it it” today because women honestly expect the giddy feelings to last or “it’s over” now.
Wow, some of the comments are as insightful as the article.
I’ll make this as short as possible: I am in my 50s, childless, and never married. I have a lot of male friends; in fact, almost all of my friends are males. Since many of my interests are considered more “masculine” (i.e., being a rock musician, riding motorcycles, hockey, etc.) I find myself around guys more than women, and in fact a lot of the time men will tend to forget that there’s a chick in the room and speak candidly among themselves about their day-to-day lives and concerns. It makes me feel lucky, but it’a also upsetting and scary sometimes.
One very salient quality that I have noticed in modern men between the ages of 18 and 65 is this sort of overwhelming timidity in dealing with women, or outright rejection/spurning of all things female by men who are not homosexual; even if one doesn’t make any overtures to them, they will still reject one outright, loudly, vociferously, and sometimes even with threats.
This has become more and more of a factor over the last 20 years. Single, married, straight, or gay–it really seems like a lot of guys have pretty much HAD IT with us Western women, and they want to let us know how upset they are.
This is of course quite an unhappy thing. I’m a very friendly person, and have always had a lot of admiration for men–the way they can fix things, their strength, their playfulness, their protectiveness towards weaker things, including their mates and offspring. I have never really held with any of those ideas that men owe women something JUST BECAUSE, ya know? When I hear women complain about men, I try to tune it out, and if I can’t I will take a stand and defend males against unrealistic feminists who want to blame males for all the world’s ills. This has been the case for an awfully long time, too, and has made me somewhat of a pariah among my female peers, who no longer trust me with their confidences, since I might go rogue at any moment and start defending those slavemasters of humanity, human males.
And I notice that some men get really freaked out by me wanting to be helpful toward them; when I express any admiration of males it makes them suspicious and sometimes angry. I can tell that a woman being kind, helpful, a good listener, not always going on about what she “needs”, not blaming men for this, that, and the other thing–that really seems to throw a guy off these days.
I have had some serious problems with my new boyfriend–a widower only a little younger than me–being suspicious of me for wanting to cook for him, to do his laundry, to organize his files, to greet him with a drink in my hand after he gets home, to give him a kiss and a hug just because I’m happy to see him. He can sit and look at his tattoo mags right in front of me; he doesn’t have to hide them like he always did before! If he, in his exhaustion from a hard day’s work, drops his smelly socks on the floor–I pick them up and put them in the wash. If he falls asleep in his chair and snores loudly, I get a blanket for him. This is apparently something he is not used to in the least. He has fought with me about it.
That’s right–it made him suspicious at first and caused us to fight, for me to want to treat him with scrupulous (normal) concern for his wellbeing and happiness!!! For me to want to make his life easier; for me to treat him with value, and not like a meal ticket and someone to bitch at when I’m feeling crappy. (Things are getting better, but it was rough at first.)
What a sad state of affairs we have now, that people can’t just be natural and happy together anymore. How has this unrealistic, wrong-minded activism actually helped anyone in this world….?
Women are human beings, too, of course, and deserve to be treated equally under the law. No sort of human civilization could exist without the significant contributions of females treated as equal partners under the law–it’s a cornerstone of civilized thought.
But it seems like we’ve had to accept a lot of really bad stuff with the good; if a woman, for example, opposes government-funded abortion: Well, she just can’t be standing up for all women, then, can she?! She’s keeping us down, she’s a stooge for men–take her out and shoot her!
Without a doubt, these academic types who urge us women to turn on men, could not make it by themselves in a less-civilized world. To rely on a man for strength and protection, they think, is worse than weakness–it’s sabotage. I hate to be mean-spirited, but I’ve about had it with these so-called “feminists” who couldn’t care less about their fellow human beings, and who seek only to promote an ideology that is completely depending upon the civilization they profess to despise.
Your husband is a lucky man!
I’m just fine and don’t need to ‘man up’: 28, educated, great job, savings, friends, and plenty of leisure time. Oh, and single.
My single friends and I watched as the fathers of our generation were taken to the cleaners at family court. We’re not willing to risk what we worked for to end up in the same situation. Until the women our age realize what they’re up against, and most of them will, I’ll continue enjoy the single life.
Another Career female spouting faux “pro-male” crap while trying to feel the men out on this blog to see if they’d ‘pay’ for a new book idea. Are we men suckers or what? I bet this Dr. Helen hag only popped out a couple kids for her sad-sack husband and then went right back to her career even though her husband probably would have liked to have had more children.
Total money grubbing phony.
TO: Drogan
RE: Heh
You’re one delusional guy, buckie.
She’s married to the Blogfather. The guy who runs Instapundit. Then again she stands on her own two feet as a forensic psychologist and a blogger in her own right. [NOTE: Albeit I'm not particularly happy with the operating system she uses for that.]
As for the ‘hag’ comment, maybe you should visit her web-site….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. -- Miss Piggy]
Jim Dorgan,
I can understand your concern. However, if you know anything about being an author, you would realize that writing a book is a labor of love, not money. Books are hard to write, a dime a dozen and bring most authors little financial return. That said, I am considering writing this book because I think it is important and because no one else has really tackled the topic of marriage, sex etc. from a strictly male point of view. And yes, I would need men’s help and interest since it would be for that audience.
Helen: Need men’s help??? With your following, we would happily write the whole book and you’d only have to sign the query letter!
PS: You can keep the royalties.
Kevin,
With all the great material you all have given me over the past six or so years of blogging, it should be a breeze.
No offense, but maybe the book you SHOULD write should be for women.
I don’t think there are many women left who actually know how to treat a man. The stuff that is now considered “outdated nonsense spouted in the 50′s” actually turned out to be sensible and very good ways to get and keep a man and have a happy marriage.
Women really should be there to take care of and nurture their husbands and their children. They should be kind to them, feed and clothe them, and be there for them through thick or thin.
In return men should be there to take care of and nurture their wives and children. They should be kind to them, feed and clothe them, and be there for them through thick and thin.
The only difference between men and women on this is how they go about doing it.
For whatever reason, women now days seem to think all the sacrifice should be on the man’s part and never on her own otherwise she is not being fulfilled. Why should any man want to make a home with someone who doesn’t appreciate them or care for him as a man? And by appreciating and caring for him I don’t mean carping at him about his friends, his hobbies, his long hours at work, and how he never helps around the house.
It is my experience as a mother of 4 sons and 2 daughters, it is the women who don’t get this. (The women who do are happily married.)
Men, as a rule, are much more eager and easy to please. They have had years of learning how to please mom, teacher, and every woman at the office.
Women have had years to learn how special they are, how important their career aspirations are, how to whine about how unfair men are, how men only want one thing, and how to expect daddy to pay for everything.
It’s the women who need to get a clue.
TO: Lily
RE: The ‘Carping’
….caring for him I don’t mean carping at him about his friends, his hobbies, his long hours at work, and how he never helps around the house. — Lily
I’ve found, through personal experience, that when the ‘carping’ begins, the marriage is, for all intents and purposes, OVER. And all the woman is doing is building her ‘body of evidence’ against the man being with her.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Woman, n., The unfair sex. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 19th Century]
P.S. The problem has been around for a LONG time. I even suspect that Eve blames Adam for the Fall.
I suspect this book if written will be read by more women than men – surreptitiously of course.
Mrs. Smith:
“That said, I am considering writing this book because I think it is important and because no one else has really tackled the topic of marriage, sex etc. from a strictly male point of view. And yes, I would need men’s help and interest since it would be for that audience.”
Your aim would be misplaced, men, as a rule, don’t read “self-help” books about relationships…that’s a “chick thing”.
If you’d permit me to suggest it though, you might do us all a service, (and make a heap of money, hang with Oprah, etc), in aiming a tome at late-teens and young women about how they should think about being “real women” before they start whining about the lack of “real men”.
I think the success of Martha Stewart and shows like hers show how big a void exists in the lives of young women today. To my eyes, the stuff that Stewart did on her show was the kind of knowledge mothers used to pass on to their daughters.
In a similar vein, the “This Old House” home improvement shows, (watched mostly by women, I suspect), are a way for women who grew up without benefit of fathers to vicariously connect with the daddies that they never had.
Men don’t need a book, even one written by a woman, telling them that the deck is stacked against us. We know it…and some of us even admit freely that a lot of this was a stew of our own making by in the past being, (or tolerating), absolute bastardly behavior on the part of other men.
What men need is what women need, to stand up and tell a cad that he’s a no-good dirty rotten son-of-a-bitch when he mistreats a woman, and for women to stand up and tell some tramp that she’s a spoiled ugly little monster when she mistreats a man.
In short…self policing.
If you actually did some fact checking before spouting off, you would’ve found out how completely wrong you are on every point. She is married and has been for many years. Her husband is the InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds (and one lucky man). They have one child that I know of, a teenaged daughter.
Dr. Helen has been writing about the issues of men for a long time and every time I’ve seen her discuss the topic, she has been very reasonable and favorable towards men and their views.
Perhaps if you spent a few minutes doing some background research, you wouldn’t come across as so uninformed and well, stupid.
Not only is she married to the Blogfather, but Doc Helen is also a cyborg. I wouldn’t mess with her.
I also saw a recent study suggesting that women are now more likely to cheat on men than the other way around. A good woman is actually now harder to find than a good man. I have never been married but have always dated with my eyes on hopefully building something long-term. Whereas historically men may have been more guilty of “just wanting to have a good time” or “not wanting to commit”, I have found that women my age – I am 33 – are increasingly guilty in this department. We men have had to laugh it off for years when a woman makes a sexist joke about men being “lazy” or “good for one thing only” while women seem to have grown increasingly materialistic, self-absorbed, skin-deep, superficial divas whom we are told to “celebrate” as liberated women. Many have no interest in starting a family or a mutually respectful relationship with men. Maybe men take longer to grow up now because that is exactly what today’s woman is looking for. Someone who “lives for the moment”, does not want commitment beyond a fling, and doesn’t do grown-up things like make their own money, hold a steady job, plan for the future, or talk about starting a family. Maybe I am just unlucky, but the women I date seem to be book-smart, certainly, but seem to have no clue or care about what goes on in the world outside of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” or “What Not to Wear”. I would love to find a good woman who is not afraid of commitment, cares about the world outside their personal bubble, and actually cares about the feelings of someone other than themselves. This is tougher in America than one might initially think. Make no mistake, men are just as guilty, but it’s time to stop pretending that all men are pigs and that women themselves cannot be pigs simply by virtue of the genetalia they happen to be equipped with at birth.
And even when women “commit”, they may not commit.
http://www.sptimes.com/News/061800/Perspective/Can_it_truly_be_Fathe.shtml
When one woman does this to a man, it says something about that women. When this situation is allowed to persist – the column is 10 years old and the original court case was filed 18 years ago – it says something about all women, or more specifically about their trustworthiness.
I think the male-female perspective confuses the issue. We’re talking about virtues traditionally associated with masculinity, sure, but one could abstract the sex and the virtues would remain intact, wouldn’t they? I don’t think the infantilization of people – everything from health warnings to sumptuary laws to the prolonging of adolescence into the late 20′s has as much to do with misandry as it does with a political philosophy that requires adults to understand themselves and others as children. It is philosophy that has advanced paternalism, that has confused liberty with license, and has elevated the egalitarianism of the playground to the status of singular civic virtue.
I guess it’s fun to watch that dynamic play out along the axes of sex. But it’s pointless, this is all so much piss into the wind. Unless you’re confronting the foundation upon which all this garish rot is built, you’re just wasting your time contributing to the wrong side of a signal-to-noise ratio.
I’m on my second marriage. In both cases, as soon as I married, my wife stopped working, stayed home, and started a steady diet of Oprah.
I don’t know how long my current marriage will last, but I will never, never, never remarry. In my experience, women are just out to find a way to secure Maslow’s hierarchy at the expense of someone else.
why is it that when a man makes poor choices in spouses it’s always the woman who is the evil one in the relationship who ruined it all and the guy was just a victim of circumstance who ended up with a fat harridan but when a woman make poor choices in spouses who marries a man who turns out to be an abusive alcoholic, gambler or child-molester, the woman is still always the foolish one who made stupid decisions in choosing a man? why is it that some men continually say they are smarter than women and women shouldn’t be allowed to vote but then turn around and say women should be smarter than men when it comes to choices in mates because they have the uterus and the buck stops there? why is it some men say they should be allowed to cheat because they it is their natural desire to spread their seed and their dna but if a woman cheats and only has one egg each month to spread her dna, she is evil for the same desire to spread her dna? why is it that a man feels entitled to all the pussy he desires but when pregnancy results from that same random desire he spread around he would rather have society pay for his offspring rather than pony up the dough for his share of the child he created? why aren’t both men and women held accountable for making poor choices in mates equally? we have far too many stupid, low i.q. people making decisions with their genitals rather than with their gray matter and then people cry victimization when their poor decisions come to fruition.
i think there is nothing wrong with men going ghost and quitting women and on the flipside there is also nothing wrong with successful single women quitting men and becoming single mothers through artificial insemination rather than these same men and women making bad relationship choices a reflection on all men and women by proxy of their poor decision making and turning courts into a divorce war-zone because a handful of idiots don’t know how to do it right in the first place. let the wheat separate from the chaff and the people who are actual grown-ups will hopefully rise to the top and raise a better generation of human beings while the drooling, selfish dolts stick to their porn, their video games and their 7 cats.
good luck, everyone.
TO: fFerris bueller
RE: Going ‘It’ Alone
….nothing wrong with successful single women quitting men and becoming single mothers through artificial insemination…. — fFerris bueller
Except this….
The child brought forth and raised in such a manner has no experience of watching how a REAL family unit works properly. And, if it’s a boy, said boy will likely be raised to be the sort of milksop women are complaining are too abundant.
Hope that helps….
….but I have my doubts.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Children, n., Messages we send to a future we shall never see.]
What no one is mentioning here is that some of us may reject the very concept of living life according to some externally defined set of milestones. I’ve always considered my life to be my own. This means that I pursue whatever objectives that I choose for myself, not live by the dictates of others. What some of you (both pro and con in this debate) can’t seem to wrap your heads around is the fact that maybe some of us choose not to get married and have kids because we have other, more interesting objectives we want instead, regardless of whether women are good or bad.
Another thing to consider is that the marriage/kids thing really is 30 years of wage/debt slavery even if the marriage is stable and everything is fine. Some of us may choose to avoid this option for no other reason than the fact that it is easier to save for international life style retirement if one remains single, enjoy what hobbies and outdoor sports you do like, and live a frugal life style.
People like Hymowitz, Wood, and others can’t seem to grasp this concept at all.
I wish I had discovered your attitude for myself when I was young. I was never so glad to be rid of something as I was my wife. After 13 years of turmoil I decided I wasn’t likely to remarry. I’m 63 now and very happily single. I occasionally date women but find most of them with the same attitude as my ex. One even suggested that I “get rid of that thing in the garage” if we were ever going to ‘go anywhere’. That ‘thing’ is my Harley Ultra Glide. I call it the ‘Geezer Glide’ and it ain’t goin anywhere. I haven’t seen that gal in many months.
The differences between the sexes is this: Men find the woman they like and thats what makes them happy and don’t want changes – crap – don’t even cut your hair! Women see a man and imagine what what changes they can make to mold them into their idea of a man. I guess at 63 I’m no longer ‘moldable’. Hmm, new word?
I wonder who’s happier in the long run?(I think I know).
Copypasta
The change in the roles expected of men and women is nowhere better exemplified than on TV. Both the ads and the programs tell the story.
40 years ago, many of the ads featured “housewives” who anguished over making their floors or laundries the whitest white that was possible. I remember that my mother chafed at these portrayals of women who were so vapid that all they cared about was their housekeeping. (She kept an immaculate house herself by the way.) The main characters in just about every show were men; female characters were usually relatively minor. Plots were filled with action: fist fights, car chases, shootouts, etc.
Today, most ads portrary the men as idiots, much like the housewives were portrayed in my youth. The women are portrayed as wise and careful and in charge, condescending to any man that happens to be in the lives. The main characters in almost every program are women and the men serve typically only as supporting roles; a complete reversal of the way things used to be. Plots have a lot less action in them and a lot more dialogue about feelings.
Now, I don’t know whether TV drove this transformation or is just reflecting it; it’s probably a bit of both. I’m not even saying that all of the changes are bad. Personally, when I look at how implausible and unrealistic the plots of the 60s and 70s were, I thank my lucky stars that people like Steven Bochco came along and started portraying things realistically. But I loathe the condescension of women toward men that I see in ads today, just as my mother loathed the portrayal of her peers as vapid housewives.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I like the idea that women are now treated as peers to men, not servants. But I most definitely do NOT like the idea that the roles have been reversed and men are just silly buffoons to be tolerated and patronized. In other words, if feminism is about equal treatment and respect for the two sexes, great. But if it’s about trading places so that the women are in charge and the men are second class citizens, then I think it’s nonsense.
Lastly, with respect to sex, I like to get laid as much as the next guy. But a male friend once observed to me that sex is like euchre: if you have a good hand, you can go alone
JB:
Women, beginning in the 1960′s have been working hard to become the best men they can be.
Didn’t Michelle Obama say that?
“We are the men we’ve been waiting for.”
(No, she didn’t, but I couldn’t resist…)
Dr. Helen, please add one more to the list of men who’d love to read your book. It’s a story that isn’t told often enough, and it really should be told by a woman — one who knows where the ‘good men’ have gone and why.
I was taught to treat women with chivalry. My wife was startled when she first realized that I made a point of walking between her and traffic. Do I think she doesn’t know how to cross the street by herself, she asked me? Of course she does… but I was demonstrating my willingness to be responsible for her safety (just as, when I proposed to her with a one-carat diamond ring, I was demonstrating my willingness to provide for her). It’s my job, and my proud privilege. One of the reasons we got married is that she did learn to understand this, and to appreciate it.
(My stepdaughters will take a little longer. It amuses me each time our teenager scoffs at such antiquated values… and then sees a spider and shrieks for me to come “deal with it”. My toddler sons will learn this as they grow — that it’s their job to take good care of their womenfolk… and their right to walk away from those who can’t be bothered to appreciate it.)
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Maybe you’re thinking of Gloria Steinem’s remark, “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
I am a woman about 5’7″ with a small frame. Even though I am an excellent swimmer, I cannot rescue people from burning buildings, move pianos, throw a hand grenade far enough to escape the burst radius, etc. I, like most women who are not large, am unsuited to heavy work requiring upper body strength. Historically and now, the United States is protected by strong men. We are approaching a cultural catastrophe that threatens to weaken our military, and our metrosexual president is universally despised for his weakness.
I always hate these comparisons of men and women, asking who is better? There is no right answer to a wrong question. Which is better, your right hand or your left hand? Wouldn’t you just rather have both of them because they were meant to work together?
I recently did some study on the Spartans with my daughter for her history class. The Spartans eventually died out simply because they failed to have enough children. They suffered defeat after defeat mainly because they were outnumbered. (They also had a lot of difficulty controlling their slaves who outnumbered them 7 or 8 to one.) Their family structure was nothing like what we could recognize and was nowhere near adequate to ensure their survival. It’s time to get back to the basics.
Well… I guess I’ll be in a lot of trouble for this, but mother’s and women in society have a load of responsibility for the behavior of men today. First… as a society we do not respect men. I see commercials all the time insulting men. We would have a fit if it were women being treated as such. Secondly… Through divorce and out-of-wedlock births, too many boys are being raised without strong father figures. It is important to boy’s development to have a strong male role model. Someone to show them the way. No offense, but we mother’s tend to coddle our boys. That’s fine if there are two parents. Boys need both. Without a strong male role model boys do not understand what it is to be a “man”, rather than a perpetual “boy”.
Lasty… Men need to be needed. There is no place for men anymore. Men who are actually needed are much more likely to respond to that need. Men are different and we need to respect and honor what they bring to the table. I worry for my boys. They have so much to contribute even if it is different than what women contribute. We need to honor men being men.
Maybe she she read Warren Farrell’s book, The Myth of Male Power, or his first book, Why Men are the Way They Are, to fully understand her subject. the biggest point I took away from both books is this-Most women’s fantasy is to get married and be secure for life, most men’s fantasy is to sleep with as many women as possible. When marriage happens, the woman GETS her fantasy and the man losed his, wonder why men aren’t so into committment. And with women harping at them for this choice they DO withdraw and will no longer engage, literally, lol!
Men don’t want to grow-up? I’ve got news for Ms. Hymowitz, it’s not allowed today. Man-up and you’ll be shut-out. Women only want men to complain about, milk for resources to spend like crazy and then discard for a “more exciting” model when they get bored. I’m divorced because I wouldn’t “change” into a doormat and thought marriage was a “commitment” and not a “relationship” (her words, along with “pay attention to ME”). It’s been few and far between because I’m not “a lot of fun” (manly qualities of being upright, responsible, having integrity, etc. are definity “obsolete” and not arousing for women today) but I’m happy she’s gone. Divorce has only been final for a month and she’s already been “pumped and dumped” by some clod she pines after though he only needed her for one thing at the time. For well or ill, women end up with the men they deserve by what they want.
Honestly, I don’t think a book is necessary.
Men, single, married, divorced, happy and otherwise, *already know this stuff.*
To steal a touch from Heinlein, “Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you–if you don’t play, you can’t win.” And there are plenty of guys who have.
Reading this article, I think, “Exactly! Why would they want to marry when the deck is stacked against them legally?” But being happily married I worry about both my daughters AND my sons. I worry that my sweet daughters who give their dream job as “being a mommy someday” and work hard with me to make our home a happy place will have a choice between bitter men who dislike women and men who are unwilling to commit. I worry about my sons who will have the choice between a well-used party girl and some bitter woman willing to trade up at the first opportunity. My sons tell me “I want to be the best dad in the world and fix things, just like Daddy!” And I tell them all that they can, even though I’m afraid that maybe they won’t really be able to. How sad is it when having married, loving parents makes them unusual?
The irony, of course, with all this incessant chattering about the failings of men in our modern society, is that the society only exists through the effort of men and their continuing participation. Women wield progressively increased economic and political influence due to the nature of our economy’s transition to service based industries and away from things like manufacturing and the harvesting of natural resources. This creates the false impression that somehow, our lifestyle is now magically based on cubicle jobs and administrative paper shuffling. It’s not. All of the technology and infrastructure that make women’s modern lives possible is developed, built, and maintained by men. And no, the token number of women involved in these pursuits do not count. It doesn’t matter if this offends your sensibilities or hurts your feelings or strays from the delicate confines of some PC pabulum you were spoon fed in college. When the lights go out and the S*** hits the fan, throw up the bat-signal and see how many women show up to fix everything for you. Or how many even know how. Women’s current position in the course of human events is a side effect of technology. And all men know this.
A second point that is completely lost in the current discussion is WHY men participate in the social compact in the first place. Men are basically lazy and practical creatures. Men fulfilled traditional roles in traditional ways because there was something in it for them. Peer respect required marriage and a family. The ability to provide oneself with the resources to survive required constant work and vigilance. The compelling need to pass your DNA on to another generation required finding a wife and raising your children to adulthood. None of that is required anymore. Why should a man do anything that women are currently complaining that they don’t do? They get all the sex, reproduction, attention, etc, and still get to do what they want, which is play video games and watch football. It’s what their fathers and grandfathers wanted to do, too. They just couldn’t. Meanwhile, we’ve removed any moral or religious compulsion that might require they behave otherwise.
Which brings us too my third and final point, because I’m sure you’re as bored as I am by now. And that is the absurd and giggle-inducing irony that women, at this stage in our history, and given all the self-serving contradictions of modern womanhood, from fashion choice to reproductive rights, would somehow find themselves shocked, SHOCKED, that men would also decide that maybe they could have their cake and eat it too. Welcome to gender equality, sisters. We just don’t have to want what you want. And what you want is increasingly less relevant to our interests.
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. — C. S. Lewis
Men are real bastards. Most of them want to cut my throat. But only men provide me with economic opportunity. Women cannot and will not provide me with economic opportunity. Thus I ignore them. I will tolerate no work interview that includes women in the process, as it is inevitably a complete waste of my time. It feels good to walk away from it.
Only men take risks and create. Women can only inhabit as functionaries in the structures that men create. When organizations become feminized, the vital creation function is replaced by mass concern for comfort and security, leading to ossification and death.
One last comment : Where have all the good men gone? vietnamcupid.com is one destination.
Worked for me.
Thanks for the link Elmer. I’m going to file that away for future reference.
A tip from a friend of mine in the Air Force, South Korea is also a great place for a western man to be. Marriageable women outnumber men by a good margin.
And the Philippines
And Australia, (Ozzie men treat women like DIRT, srsly!)
And Eastern Europe
And Mother Russia,(fancy blondes, do ye?)
And South Africa,(blondes again, and they all want to DESPERATELY get out of what that joint is becoming)
And anywhere in the Arab world, (challenging, but it CAN be done…and here ye MUST be discreet!).
And South America…Brazil? Argentina? Hello!
And, if you haven’t got “those kinds” of “issues”, church-going American Black women are usually VERY conservative and old-fashioned when it comes to family and marriage and such. They hold no truck with dipstick Honkie bunk about that sort of thing…they got eyes and ears and they know sh!t from shine-ola. I’ve never known a White fella who married a Sistah who regretted it. And that is what it is…
The cautionary note about foreign women though,is that you MUST NOT bring them to the States as soon as you get spliced.
Give it a few years, keep a pad in both countries.
Farm-boy, let me tell ya…the world is an absolute smorgasbord of women who would like very much to get to know your dullard hillbilly self.
F’reals, playah.
Let “Princess” down the block be like the used car dealer who never realizes that what REALLY kills a business is the customers who never even walk onto his lot.
That’s HER problem. If she can’t dope it out on her own, then her “rides” will be “sold to the wholesalers” soon enough.
Why should a man ‘man up’ when it is easier to ‘woman down’?
Being happily married, I think I am one of the lucky ones. Not coincidentally wife and I slipped eventually into very traditional roles after having gotten married as typical urban progressive yuppies.
But I digress. The point is, I still see the inevitable. When they finally get over the uncanny valley and create lifelike video game porn (in 3d no less) marriage will all but die out… I hope I am just kidding, but it seems possible at this point.
Helen, I would be delighted to buy and then read your book.
I have next to no sympathy for either the loser men or the whiner men we seem to have produced in the last couple of decades. But a couple of bits of reality.
Men can and do get away with zero achievement lives. Blaming women for that is silly. Smart women look for smart men – zero achievement leaves a man in beta land.
On the other hand, serious men know a couple of things: they are going to, by and large, become more attractive as they get older. They will have more money and bulkier achievement lists. 60 year old five foot five billionaire can and do date super models.
Now, marriage; I can see what’s in it for women but it is not at all obvious what men, especially successful men, get from the institution. After all, with not so very many dollars you can pay a very beautiful girl to attend to your sexual needs and then leave. For a few dollars more you can keep a mistress and revolve them according to the community property rules of your state or province.
No, for a man to be convinced to marry there has to be a lot more than sex or beauty involved. So what would that be? Well it certainly isn’t a nagging Oprah watching, weight gaining lump on the couch buying stuff off E-Bay.
Nor is a woman whose career makes her a part time wife. (Yes the money is nice, but the sacrifices are too extreme.)
What enticed this particular man to take the plunge (after two failed attempts) was a beautifully made leg of lamb for lunch. Which embodied the sense of nurture and sheer culinary competence. It was style. It was a firm commitment to children which extends to homeschooling our boys to avoid the serial craziness of the industrial school system.
It was a conversation, ongoing, about how we can live well and responsibly. And independently. If we are extravagant we eat lentil stew (wonderfully made) until its paid off. We live in cash. We buy vintage.
And that conversation takes place over a glass of wine and a bit of foccachia and cheese and olive oil and balsamic every night. The boys reveling in a bit of screen time.
We will not divorce but my wife has a rightful claim to everything we have. I might have made the money but she created to world in which I can work.
Best of all, eleven years in, we both have the sense we are just beginning.
I have had to grow up and so has she. We have children. We’re the adults now. But what we have never had to do is be any less than the best we can be. No compromise. If I don’t live up to my own standards, I know I am disappointing my wife and vice versa.
The problem here is, YOU have found something decent, and I can even list things you are doing correctly (Confirming the frame, for instance – which both makes you the dominant partner, AND forces her to either confront you directly, or know that she’s a weasel if she goes behind your back, and will also show up during that conversation in subtle disrespect.)
However, some of us have learned the hard way, or been tricked in some cases, into bad deals which we cannot get out of, even IF we now do the “right” things.
In my case, it is amplified by being attractive, gaming her when I feel like and ignoring her when I feel like, but still being beta in some ways (providing, for instance.)
But if I decide not to provide? MY name is still on everything, so she really has no incentive to be more than a beast (and she shows it more all the time.)
The objective now is to make such things as Game unnecessary, to take what men want WITHOUT giving up what the “wymmynz” want, and let them stew in their own shit. Nothing nasty – just protecting young men from their hormones and short-sighted judgement.
Women think that eventually if they write enough of these articles mocking men that we will somehow cave to their demands.
Hey broads and bimbos – call me man-child ALL YOU WANT. I have my money to myself, all the free time in the world, and I pick the women that I date but refuse to marry.
If you think you are going to mock me into marriage, well keep trying!
Silly girls.
Blah, blah, poor emasculated male…just be a MAN, be strong, follow in G-d’s way (advise King David gave to his son Solomon) & stop worrying about how some female will do you wrong…the bottom line, is challenge yourself to live heroically by enobling yourself, going beyond your selfish self, be humble, & treat all, yourself included, w/ dignity & respect. And stay away from the degrading porn.
Judith,
You don’t know what you are talking about.
Read what Dr. Helen wrote. She understands how women think a lot better than you do.
TO: Judith [the Jewess]
RE: Good Advice
The topical thread is about women being peeved that men aren’t what they’ve made them to be….via almost 100 years of (1) gaining power and (2) using that power to destroy men.
Talk about God….
….it was a woman who caused the Fall in the first place. And looking back through that Old Book’s Older Part, I see how women have succeeded to continue their ‘fine effort’ at destroying civilization. Or maybe you could please explain how between David and the arrival of Babylonians, God was replaced by the Ashtroths and Moleck.
We see the same think happening today. Women get the vote and then put into place political figures that support their ideals….as opposed to good governance. And look where we are today…..
Hope that helps….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[History repeats itself. That's one of the problems with History.]
TO: All
RE: The ‘Natives’ Are ‘Restless’
ask me out on a goddamned date.
As well as ‘desperate’ and ‘vulgar’.
Why any man would want to go out with her sort can only be explained by he recognizes and ‘easy piece’. Men in their right mind will tell her to FOAD….probably more politely in some the more mature.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[You can tell how desperate they are by counting the number of times they ask you again after you've told them no.]
Thanks for this. I was beginning to think I was alone in not hating men. Great to read all the comments!
I’m a 28-year-old woman… that age where biological clocks are ticking faster and the long-term boyfriends are having to either sink or swim, and we all know how lovely that can get. I am married, but I have many single, frustrated friends and acquaintances who are convinced there is something wrong with all men “these days”.
I’ve believed for a while that some women try SO hard to be equal to men that they forget that we are not equal. Fact: we are biologically different… our brains work differently. They just do. And that is a good thing, celebrate the differences.
When buddies want to know how I “found such a good husband” (aka got him to marry me), I offer this advice: A man needs to be needed, just like you do. And if you want to be loved, be loveable.
And there is nothing wrong with wanting to sleep in.
hey, that seems like good advice, and pretty succinct too!
1) No woman will ever verbalize in public or private what they really want. So there is no point in having a discussion about it (with women).
2) Women make demands to test the strength of men. Many men misunderstands this and think they should give in to the demands. Sorta like a wrestler that looses on purpose.
I’m reminded of the book, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation”.
Debra Tannen did an outstanding job of analysis.
And after that, I married an English major.
Even debra Tannen can be wrong.
This crap will never end.
Caveat Emptor!
People make the wrong decisions in partners all of the time and it’s unfortunate for any resultant children from such relationships. My mother married my father who was a man who turned out to be an abusive, lazy, worthless alcoholic. His parents (my beloved paternal grandparents) spoiled him beyond belief because he was the firstborn and he grew up feeling ‘entitled’ as a youth (always getting away with his criminal activities in town because my grandparents were well-respected, [my grandmother being a teacher and grandfather and a military veteran]). My mother thought she was marrying a man from a good family who would be a good father and when she became pregnant [with me] his abusive nature reared its ugly head and one night when he held a gun to her pregnant belly on their front lawn as he orally raped her, my mother decided to divorce him before I was born (yes, I’m a ‘bastard’ lol).
My mother tried very hard to deal with the circumstances of single-motherhood (and, back in those days, it was no easy task and quite a stigma) and get a job while I was shuffled from babysitter to babysitter. I grew up with my mother ripping me from babysitters I became attached to and instead thrusting me into the clutches of babysitters who were abusive to me so that ‘she’ didn’t have to fear that I would find a ‘parent’ figure in any of my caregivers. Unfortunately, my mother chose yet another man who was an alcoholic and she left him soon after my half-sister was born. My mother went through her share of assorted ‘boyfriends’ and yet another failed marriage all the while my sister and I suffered virtually alone together as she shuffled us about.
My birth-father never paid a single cent of child-support and he never married his later live-in baby-mama who he had three children with and lived on welfare with along with free medical and food-stamps also while he worked under the table for ‘cash for his drinking habit’. He was the ultimate ‘dead-beat’ dad, living on welfare to support his brood and his woman and never so much as sending me a birthday card/christmas card. But, his parents, my beloved grandparents were mortified at how their son had turned out and always loved and adored me and gave me unconditional love that I never got from my mother or my non-existent father.
My mother went through drug addiction and health problems and my sister and I ended up in a Foster home when we were young and that was a terrifying ordeal to go through even though we lived with a stable two-parent Mormon couple we had no coping skills to deal with being teased for being foster-children or being treated like second-class citizens by the foster-parents themselves who seemed more in it for the money than for helping children going through a crisis.
As I grew older, I promised myself I would never have children and never marry and I would stay a virgin forever…until I was raped at 17 by my best friend’s married brother-in-law. I never reported the rape because I couldn’t bare to hurt his wife and children [a few years later they divorced...surprise surprise].
By 18 I ended up in a mental institution after having a nervous breakdown and when I was finally released I got a job and met the man who would eventually become my husband. He was a good, hard-working, decent man with a lot of his own skeletons. It turns out, we were both very broken people [he had been molested for years by his older brother growing up and harbored a lot of shame and anguish]. We both decided to have a child together and we got married…and, *sigh* he became more and more distant, sank into alcohol and drugs and while I home-schooled and helped run our business, I was always in a state of constant worry (especially about his drinking and driving). In 2007 when he broke two of my ribs I’d lost hope that he could overcome his demons and I feel into a spiral of suicide attempts that landed me in the ER near death three times from 2008-2009. STUPID ME.
But, do I hate ‘men’ because of all that? Hell no! “Genitals” have nothing to do with it all…it’s ‘humanity’ and sometimes humanity is just plain ugly.
My husband and I are still tentatively together (when he cheated on me with a drug-dealer I thought I couldn’t forgive him but, I did), and we are trying to work things out. I’m actually really proud of him for trying to overcome his addictions but he’s still struggling and so am I. Relationships aren’t easy and people aren’t perfect.
Our daughter suffered the bad days even though I tried my best to shelter her from them as best I could. Now she’s engaged to a man who got custody of all three of his children and has no plans of having her own children (he had a vasectomy and he barely makes ends meet which means he will probably never be able to afford reversing it soon enough to have any other children). He’s a good guy, not abusive, had a past drug habit which he kicked but has a plethora of health problems and I don’t see their future as anything but a long, painful struggle but hopefully filled with love and non-violence.
So here I am, stuck wondering what God wants me here for and what good I can do if any to make a difference? My soul is so tired and I know there are a lot of people who are feeling that way too (men and women both). It’s not a gender thing…it’s the human condition and we need more compassion for each other.
Yes we do, but there is often quite the opposite of compassion at PJM. There is the illusion of how everyone can make it on their own without help. God knows that I do not care for help myself, nor do I care for the welfare state, but life makes it clear that sometimes we need some help, conservative philosophy be damned. Too often, conservatism seems to be about identifying the right people to hate, or if not hate, at least despise. Many here do that so well, they must have amazingly fulfilled and independent lives….or maybe not.
Hmmmm.
Congrats! You’re a liberal. You accuse conservatives of generalizing while you generalize. This is known in most circles as “hypocrisy”.
But for you this is known as “just another day”.
I was just sharing a part of my heart and soul. I was crying so hard when I wrote that, that I made a kazillion typos (sorry, grammar/spelling nazis).
I’m just me, Dwight. I don’t have an ‘agenda’. I always speak my mind no matter what anyone ‘thinks’ of me. I don’t care. Once you’ve been close to death you really appreciate the truth.
((HUGS)),
ME
The only people who kept me from starving, were private churches and welfare and bread/cheese lines. My mother went on welfare after my sister and I came back from Foster care, she got a gov loan for a house after her hysterectomy and the house was filled with lead and and other noxious chemicals. My immune system was so hammered by age 8 that I was always walking around with a kleenex in my hand. I was a sickly child until I left my mother.
Fake “centrist” lays it out. Again.
Indeed, Pick It Fence But thrives on the notion that it determines what a “Conservative” is. Red Pencil Neck has the notion that to be a “Conservative” you must be a priori fatally flawed.
Why is this? To deflect.
(CNSNews.com) – Two-thirds of the eighth graders in Wisconsin public schools cannot read proficiently according to the U.S. Department of Education, despite the fact that Wisconsin spends more per pupil in its public schools than any other state in the Midwest.
D-White is/was a high school English teacher. D-White believes in the group as the primary. Therefore D-White is in part responsible for this education debacle.
D-White accepts public funds. This is not welfare? Oh yes D-White. Remember that many welfare recipients have done and do some work for their checks. No shame there. A matter of degree? Pray tell.
Tongue it up D-White, let’s here your defense of taxpayer money funding union chosen candidates, or Wisconsin, or something similar. Go for it. Get on with your cherished Groupthink. Go for it.
Or be brave, Try Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Certainly unknown to Red Pencil Neck.
Looking quite Thin Ping Pong Tongue.
And says, “How does it feel
To be such a freak ?”
And you say, “Impossible”
As he hands you a bone.
Delia, how I hope you come back and read this. I just want you to know how much God loves you. People can think it’s cheap and trite to say that, but I hope you will think about it. Say it to yourself: “God loves me.” I had lived nearly half a century before I finally let it sink in. Even though many of us will say the words, I don’t think most people really let it be true. Let it be true! There IS a good purpose for your life. God don’t make no junk.
And you’re right, the male-female thing is an often overblown divide. I think for most of us it’s our most sensitive area and the way we are most easily hurt. So it’s only natural for it to seem like an irreconcilable division among us. But YOU know something so many people need to hear, something that can help them heal. Don’t give up. I believe your voice will be heard, and it will do a lot of people good.
Many American women seem to believe that marriage is a one-way street and the man is the unpaid chauffer often without benefits. I’ve read that studies show 70% of American woman do not enjoy sex, which means there are a lot of men married to women that did not get married to enjoy all of the benefits of a marriage but only the money the man earns.
My first wife (1968 – 1979) said take her as she was or leave so I left in 1979 suffering from LTFA (Libido Torture and Frustration Anxiety—its parallel is PTSD.
Number One didn’t enjoy sex and seldom offered it often accusing me of marrying just for the sex. Well, yea—that was supposed to be half of the bargain.
When we got married, number one was cute and sexy and while dating was a hot partner in the passion department. Once we were married, the heat vanished and was replaced by global cooling while she chunked up to twice her weight.
From my experience with number one, women will put out while dating to hook the guy. Once married, the husband becomes a pair of pants with deep pockets and any passion that existed will take a walk and never return.
70-80% of women can’t have orgasms without clitoral stimulation. Women are usually embarrassed to even masturbate or learn to pleasure themselves. Guys, do your shy wives/girlfriends and yourselves a favor and buy her a vibrator and she will finally ‘get’ why you enjoy sex!
Right.
I didn’t read your whole thing carefully.
But politics or not
I always tell young men
You never let a woman decide if you are a Man or not
a woman defines a man according to her needs at the moment
we all know that
and most of us know what kinds of needs they are going to be
fist fight, fix sink, fix check book,
F**k H*r brains out
whatever they maybe
You don’t let a woman decide if you are a Man or not
nor do you ask another Man
believe me buddy
You are a Man
As Dr. Helen says, this is because men allowed women to turn them into the ‘men’ that the women thought they wanted. All along women have been testing us to see if they can trust us (and they desperately want us to pass this test) and we have disappointed them time and again by giving in to their stated desires. A man who changes simply because his woman demands it is committing the first betrayal.
I’ve studied hard on this topic for years, but quit writing about it because it’s too easy to be lumped in with the whiners.
“There are always women who will take men on their own terms. If I were a man I wouldn’t bother to change while there are women like that around.” — Ann Oakley
(Take the free samples, but leave when the relationship becomes difficult – the men I know who really became superior men ultimately gave up the free samples, too) Of course, too many women these days study hard not to be the woman that Annie speaks of. Sadly, the women who learn this well enough are destined to come to hate (mistrust) the men they can successfully change and eventually leave them.
Men can be men again, and many are undertaking ‘studies’ (labs, actually) to ‘regress’ back to that highly desirable goal.
It is possible for every man to be that man that his wife would cheat on him to be with, and it’s an immense gift to the woman when he can be, or become, that man. Being that man is an even bigger gift to himself.
It starts with simply being who he is and refusing to change simply because his woman demands it. Unapologetically. If all it takes to change a man is a woman screaming at him (or a few nights on the couch), how can a woman trust that man when *important* things (things that go beyond the desires of a single woman) are happening?
Since men are indeed loners (get over it), they can disclose their feelings, but never discuss them.
Men first need to know who they really are (and that is a book in itself) and then just be that man. Without apology or discussion.
It’s amazingly simple. It’s astoundingly hard.
I think this article highlights the thing we’re seeing in the recent union protests in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Once you have something, you never want to give it back, even if doing so would be fairer and better for society. It’s human nature to want this. In the unions’ case, it is generous benefits negotiated in the past, some of which grow ever more in value as time passes. In the case of women, it is the protective nature of society, the historical benefits that existed while then being outweighed by their second class status.
During the last fifty years, as women made the case that they were just as competent as men to be doctors, lawyers, CEOs, and scientists, they didn’t simultaneously make the case that men were just as competent parents and child rearers. Many women want to keep these advantages, the assumed custody and alimony in divorce court, the disparity in judging spousal abuse, the “she said” being taken over “he said”. They want men to keep holding the door and picking up the check.
I remember in college listening to routine paroxysms about bad men. Some seemed surprised I was not eager to listen to my inherent deficiencies. Too many girls outside of North America who don’t have this problem. When I met a few Au pairs I did not bother with American girls. I married a Russian 8 years ago. I can’t say I died happy because I am not dead yet.
I am a fairly patriarchal male, with a stay at home traditional wife and the father of a 21 year old college junior son;
having said that, what Helen Smith seems to be saying is “we act like doofus child-men because….wimmin hurt our fee fees”
Seriously? My advice to my son, and all the other young men out there is straighten up, turn that damned cap rightways, and act like men; if women want to call you names, get over it- may that be the worst slings and arrows you will suffer in this life!
If you are so fragile and childlike that disagreeable feminist notions make you behave like a doofus, well, you probably are proving the feminists right.
So, you’re a RealMan(TM).
So what is it exactly that make men so childish? Playing a video game that doesn’t tell him he’s an idiot like his wife does? Hang out with friends who don’t appoint themselves his ISO 9000 examiner? Play sports (do RealMen really opt to swipe their credit card for their wife’s purchase at Lane Bryant over swinging a bat)?
Sounds like the modern definition of immature is having a hobby that doesn’t retaliate with insults and more demands. But if men treated women they way women like Ms. Hymowitz treated men, the comments would also be telling men to shape up. And RealMen(TM) would be on board.
You have just proved that age does not equal wisdom.
We live in a judicial climate where a man’s children can be taken from him on a ‘no fault’ basis. Where a woman can jail a man based on a bogus accusation of ‘rape’ without any proof, just to gain sympathy.
You seem like someone who would happily jettison any notion of US constitutional rights, due process, and judicial fairness just to avoid having to hold a woman accountable for her behavior. Old woman-worshipping suckups like you are relics of a bygone age.
You are seriously misguiding your son if you fail to educate him about these things. Chances are, he knows more than you already.
The fundamental premise, that men have CHANGED to become their sorry state, is not explained. I hear stories about grandfathers, uncles, great-uncles, from back in the day who abused their wives, ignored their job responsibilities, and were generally drains on the others in their circle. This is not a NEW phenemenon and hence we need not compare before and after situations to discuss improvement. Getting men to step up to their obligations (and women too) is a timeless request always worth considering regardless of generation.
Phalates.
I’m reminded of this article:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/men-the-gender-wars-are-over-%E2%80%94-we-won/
For some reason, the Wall Street Journal has recently been stirring the cultural pot by promoting books written by the perpetually disgruntled or borderline psychotic.
First we have a tome on purportedly superior, albeit horribly abusive, parenting techniques written by a Yale law professor (hint – anytime an Ivy Leaguer tells you how to run your personal life, run away as fast and far as you can). Now we have Kay Hymowitz regurgitating the latest version of the “toxic male” complaint, which by my recollection has been around for 30 years and rapidly becoming stale.
If Professor Chua and Ms. Hymowitz represent the best that American womanhood has to offer, is it any wonder that young males are holed up in a basement bunker, watching ESPN, mainlining legal and illegal self-medications, and pondering that maybe, just maybe, turning gay isn’t a bad lifestyle choice.
Look, every American generation has contained layabouts, hustlers, moochers, substance abusers, manipulators, the chronically neurotic, the wildly histrionic, and others residing two standard deviations from the norm. Both genders have been richly represented. If you want to eternally miserable (but collect material for the next Wall Street Journal hyped book), establish strong professional and personal relationships with this dysfunctional lot.
But flying under the radar screen are millions of good and decent young Americans who struggle and succeed in pursuing happiness personally and professionally. For every young male living in arrested adolescence, I can name ten good, decent, and hardworking young men who display a maturity beyond their years.
And for every Professor Chua who calls her daughter “garbage” because a classical music piece isn’t performed perfectly, I can name dozens of American mothers who patiently spend hours helping their children overcome various learning disabilities. Then at the end of an exhausting day, these women get down on their knees to thank God for the blessing of that child, challenges and all. I watch these young men and women and literally cannot breathe because I am so in awe of them.
Your outlook on life is affected by your associations. If you want to walk in the sunshine, select friends, romantic partners, and professional associates who are decent, kind, optimistic, and hard-working people. If you want to tumble into the darkness, write books about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, or wrangle a tenured position at an Ivy League law school, hang around toxic, dysfunctional, antisocial, and neurotic folks. The choice is yours.
“Men Don’t Exist to Serve Women’s Desires”
Well, actually we sort of do. It’s just that we don’t exist to serve the desires women consciously recognize. It’s always been like that. We sit around an watch football, build cabinets, fix the cars, etc., and take a large ration of S*** if we sit down for a minute. But if somebody threatens the kids, well, Nellie bar the door, their life is in danger.
I am very very left wing and I love all of your articles about gender. Sometimes I just want to grab every woman that writes an article like the WSJ one, shake them, and yell “men are people not your f–king accessories!” in their ears until they either get it or call me an associate of the patriarchy and kick me out.
There is something seriously wrong in this country where women are given empowerment classes due to an academic shortage in STEM subjects while men are ridiculed for academic under performance in…everything else.
Dear Rose, If you really wanted to tell folks you deal with, “men are people not your f–king accessories!”, how can you possibly be, as you claim “very Left wing”? That is APOSTASY to the Left!
Ya know, the whole BS these feminists perpetuate really pisses me off and makes me want to break some faces, I’m an active combat U.S. Marine who’s toured Iraq&Afghanistan, I am currently in Afghanistan right now and looking at how pathetic the American Women and America in general is, it really makes me wonder why I’m putting my life and sanity on the line for all these worthless dipshits.
I’m 23 years old, 6 more months and I’m out of here, I’m going to go back home and pick up a easy job, sit on my ass and play video games, smoke pot and get drunk with my buddies, and be as promiscuous as I can possibly be. Because I simply don’t give a damn, WORK sucks, SCHOOL definitely sucks. I’m just going to spend my days doing absolutely whatever the hell I want and avoiding responsibilities and obligations as much as I can.
I don’t need some little slut with a degree in some soft science or some liberal arts crap writing blogs condemning Men like she has some divine authority…
Let me tell you dumb ass Women one thing, YOU DO NOT DICTATE WHAT MANHOOD IS, YOU ARE IRRELEVANT TO THE WHOLE PROCESS AND STANDARD OF MANHOOD, YOU HAVE NO SAY IN WHAT A MAN IS AND WHAT A MAN ISN’T.
Oh and THANK the non-existent God that the whole institution of marriage is dying out, my generation and the generations after my generation are NOT interested in marriage, I HOPE, I JUST HOPE marriage completely dies out from Western society. I WILL NOT hand my balls over to be squeezed by a whore and the state. NO SIR I WILL NOT. I’d rather just impregnate a Female, pay child support, and be as selfish and self-serving as I can possibly be.
TO HELL WITH MARRIAGE
TO HELL WITH FATHERHOOD
TO HELL WITH WORK
TO HELL WITH SCHOOL
AND TO HELL WITH DEFENDING THIS WORTHLESS, DYSFUNCTIONAL, DYING COUNTRY
A LOT of young Marines feel the same way as I do, to hell with Western civilization, let it die.
Thank you for your service troop. I won’t be as harsh, but I agree. Western culture is dying, and ISLAM will cause these feminists to rethink their position. Godspeed to you and the rest of our troops.
This right here, sums up why I won’t serve in the military. I know plenty in the Navy and Air Force who feel the same as you do. The fact of the matter is that the America we would give our lives defending IS NOT the America of today.
When you pile on the sheer number of people willing to trade liberty for security it really starts to sicken you doesn’t it.
Get home in one piece and I’ll buy you a beer if you’re ever in San Antonio.
> AND TO HELL WITH DEFENDING THIS WORTHLESS, DYSFUNCTIONAL, DYING COUNTRY
And thank you for providing direct, vivid, and depressing evidence that this is so.
If that’s the way you really feel, then take a look at this video to see what you’ll be subject to when you get back to the ‘states’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXb9f17fYhc
And in the last few weeks, there has been several cops shot and killed.
BUT, you have to think; Who is it that wants this crap? And right now, it looks like Obama and his regime in Washington. Recent events show that he and his cronies are just flat refusing to obey court orders, and apply the laws that they swore to uphold. And they are openly supporting the demonstrators in Wisconsin and other states.
America needs strong minded individuals like yourself. Was America GIVEN to US Americans? Hell no! We had to fight for it. And our Forefathers knew that to keep what we won, we would have to keep on fighting for it.
I like your passion, buddy. You have great possibilities if you use that passion to benefit you.
Enjoy your life, and have some kids and grandkids. You can pass on that passion to them. God knows how they, and America, is going to need it.
TO: DEVILDOG
RE: Coming to America
So you’re PO’d, eh?
Well. Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. But DO gird up your loins, because things are going to get ‘messy’ here in the not-too-distant future. And people with the sort of ‘skills’ you’ve gained of late—and I from 27 years in the infantry—are going to become VERY useful
However, I recommend your setting aside your anger and mellow out a bit before making any significant decisions. You remind me of myself when I came out of that ‘spa’ the Army operates out of Benning School for Boys….the Ranger Course. Took me MONTHS to calm down. For combat, I suspect it will take a couple of years. At least.
It would help to find a ‘good’ woman. Though they are few and far between, there ARE some out there. But, as in combat, you need to be VERY ‘paranoid’, because some of them….heck MANY of them….ARE ‘out to get you’. So be careful out there.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Here there be tigresses. -- a warning for 'hunters']
Ha! You’ll be back.
I left the Marines rather pissed off in ’95. You will get bored in the civilian world. In a year or two, you will be over your mad, you will miss your friends and the opprotunity to act like a Marine.
The National Guard, active Army, whatever, will start looking good (combat units only – trust me). A few months later you will be standing in formation and enjoying yourself. I had far more fun the second time around.
We need more of you with your attitude brother. If there were more of you way back when who had the gonads to stand up to these harridans, the world would be a much better place. There was nothing wrong with elevating the status of women. BUT IT WAS DOES BY DESTROYING MEN. That is the crux of the issue. I feel for you and I get what you are saying. You are not alone.
I have a nephew in Korea that came from a broken home in the states. His mother, whom he lived with all his life, died 6 years ago. He communicates with his dad, but I’m not sure what support he gets from his dad.
I keep trying to convince him that he should make a career out of the military, since the economy is so bad. Even for returning vets with hiring benefits from the military, employment is not good.
I was in the Air Force in the 60′s; I’m still in touch with my room mate from Okinawa, that had three tours in Viet Nam. He retired, and is living pretty good on his retirement. I’m retired civilian and doing okay. I do wish I had stayed in the military to retire.
There are always going to be dumb-shits like these pathetic women that turn their psychoses into a career, and get grants for their ‘studies’.
Like I said before; I like your passion. Qualities like that can’t be wasted. You can click on my name, which will take you to my blog, and leave a comment or message that will remain confidential.
I give you my promise that I’ll do whatever I can to help you out.
TO: All the Follow-On Commenters of this Sub-Thread
RE: WHY….
….am I suddenly reminded of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
Particularly the opening scenes of the high school ‘civics’ class taught by the one-armed veteran. Wherein he states….
This year in history, we talked about the failure of democracy. How the social scientists of the 21st Century brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.
Heh….
Heinlein wrote that novel in 1959.
How prescient can you get?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. -- Isaac Asimov]
P.S. Well….maybe Heinlein’s associate was wrong in this instance…..
A follow-on tag-line that correlates well with my previous missive….
….democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. — John Adams
Maybe that’s why the Founding Fathers set US up as a representative republic and not a democracy.
However, since then, we’ve turned ourselves INTO a democracy more and more with each passing year. Forgetting the words of John Adams.
Doubt this?
Look at the popular election of Senators, taking power from the state-level government. Look at Reynolds v. Simms (SCOTUS 1964) that turned the state senates into nothing more than over-paid state representatives. In Colorado, the Denver-metroplex now holds 17 of the 35 senate seats. And guess where all the resources—water, finances, etc.—of the state are migrating to. Three guess. First two don’t count.
There’s a good reason why the east-west US Hwy 50, in southern Colorado doesn’t get much maintenance. It’s because it doesn’t serve Denver.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session. -- Benjamin Franklin]
Hello brother Devildog,
American, and to a lesser extent Western women, don’t know how good they have it. If islam destroys this great country our women will have gotten what they wanted, the destruction of white male SUPERIORITY. And then where will they be? Chattel, who, if they peep in protest may very well be beaten to death. But there are many men in this country who do not kowtow to rubberdick females and will do the chivalrous thing to defend their beloved and their way of life to the death. I implore you, as one leatherneck to another, do not turn your back on the civilized world because of a few whiny bitches. America and the world needs the bravery and intestinal fortitude of The Few, The Proud. Otherwise the world will turn into the shithole in which you are currently esconced. Keep fighting the good fight and know that when we men surrender, all hope is lost, as are we.
Semper Fidelis, and never forget what those words mean, teufulhunden.
I have read the WSJ article and the article above, and I have learned more about this subject of modern expectations of manhoodness and womanhoodness than in any book. It is all interesting.
One or two observations can be made, but they are rather mundane. On the one hand we have parents saying in their comments that they (all) are raising THEIR sons to be manly and what not and avoid this and that. And on the other hand there are parents that are saying they are raising THEIR daughters to be lady like and whatnot and avoid this and that. Well, someone somewhere is lying if both parties are complaining about the way the modern adult generation is failing fundamental moral and social expectations. Its all rather droll. Someone is lying, America is lying. Now everyone, we can truly say, is a victim of some sort of discrimination.
So why aren’t we happy? Maybe in America’s unhappiness, America actually is. If somewhere there was a plan to destabilize America’s moral integrity, trust and decency, well, the plan has succeeded.
But it is also rather droll to point out that America is still basically all about money, wealth and property. If you think not, its because you probably have them. If the male does not have any of these things, then he is considered undesirable, and because of Educational debts and jobs that deny long-term income security, there are currently a lot of them. Paradoxically then, and colaterally speaking, there are indeed only a few good men in America today; otherwise there are plenty of good men. The current banking fiasco has more than financial fallout. This is worth examination, especially when the fabric of America’s morality has always been married to the wealth of its citizens.
When error and complaint is made by both parties about current conditions or circumstances, whatever those circumstances may be, and whomsoever those parties may be, then it could be argued that such a society has reached its true state of equilibrium, its default state.
A penniless, jobless, divorced-wracked indebted America has now found something else to squabble over.
When homes are considered collateral investments to be bought and sold to make money, and they are in America, it makes sense to say that the occupants odf such “homes” will never have any sense of community or social loyalty.
TO: Sally
RE: Good Point….
When homes are considered collateral investments to be bought and sold to make money, and they are in America, it makes sense to say that the occupants odf such “homes” will never have any sense of community or social loyalty. — Sally
….that. People don’t invest their heart in a community that they don’t intend to live in for any SERIOUS length of time. It’s just rental property, with the enhanced benefit of gambling for potential profit. And therein lies the proverbial rub. ALL RENTALS go down the toilet. And the more ‘rental’ attitude there is in a community the more likely it will go down the toilet as well.
RE: Another Aspect
As with DEVILDOG (above), there is a lack of godliness. Indeed, outright hatred for God. And therein is the moral sewer that the community is going into.
As with the Israelites after Solomon, went away from God’s love, they sank into a moral sewer that they would not get out of. And look what happened to them…..the Babylonians arrived and cleaned their clock.
So we’ve—as a nation—have raised up the proverbial generation of vipers. And the video that Cybergeezer links to in the DEVILDOG sub-thread, manifests that PERFECTLY.
RE: Where Does that Leave US?
On the brink of (1) disaster and (2) the fulfillment of prophecy.
Things are going to get VERY ‘interesting’. RATHER SOON….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible. -- George Washington]
As the father of two girls, now women with children of their own, I used to impart the following: Find a man like a wolf, one who will circle and protect you and your offspring. He needn’t be “nice” and it’s not important that I either like or love him, but make sure he is your warrior. It was in my self-interest, of course, that I taught my girls this principle in selecting a mate: It was in the interest of survival, theirs and, ultimately, of mine. I lived through the awakening of “female” power and feminism but never altered my stance. As older adolescents and young women, my daughters laughed at me and my “old” views on relationships and women. In the end, however, they found men who would, and could, protect them while they were busy making and raising babies. As a result, my own spiritual and genetic survival is highly likely if anot assured. Both girls, as women, are proud, capable and respectful human beings. Whatever modern day western feminism and its resulting effects did, it never could do away with the basic principles of male-female relationships no matter how perverted and distorted modern feminism has altered them.
Thanks, Doc.
Hey lady! Why don’t you just go get a dog?
I think what you are saying is feminism is not about equal rights but about rights for women and until it embraces the idea of equal rights, we will continue to have the strange (unhealthy) dynamic we have currently.
Or as somebody once put it: The real underlying principle of feminism is that women should have options and men should have obligations. That certainly is the way that it has played out.
That “someone” is Warren Farrell. He wrote it (and a lot more) in this book.
I am completely fascinated by this whole dialogue that is actually popping up everywhere. I have a Masters in Counseling Psychology and I have to say that I was completely unaware that men were feeling this way. And I understand now what their gripe’s are. It does appear that in some ways there is a pendulum effect that has occurred. In other words at a point in time women’s rights were not supported and women, and the ways in which we engage in the world, were considered less than. However, as women have started to come into their own so to speak it seems as if they’ve done what many people who feel they’ve been “victimized” or “subjugated” do. They either over-identify with “the oppressor”, so you do still have the women who to a fault defend men who are not actually respectful of our gender. Or you attack or belittle; trying to put the “perpetrator” in their place. Either to make them feel what you felt, or to feel recompense.
Neither stance is healthy. First it rules out the individual. No one should be held responsible for what another did. Second, it’s based on historical trends and not present-centered analysis and critical thinking. There are many amazing respectful men out there who are being disrespected, and mistreated because of some idea of what “men” are.
Also, in terms of equality. We are not equal in all ways. That’s what makes both individuals and genders unique. What should be equal is our legal rights. There’s no reason why any of us should get obsessed with acting like we are equal in all ways. But we also don’t need to stand up and point out all the ways our gender is better. I think that part of the problem is everyone is in an aggressive stance, and therefore evokes defensiveness on the other side.
Bottom line problem I see, is that women are trying to make men more like women. We have to start respecting individuals, and genders, for who they naturally are and what they are drawn to in the world. That’s not to say we should tolerate mistreatment and abusive behavior. But I think we should stop trying to box anyone into some ideal of what they should be. We have been pushing men to be both masculine, protective, and caretaking, and at the same time sensitive, question-asking, loving, and equal in parenting, too often. I get it. The pendulum has swung too far and there are a lot of unfair expectations. And frankly a denial of reality on our part as women. How fair is it to expect someone to bear the whole financial burden let’s say yet not contribute in any way in return like let’s say cooking meals for instance. I have male friends who do take the whole financial burden- working their asses off at high stress jobs- and then have wives who feel entitled to that without any exchange of resources. If it’s about partnership and you don’t have the money to equally contribute do your best to give time, energy, kindness, whatever resources are available to you.
This is not to say all couples are like this. Plenty of marriages now are more equal in the sense that both people contribute- men take care of kids, and women contribute equally financially. And in no way should we be tallying everything. But all in all it is unfair to expect anyone to naturally and willingly do whatever stereotypical behavior you think they have to. Whether it’s a man assuming that their working wife should also be responsible for ALL childcare because she’s a woman, or a woman expecting a man should pay for everything because he’s a man.
I get why men are so angry and writing as forcefully as they are. There is not an outlet that is understanding towards them. It’s typical to support the “underdog” and at a point in our history we really were the underdog. In the sense of their was (and in some ways still is) a power dynamic. Men are more physically powerful, so they can do things to us, or make us do things we wouldn’t want. (And while it’s not the norm, it’s still very prevalent.) Men also are still more represented in position of influence like politics, and finance. And yes men, you still get paid more for the same jobs. This all implies a power differential. That’s why a lot of people don’t worry about what’s happening on your side.
Yet in truth, your being misunderstood, judged, and in many ways mistreated. That is never acceptable.
My hope though is that all the staunch feminist’s and diehard men on the other side, can lower their weapons and look at this dilemma. As long as we attack the other it doesn’t work.
I’m fascinated in this whole debate. I would love to start interviewing some of you guys too. I think more women like me need to understand what you all are facing. A lot of the problem lies in ignorance.
Vanessa
May you can co-author a book with Dr. Helen.
No one needed to masters degree in psychology to see the obvious. This has been written about here and there for years but has been gaining traction because of the sheer numbers of young men dealing with this exacerbated by Obama’s Great Recession. If you know any young men, and many from the older generation who still haven’t been neutered you would have discovered this for yourself. There is a tremendous amount of cynicism and resentment circulating around. The question is always asked: why are young men not attending colleges in greater and greater numbers? Why? Why would they when the curriculum, the teachers, the agenda are all arrayed against them? Why should they when the first prerequisite of acceptance is to drain oneself of testosterone before crossing the threshold? I get a kick out of people who hail from the psychology background. Most are clueless about reality and what is going on around them. But then most people I know who majored in this subject did so in an attempt to explain themselves and deal with their own issues. It’s a solipsistic endeavor which tends to blind one to the larger picture.
I think you’re right Scythe. You don’t need a masters degree to understand this dynamic- though I actually think that’s obvious. And sometimes psychology focuses so much on the individual that it does not take into account the larger social dynamics that contribute to, or even create, certain attitudes and values. So right again.
Having said that, I don’t spend a lot of time trolling the internet reading blogs. And truth be told men are not speaking about this dynamic to me. It was only when one of my male friends started discussing it that I started to ask around and look around more. Of course once I opened my eyes to it I saw that it was everywhere and that actually a lot of men are upset. Until then though I was ignorant because it’s hard to put yourself into someone else’s shoes or perceive realities that are so far removed from your own. You don’t even know to look for them.
Much like many of you can’t understand what it means to be a woman. You absolutely cannot know what it is like to grow up female in this country and what you have to navigate because of that. Maybe that’s why so many men in this response section have spouted out such angry, hate-filled ignorance about women.
If you look statistically almost 40% of women in this country have been victims of physical and/or sexual abuse, at the hands of men primarily. 15% of men have also been victims. Can you imagine how that twists someone to make them angry at men in general? But, how fair is that? Most men are not perpetrators and don’t deserve to be judged or mistreated because of the actions of another.
Well similarly, how can some of you attack all women as gold-digging whores who are trying to crush men’s spirits….?
While many of us may remain ignorant to men’s experience in this country, at least there are women on this site trying to understand what’s happening. But your gender are not just victims of the feminist revolution. This dynamic wasn’t created in a vacuum by women alone perpetrating something on men. It was co-created by ignorance, judgement, malevolence and egos. I’m just saying maybe it’s time to drop the attack and figure out something else.
You as an psycologist will have no problems to connect the dots between
http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCjDxAwfXV0
You need to start a blog, something like what many other people here have.
You can click my moniker to go to my blog.
These blogs take comments in confidentiality, if you want, and you can reply at your own convenience. You will get plenty of feedback; Maybe more than you want, but, it’s a start.
DOH! Didn’t notice the “V”; See you there.
If you wish to see, just open your eyes and look.
I see you threw us a bone, but if I may paraphrase “I see you men are angry, but, although I am validating that anger, women still have it much worse, let’s have a dialog based on women’s greater victimhood.”.
Now let’s see if you are open minded enough to question some of your dubious assumptions and obviously questionable statistics.
I’ll dig up some nice male-centric reading from people (men and women) that are in your field.
Cool. Throw me whatever you got. I’d love to read it. I don’t see how you could say my stats are wrong, but I would be happy to learn something different.
I can see where you could get that idea from what I wrote but it’s not really my intention. I guess to a certain extent to a certain extent the way you read me could have some truth to it that even I was not aware of. I do believe that because of the physical power differential it’s hard for men to know what it’s like to be in a woman’s shoes. But I can also see the ignorance in that as even men have to deal with power differentials with other men- and even sometimes women. (Whether as men or children.) I’m sure we all know what that feels like to have someone stronger, or just more violent than us who if they choose could hurt us or force us to do something. So my bad on the ignorant implication.
The bottom line is, I don’t think that working to crush, twist, or contort anyone so they fit what you want is okay- whether women are doing it to men, or men are doing it to women. I think one of the dilemmas is that they ways in which men had done it to women were more obvious for a long time. However, I think that as many people pointed out things like the way men are treated when it comes to custody and divorce are astonishing.
My point was that none of this exists in a vacuum. There is a background to story to this that feeds into the perverse dynamic that is going on. And I do not think it is justifiable that anyone holds another person accountable for what happened to them at the hands of someone else but it’s only my mothers generation that the attitudes towards women were unjustifiably minimizing and that their freedoms were extremely limited without harsh societal consequences. So it’s still a bit of a fresh wound for a lot of women. And mothers passed their fears and angers onto their daughters.
I only think this is important to bring in to the dialogue for the men who are writing with such anger, and judgement towards women. Nobody here stands alone in beating treated poorly- not men or women. The goal to me is about creating more understanding of what is happening, treating people as individuals not just members of a “gender” group, and acting with integrity in whatever we think is the right thing to do. It just softens things a bit if you can have compassion for the people that you may otherwise be slinging arrows at.
What a bunch of bitter, creepy, deluded, sniveling, unaware, self-absorbed penis-owners. Wipe your noses, boys. Grow up.
First, you are a woman. Your attempt at impersonation is amateurish, toots.
Second, you precisely proved the point of the whole article Dr. Helen (a real woman) wrote.
Men don’t need you, but you need them. The free ride is up, toots.
Troll.
With free keyboards and cheap internet connections, who needs a real life?
Yeah, grow up and do as your told.
Two words: Jules Feiffer :>
The cartoon strip I have in mind shows the back of a sofa in each frame
with awkward teenage hands and feet peeking around it, and captioned
critiques by the girl of the boy’s make-out techniques.
In the final frame he is walking away while she watches in disbelief;
The caption reads: ‘Frack this, I am going to shoot hoops with the guys.’
Devildog, I just prayed for you young brother. I’m sure you don’t want my prayers to a “non-existent god”, but I did nonetheless. I prayed for you and our other brothers to come home safe, to find happiness in your life after the green machine, updated that you will realize thar despite it’s faults, there are things in this country that are worth defending. i was where you are 20 years ago, leading combat patrols in northern iraq, 2/8, and generally disgusted with everything going on in the world. Hang in there and Semper Fi.
What 117. Graham said. Man up, indeed. What a bunch of babies. I don’t know men like this. Well, maybe a couple, of how a woman done him wrong. Maybe they should get a dog.
Precisely what is the point of your comment(s)? More specifically, what would you suggest instead of complaining…homicide perhaps?
While feminists have become more militant in their quest for superiority over males (see every TV commercial, where a woman is smart and clever and the male figure is a bumbling idiot), like Kay Hymowitz, they simultaneously want to be adored by men. To Kay and her “empowered” female friends, I’ll state the obvious:
In order to be adored, you must first be adorable. Whining about what’s wrong with men is not adorable.
TO: Son of Bob
RE: Heh
In order to be adored, you must first be adorable. — Son of Bob
I heard this many years ago, in a different format.
The only way to have a friend is to be one. — Ralph Waldo Emerson [19th Century]
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before them I may think aloud. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson]
P.S. My best friend is my wife.
such a great article, and such good commentary, I would have liked to hear from some more gals, but the article probably angers many of them.
truth hurts
(and yes, I agree with many others here, for a guy getting married today is crazy, it doesn’t make any sense, there is no value-added)
make a choice ladies, what do you want? a man or a child? if you want a man, then let us be men!
Trust me, this is one woman who wasn’t angered at ALL by this article. If anything, I was cheering! I’ve been saying this exact same thing for YEARS!
CHUCK PELTO: You are so right about the coming(but necessary)armaggedon.Ever since the 60′s the west has been destroying itself with catastrophic utopian experiments against reality(Kimball).The most destructive of these is gender feminism.Reality will not be denied;it will bite this virulent and false progressivism, when, in the coming civil war,men re-assert themselves in their traditional role as warriors and protectors of family, livelihood,and honor.
Something to keep in mind while we are all discussing the idea that women are trying to make men more like women: Woman generally hate each other’s guts. Nowhere will you find groups of women that have the camaraderie, mutual trust and bonds of friendship that groups of men take for granted. You just won’t. My experience, only personal of course, is that compared to the men around them, most women don’t even have any real friends. They don’t even know what actual friendships are. Meanwhile, they’re fed all this Ya Ya Sisterhood, Thelma and Louise bullshit constantly.
Obviously, this is a huge generalization. But not a wrong one, I think.
One of the side effects of this is that they have no idea how be anyone’s real friend, or what is expected of them in that role. I see women around me all the time in this situation. And usually, the more worthy of that kind of friendship a woman is, the more she finds herself shunned and back-stabbed by other women. It’s actually really brutal and sad and lonely looking.
Men need other men around who they feel they can trust, otherwise life is just too dangerous and lonely. Street gangs, sports teams, car clubs, whatever. Men have an inherent need to be around at least some other ‘Solid Dudes’ that have their back.
Women aren’t that way. And they don’t understand why men are.
P.S. And woe betide the man who seeks to fulfill this friendship need within the confines of his marriage and his wife. She ain’t your friend, she’s your wife. Totally different, more intimate, more complicated deal. Men and women weren’t designed to be ‘Gender Buddies’. They were designed to make babies and kick the universes’ ass while it tried to kill them. And that is a special bond indeed.
There were multiple Crusades to rescue Christians in the Holy Land. Even a Children’s Crusade. Ever wonder why there was no Women’s Crusade?
This is to all you feminist harpies out there: I have no problem with commitment; I want to commit and get married. I just don’t want to commit to you! So if you wonder where all the good men are, know that there are plenty out there, but none with any common sense who want anything to do with you.
TO: John2
RE: Indeed
Woman generally hate each other’s guts. Nowhere will you find groups of women that have the camaraderie, mutual trust and bonds of friendship that groups of men take for granted. You just won’t. — John2
I can vouch for THAT as the truth. I won’t name names, just yet, but I serve at a state-level with such an organization and I’ve seen a LOT of EXACTLY THAT. Furthermore, for some very ‘odd’ reason, they seem to hate ME even more than they hate are inclined to hate each other. Me being the first man in decades, if not forever, who has served in a state-level elected office in this group.
Talk about thin-skinned. I made a reference to how sad it was that a major piece of digitial artwork for publicity purposes—a beautiful banner—was ‘lost’ through no one bothering to save it to a DVD. And what did I get for my ‘unfortunate’ remark?
I was told that I was “rude” and “judgmental” for stating the obvious truth of the loss of some very useful and lovely data, that could have been readily saved.
Many of these people have no regard for either the truth or each other. And when you attempt to bring them up to the 21st Century from the 19th….three guesses….first two don’t count.
And these are more ‘mature’ women than the sort one generally associates with this thread’s topic. Therefore the problem seems to be ‘genetic’ as well as ‘cultural’.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Life is not the 'garden' people would wish it were.]
There’s a country song that sounds exactly like this story; Something about a lost dog, repossessed pickup truck, not enough money for beer, and a girlfriend (boyfriend) caught screwing around in your trailer.
It’s enough to make me order another beer!
“Hey; Bartender!”
TG
I believe you speak truth, because I have no reason to assume otherwise. While I don’t appreciate the implied justification of current injustices some or perhaps many men feel, I am repulsed by the way the men on this strand have ganged up on you and called your integrity in to question. I’m reminded of the way Bill Maher speaks about Palin. It is disrespectful and smacks of latent sexism. To my brethren who will undoubtedable view me as a limp wristed pansy who has been brainwashed and indoctrinated by a liberal, feminist, man hating neo- nazi school system hell bent on the destruction of men, if it makes you feel better, have at me. In my I knocked out many a “manly man” my day and took my share of lumps as a champion fighter. At least I don’t have to bully one woman who dares say something I dislike with the help of a few of my cyber-buddies from the safety of my desk in my cushy home in complete anonymity.
MAN UP!
Charge of Misogyny (Code Black)
Discussion: The target is accused of displaying some form of unwarranted malice to a particular woman or to women in general. Examples:
* “You misogynist creep!”
* “Why do you hate women?”
* “Do you love your mother?”
* “You are insensitive to the plight of women.”
* “You are mean-spirited.”
* “You view women as doormats.”
* “You want to roll back the rights of women!!”
* “You are going to make me cry.”
Response: One may ask the accuser how does a pro-male agenda become inherently anti-female (especially since feminists often claim that gains for men and women are “not a zero-sum game”). One may also ask the accuser how do they account for women who agree with the target’s viewpoints. The Code Black shaming tactic often integrates the logical fallacies of “argumentum ad misericordiam” (viz., argumentation based on pity for women) and/or “argumentum in terrorem” (viz., arousing fear about what the target wants to do to women).
http://exposingfeminism.wordpress.com/shaming-tactics/
Or you can reply to one of the shaming tactics with “No, but I do consider most women to be too manipulative, hypocritical and treacherous to bother with.” then just walk away. I’m no longer interested in getting into dominance struggles with women, I just want to improve my life.
I actually believe in God, but I got a bit frustrated, but the last time me and my buddies almost got hit by an IED in Helmand, I said “Oh god help me”, haha. Like they say “There are no atheists in foxholes”.
I love being a Marine, even though I hate it. Love America and will fight until my last stand for this country, even though I despise the political shenanigans going on and many of the social issues. My recent frustrations come from the political correctness and corruption from within, the USMC has been very resistant considering we’re the most conservative branch, but we’ve noticed there’s a lot of b.s. that’s starting to leak into our beloved Corps. It frustrates a lot of us younger devildogs.
Other than that, I honestly cannot understand how Women like Kay Hymowitz get off, they have such delusions of grandeur, such arrogance. I don’t hate Women because I’ve grown up around some pretty great Women, the thing with the Women I grew up around is they never needed feminism’s BS to hold them up, they just carried their own weight and remained their natural feminine selves, it made us Men respect and admire them, and they vice versa. But you have loud, arrogant, pseudo-intellectual feminists like Kay Hymowitz who just give me a migraine with their neurotic behavior.
The thing is, these Women have not achieved the illusion of equality based on merit, they achieved it by directly attacking Boys&Men and using government to undermine us. True scumbags if I ever recognized one.
A decade or so of success built by dirty tactics and attacks, government muscle, corruption and deceit, and these Women think they’re goddesses of the universe. Lets just go ahead and ignore the whole fact that Men built, created, and innovated DAMN NEAR everything around them. Feminists are parasites that leech off of an already established, successful system. Without that successful system, feminism exists no more.
We all recognize where our beloved country is going, I bet you when times get tough and the road gets rocky, parasitic, pseudo-intellectual feminists will retreat, and Men will have to rebuild back to greatness. As usual. We carry the Human species and civilization on our shoulders. You don’t need feminists, but you will always need Men.
TO: DEVILDOG
RE: Belief In the ‘Improbable’
Heh. Been there, albeit in peacetime. A malfunctioning parachute on night on an EDRE insertion. All tangled up coming out of the C141 in the dark of night.
Plummeting down and knowing I was in a world of hurt in the next few seconds. Scant seconds before impact, that ‘still small voice’ was screaming in my ear “PREPARE TO LAND!!!!”
All that repetitive training in Jump School so many years before came into play. I snapped into the landing posture one second before impact.
I could hear feet pounding up to me and a voice asking, “Are you alright? ARE YOU ALRIGHT!!!?!?!”
Spreadeagled on the ground, face down, I did a fingertips to toes inventory. Everything ‘worked’.
As I stood up, there was a funny sound from the weapons case. Opening it up, all the plastic on the M16 came spilling out. The barrel was bent as well.
It’s kind of ‘funny’ how the Big Guy works in ones Life.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[God may be subtle, but He's not plain mean.]
Nice reply. Integrity is difficult to maintain when being assaulted for simply being loyal to your basic beliefs.
And your basic beliefs are shared by the majority of people here, even though we don’t have the loudest voices.
Godspeed, soldier.
And keep in touch through this site. We need discourse like yours.
TO: DEVILDOG, et al.
RE: What WILL Become of Them
I bet you when times get tough and the road gets rocky, parasitic, pseudo-intellectual feminists will retreat, and Men will have to rebuild back to greatness. As usual. We carry the Human species and civilization on our shoulders. You don’t need feminists, but you will always need Men. — DEVILDOG
Ever read a book on cataclysmic catastrophism titled Lucifer’s Hammer?
Written in the mid-1970s by the greatest pairing of science fiction authors of the 20th Century, it’s about exactly that. And in it there is a superb line….
The feminist movement died milliseconds after the first impact.
I highly recommend it for anyone who has even the slightest interest in survivalism and rebuilding civilization from near ‘scratch’. It also provides some fascinating insight into what Noah went through.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[I'm betting that I'm just abnormal enough to survive. -- The Tick]
P.S. There is a growing body of scientific evidence that this ball-o-dirt has been ‘whacked’ five times by something that knocks civilization back on it’s knees….if not outright on its face. And comets appear to be the most likely culprit. Where do you think the Biblical Flood and all the other world-wide ‘mythos’ of cataclysmic flooding come from?
Here’s a link to an interesting article about the theory. The article originally appeared at space.com. However, it looks like they’ve deprecated it into their archives and is now available elsewhere.
It’s been almost 1500 years since the last such incident. That one brought the tottering Roman Empire into the dust and resulted in 500 years of the Dark Ages. Mean time to ‘event’ appears to be 720+ years. So we’re fortunate to have built civilization up to the point it is today without another such event.
Enjoy…..
P.P.S. It is not without good reason that comets are considered….Stars of ill omen.
Marriage is dead, it just aint buried yet. It is pointless for decent women – ie those who aren’t gold diggers or manipulators- and harmful to men. It asks men to give up a huge amount of freedom and self-determination in exchange for exactly nothing. Men my age (42) didn’t realize this till we were well into our thirties, the young men are realizing it in their late teens, early twenties. For being this perceptive and independent they should be praised, not demeaned with terms like “man-child”.
TO: Michael Claymore
RE: Ya Wanna See….
Marriage is dead, it just aint buried yet. It is pointless for decent women – ie those who aren’t gold diggers or manipulators- and harmful to men. — Michael Claymore
….what that mentality gets ya?
Go visit most inner city communities such as Detroit.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[It takes a family to raise a child....properly.]
A woman wrote a book about ‘manning up’ and barely talked to ANY men. Hhhmmm.
Move along gentlemen. Nothing to see here.
Gents? If you want to SEE what happens in the divorce courts? Click here.
http://www.youtube.com/user/peternolan1109?feature=mhum
I am the first man to bring this evidence out. The transcript is in the drop down box so you can read along with the video. It’s 40 minutes or so. It’s the best evidence you will ever need to see what a bunch of criminals the magistrates are.
THIS is what Kate HorrorHead wants you to ‘man-up’ for.
BRAVO. I have been preaching this exact same thing for YEARS, and I always get the same reaction. “Oh, M, you’re over-reacting.” No, I’m not. Men are treated like second class citizens today. Why do we expect our boys and young men to grow and thrive when every man on television is treated like a fat buffoon or a sexist pig? When the “smart” character is so often a woman, while the “dumb” character is usually a man?
We have scholarships up the ying yang for women to attend college, but scholarships for men? Find me one that isn’t contingent on some other demographic — African-American men, for example. Just a scholarship for MEN. Good luck.
We have research dollars poured into breast cancer research. We have NFL players wearing pink on the playing field in support of breast cancer research. We have pink ribbons of every description for sale in every store across the country for breast cancer research. All of these things are laudable, but I have to ask: where is the corresponding fervor for prostate cancer research? For testicular cancer research? For men’s health issues, period?
Drug and alcohol use continues to rise in the female population, and this has caused a lot of chatter in scientific and government circles. “We have to find out why women are drinking and drugging more. We have to stop this.” Yet male rates of drinking and drugs are ALWAYS higher than female rates, and they’re ignored. “That’s what men do,” seems to be the attitude.
Young men are infinitely more likely to be victims of homicide, but that statistic is dismissed. “As you can see, the rate of death from heart disease is creeping up among women. And men, too, but look at the women! Oh, and most young men — particularly young black men — die from homicide. But whatever, WOMEN ARE DYING FROM HEART ATTACKS!”
Women have WIC (“Women, Infants and Children”). There’s no program like that directed at men.
Women have shelters to escape abusive homes. Men are much less likely to seek help, and less likely to find safe harbor if they DO go looking. More likely they’ll be laughed at for not being “man enough” to take care of the situation themselves, or they won’t be believed at all.
All of this makes me sick. I’m a woman, and the treatment of men in our society absolutely disgusts me. But I’m even MORE upset by the seeming ambivalence of other women about this issue. They don’t see the problem. That’s why I was so grateful to see this article, Ms. Smith. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU.
MWR,
then please come over and say the same thing over here:
http://tnsradio.ning.com/forum
I have been telling these people that men are treated terribly in our society for more than 18 months now. For this they call me a ‘woman-hater’. It’s about time more women spoke out about this.
What I find funny is that her WSJ article seems to bag on men for not growing up, but one (the one and only 5 star reviewer of her book at Amazon thus far) reviewer makes these points with my thoughts on a few:
3) As such, women in their 20s have sharply-reduced interest in getting married – and even less interest in marrying fellow 20-somethings. It’s not that no woman in her 20s marry any guy in his 20s. Many do. But the percentages are way down.
4) Instead of getting married, attractive young women go out and play the field. But they don’t play the whole field — and that’s the key. They generally focus on the most appealing guys: the “alpha” males. Vivacious 20-something women have little interest in drudges, unattractive guys, late bloomers, short guys, introverted guys, etc etc. As a result, roughly half of males can’t get a decent date during their 20s. Hymowitz has read the work of the amateur evolutionary psychologists in the “seduction community” and appears to agree with roughly 80% of their findings: Young attractive women overwhelmingly seek alpha males. As a consequence, she writes, “beta” males have been the primary losers in the sexual revolution.
My thought – Myself being a a normal/average guy I would have to say “no shit Sherlock!!!” We’ve known that for years and she is just figuring that out.
5) Beta males are the key to the whole story. A beta male is frequently a male who is trying to be a man by doing the right thing: He works hard to learn the difficult trades demanded in the modern economy; he treats women with respect and deference, he is generally sober, he spends a lot of time trying to understand prevailing political and philosophical currents. As a result, he is very unlikely to be the seductive Prince Charming that today’s young women have been brought up to expect as their birthright. He just doesn’t have the time – and it probably hasn’t occurred to him that that’s what women want. So, he loses the girl to the bad boys, the “natural alphas” and the successful guys in their 30s.
My thought – Again, see my comment directly above. Aren’t “respect and deference” the very things that so-called feminists have clamored for?
6) Women in their 30s who are still unmarried (roughly half nowadays) often begin to get the urge to marry and settle down. But the pickings are slimmer. The women are somewhat less attractive, they have fewer years of fertility remaining and the remaining single men their own age are less interested. Many men in their 30s and 40s have become bitter or dropped out of the dating scene due to years of rejection. Others have been wiped out in a divorce.
My thought – And then we have twits like Hymowitz come along and try to bitch at us guys when ladies have been blowing us off for years. FRAK YOU Hymowitz!!!
7) Hymowitz has a good discussion of the negative impact of no-fault divorce laws on the marriage landscape. Roughly 70% of divorces are initiated by women – yet women get the kids almost every time. They also get child support. Once they have the kids and the money, it’s a fairly easy matter to get a restraining order on a man who wants to see his kids. Obviously there are many deadbeat dads out there. But there are also many successful men who have been raked over the coals — and it’s the successful men that women are interested in.
My thought – “Successful men” — in other words, $$$
8) Hymowitz really offers no solution to the man-child issue, which is fair because I don’t think there are any practical solutions. One thing that would solve the problem would be if women, during their years of peak attractiveness and fertility (say. between the ages of 21 and 29) suddenly chose, en masse, to forego years of playing the field and instead settled down with the hard-working, unexciting guys their own age whom they are now ignoring. These guys would get their dream girls – and they would work hard to support them and raise a family. The man-child phenomenon would be over because players and pick-up artists would find no more willing girls out seeking alpha males for a quick and exciting fling. Of course, the chances of this happening are not high.
Thought – yet again, no shit Sherlock. But will this happen with many western women? Nope. Even many of my female friends, all educated and professional, have critiqued their fellow gender.
Is a mail order bride our only option????
I find women from Hispanic culture, NOT Americanized latinas, to be much more attractive than WASP/Catholic women. While WASP women are more trouble than they’re worth, Catholic women don’t have as big a downside. So, to answer your question, are mail order brides the only option? From my point of view they are the best option, not the only option. Unless, you are incredibly lucky and find the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Bear in mind the John Wayne (or any of his characters) would be “Beta” and unworthy of female attention today… being moral, upright and expending effort on any of that is inutuitively seen as submitting to standards outside one’s self and thereby being weak. Taking what one wants, without regard to anyone else, and avoiding responsibility for one’s actions is appealingly “Alpha” and arousing. (Of course, this is why criminals, rapists and marauding Huns are bad and decent people own guns… unfortunately, entitled suburbanites without exposure to consequences [including today's liberal-minded empowered females] don’t grasp that until they wind up on the bad end of that.)
alpha, beta, delta, gamma male. Look at the modern American woman portrayed in soaps, sitcoms, Hollywood films. Many young, well groomed, well toned, with good figures, fashionably dressed to set off their charms, some really physically beautiful. With law degrees, psychology, medical and PR high paying jobs in fashionablee venues. Presumably the “role models” for their “sisters”. Why do they complain. They got, and took, what they wanted.
But look at their behaviours: for the most part indiscriminate coupling except that the “partner” must meet the competition with their friends. They too must have degrees from or be professores at elite colleges, be “professionals”, rich, stockbrokers, and “equal” with the women. Doesn’t seen to be anything wrong with those traits, except the indiscriminate. What man worth his salt marries an indiscriminate woman. What an insult to his amour propre. Or why buy the cow when you get the milk free. The sort of thing their so yesterday mothers would have told them if they dared.
And how these modern women do look down their well shaped and groomed noses at housewives and stay at home mothers who like what they do, love and care for their many? or few children, have faithful and caring husbands who are salesmen, technicians, engineers, small businessmen,
soldiers, policemen, you get the picture.
Then they open their mouths. If they don’t actually have voices like a pre-teen 12 year old, or the tones of their assertiveness so praised by their feminist mentors they instantly inform their requirements. They lack patience to let things develop. They must be in control, despite the ease with which they couple.
Were I a man, I wouldn’t touch most of these women with a ten foot pole. Even for physical release, which can be obtained in many other ways.
NO living male of any real value can meet their standards, or I suspect would want to. So they take as second best the metrosexuals who don’t give a damn about women except to get their leg over and pass on. Very easy with compliant modern women.
Whatever the weaknesses of the Hymowitz essay, Dr. Smith does not offer a convincing rebuttal. If I read her correctly, she theorizes that gender politics, especially the punitiveness of family law, has caused the deterioration of the young American male. Maybe she can generate some interviews that support her, but the actual patterns of American life fail to match any observable implications I would derive from Dr. Smith’s hypothesis:
1) If these guys are “going John Galt in the gender economy,” shouldn’t their neglect be strongest in the areas of personal development related to hunting mates and weaker as regards efforts that bring obvious rewards to unattached men as well? The reality, of course, is just the opposite; it’s educational performance and personal development where they are lagging, while chasing tail and the activities that support it still manage to get young men off the couch. Nor do the stats suggest that they are showing excessive care in preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies when hooking up, in clear rebuttal to any notion that family law (e.g., child support and visitation rights) is the deterrant.
2) I wonder how Dr. Smith would square her conclusions about the deterrant effects of family law with the psychology of deviance. As I understand it, the reason criminal penalties have little effect on the crime rate is because perps discount the risk of getting caught. So are we really supposed to expect the average young man starry-eyed with love/lust, who’d otherwise be hitching up, to be clear-headed enough to factor in the likelihood it will all fall apart — and demur lest he risk running afoul of alimony rules? Even if that’s true, wouldn’t our savvy legal navigator just reserve a few hundred dollars from the diamond-studded wedding budget to have someone draft a prenup?
3) If the lessons taught by marriage, divorce, and family law really explain the declining quality of the eligible bachelors out there, wouldn’t we expect to see the strongest aversion to marriage among guys who have been most intimately exposed to the system? Why then are divorced men so likely to remarry? Maybe because working wives still end up bearing far more than an equal share of housework and child rearing?
4) If we believe that young men are dropping out because of their discouragement with a system biased against them, should the pathology concentrate (or even appear) among affluent white Anglos, who often do quite well anyway? The system might be unfair, but it hardly seems reverse-discriminatory enough to send upper-middle-class members of the majority ethnic group scuttling to Mom’s basement in despair.
I don’t deny that changing gender relations are part of the story. Marriage is less motivational now that you can get sex pretty cheaply and frequently without it. Now that parents in affluent families typically both work — with a consequent increase in a teen’s wealth and autonomy and decrease in a teen’s interaction with mature adults (continuing a trend started in child-eat-child day care facilities) — leaving adolescence is a lot less motivational. In other words, altered gender relations likely made it easier for many young males to keep sponging off the parents and living like Alfie. (And no, the ones who’ve moved out are not necessarily driving, wearing, eating, talking into, playing with, or even living in stuff they bought for themselves).
But the difference in this altered “gender relations” hypothesis is that it does not attribute the problems to how life is stacked against young men (and therefore does not warrant all the resentment and whining that Ms. Hymowitz has provoked). It moves the focus to the price paid for neglecting the domestic sphere when women poured into the labor force. In particular, it suggests a need for greater concern with what the power and autonomy that comes with control over lots of unearned wealth does to the development of young people. In that sense, the real problem with the essay by Ms. Hymowitz is she asked the wrong question. The mystery is not why so many affluent American males see a limited need to develop themselves. The mystery is how many of their sisters managed to resist sinking into the same morass.
A long comment, will need several replies.
“1) If these guys are “going John Galt in the gender economy,” shouldn’t their neglect be strongest in the areas of personal development related to hunting mates and weaker as regards efforts that bring obvious rewards to unattached men as well?”
That is one of the main points: there is now a qualitative difference between hunting mates and chasing tail. Once upon a time sexual relations commenced upon marriage, now young men learn from their married peers that it all too often terminates upon marriage.
Young men are, so far, doing what they have to do to meet their own measure of success; what Hymowitz complains about is their not meeting women’s measure of success.
I know it was long. Sorry about that. Thought if Dr. Smith were going to write a book, she might browse through these comments first and I’d give her some rebuttals with which to grapple.
You write: “…now young men learn from their married peers that it all too often terminates upon marriage.” That’s the stereotype, but my recollection is evidence says otherwise. I think they actually get it more than unmarried men in the same age range, although they may be unhappy with the lack of variety or the “costs” they think they’ve paid for it.
The problem is that you’re deriving your impressions from casual observation. Three source of bias would skew such impressions:
1) Selection Bias: Do you think the sort of married guys who would talk about their sex lives in public are a representative sample?
2) Social Desirability Bias: It’s socially acceptable for your boss to make a quip about the old lady not putting out, but how would you feel if he started talking about all the kinky things dowdy, middle-aged Mrs. Boss did for him last night?
3) Omitted Variable Bias: Married men on average are going to be older than unmarried men. Sex declines with age. What you (or they) are attributing to marriage might just