House of Eratosthenes

Joe Getty of Armstrong and Getty engaged in a delicious rant Friday morning, or Thursday, or something. You remember that late-night fight that Mr. and Mrs. Incredible had about their kid “graduating” from the fourth grade; it was inspired by that. There’s a certain silliness about this time of year, which we did not so reliably encounter in the recent past, and that silliness is in these graduation ceremonies for kids who haven’t graduated yet. They are moving from the [blank] grade to the [blank] grade, and for that we are to have “graduation ceremonies.”

When the subject moved on to baseball games for six-year-olds, well…it became unavoidable to finally, finally, target with laser precision the true cause of the problem. And Mr. Getty was forced to issue the proper disclaimers. I was driving, so I couldn’t take notes. Wish I could. It was a perfect disclaimer, in the sense that it didn’t diminish the core message. The gist of it: Joe Getty is pro-woman, AND pro-man, but the object of their scorn is evidence that we’ve been doing too much the ladies’ way. The graduation ceremony that was not a graduation ceremony, after all, couldn’t even live up to being a phony-graduation-ceremony. It was a fashion show.

If we were culturally allowed, more often, to challenge the beneficial effects of such a spectacle, the challenges would be plenty and the defenses against them would be weak, perhaps entirely ineffectual. Is it good for kids to make them feel like they’ve accomplished something? Doubtful. This thing the experts call “self-esteem” does not seem to be in short supply now; if there are problems with it, the problems could be more credibly observed to be with its abundance, than with its scarcity. And the public has become aware. “Participation trophy” has become a well-known phrase now, and not a flattering one.

This era is past its zenith now, that’s a good thing. But a decline can last a good long time. And we can’t fault the women for keeping it going. Gender-neutrality is the norm now, and the truth is that out of all the most zealous-feminist people I’ve seen who have some everyday effect on us, acting out their mission to destroy masculinity wherever they find it, very few of them are women.

I was noticing in the post previous that in our entertainment media, the “western” is not what it used to be. Over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging I’ve seen, participated in, and occasionally started some discussions about why the Star Wars prequel movies suck so much compared to the originals. My position is that out of all that’s different, the most hurtful thing is the conference-room-scene. Hours and hours of actors with rubber masks on standing around in circles, talking about things. A big table, twelve or twenty bodies in the room, only two or three with any speaking lines at all, and someone intoning “Good, then it’s settled!” at the end of it. Gag. Quick, name a plot-point in the prequel movies, that was not defined this way. Anakin got fried in the third one, that’s about it. Everything else got decided in a conference room. That’s excruciating to an audience. And — it isn’t a western. Someone was pointing out, CylarZ I think it was, that part of what made the original movies so much fun was that they were westerns, battles between pure good and pure evil, decided out of necessity by way of force.

That’s essentially what a western is. Evil makes the problem, Good comes up with the solution. Good settles the injustice by way of superior force, but only because of absolute necessity; Evil creates the necessity. That’s not womanly enough for us, nowadays. We have to have these conference room scenes, with a dozen people in a big round room, ten of them completely silent. If it is necessary to create a more profound sense of drama and suspense, the formulation has come to be to have more than a dozen. A thousand is better than a hundred, of course, and once you get into the thousands you rely on the magic of CGI. Great. Now you have actors, in rubber masks, gathered around enormous fancy tables in round rooms, delivering lines in front of CGI dopplegangers who are far more quiet and deferential than anyone you’ll ever see in real life. It’s all very bland and boring. On top of that, we’ve lost this contrast between good and evil. We’ve become overly enamored of these stories with good guys who are really bad (they spend too much time at work and place too much importance on making money), and bad guys who are really good (they have to rob this bank because a mysterious, shadowy syndicate has kidnapped their daughter…or, they have to steal the Declaration of Independence in order to save it).

Women, by and large, don’t want this. That’s the irony. Women like manly men, who eat steak and drink beer, and know how to kill spiders, fix cars, build furniture, and who appreciate the soft skin and supple curves of a womanly-woman. A man who knows and recognizes the difference between good and evil, and will take the initiative to act in the cause of good. A man who can and will defend them against danger if need be. They want what’s been cleared away, for decades now, in a risible marketing-effort to pander to their tastes.

It has not gone well, because the effort was not guided by women-at-large, only by the advocates who bothered to do some advocating. The loudest ones. The pinheads who don’t want to see anything, anywhere, that isn’t part of their tiny world. That’s really where it started. With the idea that all of our problems can be solved if we just load up everything that is masculine and rough-n-tumble into a great big rocket ship, and fire it into the sun. The results we have seen, in hindsight, are the results we should have expected to have seen. They are the consequences of getting rid of something without stopping to ask why it was put there in the first place. Kids learning en masse at age six that baseball is a boring game and a fashion show, will ultimately make those problems worse and not better.

[…] a Big Rocket Ship With [blank] and Blast it Into the Sun Doing Things the Ladies’ Way Making This Thing Look More Like That Thing Sterling Sues NBA Elliot Rodger Had Been in Therapy for […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/31/2014 @ 09:03

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Doing Things the Ladies’ WaySaturday, May 31st, 2014

Doing Things the Ladies’ Way
Saturday, May 31st, 2014