House of Eratosthenes

The rigid & frigid brand of feminism has long had a good answer for anyone daring to stand up for the concerns, privileges and rights of men: They simply reassert their monopoly on victimhood. They don’t wish to acknowledge that men can ever deserve anything better than what they get, so they don’t want anybody else to acknowledge it either. Human nature is vulnerable to suggestion, and a real man is reticent to complain about the hand he’s been dealt. It’s inherently, and cumulatively, unmanly. So this works. They mock any sympathy toward anything masculine, and if all else fails they recite the canard about how men treated women like property “for five thousand years.”

Well lately we see a lot of clues that if we cannot stand up for men, then maybe it is fitting to stand up for manliness.

First things first: If I was an Al Qaeda terrorist, I’d be loving life right now because all the death and destruction I’d be raining down would be the fault of some silly YouTube video nobody’s seen. The American President, Himself, said so many times. So cool beans! I get to do whatever I want. It’s a social disease, Officer Krupke, deep down inside me there is good, there is good!

Second things second: I am, frankly, a little bit appalled at the news reports talking up the fly-by of the space shuttle, with the emphasis on (imagined) little kids staring at the aircraft with eyes the size of dinner plates, fantasizing about becoming pilots someday. You want some news, here’s some news: This occasion was the precise opposite of the way it’s been presented. The shuttle was “flying by” on the back of another plane, on the way to the wrecking yard. Well, museum. But same thing. It was a symbolic journey as well as a practical one: Death of America’s space program, as we have known it. This was a funeral procession.

And: I’m buying a handgun. In California. There are quite a few reminders in the process that this is something I’m expected not to do.

Margot the Reel Girl is upset about the head tilt in her daughter’s school pictures. She perceives the girls are being taught to be submissive. I don’t know if there’s anything to this or not, it comes via word-of-mouth from her daughter, and it seems the (male) principal says he was asked to tilt his head so she could be reading a bit too much into this. At any rate: I do not want to live in a world in which men and women are exactly the same, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Furthermore, if you can force me to live in such a world, I’m only going to take swifter and more enthused notice of a woman from the outside who looks like a real woman. That goes double for the teenage boys whose hormones are in a state of effervescence. So this is a campaign that cannot win.

Yesterday we had quite a spectacle in the wake of Mitt Romney releasing his tax return(s). I suffer feelings of proxy embarrassment pondering what numbers and percentages register on the scandal-o-meters of his antagonists…and in the press…but let’s review what they have to say at a high level, ignoring the evidence they’re using to try to prop it up: There is some grrrrr! outrage (yawn) in Romney having paid a mere one dollar out of seven when he makes all that money, he should’ve paid more. In their world, this is exactly the kind of guy who should be disqualified from running the country or anything else, he was fabulously successful, took less punishment for that success than these nattering nabobs think he should’ve taken, and somehow found a way to make it all legal. That’s their world. In mine, this is precisely the kind of guy we want running big, important things. Not for his sake, but for everybody else’s. This is the picture of a desirable leader. He put his hands on something, made it into something positive, then a bunch of ankle biters came after him and tried to nip his ankles…he outran them. Followed the rules doing it. Gave a bunch of what was left over to charity. Um, hello? What more do we want? Yet some of our so-called “countrymen” complain, and don’t describe the nature of their complaints, the rest of us are just supposed to fill it in for them. Okay…I’ll make a point of trying to get around to doing that for you.

These five observations all have one thing in common: They constitute, and manifest, an unwarranted and unproductive assault on manliness. Not on men, you’ll note. I cannot undertake to define any single man, or group of men, demonstrably harmed in any of the above (with the possible exceptions of the late Ambassador Chris Stevens and his staffers.) This is not about people and groups, but about cultures and expectations. We are not expected to do things like what Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins did when they landed on the Moon. I’m sure a girl coulda done it, and my point has nothing to do with the fact it was an all-male voyage — my point is that this is manliness. Why does a man climb a mountain? Because it is there. Sending men into space, to actually land on heavenly bodies, is just the next step beyond the mountain.

But that was then, this is now. We are effecting a retreat. In the long-term future, it is destined to be recorded in history as a temporary one; that American president who came after the two Bushes, the Kenyan one with the logo, stopped things up around 2012 and they get started again in [blank]. So how temporary? If Denny’s is offering you senior discounts, you are unlikely to see such an effort again — how about your grandchildren? This should bother people more than it is bothering them, I think. We’ve seen the beginning of a dark age and we do not know how dark it will be or how long it will be.

September 11 of any given year is now “Fuck With America” day. Lately, no serious effort has been put into practice to make it not so. The ramifications are rather terrifying, depending on who you are and where you need to be traveling. Our President’s response is not only an assault upon manliness but upon logic and common sense as well. He wants all these mad props for having done away with bin Laden, but when the weird-beards are agitated into a state of murderous rage (which, hey let’s be honest, that’s their whole reason for being anyway) His first move is to blame it on a YouTube video. Typical unmanly, nightmare boss: Something good happens, hog all the credit, something bad happens find a scapegoat. Then go play golf.

Are feminists trying to get rid of any images of females being submissive? Or any images of females being agreeable & pleasant? “Both” must be the only sensible answer to that question, must it not, if they haven’t put any thought into telling the difference and want to push ahead with their crusade anyway? And have you listened to a strident and proud feminist giving a speech lately? For a thought exercise, listen with some “manliness” by putting yourself in the shoes of a man who is married to it and has to listen to it day and night. Yikes, gives me a headache just thinking about it. But we’re not supposed to think about things that way anymore. Someone made a soft, unspoken and unwritten rule that when a woman’s tone of voice is corrosive, we’re obliged not to notice, as long as she’s shattering the glass vessels and window panes expressing a politically correct feminist sentiment.

The handgun thing, of course, has been debated to death. What is not mentioned so much is that dangerous things are good for kids. At least, that’s been my experience with parenthood. Time comes to get the kids in a serious frame of mind about things, it can be a little bit tough. Or very tough. But, with the arrival of a little bit of maturity, and a desire on their part to not hurt others or get hurt themselves, it comes naturally. Yes, they do have what it takes. I feel sorry for kids who are raised all the way up into adulthood never having worked or played with hot molten lead, or bows & arrows, or sharp knives, or explosives. Yes, their judgment is not all the way there yet, that’s what adult supervision is for. Maybe that’s what we’re really arguing about. Maybe the cultural split is with whether parents should be bothered with having to supervise their kids.

And, the tax return thing: We’re having an argument there about whether success is success. When things degenerate to that level, we are entertaining a quibble about Aristotle’s Law of Identity. That is not a good thing, because that demonstrates that one side of the argument is refusing to see things for what they really are. Do we really want to be governed by people who are not capable of making a success out of anything, or if they do happen to blunder into success, end up losing their shirts over it? That is the criteria? Really? I would then have to ask what exactly it is that we’re trying to do. Does anybody know?

In the final analysis, manliness is pretty simple. It’s all about finding something constructive to do after you roll out of bed, and using your brain as you get it done. That’s it. It doesn’t have much to do with actually being a man (although it should); women can be, and some are, quite “manly.” Climb the mountain — just because it’s there. Build good things, and build things that build other good things. Don’t destroy things, unless those are things that would destroy good things. In which case, make sure you get it done right and get it done the first time. Acquire your equipment before you need it, and maintain it properly so it is there for you when you need to use it. Live and let live. Prosper. Donate. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but stand up for your rights. Choose your own charities.

The percentage of Americans who say the country is headed in the wrong direction was last reported, within a casual Google search, to be sixty-one. It has been hovering between sixty and eighty percent for a good long time now. Well, I can tell you why that is: People crave a reason to be. They are not satisfied with an existence in which their own job is safe, and through that job they get medical benefits and don’t need to know what the pills & treatments actually cost, but the job lacks a definable purpose. Even the ones among us who value security over opportunity, and would give up that opportunity at a moment’s notice to make everything just a little bit more extra-extra-super-duper-safe — they share this instinct too, they’re just bad at figuring out what it is they really want. My experience with buying the handgun proves that. The wiring in our circuitry, as a species, drives our desire to go to bed at night with a sense that something is better than it was when we got up that morning, and it’s better because of something we did. We all want that, even if it involves a little bit of risk.

The Utopians are now in high gear on their acceleration ramp toward this perfect society in which everybody gets what they want when they want it, and there’s no reason for anybody to do anything. There is not much remaining to be done, in fact, and because of this they are now enjoying the fruits of their labors. It’s not that sweet, as it turns out. The temple is built, the mortar is all hardened and all the bricks are in place, all that remains is to remove the scaffolding and start taking pictures. But we can see, already, that the reality is not as pleasing as the blueprints. We do not like this new structure and we cannot live in it, for the architecture is formed around a vision of the people, and the vision of the people is as something lacking purpose, just sort of milling about. Like a pestilence of sorts. A pestilence that requires health care and vacations and union cards or something. And it clashes with our instinctive desire to see ourselves as something better.

Regardless of party affiliation, we all have it in common that we have a desire for our tomorrows — along with reasons for those tomorrows.

The Vaginization of America is complete. And it is a fail.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

For your consideration:

Some years ago I read the novel/feminist screed “Norma Jean the Termite Queen,” about a wife and mother in the 70s who decides that she is miserable with her marriage and her motherhood. Among other things, during her second pregnancy she has a minor emotional breakdown when Neil Armstrong lands on the moon…. seeing it as the symbolic “deflowering” of the mysterious and beautiful moon by phallocentric America, and bitterly reflecting that the headlines should have read “Man Lands On Moon, America Scores Ultimate F##k!”

I can’t help wonder just how much the bitter, narcissistic feminist ideology has played in sapping the American will for the space program and bringing about its demise. After all, it’s everything feminists hate: Too dangerous, too expensive, too phallic, too masculine.
- rhjunior | 09/23/2012 @ 16:48

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The Decline of Manliness in All Sorts of ThingsSaturday, September 22nd, 2012

The Decline of Manliness in All Sorts of Things
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012