Speaking of our friend down in New Mexico, he forwarded via offline an article that is pretty priceless. Yet another item listing out what makes a man a real man…except unlike most of ’em, this one finds favor with me because I agree with most of it.

A man makes things — a rock wall, a table, the tuition money. Or he rebuilds — engines, watches, fortunes. He passes along expertise, one man to the next. Know-how survives him. This is immortality. A man can speak to dogs. A man fantasizes that kung fu lives deep inside him somewhere. A man knows how to sneak a look at cleavage and doesn’t care if he gets busted once in a while. A man is good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not his career. His job. It doesn’t matter what his job is, because if a man doesn’t like his job, he gets a new one.

A man can look you up and down and figure some things out. Before you say a word, he makes you. From your suitcase, from your watch, from your posture. A man infers.

A man owns up. That’s why Mark McGwire is not a man. A man grasps his mistakes. He lays claim to who he is, and what he was, whether he likes them or not.

Some mistakes, though, he lets pass if no one notices. Like dropping the steak in the dirt.

A man loves the human body, the revelation of nakedness. He loves the sight of the pale breast, the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of the flesh. He is thrilled by the snatch, by the wrist, the sight of a bare shoulder. He likes the crease of a bent knee. When his woman bends to pick up her underwear, he feels that thrum that only a man can feel.

Left to be debated:

Does a man adapt to a changing world? That’s a pretty damned important question, and the answer upon which I would have to settle, by process of elimination, is “Yes, within limits.”

Grandpa, for example, did not exercise because Grandpa spent his days down at the city’s lumber mill throwing logs and planks around. Thankfully, people seem to be about as interested in me sitting down to figure out why a computer application is screwing up, and fixing it, as they were back then in having Grandpa provide the lumber that built their houses and buildings. That gives me a livelihood…but it’s still sitting down. So my girlfriend says “let’s go to the gym” and I say — O.K. To me, this is what a real man does because a real man, being a creature designed by the Good Lord to chase animals that are also built by the Good Lord to run away, keeps his heart rate up. At something. Of course, if I want to do that throwing lumber around like Grandpa did, I could certainly be a real man, but I probably wouldn’t make a living doing it unless I did it to keep someone entertained as they laughed their asses off looking at me.

But another part of the changing world is you shouldn’t put up blogs that criticize His Holiness The God President. Does a real man adapt to that? Well, this is exactly the same code the Founding Fathers transgressed…in fact they held a revolution over it, and built a new country, the first one on the globe that nurtured such an ingrained dedication against any royalty, ever. Anyone want to say this was not a manly thing to do? I would say this is a model of a real-man-act, right there. They flouted some rules, established others, and used reason, logic, common sense, and a highly refined understanding of general human behavior to justify their actions. And let us not forget, they believed in God, and that was also used as a justification for their actions…why they flouted some rules and established some others.

They did it so others could be free. And do constructive things. Be real men.

I don’t like the way the list bashes Sauvignon Blanc. As I said in my reply, a real man eats salmon the way little kids eat candy. Now, how does he wash down a nice flank of salmon? Soda pop? Beer? Milk? Fruity dessert wines are for the girls. Chardonnay is good…but the sweetness covers up the bouquet of the seasoning, be it sauce or dry, or if you prefer your fish plain with a little pat of butter I’ve noticed a sweet wine will defeat that experience as well. To me, this rule negates one of those experiences in life that are inherently male and inherently pleasant, which in this case is grilling up a fish over charcoal (or wood…oh yeah, baby, fish over campfire) and pairing it up with wine properly like you really know what you’re doing. Which is okay…but it does it out of concern for what others think. As a justification for jettisoning a positive and male-centric life-experience, that is not okay. That is not even close to okay. This one thing needs to go. Sorry to dwell so much on this one bullet point, but when I was a much littler man I saw “One of These Things is Not Like the Other” on The Electric Company, and I still know how to play.

Separate observation here on those “A Real Man Does [X]” lists. Most of them aren’t like this piece. Most of them are ironic. They say “A real man…” and then what follows is something you do not, in the classical sense, expect a real man to do. “…is in touch with his feelings/emotions” is the most popular chestnut, although there are many others like that. “A real man takes his wife/girlfriend shopping, a real man is out there at Mervyn’s saying ‘open open open’ with her at five a.m. on the morning after Thanksgiving.” Yeah whatever.

What’s the enchantment with that stuff? Nobody ever puts a list together that says “A real woman gives you a good natured chuckle when you tell her she looks fat in her bathing suit.” Unless I’ve missed that somewhere…I recognize the innerwebs is a big, big place…

Forwarded to me in the e-mail…not only good enough to post, but way too good to neglect.

BBQ RULES

We are about to enter the BBQ season. Therefore it is important to refresh your memory on the etiquette of this sublime outdoor cooking activity.
When a man volunteers to do the BBQ the following chain of events are put into motion:

Routine…

(1) The woman buys the food.
(2) The woman makes the salad, prepares the vegetables, and makes dessert .
(3) The woman prepares the meat for cooking, places it on a tray along with the necessary cooking utensils and sauces, and takes it to the man who is lounging beside the grill – beer in hand.
(4) The woman remains outside the compulsory three meter exclusion zone where the exuberance of testosterone and other manly bonding activities can take place without the interference of the woman.

Here comes the important part:

(5) THE MAN PLACES THE MEAT ON THE GRILL.

More routine…

(6) The woman goes inside to organize the plates and cutlery.
(7) The woman comes out to tell the man that the meat is looking great. He thanks her and asks if she will bring another beer while he flips the meat.

Important again:

(8) THE MAN TAKES THE MEAT OFF THE GRILL AND HANDS IT TO THE WOMAN.

More routine…

(9) The woman prepares the plates, salad, bread, utensils, napkins, sauces, and brings them to the table.
(10) After eating, the woman clears the table and does the dishes.

And most important of all:

(11) Everyone PRAISES the MAN and THANKS HIM for his cooking efforts.

(12) The man asks the woman how she enjoyed “her night off.” And, upon seeing her annoyed reaction, concludes that there’s just no pleasing some women.

Feeling kinda sorry for women who are dedicated to hating men and don’t realize they’ve dedicated themselves to hating men. Our linking-plus-ancillary-thoughts to Dr. Helen’s piece about IT Guys And Marriage, was unappreciated in some quarters because it appeared to show some sympathy to the male sex.

I thought my final sign-off sentence,

And so, in our modern society, after all this “progress” we have been making…the male who actually comes up with something someone can use someday, has to go through life apologizing for the way he lives it. This does a disservice and measurable damage to a lot more people than just him.

…would have clearly communicated the idea that there were much larger and more significant issues here than how tough the fellas had it. I would’ve thought wrong, I guess. Some folks are absolutely, positively determined to seek out whatever ideas are headed their way, that might direct some thoughts toward the masculine gender of a friendly nature…by which I mean, anything more benign than an intellectual kick-in-the-balls…and then filtering them out. Systematically.

Let us be perfectly clear this time.

I am not singing dirges for men and how tough they have it. Instead, I lament the untold millions of people who’ve chosen to go through their entire lives, sometimes by means of some sham called a “marriage,” and sometimes in some other way…living only half of that life. Of all the thoughts that might penetrate their spheres of consciousness about human affairs, half those thoughts are systematically rejected. In my world, fifty percent is a big, big number. To say nothing of the hollow-people who think of themselves as “men,” who’ve made it a point to accommodate that mindset, by making sure never to do anything worthy of note or notice. That has to do with deeds done, rather than thoughts thought — and that ratio is a hundred percent. All of what might’ve been done, by a fellow unafraid of doing significant things, remains undone so Her Majesty might remain un-piqued.

It is a human tragedy of gargantuan proportions. People like this are all over the place. They are nastier than they think they are, I’m sorry to say; they’ve identified a class of people, 48% out of all of us, of which nothing positive may be said. They’re more controlling than they think they are because they want all persons in earshot and line-of-sight to conform to this nasty, nasty rule they’ve made up.

How much does it really affect men?

Only to whatever extent we allow it to.

New York Times op-ed:

American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago. They’re more likely to work outside the home, and more likely to earn salaries comparable to men’s when they do. They can leave abusive marriages and sue sexist employers. They enjoy unprecedented control over their own fertility. On some fronts — graduation rates, life expectancy and even job security — men look increasingly like the second sex.

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diagnosed her fellow wives and daughters as the victims of “the problem with no name,” American women reported themselves happier, on average, than did men. Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.

This is “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” the subject of a provocative paper from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The paper is fascinating not only because of what it shows, but because the authors deliberately avoid floating an easy explanation for their data.
:
…[P]erhaps the problem is political — maybe women prefer egalitarian, low-risk societies, and the cowboy capitalism of the Reagan era had an anxiety-inducing effect on the American female. But even in the warm, nurturing, egalitarian European Union, female happiness has fallen relative to men’s across the last three decades.

Draw your own conclusions, I guess.

This morning’s Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL), the sixty-first one, goes to Michael Lewis, author of Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. We learn of this through the delightfully titled Wall Street Journal article From Patriarch to Patsy (hat tip: Dr. Helen). I’m not so sure I’m that big of a fan of the overall message. Mr. Lewis zeros in on the issue of men losing their voice in society and in the family, and thereby losing their wives’ and childrens’ respect. On that whole thing, I’m on board. It is the plague of our times. Men being harnessed as beasts of burden, valued only grudgingly and only for their muscle. Household decisions made dictatorially by the matriarch while the man does what is “expected” of him. Everyday married life looking, just a little bit too much, like the planning of the wedding that started it — women somehow knowing exactly what needs to be done, the only indecision involved being the egotistical competitions with other women, while the men stand around with hands in their pockets trying to stay out of the way, until they’re told what needs to be moved where. Man-haters being given exactly what they wanted, and ending up angrier.

I just have some reservations about the tone; it seems to me to be whiny, and unlikely to accomplish much of anything in terms of getting a message out. My beef is — you’re not going to get too far arguing for “the rights of men.” It’s kinda like highlighting the plight of an endangered species of beetle or spider. The cute furry things with the great big eyes will win out every time.

No, the central issue, to me, doesn’t have to do with what men need, but with what others need. Not only what they need, but what they want. Here is the ugly truth nobody wants to admit anywhere: We want the patriarch. We need the patriarch. Kids are programmed to respond to his benevolent guidance, and women are programmed to co-exist with him, and to the extent it is required for shared responsibility in the household, I’ll go ahead and say it — even obey him. Women who rankle at that, whether they know it or not, by rankling at it are demanding all of the responsibility for making decisions in the household. And by demanding that, they demand something that will thoroughly exhaust them — it’s not an “if” but a “when.” I’ve not yet seen it fail.

So there is no need to crusade for “equal rights” for men. There is no need to crusade for “fairness.” This is all unnecessary and a losing argument.

But this may very well be unfair criticism. Home Game itself, going by the product description, does not appear to be provided to us as an instrument of advocacy for social change; it appears, more, like something tossed out there for laughs. With perhaps just a dollop in the stew of something more serious —

When he became a father, Michael Lewis found himself expected to feel things that he didn’t feel, and to do things that he couldn’t see the point of doing. At first this made him feel guilty, until he realized that all around him fathers were pretending to do one thing, to feel one way, when in fact they felt and did all sorts of things, then engaged in what amounted to an extended cover-up.

Lewis decided to keep a written record of what actually happened immediately after the birth of each of his three children. This book is that record. But it is also something else: maybe the funniest, most unsparing account of ordinary daily household life ever recorded from the point of view of the man inside. The remarkable thing about this story isn’t that Lewis is so unusual. It’s that he is so typical. The only wonder is that his wife has allowed him to publish it.

This has societal implications. The consequences of this man-as-beast-of-burden family configuration, are not limited to under the roof of the household. It has a bearing on how all of society functions. And that is the point. It shapes and molds how future generations develop — and not in a good way. What child, boy or girl, can possibly come to maturity in a healthy way, after spending a childhood perceiving the cleansing, creative power of raw masculinity only as a toxic agent, as a contaminant, something to be abhorred and avoided? It just isn’t possible. Masculinity is important. It is essential to life. It’s gotta come from somewhere — even if it comes from the ladies.

Which it certainly can if that’s what is necessary. But the girls aren’t built to provide this. The beverage being served is a poor fit to the vessel, and the vessel doesn’t come out of the experience whole. Ever quaff down some hot coffee out of a cold-soda cup? It’s a painful mess, isn’t it? That’s why they’re so stressed out over the last generation or two. The feminists pitched something overboard, and after they got it pitched overboard we figured out it wasn’t the dead weight we were told it was. It seemed like it at the time…because what we were pitching overboard, didn’t bother to fight back. That would have been unmanly.

And that brings me to the sentence that is pure gold. This sums up, nicely — as in, Bingo! — exactly what the state of male-female relations is, in 2009:

Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight.

Thing I Know #157. If a man and woman are really “together,” the woman can’t be unhappy when the man is happy. The man can’t be happy, if the woman is unhappy. But for the man to be unhappy while the woman is happy, is very possible. There are people who have understood this difference between men and women, and gambled on it, and won, for generations. They’re called “salesmen.”

Dr. Freeberg’s prescription for this household disease is to make the man happy, so that the happiness of the other inhabitants naturally follows. Not send him off on an “all guy camping” weekend. That doesn’t work, because that’s exactly what you do with a horse, a mule, a yak, or any other beast of burden — board him up in a stable to sleep, feast on oats and recharge. No paradigm-shift there. Nope, the man has to plan things. Be treated in some way other than how a barnyard animal is treated.

I’m convinced, from what I know about how people function in their households now, that a lot of families live day-to-day and year-to-year in crisis mode. And a lot of angst would be cured and done-away-with if only a weekend was circled on the calendar, and the man was given free reign to plan it, right down to the mile and the minute. I would estimate easily half the households where I live, in Soccer-Mom-Central Folsom, would draw an enormous psychological benefit if this proceeded like General Grant planning the next day’s battle: In solitude. He disappears into his tent at midnight with a bagful of cigars, some grease pencils and a hunk of parchment, and even his most trusted aids are not allowed inside.

Do it before the kids become teenagers. That’s too late.

The wife is not allowed to say “Honey, when we drive through X, can we hit Y?” Absolutely not. General Grant in his tent. Too many women seem to have walked down the aisle without learning to trust their men.

Everyone’s allowed to comment on how it could’ve been better — a big part of our problem is that soft, squishy men are avoiding criticism by avoiding any opinions — but no sloppy, generalized, vague criticism is allowed. “Next time, let’s check the weather” — good. “That trip sucked” — out-of-bounds.

In 2009, my plan would be unworkable for a lot of families. And this is a sad thing. Because these are families that never should have become families. Also, they’ll only remain families so long as the man remains docile. As soon as he expresses an opinion, never mind whether it has any tangible effect on anyone, it’s all over. See ya in court pal. He’s the villager who didn’t put up a fight.

Figurative:

Gerard’s latest find that surely heralds the end of civilized society as we know it today, is a deplorable peekaboo garment for your papoose. In response, commenter Rob De Witt brings to our attention a whole page of attire for men to wear to show off that they’re “pregnant.” Or recently have been. Baby carriers; “bump” tee shirts; macho looking diaper bags. “Men who change diapers RULE!”

Yup, I’ll just bet, Sugar. You’ve been fantasizing about men who change diapers since you were twelve.

Literal:

Get ready to squirm.

The woman who allegedly killed her husband by setting his genitals alight told neighbours that she was justified because “his penis should belong to me”, a court has heard.

According to News Ltd reports, the Adelaide Magistrates Court has heard 44-year-old Rajini Narayan told people next door she set her huband’s penis on fire after discovering he was having an affair.

“She told neighbours ‘my husband loves another woman, he hugs her’,” she said.

“(She said) ‘I’m a jealous wife, his penis should belong to me, I just wanted to burn his penis so it belongs to me and no one else.

“(She said) ‘It’s just his penis I wanted to burn, I didn’t mean this to happen.”

Prosecutors allege Narayan doused her husband’s genitals with methylated spirits while he slept, before setting them alight.

A house fire was sparked when he leapt out of bed and knocked over the bottle, causing over a million dollars worth of damage to their property and the neighbours’.

It’s been revealed the charges against Narayan have now been upgraded to murder.

[T]o call me [an Englishman] without those rights is like calling an ox a bull. He’s thankful for the honor, but he’d much rather have restored what’s rightfully his. — Benjamin Franklin (apocr.)

Our friends across the pond are having a little bit of a spat over whether equality really does mean equality, when such a literal, dogmatic interpretation might possibly benefit men:

Many charities have been told that they must extend their counselling and outreach services to men because of new equality laws which require local authorities to ensure that services do not discriminate on grounds of sex.

Fiona Mactaggart, the former Home Office minister, said an “unintended consequence” of the law has meant some domestic violence services have lost grants or contracts for refusing to do so.
:
She said: “There are some local authorities who interpret equalities to mean that a refuge has to provide for men, not only for women.

“There are some stupidnesses developing in the system that nobody intended.”
:
The new Gender Equality Duty, created under The Equality Act 2006, requires that “public bodies must promote and take action to bring about gender equality, which involves: looking at issues for men and women.”

There we go again. “Everybody” intended this to be a one-sided thing. Well, everybody whose opinion Mactaggart thinks is worth something, thought that way.

As we’ve noted in these parts, many times: The word “everyone” (“nobody,” in this case) very seldom is deployed to describe what it has classically meant.

Nicola Harwin, chief executive of Women’s Aid, which counts the Prime Minister’s wife Sarah Brown among its patrons, said the charity is still allowed to exclude men from refuges.

However, when council contracts came up for tender, many branches are being told that they must provide services such as advice and counselling to men or lose their funding.

Miss Harwin said: “Women do appreciate being engaged in women-only organisations. When you have been disempowered and had no control of your life it’s important for a lot of women to see that this is an organisation run by women for women.”

My sympathy for this point of view is running out by the second. I’d like to know more about this process of healing, during which time some mindset is maintained that men are not, and cannot be, contributing toward anything good. How debilitating that must be! Do these abused women eventually learn to re-assimilate with a society that has some men in it? Or is that object lesson saved for much further down the road, after some scars have healed?

Because it sounds, to me, like a man-basher’s club. And I don’t see what that has to do with getting past something. Think, for example, about a man who loses his life’s savings in a short, bad marriage. How would you react to someone saying “when you have been disempowered and had no control of your life it’s important for a lot of men to see that this is an organization run by men for men.” That isn’t how we typically respond to a situation like that, I’ve noticed; instead it’s the ineffectual and irrelevant “All Women Aren’t Like That” defense, repeated ad nauseum. Great importance, in other words, is placed on stopping that wounded male from forming an unflattering stereotype in his individual noggin…for the benefit of the opportunities of the women he may meet later, after he has accumulated some more assets.

Fair enough. How come that doesn’t work on this side of the fence, Ms. Harwin? In fact, from what pocket of the universe do you ladies arrive, in which you fully expect phrases like “gender equality” to be tossed around like pudding and refried beans at a food fight…and then it comes as such a surprise to you when it’s interpreted bidirectionally? How could that be unexpected? To whom would it be unexpected? What kind of mindset does it take?

FARK commenter lewismarktwo speaks for me:

Yeah, cause all men are the same and those men (all 12 of them) who were abused just can’t wait to pay the abuse forward to the first women they come across.

Or maybe it’s a good idea to expose abused women to non abusive men who might understand what they were going through so, you know, the abused women realize that all men aren’t scum?

The harpies in this article have some knowledge, or else an agenda, that stands in contradiction to this. I’m really not entirely sure which it is…but I’m leaning away from knowledge, and toward an agenda. Leanin’ hard.

Rediff News:

While a recent study concluded that men prefer dating beautiful bimbos, new research has confirmed what many males and advertisers long believed: driving a flashy car really does make a person more attractive to women.

Psychologists at the University of Wales presented women with separate images of the same man sitting in a silver Bentley Continental, then a red Ford Fiesta. The study involved 120 participants, reports The Scotsman.

After seeing the male, the volunteers viewed him as ‘more attractive’ in the prestige car. However, when men were shown images of a woman of comparable attractiveness sitting in the same cars, she was judged to be equally alluring.

Dr Michael Dunn, who led the research, which has been published in British Journal of Psychology, said: “In the past, women were very restricted economically and tied to men for financial security but in recent years, through female emancipation, they have become independently wealthy with access to their own financial security.”

“But what you find is that there is still a preference for wealthy males, which suggests that these preferences are evolutionary, rather than social factors.” According to him, men were hard-wired to view women in terms of purely reproductive attractiveness, regardless of the outer signs of their wealth or status.

Donna Dawson, a psychologist specialising in personality, behaviour and relationships, said: “This doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s hard to fight against our genetic inheritance. I think women have always looked to men for some sort of financial security and the car is proof of that.”

I hope nobody paid too much money for this research.

You know what you could start studying, is the true difference between “cocky” and “confident”…as in, women like the latter but despise the former. I’m not too curious about where the line is drawn, since I’m off the market and not lookin’. Nor am I too curious about the conceptual difference. Even when I was single, I think I had a pretty good handle on what women really wanted — they wanted a man who knew what he wanted, kinda-sorta, but only to such an extent that they could control his daily efforts. They wanted to tame a wild beast, wild enough to be powerful, but tame enough to eventually submit to her wishes.

I’d like to know about the disparity, among women from a variety of different walks of life…how much they’ll agree on the Goldilocks thing, that this guy’s too cocky, that guy’s not confident enough, this one over here is juuuuuuust right.

Do guys get more latitude in this whole thing if they drive something with a higher sticker price? Like if you’re driving a ten-year-old Datsun, are you just too cocky, best o’luck to ya pal, throw ya back in the ocean and keep looking…but could a bigger dickhead be perfectly alright if he showed up in a Dodge Viper?

That last one isn’t too much of a mystery to me. But I’d love to see it written up in a scientific paper.

Lastly, I’d like to know if there’s an evolutionary trait involved in what women tend to do over time. And you know what I mean. They pick you out of a line-up because you’re the “alpha” male, the one with the strongest will, and then couple-up with you…yes, believe it or not, I have from time to time emerged at the top of the heap in this perverse contest, once or twice, back in the day. And then once you’re half of a real couple, systematically kill off every little thing they once found attractive. It’s “mental abuse” if you decide things for yourself, in any manner other than the way a nine-year-old boy would do it.

In my late twenties, I made an informal resolution to never date liberal women ever again. And for the most part, that solved that little problem for good. And that’s my advice for the next generation of dudes. Women who get pissy and resentful if you decide things for yourself…women who get pissy and resentful if you voice an unexpected opinion…women who get pissy and resentful if you find soap operas boring and unrealistic, and have the nerve to say so out loud…women who get pissy and resentful if you grow hair on your body, in places where women can’t do the same thing. Just pass ’em all up, boys, and for the most part, a happy life is guaranteed to be yours.

Even if your trusty steed is, say, an eighteen-year-old Toyota Corolla with 341,000 miles on it. So I’m told.

Kinda interesting…the headline blares away about women spending twice as much time doing household chores as the men, in the land down under. But inside the guts of the story you see the issue has more to do with an informal gender-identity with regard to the chores, with her doing the inside ones and him doing the outside ones.

The time she spends on the inside-ones is carefully computed, relative to the time he spends helping her out…whereas the manly lawncare is just…done.

Australian Bureau of Statistics social trends report finds women doing double the housework

WOMEN are still doing almost twice the amount of household work as men but at least the males are pulling their weight outside, a report on social trends says.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released its quarterly snapshot of Australain society and it shows households have allocated “his and her” chores.

Between 1992 and 2006, the average time men spent on household work rose by an hour and 25 minutes to 18 hours and 20 minutes a week.

Despite woman spending more hours in the workplace, they are doing about the same amount of time on household work in 2006 – an average of 33 hours and 45 minutes a week – as they did in 1992, the ABS reported.

Household work is defined as caring for children, as well as cleaning and cooking.

Women did most of the indoor tasks while men spent time outdoors mowing the lawn and home maintenance, the polling shows.

“Spent time outdoors.”

I suspect if the headline was more in keeping with the contents of the story — that men and women have, and act-upon, pre-conceived notions of what task is better suited to their personal characteristics, including their gender — it wouldn’t have been nearly as incendiary as this unsupported and unstated implication that the lads are failing to pull their weight. And therefore wouldn’t have piqued nearly as much interest.

We sure do have a lot of people running around, who don’t really want men and women to get along any better. Y’know?

You gals looking around for stories like this, and tales of “I wish my man could be like him!” just to see how jealous you can be — my woman works at her job twice as many hours as I do at mine, then comes home and cooks, vacuums on her days off, and even brought home four boxes of my favorite beer last weekend. So you work hard at making others happy, others will work hard at making you happy…and you don’t even need some ledger-scribbling bean-counting nanny government agency to make that happen. What a concept, huh? That goes for some of you fellas, too. But this kind of falls into the “if ya gotta be told you ain’t never gonna learn” file.

Dr. Helen, noting that some 82% of the job losses in this recession are happening to men, summarizes the situation thusly:

Men are constantly being told that they are providers for women. Even so-called “feminists” who pretend that they are for equality expect men to pick up most of the burden of child support and pay women off in a divorce. They even think women should be paid for their services at home — apparently by men who go to work all day to support their families so the wife can stay home. And now that many men are out of a job, we’re told that they are just getting the punishment they deserve for chasing the money they need to provide for these women and their families. Does anyone see the hypocrisy here?

Here’s the plain truth of it, straight from The Blog That Nobody Reads:

An engine that provides power has some precision to it; it has to be tuned. The ignition has to happen just as the piston is at the right location in the cylinder, for example. If things aren’t exactly as they should be, performance will suffer, and if they’re further out of whack then it will stop running altogether.

And this is how our society runs. Shun men completely, and you reject access to the wonderful things men are counted on to provide; offer men the sense of security that is routinely provided to women and that most women so regularly crave, and you reject that access again. So you threaten to throw them away, to get what you want. Men aren’t quite completely rejected, and they aren’t quite completely accepted either. Our society needs men to be teetering right on the rim of the trash can. That is how we get everything we want or need, by threatening to discard them, but not quite doing it, or at least, not doing it until such time as a superior replacement is immediately available.

Black men, white men, red men, yellow men. But not women and not kids; men. “Do this, or you might not have a job.” “Do this, or you might not have a wife.” “Do this, or you might not be able to see your kids again.” Do this or you’ll lose your house. Your good-standing with the IRS. Your dog. Your 401k. Your car. It is the precision-tuned engine that keeps our world turning. It is how we get everything of value that we want. If you’re a stay-at-home wife, look around the room and look at everything you have; if you work, think of everything your company did for the past year. Eighty percent of it, or more, happened because a man got threatened. That’s the world’s fuel.

Why is that? Because our sons are raised with the idea that when someone tells you your effort wasn’t good enough, and you are about to be defrocked of your status, maybe they’re your friend. Maybe they’re holding you to a “higher standard.” Maybe they “see something in you.” We teach our sons that…we don’t teach that to our daughters. And so, you’re engaged in a duel to the death if you threaten a man’s kids or a woman’s kids. But threaten a man’s status, and he’ll try to figure out a compromise with you; threaten a woman’s status, that’s pretty much the same as threatening her children. Not a winning proposition. So we don’t threaten women to get what we want. We threaten men to get what we want.

There is another plain truth. Disregarding the few lucky gentlemen who fall in love in high school and manage to keep it going over a lifetime — which used to be the norm — adulthood, for men, is a rather comical and dreary in-and-out hokey-pokey. Nice house full of frilly knick knacks I would never have bought if I was still a bachelor…shitty apartment…nice house…shitty apartment. What’s happening is that the man is being accepted and rejected, just as the piston rises and descends in the cylinder, so that the engine can produce power and the world can go. That’s the way it works. You threaten the status men have acquired, to get the things you need or want.

Not a rant, just a statement of fact.

Update: Don’t know exactly what came over us, but we probably owe everyone skimming through this some kind of apology. The notion that eighty percent of the things we have, we acquired by threatening men…it is politically incorrect to the point of offending the sensibilities of any civilized creature there ever was. Naturally, an apology is immediately forthcoming. We’re big enough to admit when we were wrong.

We will NOT be standing behind the idea that eighty percent of our staple items are provisioned by threatening men.

It is, as we wrote over at Dr. Helen’s site, as we groveled in our mea culpa…more like something in the low nineties. We regret the error.

Carry on.

The entry that snagged the fifty-fifth award Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) is delivered via the Counter-Feminist…I’ve bolded it:

This is a man’s world only in a metaphorical or superficial sense. It is not a “male dominated” world imposed on women. Rather, it is a world built on the common expectations of men and women. What some call “patriarchy” has been just as much a creation of women’s traditional expectations as men’s.

Coincidentally, this is exactly what my eleven-year-old son and I were talking about on our way to playing disc golf yesterday. He wanted to know more about Thing I Know #26…

There really aren’t too many things in the arena of human existence louder than a pair of women recognizing each other at a Starbuck’s coffee shop.

I explained that what women really are, is this: The personification of civilization. And civilization runs on protocol. (“Protocol,” we’d already discussed, has a number of meanings that apply to cocktail parties, foreign relations, computer science, and other things; but it always means “A set of things upon which you agree, that are observed so that you can communicate other things on which you do not agree.” My definition.)

That is the female role. With women and no men, protocol is established, codified, enforced, and the blessings flow from that; but things outside of protocol, go undone. With men and no women, there is a lack of protocol and anything that requires protocol, likewise goes undone.

This liberates women from certain things that burden men. A little girl, for example, can make a lot of noise and a little boy cannot; girls are adorable, they can get away with it. Sure, if she makes enough noise, eventually there’ll be a smackdown. But the leash is much longer. Expect silence from a boy, and get something else, the line’s already been crossed. Expect silence from a little girl, get something else, it’s free entertainment for awhile. Aw, isn’t that cute! My son hates that part. But as I pointed out, that’s really a double-edged sword. Don’t feel too abused, because we got the long end of the stick on that coffee shop thing. When you’re old enough to grab a coffee, you’ll go in and grab one, and if you see one of your pals there you can go on about your business after a simple nod. “Hey Bob, how’s it goin’ buddy?” Maybe a howz-the-wife-and-kids if you’re feeling really talkative.

You don’t have to make that whooping sound.

A woman sees another woman at the coffee shop, protocol requires her to behave as if this is a real event. It requires the kind of reaction you’d show to…cancer finally having been cured. No, you have to think on a bigger scale yet: The world, somehow thrown out of orbit, now somehow having been re-aligned. If they once had occasion to see each other regularly, but no longer do, a hug is also required. Imagine if women greeted women at the coffee shop the way guys acknowledge other guys; just imagine that. That would be a slight. That would be a “dis.”

Other women would find out about it.

It really is quite out of the question. That’s protocol for you. And this is why, if women made absolutely no decisions at all, the world would be a truly dreary place. Men are utilitarian creatures. We fix stuff; we do that. We are “libertarians” by nature. That usually works pretty well, because this is mostly a libertarian world.

But not completely so. Protocol is a good thing. There are too many things you can’t do without the protocol. And so we value the opinions of women. But here’s the deep, dark, dirty secret, and I fear putting the Big Reveal on this one, will get me in more trouble than discussing TIK #26 ever could or will:

We’ve valued what women have had to say for quite awhile. Well before suffrage.

For example, what is a mud room? You think, in a world in which men made all the decisions, we’d have had such a thing as a mud room? No, we would not. Things like mud rooms, antimacassars, doilies, and separate buildings for horses came into use as observations of protocol, and these protocols came about because your great-gramma had a helluva lot more to say about where great-grampa put his muddy boots, than you’ve been led to believe.

And that’s why women are so incredibly loud when they’re at the coffee shop, and they recognize someone. And that someone is just as loud. “Oh, how ARE you?? So good to SEE you!!”

There really isn’t anything human beings do that is any louder. But don’t bitch about it. You’re looking at the reason the rest of us, man and woman, have any capacity for communicating with any others among the rest of us. Whatsoever. Don’t believe me? Work in an office full of only-men sometime.

My son had a question I thought was pretty funny: “What would happen if men greeted each other in a coffee shop the way women do?” Oh gawd. Do not go there!

I told him that would be off-the-charts weird. Oh and one more little thing…you’re not going to tell your teacher or your mother about this little talk, are you?

Just observing protocol, you know.

With one fell swoop. You know the ones — “101 Tips and Tricks to Keep Him Happy in Bed! Tonight!”

Reality is much, much simpler, especially if the ladies approach those they’re trying to please, and…y’know…ask us.

Ace’s advice?

[F]or most guys, I am guessing that the women they remember the most — the ones that stick in their minds, the ones they never quite get over — are the ones that were the most aggressive and accessible sexually. Want to make an impression on a guy that will last forever? It doesn’t have anything to do with haircuts or fashionable purses.

Men are simple creatures. Protoplasms. It is a strange irony that a woman can pretty much get whatever she wants from a guy with no arguments and no disagreements —- nothing but “Absolutely, dear” and “Whatever you want, honey” — by doing just one thing (but doing it two or three or sometimes four times a week).

Either women don’t quite get this, or are, you know, just too complicated to act upon it.

It’s baffling that women’s magazines even exist. All those wasted pages on “How to Keep Your Man.” Any article on this topic that contains more than three words (“Screw him lots”) is missing the big picture and dwelling on trivialities.

I think CUS gets the top prize for contributions to the comment section…

I have remarked to my wife at the grocery store checkout counter that I could write every single article in Cosmo headlined ‘How to Keep you Man’, ‘How to Wow your Man in Bed’, ‘How to Keep your Man Satisfied’ etc. etc. etc.:

Give him a blow job.

And yes, it is just that simple.

Anthony, on the other hand, does a great job of capturing exactly what Dr. Helen was talking about, by typifying the status quo: Men as beasts of burden. You keep them on the “right” path, by bruising their sensitive, tender egos anytime they wander astray:

This is the saddest thing I’ve ever read by a man. The reason you are dissatisfied and perplexed by women is not that women are confused.

It’s that you are such a sorry excuse for a man.

Anthony, if you are a woman — which I believe you are — you’re ordering up more quantities of what has already frustrated you. No one’s ever pronounced a desire for a preening, pliable sycophant of a man, and there’s a reason for that. Because nobody wants one. But if you really are a fella, your position is even more absurd because you’re placing orders on what the other sex wants by proxy. Placing an order for what has never made women happy. In all of human history. Not once.

Ace is right. Quit reading heavy, expensive, petroleum-product glossy mags (which contribute to global warming, anyway) about how to do stuff, and just jump in and start doin’.

You realize how aggravated the ladies would be if men behaved this way? It would be like, dishes stacking in the sink higher and higher, night after night, while we sit around and read glossy magazines with “101 ways to get those dishes done” on the cover.

Update: Forgot to deliver a primer for those who aren’t “into blogs” and may not know what’s going on.

Glenn Reynolds does Instapundit, and Dr. Helen is his wife. That’s why everyone’s being all cutesy.

Each of them is responsible for running something remarkable and worthwhile, although their styles are diametrically opposed. He’s a linker, she’s a thinker.

There, now you know what you need to know. Except about what’s up with Anthony. That I don’t know. I’ve got a couple of ideas, and I’m not that curious about ’em.

Not too long ago, three regular (or semi-regular) readers came down on the head of Yours Truly for saying women couldn’t get the job done in Information Technology as well as the men…although I said no such thing, and would not have said any such thing. The subject of the article, and presumably of the thread that opened up under it, was women avoiding technical fields of their own accord. The article I linked said that women were being given choices their mothers had not been given, and they were using those choices — female choosiness led to an underrepresentation of women in data centers. They didn’t want to do it.

My comments were that women tend — are you reading? TEND. TEND. TEND. (black marker, circle, underline) — to thrive on attention. As a technical field becomes more professional and more intensive, it takes on a certain “what’ve you done for us lately?” aspect. You aren’t a miracle-worker anymore. You do exactly the same stuff you did when people put you on a pedestal and worshipped at your feet, except now you do it on an assembly line. Next miracle, next miracle, next miracle…keep it moving. No applause. No kudos. No attention.

And that is guy-work. It isn’t that I haven’t met any lady miracle workers. Quite to the contrary, I’ve met quite a few. And if they make it that far, they are generally more intelligent, more articulate and more well-rounded than the men, brain-wise. But they have to have their “strokes.” Whether they want to admit it or not, performing before an audience is integral to the job they are doing. Without the feedback they become bored and frustrated. Sure they can tolerate it. But one way or another, after a time, they’re gone.

These efforts to “recruit more women into IT” therefore become, unavoidably, a sort of dog-chasing-tail exercise. What we ignore is that among women who are capable of doing these jobs, most of them don’t want to do it…and among the women who do indeed want to do it at any given time, if you give them a few years most of them will be gone.

Goldstein at Protein Wisdom also notes that men and women are not the same. The subject under discussion here, is firefighting in the great city of Los Angeles. Once again, there is an effort to recruit women.

This time, though, the difference in ability is more pronounced — the measures taken to overcome that difference in ability, are more determined, less honest, and, after awhile, actually become dangerous…

[F]or years, nobody questioned the underlying assumptions pushed by the City Council and the city Fire Commission: that women wanted to be firefighters, that women were kept out, and that women had special skills needed on fire lines, just as female cops brought special skills to their jobs. If Bamattre was jettisoning standards and practicing the equivalent of grade inflation in order to slip women into fire stations, the thinking was that the ends justified the means.

“It is a political-correctness issue, more than one [that asks] whether it makes good sense or not,” says [former Los Angeles Mayor Richard] Riordan, chatting by phone during a ski trip to Whistler Mountain in British Columbia. “But that is a fact of life.”

Then, in 2005, City Controller Laura Chick alleged in an audit that Bamattre was engaged in a rollback of physical requirements. […]

Then last May, a former drillmaster at the Frank Hotchkins Memorial Training Center testified in Superior Court that he had been ordered by two high-ranking chiefs to pass women, and had stood up to their double standard. “I recommended termination on 95 percent of the women that could not throw that ladder,” testified Captain Scott Campos, now at Fire Station 5. “And in all cases, it was overlooked — and they were sent to the field.”

Bamattre’s alleged lowering of standards “put people out in the field that weren’t qualified,” says Lima, who won a $3.75 million judgment after he claimed his superiors retaliated against him — for making life as tough for women firefighters as he did for the men.
:
“They recruit them, and then they beat them up,” claims attorney Thomas Hoegh, who is handling at least two lawsuits against the Fire Department. “They encourage the women to join the department, then look what happens to them. They are all getting hurt badly.”

Most of the injuries, he says, “are occurring during training activities. One wonders what is going on here. There is a double standard. They are encouraging them to join, then they do everything in their power to try to get rid of them.”

But firefighter Julie Wolf — one of the rare women working on the fire line at a fire station in Los Angeles — has a different theory about what is causing the endless cycle of female hirings, washouts, injuries and lawsuits.

“Some of the women can’t do the basics because of strength,” says Wolf, a tough-talking engineer at Station 63. “Captains document it, and all of a sudden it is a ‘hostile working environment’ against the captain… I have never seen a woman overdrilled, and it has never happened to me.”

Wolf is growing tired of the recriminations — from women. “That is what we do. That is our job. All of a sudden it is humiliating and hostile for a member to perform their job? I don’t understand that.”

As a result, she says, “I think they are a bunch of crybabies. When I come to work, I am a firefighter first and a female second. I come to work and do my job.”

This is all a case of confusing the moderate with the extreme.

Whether we want to admit it or not, our goal is that for each fella doing a job, there should be a gal doing exactly the same job…at the same grade, for the same pay. One-for-one, ten-for-ten.

Anything less than that is undeniable evidence of discrimination.

At the same time, we want the women to have choices. All selections conceivable, should be available to her, and woe upon the head of anyone who gets in the way.

Well the problem that surfaces is that in addition to being able to do different things, the two sexes also want different things.

It never once seems to occur to us that a woman can exercise her choices, and as a direct consequence of that, end up being absent in that seat we just got done deciding should be filled by a female butt. We think if the fellas want to do something, it just naturally follows the women want to do it too. It doesn’t really work like that.

The other problem that comes up is that when you start talking about statistics instead of talking about potential, the anecdotal tales about women-I-knew become irrelevant. It’s a conversation about commons instead of about elites. What women can do is no longer part of it — statistical tendencies reign supreme. That’s the conversation: Statistics. That’s what we’ll be sending the bean-counters in to start counting, so the lawsuits can be filed: Statistics. What MOST men do. What MOST women do. What most women want.

I’m going to let Julie Wolf have the final say on what most women can lift. In my experience, most women don’t like it when they do something extraordinary, and nobody notices. They certainly don’t like it when the attitude they get back, is “About time…now go perform this other miracle, over here.” They don’t deal with that situation the same way the guys do.

All you fellas who want to doubt me on that one, if you’re married, why don’t you go a couple weeks without saying anything appreciative or thankful about anything your wife does for you. Let me know how that works out for ya.

Get ready, feminists. Anytime someone points out that men sometimes don’t receive a fair shake on things, the standard reply is to cast the complaint in a light of “whining,” to discourage anyone from giving it a hearing. It’s what you do. Reliable as a well-wound clock.

So I won’t whine, I’ll just ask the question…throw it out there. Is this reasonable?

The Hatred Men Have To Put Up With….

A couple of months ago, KTLA.Com posted a story about a woman who attacked her sleeping husband with a meat cleaver. Nowhere in the article is there mention of self-defense on her part, or a history of abuse on his part, yet a large proportion of the comments posted about this story support the woman’s actions, one even calls for other women to follow her example.

In case the link dies here is the story in full…

Cops: Wife Attacks Sleeping Husband with Meat Cleaver

KTLA News

November 19, 2008

VICTORVILLE — A local mother is accused of attacking her sleeping husband with a meat cleaver.

Officials say 33-year-old Olivia Geatian hacked at her husband’s head three times with a meat cleaver as he slept early Sunday in the couple’s Oro Grande home.

Geatian appeared in Victorville Superior Court Tuesday where she was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon, domestic violence and attempted murder charges.
:
When deputies arrived, they noticed Geatian was intoxicated, officials said, and arrested her for domestic violence and assault with a deadly weapon.

The District Attorney’s office later filed attempted murder charges against her.

The woman’s husband was hospitalized at St. Mary Medical Center where he received numerous staples and stitches to his forehead.

He was also able to speak to deputies and tell them what happened.”

and here are the more egregious comments…

“Misunderstanding
All women should follow this example. We are beaten down by the system of men. Let us set ourselves free through action. I 48 years old and almost have an associates degree from a Kentucky community college, I can see the bigger picture. Let this woman go, let her be the part of the revolution.
Posted by G.B. at 4:48 pm Nov 25, 2008”

“Bummer!
Good for her!
Posted by Boo-Bear at 1:00 am Nov 23, 2008”

“he probably deserved it.
you wonder why women go crazy, SOME MEN MAKE US CRAZY. LEARN HOW TO TREAT US LIKE LADIES AND WE’LL ACT LIKE LADIES
Posted by MARCI at 12:12 pm Nov 21, 2008”

“haha
i bet he deserved it
Posted by jessy at 1:34 pm Nov 20, 2008”

“getting crazy
This lady must of put up with a lot of his crap, before she got to this point of attacking her husband I am sure the public will find out more details to the story.
Posted by edna r. at 12:00 pm Nov 20, 2008”

“Hmmmmm
Perhaps there is more to this story than there appears. However…….what if the man was flirting with another woman, or worse? We dont know what kind of party it was, after all.
Posted by Yami at 8:27 am Nov 20, 2008”

“MY HERO
SHOULD OF CHOPPED OFF HIS WEINY
Posted by FLO at 7:36 am Nov 20, 2008”

“curiuos
I wonder what he did. You know she had to have a good reason to get him like that. Don’t judge till you get the whole story.
Posted by melissa at 1:43 am Nov 20, 2008”

“only 3 whacks!
she should have hit him harder
Posted by noinabo at 10:31 pm Nov 19, 2008”

From the spelling errors, it’s probably safe to presume these are not influential pillars of society, in spite of the education from such prestigious universities as a community college in Kentucky. But the people who are in charge, listen to this kind of anger, and we are reminded once again that there is no actual experience necessary to get it aroused. A lot of pinheads out there just want to hate men. Maybe they were wronged once upon a time…maybe they find it’s just an effective way to make new friends.

But this wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it was only the hateful people who were engaged in it. As it is, a lot of folks are generally supportive of men, or at least think they are — and somehow, irrationally, inexplicably, find it necessary to insert some transgression committed by the man. As blogger Porky points out, there is no mention in the story of such a thing taking place. Some of the other comments speculate that gosh darn it, he must’ve done something to tick her off. Maybe did some groping at the party held earlier, that inspired some jealous rage. Nice compromise. The attempted murder was a disproportionate response — but it was justified, somehow, nevertheless. We “know” it.

We don’t know it. This may come as a shock, but it’s not at all a rare thing in the dealings between the male and the female, that a less-balanced female will occasionally get-it-in-her-head that the male is supposed to do something. And she’s quite agreeable about the negotiations that must ensue. She’s agreeable as long as he does it.

Trouble is, it isn’t common knowledge just how quickly that veneer of agreeability can fall away, and how completely, if he doesn’t do what she wants. That’s because it isn’t common for men to refuse.

So no, I’m afraid we don’t know he “must’ve done something” to cheese her off. I’ve dated my share of imbalanced females…perhaps, before they find me appealing, something has to be slightly off-kilter up there. Whatever the reason, I’m in a position to state: A lot of times the provocation doesn’t really matter. Anger follows anger, like links in a grisly chain. It’s every bit as likely the altercation was about something he wasn’t going to do, as about something he did do.

And there is something terribly wrong with people who feel the compulsion to insert that bit of fiction into stories like this. Something so wrong, that it would interfere with any and all decision-making, even the most basic kind. And I don’t care what community college you went to in Kentucky, it’ll leave you less capable of dealing with life, and getting along with people.

Go ahead. Come at me with the standard defense of “Yeah but all women who swing axes at their husbands skulls aren’t like that.”

The Wedding Rule determines that there is only one response possible for the guest who announces guest-list problems. You know what I mean. “Don’t invite X; X and I are not on good terms; if X is coming, I won’t.”

The one response to be given is “that is too bad, we will miss you.” The burden of an incompatibility problem is to be shouldered by whoever creates it.

This is great advice for couples’ therapy, I’ve learned. Having been “urged” by many former lovers to “go to counseling” I’ve given them all the same answer and never once regretted it. They all became “former” this way and I couldn’t be more pleased.

How many times have you heard about this as an indictment? He stole money from my purse, he slugged me in the eye, he set my dog on fire, he beats my kids, I’m pretty sure he killed my mother by pushing her down the stairs…I urged him to go to counseling and he refuses to go.

Refusing to go to couples-counseling is thought to be on par with ghastly transgressions — and it shouldn’t be, it really shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with refusing to go to counseling. It’s an expensive service, invariably considered by households during times in which expensive services can be least-afforded, that exists to make certain things look reasonable that otherwise never would.

They grapple with the question that, up until now, was not allowed to be stated.

Disturbingly, some grapple with it by finding elaborate ways to dismiss it. But an idea truly worthy of dismissal, could be managed in some other way. Most tragic is this argument that, since every woman has a father, a woman who truly hates men would be hating part of herself, and such a thing would be clearly impossible since it’s a contradiction.

A contradiction it is, yes. You can tell by the way such women behave. Apprehensive, twitchy, grouchy and mean. Whoever said contradictions were automatically and everlastingly expurgated from human affairs? Especially belligerent, omni-potent, omni-present and omni-confrontational political movements?

I have a theory about this. My theory is that I can convince any woman, anywhere, anytime, any fine lady you care to pick out for me, that feminism is hatred…or at the very least, that it has the capacity for this. All I need is some magic way of temporarily changing sex in a human, and a time machine. I’d turn them into men and transport them to the late 1970’s to walk around there for six months. Just walk around in the shoes, sister.

See, we don’t remember anymore how shrill the rhetoric was back then. Men had to give up “the power” — not some of it, but all of it. There was no talk about moderation, as you would have to have nowadays. Politicians weren’t that clever just yet…this was just post-Watergate. The talk was about a trading-of-places. We’d been oppressing women “for five thousand years” and it was their “turn” now. There was talk of seats on a bus, that MEN had been in FRONT and WOMEN had been in BACK and it was TIME for the WOMEN to sit in FRONT and for MEN to sit in the BACK so things would be evened out across time. There wasn’t any stigma about being an extremist in anything, and no glory in being a moderate about anything; too many baby-boomers running around, and young people don’t see the occasional wisdom in such a thing. It was all about whose turn it was.

They said, back then, what a lot of organized minority groups would like to say now if they could, but can’t. Gettin’-even-with’em-ism. It was out front-and-center in full force. Men are pigs; oh yeah, maybe not all men, but the ones that aren’t, are acceptable as collateral damage.

It was also pre-Clinton. Feminist had not yet been caught defending the most powerful male chauvinist pig the world had ever known. And so, since they hadn’t been embarrassed that way just yet, they were still powerful. They had real power. You couldn’t do anything without making the feminists happy, or at least satisfying them to the point where they’d leave you alone for a little while. And if you made them unhappy, you were a pariah. They’d get you.

Everyone, who was anyone, who made any decisions of any importance whatsoever, thought about the feminists. What might tick ’em off, what was “sure” not to. And if you could transport someone wrestling with the “feminist hate group” question back there, or transport that era back up here to the girl grappling with the question…the answer would be completely obvious. Feminists had a vision for men. It was a unified vision. And it was pretty far away from an equalizing one. They were already using the word “equal” in their slogans, yeah, but equality wasn’t what it was about. Not to the ones who were making the decisions about where the feminist movement would be going next. It was about grabbing that seat — demoting the “boys” to second-fiddle status, so we could find out what it’s like. And, to a lot of them, it still is about exactly that…even though a lot of ’em weren’t even born yet back then.