House of Eratosthenes

It would be most tragic if a casual reader caught sight of my post immediately previous, in which I lament what has been happening over the last several decades to womanhood, and concluded from this that I think manhood during this same stretch of time has been doing wonderfully. The truth is I don’t think that. Or, reviewed the arc of similarly-titled posts overall and concluded I’m entirely confident about where things go from here on, under President Trump, who’s going to make everything fine & dandy, no need for anyone to worry about anything. I don’t think that either. I know there are people out there who rush to conclude this about their fellow countrymen, that these fellows have been fully assuaged, believing with Trump in charge everything is on auto-pilot. The target that is in their sites, is anybody with an opinion to share who doesn’t buy wholesale into every kooky Trump-conspiracy theory they & their compatriots have thought about peddling. Some of those theories are kookier than others, so it logically follows that their target is any & all rationally-thinking Americans. That’s an error.

They’ve been eager to point to the historical enshrinement of manly personalities into the position of the next iron-fisted dictator, most famously pointed-out in F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (for those who are too rushed to read the whole thing, you can catch the video summary here, reproduced from a cartoon series that appeared in Look magazine, 1945). This is an entirely valid concern. The problem is not one of validity, but of relevance. I have yet to meet the Trump supporter who pushes the idea that, with The Donald in charge, we can all stop worrying. If I am to be listed among them, my own viewpoint is: Heck ya, we should be worried about The Road To Serfdom under this new guy; we should have been worried about it under that other guy; we should have been worried about it under the guy who came before him, and the guy who came before him — we should maintain, and act on, a concern about this all of the time.

And I’ll go much further: It is Trump’s critics, not his fans, who are guilty of condensing complex public policy issues down into overly simplified perceptions and prejudices about gender roles. It is only normal for them to do so, because they have become acclimated to it.

No one with a name or reputation worth defending, is going to put that name or reputation under a written statement to the effect of “get rid of all masculine traits, and all society’s problems will be solved.” But, that is the sentiment being acted-upon when we see institutions of higher learning prattle on with their foolish nonsense about “toxic masculinity.” In the world that has become unnaturally familiar to us in the recent past, we can’t deliberate the distinction between these two things, because the acid test would be whether the designers of toxic-masculinity curricula would be willing to trash something that is exclusively masculine, and at the same time, undeniably good. And in merely composing such a question, you see, I’ve already lost ’em. Their culture will not acknowledge any such thing, for it’s written into the leading pages of their catechism that females can do anything males can do — at least, all of the good stuff. It’s a “soap bubble” catechism, retaining whatever structural integrity it has by way of tolerating no breaches in the perimeter. They’ll refuse to entertain any discussion of good thing men can do that women can’t do. Their stated rationale for this refusal is in identifying some woman, somewhere, who’s shown herself capable of doing whatever the good thing is, that anyone cares to name…and yes, somewhere there always will be one. But the real reason for refusing to discuss it in an honest dialogue, is they can’t afford to do so. Once you acknowledge males are innately superior at doing something, no matter what it is, even the silly stuff like playing video games, you leave the door open to the dangerously natural: Gender roles. You tacitly acknowledge that they’re a real thing, and perhaps our perfect Utopian destiny is not waiting for us beyond the point in the pathway ahead where we discard them. Maybe they’re not just garbage to be cast over the shoulder as we march confidently and progressively onward. Maybe they’re something we should keep. Maybe gender roles are even something we should, dare I say it — cherish.

So with two or three generations ticking by, society guided by a “get rid of masculinity and everything will be fine” credo that no one’s willing to say out loud, even as anyone with some authority to wield makes weighty decisions based on it, over time we have accepted the War On Boys as normal. It starts with public K-12 education, in which “boys are treated like defective girls” (0:29).

We’ve become accustomed to masculinity itself being undefined. It’s treated as a mental illness in the school-age boys, something in need of medication. Later on, we routinely see it undefined further, by way of defining opposites. We haven’t long to wait at all before someone says, with a residue of irony that diminishes asymptotically across time, “a REAL man…” and then what comes next is something a real man wouldn’t actually do. The one that appears most often is “isn’t afraid to get in touch with his feelings,” which means something stupid, like crying during a movie. Nope. Common sense provides the correct answer here, as it usually does, real men don’t actually do that. Or: cheerfully holds his wife’s purse while she hits the can at the shopping mall. Nope again. A man may love his wife, but standing there like an idiot holding a purse, with no idea of when the ordeal is over, is not living the American dream. Hate to break it to those who needed to see it, I’m sure it comes as a shock. The science is settled.

This stuff we today call “liberalism” achieved victory after victory during this time, by selling itself to the non-liberals first. To salt-of-the-earth types who respect God, and the people who share their communities with them, the types who most strongly resemble the grandparents, aunts and uncles who have earned your respect. People with actual brains, and consciences, who are way too good for what the liberals were selling them. How did liberalism manage to make inroads on this slice of Americana? Well, the obvious answer is “by lying about what it really is,” but it’s more complicated than that, and the war on boys is an apt example of this. If liberalism had been subject to truth-in-advertising restrictions, it would have had to recruit new “soldiers” into this war by saying: We want to create a climate of fear. We want men and boys to be afraid, very afraid. We want males to be teetering on the brink, forever, of losing whatever positions they have in academe, in their professions outside of it, and in society in general — or, to have lost those positions already. That is how we want to re-define what it means to be a man: There are men who have already lost it all, and there are men who haven’t but are afraid it’ll happen any minute. We want men to see what it’s like.

Had they sold it that way, it would’ve been truthful. But they wouldn’t have sold much.

The recruiters were far craftier than that. They attacked the decency angle. How do you get a decent, wholesome mother of sons, to support something that will put her sons’ future in jeopardy, all day every day, forever? When she has three, four, five or more sons she loves more than anything? How do you do that. The answer is, you make it about behavior. Enter: The so-called “objectification” of women.

Esquire UK editor Alex Bilmes got in some hot water this week when, on a panel about feminism’s conflicts with advertising, he admitted that his magazine objectifies women. As The Guardian writes,

“The women we feature in the magazine are ornamental,” he said, speaking at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London on Tuesday. “I could lie to you if you want and say we are interested in their brains as well. We are not. They are objectified.”

He went on to compare pictures of women to pictures of “cool cars,” which is to say that the models are presented to men as trophies and objects for use, instead of people. The comment has churned up outrage, but really, we should be happy that Bilmes was being, to use his own words, “more honest.” Nearly everyone is or has been complicit with sexism on some level, but almost no one admits it. Seeing someone admit outright that his magazine deliberately objectifies female models is refreshing. Bilmes even used the word objectified correctly, to mean “reducing to an object,” rather than simply looking at with lust.

That’s Amanda Marcotte being charitable. But, if you follow her link back to her own article, you find she shouldn’t have done this, for she makes a point about the stop-female-objectification movement that is more against it than for it:

Objectification is reducing someone to an object, but unfortunately it’s all too often used to mean “crossing some invisible line from being attractive to being too sexy,” whatever that means.

Her point is at least definable, even though she doesn’t want to define it: Men are to bear all of the responsibility for everything. Can this be rationally denied? A man who looks at a woman can certainly do it impolitely, but it is undeniable that he lacks the power to “reduc[e her] to an object.” This is a metaphor for something else. As we go looking for that something else, we find a kaleidoscope mish-mash of lists of tell-tale signs as this social-justice warrior and that one scramble over one another, each to lend their own contribution to these newer layers of revised definition; but the one common facet to it all is making the object of objectification feel like she’s this “object,” and nothing more.

That’s why it’s all bullshit. If men are to be made responsible for the feelings of women they’ve never met, to whom they have no connection whatsoever other than that woman existing within the physical frustum of their gaze — well, they would have to be responsible for everything else too. And the woman would have to be responsible for nothing. Reminds me of the old joke about the redneck kid in the park, enjoying a nice, long, rude gaze at the temptress walking by, who chooses to confront him and demand “What do you think you’re looking at??” “What yer showin’ me,” came the unabashed reply, without skipping a beat…

Ah, that’s not polite at all. But it’s quite correct.

What’s incorrect, is that males who stare at Beyoncé exactly the same way other guys stare at someone else, are somehow innocent of a transgression of which the others are guilty, because of Beyoncé’s intentions. But that’s part of what has been lost. What a masterful move. The kindly old salt-of-the-earth mother-of-sons will fall for it every time, too, since it can be so naturally presented as instructions to your boys not to stare. What concerned mother can ever pass up a chance to refine her male progeny into behaving more like little gentlemen?

The big lie here is that it ever had anything to do with that. This was about the women who were not receiving these stares. It was “If you won’t steal a glance at me, you aren’t allowed to steal one at anybody else either.” It was Rush Limbaugh’s Undeniable Truth of Life #24.

But, good luck telling that to anyone at the time. It would have been construed as paranoid, by just about everyone, for anyone to portray this as an attack on maleness. Nevertheless, with the gift of hindsight, if we’re honest, we can acknowledge that’s exactly what it was. There’s guilt, with no crime, after all. And no one within the targeted demographic is innocent! Not even America’s First Holy President, believe it or not.

President Obama has apologized to California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris after praising her looks during remarks at a fundraiser this week, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Friday.

“They are old friends and good friends, and he did not want in any way to diminish the attorney general’s professional accomplishments and her capabilities,” Carney said during his daily briefing. “He fully recognizes the challenge women continue to face in the workplace and that they should not be judged based on appearance.”

Obama made the call to Harris, a potential gubernatorial candidate, Thursday night after returning to Washington from a fundraising visit to California.

At an event to benefit the Democratic National Committee earlier in the day, Obama said Harris is “brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough,” adding that “she also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”

Did Barack Obama ever apologize for His prior behavior, since stepping out into the public view a decade-or-so ago, about anything else? Just one other thing? Can’t recall.

Okay so we have: Noticing something visually appealing about a woman — sorry salt-of-the-earth Mom, you were fooled, it’s not about rude staring because President Obama didn’t do that — is tantamount to a denial that the woman has anything positive going for her outside of looks. And that, in turn, is somehow the same as making her feel this way, which leads to objectification. Two equivalences. Both bullshit.

The truth is, there was nothing broken here, nothing in need of fixing. A nice, long, vulgar leer is unbecoming, but there’s nothing by way of social reform needed to fix that. People do things that are unbecoming all the time. Producing a DVD that forces me to watch all the previews is unbecoming. Calling me on the phone on a weeknight for donations, or surveys, is unbecoming. Especially when I’m in the middle of throwing a temper tantrum about a DVD produced the wrong way.

Staring may not be something that would earn your silver-haired saintly momma’s approval, but it’s also not rape. Sorry, it’s just not:

This website has seen many students, faculty members, and administrators – especially in “higher education” – say some pretty dumb and hateful things about men and boys, often with the general support or acquiescence of the academic community. It has happened so much that it is increasingly hard to top the moral contortions and blind hatred they have pushed out over the years, like an unregulated megacorporation spilling toxic waste into the public drinking water.

But this case is pushing it. Straight from the Goshen College website, on a page titled “What men can do to stop rape”:

“Don’t allow psychological rape or commit it yourself. Psychological rape consists of verbal harassment, whistles, kissing noises, heavy breathing, sly comments or stares. These are all assaults on any woman’s sense of well-being.”

That’s it, men. It’s time to come to terms with our Patriarchal Privilege™. We actually are all rapists. We just never knew it until Goshen College told us.

Of course, under this definition most (if not all) women would be rapists as well. But as Feminists & Friends have told us in the past, since rape is all about The Patriarchy™ men cannot be raped anyway.

The link no longer points to a page that actually says that. That’s the thing about this “stare rape” fantasy, it’s like a mess of cockroaches. Light hits them, they scatter. That’s another tip-off, for those who need it, that there’s something wrong with this.

Fact is, it’s natural. Men are interested in women, and women are interested in men. When you hear someone complain about that, you’re almost certainly hearing someone who wouldn’t exist if it were not true.

To the extent that the complaint is about insufficiently refined behavior, look to modern liberalism and modern feminism as the original causes. Society has provided ways to deal with these “problems,” and those preventative measures were among the first things targeted by the progressives once they found their way into unprecedented levels of power. We used to call it “role modeling,” and then the newly empowered proggies, again acting on contrived new rules they would never put together word-for-word, with an actual name or reputation underneath, came up with this new load: Who needs role models?

And is it really the case that children learn about gender primarily by observing and copying behaviour in others, as shallow ‘social learning’ theories imply? In practice, academic approaches to gender development have moved on, placing much greater emphasis on the ways in which children’s understandings of masculinity and femininity are actively shaped by diverse and changing social contexts.

The evidence that boys growing up without fathers are necessarily harmed is also unconvincing. Reviews of research on fatherhood over years suggest there is very little about the gender of the parent that appears distinctly important. Indeed, they reveal instead common factors in positive father and mother involvement or care.

Of course boys, and girls, benefit from the presence in their lives of positive, involved fathers. But it is difficult to single out fathers as making a unique contribution. Conversely, focussing on the need for a ‘male role model’ downplays the important contribution of women. Far from ‘feminising’ boys, there is evidence that mothers, grandmothers, and female siblings and friends have a significant positive impact on their development.

It is important too to ask what kind of male involvement is healthy for boys. Some boys and young men suffer not from an absence of male role models, but from an excess of limiting and destructive models. We shouldn’t therefore assume that any male role model is better than none. [emphasis mine]

This is the kind of thin rationalization that has become commonplace and accepted, in our society, in the recent past. “I can’t find anything fathers bring to the table here…certainly, nothing I could learn to appreciate.” Again we are gifted with the wisdom of hindsight. We should have been viewing such highbrow screeds as what they really are. Not essays of enlightenment from someone who can see something eluding everyone else, but rather, confessions of ignorance from someone who can’t see something everyone else can; specifically, anything good about males. When it’s taken into the tall grass of defending no-role-models as “at least not as bad as something else”…that’s pretty far gone. Lots of things aren’t as bad as something else, after all. Enslaving women is not as bad as something else.

But, we do need role modeling for boys. Without it, we are lost. No need to argue about it, we have experienced it, as a society, first-hand. How lost did we get? Well, someone has to ask the question…Captain Capitalism asked it, and did a pretty fair job of asking it.

Are There ANY Masculine Millennial Male Role Models???

I noticed something a bit odd.

Tom Cruise and Mark Wahlberg are the two main guys heading up the two main action movies in play right now. Cruise is over 50 and Wahlberg is over 40.

Where the heck are the Millennial male action heroes???

So when I tweeted this out, an Agent in the Field returned this. The top 40 or so actors under 35. And bar Captain American and Thor (both actors are Chris I believe), the rest of them a[re] pussies for god’s sake! Seriously, look at those limp-wristed, pansified girly men. Christ, the original Hans and Franz in SNL were more manly than this lot!!!!

Oh well. Millennial girls worship at the altar of feminism. I guess they got their dream come true with the men of this generation.

There’s something I’ve been noticing as well, which could explain what The Captain had been noticing. We’ve been getting punch-drunk on the spectacle of women yelling at men and the men not being able to talk back. Kinda gets back to the subject of previous post. I recall this surreal joint-press-conference being done by then-current President Obama and former President Bill Clinton, in which Obama seemed to abdicate. They both made a big deal about wrapping things up and meeting the schedule expectations of their respective shrewish wives…very telling. Seems there’s a constituency out there demanding this. Can’t get enough of the sight, or at least the idea, of a PWSHNSSMWWTF talking down to her man.

It is, perhaps, not an exaggeration to say that somewhere along the line, that’s become what masculinity is. Standing there & taking it while your wife, girlfriend, female at work, playground duty teacher, or some other female is talking down to you. And I find it rather telling: It starts with a desire to teach boys not to behave too lasciviously toward the fairer sex, to act more like gentlemen. What a laudable goal. And it ends with the ultimate extrovert holding court where he has no business doing any such thing; the modern-male ideal among those who seek to dismantle masculinity, without admitting that’s what they want to do. Bill Freakin’ Clinton. Who certainly does have his fan base; but would any among them want their sons to turn out like this? To treat women the way Bill Clinton treats women?

Honey Rider The real tragedy is that there was no culture-conflict necessary here. If you look at it from a high level, thinking only about the essentials, most people are not involved in any disagreement about what we want. There should be a balance. Before all this shit came down, really, we had it already. James Bond, in Dr. No, supposedly the prime example of male symbolism that required reforming, first serious interaction he ever has with a female: He acknowledges Honey Rider’s presence, does not treat her as merely an object (although, arguably, the producers of the movie do), makes a promise to her that he will not steal her shells, and when her boat is filled with bullet holes promises to buy her another. And then he spends the next forty-five minutes solid dishing out to her one instruction after another after another…supposedly highlighting the need for the oncoming feminist movement. Which arrived. But did not achieve the necessary balance, of men knowing what to do, and at the same time respecting a woman’s presence, dignity, wishes, etc.

No, it didn’t provide a balance that was missing, it took one away that was there already. It replaced this delicate balance with an absolute. We can’t find male action movie role models, because male characters can’t figure out for themselves what to do & just do it anymore. That would be a remnant of patriarchy!!

The Captain has noticed a deficit, because you can’t make an “action movie” this way. Action movies, in the classic James Bond era, worked because they were at least somewhat connected to what might happen in real life. The protagonist was physically local to his challenges, and he decided what to do about them. Nowadays, a lot of these decisions have to be checked: Does the female approve? One trick that has become popular in recent years it to use the “bluetooth headset,” connecting the protagonist to a “roomful of computer nerds” who let him know what secret panel is behind what wall. And, tell him what to do next. When to duck. It looks snazzy, but it also serves the purpose of fulfilling the “action movie” fantasy of lazy, couch-entwined females: The female, safely insulated from the physical danger, tells the male what to do, and then he does it. All the vital elements of the story are told. Except for one thing: A man actually making decisions.

This is dysfunctional, because in addition to failing the test of realism in telling an action story in video form, it fails the test of fantasy as well. What level of desire do women have, for a man who is constantly asking what to do next, until all the decisions made are entirely reflective of his female overseer’s priorities, and not at all of his own? Any man with any experience dating women at all, knows the answer. Chicks hate that. Feminists won’t permit us to talk about it openly, but women have a primal revulsion against that. There are few things that get a woman aggravated faster, than when she asks something like “Where should we go eat?” or “What color should we use to wallpaper this bedroom” and gets back an answer from her stud, some variation of “Oh, I dunno…whatever you wanna do.” This actually annoys the average women more keenly than any so-called “objectification” ever can, and a hell of a lot faster. It denies her the man’s sense of identity. And evolution has built her to seek this out in a man. She doesn’t want a certain color of wallpaper, she wants his color of wallpaper, some sign that she’s making this house a home with that guy, and not some other guy. It’s why all the cultures around the world, the advanced and the not-so-much, that never had any contact with each other, use both Christian names and surnames. And, in almost all cases, inherit those surnames from the father. The actions of the individual reflect, well or poorly, on the name he’s given as an individual, and also on the family crest. Each name is an unfinished book, and these deeds are written into those books. That’s how it works. Humans, at a biological level, expect it to work this way.

Now when you have The Flash and Green Arrow sidestepping the meaningful masculine act of making decisions as the action-hero physically confronting the danger, leaving it to their distant, protected, bluetooth-connected strong-willed female computer nerds to tell them what to do next, what this does is remove the need for a male role model. How is a man to conduct himself? Well the question answers itself, now; there are no decisions to be made, just listen to the female voice on your ear bud and do what she tells you to do. But what about ethics and moral reasoning? Leave it to majority rule; decide however it seems society wants you to decide. Listen to the Loud Crowd. And, the job is done. No need to think for yourself.

There’s no use resisting it, anyway. You Will Be Made To Care.

In recent years, we’ve seen how the real crime isn’t conservative intellectual or ideological dissent but conservative emotional dissent. Mozilla’s Brendan Eich being pelted from his job, the perfidious treason of the wedding-cake bakers, the assaults on Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, the bonfires of asininity lit every day on college campuses: These have so much less to do with an ideological argument and more to do with the new unwritten and unspoken fatwah: “You will be made to care.”

Making “emotional dissent” a crime, is necessary. A compass can only be used as a compass if it has one needle. And since liberals cannot defend the direction toward which their compass needle points with facts, logic and common sense, they have to be particularly touchy when it comes to contrary needles pointing in different directions. To make it seem reasonable that the human male is entirely lacking in purpose, they have to make it look to the casual observer like it’s always been that way.

I was reminded of this a few years back when Severian and I were targeted for retaliation by, of all people, award-winning Science Fiction author John Scalzi and his Internet-admiring pals…

Morgan quotes me, John Scalzi quotes Morgan, hilarity ensues.

Skimming through that thread is a clinic in point-missing. Or a classic illustration of Larry Correia’s first rule of internet arguing: Skim until offended. Since Morgan mentioned “pulling his man card” in the third sentence….

For the record, the following are NOT the point of that post, or my original post, or the Vox Popoli post which inspired it all.

– Ha ha, Scalzi is a weak weakling that’s weak.
– Masculinity comes in card form.
– Manhood is defined by one’s bench press.

All of that is just projection. The point is larger and simpler: It takes a tremendous amount of effort to maintain a worldview like Scalzi’s.

He claims his daughter out-lifts him. Which means one of two things must be true:

1. He’s actually been in the gym recently, such that he can make an accurate head-to-head comparison with his daughter; or
2. He hasn’t, in which case he’s just making that comparison up.

If it’s the former, he could hardly fail to notice that the average man is stronger than the average woman, and it’s not even particularly close. Even assuming Miss Scalzi is in the top 1%, female strength-wise, and trains like a demon; and that Mr. Scalzi is in the bottom 1% of male physique (or has a degenerative musculoskeletal condition or something) and has never lifted a weight in his life, he can’t have failed to notice that most of the girls are over by the little plastic jazzercise weights while the guys are throwing plates around. Maybe his girl out-lifts him, but the average girl is nowhere near the average guy, and five minutes in the gym is all it takes to see it.

In case you’re wondering about that “masculinity comes in card form” thing, I’m pretty sure it’s a reference to Scalzi’s tweet about me, which is buried behind one of those several links:

“Somehow, ‘revoking the Man Card’ doesn’t seem adequate for this.” — Dude who apparently keeps his manhood in a card.

I didn’t comment further on this at the time…but, there is a question that arises sort of naturally out of this. Where else does one keep one’s manhood? I’ve got my own answer, and a card is not it. What’s Scalzi’s? It’s necessary to know, in order to get his little jibe.

And his answer, I’m left to conclude, likely is not the same as mine…

Spot the debased beta. This won’t be a difficult test. Regular beta males aren’t always immediately discernible, but debased betas stick out like a White person in Germany.

Our case study today is John Scalzi, a quisling male emblematic of so much that has gone haywire with White American men (and their beards).

Exhibit A: This is Scalzi’s Christmas card. He signed off on it. He approved of it. This is how he wants the world to see him.

Is this the Self-Shiv of the Week? I see two brutish women and one screeching little girl. Merry sexual inversion, everyone!

Nature abhors a T vacuum, and Scalzi, having surrendered his T to the devil for the nice life in a 98% White town, guarantees that his defensive back megawife and daughter take up the T slack. And so here they are, wife and daughter doing a man’s job and smirking like a cocky self-assured chad respectively, while the nominal male (scalzied) clasps his hands together and shrieks with delight off to the sidelines as the real men get to work.
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The debased beta is a creature of the modern dystopian West. His kind was vanishingly rare before THEE CURRENT EPOCH, because any males in such craven, open revolt against their masculinity were bullied into social seclusion and ignored by women with anything on the ball. (Or they successfully transmogrified their effeminacy into a strength by becoming the charming dandy lover to loveless housewives.) But now they effloresce all across America’s fruitcup plains, glorified by the media, championed by disingenuous feminists, and medicated into an epicene stupor by Femme Pharma, corn, and porn.
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The handicap principle I mentioned above is a factor, but only applies to betas who don’t routinely and excessively neuter themselves, thus retaining some of the tactical value of the counter-signal. Scalzi is not one of these betas; his self-abasement is thorough, habitual, and nauseatingly ostentatious.

Another facet of the DB personality is the love for wallowing in powerlessness, reveling in weakness. This self-abnegating stance harkens the sacrifices of hermit monks or early Christian proselytizers, but the real impetus for it is the classic fear of success psychology. A lot of emasculated betaboys in Scalzi’s position don’t want to act more manly because they secretly fear improved manhood will lead them to abandon their fat wives. Affecting an air of servitude and prostration and doofusness reinforces the comfort bubble that debased betas prefer to ensconce themselves within, precluding any possibility of betterment and temptation to vice.
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Reading Scalzi is like bathing in a vat of menstrual blood and having pure estrogen injected straight into the scrotum. One must exit Scalzi’s world through a decontamination chamber of red meat and range shooting. His sickness can’t be allowed to spread to vulnerable men. His dildology worldview is a disfigured anti-reality that will yield like buttery goodness to the shiv every time, because nothing substantial underlies it. And the Chateau will flay him, over and over, until his ugliness of mind and spirit perishes from the earth.

Somewhere, Severian was marveling at the profile difference at work here. He and I are, relatively, nobodies; I’m actually going on thirteen years now saying over and over again, “nobody reads this blog” and it’s become a catchphrase of sorts. Scalzi is famous and successful. He has no reason to deign to talk to us. And yet, he went right into this “must have the last word in everything” mode, time and time again. Which made for more posts about his strange debased-beta relationship, and still more. Maybe that’s all part of the plan. Maybe he’ll chime in, in response to this, as well. Who knows? Virtue-signalers never go half-way. They’re like the Energizer Bunnies of Internet packets.

But that just makes it all the more remarkable that the original question remains unanswered: What purpose, in their world, do men have? Biology itself is waiting on an answer. Lots of things have been eliminated; men aren’t supposed to decide things, aren’t supposed to lend their identities to anything, definitely can’t tell a woman what to do. They can squeal like little girls when their wives push calendar years off the edge of cliffs, but you know, real-little-girls can do that. So who needs men? And for what?

Bottom line is, yes something is changing here. The new Trump administration is making people feel very uncomfortable in a lot of ways, and discomfort can feel unnatural sometimes. But as Trump’s predecessor often pointed out, people can be very frightened of change, this doesn’t necessarily mean the change is a bad thing.

Maybe what’s been going on, is people have become accustomed to decisions not being made, save for the decisions that are mostly expected. There’s been a slippage of standards here. The extraordinary decisions that are hailed as revolutionary and courageous, if you look at them closely you see…there’s really no courage here. It’s not “revolutionary,” quite so much as upside-down and inside-out. Direction-less and lost, getting things backwards. The “guidance” on allowing transsexuals into the girls’ restroom (warning, video behind like auto-plays), that’s a perfect example.

A back-to-basics is overdue. Were things so bad before? Back then, a woman could show pride in being a woman, and at the same time, have some respect for men. Men could do the same; if they were proud of being men, they could still respect women. And they could make decisions. Go so far as to say what must be done — if they knew the answer. And this was not pilloried as some kind of assault on women. There was no “How Dare He??” after Indiana Jones said “I’ll make it up as I go along.” To be sure, there must have been some troubles…someone must have said something that caused offense…something to put us in the soup in the first place. But the big take-away from all this is, it’s better to do something and screw it up, even to the point of offending people, than to just scuttle along, not doing anything except squealing like a little girl with your hands squished together, for sake of not offending anybody. And then offending someone anyway. And then having to tweet about them on the Internet so you can have the last word…and pretend up is down and down is up, men are women and women are men, etc. Too much complication. There’s a lot more time and energy left over to be used for productive things, if we just see things as they really are and act accordingly. And, ya know, do stuff instead of coming up with excuses not to do stuff.

Heh, now Supernatural looks even more like an aberration given that it’s almost a straight rebuke against everything you pointed out here (guys making decisions, being men, etc). What’s even funnier is how big of a fandom this has among liberals – ESPECIALLY the hardcore feminist liberals.

How did liberalism manage to make inroads on this slice of Americana?

Two ways. The first: Almost everything about it sounds Christian which was the dominant cultural paradigm at the time. The other… like you said-

Well, the obvious answer is “by lying about what it really is,” but it’s more complicated than that, and the war on boys is an apt example of this. If liberalism had been subject to truth-in-advertising restrictions, it would have had to recruit new “soldiers” into this war by saying…

But see, like Jonah Goldberg pointed out (and you’ll see if you run into many liberals), I don’t think making them be truthful would work because the first lying leftists do is to themselves. They ALWAYS believe things are going to go exactly as advertised. “Oh we’re not going to make men afraid, we’re just going to make women feel safe.” Then conservatives come along and try to warn about unintended consequences and liberals think conservatives are lying because unintended consequences can’t happen – things must happen exactly as advertised. If we don’t intend them, they can’t happen – so conservatives are just being dishonest. You don’t have to go talk to a liberal, just go find a conversation where one conservative was trying to talk to more than one and you’ll see this play out.

She doesn’t want a certain color of wallpaper, she wants his color of wallpaper, some sign that she’s making this house a home with that guy, and not some other guy.

If that’s true why are they never happy with the color we pick?? 😉

Now when you have The Flash and Green Arrow sidestepping the meaningful masculine act of making decisions as the action-hero physically confronting the danger, leaving it to their distant, protected, bluetooth-connected strong-willed female computer nerds to tell them what to do next, what this does is remove the need for a male role model.

NERD ALERT!

Actually we have 3 levels here.

Green Arrow is very nearly NOT what you are talking about. Yes Felicity is often on the radio feeding him intel but in the general Oliver is leading the missions – coming up with the plans, having Felicity work on those plans, etc. Very often when things go wrong he makes the call on what to do.

Legends of Tomorrow is almost a textbook case. Unless the latest season has changed, last time I watched they were seeking a leader (after the last one, who could never actually LEAD, left) so of course the older male took over only to be proven too hesitant and slow to react on an incident so the kick-ass girl had to take over as leader.

Flash is middle of the road. Barry has a team advising him, but it’s just as likely to be one of the males giving him advice as either of the girls in the room. For two seasons now it was definitely the older male mentor figure telling him the plan with sometimes his best buddy providing calculations. And then sometimes one of the cute babes there too (what can I say, Flash has some great eye candy – iZombie too).

Now iZombie – THAT’S a show you should try sometime. The girl makes decisions, but her male love interests are just passive figures. I think it’s a bit more complex than you may immediately give it credit for. Also some good eye candy, leer away.
- Nate Winchester | 03/05/2017 @ 19:33
I first became aware of this with Tomb Raider: Legends, when Lara Croft used her bluetooth headset to communicate with “Alistair and Zip” back at her London Mansion. I was all in favor of it because it was a video game, whose producers were using this device in a most elegant way to explain to the user what was going on, and what needed to be done. In that forum, it makes a lot of sense.

On live teevee, though, it makes less sense. And when everybody is doing it — Supergirl’s doing it too, I didn’t mention that — it gets tired really quick. One is left to wonder what is the point. And the answer ends up being, really nothing more than to separate the action-hero(ine) from the decision-making. And, I have to worry about the generation of tow-heads who are being brought up on this “action.” In my generation, it was the above-mentioned Indiana Jones chasing after a convoy full of Nazis who stole the Ark of the Covenant. “I’ll make it up as I go” is a line that nicely captures the situation, as well as the character…

…what if he could have a hot computer-nerd babe advising him on a bluetooth headset? Would that add something, or take something away? Well…it wouldn’t add anything, I think everyone could agree on that…
- mkfreeberg | 03/05/2017 @ 20:07
I first became aware of this with Tomb Raider: Legends

NERD ALERT! LOOK AT THE NERD!

I can’t decide if I respect you more or less after this revelation. 😉

And when everybody is doing it — Supergirl’s doing it too, I didn’t mention that — it gets tired really quick. One is left to wonder what is the point.

lol Well to be technically fair, Arrow, Flash, Legends, and Supergirl are all made by the same pair (or at least, 1 guy of that pair, I forgot how it broke down). So definitely a motif there.

It may also be some way for them to have team shows without having to stick everybody onto set and have fancy coordinated actions scenes. Would probably bear with comparing to the various Star Treks.

But I think you may be onto something about this all training our kids for rule by committee… This will bear further study.
- Nate Winchester | 03/05/2017 @ 20:30
Yeah. “I went through something” -> “Kids today are not going through that thing” -> “ergo, humanity is DOOMED, I tell you!! DOOOMED!!!”

I’m not the first middle-aged dude in human history to follow this train of thought. I know it is fallacious, in the sense that it is not completely valid. This is easily proven. We’re still here…

It isn’t completely invalid, either. Doers, deciders, occupying different spaces, decisions being made by the people who are not actually there…this will not end well.
- mkfreeberg | 03/05/2017 @ 20:34
Re: “‘The stare-rape’ fantasy”: This was used to great advantage by the women in my unit in the Air Force. You see, we had the “3-second rule.” (This was later increased to the “5-second rule” due to overuse by the “victims.”) If a man stared at a woman for 3-seconds, this was considered tantamount to sexual assault. The woman would be taken off duty for two weeks to “compose” herself, while the man was subject to a review and possible disciplinary action. Who doesn’t want two weeks of risk-free paid vacation at the expense of someone else? Suddenly, the mass of “bladder infections” that happened anytime a female had to do the same work as a male morphed into a mass of sexual-harassment by stare complaints. It was so bad there were actually months at a time that our unit of 40 males and 5 females had no females on duty, until we got the overweight married woman who didn’t dare complain that men were objectifying her. Strangely, if a man had her weight problems they would have been drummed out…

Fortunately for the men, only the first few were disciplined. After that, there was a swift realization below the bureaucratic-level that this was one of those many, MANY rules that gave advantage to one race or gender in the name of “looking good” and that punishing another race/gender was no longer necessary.
- P_Ang | 03/06/2017 @ 07:01
“And, ya know, do stuff instead of coming up with excuses not to do stuff.”
http://tommclaughlin.blogspot.com/2017/03/ivy-league-2017.html#links
But…but…I fall on the spectrum of a SPECIAL DISORDER!!!!!
- CaptDMO | 03/07/2017 @ 10:09
Hey, has Scalzi tweeted about this post yet? The dude must spend umpteen hours googling himself, no?

I have a few disconnected thoughts about this, that alas don’t involve “Tomb Raider:”

— Re: Indiana Jones vs. Supergirl and the bluetooth-in-the-ear thing, well, part of that may be simple dramatics. Omni-competent heroes are boring; it helps to explain how they always have all the info they need right at their fingertips. Technology’s a real drag in that regard. Same with horror novels, which I love — most of the old tropes wouldn’t last five seconds in the Instragram age. Set your scares in the pre-cell phone era.

— Re: Scalzi and that godawful Christmas card… ugh, where to begin? Heartiste covers it pretty thoroughly, but jeez, every man with a functional set of nuts squirms uncomfortably looking at that picture. What self respecting adult — not “self-respecting man,” self-respecting adult — would consent to be portrayed like that?

— Re: everything else, I think one of the biggest problems in post-scarcity society is that men are almost superfluous. I know, hardly an original insight — Derbyshire has a column nailing this somewhere — but we have yet to see the full psycho-social ramifications of this. Women have one huge advantage in post-scarcity society: They still have something to DO, something they’re designed for — bearing children. Say what you want about “the social construction of gender,” but women still have a level of psychological security that men simply don’t. Scalzi going out of his way to lick his wife’s boots at every opportunity might, in this sense, be a valid — though pathetic and creepy — response to male superfluousness. If you can’t beat ’em — and hell, we can’t even seem to find the goddamn battlefield — then join ’em.
- Severian | 03/07/2017 @ 17:42
Yeah. “I went through something” -> “Kids today are not going through that thing” -> “ergo, humanity is DOOMED, I tell you!! DOOOMED!!!”
I’m not the first middle-aged dude in human history to follow this train of thought. I know it is fallacious, in the sense that it is not completely valid. This is easily proven. We’re still here…
It isn’t completely invalid, either. Doers, deciders, occupying different spaces, decisions being made by the people who are not actually there…this will not end well.

Oh I’m not disagreeing with you there, the only quibble is that doom can take many forms.

It’s what I wrote about here:
http://www.rottenchestnuts.com/a-parable-on-civilizations-guest-post-by-nate-winchester/

They say “the straw that broke the camel’s back” but let’s be honest, it’s not really the straw that does it, it’s all the weight from before. The proper term is the “sorites paradox.” Just as it is not one hair whos presence/loss makes a man bald, neither is it one thing that crashes civilization, it’s lot of things that add up.

And like you said, humanity will survive even this. But it won’t be comfortable or pleasant, and THAT’S what the wise must try and impart to the foolish.
- Nate Winchester | 03/10/2017 @ 09:42
I agree…staring is not rape. I also agree that men should be men and women should be women. Neither should be forced into a gender role. Let natural inclination, buffered with morals and manners, lead each person to their place in society. In fact, I agree with most of what you have written.

I disagree with your unfolding of the “stare”. Because I am a woman, not a man, I appreciate a nice look now and then. Because I am a woman, not a man, I know that my perception of a man’s intent can become my reality. A nice look now and then is much different from a long, lewd leer. The look is safe, the leer can lead to terror and physical harm. I am a woman and I am hard-wired to keep myself safe from attack….because men are stronger (usually) than I am. So, that leer does make me shift into high-alert, it makes me nervous, it puts me on edge and causes me feelings of panic if I am alone. It alerts me that an attack may be imminent. This is a woman’s reality. I would be stupid to ignore any warning signs of potential harm.

A real man does not want to terrify women. So, please, be a real man. Look, now and then, in an appreciative manner. Save your long, lewd leers for the pictures in the magazines.

Thanks for the coffee cup-love it.
- oaemmerich | 03/10/2017 @ 10:59
The look is safe, the leer can lead to terror and physical harm.

Take note of those 3 little words, gents.

The erosion of liberty is ALWAYS launched by those little words…
- Nate Winchester | 03/10/2017 @ 11:46
Hmm….that was not what I was trying to impart to you.
- oaemmerich | 03/14/2017 @ 14:10
Glad you like the cup. It needed a new home.

This is not an issue in which one side, or the other, is laboring under some difficulty getting its point across. It’s all pretty simple and both sides make points that are understandable and logically valid. There are acts of “terror and physical harm”; connected to those, by way of a few pounds of emotion and a dry ounce or two of reason, is an act that is “lewd” and rude, but usually not illegal.

And connected to that, in turn, by a mere matter of degree, is the “nice look now and then” which is not rude at all, is even appreciated. What’s the difference? We have to figure it out if the law is to be involved at some point…and we’ll have to adjudicate it according to the feelings of the person who could be given these jitters. How else is it to be done? It is according to those feelings that we have these civil and criminal remedies in the first place…

Sexual Harassment and You from Rowan on Vimeo.

What’s happened here is weaponization of the social justice warrior’s favorite geometric shape: The spectrum. By pointing out “this thing and that thing are both on the same spectrum,” or jumping into action when someone else points it out, the SJW can easily convert society’s intrinsic rejection of brutal acts carried out by strong, malicious persons upon weaker, innocent ones…into a rejection of certain undesirable demographic groups. In this case, unattractive and unappealing men.

The more practical solution would be to go back to the days when girls were taught by their parents to think about their physical appearance, and how it will be perceived — by everyone in line-of-sight having a heartbeat. Rich men, poor men, cute men, nerdy men, creepy men, jealous old women, competitive young women, women who have money, women who don’t…everybody. Feminism has replaced that with what’s comfortable: “I’m making myself up for the cute guys, and I imagine I’m invisible to everyone else.” And then if that applecart is upset by the ensuing day’s events…like the video points out…it’s a lawsuit.

Recent social reform has not, I would argue, enhanced our behavior around, or ability to get along with, the fairer sex. It has enhanced our ability to create litigation. That was the original intent of the reform. We’ve been played. Meanwhile: Both the nice appreciate looks, and the long lewd leers, continue…restrained somewhat, like they were before. Snuck here & there, caught here & there. Like they were before. Just more training and more punishment, and a bit more ignorance about the true implications of “wear[ing] that in public.” That’s what’s changed.
- mkfreeberg | 03/15/2017 @ 05:49
12 days without a new post? What are we not paying you for?

On a more serious note, I’d like someone to analyze how exactly Obama could issue executive orders bordering on or outright crossing the lines of legality, while every POS pipsqueak liberal with a law degree in the US is somehow able to block President Trump from defending US Citizens? Is it really that easy to throw a wrench in a Presidential order? “Oh my, that hurts the feelings of Muslims! It’s cultural for Muslims to want to murder Westerners! You’re denying them their culture and heritage! Boohoohoo sniff…”.

Maybe you can throw some analogies to women in there to tie it in, I don’t know. Good luck, because I’m really confused…
- P_Ang | 03/17/2017 @ 06:40
[…] Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… VI The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… V The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… IV The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… III The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… II The […]
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The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius… IVSunday, March 5th, 2017

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