MRAs may be victim of one thing, and one thing alone: the media blitz.
The news-entertainment media is a product with zero obligation to truth. They keep up the image of truth because it’s part of what keeps you buying the product, but they have no obligation to truth.
They’ll do whatever sells papers, TV minutes, movies, magazines, video games and books.
MRAs have absorbed from these people certain notions that infect all of their other reasoning. The primary one is that liberalism (more individualism, fewer social standards) is the solution to all problems.
Marriage difficult, laws favor women? Let’s do away with marriage then!
Affirmative action blockhead? Let’s demand that we get the right to sue, too!
Society sees men as predators? Let’s insist society doesn’t judge anyone by appearance!
Basically, MRAs end up saying the same dumb stuff that feminists and other liberal lapdogs do: you can’t judge a book by its cover, so treat everyone like a genderless, raceless, cultureless, sexless, and soulless being.
As a man, that defecates all over your hopes and dreams. You want to be known for what you did do: you took a stand on something and defended it. You set up a family and led it a certain way. You created some things, had some ideas, fought hard and rocked on.
Instead, you get all of that thrown out so you can be “equal.”
As an MRA, you have to be truly brain-fucking-dead to endorse this viewpoint, but most of you will because as said above, you’ve absorbed thousands of hours of media telling you this is the only solution.
Who else likes only solutions? Tyrants: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
And instead you miss out on a traditional role for a man, which goal-based and not appearance-based.
In a goal-based society, you always have a purpose: career, family, self-development, nation, and possibly religion.
In an appearance-based society, you must always try to look better than the other guy, and you do that through shallow and insincere acts. Giving bums a few bucks. Donating to the famine in the horn of Africa. Cheering for the feminists. Crying over events in far-off countries.
In other words, everything that’s not you becomes important in an appearance-based society. On the other hand, everything that defines who you are as a person — underneath the appearance and the social group — is totally lost. You don’t exist. A social clone of you does.
Sometimes it’s better to have a goal, and because you’re on the path to that and in the right place, not worry about appearance or the details.
When I’m having sex with someone, I want it to be an unencumbered journey of exploration with a very specific person. I want no map, no “to do” list, no expectations and no goals. Just all in, focusing on the moment, not on the finish line.
In my mind, the focus on the orgasm rather than everything leading up to it, is like focusing on the wedding but not the marriage – pretty much missing the point.
{…}
I did my best to explain the performance pressure around having an orgasm. That in many cases, women feel like they have to get there to please the guy, like the guy will feel like a failure if he can’t make you cum. And, of course, we feel like a failure, or like we are flawed and not good enough if we can’t get there. Then the whole focus becomes this one thing, and it’s just too much pressure. Frankly, it’s incredibly hard to have an orgasm under that kind of pressure.
One of my friends is clearly getting it. He explains how he sometimes feels so much pressure to perform, that he’s almost not having fun – which has it’s own obvious repercussions on his performance and pleasure. It’s not dissimilar.
“Imagine if you could remove all that?” I said. “Imagine sex with no pressure, no disappointment, being truly in the moment and not worrying about achieving a goal.” – BlogHer
It’s an interesting parallel.
In the feminized-MRA world, you are a commodity who tries to make your buddies think you’re cool by having sex with underconfident drunk chicks who don’t remember your name.
In the world of men not boys, you are someone who matters because of where he’s going and what he does to get there — not some trivial details of appearance.
A woman feels best having sex with a man who makes sense in all parts of her life. When she’s a girl, that may be the boyfriend of the semester, but then she grows up. By the time she’s 21, she wants a real man. Someone who not only takes her out on dates, but might take her for a lifetime.
In that context, the orgasm is a detail. Without that context, all you have is pressure to perform, and when it’s over, you have nothing.
The problem with MRAs (as said here before) is that they want to be male feminists. This means they want to glorify being victims.
That is a popular stance with those who are confused, but it’s not policy. Policy is how you make society function by setting up values, rules and procedures.
No area is this more clearly seen than the topic of marriage. MRAs want you to think all marriage is bad; as I’ll demonstrate, they are actually working against their own best interests.
Society automatically paints a stereotype on men who hesitate, delay, or elect not to marry. They are labeled as:
A) Womanizers who are unable to participate in a long term relationship, or
B) Selfish, childish or irresponsible men who can not take care of themselves or another person.
No other explanation is ever explored.
– all quotations from Do-Not-Marry.com
Let’s reverse this. Reasons a man would not marry:
Self-satisfied. This includes both selfish (including solipsists, narcissists and megalomaniacs) and literally self-satisfied. If you are a genius painter, you have no use for marriage or sex.
Incompatibility. You have not encountered a compatible partner. The more personality you have, the harder this issue is.
Failure. You would otherwise marry, but have been unable to get your act together.
You either cannot marry, want to marry but cannot, marry or fail to marry. That’s it.
The first question is: are you someone who wants to marry?
People can do this for the wrong reasons, such as fear of aging and death. Nothing can stop that. Or social fear. Nothing can stop that, either.
Most people marry for a simple reason: it makes life better.
Any repeated process, task or technique gets boring. You are not learning anything new. It’s a dead-end rote route. No matter what your age, unless you’re pathological, after about a dozen first dates you get it. What next?
A significant number of 20 and 30-something women spend most of their disposable income on luxury rental apartments, upscale restaurants, frequent exotic vacations, leased cars, spa treatments, and excessive amounts of designer label clothing, purses, shoes, etc. Are all women like this? No. Could this be your future wife? Possibly.
Why would any MRA even consider such a woman? She advertises that she has no control over herself.
The only reason you would attempt to marry one of these: she has entrapped you sexually. You are excited by her drama, her sensuality, and most of all, her competitive effort to be sexually appealing and thus, when she has you, you feel like the focus of all of this intense sex energy.
This puts you in the position of beggar and receptor, not creator and initiator. You might as well sell yourself for passive intercourse by baboons.
Like anyone else in life, women mark themselves by their behavior. You are what you do, and that doesn’t mean career. It means how you spend your time. If you spend it on surface activities, whether mainstream (consumerism) or underground (hipsterism), you are a directionless person. E.g. you have no direction but you.
The people in this life that you want to know have started the process of self-actualization. They are comfortable in their own skins, and recognize their limitations and the limitations of being human. As a result, they are not interested in egomania, narcissism, megalomania and solipsism.
Instead, they direct their energy toward productive things. They will have a job, and a home of some kind, like everyone else. But instead of ineffectual “hobbies” — tv, sex, drugs, drink, vids, etc — they are directing that energy toward some constructive end.
One person commented to me once that there are three places to hunt modern woman: in education, in volunteer groups, and overachievers in the workplace.
You want to find one of those, not the modern female narcissist (MFN) as discussed above.
Immediately after buying a ring, the man may be rewarded with demands of financing all or part of a lavish wedding… (Depending on the size of his bank account.) The costs of today’s weddings exceed that of a house down payment. (Or in certain parts of the country, the house itself.) If a man enters a marriage having saved up a down payment for his dream home, it can suddenly be snatched from right from under him. Many men may object to spending this sum of money on a one-day party.
Here is the logical fallacy: the trend is x, therefore you must do x.
Don’t do x. Independent of trends, people have been getting married in small local ceremonies and asking their parents to pay half or more — for centuries.
If she insists on x, you are marrying an idiot. Don’t do it.
The injustices can go from bad to worse when children enter the picture. If the man can afford to carry the entire financial burden, the woman can elect to stop working. (Regardless of how the man may feel about the decision.) The day the woman stops working is the day all of her past financial baggage unequivocally gets thrown onto the man’s head. If the woman has racked up credit card debts, these are now his payments. If the woman has not bothered to pay off her student loans, these also become the man’s responsibility. (Stomach-churning irony = the man is stuck paying for her degree, and she’s not even working anymore!!) And can the man object? Can he say, “No, you made your mess, and it should not be my job to clean it up. You knew you wanted kids even before you met me, and you should have planned ahead.” No, the payments can’t be deferred until she is once again able to continue repaying them herself (besides, that day may never come), not if he wants to retain a clean credit rating to get a loan for their dream home.
Did he take the nails out of his hands to write this?
You will inherit her debts. She may have them. So may you. You will also get some financial breaks at tax time, and increased likelihood of promotion in the workplace, to deal with this.
If you start off your marriage by treating your wife as chattel — “she should be earning me money,” which is what a pimp says, not a man — you will poison that marriage forever.
Your kids will be healthiest and happiest with a stay-at-home mom. As a result, you need to transition from single-guy-with-an-apartment mode (cut all costs, live day to day) to adult mode. Adult mode isn’t just a setting on your cable box.
It means that you are planning for a family, for stability and a future. It is a prerequisite to marriage that you be ready to do this.
If you treat marriage like extended dating, it will fail.
Marriage is starting a family. On the downside, you will be obligated to this family.
On the plus side, you get a family, and unless you alienate that family, it will be the greatest source of joy in your life.
Webster’s defines slavery as “the state of being under the control of another person.” If the husband earns enough to support both of them, he would be hard pressed to make an argument to preserve equality, and have her continue working as he does. If the wife decides to stop working, the men who have been left holding the financial bag find their options limited. They may find themselves stuck in careers they hate, or working for abusive exploitative management, working excessively long hours, working in jobs that are physically threatening, that have no growth potential, enduring prolonged commutes, etc. At this point, considering the corner he’s been painted into, he is often powerless to affect any change in his own life.
This is true whether you get married or not. This is a debt-based society. If you stop working for more than about a month, you go bankrupt in most cases. In the best cases, where you have saved up enough, you may be able to take a few months off, but not much more. This is independent of marriage.
What you gain with marriage however is a greater understanding of your career needs. Most likely, your boss is married. His most valuable employees are probably married. Marriage is for stable people who are committed to having families. For this reason, married people are sought-after employees.
In addition, you now both live a more efficient life. Instead of paying for two places and two commutes, you pay for one house, one commute, and one set of all bills.
If you aren’t a selfish idiot like an MFN, you want your children to grow up in the most stable and nurturing environment possible. That does not include a working mother. Nor does it include divorce or parental instability.
In other words, marriage — which leads to family — is not about you. It never was. It’s about making a family. If you try to treat it as permanent dating, you will fail.
If a married man cheats, he’s the scum of the earth…A selfish jerk who has jeopardized the family unit. However, when the woman cheats, she’s conveniently portrayed as the victim. Poor thing. It’s for her empowerment, or to help her self-esteem. Worse yet, her cheating can be the man’s fault. How? He doesn’t compliment her like her new man does. Or he works too much. (Yes, the man who is scrambling to pay the mortgage and cars she may have demanded is now considered negligent. The man who may be working 2 jobs to allow her to be home with her kids is now considered negligent.)
Your problem above is a political one. Feminism and liberalism together always favor the perceived weaker party, and have in them an entrenched hatred of the stronger.
Femninism ruins women and leaves them with wrecked lives. If you are marrying a feminist, or a woman whose friends are feminists, expect to be divorced (acrimoniously) and vilified within the decade. Whether you screwed it up or not.
It’s perfectly acceptable for a woman to demand a man make a certain salary, to be deemed “marriage material”, and provide stability. Likewise, if a man demands the wife do the cooking/cleaning, he can now be labeled a sexist misogynistic PIG. If he asks her to carry her weight financially (just like he does), he can be criticized as an inadequate provider. What exactly deems a woman “marriage material”?
To top it off, some women have gotten so pampered that they not only quit their jobs the day they find out they are pregnant, but they hire as many nannies as their husband can afford. Yes, they stay at home, and hire someone ELSE to raise the kids and clean up, while they drink lattes and go shopping all day with other pampered “stay-at-home” mothers. This is not all women, but certainly the odds increase if the man can afford it. Does it pay to work hard and get ahead anymore, if this is how your hard earned money is squandered?
Are all women like this? No. Could this be your future wife? Possibly.
He wrote this as he held his severed penis and admired the fineness of the cut.
Traditional roles are your one salvation. They give each partner a domain in which they can be valuable. This is the only lasting form of stability.
You do not want your wife competing with you for authority, so delegate. She handles the home and the kids, which is a full-time job.
If you marry an MFN, she will screw this up because you screwed it up. You married a moronic narcissist. How many men are out there talking about how they realized their wives were dangerous morons after the divorce?
They didn’t recognize the truth because they were in victim-mode. Victim mode is when you decide to ignore vital information because you’re afraid of it. It always ends up with you getting screwed.
No sane woman marries with the intention of failing at it. If you find a woman has a cavalier attitude toward divorce, you get what you deserve if you marry her. She warned you.
As he says, not all women are like this. If you read that with a critical eye, you realize this means you have an option to pick a woman who is not an MFN.
However, you won’t exercise that choice because being in victim-mode also puts you in weenie-mode. You are not encouraged to stop, think and take responsibility for your actions. No — you can always blame someone else.
“Women did this to me. Heartless modern women ripped away my soul,” he said, holding his dismembered penis. “I knew she was a stripper who loved cocaine, but I never thought she’d cheat on me. I thought I was different.”
Women are like men. They are individuals. Most of them are shitheads. Most men are shitheads. The two go together. If you’re not a shithead, don’t pick a shithead wife.
This leads us to the one valid point he makes, and then underwhelms:
Prenuptial agreements
If a man insists on a prenuptial agreement, he is selfish and unromantic. When is the last time a woman who demanded a prenuptial agreement was called “unromantic”? On the contrary, if a woman requests a prenuptial agreement, she is fiscally responsible and looking out for herself. (Note: If your fiancée refuses to sign a prenuptial agreement, run for the hills. She has just shown her hand.)
Absolutely.
If you and your wife come from the same mindset or religious community, you are one of the fortunate few who do not need to worry about such things. You do not intend to divorce. The penalties for screwing up are high, so you make the choice carefully — both of you. She chose you and you chose her.
Remember that half of marriages do not end in divorce, and the number is probably even higher since “half of marriages” includes a huge number of second-fourteenth remarriages that have no chance of succeeding either.
If you screw it up once, you’re likely to screw it up again, usually by the same method. (I have zero sympathy for a man who hooks up with a married woman, helps her cheat on her husband, then marries her and seven years later is shocked — shocked, I tell you — to find her in the sack with the pool guy.)
However, if you’re a normal person who is hoping to survive this broken time of feminism, litigiousness, dysfunctional government and society and so on, you may want a pre-nuptial agreement. Think up a fair one.
If the woman rejects it, move on. She is not of the mindset for marriage.
By the same token, many men want to create a pre-nup agreement that preserves the pre-marriage perpetual single-guy-in-an-apartment lifestyle. This arrangement usually says, “If we get divorced, I walk away with what I earn, and you get nothing.”
This is too extreme.
Realistically, she will have given up her career to be your wife and mother to your kids — if she doesn’t, your kids and you get inferior attention and she is more likely to stray, drugged on the power of her spending, forgetting how you providing a stable home allows her to enjoy that income. You want her to give up her career and become a Mom now. You give up your reckless lifestyle and become a Dad. See how there’s a trade in evidence there, equally for both parties?
This is why the courts hand money to the woman: she has sacrificed to become a wife.
They are overcompensating, of course, because we live in a time of liberalism and that encourages subjugation of the more powerful party. We get “equality” that way.
She will be compensated because she has given up a lot to become married.
Your only defense against this is the exact opposite of what this guy and most MRAs recommend.
Do not become a victim. Become a victor.
You do this through two methods: (a) insist on traditional roles and (b) pick the right woman.
Men need to stop and ask, “Why exactly am I getting married? What exactly does marriage mean to me in today’s world?”.
It is no longer a lifelong commitment, because it can be reversed overnight.
To be a man who insists on acting like a victim, and then avoids the one state of life that escapes this process, and then also refuses to get politically involved to fix the situation, is to join the culture of weenies who are also behind feminism, the nanny state, sit-when-you-pee, etc.
Feminism is liberalism. If you drift toward liberalism, you are supporting feminism.
Modern life is derived from liberalism. The idea of equality is its foremost concept.
Traditional roles are derived from a different concept, which is that of roles. Roles make each person sacred for what they do that is not the norm, instead of making both people the norm and then making them compete.
The woman reigns over the house and children. This is her responsibility.
The man reigns over income-production and family direction. This is his responsibility.
Any healthy marriage involves the two partners being able to discuss each others’ zones of responsibility, but not sabotaging each other by micromanaging. Any healthy marriage involves knowing that raising kids and taking care of the home is a full-time job that is biologically and culturally more important than bringing in a paycheck. This is at least how adults look at it.
What’s a mom worth?
According to one report, $138,095 a year.
That’s the figure in a study put out by Salary.com, which calculates the wages that would have been paid a stay-at-home mom in 2007 if she were compensated for all the elements of her “job.” That total was up 3% from 2006′s salary of $134,121.
{…}
The job descriptions that Salary.com used to determine a mom’s salary includes 10 jobs that moms do on an average day: housekeeper, day care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, CEO and psychologist. – MSN
While the above estimate might be extreme, the point is well-made: to be a wife and mom is hard work, if it’s done well.
If it is not done well, a sensible husband takes it up with the wife. Don’t wait for her to get to this stage:
To top it off, some women have gotten so pampered that they not only quit their jobs the day they find out they are pregnant, but they hire as many nannies as their husband can afford. Yes, they stay at home, and hire someone ELSE to raise the kids and clean up, while they drink lattes and go shopping all day with other pampered “stay-at-home” mothers.
These people are behaving badly. If you’re in command of the home, lay down the law. You need to confront the wife about her bad behavior. It’s not normal to be a lazy wife. Get her ass in gear.
If she cannot follow through with it, tell her you cannot afford the nanny and cancel the payment. If you’re uncomfortable with that, look for evidence that the nanny is botching the job. Force the lazy wife to panic and have a tantrum, then document it. She will either come to her senses or reveal herself to be an MFN, at which point you look like the sensible party: she refused to take care of the kids.
Traditional roles are your defense, and enable you to enjoy marriage as two people working toward a goal, instead of two selfish people manipulating and using each other for selfish ends.
Liberalism is about the ego. Me, me, me. We’re all equal means “But I’m more equal.” Traditional roles are the opposite.
Pick the best woman you can. This starts with getting out of victim mode:
Does it pay to work hard and get ahead anymore, if this is how your hard earned money is squandered?
Do not listen to this poisoned voice. You are going to attend a job, and work to get ahead, whether you are married or not. The question then is whether you come home to a happy family or a dismal bachelor apartment, too tired (and eventually, too old) to go out and score some idiot for a few moments of sexual pleasure.
It pays to work and get ahead, and to use the one power you will always have, which is choice.
MRA includes “game” which is both a way of talking morons into bed, and a way of managing the upper hand with your spouse. “Game” is a subset of manipulating human psychology. If you’re a white hat, you do this to make good things work out; if you’re a black hat, you run scams. Most of us are greyish white hats.
You use psychological manipulation every day on people who need to be manipulated. Talking your kid into putting down the pretty snake (around here, we get coral snakes) is a fine art. So is working with subordinates or bosses.
Your “game” is psychology game, and it’s the opposite of what society tells you to do — which is lie back, enjoy it, become a victim, and then after you’ve been nailed to a cross, demand reparations. Society is designed to control you, not make sure you get what you need.
When looking to marriage, you cannot use “game” (scare-quoted for being such a goofy phrase) in the same way you con women into bed. It’s not a con. It’s about maintaining the male role as leader and dominant creature that makes a woman feel safe:
The point is, if I had been nice, I would have never had married Jennifer. I would have just seen a pretty girl with a not so great boyfriend bugging her and done nothing of interest. Being nice is a very important aspect of your personality, having no nice in you just means you’re an asshole. Adding in a little of the jerk / Alpha Male trait is the key to building attraction though.
At some point in your courtship, you likely did something that was a little crazy, a little wild, something over the top that made your wife to be sit up and take notice of you. Maybe all it was happened to be fronting up to her, and making it plain being just friends with her wasn’t an option you where going to be able to live with.
Marriage can easily fall into a rut. When was the last time you made it plain being “just friends” still isn’t an option you can live with? That you want a passionate connection to her. Make sure she knows with her you have no half-way. If you don’t do this to her at least once in a while, you leave the door open for someone else to do it to her. Emotional connections are serious things and sometimes not even your best friend can be trusted with the woman you love. Do not let the moment pass.
The fundamental mental aspect of game is mental toughness: you need to set a goal and pursue it aggressively. This is the mental aspect our ancestors called vir.
You are the man. You choose the woman, you woo the woman, and you make it clear what the roles are. Any woman who has problems with this is defective, and in healthier times, would be relegated to prostitution or other careers for flake-out nutjobs who cannot commit.
As part of this decision, you need to not screw it up. How many men do you see on a college campus who sought out the non-confrontational female? Usually you see white nerds with fat girls or Asian girls, because they think these will be easy and not force the man out of his single-guy-with-apartment comfort zone. This is of course insane because both fat girls and Asian girls are women, and women are humans, and all humans operate within a range of the same psychology.
Pick the right woman. Pick someone who is honest, realistic and (ideally) has traditional values. That is the kind of woman you can base a relationship on.
If you are looking for an easy score, you face a trivial problem. You need to find some girl who has gone to a bar with the intent of getting drunk and (although she can’t admit it) getting laid.
Women like this do not actually believe they will ever achieve marital happiness. If anything, they are certain they will not, and are self-pitying, and thus prone to all sorts of bad mental habits.
If you are looking for a wife, you have to change your thinking. This is no longer coerce some idiot into bed time. This is no longer single-guy-in-apartment time. This is an important choice.
To claim that marriage is bad, because many if not most women are bad, is the height of stupidity. Here you are, sacrificing something good that you could have for yourself, in the name of what other people do. Might as well dice your penis and make chili with it because you have no right to own one.
The Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) movement is doomed as long as it chooses to put men in the position of passive victim. This is the opposite principle of what it is to be male, which is active conqueror.
Until it figures that out, there will be people like the above-quoted “Do Not Marry” dude who pander to your fears, insecurities, doubts and sense of self-pity. His goal is to make a buck off you and he doesn’t care if it ruins your life.
My solution earns me no money, and is simpler: act like a man. If you don’t think you can, use discipline to force yourself into the role. Get out of the role of victim and passive half-man at home in his apartment, with his boring job and shitty video games. Get out there and fight.
The blog you are now reading (still) may never be as popular as many other Men’s Rights blogs simply because it does not tell you that you are a victim.
There is nothing less masculine than deciding to consider yourself a victim. By doing so, you place your fate in the hands of others — at least, you take it from your own hands.
Masculinity is the principle of forward motion: vir being the root of the Latin word for man, it means the principle of men, which is warlike aggression to fix problems and establish a moral self, family and society.
Vir is what propels people to get off their lazy butts and set aside seed for next year, to plant crops and cut rocks from the earth, to chop down trees and grind their stumps, to build vast architectures, to wage war against disease, filth and cowardice. Vir is what defines men.
You give that up when you say, “Man, I really wanted to be big, but life screwed me out of it.” You’ve just told yourself that you cannot do what you want to do, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It feels good at first. Why? You probably have a legitimate reason for complaint; for example, family court judges may be biased against men. But it’s deeper than that.
Being a victim lets you off the hook for having to fix the issue and move forward. It makes you feel OK about self-pity, and about telling yourself that it’s not your fault, but someone else’s.
It gives you someone to blame and lets you claim that person holds you prisoner and oppresses you, thus all those dreams remain on paper and never realized.
Hilariously, the entire Men’s Rights Movement seems to want to emulate feminism and with it, the principle of victimhood. It’s like a group of men deciding to cut their balls off and cry with each other.
Your grievances are legitimate; your methods — well, let’s just say that emulating a failed movement like feminism is not the brightest of ideas. It’s emotionally comforting. But do you really need a teddy bear?
Victimhood is the one great ill of our modern society. Because we give preference to victims, everyone wants to be a victim. That means no one takes responsibility for fixing problems. Vir is in short supply.
If there is a true masculinist movement, it will be one that rejects all thoughts of victimhood and instead demands not equality but parity, or a necessary role for masculinity in the universe.
It won’t be popular with those who have already decided to give up, however.
Our legions of teachers, pundits, entertainers and government employees love teachable moments.
These occur when you get an example of something so obvious that every person in the room, no matter how stupid, can see the point (e.g. trigger of mental control) you wish to communicate.
“See, class. When Johnny comes into the room and sees the nuclear device, he presses START and everyone in the whole world dies. When Jimmy comes into the room, he sees the nuclear device and goes to find a teacher or responsible adult. Which would you prefer? World destruction agony, or a few moments to find Mrs. Hauser or Mr. O’brien in the hall?”
In order to have teachable moments, you need very simple mental viruses that have two components:
Universal. They need to be simple, and highly vague in scope, yet very clearly delineated. Thou shalt not kill functions because it is vague, but it’s easy to pass on.
Dramatic. They must have emotional appeal, by showing us on one hand the happy ending where everyone is friends, and on the other, the boatload of dead orphans surrounded by crying parents.
It’s no different than writing a television commercial: you want to show your audience two options, one of which is really good and the other of which guarantees they will never have sex again. (For all our pretense, we are just silly little animals underneath the suits, laws, tech and verbiage.)
The problem with teachable moments is that while they appear to be highly valuable principles, the process of making them teachable has made them limited and vague, which means they inevitably clash with other needs and leave the student confused.
Each of these teachable moments must be abstracted into an easily-remembered and dramatic principle. Here are some good examples you were taught in school:
Share. If someone comes up to you and you have a toy, share it. This doesn’t take into account relative need or whether you were actually doing something and he’s just screwing around.
Non-violence. Violence always leads to suffering, and suffering is bad (and we like to pretend, socially, that it is avoidable) so never violence. Again, no scope or need considered.
Materialism. The love of the dollar is bad. So is “keeping up with the Joneses” or buying stuff just to impress others. Good citizenship award winners don’t do this.
Tolerance. No matter how crazy someone else’s lifestyle, you should tolerate them, because you would want to be tolerated. Never mind that you put many hours into behaving sensibly and so do not need “tolerance.”
Power. Teachers like pithy statements like “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” which is their way of blaming leadership for bad leaders. Good citizenship students don’t want power, they want love.
Unity. We are all the same under the skin, in the soul, we all bleed red, etc. They don’t want you to shut down your classmates who happen to be idiots, so they force this idiot subsidy on you. But we’re all one! Fearful people love this, because it appeals to their terror of conflict.
All of these miss the real point. Not sharing is a form of putting personal needs before anything else, pointless violence is focusing on means not ends, materialism is a lack of forward motion, hatred of the person distracts from fixing the pattern that produced them, power must not be used for selfish means and group survival is how civilization works. Each of those is too abstract for the teachers much less an assembled group of students ranging widely in ability.
“Keeping up with the Joneses” is one that we are taught by our movies, government propaganda and academic instructors. The classic example is Mr. Smith who sees that Mr. Jones just bought a new wide-screen TV, so Mr. Smith runs out and buys an even bigger one. A pointless consumption race ensues.
But where they fall down is telling you about the abstraction. It’s more complex than buying consumer goods. What about when you decide to put in extra hours at the food bank because Mrs. Jones did? Or gossiping about how crass and trailer trash Mrs. Cook is?
Or even my favorite example, and the point of this article: human consumption. Not the fun kind that involves an open spit and flame, but comparing your “baby bangles” — your loin-fruit that you are certain are smarter, cuter, nicer and more enlightened than the little simians Mrs. Jones popped out.
Ever since WWII, parents have treated children as an extension of themselves. This is equal parts consumerism, moral superiority (mimicking their governments) and conspicuous success, where each person is able to shout down others by showing them wealth, good breeding and possessions all in one.
The results on children have been catastrophic. They experienced both fawning helicopter-parent love and the sickening realization that it is not about love for them, but love for self. The parents want children to show off, “proof” they can use to remind their neighbors that they are indeed inferior.
Generation X got accustomed to being unimportant while the parents had TV to watch, but suddenly vital to the family when neighbors or relatives showed up. We were paid actors — free rent and food — whose purpose was to make the parents look good. And if we didn’t?
Well, I’m sure you’ve all seen the teachable moments about child abuse.
Below the nice comfortable level of socialization we have lurks a dark underworld. Natural selection, primal combat and animal urges. We either avoid the topic entirely, or try to find a way to explain it through religion.
And when it rears its ugly head, we find ourselves trying to conceal it, like prostitutes abusing make-up to hide the black eyes and meth sores.
Since the era of the permissive society and the mainstreaming of modern feminism, western society has gone a long way towards liberating women’s sexuality. Younger women have, to an unprecedented extent, been encouraged to believe they can be as sexual as they like and to experience and express their desires as they wish. Even the age-old proscriptions on female promiscuity have been largely broken down, exemplified by the glorious flowering of the SlutWalk movement.
Simultaneously, and perhaps not coincidentally, male sexuality has been increasingly seen as a problem. You can hear it in the gentle, dismissive mockery that says men are simple creatures who “only want one thing” or, at the extreme, outright vilification. The male gaze threatens, male desire is aggressive. Our primal instincts are pathologised with the jargon of gender studies. Righteous and necessary efforts to reduce sexual crimes have had the unwelcome effect of teaching generations of men that our sexuality can be dangerous and frightening. – The Guardian
People are such painful blockheads now. It can be one extreme, or the other. No middle path, as that’s not a 1 or a 0, so our computers would hate it.
Like many things, sexuality makes sense when it is given a sensible goal. Otherwise, it becomes like other addictions: us chasing a method and hoping it will bring about the significance of certain selective end results.
If you meet the woman of your dreams and spend a night of passion with her, no amount of “nights of passion” with other women will re-create what you had. In fact, they will make you miserably lonely. It was about her, the time and the union; more sex cannot fix that any more than more candy.
For this reason, many of us idealize the older way, in which men and women were selective with their sexuality and so made their union rare, beautiful and striking.
In the modern time, we are looking backward and trying to edit out the past by making political decisions in the present. We fear the power of men? Demonize them and their sexuality. Change the history books to say all men are rapists. Make sure we have at least 50% gay, minority, female and disabled heroes in every movie.
We are slowly rationalizing ourselves away from common sense, whose origins emerge from a study of reality itself.
Computers and the internet are changing the nature of our memory, research in the journal Science suggests.
Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers.
When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.
The researchers say the internet acts as a “transactive memory” that we depend upon to remember for us.
Lead author Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University said that transactive memory “is an idea that there are external memory sources – really storage places that exist in other people”. – BBC
We are slowly externalizing ourselves with gadgets, as William S. Burroughs said.
Instead of knowing our world, and being able to understand it and predict its responses, we rely on objects to do that for us — and thus let them mold us.
As we re-write history, we have made it one of those external objects. If all the history books say men are rapists, they will start to think it not only plausible, but their destiny.
A forward-looking society would not pit women against men, and demonize men for being stronger. It would look toward complementary roles that brought out the best in each.
But that’s complicated, and the crowd doesn’t like it. Instead, we look backward for sources of our betrayal and suffering, and use those to ruin the future for men so we can all hold hands and sing.
If you say the term “banksters” out loud, you are immediately lowering your IQ.
It’s a clever contraction of “banker” and “gangster” designed to make you feel like a victim. Those evil banksters, they did it to you!
The truth is that bankers are what bankers have always been, which is relatively plodding people who look for ways to make money. That’s…their…job.
If you give them an opportunity through your own vast stupidity, they will take your money and send you a bill for services rendered. Shame on you.
This reminds me of the great secret about snake bites: most of them occur to males 18-29 when alcohol is involved. Most snakes won’t bite until your drunk ass picks them up, probably while a friend tries to snap a picture with her iPhone.
Wall Street does what any money-maker should, which is look for opportunities. It wasn’t their fault the economy collapsed. After two presidents told the regulators to ease up on the rules for house loans, a new market emerged: millions of credulous people willing to sign up for absurd debt loads.
Now many people are feeling hurt. They don’t want to face the real problem, which is that our society is in the hands of a gang of dangerous idiots known as voters. Instead, they want to blame some Satan or Sauron character.
When you blame the scapegoat, everything else is OK or at least assumed to be.
If you want to lower your IQ, go around talking about banksters. It will make you popular. It will also push the truth farther away from your pudgy little hands.
I always say that men and women don’t need equality; they need parity.
Parity means that each gender has a role which is essential and cannot be denied. These roles are preserved by the fact that they are distinctive, and cannot be swapped.
This means that in her domain, the woman is in control; in his domain, the man is. The result is a stable family where responsibilities are divided intelligently toward a collective end.
Equality, on the other hand, means two of the same thing — one of which just happens to menstruate, give birth and perform a sexually receptive role.
Under equality, the home becomes a constant struggle for power, since each parent has equal claim to every part of every role. The result is constant re-negotiation, and children are introduced to instability from an early age.
Demanding “equal degrees of equality for men” (or in other words, feminism for men) will not solve the problems of men in modern society.
It will put men into a victimhood role as well, but this is a competition they will never win. They are bigger, stronger and have more success in the workplace. They will always been seen as the dominant force, not the oppressed, in the victimhood narrative of the left.
I have described before why no masculinist can be a liberal/leftist. Leftism is the quest for equality, which results in constant internal struggle, which in turn results in a transfer of power from the dominant to the victim. Leftism will always oppose naturally strong things like men, and instead defend those who are naturally smaller and weaker like women.
Parity is a more sensible model than “equality” (which becomes favoritism to the weaker). You want women to have some sacred roles, and men to have others. This sounds old-fashioned, but then again the oldest social order in the world is every person for themselves, with constant bickering, and none of the cooperation that allowed us to rise above the level of apes.
Since 1789, when with the kings the French overthrew hierarchy, Western society has wasted itself fighting for “equality” despite equality leading to constant internal bickering. The result has alienated everyone from everyone else, because without parity of roles, any person can demand what you have at any time. As a result, people are constantly defensive.
The “Men’s Rights Movement” and “Men’s Rights Activists” of the world are repeating the error made by feminists. In seeing that some men are mistreated, they respond by demanding absolute rules, rights and lack of role according to the principle of equality. This just makes the problem worse.
A more sensible view is to find a way that men and women can cooperate without the adversity by each having sacred domains. In addition, by halving the workforce you double salaries and halve the cars on the road; you ensure that women are not mistreated by giving them an essential role, and not making them interchangeable commodities.
The only reason men today do not embrace this idea is that most are drunk on the constant media barrage demanding equality (and victimhood) for all people. This combination of martyrdom, revenge, guilt and a license to act selfishly has turned men into whiners and women into harridans.
Many people in this world are self-hating. When your society is based on illusions, and requires you to spend a lot of time humbling yourself to those illusions, you tend to hate yourself.
This increases the more you succeed, which is why our wealthy elites are so self-destructive.
Women in the west have it pretty good. If they stumble out of high school with a degree, and stumble down the street to community college to get some kind of certification, they are basically guaranteed a middle class income.
Then the question becomes what more they want out of life. On this point, women are confused.
In comes feminism. A splinter of liberal ideology, feminism demands equality for women. Well, sort of — what it really demands is what men have, under the guise of ideology.
The problem is that it destroys women as well.
From repeat domestic violence calls to Los Angeles car chases, hit-and-run drivers and the balloon-boy hoax, worthless louts consume vastly more law enforcement resources than the rest of us.
{ snip }
Various studies have shown that children raised by a single mother comprise about 70 percent of juvenile murderers, delinquents, teenaged mothers, drug abusers, dropouts, suicides and runaways. Imagine an America with 70 percent fewer of these social disorders and you will see what liberals’ destruction of marriage has wrought.
{ snip }
A 2008 study led by Georgia State University economist Benjamin Scafidi conservatively estimated that single mothers cost the U.S. taxpayer $112 billion every year — in addition to asking the rest of us to keep an eye on their kids while they go clubbing.
We could have had two Iraq wars — Obama could have “saved or created” half a million stimulus jobs — at that price. – Human Events
We have single mothers because all things in nature follow the path of least resistance.
In the case of relationships, this is divorce or perpetual singleton status. When this happens, the children grow up with single moms. If those moms are insane, the dads bolt. If those moms were so drugged on feminist logic that they didn’t realize that not all men are equal, and hooked up with a scumbag, he’ll bolt too. Either way, the single mother ends up bearing the brunt of the burden — because of her own poor life choices.
The root paradox of feminism is equality. It believes that men and women should be equal, except that women are more equal because women, as the “underdog,” need more help to be equal.
For 30 years, the feminists have been pretending that their goal is to abolish all sex discrimination, eliminating all gender differences no matter how reasonable. When it comes to domestic violence, however, feminist dogma preaches that there is an innate gender difference: Men are naturally batterers, and women are naturally victims (i.e., gender profiling).
Starting with its title, VAWA is just about as sex discriminatory as legislation can get. It is written and implemented to oppose the abuse of women and to punish men.
Ignoring the mountain of evidence that women initiate physical violence nearly as often as men, VAWA has more than 60 passages in its lengthy text that exclude men from its benefits.
{ snip }
Women who make domestic violence accusations are not required to produce evidence and are never prosecuted for perjury if they lie. Accused men are not accorded fundamental protections of due process, not considered innocent until proven guilty and in many cases are not afforded the right to confront their accusers. – Town Hall
Like all liberal ideas, feminism favors the underdog and so becomes a jihad/pogrom against those who are doing just fine. That means men.
Unfortunately, this forces the issue. Men now have no recourse except to treat all women as sociopathic parasites and avoid entering in contract with them. Goodbye, marriage. How many Gen Xers managed to get married again?
Here’s typical liberal logic — wanting to have it both ways:
Over the past few years, an alimony reform movement, of sorts, has taken shape across the nation, and now many consider “lifetime alimony” a thing of the past — a relic from the days when very few wives worked outside the home. Indeed, most states already have revised their alimony laws, setting limits on the duration and amounts of payments.
But, do these alimony reforms go too far?
In many cases, I think they do. Sadly, it seems that stay-at-home moms and other women with little or no income of their own have lost their voice in state legislatures largely controlled by men.
For me, the arguments in favor of alimony are straightforward. If a woman has been in a long-term marriage, and she has either been out of the work force for decades or has an income that is substantially less than her husband’s, I believe she needs –and deserves –alimony in order to maintain a post-divorce lifestyle that’s at least somewhat comparable to the lifestyle she enjoyed during the marriage. – Forbes
Either men and women are equal, or they’re not.
If they’re equal, neither one should be expected to bear the burden of the other. Child support, maybe; alimony, no.
The woman can go back into the work force and earn a living just like the man is doing.
If the marriage failed, it took two to make it fail. She is as guilty as he is.
Feminism and liberalism don’t want you to think about these things. (It’s paradoxical for a man to be a liberal. Liberalism is defense of the individual against reality; men who are masculine embrace reality and view it as a joyful challenge. If you sit down to pee, by all means be a liberal. But masculine men, gay or straight, have no business being liberal.)
Instead, they want to continue what they do best, which is destroying those who do succeed in order to subsidize those who fail.
Neurotic lonely women everywhere go home to their mold-infested townhomes, pay they children’s bail and the drink wine as they surf dating sites alone.
Feminism is female self-destruction. In the name of equality, it has put men in a position of assumed guilt. The male response is withdrawal. The female consequence is loneliness, schizoid neurosis and self-hatred.
I had some truly great teachers, but many of the teachers I have met are burnouts.
When the profession stopped being honorable, meaning in the 1970s when teaching became a political education job and not a technical one, many slackers and do-nothings crept into the ranks. They saw it as a quick jaunt to middle class respectability.
These teachers are valuable because they show you the misconceived view of the world that is common among the middle class. Half of the middle class is hovering above working class, and they want to climb, so they adopt fashionable attitudes. Most of the hipsters in the world are hiding granddads who were unfashionable things like farmers, coal miners, cops and firemen (all decent jobs).
If we want to know what most people think that is wrong, these teachers are a great summary. They pass along half-truths with whatever is covered in the textbooks, and a decade later you find out how wrong they were and wonder why they bothered to mention this stuff.
The half-baked high school burnout teacher vision of Darwinism is this:
It is a dark and cold night; a misty night, with fear and solitude hidden within. Two muscular cavemen emerge from the shadows. They draw weapons and fight to the death! Suffering, blood, and horror transpire. Then the victor carries off the women, and we’re descended from him and not the other guy.
When 98.6% of modern people talk about natural selection, this image is what fills their minds.
Now fast-forward to the super-liberated 2010s and these burnouts are now PUAs who have written successful books on conning low self-confidence women into having sex with you.
In the PUA view, the pub or cofffeehouse is the hunting ground for the new Darwinian man. Not necessarily musclebound, but armed with an array of memes and gambits based on the lowest impulses of human psychology, this man is prepared to duke it out with the wits of America’s lower middle class women. When he takes home the prize, he thinks that he is the Darwinian superman emerging from the mist.
What they forget, like those high school teachers of the past, is that natural selection is a far more complex process. It is based on survival and reproduction, not conflict and subjugation. The third man passing through the primordial mist is the one who watched the other two fight, and vanished into the shadows. When the combatants were dead, one from defeat in battle and the other from infections resulting from that battle, the sneaker in the mist was busy raising his kids, and we’re all his descendants.
In the same way, the true alpha male is the one who has a clear plan for his life. He emerges from childhood sated with those pleasures and ready for different ones.
His counterpart, the true alpha female, is the same way way. She knows that a white wedding and happy married life, plus fulfilling career options for her and the husband and kids, awaits. She isn’t screwing around — she dates rarely, finds herself in an LTR or two if at all, and marries a man of similar outlook.
These are the people who are in it to win it.
If the women in bars honestly thought that the future held for them a white wedding and a man who would love them as much at 70 as he did at 20, they wouldn’t be in those bars. They’d be home studying, or socializing in more constructive ways than consuming alcohol.
If PUAs truly thought they had any future with a woman of quality, they would not be wasting their time with the relatively trivial pursuit of chasing tail. Empty pleasures are what you pursue when your life is otherwise not heading toward a superlative direction.
Instead, PUAs start out with the supposition that no good women exist, so they make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. They screw around for a decade or two, and then finally hook up with some woman who did the same. Their kids recognize that their parents act more like coworkers or porno athletes than people deeply in love, and adjust their expectations of their own futures accordingly.
Sexual competition is not about bedding women who have given up hope. It’s about finding a quality woman and leveraging that find into a long-term satisfying life.
Then again, there’s not a huge audience of underconfident people who desperately need affirmation to whom that message appeals — which is why PUAs target their real prey, the underconfident male. They then take the cash from those lost souls and use it to make a life for themselves. That’s Darwinism at its finest.
A good way to destroy your kids is to pass your doubt, fear and frustration on to them.
One way to do that is to provide a neurotic home life, which produces unstable children. In part, their only mode of survival is to shrink away and do the minimum, avoiding conflict.
That creates people who cannot deal with life, need constant reinforcement, and so flock to liberalism and other ego-salves.
Is your kid a “dove” – cautious and submissive when confronting new environments, or perhaps you have a “hawk” – bold and assertive in unfamiliar settings?
These basic temperamental patterns are linked to opposite hormonal responses to stress – differences that may provide children with advantages for navigating threatening environments, researchers report in a study published online July 8, 2011, in Development and Psychopathology.
“Divergent reactions – both behaviorally and chemically – may be an evolutionary response to stress,” says Patrick Davies, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and the lead author of the study. “These biological reactions may have provided our human ancestors with adaptive survival advantages. For example, dovish compliance may work better under some challenging family conditions, while hawkish aggression could be an asset in others.”
{…}
Doves with parents who fought violently produced elevated levels of cortisol, a hormone that is thought to increase a person’s sensitivity to stress. Hawks from such stressful home environments put the breaks on cortisol production, which is regarded as a marker for diminishing experiences of danger and alarm. – Medical Xpress
If you fight in front of your kids, or just produce a neurotic and unwelcoming home life, don’t be surprised when you end up with dropouts or criminals.
This was common sense a century ago, but we’re “enlightened” now.
MRAs may be victim of one thing, and one thing alone: the media blitz.
