GROIN

The 1990s were a shallow, plastic decade and what made it worse was that people then pretended that it was the exact opposite.

If the theme of the 1980s was manic materialism, the theme of the 1990s was denial of the same, with results that somehow imitated that same materialism by not being materialistic.

Just like in the 1960s, everyone dressed up in Hippie Halloween costumes and went out to be profound without money or power, and ended up coming back to money and power, this time with an arrogant belief that there must be no other way.

Shortly after the 1990s ended, a new generation shifted up a hybrid of 1960s and 1990s culture, a hippie-grunge-slacker hybrid. Because such a formulation is inherently unstable, it quickly became a cover story for dishonest, selfish and pointless human beings… in short, average people who wanted to appear exceptional.

For those who think about the issues the MRM raises, there are two good points to make about hipsters:

1. Irony is hatred. Irony, in the vernacular used by hipsters, means finding out that things are not as you would expect them to be. In other words, the world’s normal course is defeated because we found an exception. This barely-concealed hatred for all normalcy, nature and health exists only to defend the hipster against charges of being weak and pointless, which of course they are. The first group to become hipsters were the ones with the trust funds. They could afford to be insincere.
2. Betas rise through hipness. Since the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, beta males — those without exceptional abilities — have been rising by being “hip” and in touch with this new social fashion. If you can’t get ahead by being useful, get ahead by being social. Many males who think they are betas are actually alphas who have been cowed by the hamsterlike obedience that hipness inspires.

Hipsters are insincere and hollow because they conceal their primary goal, which is making themselves look good. They contort and adopt anything they can find, ironically of course, to make themselves stand out in a crowd. This suggests they have no concept of being actual, functional human beings.

Men have suffered from the hipster because the hipster hates all real masculine values and wants to replace them with a simpering insincerity and obedience. The hipster is a slave to his woman and likes it, because he has insulated himself with irony. He’s not doing it because he believes in it. He’s half-mocking it and if it falls apart on him, he never cared. He was always free.

Men succeed when they have a unique role which only they can fulfill. They can then compete for improvement in this category. Men fail when the areas that men can be good at are replaced by areas in which only simpering, subservient, weak-chinned men thrive.

These hipsters and other socialites are distinct because they are inverted. They aren’t good at anything, except socializing. They define themselves by female interest and how hip they and their stupid dubstep-psychobilly bands are. These values are the opposite of male values.

Male values of the strong type are not based on what others think. They are based on results, on doing the right thing in complex situations that sometimes require bad things to be done to get good results. They are based on being proud, independent, and taking women when you are ready, not as gluttony.

Since you were born, a vast media establishment and the people you socialize with have been trying to drum a formula into your head: it’s not who you are that matters, but what other people think you are. This emasculating nonsense will make you into a hipster, and as hollow and purposeless as the 1990s.

The modern fallacy is that nothing comes before the individual. What the individual thinks, feels, judgments, emotes and desires are more important than reality itself.

Both democracy and consumerism bear out this ideal. In order to exist, however, it needs a support structure just like how high school nerds like being BFFs with Kung-Fu masters. The support structure for a civilization made of non-civilization, or individuals each doing what they want at the expense of the collective, is a strong central enforcement. Both social pressures (political correctness) and government come into play here.

What this means is that if you suggest a contrary idea, which is that each person should be responsible for adapting to reality (this is called “natural selection” in your science books), you will be a heretic. Blasphemer. Antichrist. And not just to government; to society, including your friend group, also.

However, only by adapting to reality and facing life’s challenges do we truly become who we are. If we do not, we remain forever-children, stunted in our growth by walls of fear beyond which we do not tread. Society fears those who do go beyond those walls because they make the rest of us look stupid.

All of this is a long introductory way of saying that the Men’s Rights Movement, like any other group of modern people, is predisposed to (at first) hate, loathe and fear any suggestion of “manning up.”

Manning up is a principle like survivalism, libertarianism or frontiersmanship. It suggests that life will always throw suffering, problems and dilemmas our way, and that we live best when we occupy ourselves in confronting these and beating them by inventing our own solutions.

This is in dramatic contrast to what society likes to do to people, which is tame them, so that when they have problems they call the cops, the firefighters, the psychologist, the banker, the lawyer, the doctor, the talk show host… in short, they call (and later blame) anyone but themselves.

Manning up isn’t as simple as finding a good-paying job and supporting your most recent conquest as she bubbles out babies. Manning up means leaving behind the convenient, confronting your fears and conquering them, all in service to a purpose that is bigger than yourself.

Where most of society wants the individual to come before reality, you put reality before the individual, and then show the individual rising to match.

Feminism came along to question man’s “natural” role as leader and I think this is simply God/Allah/Fate/Karma’s way of bringing about the next evolutionary stage of man – painful, but necessary. Now that it has and man’s role has been removed from society, we can see the destruction wrought upon society our forefathers and Shakespeare warned about for millennia. Now is the time to look back to those old patriarchal values, pick what is true and useful, tweak them in the light of 21st century knowledge, and discard the rest. It will also be the last time women will have their say as “leaders” for… with all the evidence the MRM community is gathering for historical posterity during this process of regeneration of the next patriarchal age… the argument for man’s natural role as leader of the home and state will be beyond refutation – no man will be so stupid as to say “yes dear, whatever makes you happy dear” ever again.

Once men define for themselves in the 21st century what men and masculinity mean for them, women will naturally fall into line. Peace will return to the state. Love will return to relationships. And sons like Hamlet won’t have to agonize over avenging the murder of their father by feminism. I predict that in 50 years… even women will roll their eyes in shame at how their mothers and grandmothers treated the men in their lives. The lesson will have been learned and both genders will emerge in a more balanced, not equal, relationship with one another. – In Mala Fide, “The Fear of Manning Up”

He makes the point clearly, but it needs to be revealed again: feminism = equality. Equality is the death of masculinity. Equality means “I’m OK, you’re OK” and everyone is equal without having challenged ourselves to face and overcome our fears.

In short, it’s a death of evolution. Who loves equality? Those who fear they are not equal, and no one else.

Men in this modern time are all kept men. You are kept because living in this society is easy if you don’t have any large goals. If all you want is a job, an apartment, some hobbies and a little fun, you are living in the period of history when this is easiest. True, the girls are all crazy and most of them are fat or have diseases, but that’s like the damaged goods shelf at Kroger, lower prices… and true, your apartment is in a trash-strewn wasteland where you’re as likely to get shot as noticed, but it’s at a discount too. You can just pass your whole life away in this method, without ever forming any goals that take you close to the edge of self-discovery or worse, challenging yourself. It’s a paradise for the chinless.

All of the above is a rather complicated way of telling you that masculinity is to you an unknown quantity. No one in the media, government or high society wants it to exist. None of your friends know anything about it. And if you start getting close to any idea approximating masculinity, the armies of the chinless will rise up and start complaining about how you offended them. – In Mala Fide, “Masculinity versus The Age of the Chinless”

If we are to be a “Men’s Rights Movement,” we must work for men and for masculinity, not against some strawman mythological enemy who turns out to be another head of a Hydra we never even lay a fist on. Feminism = equality. Equality comes to us from liberalism. Liberalism is what defines the modern time.

Men have no role in this time because it has been deliberately removed by those who fear leaders, and fear those who are more than equal. If you want to reverse this process, you don’t do it by getting down on your knees and begging to be equal. You do it by throwing equality out the window, and leading down a new path.

The MRM-sphere is slowly gaining momentum as it faces its own identity crisis: do we want to become another victims’ rights group, or are we a movement for a uniquely male place in the world?

Those who find masculinism more appealing than victimhood are not the most popular party in this debate, because victimhood has two salient advantages: it lets us follow the pattern that feminism set up, and that is a path of least resistance that lets us continue to live sloppy, careless lives.

However, that might not get us what we want.

Feminists and MRAs both say they want equal treatment under the law. The rub, for MRAs, is simply that feminists haven’t made good on their promise of equality. They haven’t, and they won’t – because why should they? Average people (men and women alike) are not so idealistic that they would refuse it of the rules suddenly shifted in their favor. – Jack Donovan

“Equal treatment under the law” is a complete fallacy. No individuals are equal, and the genders are different enough that “equal” becomes a prescription, not a description. That means that humanity will have to rush in like a white knight and compensate somehow for those less equal than others.

This gets us right back to where we were.

If our situation were as simple as men facing discrimination, our job would be a lot easier. Instead, we’re trying to fight multiple symptoms (like discrimination) which share a common root, which is the bias of this society against men, or indeed against anyone who might be “more equal” than average.

Paul Elam describes this gendercide quite well:

Two full generations men before you that completely failed to tackle the forces that left you with no avenue but a life of self-indulgence, where ambition is defined only in short term goals and instant gratification…You come from a fatherless world…I am not talking about whether your father in particular was involved in your life. But I would bet (and no, GL, I don’t have the Harvard study handy) that most all the young men in lifestyle Game or PUA had absent or systemically marginalized fathers. Even young men who have their fathers are impacted greatly by fatherless culture because of the kinds of social forces that culture creates. – Paul Elam

Our society starting hating men in 1789, when we started demanding that everyone be equal.

Equal means that those who rise above will be penalized, because that’s the only way to enforce equality. And while the egalitarians will tell us that they mean “equal opportunity,” that’s a sleight of hand. You cannot prove equal opportunity existed, so anytime someone rises above the others, they get torn down under the pretense of having had some unequal advantage.

It’s a lynch mob pretending to be the salvation of humankind. Their goal is to destroy anything above the average. They want to do that so that each of them feel OK and accepted even though they have no particular ability.

Now, this pattern happens time and again. Yes, we can trot out the Soviet Union, which collapsed from so little motivation that it couldn’t even make a functional automobile, or even the French Revolution, which destroyed so many people that the society caved in.

But you can even see this pattern in your average committee. A few people will monopolize the floor, speaking too much and not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise. Soon they control what is accepted as “truth” and “good.”

This happens in business, in non-profits, in churches and synagogues, even among atheists. It’s a human pitfall, like depression or any of the other snags of life that we try to out-maneuver daily.

1789 was followed by 200 years of warfare to establish this principle as winning out. Finally, in 1991 it won — by abandoning its hard-line edge with the Soviet Union, and instead embracing the kind of fat ‘n’ sloppy that makes America so wealthy and so frustrating. Consumerism and socialism joined as one.

The 1960s can be characterized as the switch from majoritarianism to minoritarianism in America, when the moral high ground shifted from the majority to anybody who can successfully characterize themselves as a victimized minority. – iSteve

Since that time, we’ve seen the same pattern from those committee meetings and revolutions mentioned above: a small group crowds out the rest and legitimizes incompetence if and only if that incompetence is paired with the right dogma, e.g. loudly proclaiming how we’re all equal and it’s great.

You can see this in how feminists work. At your average university, a couple of them penetrate the English department or the Philosophy department. Then they use passive aggression, or strategically being offended by others and thus demanding the punishment of those others, to remove anyone but the feminists.

Soon it’s like a prison gang. They rule, and to get ahead, you brain-numbingly repeat their warped dogma.

What is the price of allowing equal incompetence to predominate over the competent?

In 1995 the six largest bank holding companies (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—some of which had somewhat different names at that time) had assets equal to 17 percent of U.S. GDP. By the end of 2006, this had risen to 55 percent, and by 2010 (Q3) to 64 percent.7

In retail, the top fifty firms went from 22.4 percent of sales in 1992 to 33.3 percent in 2007. The striking exemplar of retail consolidation has been Wal-Mart, which represents what Joel Magnuson in his Mindful Economics (2008) has called “Monopsony Capitalism.” Wal-Mart uses its power as a “single buyer” (thereby monopsony, as opposed to monopoly or “single seller”) to control production and prices.8 The trends, with respect to concentration in retail, can be seen in Table 1, which shows the rise in four-firm concentration ratios in six key retail sectors and industries, over the fifteen-year period, 1992-2007. Most remarkable was the rise in concentration in general merchandise stores (symbolized by Wal-Mart), which rose from a four-firm concentration ratio of 47.3 in 1992 to 73.2 percent in 2007; and in information goods—with book stores going from a four-firm concentration ratio of 41.3 percent in 1992 to 71 percent in 2007, and computer and software stores from a four-firm concentration ratio of 26.2 percent in 1992 to 73.1 percent in 2007. – Monthly Review

Our society is dying. No, “the corporations” didn’t do it — the voter did. The average person experienced a failing of personal moral responsibility and stopped making realistic decisions, and started making convenient ones. As a result, we threw away culture and let the incompetents rule us through commerce.

Now we live in a troubled world. Our technology is no longer advancing. We’re polluting the planet. Our cities are ugly, loud, filthy places where we sit around in cars because traffic is bad. Our jobs have been adjusted downward so idiots can do them, and as a result, they are boring. We can no longer have pleasant relationships between the sexes, so we use each other and then simmer in the swarming distrust.

One result of this is that as culture dies, and competence becomes rare, we become addicted to nanny state agencies like administrative government and large corporations that provide us with convenient but not necessarily healthy products. We have lost our will to act decisively, and have become couch-bound wimps.

If you wonder why masculinity is such a topic lately, this is why: we are fighting for our souls. We either decide we wish to be men who initiate, conquer and create, or we decide to become man-boys who fall back on the couch, play video games, and try to hide the fat girls they bring home on lonely nights.

Before we get into any political drama, let’s talk about tradition.

Cognac in elegant glasses. Cigars in wood-paneled libraries. Shotguns and tophats as we stalk our wily prey throughout the countryside. Horses, athletes, and warriors struggling against all odds. Gentlemen who could kill at a word, then return to friendly shores to read books, drink tea and fix things around the house.

Tradition carries with it an important weight. This isn’t just the stuff that’s left over from the collapse of other ages; it’s the stuff that survived because it kept its meaning through good times and the bad, through the rollercoaster of life, and made people seek it out.

We tend to think of tradition as rules, but perhaps tradition is something else. Perhaps it is a vessel for our sacred delights, and the products of hard-won wisdom, such as comes after a ten-year voyage in a forgotten war blighted with betrayals, misfortunes and epic victories.

So why are MRAs afraid of tradition?

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) is split into two groups: the masculinists, who want a positive role for men that fits into a positive role for society, and the Feminist Men’s Rights Activists (FMRAs) and Pick-Up Artists/Gamers (PUAs) who want a defensive role for men, like feminism is for women.

The MRM is divided between these two impulses. To the masculinists, the idea of adopting feminist-style victimhood politics and demanding equality strikes us as too humiliating, too broken in spirit and too passive. The FMRAs fear tradition because it would force them out of their defensive role.

Luckily, Bonald intervened with a compendium of quality points:

Rather that seeking to dignify men by rejuvenating patriarchal gender roles, [the traditionalist movement] seeks to help men achieve power, power in the service of self-gratification rather than service. Individualist “empowerment” is a Satanic goal.

{…}

It is acknowledged that traditionalism and the alternative right represent a more radical critique of feminist society than the MRM, which only wants to relieve men of intolerable iniquities without questioning the Leftist/feminist order as a whole. – Throne and Altar, “So traditionalists and MRM can’t work together after all?”

I want to set aside his use of the term “Satanic,” which is designed to provoke anyone who has a battered old Slayer CD hidden in their desk, and look at the salient points of this conflict.

• Feminism is individual empowerment through equality. In the feminist view, society/nature is bad and the individual needs to go on the defensive and by doing so, achieve certain rights that are granted by society. Anyone else see the paradox here?
• Real power comes from self-actualization. You cannot buy power at a store, and you cannot produce power by repeating actions that once made you feel powerful. Having sex 1,000,000 times will not replace the feeling of being with a lady you really esteem. Getting drunk 1,000,000 times will not replace the rush of conquest, or the sensation of personal victory. What defines men? Setting aside the pleasures of boys and focusing on real pleasure, which is making things happen. Conquest.
• Modern society is based on individual empowerment. Feminism is not the exception; it’s the norm. Feminism is like ordinary grocery store white bread that, at the factory, someone poured butterdough flavoring on. Now it’s butterdough bread. Still the same essential stuff. Our society is powered by individualism, and feminism is just female-tinged individualism, or “I’ll take everything for myself.”
• This attitude is what makes modern life miserable. Men no longer have a role where they are appreciated. In fact, all those individualists out there are trying to figure out how to steal from us or take from us because they think we are strong. And they’re using society’s pity for them as women, GLBT, minorities, blind, deaf, stutterers, etc. to justify taking that power from you.

Don’t believe me?

The unemployment rate for males between 25 and 34 years old with high-school diplomas is 14.4%—up from 6.1% before the downturn four years ago and far above today’s 9% national rate. The picture is even more bleak for slightly younger men: 22.4% for high-school graduates 20 to 24 years old. That’s up from 10.4% four years ago.

{…}

“We’re at risk of having a generation of young males who aren’t well-connected to the labor market and who don’t feel strong ownership of community or society because they haven’t benefited from it,” says Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley. – The Wall Street Journal, “Generation Jobless: Young Men Suffer Worst as Economy Staggers”

Your civilization has been so busy worrying about individuals that it forgot to put together a sensible society!

The basis of civilization after all is that “it just works” meaning that there are jobs, social roles and ways of handling transgressions. All of this has been upset because we have no direction. Instead of a direction, we stagger around trying to make sure every individual need is fulfilled.

Every individual need except those we think should be fine because they’re stronger or richer, like men. Men? They’re the ones who are oppressing those individuals, so if they do get jobs, tax them double.

What happens in a society of individualists is that the underdogs are defended from the stronger. They do this to preserve equality, because no one needs equality except the underdogs. Soon the quest for fairness gets re-styled into a quest to take from the strong and give to the weak.

You cannot have feminism without first having this underlying attitude.

What’s scary is that FMRAs want to preserve this attitude by trying to make men into victims, too! That’s not going to work. Underdogs always need a target, and they’re not going to target women just because some men claim to be injured.

Instead, they’re going to take from men and give to women, GLBT, minorities, the deaf, blind, stutterers, etc. and those people will take over this society, much as in the Soviet Union, those who joined the Communist Party got ahead, or in Revolutionary France those who joined the Revolution got ahead.

Women are overtaking men in education and in the workplace, a senior Government minister said yesterday – creating a new generation of stay-at-home fathers.

Universities minister David Willetts predicted relationships and traditional household structures will be transformed as the fairer sex powers ahead, and women earn more than their male partners.

Successful women will have to ‘marry down’ by choosing partners less qualified than them – and may increasingly select men based on how supportive they might be to their careers, rather than whether they can support them financially. – The Daily Mail, “Intelligent women forced to ‘dumb down’ and find a less-educated man to marry”

Traditionalist MRAs are trying to rip out the problem of anti-male bias by the roots, while FMRAs are trying to apply symptomatic treatment. A daub of calomine lotion; there, that takes care of the itch. Have a shot glass of brandy to take away the pain. You get extra dessert tonight too.

But the problem remains. In fact, as traditionalists see it, the traditionalist solution is the one that addresses the injustices both men and women complain about — by giving men and women each a complementary, sacred role in which they have a guaranteed place of value in society.

Modern civilization fears that idea. In the name of the individual ego, it will enforce the ultimate conformity, which is (just as in high school) a dominion of what is popular over what is not uniformly pleasant and therefore unpopular.

Fame is the No. 1 value emphasized by television shows popular with 9- to 11-year-olds, a dramatic change over the past 10 years, UCLA psychologists report in a new study.

On a list of 16 values, fame jumped from the 15th spot, where it was in both 1987 and 1997, to the first spot in 2007. From 1997 to 2007, benevolence (being kind and helping others) fell from second to 13th, and tradition dropped from fourth to 15th.

Community feeling (being part of a group) was the No. 1 value in 1967, 1977 and 1997, and it was the No. 2 value in 1987, the study found. By 2007, however, it had fallen out of the top 10, to 11th. – Science Daily, “Popular TV Shows Teach Children Fame Is Most Important Value, Psychologists Report; Being Kind to Others Fell Dramatically in Importance Over 10 Years”

This is a problem because as men we are there for the unpopular problems. Our goal is not to flatter others, but to take on the hard challenges and fix them. This is our role. But the individualist-dominated society wants to exclude us, and replace us with chestless automatons, because individuals fear the stronger beast.

If you want to apply some calomine lotion, getting legal approval from society for you to be a victim and because it hurts so bad, to get extra sex from sluts and to stay in your apartment playing video games, well, that’s OK. It won’t change the problem.

But if you want to fix the problem, which seems to me a reasonably masculine way to handle any situation, then you’re going to have to go deeper, remove the underlying roots of the problem no matter how pleasant they seem, then face the unpleasant truth and correct it. That will require something like the traditionalist approach.

It’s hard to admit you’ve been conned. A con by nature is covert; it sneaks up on you. One minute you think you’re helping some guy collect his inheritance in Nigeria, and the next, you’re watching your retirement fund disappear.

Pulling a con requires the type of subtle military maneuver used in guerrilla campaigns. Do not attack the target; attack what supports it. Do not assault the fort; dig under it and let its own weight pull it down. In cons, you attack indirectly and let people’s fear or greed pull them in.

For example, you will see parents con their kids. In this case, a boy (let’s call him Conner) does not want to go to the library, and the discussion goes like this:

The essence of a successful con is redefining the underlying terms, and then making them sound pleasant, so that your victim rushes to the con. The best cons make the victim seek the con time and again. (I might consider “daytime television” to be applicable here.)

Let’s look at a really successful con that works over and over again:

White Knight Syndrome
n. A personality characteristic found in most males that lead them to:

1. rush to the aid of any female they see who appears in any form of distress.
2. Become attracted to said damsel in distress.
3. Follow the dying code of chivalry and generally act like a nice guy.

Also called “young man’s disease.” – Urban Dictionary

The con is that your good intentions become a tool of passive aggression.

If a girl is mad at her boyfriend, she wants to shit test or just provoke him, which will force him to overreact and get all apologetic. She will then get him to a public place, and hassle him until he starts pushing back. At that point — watch for it — she’ll roll her eyes around the room looking for a white knight.

Sure enough, in comes white knight, and he demands that boyfriend stop. Boyfriend may try to explain, but he can’t back down, so the two of them slug it out. Girlfriend sits back and watches. She will never feel more powerful. She has two (2) penises fighting for her. She will go home with whichever wins.

(Naturally, these rules do not apply to real women, only the dumb turnip-picker slags and the mentally unhealthy, many of whom populate our universities although educating them does nothing but make capable insane out of raging vagina. Real women have no time for this kind of behavior and would think both men were idiots. Not neanderthals — real women don’t oppose fighting — but idiots for being in this d-bag of a situation.)

White knighting gets more men injured, pride broken, and possibly publicly humiliated than any other act in which men engage. In the background you can hear the sound of a woman who pulled off a good, solid con: tee hee. She’ll go tell it to her girlfriends and they’ll all have a laugh.

But where do we get the impulse to white knight?

Some of it is just inexperience. You want to do something nice, and you have no idea how stupid and brutal other people are, so you intervene. Later on you’ll become cynical and go to the opposite extreme, where if a girl is getting raped at the next table you won’t even notice.

The other part, and the biggest part, is that our society trains you to think this way. The root of white knighting is liberal democracy. In liberal democracy, we are taught not that life is a struggle for a sensible social order, but that life is about treating people well. Share your toys. Be nice. Do The Right Thing.

In a masculine order, we care about having a sensible order. The people come secondarily because (duh) the order affects more than its immediate participants. Everyone will have to deal with the result. It’s less a question of person to person relations than finding a healthy order for everyone.

Liberal democracy doesn’t like that, because it affirms the law of the jungle, which is that some rise higher than others. From every aspect, having a hierarchy makes sense — except one. Socially, hierarchies are unpopular. If you want to appeal to a small group, you have have a hierarchy. But if you want a huge number of people to like you, you need to speak the gospel of equality and love.

Because it’s based in equality, liberal democracy has one single mode of thought: defend the weaker from the stronger, because that way, we’ll all be equal. In a liberal democracy, if you’re seen as defending the weak from the strong, people think you’re a Hero and may heap money on you. Think of Bono, Obama, Opraph and other fakers.

That dogma is what causes white knighting. In fact, if you think about it for a while, you’ll see that white knighting isn’t separate at all — it’s the dogma of being socially popular, specifically designed to ensnare men. If you see a weak woman and a strong man, you think: he’s probably oppressing her.

If there’s a solution to white knighting, it’s to stop raising our boys in a culture that encourages them to act like morons any time a woman complains. This probably means burning the television, any popular books from big publishers, and throwing out all your copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, but it might be worth it.

An interesting dialogue on masculinity has arisen, which is fortunate since you’d think the first thing a “men’s rights” movement would do would be to understand men. Alas, our political system is more defensive than pro-active, so that didn’t happen. But now is a good time to do it.

In one of the first posts to kick off this round of dialogue, Koanic writes:

What are the culturally universal traits definining manhood? Mark from Post: Masculine lists two:

1. Emotional dissociation.
2. Initiation.

Jack Donovan counters this with a more cosmological definition:

Masculinity is that which is least feminine; femininity is that which is least masculine.

In the last article posted on this site, it was suggested that masculine and feminine are complementary principles.

So now, as good investigators (a large category, of which “scientist” and “mystic” are both subsets) let us return to the original definition and see if we can reconcile these three viewpoints. Here’s an initial stab.

1. Discipline.
2. Initiation.

The idea of men as logically dissociated makes sense in that we must put emotions on the back-burner in order to accomplish what we need to do. However, there’s a larger part of it, which is discipline, in a martial sense.

You put aside your emotions, or even smaller logical concerns. A truly masculine force is able to sacrifice some or many in order to save all (yeah, I’m thinking of Ender’s Game here). This is a subset of what seems to always define masculinity for me, which is strong goal-orientation versus method-orientation, which is more of a concern for nurturers.

When someone is goal-oriented, everything else takes a back seat and becomes a means to that end. This is why men are the guardians of civilization, and women its anchors. The two complementary principles ensure that good things can exist by stimulating the need for them in each other.