GROIN

If you are reading this, you exist, if you exist, you were most certainly born, and if you were born, you will most certainly die. There are few guarantees in life, but death is one of them.

Life and death are as complementary to each other as good and evil, light and darkness, sun and moon, woman and man. It has been said that woman is the gatekeeper of life. This is true. But if woman is the gatekeeper of life, then man is the gatekeeper of death. Life and death are not dual opposites, but a complementary duality. We like to view them as opposites because we fear death.

Consider the Octo-Mom, a modern day myth if there ever was one. The Octo-Mom is just like a serial killer; she is a serial-birther. Charles Manson may as well be the father. Indiscriminate killing is equal to indiscriminate birthing. We do not see her as a murderer, but this is pretense. Her goal was having children, and all else was indiscriminate. For her, it was like getting her nails done or buying a pet poodle.

A birth is in no way superior to a death. If anything they are equivalent. The predator needs its prey, but the herd also needs its predator or the herd becomes overwhelmed in indiscriminate and directionless individuals who weaken the herd. The herd can face death every day, or it can suddenly face failure through nonexistence. It fears death so much it makes death taboo, and failure much more likely.

Fertilizer is dead matter out of which life arises. Without the constant death of organisms to provide decaying matter full of nutrients, plants would not grow; without the death of (parts of) plants to be eaten, animals would not live. Life needs death much more than death needs life. If this was a poker game, Death would be on the button, with a 10 to 1 chip advantage, puffing away on a cigar (Death doesn’t have to worry about cancer).

Now consider the recent story of Suzy Favor Hamilton. Suzy Favor was an Olympian runner that recently revealed she led a double life as an escort. She was not bankrupt or in need of money. She is another form of the indiscriminate, essentially confusing lots of sex with the meaningful feeling that sex in the right context can deliver. She favored the indiscriminate “life” over death, and so encountered failure as a person.

As far as the excuses we give for the Octo-Moms and Suzy Favor Hamiltons of the world, these are mostly nonsense that we agree to pretend is important so people aren’t offended. Hamilton’s indiscretions were rationalized as “coping mechanisms.” Fair enough, but did you know that Ted Kaczynski’s mail bombs were also coping mechanisms? It may be hard to believe, but I am a psychoanalyst — just ask me!

You may recall that in the 90s, out of nowhere, rose yet another vague, nebulous “awareness campaign.” This one was essentially about safe sex and sex in general. We all needed to have lots of frank discussions about sex and be educated about sex, and who better to talk with you about sex than MTV and your gym teacher? They supported the indiscriminate, too, because they saw sex as a way of keeping death away. Maybe more of it will help.

Our society needs to own up to the importance of death. Without death, there is no life. Without life, there would still be death. Humankind has mastered many things in life, but even if we beat old age, we will not beat death. If I was a gambling man, and I am, I would wager that man will most likely never master death. I will give you 10 to 1 odds; my money is on death all the way. Man is not the master of death, for Death is the master of Man.

The great ugly secret about “freedom” is that it becomes a goal in itself. The neoconservatives found this out when, in the name of sharing freedom, they ended up having more wars than they could fight.

Sexual freedom is a form of Iraq and Afghanistan. You can win the battle, but can you win the occupation? The ugly secret rears its head again: freedom replaces the goal, and becomes a new quest like any other “ideological” crusade.

In the case of sexual freedom, the absence of restraints means that there is no goal and thus, no time scale. There is no maturation process. There is no eventual goal to end up as an adult. Instead, one stays trapped in the teenage loop forever and ever.

As a result, the simple idea of “sexual freedom,” of separating sex from any sort of goal such as family or love, creates a mentality of the perpetual loop: act for the moment, and for the self. Do not think of future. Do not experience change over your lifetime.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, who wrote Prozac Nation back in 1994 and should have lived happily ever after, writes about how her teenage loop has led to an unfulfilling adult life:

It had all gone wrong. At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24. Stubbornly and proudly, emphatically and pathetically, I had refused to grow up, and so I was becoming one of those people who refuses to grow up—one of the city’s Lost Boys…By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing, but I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security—kids you do or don’t want, Tiffany silver you never use—that makes life complete. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don’t have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will. I was alone in a lonely apartment with only a stalker to show for my accomplishments and my years. – “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life,” by Elizabeth Wurtzel in New York Magazine, January 6, 2013

She goes on to detail how she fled responsibility at every turn, including sexually. There was never a plan to live happily ever after, but a chance to take someone home for the night. Eventually, the options dwindled and apparently, so did the fun.

The MRM is in freefall at this point because it never really took a stand. “Equality,” like “freedom,” is not a goal but the absence of a goal. It’s like dedicating yourself to not-growing-up or to not-eating-vegetables.

MRAs often talk about how they just want “equality” (and/or “freedom”) for men to be equal to women. This sounds good to them because, despite all their talk of red pill/blue pill, they’re still invested in the dominant narrative of their time.

Since the French Revolution, this narrative has been the hive mind. The individual, dedicated to himself or herself, joins with other individuals who want the same, and they smash down all real goals and replace them with not-growing-up and not-eating-vegetables.

When MRAs talk about “equality,” they’re following the same path. The actual goal is for men and women to have a place where they complement each other, and where they are each sacred and important. This only comes through traditional sexual roles, which have goals beyond the sex itself.

Anything else resembles a fear of growing up:

But when I became old enough to learn to shoot, I took one lesson from my father and then refused to go further. It was a rite of passage, a stage on the way to adulthood. But I did not want the responsibility of handling weapons. And, frankly, I just didn’t want to grow up. And because my parents were a little too liberal, and I was far too stubborn, they didn’t force the issue. So I went out into the world with a child’s salutary fear of guns intact. – “Gun Control & Personal Responsibility,” by Greg Johnson in Counter-Currents, January 16, 2013

Our modern society is based on not growing up because we fear the goal itself. Out of fear from becoming like our parents, who lingered neurotic in jobs they hated and endured marriages they claimed to feel enslaved by, we just avoided all of it. We dated or hooked up, but the second night, went home alone.

Sexual “freedom” crushed our souls. Feminism and sexual liberation were just one of many “revolutionary” movements that mimicked the French Revolution in that they overthrew the goals, and replaced them with personal whims. Like the others, they led nowhere.

This occurred because the absence of something is not a goal. If anything, it resembles a hate movement. If your gender does not feel equal, you might ask whether equality is necessary, or just a talking point. Most likely it’s just the drama of others.

What women (and men) lost was a sense of purpose to their lives. What they gained was a void in which they could project their egos, but which led nowhere but to the endless procession of days of getting up, going to work, amusing oneself with alcohol and sex, and repeating. It’s even more soulless than its antecedent, the grim 1950s “corporation man” and his house with a white picket fence in the suburbs.

Rather than crush our souls with these anti-goals, we should stop giving up on having what nature and common sense would have us possess, namely normal lives in which we mature and learn. Instead, we should crush the “revolutionary” notion that a non-goal is superior to a goal.

The MRM is pitched to us as a battle between men and women, but really it’s a battlefield of values based on a single value.

On one side are the people who think values are arbitrary and women should be able to do whatever they want, and men should pick up the tab. On the other side is common sense.

It is common sense that traditional values originated in wisdom about the nature of reality itself. Feminists want to argue that values are “social constructs,” and that they’re arbitrary, but this denies the fundamentally practical nature of values from the past.

Right now, of course, values are fashions. Liberalism is a fashion, and it is the parent to feminism, so it’s no surprise that feminism is also a fashion. Modern people project their own behavior on the past, in order to make their own behavior seem less aberrant.

The center of this battle over values is the battle over value. The point of this battle is that there is a value to sexual selectivity if not chastity, and the cornerstone of modern feminism and liberalism is to deny any such value.

As the late (to the blogosphere) Ferdinand Bardamu wrote:

The more dicks a woman has been banged by, the less likely she’ll be satisfied by any particular one. As the number of he-rockets ravaging her she-pocket increases, her ability to bond with a man is accordingly decreased.

This clashes with the modern idea that women should not be idealized, but seen as beings with needs who can’t stop themselves. In that view, it’s acceptable that they behave like nitwits, because all we want out of them is that they be acceptable.

The ever-cheerful Athol Kay echoes this sentiment:

The fewer sexual partners a woman has before marriage the higher her marital satisfaction and the sexual satisfaction she has within marriage. You very much want your wife to sexually imprint on sex with you and completely bond to you. The sex is just going to be that much better over the long term. Not to mention no other ex-lovers lurking on Facebook, sexual diseases, bad experiences and regrets to worry about. The harsh truth to the modern hook up girl is that yes indeed every time you sleep with another man, you damage your long term wife potential. Plus the best predicator of future behavior is past behavior and highly promiscuous women before marriage are probably far more likely to cheat on you during marriage.

But how can this be? Our enlightened modern society teaches us that these are all lifestyle choices, and that we shouldn’t find a woman delectable because she’s virginal.

In fact, you’ll hear this from a lot of people: virgins are bad in the sack. Virgins are nervous and a mess. Stay away from virgins, you want someone just short of hooker.

The sexperts at the newspapers and high-ranked blogs will also rave on and on about “sexual experience” and pity those who are virgins, or condemned to date them.

There’s a simple explanation for this: they’re justifying their own choices. They settled for the girl with more than few dents, and now they want you to do the same.

In their distracted little brains, that validates their own choice, even though you have no intention to make any comment on their choice pro or con.

Many of them are even trying to use the moment to brag. “Yo, bro, you don’t want to be with a virgin. Trust me, I’ve had a million girls, and virgins are the absolute worst.”

If you were going to divide humanity by how stable they are, you’d probably have feminists, internet braggers, government experts and newspaper sex columnists on the side marked UNSTABLE. Everyone else goes in the ark.

Values of the past are not based on religion. They’re not arbitrary. They’re based on common sense, which includes basic economics. That which gives itself away too freely has no value. That which gives itself once has actual value.

Modern men are just beginning their backlash against feminism. They haven’t yet figured out that feminism naturally and inevitably arises from liberalism (heck, even the French did it back in their 1789 revolution). They haven’t yet understood what a Men’s Rights Movement would look like.

But slowly, values are changing. We went off on a bender with liberal values, and it created hell. Now we’re trying to retrace our steps, and find a path to not just “acceptable,” but actually good.

Where morality tries to construe life as a series of binary yes-no decisions, in fact life more resembles a spectral decision tree. Beyond a minimum, each decision is a matter of picking things that are better over things that are less better.

This is the nature of a relativistic universe. With only one option, you accept it. When someone better appears, or you can imagine it, that second option makes the first look worse. When you have a dozen options, and better/worse becomes a question of several factors and not just one, complexity results.

Take for example the age-old American practice of buying a car. There is no single determiner of what you should do. There are important factors: efficiency, roominess, frequency of repair, whether you trust the manufacturer. Any one of these vectors can become the basis for your decision.

When we look at the sexual revolution, we’re going to have a yes-no binary decision thrust at us. The basis of that decision is morality, which is extended to guilt on the basis of “equal treatment” and equal validity. Either you are with the program that makes people happy, or you should feel guilty.

What’s killing the sexual revolution is that life is (as mentioned above) not a question of binaries. It’s about a spectrum. When people see that on that spectrum an option exists which they find more palatable than the sexual revolution, they reach for it.

In modern life, we are used to many decisions made on the basis of perceived quality. Buy the network card that uses the Atheros chipset, not the Broadcomm one. Buy a Mercedes, not a Hyundai. Buy the organic mangoes, instead of the ordinary humdrum chemicular ones, and get the smaller and denser mangoes in that group.

For people who intend to have full lives, the choice of lifestyle is similar. Dating is OK; marriage is better, once you’re out of college. If you’re going to marry, what’s the way you get the best quality marriage?

Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

Researchers originally attributed the cohabitation effect to selection, or the idea that cohabitors were less conventional about marriage and thus more open to divorce. As cohabitation has become a norm, however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself. – “The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage,” by Meg Jay, The New York Times, April 14 2012

One answer here is traditional roles. Men court women; they do not “date.” When they find one they like, they ask for exclusivity. What follows are social engagements scripted to reveal the couple’s aptitude for one another. Eventually, there’s a formal request to a paternal figure for approval.

When the marriage is consummated, each partner is given an exclusive and complementary role. Women rule the house; men rule the workplace. In exchange for her harder job with longer hours, the woman is given more flexibility of time and less oversight. Trust is essential.

The rules of traditional marriage were not made-up arbitrary voodoo that we pulled out of thin air. They are designed to build the trust that can allow two people to rely on each other. They don’t always work, but then again, nothing always works.

They work better, however, than the sexual revolution and its try-before-buy low commitment ambiguous relationships. What has killed the sexual revolution is the small but increasing faction of Americans and Europeans who are choosing tradition over modernity because tradition simply works better.

Feminism promised to liberate women and make a better society. It demanded two things: first, equality for women; second, sexual liberation so that women did not have to feel “constrained” by social roles that emphasized chastity.

The first, equality of women, gave them new rights but also made them equal interchangeable parts on the production line. Without a sacred role, they are unable to achieve more than moderate approval through work, but at the expense of having a family which they also have time to appreciate.

The second, sexual liberation, reduces women to sexual objects. They are then traded around, and those foolish enough to rack up the miles and lose value become the embittered perpetual singletons with checkered histories and emotional baggage by the mile.

A new group is rising. This group has stopped trying to play the binary shell game of “equal/un-equal.” They have chosen inequality that has in its stead complementary roles, where women and men are not parts in a machine that consumes them. – “Feminism is Doomed,” by Brett Stevens, In Mala Fide, April 11 2012

Feminism (a sub-set of liberalism) is a moral dogma. It is external to the individual and formed of a standard of behavior encoded in yes-no decisions. It is based on guilt for the inherent inequality of life itself.

It won the battle in that when presented with guilt questions, especially in a public setting, people tend to go with the “safe” option. Of course everyone is equal; let everyone do whatever they want, and they’ll be happy, and we won’t have riots or violent revolutions.

But when that focus is removed, and people are instead forced to consider the question of what will make them happy in the long-term, the guilt loses its value. It takes a few generations, but people stop caring about the moral answer.

What they care about, as always, is a better quality of life. A better quality of belief system, perhaps one that does not require the overhead of an external ideology of feminism. A mode of behaving in which our innocent young boys and girls have an equally innocent and delightful future awaiting them.

The sexual revolution has died. This awareness hasn’t yet fully impacted the mainstream, but it’s coming. Like all waves, it starts with a drop. When it hits, many of the people who are currently in positions of authority will find themselves removed. Such is the nature of change.

If you had to get a cancer, which type would you prefer? Here are your choices:

Behind door #1, a fast-growing cancer that quickly presents symptoms when it’s a type 1, so it can be cleanly removed.

Behind door #2, a slow-growing cancer that does not present symptoms until it is a full-blown type 4, leaving you no surgery options except digging a six-foot hole.

Although in real life there’s some middle group between the two, most things fall into these two categories. The fast and obvious versus the slow and clandestine.

One is direct and the other is not. The direct exists on a single level: it acts toward its goal and looks it. The indirect has two levels; first, its appearance and second, its actual goal.

Femicide, or the killing of women, occurs indirectly. Like most real “traps” in life, it has a pleasing outward appearance. If you’re thinking of dogs lapping up antifreeze, which tastes sweet, and then dying horrible deaths here, you’re probably correct.

Our Western civilization has enacted femicide by removing the powerful role that women had, and instead assigning them another role as interchangeable cog. For a relatively small amount of money, they gave up the security of having family as the center of their universe, and are now fodder for The System.

Woman: But you would want your wife to stay at home and do nothing with her life?

Me: How long does it take to cook three healthy meals and keep the home clean? Not more than four hours. If she is awake for 16 hours a day, and spends four hours of quality time with me, that means she has eight hours to do whatever she wants, at least until the kids start rolling in. She can pursue her hobbies and passions, go to the gym, read books, and enjoy her leisure time. As long as it doesn’t come at the expense of maintaining the home, and she does her best to please me, she is free to do what she wants.

Woman: But I want to accomplish something. I don’t want to be just a housewife.

Me: Pushing papers in an office is accomplishing something? Let’s be real, no woman is going to win a Nobel Prize with her work as a human resource associate, middle manager, or government bureaucrat. If you owned your own business or ran a charity that fed starving kids, I’d agree that you were accomplishing something, but spending all your days in meetings, dealing with dumb office politics, and being a standard-issue wage slave sounds a lot less fulfilling than being able to pursue your interests while satisfying a man who takes good care of you.

Woman: But if I don’t have a job and my husband has an affair, I’ll be helpless. I want to have a backup plan in case he neglects me.

Me: So you’re going to marry someone with the expectation of failure? If you already have divorce in the back of your head before you walk down the aisle then I guarantee it won’t work. It’s having the need for options and a way out that ensures the marriage will fail. It’s only when both parties are unconditionally committed to the marriage that it has a chance of success. – Roosh V.

He makes an excellent point. Very few jobs are “accomplishing something.” In fact, most of them are just earning a wage. Even most professions are following in the steps of others. And now that we’ve doubled the workforce by sending women out to work as well as men, the salaries are lower, even if the dollar amounts are higher.

Under a traditional society, men worked and women were in charge of basically everything else. In exchange for this seemingly lopsided bargain, women got greater free time and at least in the South, the ability to engineer just about anything through a backdoor system of influence. Women talked to other women who talked their husbands into doing things. It gave men a forward role, and women a way of building a civilization around that.

As for bulimia, anorexia nervosa, or any other eating disorder associated with women, the Left invariably manages to link these to our inherently sexist society, with women – the poor dears – driven to diet, puke, and starve themselves in a desperate attempt to fit the apparent preferences of misogynist males for women who look like they’ve just emerged from a concentration camp. Strange, then, that these illnesses only came into fashion following women’s lib in the 1960s.

Modern western society’s emphasis on pushing women away from the family into the wider society, where image becomes an issue, and the endless pornographization of our culture (“bitches gotta look good nekkid”), both leftist initiatives, seem to be at the heart of these phenomena. – Alternative Right

Further, women were not cast out into the world like meat for sale. They were able to stay home with their families until it was time to get married, or in uncommon but frequent cases, to launch on a career path instead. When they got married, as most people still seem to want to do, they were taken care of and the same social rules that MRAs bemoan kept the husband honest regarding his wife.

There were bad husbands, but that is a function of the people involved. If you are unable to pick a good husband, exchanging the first bad husband for the second, third, fourth etc. won’t do you any favors. You would have been better off with the first one unless he was a true-blue sociopath, which is a situation not to be handled by divorce, but by criminal law… but I digress.

Women had it better when they had a sacred role. Now, they’re pieces of meat. Meat to fondle and fornicate with, like a prostitute but they don’t get paid (except in dubious “pleasure”). Meat to throw into the wheels of the machine as some desk-bound functionary. Meat to watch hundreds of hours of television that saps its self-esteem, compelling it to buy more products.

This is why a growing number of young professional women who seem to “have it all” are burning out at work before they reach 30.

These early career flameouts are reflected through the corporate ladder. Today, 53% of corporate entry-level jobs are held by women, a percentage that drops to 37% for mid-management roles and 26% for vice presidents and senior managers, according to McKinsey research. Men are twice as likely as women to advance at each career transition stage.

…One reason that women are burning out early in their careers is that they have simply reached their breaking point after spending their childhoods developing well-rounded resumes. “These women worked like crazy in school, and in college, and then they get into the workforce and they are exhausted,” says Melanie Shreffler of the youth marketing blog Ypulse. – Forbes

One brutal truth: worker or mother, pick one. You can’t do both. As a Generation Xer, I got to witness firsthand the experiments in being both workers and mothers, and the results were uniform failure across the board. Social class, job type, etc. didn’t matter. Jobs always require you to be there more than you think you will, always wear you down, and always force you to confront the ugliest in humanity. Exhausted mothers return home with 25% of their energy left, and throw TV dinners at the kids, or embark on an ill-advised campaign to show the world they’re the best mothers ever, which sets up unrealistic expectations and results in quiet resentment of the children, and vice-versa.

The tipping point for Christianity in the US likely occurred when supplication became the church’s most profitable enterprise (as opposed to a backwoods hustler’s game), or at least when aspiring young preachers realized what success it could bring them. From there on out, a more female-oriented faith was inevitable.

If preachers had merely stopped there, it would be bad enough, but in their eagerness to please female congregants they’ve taken things a step farther, and many have progressed to the kind of outright man-bashing and shaming one would normally expect from a lesbian apostate such as Mary Daly.

They’ve gone from forgiving women’s sins, faith healing and praying for money to playing the part of a drill sergeant for husbands, who, as we all know, will never be quite good enough for wives, guaranteeing plenty of work for the energetic preacher. – The Spearhead

What’s happening here, in parallel?

Business panders to women by offering them a pleasant illusion, and it ends up enslaving them.

(Some) Churches pander to women by offering them a pleasant illusion, and it ends up creating a religion in which no one participates.

Beware the indirect. Very little in life is what it says it is. Many rocks have snakes underneath them. Not all sweet-tasting things are free of poison. Fool’s gold exists. How many other ways must it be said?

The result of feminism is femicide: the destruction of female lives. Not quickly, like murder, but slowly over the course of decades. We turn them into pieces of meat and cogs in the machine, then tell them that “empowerment” means casual sex followed by years alone in their lifeless apartments, sipping Chardonnay and surfing Amazon.com, wondering about the could-have-beens: could have been a mother, could have been really loved, could have been something more than a desk-bound functionary with a high wine bill and low self-esteem.

What we think of feminism, female empowerment and pro-grrl ideals are in fact a subtle trap that lures women from a place of importance, and instead turns them into chattel. The ideal alternative is a traditional society, but trillions of dollars of movies, government propaganda, books, magazines and TV shows tell you otherwise.

I guess you’ll have to actually use your brain to figure this one out.

There are two types of freedom: freedom from something, and freedom to do something.

If you believe that your fate is conditioned by a vicious and self-serving government, you may want freedom from it. But if you have instead a constructive goal, you want the freedom to do that goal.

The first case is easier because it involves a clear enemy. The second is harder, because it does not state the reason why you would not be able to accomplish what you want. It is a matter of social approval as a whole, and not some part of society that is denying you what you seek.

MRAs talk quite a bit about false rape accusations. They do not like to talk about the relationship between casual sex and rape allegations. When men and women hook up at random, regret happens frequently. From regret come the accusations of false rape, which are unprovable as they are provable.

Statistics show that as many as 78 percent of women will engage in a hook-up at some point during their college tenure, 14 percent of whom will rely on a friend to tell them what happened the next day, 49 percent of whom will never see the partner again, and 16 percent of whom felt pressured into the sexual encounter. In a given year, roughly 97,000 cases of college campus sexual assault or date rape related to binge drinking are reported. Another 100,000 college students annually report being too drunk to know if they consented to having sex. – The Washington Post, No sex on campus?

With all that regret, bad behavior is inevitably going to follow.

Let’s look at an alternative. Traditional culture provided a ritualized courting period, after which a man married his future wife, and they generally lived together in innocence and mutual support. Many marriages were arranged, which is a polite way of saying that if your young people are confused, you go to the wisest village elders and pick some candidates for a match. Unsurprisingly, arranged marriages often last where “romantic” for-love/sex modern marriages do not. There was no illusion about sex being love, or marriage being a hedonistic pleasure. Marriage was like a battle-bond, by which a man and woman forged a family. In traditional culture, the only rapes that happened were assaults by strangers or men the women would normally not be speaking to. In our culture, the only difference between consent and rape is the degree of persuasion employed.

Our modern false rape epidemic is created by casual sex, itself a creation of feminism, itself a creation of liberalism.

When it comes down to “he-said/she-said,” there is no intelligent way to proceed, but the problem is that you’re damned either way. If you take her side, you may well be sending an innocent man to ruin. If you take his side, you may be excusing a heinous crime of personal violation. We can’t gamble with either of those outcomes.

Tradition had a better plan. Why do MRAs fear it?

MRAs are afraid of Tradition because feminists are afraid of Tradition. Tradition is patriarchy and honor. With honor comes the possibility of shame and dishonor. If no one cares and there are no consequences, dishonor — allowing yourself to be seen as weak, fearful and inept — is the easiest thing in the world. Honor requires an honor group, a group of men who will hold other men accountable, and MRAs are just as dedicated to breaking up male honor cultures as feminists are. – Jack Donovan, “Like Slipping Into a Warm Bath”

MRAs have (so far) based their game plan on creating a mirror-image of feminism and hoping to defeat it by being “more equal” than those who demand equality. The problem is that equality is never a goal in itself; you reach equality by penalizing those above the median, since you can’t force the incompetent below that median to suddenly, magically become more competent. Equality exists through penalties on the more equal.

In practical terms, this means feminism will always win out over MRA because feminism supports a group that is seen as inherently biological weaker. They will always be pitied, and men not. Men asking for pity alienates strong men and attracts weaker men. It’s a vicious cycle of failure that explains why MRM has gotten zero political traction.

Reversing feminism by imitating it offers an unlikely solution. What makes more sense is to figure out the origin of feminism, and reverse that. In the case of our modern society, that origin is a withdrawal from shared values and a leap into the world of subjective, individualistic and social forces. That is the source of the disease.

If we’re truly tired of that, we’ll seek to incorporate tradition in our plans as a solution and not a symptomatic treatment. At that point, we will be clear in our minds that we want a cure, not just a more comfortable disease.

A fascinating discussion has broken out in the world of men’s blogs, based on the question “What is masculinity?”

I read Jack Donovan‘s many projects because unlike most writers, who specialize and then add a worldview to match, Jack has a complete view of the world and can apply it to any specific area. This is why anything he writes offers a point, and then context, which gives you more to think about.

Here’s his most recent stab at a definition of masculinity:

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

I like this because it puts everything in the world on a spectrum which runs from one to the other. My own tendencies are to try to find a discrete definition, but what’s good about the type of definition you can see above is that it covers everything.

You know what else covers everything regarding gender? Language. Many languages use gender on their nouns. This means that maybe a chair is masculine, but a fork is feminine; it takes a long time to understand how the genders “work” in that language, but generally at that point, you know a lot about the culture.

I have an addition to Jack’s term for consideration by the MRA blogosphere, “man-o-sphere” (sounds like an angry ben-wa ball) and the gender blog world in general:

Masculinity and femininity are complementary opposites. That which is not masculine is feminine, and vice versa, such that a completed whole emerges only through the two parts.

When you think about it this way, the masculine and feminine roles are different approaches that balance each other and by doing so, enhance each other’s understanding of the other. Additional complementary opposites: hot/cold, dark/light, smart/dumb, fast/slow, wet/dry.

Complementary opposites are a product of a relative universe. To know what is hot, you must know what is cold, because without the other to define it in contrast, neither term means anything. If you lived in a climate where the temperature was 80 F year-round, you probably would not think of hot and cold as terms to describe a day.

It is the same way with gender. What is feminine defines the limits of masculinity, and vice versa. This enables each gender, by being distinctive, to strengthen the other. Much as we need night to have day, we need masculinity and femininity forever playfully wrestling in order to have a whole vision.

One of our society’s favorite excuses is that you cannot get to the truth of a matter because there are too many “shades of gray.”

This is their way of saying that they don’t want you to reach an answer because they’d prefer you simply shrug and move on and leave things as they are. Either that, or they want to convince you to avoid taking action, because decisive action is what the modern self-doubting moral hamster fears.

However, there’s a problem with shades of gray. It replaces a clear pattern with an ambiguity that is usually taken advantage of by idiots.

All of which is a poignant, personal way of alerting you to the fact that Cosmo has come up with a new name for this kind of nonviolent collegiate date-rape sort of happening: gray rape.

And some feminists are angry, and they’ve launched a letter-writing campaign about it, though if you’re reading Cosmo for purposes other than to revel in its unique special brand of inanity you have bigger issues with your sexual identity than what to call that time you fucked that guy you didn’t really want to fuck. I’m not sure what to think about any of this, because while Laura Session Stepp (the writer of the Cosmo story) is a tool, reading the individual stories of “gray rape” victims that so closely mirrored my own — they got too drunk! they said no, but then they passed out! when they realized they were having sex, they stopped! — I felt absolutely nothing. It was one drunken regrettable night. One of so, so many more to come. And I have found that when a guy demeans you in a drunken state, it is more likely to stick with you and haunt you if you give anything resembling a shit about his opinion. – Jezebel

The way feminism’s advocates describe their lives always reveals the actual results of feminism.

On the surface, they describe a paradise that resembles those commercials for Nuva Ring: strong, independent women doing whatever they want to do and having successful careers.

Under the surface, we see bored women who are slaves to their jobs, with a string of failed relationships and so many regrets and emotional baggage that they’re incapable of bonding to anything more complex than an iPod.

However, she brings up a good point: why do we choose to have shades of gray, when we could just make a decision and impose black/white boundaries, and be done with the misery?

People like shades of gray because it hides their incompetence. If there’s no clear standard, anything goes. If anything goes, no one is wrong. If no one is wrong, I personally am not wrong, and no one can tell me what to do. I’m free!

The high cost of this kind of “freedom” — which isn’t liberty so much as it is narcissism — is that people have to stumble through the learning that enabled us to create a civilization, but each person has to do it alone and only gets good at it when they’re 50 and it’s too late to matter.

Both MRAs and feminists are barking up the wrong tree. They demand equality, strong rights protection, etc. but these things do not produce happy lives. Instead, they produce broken ones.

And both groups seem to live in different worlds. To a feminist, most rapes go unreported. To an MRA, most reports of rape are false. Which is true?

I will advance a radical proposition: it’s not the rape, it’s the shades of gray. In the gray area, women toss out their sexual favors carelessly, and men run panting after them like dogs. The only way to prove your “freedom” (and thus, success) is to be having sex. The competition is high.

The result of this is many regrets. People regret having sex after sex, or during sex. They get pressured into sex they don’t want.

Worst of all, there is no convincing evidence. It’s all he-said/she-said. Two people leave a party, drink heavily, and go back to his place or her place. After that, there are no witnesses, and so a gray rape, an outright rape, or a false accusation look the same the day afterwards.

• Signs of aggressive sex. Some people enjoy rough or “athletic” sex and the signs here are indistinguishable, unless he punches her in the head repeatedly or she has handcuff marks on her wrists. Still, we don’t know for certain those were not part of the sexual stimulation.
• No condom. People like to think they always make the right choice, but it’s hard to not notice that condoms murder sensation. Even with thin condoms, it’s more like having sex with an innertube than a person. As a result, the condom often gets chucked aside in the heat of the moment. If this were not true, sales of birth control pills, rings, etc. would fall through the floor.
• Her condition. She drinks to oblivion, maybe takes some drugs, and then the next day is certain she was raped. Maybe she was; but how the heck are we to tell? Come to think of it, how is she going to know, given her mental state? Or him?

When we endorse casual sex, we put men and women at a disadvantage. They give away for free what should be a powerful bargaining chip, and as a result, they end up alone after a string of failures.

In addition, they fail to enjoy the process. Man versus woman is now an adversarial relationship, not a playful one. It’s people using each other for their own ends. Maybe the reason we are so quick to accuse bankers of causing all our ills is that secretly we recognize our own hypocrisy.

The biggest tragedy however is that rape is now a perpetual gray area. The courts are becoming reluctant to touch gray rape or acquaintance rape because the cases are expensive and far too often end in a situation where the truth is so unclear that to rule either way is injustice for someone. Lawsuits result.

If men want a future where they can both have a woman and enjoy her without all of the dysfunction, this future lies in doing away with “gray areas,” including the indistinguishable acts of casual sex and gray rape.