Transcription
Hi everybody. I'm Girl Writes What. And uh, uh, an online friend of mine was, uh, really pissed off after reading a recent effort on the part of, I can only assume, a traditionalist woman, in, uh, trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with men these days. I'm gonna leave the article in the information section, along with, uh, some other stuff.
But, uh, basically, just like many traditionalists and feminists before her, she, she really missed the mark by a freaking mile. Um, even though she really, she kind of danced a little closer, like within a hundred miles or so, of the, the few core issues that currently discourage men from being the good little married drones they're supposed to be. Despite being critical of feminist attitudes that she rightly sees as anti-male, the article was still absurdly gynocentric. It was very much about what women want and why they're not getting it. And like, that is getting married, having babies on women's schedules, as decided by women. I almost have to wonder whether this author even bothered to ask any actual unmarried males why they're refusing or not bothering to, uh, man up before writing her article.
But as I said, it at least poked at the surface of the festering boil that is the systemic nature of the problem, even if it didn't give it the lansing it truly deserved. Her conclusions seemed to come down to, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" Uh, and, "Why get a good job when women are independent and can just give milk away for nothing?" Um, both are backhanded criticisms of women's behavior, which is kind of nice, somebody brave enough to blame women for their own troubles. But, but they really fall far short of any real examination of the underlying issues. So I'm going to give it the old college try and give a bit of an overview of what I believe has become a multifaceted problem.
Now, I'm going to read a recent part of a recent article from Hartiste, who said a very great deal with some serious literary flair. Uh, it's kind of pearls of wisdom from the pit of social nihilism that is the pickup artist community. And, uh, and he actually was spot on about some things, yet again, overly simplistic about others. I'm just going to quote some of the relevant, relevant bits and leave a link to the article below.
He says, "If you want to know why men are running away from marriage, children, and beta provisioning, one major reason is that the women available to these working-class men are flat out disgusting. What man of normal mental health and active libido wants to romantically woo and date, let alone marry, a beastly, waddling, tatted mountain of postulants with the issue of three other men barking and nipping at her cankles? And let's not forget that economically empowered and government-assisted women, slaves to their hypergamous instincts for a higher status mate than themselves, cannot help but winnow the pool of men deemed acceptable marriage material. When women say there are no good men left, what the astute observer hears is, 'There are no good men left, thanks to a combination of my increased expectations and decreased attractiveness.'"
He goes on to say, "To the factory farm, tower ivory tower sociologist studying marriage trends and turning out paper after paper of half-assed hogwash, there's a whole other world out there. It's the world of men, and in that world, men's desires matter. You should think about incorporating that ugly reality into your theories."
As blistering as that little snippet was, it raises some very important points. And I think the most important one is that men's desires matter. When men can't find women they desire who are willing to partner with them, then why would they partner? And, and it really can't be stressed enough, uh, that the reality of divorce and family law in our culture plays a huge part in men's growing contempt for marriage as an institution. It's not that men are commitment-phobic. It's that women seem increasingly commitment-incompatible. The word "commitment" has, in fact, in female parlance, come to mean, "up until the moment I'm no longer 100% satisfied with the person I married." And that attitude's only going to lead to more and more divorces, as more and more successful women effectively set their sights higher than they reasonably should, while their youth and attractiveness wanes, leading to a growing number of them feeling like they settled, even if they didn't. Even if they scored someone two points above them on the overall attractiveness scale.
One symptom of this, I think, that's very telling, is OkCupid's recent revelation that women on their site deemed 80% of men less than average attractiveness. That is, 80% of men were below average. This does not compute. This in no way is in line with reality. This is about women's expectations. And oddly enough, no one, least of all women, seem to really give a [ __ ] what men want in a partner.
Why can't men just be happy with what's available? Well, when you look at what's available to the average man in his 30s or early 40s: a 35-year-old woman who hollers "yes" over the jangling of her biological clock, while unable to keep the grimace from her face because he's a bigger loser than the five guys she dumped in her 20s, and now she's having to settle. Or a divorcee who's already financially annihilated and emotionally crippled, at least one other man. Or a single mother who's collecting reams of child support from one poor schmuck, while her other baby daddy manages to duck his obligations because he's a drug dealer and his income's off the books. And yeah, I'm exaggerating, but you see my point.
And no, not all women are like that. Lord knows, I know not all women are like that. But frankly, the consensus among today's women seems to be that this state of affairs is just the new normal. Uh, even responsible women will often frame such destructive choices on the part of other women as somehow valid and defensible. The sentiment in the mainstream is that men should just man up and go along with pairing up 2.0. Who cares what men want? And that essentially, a woman's behavior and life choices should have no effect on whether she's able to attract a good, reliable man. All of that really doesn't speak well of the principles of even those women who are more well-situated. In fact, I think it's safe to say that the fewer female voices of reason there are out there, the more men are likely to wash their hands of the entire idea of partnering.
But I honestly think it goes even deeper than just the baggage the average unattached woman now carries, or the danger of ending up an emotionally and financially devastated statistic with generous every other weekend access to one's children. That's keeping men from manning up. I kind of started thinking a little bit more about this when I watched Typhon Blue's extremely thought-provoking video on what she calls the apexual male. A man who, who does not identify with other men, but merely identifies with his place in the status hierarchy. I, I highly recommend anybody to go watching, go watch that. And, and I'm going to leave the link in the information section as well.
Her video got me thinking about the white feather girls. For those of you who don't know, this was a group of young women in the UK during World War I who went around bestowing white feathers of cowardice on any man they saw in civilian clothes to shame them into enlisting. Now, when I consider how vulnerable so many men were to those kinds of shaming tactics, vulnerable enough to enlist in a war that killed 10 million to preserve their manhood in the eyes of [ __ ] women they'd never even met, I just can't believe that it's only the risks of marriage, as onerous as they are, that have rendered men impervious to the kinds of shaming tactics employed by traditionalists and feminists who seem increasingly desperate to strong-arm men back into their old roles.
So I think beyond any discussion of the risks of marriage, unfairness in family court, all of that, I think way down at the, at the core of things, uh, maybe it's about a positive male identity. Now, male identity almost always revolves around doing rather than being. Most of that doing has revolved around being of use in a uniquely male context. Most of men's usefulness through history has derived from learning male skills and performing them well, embodying a male role in the service of women in society. In the more turbulent past, those roles, uh, needed to perform a valuable service to women or the community that women couldn't or shouldn't be expected to perform for themselves.
Now, this is the most common path, in my opinion, to a positive male identity. Because men lack a mechanism for automatic own-group preference. Simply put, they just don't relate to other men automatically just because they're men. Women have this bias, which provides them a natural ability to form cooperatives and relate to other women and seek consensus through their strong mechanism for own-group preference based on gender alone. Given the gender roles through most of human history, this mechanism really makes sense. Their individual value, as to put it bluntly, breeders, meant that in a survivalist environment, you didn't throw a woman on the trash pile without a pressing reason. Adjustments were made when they could be to keep as many women as possible within the sisterhood.
This is where you'll find a ton of attention in female spaces given to things like tone and being nice and, you know, emoticons with smiling faces and getting along even when there are disagreements. A lot of their interactions are about comfort level and feelings of acceptance. Men, on the other hand, lack the hardwiring to form a preference for maleness based merely on maleness. And that really just makes sense when you think about men's roles for the last couple million years or so. Um, roles that involved things like beating the men down the valley to a pulp when they threatened as women and children, or competing against other males within his community for a shot at the mating game. Given those roles, automatically siding with one's own gender over the other is just not going to work.
And it's not that men can't manifest any forms of own-group preference. It's just that when own-group preference manifests in males, it just isn't based on maleness alone. There has to be a common purpose, a common set of ideals or principles, a common duty or cause, a common doing, or a common position in the status hierarchy. So men can indeed identify with each other and relate to each other and be team players among other men. You see it in churches, military units, fraternities, sports teams, even sports fans, political parties, movements, project teams, stuff like that. And while they'll often form hierarchies within those contexts, those realms can be sources of a sense of loyalty and brotherhood among men.
The myth among feminists that men will insult each other for displaying feminine traits because they see women as inferior is really just that, a myth. Men do this because women have a trump card that they don't. A trump card that bestows intrinsic value on them: their uteruses. And they retain that value even when they gender-bend a little. A woman who acts like a woman isn't seen as inferior at all. A man who acts like a woman, uh, has always been seen not as a woman, but as a woman without a womb. That is, a woman with no value. He has no female value, and he has no unique male value. Therefore, he has no value at all.
And unlike women, who, who were valuable in and of themselves, men who were not useful did, and still do, get thrown onto the trash heap of society. In the currency of reproduction, an ovum might go for a thousand bucks, a uterus, a cool mill. An ejaculation is worth about 10 cents. To be acceptable mating material and worth a community keeping him around, a man had to do more than generate sperm. And when the only thing keeping you from becoming completely disposable as an individual lies in differentiating yourself from the feminine to spare women those onerous tasks, well, guys are gonna enforce that [ __ ].
It is my belief this is why men have always tended to define themselves by their roles: father, husband, working man, soldier, career man, family man, middle-class man, politician, activist, all of that. In other words, roles to exist in which allow them to relate to other men who also occupy those roles, and to derive a positive and meaningful identity from performing their masculinity through those roles. And I also think this may be why suicide rates for men skyrocket after divorce. You haven't just taken away his kids, his wife, his assets, and a good chunk of his income. You've effectively stripped him of a huge part of the male identity he's built around himself.
So I'm thinking that for most men, forming a positive male identity in relation to other males requires a couple of things: a male role that's differentiated from the female one, or at the very least, a male-oriented environment. And well, positivity. Men used to be able to construct a positive male identity out of marriage. That is, through the respected and uniquely male role of husband and father. When that identity is increasingly characterized by society as superfluous, obsolete, or in the words of Harriet Harman, unnecessary to social cohesion, it's no longer a way for a man to defer his disposability, is it? Moreover, when that identity can be unilaterally stripped from him on the whim of, of his wife, even when he did everything right, marriage ceases to be a positive way for men to define themselves as men. It really becomes a way for men to define themselves as chumps and idiots. And nobody really wants to define themselves that way.
Moreover, from sitcoms to rom-coms, to TV commercials, to billboard ads, the role of husband and father is increasingly one of playing the incompetent buffoon to a sassy, smart, together, disrespectful wife or even child. In the mass media, there's nothing noble or respectable about husbandhood or fatherhood anymore. And when the roles within the marriage, uh, have become virtually indistinguishable and interchangeable, a man's role becomes less and less male. It's just a role. Um, it can be a path to meaning and fulfillment if he's lucky, and it may be something he desires to do and to become, but it's not necessarily a path to defining himself as a man. So we can scratch that one off the list. Even for men who've been living under a rock when it comes to divorce law, marriage and children no longer offer a reliable path to a positive male identity. It's no longer positive, nor is it significantly male.
The workplace is yet another melee that has largely lost its maleness. And that's not to say that women ruined everything. It's not so much the presence of women, but rather the alterations in environment and interaction many women demand when they want to engage the world through the paid workforce. A male space that leads to a positive male identity doesn't need to be free of women, but it needs to be male. It needs to be an environment that suits their psychology, not one in which they end up being metaphorically castrated if they want to steer clear of trouble with human resources. And I'm not even talking about vulgarity or expressions of sexuality. I'm talking about things like aggression, ambition, ribbing, competition, passion, plain speech. All of these are often discouraged when women are present in order to spare feelings and prevent discomfort. Outspokenness is replaced with drawing room rules of discourse, and ingenuity with protocol. All of which render a feminized workplace, though tolerable to men, no longer a path to a positive male identity. It's no longer a male space, and it no longer appeals to the psychology of men. The workplace has therefore become a ladder fewer men feel driven to climb in order to construct their identities.
Combine this with the fact that their job is frequently on the line the moment they step out of the rigid, rigid, uh, restrictions on their masculinity, um, and offend an overly litigious female co-worker. A large number of men are not only becoming disenchanted with the expectation to perform in an environment that doesn't feed their nature and has set them up to fail, uh, and that sees him as disposable in the absence of those uniquely male-centered psychological rewards and motivators. A growing number of them are finally opening their eyes and waking up to the negative aspects of wage slavery. And that is a pill that once taken, can't be unswallowed.
In every single space males congregate where women have elbowed their way in and demanded changes, you seem to find large numbers of men just kind of giving ground and eventually losing their drive to really perform there. And, and again, I don't think it's the presence of women that does this. It's the enforced necessity to change one's behavior in order to maintain a proper decorum around them. And the changes in how those places function that women often demand. It's the expectation that the environment and the men in it should adjust to suit women's needs, rather than expecting women to adjust themselves to that environment.
A few bastions of maleness remain. Places where women are often welcome, right up until they begin to demand the environment change to suit them. At which point, you'll begin hearing a lot of male protest. I can even see this tolerance on the part of men when, say, a woman sneaks into the men's room because the lineup's too long at the ladies' room. Everything's fine, unless she suddenly takes offense at men behaving the way men do in a restroom, by farting and pissing in her presence.
So where are men retreating to? They're retreating to the internet and the few men's spaces that haven't tailored their rules of conduct to suit women's easily offended natures and need for comfort. They're retreating to the MRM, where a common set of ideals and values bonds the community and allows them to define their maleness irrespective of society's or women's approval. A place where words and ideas are more important than the tone or the smiles that may or may not lie behind them. They're retreating to the hierarchy and uniquely male objectives of the pickup artist community, where competition and score-keeping are indeed still allowed, even encouraged. And where there are men for others to admire or to mentor. Where they thumb their noses at women. What women say they want, society was not working for those guys, so they invented their own society and they're running with it by their own rules.
You see it in comics and video games and those related forums online venues where refusals to police speech are usually deemed misogyny, and the men there just don't really give much of a [ __ ]. You see this in Men Going Their Own Way, who've taken a stand based on a realistic assessment of what's in it for them and who maintain their self-respect not by complying with society's expectations, but by disregarding them. And you see it in the beer buddies, hookup, and Xbox culture. Part-time jobs men tolerate but don't care about. And you really see it in the gynocentrism of manginas and white knights who supplicate and pander to the feminine, even when it's ugly or amoral, differentiating themselves from the feminine through their blind worship of it. And why? Because all of the approved paths to a positive male identity, the path society both endorses and depends on, are gone.
Even when men don't consciously realize it, they, they know it somewhere in the backs of their brains. Men have always been willing to work and sacrifice and sweat and bleed if they were rewarded with a means through which to see themselves as worthy of respect. But when every single role society wants to cram you into is no longer a way to respect yourself or have the respect of others, then it's really time to throw those roles away.
And one thing that Typhon Blue's apexuals at the top of society, like Bill Bennett and Obama, feminists like Kay Hymowitz and Katie Roiphe, traditionalists like Suzanne Venker, one thing they're never going to realize is that using shame to try to coerce men to do what is expected of them isn't going to work this time. Because while it's possible to shame a man into giving his life for his country if there's a promise of respect in it, it's impossible to shame someone into working his ass off and risking his whole future just for the joy of looking in the mirror and seeing Homer Simpson or Ray Barone or Dilbert looking back at him. When the cost of society's approval is the self-respect you derive from a positive identity, it ceases to be worth it to a lot of men, anyhow.
Those are my ideas. Um, these are just things that I've been thinking about. And, and I don't absolutely do not think that they are written in stone. If anybody has any, um, anything to add or any criticisms of my assessment here, I will happily entertain them in the comments. And I guess I will see you all again later. Bye.