- They don't like to admit it, but a current shift in popular
culture is saying it for them. Loud and clear.
-
- This month, cable television made room for what is being
billed as "the first network for men" on TNN. (Initially christened
Spike TV, the network name is in dispute.)
-
- British author and genetics professor Steve Jones' fascinating
new book "Y: The Descent of Men" explains in bold biological
detail why men are the true "second sex."
-
- "Males are, in many ways, parasites upon their partners,"
Jones writes. "Their interests are to persuade the other party to
invest in reproduction, while doing as little as they can themselves. Like
all vermin, from viruses to tapeworms, they force their reluctant landladies
to adapt or to be overwhelmed."
-
- A recent article in BusinessWeek is titled "The
New Gender Gap." The subtitle declares that "from kindergarten
to grad school, boys are becoming the second sex."
-
- Meanwhile, an article by David Brooks in the Atlantic
Monthly heralds "The Return of the Pig" and suggests that grown
men are returning to the ways of the male chauvinist for reasons that are
partly defensive.
-
- The roots of the problems facing new-millennium guys
are as varied as the cultural corrections evolving to deal with them.
-
- A favorite place to lay blame is, of course, at the feet
of today's women.
-
- Feminism has long been a dirty word among men who are
uncomfortable without implied dominance; and as a result of the growing
achievements of women in areas from business, politics, sports and culture
to such traditionally male establishments as the military, some guys feel
diminished.
-
- As the pithy and eternally amused Jones puts it, "The
present century may be the age of women: the first in which, like it or
not, slightly less than half the population is forced to accept that biology
no longer gives it an alibi for injustice."
-
- Biology also appears to have less and less use for males.
-
- "Men, toward the end of the last millennium, felt
a sudden tightening of the bowels with the news that their services had
at last been dispensed with," Jones writes. "Dolly the sheep
-- conceived without masculine assistance -- had arrived. Her birth reminded
half the population of its precarious position."
-
- If that isn't enough bad news, medical studies show male
fertility being compromised by a host of factors.
-
- Jones describes in scientific detail the myriad ways
in which environmental changes are lowering sperm counts. Meanwhile, testicular
cancer is on the rise. And a study of Italian taxi drivers shows that sitting
all day in a warm car seat -- effectively overheating what your grandmother
called "the family jewels" -- compromises a man's ability to
produce sperm.
-
- "Perhaps, as men suffer the pains of modern life,
so do their vital parts," quoth Jones.
-
- Health studies of males -- from conception to old age
-- demonstrate the myriad ways in which, as Jones puts it, "Masculinity
emerges as a fragile and uncertain thing."
-
- Now brace yourselves, guys. That's not all. Guys are
feeling the heat in the workplace, too.
-
- Susan Faludi, writing in her landmark 1999 book "Stiffed,"
points out that white-collar guys are hard-pressed to develop and maintain
a sense of manliness in a context that essentially denies their physical
selves. Men who are paper-pushers disconnected from their inner hombres
may be longing for the "fight club."
-
- Equally emasculating is the fact that traits and characteristics
traditionally associated with women -- cooperation, adaptation and teamwork
-- are prized in today's service-driven industries more readily than typically
male attributes such as dominance and aggression.
-
- Men seeking refuge in popular culture are in for a cold
shower. For every supersize male action hero at the Cineplex, there is
a larger-than-life go-girl kicking the stuffing out of his weekend grosses.
The same pattern is discernible on the Billboard charts and on the lists
of best-selling books. Where once guys and their interests held sway, men
are now having to share what was once a biologically derived sense of entitlement.
-
- But wait ... there's more. ...
-
- An increased cultural emphasis on men's appearances --
from fashion layouts to Diet Coke commercials -- finds that men are under
the same pressures to achieve idealized standards of beauty that have burdened
women for decades and produced insecurities to which the marketplace offered
expensive solutions -- from cosmetics and clothing to plastic surgery.
-
- The guys in trouble are not just the adult males.
-
- In classrooms across America, boys are slipping, too.
BusinessWeek reports that what is under way is a "stunning gender
reversal in American education." The story quotes William S. Pollock,
author of "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood"
and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "It's not
just that boys are falling behind girls," Pollock says. "It's
that boys themselves are falling behind their own functioning and doing
worse than they did before."
-
- Part of the problem seems to be that, in plain terms,
boys aren't being allowed to be boys.
-
- So what has begun to surface in pop culture is a masculinity
reclamation project, a defense and validation of beleaguered boys and men.
-
- In much the same way that specialized television programs,
movies and publications evolved over the years to cater to women, a whole
new breed of guys-only offerings are cropping up.
-
- Much of the new go-guy fare gleefully plays to the lowest
common denominators -- the beer-guzzling, belching, T&A sort of entertainment
generally associated with the average bachelor party. Guys seeking more
thoughtful explorations of what it means to be a man can look to Jones'
laudable "Y: The Descent of Men."
-
- In the end, the largest shift in thinking -- for both
men and women -- must come from the realization that guys are not at the
top of the heap anymore. Their strength lies in accepting -- and being
accepted for -- the idea that they are part of it.
-
- Let's hear it for the guys.
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Kim Weber
- wvadreamin@citlink.net
- 7-10-3
-
- A very fundamental change in our society needs to take
place if we are going to continue as a country. Women need to just grow
the f**k up and start supporting, in all respects, their men.
- This article shows just how pathetic we women have become.
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Marilyn A. Guinnane
- 7-11-3
-
- To address your MEN IN TROUBLE essay, I believe all that's
really needed to put men back on track is for them to feel self-assured.
Let me assure, then, all men out there in Rense-land: YOU ARE LOVED!!!
YOU ARE NEEDED!!! There is no replacement for what you have to give, yin
to our yang (or is it vice versa?). Your wonderful minds, your great senses
of humor, your little boy charm, your very masculinity. What would we do
without you? What would you do without us? We are a team, fellas! Women
don't want to see you feel badly about yourselves. Our fathers, our sons,
are MEN. You are fabulous!
-
- And just because you don't have the top of the heap all
to yourselves anymore simply means that you learn to share. That's all.
There's no need to feel threatened. After all, as a song of yester-year
so aptly said, "There ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby."
You cannot be replaced.
-
- And me? Oh, I'm just your friendly neighborhood feminist;
thought I'd drop in for a while to tell you a great truth: Love yourself,
(your soul) and matters just sort of magically become solved.
-
- Life just wouldn't be worth living without men. I'd be
willing to bet that 99% of all women on this planet would concur. Bless
you, guys.
-
- Marilyn A. Guinnane
- Washoe Valley, NV
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Richard
- Founders' America
- 7-11-3
-
- Jeff -
-
- Regarding your posting about the decline
- of men's influence and power, this may be informative.
-
- -Richard
-
-
- CRAZY WOMEN - CRAZY SOCIETY
- WHY SOME MEN ARE DRIVEN TO VIOLENCE
- ©1994-2003 Founders' America
-
- There is a direct correlation between the rise to power
of the emoting feminine mind - feminism - and children killing children
in the streets. If you apply inductive and deductive analyses to the issue
of America's decline, you'll come to that conclusion yourself.
-
- Feminism is destroying the greatest civilization the
world has known. And men in America ((particularly white men)) are impotent
to stop the destruction because mothers have been emasculating their sons
for decades while fathers have been abandoning their children and familial
responsibilities.
-
- Why?
-
- Women are more likely to try suicide ((men are more capable
and succeed more often)) and women suffer more mental disorders than men--suffer
from depression at a rate twice that of men. And they report dissociative
mental states at a 9:1 ratio to comprise a majority population in mental
hospitals. Why?--because women's hormonal system is more fragile, more
prone to instability; ergo, women are more emotionally unstable than men.
-
- The emoting feminine mind displays excessive emotionality
and/or a variety of mental imbalances including PMS, FPS ((False Pregnancy
Syndrome)), FMS ((False Memory Syndrome)), AAS ((Alien Abduction Syndrome)),
Satanic Ritual Abuse Syndrome, Multiple Personality Disorder, Affective
Nursing Syndrome, Münchausen by Proxy Syndrome, Factitious Disorder
Syndrome, and others.
-
- Of course, these afflictions are denied by feminists
to be biological in origin, so they attribute them to men's tyranny against
women since men are virtually free of such disorders, and since, in their
illogic, feminists believe that women and men would be truly equal but
for certain unfair environmental influences.
-
- Recent reports about "facilitated communication"
with autistic children -- reports of "facilitators" helping otherwise
autistic ((uncommunitive)) children type out meaningful messages, but who
later are found to be typing the messages for their charges -- make my
case ((I call this phenomenon "False Facilitated Learning"; read
postscript)).
-
- Skeptics have been vindicated by reports on ABC's 20/20
and CBS's 60 Minutes. It now appears that we have a new category of female
hysteria: False Facilitated Learning syndrome.
-
- On February 20th, 1994, 60 Minutes was the first news
organization to reveal the truth about widespread reports provided by professional
social workers and psychologists that autistic children were suddenly making
connections to the outside world from their heretofore secret and closed
inner world, using the typewriter and the helping hand of facilitators
who held the wrist of autistic children while the kids typed coherent responses
to questions.
-
- On April 29th, 1994, 20/20 aired the definitive conclusion
on the phenomenon, reporting that it was neither a real breakthrough nor
a hoax--but a manifestation of psychological delusions on the part of female
facilitators ((the one or two male facilitators who displayed the phenomenon
may have right-brained, emoting temperaments like that of women; a gender-based
trait that seems to impede rational thought processes)).
-
- Why did it take reporters so long to expose the truth,
especially after those news broadcasts in early 1993 aired video tape showing
autistic kids being "guided" by facilitators, and typing out
meaningful messages while the children were looking away from the keyboard?
Upon first seeing the "miracle," I immediately knew that either
the facilitators were self-deluded or they were knowingly pulling off a
hoax ((this is not to deny that some mildly autistic children do begin
communicating through facilitated means)).
-
- It's politically correct for major news media to avoid
any story which might reveal gender-based mental imbalances in women--like
that in "Janice," a facilitator who apologized to an emotion-wrenched
family on that 60 minutes report, after she had wrongly charged the parents
with childhood sexual abuse through "proof" of her guiding hand
and the typing finger of the parents' autistic child.
-
- But there were dozens of Janices out there doing the
same thing! Certainly that's worth a follow-up report to discover what's
in the mind of women that would predispose them to such self-delusion.
And even though 20/20 and 60 Minutes staff displayed courage in exposing
this extremely dangerous phenomenon, which infects American culture in
many other ways, they lacked interest in addressing the much bigger story:
How could so many professional women be so perfectly self-deluded?
-
- Janice appeared confused and embarrassed in her apology,
after she had nearly destroyed a loving and well-adjusted family. She claimed
not to understand how such a thing could happen when she learned that her
charge hadn,t typed out those messages--but that she was doing it on some
unconscious level for the child, and providing messages containing a deviant
sexual theme! There's one for Freud.
-
- Actually it was Freud who first reported an overly delusional
mind in women. Freud was so shocked by the great number of women who reported
incest during psychotherapy he concluded that many of them had to be mistaking
fantasy and dreams for reality, so he abandoned his theory on incest-related
neurosis in adults.
-
- A similar phenomenon was reported in 1992 by several
dentists who had discovered that an unusual number of women were falsely
reporting sexual abuse after having been anesthetized, and even though
female assistants were present to confirm the impossibility of such molestations.
Female patients had conjured up sexual events while asleep, then believed
them to be real upon waking ((this is not to deny that such kinds of sexual
abuse do occur)).
-
- I believe the capacity for the emoting feminine mind
to become self-deluded negatively impacts our society in general, especially
in the social sciences ((there's no room for the phenomenon in the hard
sciences, where the scientific method must be employed)). And I believe
that it contributes to the many bizarre manifestations found in religions
and New Age cults.
-
- I believe it is the creature now infecting the liberal
Hollywood establishment, liberal news industries, and liberal education
in America--to rapidly destroy American civilization.
-
- Emoting feminine mind accounts for the strange gender
gap among the recent Menendez trial jurors. And it was at work, too, when
news people across America reviewed those video tapes but denied their
own eyes--feeling certain that somehow those autistic children could be
typing sensible messages while looking away from the keyboard!
-
- [[NOTE: A male researcher conducted the tests to determine
that facilitated learning was actually facilitator-driven, which forced
the news organizations to accept what their own sight would have confirmed
for them if their emotionality hadn't clouded their rational mind.]]
-
- If an alien race were to descend on the planet and take
note of the psychological differences between men and women, and if they
could get by the PC police, they would conclude that women are simply more
susceptible to emotional instability than men are; that feminists are distracted
by the emotional appeal of an equality between the sexes that only eons
of human evolution might lend, since men's greater aptitude for rationality
- for logic in math and science - is genetic-based. And because a civilization's
long-term survival depends on the appropriate and natural division of its
labor force, they would conclude that ours is a civilization destined to
collapse if women continue abandoning the rearing of children to take positions
of leadership and responsibility from men, and if the twin government tyrannies
of affirmative-action quotas and proportionalism, which require a dumbing
down of qualifications to suit the needs of women ((and minorities)), aren't
stopped.
-
- Rather than concluding that woman have been oppressed
because men are brutes, feminists ought to take a more rational view and
answer this question: Why have societies throughout the ages evolved a
sex-based division of labor in the workplace, in the rearing of children,
in defense, in leadership, etc.? And then ask themselves if they're willing
to destroy a civilization for their acquisition of a mendacious equality.
-
-
- -Founders' America
-
- P.S.
-
- False Facilitated Learning: false claims that autistic
children have learned to communicate through their therapist using a keyboard,
when, in fact, the therapist has unconsciously learned to go into a dissociative
mental state and provide both the child's and the therapist's communications--while
guiding the autistic child's finger over a keyboard.
Comment
-
- From Marilyn A. Guinnane
- 7-12-3
-
- "Richard" from Founders' America, Jeff, launched
himself into a rather lengthy diatribe with regard to a woman's mental
instability, in effect stating that the hysterical female should always
hand the reins over to men in all matters of importance, from governing
(tell it to Catherine the Great) to financial matters (is this "Richard"
a clone of Henry Makow? This "Richard" who didn't have the courage
to even offer his last name?) and so on. If we are so inept, perhaps the
rearing of children ought to be turned over to you men, too. In fact, why
not just turn us into baby-making-machines? You know, walking incubators?
The CIA has certainly made many women into Stepford Wives through their
MK Ultra mind control program; why I'll bet that just suits you, there,
Richard. In point of fact, the dissociative personality disorder that you
speak of is created by MK Ultra, and other mind control programs, and they
do crank 'em out. Oh yes, their favorite victims are women. Not men. So
there's small wonder in that mental wards are getting to be crammed with
women suffering from this and other CIA created syndromes.
-
- Two things I find of interest with regard to women in
business or in any position of responsibility: One is that it's been proven
that women are much more multi-tasked than men, and I needn't expound on
that further, right. It's self-explanatory. Number two is that when I went
through flight attendant training some years back, we were taught that
men and NOT women passengers were likelier to panic in an emergency evacuation.
Sort of puts the hysterical female argument to rest, does it not? I think
you really need to put these items in the olde pipe and do a bit of smoking,
Richard.
- Really, it's a shame that most men can't cope with our
rise to power, and not even much power at that. Feminism isn't what's destroying
America. Television is destroying America! A third rate, at best, educational
system is destroying America! The Federal Reserve System is destroying
America! An Illuminati puppet president who didn't even win the election
is destroying America! Bill Clinton helped to destroy what he could of
America, in selling the Chinese nuclear secrets! That men occupy most places
of power have nothing to do with the destruction of America, unless those
men are Trilateralists, members of the CFR, high ranking (33rd degree)
Freemasons, or Alan Greenspan.
-
- That women have managed to make a teensy dent in a male
dominated world has nothing to do with the destruction of America, either.
We women are human beings who ask for equality; doesn't that strike a chord
in your heart, Richard? Political correctness be damned. Tell the truth.
Equality or non-equality; which is fair?
-
- Marilyn A. Guinnane
- Washoe Valley, NV
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- From CK
- 7-13-3
-
- A large problem today in the feminist movement is in
the use of term equality. Equality, as it is used in this highly charged
topic, means performing the same job or providing the same function or
role, i.e. feminist's demand of sameness for men and women in the military,
political, work worlds, etc. If feminists, and possibly anti-feminists,
were for the sameness of worth, we would not be having this discussion.
To value truly a woman in her ability in being a mother, wife, nurturer,
stabilizing familial influence, among many other attributes, and a man
as being a father, husband, provider and protector, would prove greatly
restorative for society. In fact, I would hazard to guess that women were
considered more essential in 1950's-prior western society, then today because
of the recognized values mentioned previously. As a kid I can still remember
my grandfather, who was born in 1909, unequivocally stating to us grandkids
that women are the more important of the two sexes.
-
- Their ability to bring forth life and provide feminine
sustenance for their husbands was revered with a kind of awe. Therefore,
this was a kind of contract, not written but known, between the two sexes
that kept things together. It was accepted to refer to people as mankind,
or when writing to apply "He" to males and females together,
because this was in a sense an artificial offering to men to counter-balance
the huge importance of women. (As a brief aside, the Microsoft spell checker
for Word does not recognize "mankind"; it instead offers humanity)
Feminists, by attacking not men, at first anyway, but the women who are
in touch with their true biological and spiritual femininity, broke this
contract. A woman today who devotes herself to her man, children and to
expressing her "hard-wired" femininity is sadly considered backward
and a failure; just as a man who worked 40-plus hours a week, for his entire
adult life to provide for his family, is considered someone who wasted
his life in minutiae. For a Hollywood version of this prevailing thought
just watch About Shmit with Jack Nicholson.
-
- Men and women are different beings inside our skinsand
of course outside, too. Our hormonal responses to stress (which is basically
life on the planet) are vastly different. In a sense, we are biologically
and hormonally who we are in how we stress and then act upon it. Men do
the adrenaline/testosterone dance; women the oxytocin/estrogen two-step,
although after menopause women tend to stress slightly more like men.
The effect of these hormones on our perceptions is paramount in how we
interpret life and how it is dealt with. It is well known today that when
stressed or challenged men either fight or take flight; women tend and
befriend. These two vastly different response patterns effect our daily
interactions profoundly. To deny this though social movements, federalized
programs, and plain and simple peer pressure is a tragedy, doomed from
the outsetbut it is going to wreak more havoc before the pendulum returns.
Androgyny and "equalness" is the current socio-political fashion.
As all fashions based in fleeting newness it is a matter of time before
they become outdated.
-
- A recovering feminist
- CK
-
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