Accidental Historian

Getting Carded, Part 1

If I ever meet the guy who invented the man card I plan on punching him in the face.  With my fist.  Actually, I probably won’t, since that would be assault and the man card fucker totally isn’t worth jail time.  You know what is worth jail time?  Pretty much nothing, that’s what.

Anyway, the man card.  It’s a stupid thing.  It’s mostly an annoying thing, especially in those stupid Miller Lite commercials where they take some dude’s man card for drinking a different kind of light beer.  Because nothing says, “I’m a masculine hunk of manhood,” like drinking shitty, mass-produced beer.  Beer should not be a masculine/feminine thing, anyway.[1]

The man card has become a sort of self-regulating thing amongst men.  It’s incredibly fucking annoying to have to deal with this and pretty much requires a certain level of abruptness in its handling.  Because all the “man card” does is enforce a specific idea of what a man actually is based on really dumb and transitory societal rules.[2]

A few weeks ago I was out with friends.  There was an extremely cute redhead there and I was talking to her.  At one point a Matt Nathanson song came on and I was all, “Hey, Matt Nathanson.”  She was all, “Oh my god, I love Matt Nathanson.”  And I was all, “Dude I was totally at the show he did at the Riviera last summer,” and she was all, “I was in the front row.”

We had what I like to call “a Matt Nathanson moment.”[3]  For those keeping track, I was having a conversation and connecting with an attractive redhead.  I’m a huge fan of redheads, even more the attractive ones.  It’s kind of a thing.

My buddy was sitting there and he said, “You listen to Matt Nathanson?  I’m taking your man card.”

I turned, looked at him, and said, “Shut up, dude.  The man card is bullshit.”

This, I think, is the only appropriate answer to the man card issue.  It’s just an attempt to enforce a certain set of behaviors or values that belong to the category of “men.”  So, for some reason, “men” aren’t supposed to like Matt Nathanson or the music of Matt Nathanson.[4]  That means that if I, Geds, like the music of Matt Nathanson then I am not a “man.”

Of course, there’s also the issue that while the attractive woman was talking to me about Matt Nathanson she was not talking to my friend about, y’know, acceptably manly things.  So I think there’s a certain level of competition in the whole thing.  Because if we’ve learned anything from reruns of Saved By the Bell, it’s that girls see relationships as the outcome of a round of combat, or a battle of wits, or an embarrassing '80s sweater/feathered hair off.  They will watch two men fight and then pick the winner because we all still live in caveman times.

And now here I find myself in a bit of a bind.  I’ve written one page of text and two pages of footnotes and haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of my original intentions in this post.  I’m also pretty sure that I’ve already gotten completely off-track, so I think I’ll go all multi-part series on your asses.

Sorry.

But, just to create an illusion of continuity, the thing that’s gotten me thinking about this is this piece by David Wong at Cracked.  It’s one of those things that starts really well and goes completely and totally off the rails by the end.  Basically, I read it and was in total agreement with items 5 and 4, then in total disagreement with 3 (but not for the reasons you might think) and partial disagreement with 2 and 1.  Part of the problem is that only points 5 and 4 are actually related to, and in support of, the title of the piece.  Ironically an article that's ostensibly about women becomes almost totally about men at the end.

Hence, post.  Erm, posts.

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[1]True story: I went out on a first date with someone last year to a brewpub.  I proceeded to order a wheat beer of some sort and a chicken wrap.  She ordered an IPA and a cheeseburger.  I pretty much pointed out that this was not how things are supposed to work according to standard relationship gender roles.  ‘Twas hilarious to everyone involved.

She was also the only person I’ve been on multiple dates with since, well, since Amy, pretty much.  So I guess that means that, at least for some people, such things as “demonstrations of manliness based on really fucking stupid criteria” are, well, really fucking stupid.  And, um, no.  No relationship developed.  Why?  Because any relationship requires two people.  When one of those two people is me that means that one of the people is actively attempting to cause the relationship to fail for no damn good reason.  But that’s a story for another day.  Maybe.  Probably not.

Actually, it is kind of an interesting thought experiment.  What it boiled down to was that she was more into me than I was into her.  The reasons for that, at least from my perspective, were entirely valid and based on a complete lack of emotional engagement (and, honestly, a sense that she wanted to immediately jump into something to which I wasn’t sure I wanted to jump.  On many levels that whole thing actually did reverse the traditional rom-com gender roles, which is kinda funny).  But, again, the party that wasn’t engaging was me, and I tend to think that's at least partially because that’s what I do in general.

I’ve realized in the last few weeks all my bullshit criteria and rules and whatnot of dating aren’t actually worth spit and there should be one and only one criteria worth paying attention to: is this person worth caring about?  But that’s part of a much, much larger discussion of how people interact and is wedded to a whole set of other thoughts I have that start from my realization that religious affiliation as a sorting hat for friendship is the worst possible mechanism.  Except possibly sports fandom.  Or what bands you follow.  Basically, it’s that you aren’t friends with or in a relationship with a checklist.  So someone who is a yes in every checkbox might be someone you can’t stand and someone who hates everything you like might be your absolute favorite person in the world.

That, then, gets back around to a critique of online dating as a thing, because creepy-ass eHarmony founder guy and his scientific surveys can’t really predict why people will like each other.  The sooner we stop thinking science can the better off we’ll be.  I think.

But that’s a whole ‘nother post.

[2]Unfortunately I think the man card, or at least its popularity, needs to be blamed on Scrubs.  There’s one episode where Dr. Cox hands JD three man cards and takes them away whenever he does non-manly things.  Much of the humor of that show was built around JD doing non-manly things according to Dr. Cox’s assessment and then Dr. Cox calling JD by girls’ names.  I love Scrubs and I think that it was set up in such a way as to make sure that Dr. Cox was seen as a broken man who should be emulated by no one, ever, at any point, but JD wasn’t exactly depicted as a hero, either.

[3]This is a moment that occurs when two people connect over the music of Matt Nathanson.  Also, note, too, that he plays a 12-string guitar.  That's not an instrument played by just any dipshit trying to impress girls in a coffee shop.

[4]Part of the problem is that he seemed to take the “get songs played over the closing credits of shitty WB chick shows” route to fame.  I’ve been listening to his music since some time in 2005-2006.  He suddenly busted out all over the place after Some Mad Hope blew up overnight in 2008 or 2009 because he was suddenly on TV soundtracks (at least, as best I can figure out).  Other than hearing one of his songs on an episode of Scrubs, though, the only time I’d hear him would be playing over the ending credits of primetime soaps marketed to teen girls.  There’s nothing wrong with this particular route to fame, since money is money and people making money for doing what they’re good at isn’t exactly something I begrudge.  But it immediately pigeonholes him as a guy who writes that kind of music for the teen girl audience.

So it doesn’t matter that I was listening to him before that happened.  It doesn’t matter that I’ve never in my life seen a single episode of Gossip Creek or Gilmore High (I did, however, once sit through a couple epsiodes of of Everwood for some reason.  Oh, wait, no, I remember now.  There were two reasons: Emily VanCamp and Sarah Lancaster.  Also, probably, boredom, which I'm assuming was exacerbated rather than assisted by watching Everwood, since I remember exactly nothing about it, save attractive women and the fact that I should probably be embarrassed by this whole parenthetical thought.  Sarah Lancaster, of course, went on fame in the role of Gift Shop Girl on Scrubs.  And she was on some different NBC show or other, too, but who really keeps track?  Emily VanCamp now stars in some show I've never watched and that I only know because someone bought ad space on Chicago bus shelters and I'd walk past an think, "Hey, that's that hot chick what was on Everwood.") or whatever he’s now associated with, someone who doesn’t know me hears me mention Matt Nathanson and he’s like, “Dude, what?”

Again, I do not begrudge Matt Nathanson his success, no matter the route.  I get the general impression that he’s one of those people who you can genuinely say deserves every good thing he gets.  But I dunno, maybe he goes home, takes off his public persona, and rapes kittens or something.

Fixation

Go to the corner of Clark and Washington in Chicago[1] on pretty much any given weekday and you’ll see this guy.  He stands there holding up a sign that indicates he’s on a hunger strike.  He wears a vest that says he’s been on said hunger strike since 2006.  The vest also says he’s an outlaw wanted by the FBI.  That part always makes me giggle, since I’m sure that the FBI wishes all of their wanted outlaws stood on busy street corners holding up signs to the effect whilst weakening themselves through not eating.[2]  Really, criminal underclass, that’s just polite behavior.

The guy’s reason for his wanted-outlaw-on-hunger-strike status is that he hasn’t been given any visitation rights whatsoever for his child since, apparently, 2006.  Every time I see him I can’t help but think that there’s probably some sort of correlation between him being the sort of guy who can stand on the street corner in downtown Chicago day after day after day after day engaging in silent histrionics about his lot in life and being the sort of guy who’s not allowed to be around his children.  This is obviously armchair psychoanalysis of someone I’ve never once talked to, but there has to be something in that story about how the dude is creepily obsessive about things and has no sense of proportion and is also not allowed around his children.  He could also be some sort of pathological liar or something.  Again, I don’t know.  I tend to ignore the dude.

The last time I walked past him I found myself thinking about another guy I know.[3]  I met him several years ago and ended up talking to him a lot, because he’s the sort of guy who will stop you and make you talk to him for ten minutes.  The subject is always, always the same.  It’s about how his ex-wife is an emotionally abusive bitch who took his kid from him and won’t let him have visitation rights.  One time he even pulled me aside and told me the statistics about child abuse.  They apparently skewed pretty strongly to the direction of men = gentle, loving, and unfailingly kind, while women = emotionally, mentally, and physically abusive crazy people who probably shouldn’t be around children at all.

Eventually I learned that there’s a term for that particular guy: Men’s Rights Activist.  He would color my interactions, such as they’ve been, with MRAs since then, especially after I learned that the stats he threw at me weren’t even an example of lying through statistics so much as they were an example of flat-out lying.

Other people I know also know that second guy.  Through them I recently found out he wrote a book.  I briefly handled the book, what was extremely obviously self-published, but I didn’t read it and don’t want to.  I was told, however, that he refers to himself time and again in said book as a nice person and a kind person and a patient person.

I was also told by someone that knows me and that other person that his stories of his crazy ex-wife reminded them of me and my beloved stories about crazy girls.  A year or so ago that sort of comparison would have bugged the shit out of me.  I’d rather not be compared to that guy, since he’s obviously an angry, overly fixated individual who wants the world to know that his problems aren’t his fault and everyone else is out to get him.  I’m not like that at all, since I’m, y’know, me.  And I’m different.  Because I said so, that’s why.

Since I’m being introspective about things these days I took that comparison in stride and I actually thought about it.  The fact is that there are things I have in common with that guy.  There are things I have in common with the crazy dude who thinks the FBI is out to get him due to his child custody issues.[4]  There are things I have in common with the MRAs and the Nice Guys of the world.  It’s important to recognize what those things are and how to not be that person.

Before I go on, however, it’s important to bracket off a thought.  There are actually people who have a raw deal.  There are men out there who have gotten screwed by the justice system in custody hearings.  There are women out there who have taken the kids and run for the border.  There are guys who have been screwed over by genuine bitches.  It happens.  Life sucks like that sometimes.  My intention here is not to minimize that.  My intention is to point out, though, that I don’t think that it happens nearly as often as those poor victims of abuse at the hands of crazy bitches would have you believe.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a, for lack of a better term, matrix of beliefs/attitudes/qualities that go in to creating one of these guys.  In no particular order:

Self-absorption/narcissism
Self-deception/cognitive dissonance
Passivity
Obsessiveness/fixation
Helplessness
Black-and-white categorization
Externalization of blame and responsibility

Basically, it works thusly: guy meets girl.  Guy decides that girl is the greatest thing in the world.  Guy hopes that girl sees the same thing about him.  Guy sits around and waits for girl to realize it.  Eventually guy decides girl won’t realize it and decides that means that girl, like all girls, is a total bitch.

I also genuinely believe there is a certain type of woman who recognizes this personality type and takes advantage of it.  I think some are actually calculating bitches who use men, but others just kind of do it due to their own particular set of emotional issues and/or damages.  As such, I think there is a germ of truth to the passive guy’s whole, “Women are just bitches who want to take advantage of me,” thing, because they’re more likely to find themselves in the thrall of bitches who want to take advantage of them.  It’s a bit of a tautology, but I don’t think I’m just making that up.

That’s where the Pick-Up Artist/Nice Guy dichotomy comes in to play.  Take a Nice Guy and let him stew in his own juices of failure and lack of sex long enough and he’ll be ready and willing to flip that switch from “passive” to “aggressive” (or, really, “passive/aggressive”) and that “helpless” switch to “asshole.”  That black-and-white categorization means that they’ll think there are two types of men in the world: Nice Guys Who Never Get Any and Jerks Who Get All the Poon.

You stay in that place through self-absorption and self-deception.  You are right and don’t need to change and everyone else is wrong unless they disagree with you.  The only way to fix that is through honest self-assessment and realization that the world is a lot bigger and more complicated than you want to think it is.  That’s a tough thing to do.  It’s also a lot less satisfying than just saying, “Women iz bitches who be out to get me.  Fuck them.  Literally, if possible.”

Anyway…yeah.  Those are some thoughts that I think are important to put on paper.  Or, um, computer screen.  They also lead directly in to a bunch of honest self-assessment I’ve been doing for the past few weeks that I kind of want to articulate in the near future, especially since a lot of it then transfers over to the Dancing Monkey Project and my increasing realization that said project might actually be a really, really bad idea as conceived.

In short, I think it was meant to solve one problem in a way that actually probably creates and/or reinforces another problem/series of problems.  The problem it solves is more of a symptom than an actual disease.  So, uh, yeah.  Hopefully I’ll be able to explain this in a way that makes sense.

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[1]For the non-Chicagans out there, Clark and Washington marks one of the sides of Daley Plaza, also known as “across the street from City Hall” and “that big public plaza what has the Picasso statue.”

[2]I just got a brilliant idea for the next season of Burn Notice!  Are you reading, Matt Nix?  Also, if you are, I’m sorry about that whole thing with The Good Guys, dude.  The show had major flaws, but it was deeply enjoyable, sometimes in spite of itself.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go listen to some Foghat.

[3]I am going to be as circumspect as possible in this description, so be warned.

[4]Y’know, the more I think about that, the weirder it seems.  Unless his child custody stuff actually stems from a federal indictment I have no fucking clue what the FBI has to do with anything.

Men Behaving Badly

I’ve come to the conclusion that the easiest form of blog fodder for me is to simply link me to an article by Kay Hymowitz.  I suppose that’s a protip for those of you who want more content from me and don’t really care if it’s repetitive and angry.  It seems, after all, that every time I run across an article by Kay Hymowitz the article itself is repetitive and stupid.

I (unwittingly) followed a link to one from the comments over at Sadly, No! and was surprised by two things: 1. good god, the woman’s been writing these articles for at least three years, and 2. holy shit, she’d been recycling the same article.  I had to check the byline, since I knew I’d read parts of the article she wrote (and blogged on them) before, but the articles in question weren’t from 2008.  This “most recent” one was.

Since I can’t leave well enough alone, I find it absolutely necessary to, yet again, wade in to this horrid stew of misogyny, stupidity, douchebag apology,[1] and Uncle Tom feminism.  Why?  Because this sort of shit matters.

There is a certain subset of men who are horrid, vile people.  There’s absolutely no way around this.

[Um, this next bit is just a big wad of trigger-riffic stuff.]

Witness, for instance, the latest tempest stirred up by Rebecca Watson.  I’ve written about her run-ins with dickhead men in the past.  Quite frankly, Rebecca doesn’t need me to defend her.  She’s a grown-ass woman, after all, and she has some people with much louder voices than me in her corner.  Still, she brought something to wider attention that I think I do need to add my voice, no matter how small, to.

The situation is this: a 15 year-old girl posted a picture of her smiling face with her new copy of a Carl Sagan book on the atheism thread over at reddit.  She was then inundated by a whole bunch of men, many claiming to be significantly older than her, making rape jokes, kidnap jokes, and any number of increasingly disturbing anal rape jokes.  There are literally absolutely no excuses for this.  Absolutely no one should be subjected to that sort of bullshit from anyone, ever, anywhere.

This is the behavior of sociopaths.

No one should ever, for any reason whatsoever, be subjected to a pile-on of strangers making commentary about the value of their own blood as a sexual lubricant during unwanted anal sex.  It’s not funny, it’s not cute, it’s not cool, and it’s not even remotely civilized.  It’s making rape jokes.  It is threatening someone with unwanted bodily harm of a most intimate sort for giggles.

The worst thing about this, though, is that Watson chose to highlight only the comments that were upvoted by a margin of at least 2:1.  It put into stark relief the problem of anyone trying to make the, “But it’s just a few bad eggs making tasteless jokes,” defense.  Yes, it was a few bad eggs making tasteless jokes.  And several hundred other bad eggs, well, egging them on and supporting them.

So, again, let’s recap: a bunch of guys on the internet threatened to forcibly sodomize a teenage girl and a whole shitload of other guys stood around, watched, and laughed.  When someone pointed it out the big shitstorm was, “How dare you rain on our parade?”  Yes, men such as PeeZed and Ed Brayton vocally smacked down the dipshits and their apologists, but the fact of the matter is that it should not have been necessary.  People should know better than to threaten to visit anal rape women just because they’re cute and have the temerity to, y’know, exist.

This is a huge problem.

But what does it have to do with Kay Hymowitz, or an article Kay Hymowitz wrote in 2008?  I’m glad you asked.  No, really, I am.

Men who threaten to anally rape teenagers on the internet can only get away with it in an environment where there’s no social cost to threatening to anally rape teenagers.  They can only thrive in an environment where they’re celebrated for the humorousness level of their anal rape jokes.  It’s really not that hard to stop the problem, but somebody has to stop letting it happen.  Consider, for instance, how quick people are to cry racism when some random Tea Partier goes after Barack Obama for something.  Shouldn’t we be crying, “Holy shit, there’s something wrong with you?” whenever men treat women like garbage?

Is it weird that I even have to ask this question?  I think it’s weird that I have to ask this question.  I mean, seriously.  It’s nearly 2012, people.

Anyway, Kay Hymowitz…right.

Some of the biggest actors in the “treat women like pieces of meat who only deserve to be fucked” sphere are the MRAs.  I’ve mentioned them many, many times, but for the uninitiated, MRA stands for “Men’s Rights Activist.”  The “rights” of men they’re activisting about are pretty much the same as the “rights” of white people to treat those stupid darkies like sub-humans.  They see feminism and the feminist movement as this terrible thing that is well on its way to ruining men as we know them.

MRAs enjoy a strong Venn Diagram overlap with another group of dipshits known as Pick Up Artists, or PUAs.  Basically, PUAs sit around and share tips about how to pick up hot women, fuck them, and then never talk to them again.  Think Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother, but without the redeeming qualities of being NPH, scripted, and Wayne Brady’s white brother.  MRAs and PUAs, while often sharing bodies and everything, most definitely have one major thing in common: they believe women are good for absolutely nothing outside of the whole “temporary penis receptacle” thing.

It occurred to me today whilst juxtaposing a terrible Kay Hymowitz article and an absolutely awful collection of men on reddit that there might just be a commonality here.

In the Hymowitz article in question, entitled “Love in the Time of Darwinism,”[1] pretty much tries to prove the point that men are simply trying to evolve in the face of feminism.  This, I shouldn’t have to tell you, is incredibly stupid.  “Darwinism” doesn’t apply to this situation in any way, shape, or form, beyond the whole idea of competition for sexual selection.  The collection of dim bulbs and ne’er do wells that occupy Kay Hymowitz’s tragically depressing world are trying to have sex, but aren’t actually trying to perpetuate the species.  I imagine that your average PUA lives in terror of the day he gets a call that starts, “Hey, um, we hooked up about nine months ago…”

Basically, “Darwinism” here is used, whether Hymowitz realizes it or not, in the sense of “Social Darwinism.”  Social Darwinism, of course, gives us such non-evolutionary bullshit as, “Them darkies ain’t as good as us white folk,” and, “Hey, let’s kill all the Jews, since they’re obviously inferior to us due to their strange lack of blond hair and blue eyes.”  Let’s not dress this up as something more interesting or less infuriating than it is.  I mean, really.

Anyway, it’s articles like this that provide cover for jackasses.  Let’s consider this gem for a minute:

For one illustration of dating à la Darwin, consider what’s known as the Seduction Community. The Community is a loose network of dating coaches, gurus, and their followers whose philosophical origins lie variously in Darwin, Norman Vincent Peale, and hyperlogical geekdom. Women want alpha males, the Seduction Community agrees; with some effort at self-improvement, any man can learn the game—Game, as it is reverently known—that will turn him into a Pick Up Artist (PUA).

I’d go pull out my bottle of Woodford Reserve and turn this in to a weasel word drinking game, but I’m afraid I don’t want to die of cirrhosis of the liver before I get a chance to see 2012.  But let’s unpack this.  It’s the “Seduction Community.”  Oh, that’s sweet.  Women like seduction, right?  That plays off of the notion of romance and whatnot.  And community?  Who doesn’t like community?  And, hey, if you name-check Darwin and Norman Vincent Peale and say it has “philosophical origins” that makes it sound like people sat down and thought long and hard about this shit.

Then, of course, there’s my favorite bit:  “Women want alpha males, the Seduction Community agrees.”  Yeah…did anyone in the Seduction Community think to ask, y’know, women?  No, of course not, BECAUSE WOMEN DON’T FUCKING MATTER.  Only fucking women matters.

Also, I love the, “with some effort at self-improvement,” bit.  Because, well, let’s go look at what “self-improvement” means in this funhouse mirror world:

It teaches the ordinary nice guy—in Gamespeak, the Average Frustrated Chump (AFC)—how to reinvent himself to survive in a ruthless dating environment. That means desensitizing the AFC to rejection and, alas, building up his jerk quotient. Teachers encourage clients to project confidence and sexual energy, what is called, depending on the guru, “cocky funny” or “amused mastery.” In The Aquarian, a New York–based music magazine, Kevin Purcell describes his experience at a Game workshop: “One of our first tasks was to walk around the hotel silent, repeating in our heads ‘I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about me.’ This mentality, it was assumed, would help lower the wall of anxiety and make us less prone to the pain of rejection. Like soldiers responding to a drill sergeant, when asked ‘What are you?’ we were instructed to loudly proclaim, ‘A fucking ten!’ ”

Does anyone, anywhere (outside of the world of PUAs, obviously) actually see anything even closely resembling “self-improvement” in this little vignette?  I sure as shit don’t.

You know what?  I spent a year and a half walking around in Texas repeating variations of the words, “I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about me,” in my head.  Did it make me more confident?  Yes, actually.  Did it make me a better person?  Abso-fucking-lutely not.  It made me an asshole.  I do not like being an asshole.  Apparently, though, I’m supposed to want to do this:

Remember those women who want a guy who will open the car door for them? They may be lucky if they find one willing to add “please” to “Pass the ketchup.” Women complain that instead of calling to ask them out, or even make plans for a date, men simply text, “Heading downtown. Where r u?” as they walk to the subway. That may be deliberate. “There is no longer any reason to answer the phone when a woman calls you or return her call when she leaves you a message,” insists one dating pro at World of Seduction. “What should you do? Text message, of course.” Text messages, he argues, deflect unnecessary personal involvement and keep women on edge.

True story: it just occurred to me that I accidentally did this to someone.  It was more of a, “I’m really busy at the moment and I’m not sure I really want this person in my life, and as such I’m kind of distracted,” sort of unintentional thing.  She yelled at me, which totally pissed me off at the time, but holy shit, I totally deserved that.  And probably a swift kick in the nuts.  Realizing that I basically emulated the PUA thing makes me want to go take a shower.  And then go track someone down and apologize to her.

For those who are paying attention, that’s self-improvement.  Realizing you’ve done something horrible and deciding not to do it anymore is a sign of improvement.  Resolving to become a more horrible person is not.

Indeed, the Darwinists wonder, why pretend we’re interested in anything other than sex? Jillian Straus recalls meeting a man at a Hamptons pool party who, early on in their conversation, asked: “So, are you getting any?” One of Cohen’s lessons in contemporary politesse came on a first date with a man who asked her how many guys she had slept with and whether she owned a vibrator.

I…um…wait, what?

Seriously.  What.  The.  Fuck?

I hate men right now.  I’m not even joking.  I have to be associated with people like this?

Anyway, it’s a pretty short hop from this sort of shit to joking about anally raping a teenage girl on the internet.  Ultimately, the jackasses who do and encourage that sort of thing are totally at fault for their actions.  People like Kay Hymowitz, who provide cover for this completely and totally irredeemably vile garbage are complicit in the problem, however.  By acting like PUAs have a point and all they’re doing is choosing to respond in a completely acceptable fashion to something that women have done to them, Hymowitz allows them to think they’re doing the right thing.

Not that they’d actually care, anyway.  Kay Hymowitz is a woman, after all, and not therefore not worth listening to.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take a shower.

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[1]I have a theory: any time you see an article that includes “Darwinism” in the title and features the word prominently in its body you can instantly dismiss the writer as someone who knows fuck-all about what Darwinism actually means.  This theory is null and void if you’re reading an article by an actual biologist about actual Darwinian evolution, however.  But, really, I don’t think too many of those articles actually have the word “Darwinism” in their title…

Things Not to Say About Women

I think it’s going to be “serious conversations” week here at Accidental Historian.  There are a few things I’ve been meaning to write about but I haven’t exactly gotten around to, y’know, writing them.

So let’s start:

Serious Conversation #1, How Not to Talk About Women:

I ended up reading a couple posts on a blog off of Michael Mock’s blogroll because, as with so many of these things, the blog name was fascinating.  The female proprietor of the blog solicits discussion of shit between guys and gals and whatnot.  I didn’t really give a crap about the post in question (or, well, the blog), but I did run across this:

i met a guy this weekend who said, “i’m a serial monogamist.”  he also said what ended up being my favorite quote of the weekend…”a girl took a shit in my heart and now i’m an asshole.  down deep i’m still a good guy, but one the surface, an asshole.”

Grammar, capitalization, and spelling issues aside, everything about this comment pisses me off.

Speaking as a guy who dabbles in being an asshole, were I to meet random, nameless dude quoted on the internet face-to-face I’d be forced to seriously consider hitting him with something heavy.  Because what we’re looking at here is a classic nice-guy-who-actually-isn’t-nice.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Former Conservative offered a pretty good explanation of the “Nice Guy” right about here.  The “Nice Guy” isn’t actually nice.  He’s just called this because he thinks acting “nice” will get him somewhere with the women.  Then when it doesn’t work, he blames the women for not falling all over themselves to give him a lifetime supply of blowjobs and ribs.

The Nice Guy seems to think that all he has to do to get a woman to love him forever is to prove to her that he’s better than everyone else.  And by “everyone else” the Nice Guy often means “the guy she’s actually dating or even married to.”  This, it should be obvious, doesn’t actually take in to account the opinion of the other person in this creepy pseudo-relationship: the woman in question.  Why would she matter, after all?  She’s just the prize to be won.

That’s the problem with the Nice Guy.  He’ll have you believe that because he’s a Nice Guy he’s totally better than those douchebags who just want to get in the pants of the woman in question.  See, he doesn’t just want to get in her pants.  He wants a relationship with her based on her acknowledging that he’s exactly everything she really wants and needs.  Because that’s, like, super healthy.

FC pretty much summed everything I’m saying here up in a way I can’t improve upon:

It is a terrible, terrible way to treat women. Its unfair. Its dishonest. It makes you look pathetic. Its disrespectful and says volumes about your own lack of self-esteem. It puts your feelings above those of the woman you are pursuing, despite your insistence that you care about her. Its completely rooted in self-centeredness, self-pity, and self-importance. Its even disrespectful to the man she’s involved with who probably you only think is a horrible person because he’s dating the person you want to date. There are few things in life I’m more embarrassed about than this particular episode.

So you’re probably asking yourself, “If someone else already said what he wants to say, why the fuck is Geds writing this post?”

I’m glad you asked, theoretical reader.  See, the writer of the blog that originally drew my ire managed to take that quote in exactly the wrong way.

ennyweigh, the conversation was familiar.  sailor talk and all.  he’s an eligible bachelor being told he should be out spreading his seed far and wide and that just doesn’t sit well with him.  he even teetered on thinking he’s in the minority.

Um, no.  No he’s not.  Unless there was a lot more in the conversation that just never made it in to the blog post, the guy in question wasn’t having problems with being told he’s supposed to be out “spreading his seed.”  He was having problems with women.

Let’s talk responsibility.

There exists in this world no woman who can cause a man to become an asshole by taking a shit in his heart.  There exist in this world women who are fully capable of using some dude’s heart as a commode.  There exist in this world men who have had enough dumps taken in their tickers that they’ve become callous and cruel and mean.

There is absolutely no causal relationship between those two things.  None.  Period.

I don’t know anonymous dude quoted on the internet, but I strongly suspect he’s a Nice Guy.  Even if he’s not specifically a Nice Guy, I strongly suspect he’s pretty close.  And, at the very least, the words he chose to use are close enough to how Nice Guys speak that he’s a pretty damn good stand in.

See, the Nice Guy lives in a world where there are two types of men: nice guys and assholes.  If women won’t go for the Nice Guy, then they’re obvious off searching for the assholes, who will treat them like shit and then dump them and then they’ll go crying back to the nice guys who will sit and hope that this time she’ll finally figure out to stop chasing assholes.  Eventually, though, he decides to be an asshole, just because that’s obviously what women want.

Notice how this thought process completely takes the supposed most important variable out of the conversation.  It’s all about how nice guys finish last and assholes get the girl without actually bothering to ask, “Why, precisely, does this happen?”  That’s an answer that completely and totally depends on the woman in question.  It’s possible that she just likes assholes.  It’s also possible that she doesn’t like assholes, but the self-absorbed Nice Guy is filling in the blanks with his own pre-conceived notions.  It’s also possible that the asshole actually makes a move, while the Nice Guy sits around and waits for the woman to figure out that she’s supposed to just fall in love with him because he’s, like, there.  Then, of course, there could be other factors.  Like, maybe the Nice Guy just isn't her type, in that she's not a fan of whiny, self-absorbed dweebs with self-confidence issues.  Or maybe she just doesn't like him as a potential romantic partner, period, because sometimes shit like that happens.*

When it gets right down to it, too, if you’re going to say, “This other person caused me to become an asshole,” you’re not being nice.  You’re actually pretty much the definition of a passive-aggressive asshole.  So, really, it wasn’t that long a walk in the first place.

Either way, that’s the first thing on my list o’ things that have pissed me off lately.

 

-

 

*EDIT:  I added a couple sentences to that paragraph, since I kinda cut myself off mid-thought while I was writing it and didn't realize I'd done so at the time.

The Commoditization of Marriage

On March 1st, 2010 I bought a grey 2010 Mazda 6.  I did not need to purchase a car at the time, but I wanted to replace my 2004 Chevy Cavalier and I had the money.  So I came up with a list of cars and a list of features and I spent a month test driving automobiles.  I tried the Hyundai Genesis Sedan, Genesis Coupe, and the old and new Sonata.  I drove a couple Honda Accords.  I drove a Subaru Outback.  I tested a Ford Fusion and sat in a Taurus, but refused to drive it.  I drove a Chevy Impala and sat in, but refused to drive, a Malibu.  At that point my desire to purchase a new car was eclipsed by my lack of desire to purchase the cars I’d test driven, so I seriously considered just not buying a car.

Then I test-drove the 2010 Mazda 6.  That was a Saturday.  On Monday I was signing the paperwork to purchase a new car.  It’s more than a year and a half later and every time I get into my car I’m happy I bought it.

Let’s say that hadn’t happened. Let’s say that I drove the Cavalier another year, then decided that I wanted to buy a new car.  Chances are extremely good that I would have been able to write the preceding paragraphs and change the three instances of “2010” to “2011” and everything would otherwise be exactly the same.

Let’s take a hypothetical.

On March 1st, 2010 I got married.  I’d been dating a girl since 2004 and it was a good relationship.  We just hadn’t been in the right place financially or emotionally to get married.  Finally everything was right and we decided to make it happen.

We’ve been married for more than a year and a half and I wake up every morning the happiest guy in the world.

Let’s say that hadn’t happened.  Let’s say that I decided in March of last year that, no, marriage wasn’t right.  What are the odds she’d have hung on for another year?  Or what if I’d said, “I want to get married, but not to you?”  There are plenty of fish I the sea, after all.  And I’m a great guy, any woman would be lucky to have me.

These two scenarios are so very different that there’s almost no reason to even comment on them, right?  It’s absurd that I even brought them up, especially that follow-on paragraph for scenario two.

The problem is that there is a segment of the population that doesn’t actually seem to understand that these are two totally different statements.  This, I believe, is one of the core reasons we’re getting all the, “What’s the matter with men?” articles.  We’ve decided that finding a partner is the same thing as buying a car.  What we haven’t figured out is that there is a factory out there somewhere that is perfectly capable of producing a brand-new 2011 Mazda 6 that’s functionally the same as the brand-new 2010 Mazda 6 I purchased last year.  So if I wait I can still get a car.  Hell, I might even get a car with a couple more features or better gas mileage.

There is not, however, a factory out there that’s producing 2011 model-year potential spouses.  If there is, it’s got terrible QA.  You might find that your 2011 dating prospects are significantly better than your 2010 prospects.  You might also find out that 2011 is a wasteland and 2010 was a bumper crop you really should have appreciated.[1]

Ultimately, the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles only exist if a man is interchangeable with a Mazda 6.  It’s an absurd concept on its face, but we have decided to agree that people are commodities in a lot of other areas, so it’s easy enough to just write the article as the commoditization of humans is true and assume no one will ask any difficult questions.  Fortunately for the writers of those articles, very few people will.  The intended audience of the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles aren’t actually the men-who-don’t-exist, after all.  The intended audience is women who want something to point to and say, “That’s why I’m single,” and the various culture warriors in the arena of gender politics.

Potential mates are not new cars.  If we’re going to speak of them in terms of anything made in a factory, they’re used cars.  Some people you meet are the car that was garage kept and only driven to the store on Saturday.  Some are high-mileage road warriors driven 50,000 miles a year.  Some have flood damage, some were in bad accidents.  Some have obvious signs of damage, others were so well repaired cosmetically that the problems won’t manifest until long after you’ve driven off the lot.  Even the best used car has a door ding or two and a few miles on the odometer.

My grey 2010 Mazda 6, in short, was once identical to a whole lot of other 2010 Mazda 6s.  Over the last year and eight months it has become a unique vehicle precisely because of what it’s gone through while I sat in the driver’s seat.  Or, in the case of that one door ding, what happened while it sat in the parking garage at my Irving office.

This, I supposed, makes it seem like everything gets worse with age.  I don’t actually think that.  I, personally, believe that I am a much better person and a much better potential mate than I was at any point in the past.  This is the fundamental difference between a human and a car.  Cars are inert.  They cannot grow, they cannot repair themselves.  From the moment a car leaves the production line it is on an inexorable march to broken-down obsolescence.  I am neither broken-down nor obsolete.

I’ve also noticed that as I get older my conception of who is most attractive has gotten older with me.  By this I mean that were you to take someone I thought was drop-dead gorgeous in high school and put her in the same room as me, I’d probably find her drop-dead gorgeous now, assuming that she retained the basic physical characteristics she possessed back in the day.[2]  If you then took someone who is the spitting image of her at 16 and had her walk in to the room, I’d probably say, “Wow, she looks so young.”  Then I’d make some crack about how I feel old or the kids these days or something.

I believe this is an attitude known as “normal.”  I’ve never “played the field.”  I have no urge to go pick up 22 year-olds at a bar.  My ideal woman is someone close to my own age who possesses intelligence and maturity and is attractive to me.  This, in theory, should not be too much to ask.  I mean, there have to be a crapload of single women out there between, say, 27 and 33 who are looking for a guy like me.

At the very least, I’m given to understand that there are whole herds of them, meeting to bitch about creepers and immature douchebags who sit in their mother’s basement playing XBOX 360 and who totally want them to be their mother.  So here’s a fascinating question: why haven’t I run in to these kaffeeklatsches of dissatisfied women looking for the mythical guy just like me?

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The answer to this question is as simple as it is not profitable to write a thousand or two words about in magazines.  It’s really fucking hard to meet people these days.  This probably seems counter intuitive.  I, after all, am friends with people from the other side of the country I’ve never met.[3]  I have friends who live in Ireland and California and Denver and Dallas that I could contact right now for free and say, “Hey.  How you doin’?”  I have active accounts on two dating sites, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, and probably several places I’ve forgotten about.[4]  I am, in short, socially connected.

For me, however, most of this social media is sound and fury, signifying nothing.  When it gets right down to it, I don’t put a lot of effort in to meeting new people.  Most of the time I’m at work, doing things with friends and acquaintances, or just kinda hanging out.  If I go out it’s for some sort of purpose and I rarely, like, talk to women.

So the answer to the question, “Where are all the men like me?” is pretty simple.  We’re probably busy.  Or, at the least, we’re being social somewhere those women who desperately want to me us aren’t.

Or, y’know, those women are just expecting us to show up where they already are.

-----------------------------

There’s one other aspect to this that totally gets missed.  Jessa actually touched on something I was thinking of in the comments on my post from yesterday:

With men, perhaps after "finding themselves" some women are overestimating their own perfection and expecting the men they date to be as perfect as they perceive themselves to be? Or in "finding themselves" they forgot to learn that real-life love doesn't look like storybook/fantasy love, where things aren't as lovely and perfect?

I have to offer some barely supported conjecture here.  Bear with me.  And if I’m off base, please, someone let me know.

Women – as best I can tell from popular entertainments, reading the comments on a random sampling of Facebook photos, and imagined dialog from episodes of Sex and the City that I’ve never seen – engage in a sort of closed loop of self-reinforcing mutual admiration.  Basically, women look at pictures posted by their friends on Facebook and comment with things like, “ZOMG, you’re so pretty.  Love you!” or they sit around, lamenting their status as single women and say things like, “Any man would be lucky to have you,” to each other.  This is not really a problem in any real sense.  Still, it can have some potentially negative ramifications.

Basically, what I’m saying is that I’m pretty sure there are a lot of women out there who are hearing the, “You’re so pretty and amazing,” message from their girlfriends and are not hearing that message from men because, well, they’re not.  Self-confidence is a good thing.  Unrealistic expectations are a bad thing.  That’s all I’m trying to say here.

Actually, there’s another aspect to it, too.  Take someone who has a more-or-less realistic self-image.  Say that she’s a 39 year-old woman writing about a great relationship she backed out of ten years ago in The Atlantic.  Not that I have any particular individual in mind or anything.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this woman was realistically self-aware at 28 when she decided to break off an otherwise actually great relationship just to find herself.  She basically decided to invest in herself.  That might have actually been a bad investment.

Allow me to draw an analogy:  You own a $150,000 house.  The house is perfectly serviceable and you like your house just fine.  One day you’re standing in your kitchen and you think, “I need a new kitchen.”  You decide that you don’t just want a new kitchen, but you want a kitchen with every awesome new everything and you want a kitchen that will add value to your house.  So you go out and spend $30,000 on a new kitchen with granite countertops and genuine mahogany cabinetry and, like, solid gold backsplashes and whatnot.  The day after the last worker leaves you find out you’re getting transferred to the other side of the country, so you have to sell your house and move.

You had a $150,000 house and you just invested $30,000 in a new kitchen.  That means that you can sell your house for $180,000, right?  Well, no, actually.  Chances are that you’re going to get something closer to $165,000 and you’re just going to have to eat the rest.  Hell, if you decided to put that kitchen in back in 2007 and the market collapsed while you were having it installed you might be lucky to get $150,000 for the house, hand-carved granite countertops and platinum sink fixtures and all.[5]

All of which is to say, if you know nothing is going to make you happier than an awesome new kitchen, go buy one.  But if you’re going to get one, do it for you, not as a future investment.  And know you might regret it.  And if you’re listing your house at $180,000 and all your friends are saying, “Ha!  People should be lining up to pay you $190,000 for this house.  Look at how beautiful your stove is!” but no one is looking at your house at all and the guy down the street sold his for $140,000 and your former next-door neighbor sold hers for $155,000 and none of the similar houses in your zip code are listed for more than $170,000, maybe you need to find a real estate agent who will smack you upside the head.

-----------------------------

Let’s take a minute to look at this from a different perspective.  Let’s say that we live in a world where absolutely 100% of the population does want to marry eventually.  Let’s also say, for the sake of argument, that it’s possible for everyone who wants to get married to find someone to marry.  This isn’t actually entirely realistic, but it’s not actually entirely off base.

A subset of the population, however, says, “I don’t want to get married just yet.”  This is a perfectly acceptable thing and completely understandable.  The problem is, though, the longer you wait the harder it is to meet someone.  All those people you could have married at 30 might have gotten married by the time you’re 40.  Or they’ve gotten married and divorced and don’t want to go through that again.  Or they opted out of the system entirely.  Or they have kids and you’re still all, “No fucking way, man.  I’m no parent.”  Or, well, they got fat and ugly.  Shit happens, yo.

If we take away the ever-so-convenient moralizing and the applied labels and their attendant value judgments, everyone who wants to get married and could get married but decides to wait does so for one of two basic reasons.  Either they’re scared or they’re being selfish.  It is also possible for them to be both scared and selfish.

This is the absolute, honest truth of the matter: the woman who says, “I don’t want to get married until I have achieved my career goals,” is no different than the man who says, “I don’t want to get married until I get tired of having sex with strangers I meet at bars.”  Both say, “I won’t get married until I have gotten what I want out of life.”  And if the woman ends up saying, “I should have married [random guy] because he made me happier than being Vice President of New Product Development,” she’s in exactly the same place as if the man finds himself saying, “I’ve had a lot of meaningless sex and I feel like I’ve wasted the last ten years of my life trying to get it.”

That driven, independent, career minded woman who is “putting her personal life on hold” might be doing something completely different on the surface than that womanizing cad, but at the end of the day they’ve both decided to take themselves out of the marriage pool.  Sure, we might say that she’s doing it for “the right reasons” and he’s doing it for “the wrong reasons,” but they’re both doing the same thing.  The rest is commentary, with the added bonus of ever-so-convenient moralizing.

There’s a dirty little secret that the above narrative always ignores when it’s used in the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles.  Plenty of men are primarily focusing on their careers right now.  Plenty of women are going out to bars looking for a dude for just tonight.

We can’t have that secondary narrative, though, because it gets in the way of our other favorite gender narrative.  Men want sex, after all, while women begrudgingly give sex to, y’know, get something.  So if a woman is on a career track to the halls of power, the reasoning goes, she won’t need a man.  The only reason any woman gets married and has sex, after all, is to get the security of having a man.

-----------------------------

And here we are, back at the beginning.  Marriage, as it turns out, has always been a commodity.  It used to be pretty blatant.  Men literally exchanged their daughters for money or goods or influence or alliance.  Women were literally used to create additional laborers if they were poor or additional heirs to be married off for advantage if they were royalty.  The men had to be strong and capable of working long hours or hunting or fighting just to survive.  The women, then, had to be capable of doing all the stuff around the house, the so-called “household arts.”[6]

The commoditization of gender, then, came about because the man needed to be strong and capable enough to provide and/or defend.  The woman needed to be compliant and resilient enough to make lots of babies.  Modern societies don’t need that anymore.  When the big fights are boardroom negotiations men and women are equals.  When preparing dinner involves going to the supermarket for prepackaged ingredients or meals or picking up the phone and calling the pizza place no one needs to spend an entire day cooking.

We, in short, live in a society where we can be fat and lazy and still be clean and prosperous.  And that goes for people from the lowest rung to the highest.[7]  There was a time when being fat was considered an amazing thing because it meant that the person had food and the leisure to eat without having to prepare it.  Now people who are in good shape are increasingly considered amazing, since it means that the person in question has the time to prepare healthy meals and the time to work out, instead of only having time to grab a doughnut and coffee on the way to sit in front of a computer all day.

Yet we still have this idea that the man has to be the provider and the woman has to be provided to.  We still have this idea that the role of the woman is to use sex to get her man, who only wants her for sex and procreation.  This is a completely unnecessary attitude in modern life.  Yet it still stubbornly hangs on.

All those people who are running around asking, “Where have all the men gone?” an blaming feminism for destroying men need to shut the fuck up.  It’s a dumb question and an even dumber conclusion.  The question needs to become, “What should men and women expect of each other in a modern, post-feminist world?”

Because believe you me, speaking as a man, I know that I, personally, haven’t gone anywhere, even if you keep telling me that I don’t exist.

-----------------------------

[1]In absolute terms, the late 2011 model-year Geds is a way better option than any previous Geds.  I suspect the 2012 model year Geds will be even better.  But there’s no telling what the future holds, so maybe the 2013 model year Geds will be an emotional wreck that makes 2008 Geds look like a model of balanced and sane thought.

[2]I’d rather not spell this one out in excruciating detail, but I’m sure you, my reader, gets what I’m going for here.  There are some people who age well and some who age poorly.  Amongst women who can be said to have “aged well,” the ones who are now my age are far more attractive to me than they would be if I met their teenaged selves.

[3]Michael Mock refers to these as “imaginary friends.”  That amuses me to no end and I shamelessly stole it from him.

[4]I am not on LinkedIn.  I do not understand LinkedIn.  Also, too, I was never on Myspace or Friendster and I haven’t quite figured out why I’d want to be on Google+.

[5]In the interests of full disclosure: just in case it’s not entirely obvious, I have no idea what would go in to a $30,000 kitchen remodel.  I do, however, know that people spend that much on kitchens.

[6]Whether this is an equitable distribution of responsibilities is a discussion for another day.  But, in general, in a world where all the work was done with hard manual labor and without appliances and machinery, simply preparing a meal required an entire day’s work.  Someone literally needed to be at home making that happen from sunup to sundown.

[7]For the record, this is just poetically illustrating a point.

I Don't Exist

It’s a fairly odd thing to realize, especially since no one bothered to tell the people who service my student loans.  But I keep hearing about my non-existence, so it must be true.

And, yeah, it’s awkward.  I mean, it’s not as awkward as Mark Twain reading premature accounts of his own demise, mostly because all those people who tell me I don’t exist don’t mean it personally.  They’re not saying, “You, Geds, do not exist.”  What they’re saying is, “People who are like you do not exist.”  And I’m okay with that because those people have never actually met me.  As such, I do not give a rat’s ass that they don’t think I exist.

The truly uncomfortable thing about this at the end of the day is that I’m pretty sure that the upshot is that I end up writing a blog post about how I don’t exist every couple months.  So I actually have a historical record of my own non existence.  I can search for it on Google if I want to do so.

The latest indication that I don’t exist came in the form of an article in The Atlantic.  It follows the same basic pattern of all such articles.  It starts with a story of long-lost love that was turned down due to a desire for independence.  It then moves on to a celebration of feminism to establish the writer’s bona fides as a woman who is all about the empowerment of women.  Then we get to a lament that while all the women were learning to grow and achieve and be independent all the men decided to, um, not come along for the ride, I guess.  At that point I closed my browser window in disgust.

Let’s get something out of the way right now:  I am a 30 year-old, college educated, white male in America.  My personal income is higher than the average household income of my nation.  I’m not part of the 1%* by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m in pretty damn good shape.  My story of being in good shape positively oozes privilege.  My privilege, however, is not unexamined.  This is why I refer to myself as a feminist, based on my stupidly simple understanding that women are people, too.

I add that disclaimer in because I’m probably about to say a large number of things that will potentially piss people off.  I am totally okay with that.

The only way an article like the one I’m referencing can possibly exist is if the writer of the article is coming from a position of delusion or cognitive dissonance.  That’s it, full stop.  All of these articles that revolve around the question of, “Where have all the real men gone?” can only exist in a world that is carefully insulated from the facts of the case.  It’s founded on a simple notion that, basically, women can and should change how they do things but men are not allowed to change under any circumstances.  It’s also founded on the notion that men are “falling behind,” even though the only actual statistics where that’s true at the moment are in college attendance and the number of Americans laid off during this atrocious economy that has disproportionately hit sectors of the economy where men traditionally hold a much higher percentage of the positions.

Basically, this says, “Things are bad for men right now, therefore things will always be bad for men.”  This is stupid.  A woman writing an article with that premise will be applauded only by MRAs and MRA apologists.  I’m pretty sure that, ironically enough, that means that said woman writing said article is giving herself an engraved invitation to a party only attended by the sort of men she said she wants to avoid.

In reality, the “problem” is that women are closing the gap.  They’ve been behind men for a long-ass time and we’ve become accustomed to the notion that women should be where they are.  We’ve built our mythologies and constructed our gender politics around that notion.  Men are supposed to be the breadwinners.  Men are supposed to be the leaders.  Men are supposed to be the heads of the household.  Men are supposed to be the vice presidents and women are supposed to be their secretaries.

Now some women are vice presidents and some men are secretaries.  Women making it to the halls of power get celebrated.  Men forced to ignore the indignity of being mere secretaries get pitied.  See how that works?

In, say, 1956 a woman could proudly say that her husband had just been promoted to Vice President In Charge Of Whatever The Fuck.  Her husband could mention that his wife worked down in the typing pool at a law firm or something with no loss of face.  Even better, he could point out that his wife stayed at home and raised the children, because that was how the world worked.

Now if a woman gets promoted to Vice President In Charge Of Whatever The Fuck, we say, “Here’s a sign that things are good for women.”[1]  If VP lady introduces her husband as a guy who does data entry then he’s undoubtedly failed at something.  God help him if he stays home to raise the kids or because he can’t find a job.

This, I think, is the core of the problem.  Yes, things are bad for men right now, in that men are in the worst shape in history if compared to women in absolute terms.[2]  They’ve been disproportionately hit by the recession.  There are fewer men in college and grad school than women.  The solution to that is pretty simple, actually.  I see two steps:

1.  More men need to go to college.
2.  We need to stop making a distinction between “men’s work” and “women’s work.”

The reason that more men lost their jobs in the recession is because the recession hit traditionally male-dominated industry harder than traditionally female-dominated industry.  Fewer men want to be nurses because there’s a stigma associated with being a male nurse.  But fewer nurses lost their jobs than auto workers.  If more men were nurses, then it stands to reason that fewer men would have gotten laid off.

This gives us the opportunity to consider the implications of the inverse.  Say that nurses were disproportionately laid off and auto workers got to keep their jobs.  Who wants to bet we wouldn’t see a single article about the crisis of womanhood?  I’ll give an over/under of six articles, period, on how horrible it is that women aren’t moving out of their parents’ house and sitting around playing video games in the mass media.  Who wants to take the over?  Anybody?

Maybe the question shouldn’t be, “What’s wrong with men?”  Maybe it should be, “What’s wrong with the story we’re telling ourselves?”  But that’s a much harder article to write.  It’s also a much harder article to sell.[3]

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Meanwhile, the thing that fascinates me about the article that pissed me off today is that the author, Kate Bolick, answers her own damn question.  Repeatedly.  The question, for those who don’t feel like reading, basically boils down to, “Why am I not married?”  Everything else in the article is an attempt to extrapolate data from anecdote and, basically, to make it seem like she’s not whining.  This is the very first paragraph in the article:

IN 2001, WHEN I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

She then goes on to say two things.  First, Allan was subjectively and objectively fantastic.  Second, they’re still friends and Allan is now married.

The rest of the article is commentary.  Whiny commentary dressed up as statistics, but it’s commentary nonetheless.  Just in case anyone (including one Kate Bolick) totally missed what I’m driving at:

KATE BOLICK COULD BE MARRIED TO ALLAN RIGHT NOW.  As such, the answer to her question of, “Why am I not married?” is, “It’s your own damn fault, that’s why.”

Basically, all of the self-justification boils down to, “I spent my twenties and early thirties finding myself and figuring out my career and becoming the wonderful person I am today.  Now I wanna get married and there aren’t any men for me to marry who meet my standards.  They’re all losers or creepy douchebags.  Well, except for the ones who I met who were nice but who just, y’know, weren’t for me.”

Basically, this article exists because one Kate Bolick doesn’t actually listen to herself when she talks.  I suppose there’s less profit in that than writing an article and having it published in The Atlantic, though.  So, y’know, she’s got that goin’ for her.

The answer to the question, “Where are all the good men?” is, “They’re out there.”  See, the great guy who wanted to get married ten years ago found someone who also wanted to get married and they, y’know, got married.  Did the author make the right or wrong choice in 2001?  How the hell should I know?  I don’t know her.  I don’t know Allan.  It’s also absolutely impossible to predict an alternate reality.  It might have been great.  They also might have been hit by a bus leaving the church on their wedding day.  Or, hell, maybe Allan would eventually have figured out that Kate was whiny and self-absorbed and dumped her ass.  Who knows?

There’s another option, too.  You know how you decided to spend the last ten years bettering yourself and shit?  Well what, precisely, were all the men supposed to be doing during that time, sitting around and waiting for you to grace them with your romantic attentions?  Why do you get to be the center of the romantic universe?  Maybe they’re all in class, studying for their MBA.  Or maybe they’re at work, focusing on their careers.  Maybe they’ve decided that they don’t actually want to get married, since ten years ago they were hearing that everyone needed to go find themselves and shit and what they found was fulfillment in career, education, or hobby.

Or, hell, maybe there are a bunch of Allans out there who got dumped by their girlfriend of three years at 28, then were subjected to a whole shitload of dates where they felt they were supposed to have brought their resumes and gave up.  Or maybe they found that the marriage-minded women at 28 were crazy and desperate and they decided that marrying wasn’t an option.

Or maybe there are a bunch of great guys out there who want to get married, but sure as shit don’t want to marry Kate Bolick.  She seems kinda whiny, judgmental, and uptight, after all.

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One of the great fallacies of dating is the old saw, “There’s someone for everyone.”  This tends to go hand in hand with the notion of The One.  These then get wrapped up in fairy tale notions of love at first sight and happily ever after and all that jazz.  It’s simply not true.

Not long after I moved back to Chicago I went on a couple dates with someone.  She was great on paper: accomplished, capable, intelligent, all that stuff.[4]  She was also pretty in to me.  This was unfortunate, since I just plain didn’t feel the same way.

This was awkward, since I had no idea how to handle such a situation.  There simply was no space in my universe for someone who was interested in me, in whom I was not interested, but who was not a nutjob.  So I handled it awkwardly, but eventually found myself going back and trying to say what I should have said, which was basically, “You’re really good people, but I just wasn’t feeling it and you deserve better than that.”[5]

Maybe that was the wrong move.  Maybe I’ll be looking back 10 years from now and saying, “Why didn’t I try harder to give that a shot?”  In a vacuum the odds of that happening are extremely low.  It was just a couple dates, after all, and if I’m even thinking about it in ten years that will probably seem pretty obsessive.  But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I meet absolutely no one I even want to go on a second date with in the next decade.[6]  Would it make any sense at all to look back on the late summer of 2011 and say, “Shit, I missed my only chance?”

No.  It makes no sense to think that, since I made my decision based on the facts at hand.  I made the best decision I could have and, quite frankly, I believe it was the right decision.[7]

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When it gets right down to it, the big change over the last few years is that people don’t need to et married.  Since we don’t need to get married, some people decide not to get married.  Some want to just play the field.  Some want to hold out until they meet the perfect person and find that happily ever after.  Some decide to opt out of the program for a while or altogether while they focus on other stuff that’s more important to them.

This is only a problem if people decide it’s a problem.  The “crisis” isn’t that men as a gender are failing.  It’s that the world is changing and humans suck at change.  So we latch on to something, anything, and say, “See!  This is the problem!  We need to do something about it!”  Identifying a problem and complaining about it is cathartic.  It’s also distracting.  So if the underlying question is, “Why am I not married yet?” and the answer is, “Because men suck, that’s why,” then the person asking the question doesn’t actually have to do anything or learn anything.

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[1]In the interests of full disclosure: the top two positions at my current company are occupied by women.  The company is small enough that both of them know who I am in spite of the fact that I’m pretty far down on the org chart.  This is not the first company I’ve worked for with a female CEO/President.  In my time in corporate America I have directly reported to eight women and four men.  Of that group I’ve liked working for all the men and six of the women and have thought that all ten individuals had strengths and weaknesses that had nothing to do with whether or not we shared a gender.

[2]I re-wrote that sentence four different times.

[3]On related not, I’m currently reading a book about the media.  This morning I found it necessary to bookmark a page because a chunk of the text struck me:

“Their methods are so hidden and their ignorance so dense that they have no conception of law to restrain them,” the World thundered against midwives.  “Most can hardly sign their own names.”  But another anxiety shadowed the genuine concern over their scattershot training: namely, that it was women taking business away from men.  Even as the World was pursuing midwives, it was running the headline WOMEN FARM, MEN COOK – a story noting that “The New Woman” was moving in to traditionally male jobs in farming and manufacturing, while more men were taking domestic employment.  Hearst’s Journal, though generally sympathetic to women’s labor, still ran headlines such as SHE’S PRETTY, EVEN IF SHE IS A LAWYER.

The book?  The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars.  To the uninitiated, the “century” in question was the 19th.  The “Hearst” mentioned in the quoted paragraph was THE Hearst: William Randolph Hearst.  The more things change, as they say…^

[4]We actually had a mutual acquaintance in one of my co-workers, which was something I figured out entirely on accident.  Once I pointed that out she introduced herself to my co-worker.  After that my co-worker and I had a couple of odd conversations which suddenly made sense when I realized, “Oh, [co-worker] is trying to sell me on [person I’d dated].”  So I took that as an indication that I was correct in my overall assessment that she was good people.

[5]There’s an interesting nuance here.  We have the cliché, “It’s not you, it’s me,” of which the, “You’re too good for me,” is a common subset.  Everyone knows that both things are, at best, cop outs.  At worst they’re outright lies.

However, in this specific case it sounded like I was pulling one of those.  I wasn’t.  Instead of, “You’re too good for me, I just don’t deserve someone like you,” it was, “You deserve someone who both appreciates you as a person and isn’t basically indifferent to all the dating/falling in love/whatever aspect of things.”  Because, yeah, she was in to me, but is it really a kindness to pretend to care about her in that way just to avoid, um, hurting her feelings, I guess?  No.  That’s stupid.  So, at the very least, I’ve learned how to handle that situation if it comes up again.  Have no fear, non-crazy single women of Chicagoland.  I am now fully capable of breaking things off with you in non-self-defeatingly idiotic ways.

[6]With my track record, though, that’s not exactly a non-zero possibility.

[7]This phraseology implies that she had no agency in this decision.  I want to say that she did, but in a very real way she had no control over how I thought or felt about her.  Granting her agency in my decision-making process, then, would have had one of two results: either she would have said, “You’re just not that in to me and we should break this off,” or, “You’re just not that in to me, now.  Give it more time.”

The problem is that there was a point where she tried the, “You’ve just moved back, you’ve got a lot on your mind, you might just not be ready.  I’m willing to wait.”

I remembered saying similar things to Her and attempting to insert myself as an agent in her decision-making process.  That did not end well.

^Interesting post script: when I went to go get a link to the book I saw it only had 3.5 stars on the B&N site.  That seemed low.  The book is actually quite enjoyable and I'm thinking of writing a post or three on it and everything.  So I scrolled down to see what was up.  It turns out that it has a bunch of 1 star ratings because B&N pushed free samples of the book to Nook users.  The lesson, as always: don't blindly trust starred internet reviews, since people give things 1 or 5 stars for really fuck-stupid reasons sometimes.

*EDIT:  Original version said I'm not part of the 99%.  Oops.  I went double-negative on myself or something.  Thanks, jessa.

An Open Letter to Guys

Guys, we need to have a word.

And when I say “guys,” I mean a very specific range of the human population.  I mean that weird category of the male gender that is too old to be called “boys” but not yet mentally old enough to be called “men.”  You’re having a rough time of it, I know.  Everyone expects you to grow up and stop whining and become productive members of society but they just don’t know how hard it is.

It is hard.  I know.  Look, I’ve been there.  I had the same disadvantaged white suburban upbringing you did.  I had those same terrible expectations placed on you.  I was expected to go to my high school in a nice, safe suburb and get taught by teachers who competed to fill the job openings in a high-tax district.  I was expected to go to college.  I was expected to get a job, maybe eventually get married, buy a house, have a kid, the whole kit-and-kaboodle.

There is no one who has it tougher than we have had it.  I mean, how could anyone expect well-educated, economically advantaged first-worlders with all the racial and gender privileges that come from being a white male to get anywhere in this world, let alone the high ranks of mid-level jobs somewhere in corporate America?  There’s just so much pressure to succeed beyond anything that should be expected of anyone in there.

Of course, we all know that it isn’t just the pressures of upbringing and expectation that are stacked against you.  Oh, no.  Now you have to deal with all kinds of competition.  All of the sudden women think they should be allowed to spend their time in the workplace and not just the kitchen.  Hispanics are suddenly getting educations and expecting to get good jobs.  And even if they don’t, they keep taking all of those great soybean picking jobs that are the traditional bulwark of white males the world over.  And the blacks!  Don’t even get me started on them!  They should just be happy that we’re nice enough to not buy and sell them anymore and get back to sharecropping and thanking us for being so nice as to begrudgingly admit that they’re actual human beings.

Whew.  It’s tough out there.  I know that you, like me, are seething with well-deserved white boy rage.  I know that you, like me, need to blame someone.  Because it’s obvious to you and me both that this world just wasn’t designed with white men in mind.  Nope.  Everyone wants to blame us for everything, but they don’t want to admit the obvious: the feminists, the NAACP, and the ACLU have taken over the world and are trying to marginalize and destroy white people.  White men, specifically.

I know you’re protesting the only way you know how: by refusing to participate in the society that is working so hard to hold you down.  You sit around and play video games all day and watch porn all night.  You bitch and moan to anyone who is willing to listen and make your stand against this horrible world that you live in but didn’t ask for by asking, nay, demanding that your mom bring you a sandwich.  With the crusts cut off this time.  If she’s going to be your jailer she should at least realize that she has to do all the work to keep you fed, after all.

There.  Do you feel better?  Have I justified your whiny, entitled ass enough?

Good.  Now sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.  We’ve got real issues to talk about.

See, here’s the thing: you are a bunch of petulant, whiny, entitled, self-absorbed pieces of shit.  How do I know that?  Because I have been paying attention to the real world and I’ve noticed that you…well, you haven’t.

I’ve noticed that while you are whining about how all women are bitches there are plenty of guys from very similar backgrounds to yours who are happily married to wonderful women.  I’ve noticed that while you are whining about how hard it is to get ahead in the world there are plenty of guys from similar backgrounds who are doing quite well for themselves.  I’ve noticed that the primary difference is that while you’re sitting around playing video games and being a whiny little shit those other guys are actually out accomplishing things.

So maybe it’s not so much an issue that everyone hates whitey.  Maybe it’s not so much an issue that everyone hates men.  Maybe it’s an issue that everyone hates whiny, entitled little jerkasses.  And you know what?  Everyone should hate whiny, entitled little jerkasses.

Let me let you in on a dirty little secret.  It’s good to be white in America.  It’s good to be male in America.  It’s damn good to be a white male in America.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but most of our successful businesspeople and politicians are white men.  Most of our most spectacularly unsuccessful businesspeople and politicians are also white men.  I will admit that black men pretty much have the “NBA Superstar” demographic locked up and white women pretty much have the “daytime host of 24 hour news networks” demographic lined up.  But when it comes to most other things the white man is still on top.  Have you ever watched C-SPAN by accident, like say if your XBOX 360 accidentally got unplugged or something?  You know all those old, white dudes who sit around in a big room and ramble on about a bunch of stupid, boring shit all day that are on that channel?  Yeah, they’re called “Congress” and they pretty much run the damn country.  Have you noticed that most of the people thought to be preparing to run for President are also white males and the only two women getting serious consideration show up in conjunction with the words “national disgrace” or “batshit insane” so often that everyone is starting to think their names are actually “National Disgrace Palin” and “Batshit Insane Bachmann?”  Yeah.  There’s a reason the Presidential field from the right will be made up of a bunch of white dudes and a couple women who are too friggin’ dumb to know that somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of the country is laughing at them.[1]

So, when it gets right down to it, fears of feminists taking over and relegating all the world’s men to ghettoes or worse are right up there in the realms of believableness as fears that a couple thousand Muslims are going to rise up and impose Sharia law on Oklahoma.  Now, you might take that as some sort of non sequitur, but it’s not.  In fact, let’s take it as a thought experiment.

The most recent data I can find with religion demographics is from the 2000 census.  In 2000 Oklahoma had a population of about 3.5m with a Muslim population of somewhere in the neighborhood of 6000.  As in, Muslims made up under 2/10 of one percent of the population of Oklahoma.  And this is Oklahoma, known more for its appreciation of Oral Roberts than Osama bin Laden.  And even though the numbers are a decade old I highly doubt that they’ve changed much, relatively speaking.

Let’s say, for the moment, that there are now 10,000 Muslims in Oklahoma, which had a population o 3,750,000 as of the last census.  That’s a tiny, tiny minority.  But let’s say that every single one of those Muslims is a radical who wishes to impose Sharia on the state of Oklahoma.  Also, for the sake of argument, let’s also pretend that the First Amendment doesn’t exist.  What do you think the odds are that 10,000 people would be able to impose their laws on 3,750,000?

In a vacuum, the odds are pretty low.  But it’s possible.  Consider how much influence the vanishingly small super-rich percentage of this country has compared to the madding crowd.  But there are some things that even money can’t buy, and one of those is enough influence to replace Christianity with Islam in Oklahoma.

So why would we ever need to worry about creeping Sharia law in Oklahoma?  We don’t.  But some people find it necessary to do so.  Fear, you see, is a powerful tool.  Those who want influence seek to use fear to initiate primal responses in others and keep them from thinking clearly.  Some of those people, then, become useful idiots, who continue to repeat the message because they believe that thing they fear will come to pass.

That’s a tough message to swallow.  Because what I’m telling you, if you believe the Muslims are about to overtake Oklahoma, is that you are either profiting off of the idea in some way or you are an unwitting dupe of those who are.  Chances are that you aren’t profiting off of the idea (and if you are, chances are you don’t give a shit about me or my blog.  I’m okay with that, mostly because I have no choice but to be okay with that).  That means I’m telling you that you’re a dupe, a patsy, a fool.

And no one likes being called a fool.  Sadly, though, it is sometimes necessary to call a spade a spade.

So let’s talk feminism.

I have no doubt that there exist in this world feminists who genuinely hate men with a white, hot, burning passion.  I have no doubt that there exist in this world feminists who wish that some method by which men could be eliminated from the world could be devised.  I have not, to the best of my knowledge, run in to such creatures (and, believe you me, I’ve encountered some strident feminists in my time on the intertubes), but I believe they probably exist somewhere.  Why?  Because there exist in this world people who are angry, people who are hateful, people who are irrational, and people who cannot let go of the idea that they have been harmed by the Other and there is no difference between the whole of the Other and a small number of individuals within the Other who are horrible people.

Some people declare affiliation with Group A because they hate everything about Group Opposite from A.  That’s just reality.  In doing so they have a tendency to try to turn Group A in to nothing but a platform from which to denounce their “enemies” and to denounce anyone who is not sufficiently involved in their own pet cause with the same vision they have.[3]  Every group has its own collection of fundamentalists.[4]  Any group that is widespread enough will have fundamentalists of one stripe or another.  Anyone who is not a fundamentalist and denies the existence of such people within their movement is either naïve, attempting to sell you a bill of goods, or has come to the conclusion that in being a group in opposition to a group that has fundamentalists that means that their group cannot, by definition, have fundamentalists.  Of course that person could simply be a fundamentalist in denial, too.[5]

The thing is, all groups have their fringe.  We cannot judge a group by its fringe because it is precisely that, a fringe.  The problem comes when the fringe becomes the de facto center of the group.  This has happened to American conservatism and, to a large extent, American Christianity.[6]

This, now, is where we get in to a problem.  Are you ready for a thought that’s going to blow your mind?

A large number of men are extremely afraid of women.

They’re not really afraid of any individual woman.  They are afraid of a giant, monolithic bloc that amounts to approximately half the human race.  Chances are that they don’t think that women are really going to take over the world, suck all the men dry of their sperm cells, and then kill everyone with a Y-Chromosome off.  It’s something simpler than that.

See, the sort of people who are afraid of women live in a binary world dominated by a zero sum power structure.  Any concession given to women is, by definition, taken from a man.  More importantly, any woman who can take a job and make her own money and control her own fortunes is another woman who cannot be easily controlled by being tied to a man and forced to be barefoot and pregnant at all times.

There’s something even more primal at stake, too.  At the base of this idea is one of retributive justice.  To men like this the universe works in a vast, unending cycle.  An oppressed group rises up to become the oppressor and visit unending torture on its oppressors.  So women will, in this view, rise up and turn men in to what men have historically treated women as: sub-human.[7]

As such, those deep-dark fringes of feminism become a useful tool of the man who fears woman unbound.  Bits and pieces of writing are dug up, tied together, and sometimes quote mined or flat-out misrepresented and turned in to a straw feminist.  This straw feminist hates men, sees no use for men, and wants nothing to do with men.  This straw feminist is fueled by self-righteous indignation and anger and will destroy any poor man who gets in her way.

This straw feminist image ignores the fact that most feminists actually rather like men.  Hell, many of them are married to or in the habit of dating men.  Something approaching 100% of them probably have fathers and most probably have brothers or sons or uncles or close male cousins and are friends with men.

So it’s not really that they hate men.  It’s more that they hate jerkasses.

I’m cool with that.  I don’t like jerkasses much, either.

The thing is, though, the men who fear women know they can’t get everyone to hate women as they do.  They also know they don’t have to.  All they have to do is get enough people to passively accept their bullshit that they become the de facto voice of men in opposition to women.

That’s where you come in, my XBOX 360 playing,[8] whiny, entitled friend.

See, you’ve gotten the soft sell where anti-woman bias is concerned.  I call it the “uppity bitches” approach.  Basically, the idea is that equality exists, so the women who keep complaining are just looking for more than their fair share.  And they want it both ways, too.  Call it reparations, if you will.  You have to let them get the good jobs, but you also have to pay for dinner because women have it so damn hard.  And they’ll nag you to no end.  They’ll ask you to put on a nice shirt and vacuum.  And if you have children…oh, boy.  There will be no end to the chores and honey do lists then, no sir.

Let me let you in on a little secret:

Sometimes a woman wants you to take a shower because you smell like shit.  Sometimes she wants you to throw out your old t-shirts because you look like a slob.  Sometimes she wants you to wash your damn dishes because you are a goddamn slob.

You know how you want a woman who is all thin and tan and pretty?  Yeah.  That takes work.  You know how you want a woman who loves you for who you are and doesn’t try to change you?  Yeah, chances are she will (otherwise, really, why would she be with you?), but chances are that you also embarrass her sometimes.  Or, maybe she’s totally fine with you wandering around in t-shirts but she sometimes wants to dress up and go out for a nice dinner instead because, y’know, eating McDonald’s in the basement gets old after a while.

Oh, and you know how she asks you to go to museums and shit with you sometimes and you never want to go?  Don’t bitch about that.  Chances are that she likes stuff like that and wants you involved because she likes you, too.  I don’t know why she does, though.  You’re a whiny, entitled little brat who doesn’t know a good thing when it’s asking you to take it out to dinner.

I mean, I don’t like you much.  I hate to tell you that, but it’s true.

The fact is, though, that there are women out there who are bitches.  Such is life.  There are men out there who are jackasses.  There are also fantastic people who have bad days and kind people who run out of patience after a while.  So you might well have run in to some crappy people.  Or you might have run in to some great people on bad days.  If that’s the case, well, I’m sorry.  But the only thing you can do is try again.  You’ll get it right eventually.

And if you haven’t really run in to a lot of bad people and are, instead, sitting around patting yourself on the back about how the damn, uppity bitches can’t get their claws in to you…well, I’ve got news.

They’re better off for that.

So shut up and grow the fuck up.

Sincerely,
Geds

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[1]This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be laughing at ol’ National Disgrace and Batshit Insane.  We should be trying to figure out how to make it so we live in a country that recognizes that there should be options other than “old white dude” and “moron who can’t possibly win and shouldn’t due to the terrifying reality of a world in which she would.”  Seeing as how our only other female national political figure with a shot in hell at the Presidency is Hillary Clinton we’re looking at a systemic problem.[2]  It’s not a “Republicans are racist, sexist fucks” thing, it’s an “Americans are racist, sexist fucks who want to pretend we’re not by ignoring the evidence set before us” thing.  Our so-called “liberal” major party is better, but “better than the current Republican Party by the tiniest of margins” is not a feather in your cap by any stretch of the imagination.  Who else was in the field against Clinton and Obama in 2008?  John Edwards, some other white dudes, and an elf or dwarf of some sort (by which I mean Dennis Kucinich, who I mock because I am a whole-hearted supporter.  Seriously.  I loves me some Dennis Kucinich.  In a totes hetero way, of course).  Who was in the field in 2004?  Gee Dubs, John Kerry, John Edwards…yeah.  2000?  I can’t think of a single non-white non-male save Alan Keyes.  Who doesn’t really count, since he was an extreme longshot Republican candidate.

My point?  White men aren’t in any danger of being underrepresented any time soon.  And that’s just in one spot.  Look at Congress.  Look at the Supreme Court.  Look at the CEOs of major corporations.  White men are doing just fine, thanks.

[2]Um…I realize this can be read as me putting Hillary in the same category as Batshit and Disgrace.  I like Hillary.  I voted Obama in the primary but would have had no compunctions voting for Hillary in the general had she won the nomination in 2008.  And that isn’t just with the thought of Hillary up against a McCain/Palin ’08 ticket.  In a vacuum I think President Hillary Clinton would probably be doing about the same as President Obama in balance.  And I like President Obama in balance, so six one way…

[3]One of these days I’ll write up a post about internet atheism.  That’ll be fun to see.

[4]”Fundamentalists” is one of those fuzzy words.  There are those who want everyone to believe that their group cannot possibly have a fundamentalist equivalent because fundamentalism is an inherently religious concept that requires some sort of holy writ to which one must cleave.  That’s crap.  Fundamentalism is the result of ever-evolving community.  As an initial idea takes root and grows and splits in to ever more branches there will always be those who cling to the trunk and say, “You can’t be one of us unless you’re right here!”  Those people are fundamentalists.  Of course sometimes the tree is so large and has been growing so long that some people cling to one of the branches and insist to anyone willing to listen that they have hold on the trunk and everyone else is just intentionally denying the direction of gravity’s pull.

There’s also the issue that the fundamentalist can only see fundamentalism in the Other and never in the self.  But, again, that’s an issue for another day.

[5]The intention here is not to set up a false equivalence.

[6]Weirdly, I don’t think Christian fundamentalism actually counts as the majority of American Christianity.  It just counts as the loudest and most active segment of American Christianity.  Somewhere out there is a vast, silent crowd of liberal Presbyterians and indifferent Methodists who are allowing the fringe to dominate their religion because they don’t care.  Or they’re not thinking about it too much.  The problem then becomes that Group Opposite A has to take over the opposition to the Evangelicals.  So we get the Gnu Atheists, the feminists, and the gay rights activists as the strongest voice against, which creates a de facto dialogue where you’re either for Jackass Evangelical God or against Christianity as a whole.  False equivalences work to elevate the edge and destroy the middle.

[7]Sadly, there is enough historical precedent to make this idea not utterly stupid.  Oppressed groups often do terrible shit to their oppressors when freed.  Or they find some other group to do the same to.  Humans have a bad habit of sucking sometimes.

[8]Also, we really need to get to the point where “person who plays video games” isn’t easy shorthand for “man-child in a state of arrested development.”  For one thing, this means that every time said shorthand is used the first bunch of people who show up chime in with, “But I play video games and I have a job!” and totally miss the point being made.  Because “plays video games” doesn’t mean “plays video games.”  It actually means “plays with toys.”  Because some people haven’t figured out that video games aren’t fucking toys any more.

The problem is that people my age played with the first generation of widely available video game consoles and were early adopters in basically every sense of the word.  So we’ve experienced a sea change within my generation where the video game is a natural entertainment device for almost everyone under 35 and at least not completely alien to people in the 35-45 range.  But they still aren’t universal to people currently between, say, 25 and 45 and completely foreign to people much older than that.  So for anyone over 45 the video game is a toy.  For anyone younger than that who never really got video games or stopped playing after college or whatever they’re a sign that the person is not serious.

Video games are a unique target, too.  They’ve followed television and movies as delivery devices for mass entertainment, but even though people will tell you TV rots your brain there isn’t the widespread mockery of TV that there is for video games.  And movies are fun for all ages.  Video games get a unique level of derision, I think, because they came on so suddenly and were, initially, really just toys.

But those kids that grew up playing with toys are adults now.  And they’ve been steadily bringing video games farther in to the adult world.  You cannot tell me that the Mass Effect series, for instance, isn’t powerful, mature entertainment.  Of course there are growing pains.  As with any medium attempting to introduce adult themes, video games have had their misfires.  They’ve also been wildly misrepresented at various times.

Give it a generation and video games won’t be the target of widespread derision any more.  They’ll just be right there with movies and TV on the entertainment options list.  And we’ll all be wondering why the hell we had to have this talk.

On Idiots with Shovels

I am what you might call a veteran of the internet.  I know my way around blogs and threads and comments and, although I mostly consider it to be not worth my time, I’ve been known to gleefully jump in to the middle of a flame war from time to time.  They are, in the right context, a hell of a lot of fun.

Still, I believe that it’s best to approach an opponent, even an internet opponent, with charity in mind.  In all honesty, it’s possible that they just don’t know.  Think about it.  Those of us who have been to the flame wars have seen all the tricks.  We can identify a concern troll, a sock puppet, or a Poe from the first word of the first comment they post.  We’ve usually vetted sources, too, so we know that someone referencing Source A is probably a willfully ignorant tool and can safely be mocked in to Bolivian.  But some people are sheltered, precocious souls who just kind of wander in to the middle of the line of fire.  So it’s best to make sure you’re not going to create an implacable enemy out of a well-meaning fool.

With this in mind, I believe it is important to offer Kay Hymowitz the charity of considering the substance of her self-selected defenders.  She may have simply entered some random search terms in to Google and accidentally wandered in to the cesspool that is the world of self-proclaimed Pick-Up Artists and Men’s Rights Activists.  Hey.  It happens.  Some people just don’t know…um, stuff.

Let us consider the substance and not just the web addresses of the articles she chose to use to defend herself.

[A] writer at the popular dating website The Frisky titled a recent piece “Call me and ask me out for a damn date!”

And here we get to the second, more interesting benefit of offering charity: you often give the other person just enough rope to wrap one end around their own neck and the other around a convenient tree branch.  I know it sounds completely crazy, but centering an argument in a William Jennings Bryan-level[1] article around the title of another article on a website called “The Frisky.”[2]

Actually, it’s really not so bad as I make it out to be in the footnote (seriously, go read the footnote now.  It’s funny).  Because, you see, I actually tracked down the article.  Whilst doing so, since Ms. Hymowitz couldn’t be arsed to actually properly link to it, found out the article is actually called "Girl Talk: Ask Me Out On a Damn Date."  Why does that matter?  Because if you're gonna cite something, at least get the damn title right.  It's a really simple way of making it look like you actually know what you're talking about.  That's a little trick they taught me back when I was getting my history degree.

And do you know what the article is actually about?  How annoying it is when a guy doesn’t actually ask you out on a date and does one of those, “So you wanna hang out sometime?” bits of half-assery and you just wish he’d fucking man up and risk the goddamn rejection inherent in actually trying.  Also, it sure seems to me that it's written to a guy who said woman knows pretty well and who is apparently too damn stupid to pick up on the fact that she wants him to ask her out.  Because that’s so fucking annoying, amirite, girlfriends?  I love everything about this article, too, because Ms. Wakeman[4] actually refutes every goddamn thing that Hymowitz is trying to claim is wrong with both genders in one goddamn paragraph without even trying or knowing she’s doing it.  Don’t believe me?

 

I want the date to have a place, or at least, a notion of a place.  “A drink.” “Coffee.” “Dinner.” “Walking around a bookstore together.” I sincerely do not care where we go or what we do; I just want to prepare for it (eat dinner beforehand, don’t eat dinner beforehand) and know how I should dress (heels? sneakers?). You don’t even have to spend money. I’ll pay for myself if you don’t offer! Really, this should not be intimidating.[Emphasis hers.]

I’m just going to say it:  Jessica Wakeman, I don’t know you and I’ll never meet you, but I think I’m in love with you.[5]  But don’t worry.  I’ll forget about this soon enough.  Although, in all honesty, a quick perusal of the thumbnails on her collection of articles and the bit where she basically comes off as a super-sarcastic feminist-type has convinced me that, were she in Dallas or I wherever she is I most certainly would ask her out.  With date, time, and location all ready to go.  At the very least, I am :this close: to subscribing to her newsletter.

Why do I say this refutes Hymowitz’s entire friggin’ thesis?  Well, I mean other than the bit where it’s actually excruciatingly self-declarative in its general, “Wow, Hymowitz is fuck stupid,” factor, there’s the rest of the article.  This is Hymowitz’s very next sentence:

A lot of men wonder: “WTF??!” Why should they do the asking? Why should they pay for dinner? After all, they are equals and in any case, the woman a guy is asking out probably has more cash in her pocket than he does; recent female graduates are making more than males in most large cities.

Well, that handles most of the objection.  But why do men always have to be the ones who do the asking and risk the rejection?  I mean, if women do, truly, want to be equals they should be just as equally rejected by us poor, put-upon men, right?  Let’s see what Jessica “I Have All the Answers” Wakeman has to say about that.  I’ll bet she’ll be all, “Waaaaaaa, I’m just a woman.  I shouldn’t have to work at it!”

Generally speaking, I think men are intimidated by women who do the pursuing/asking out, though, so I do it on a case-by-case basis. And if I can do it — and I have done it — you can, too.[Emphasis hers]

Oh.  Never mind.  That…that actually makes a lot of sense, Ms. Woman Who Wrote An Article That Was the Exact Opposite of What Kay Hymowitz Claimed it to be.  I would, in fact, hazard a guess that the same guys who are whining about how they have to do all the work are the same exact guys who would get all whiny about those uppity ass bitches who won’t stay in the kitchen and make them a goddamn sammich.

So let’s go back to Ms. Hymowitz and see if this gets any better.[6]

Sure, girls can—and do—ask guys out for dinner and pick up the check without missing a beat. Women can make that choice. Men say they have no choice. If they want a life, they have to ask women out on dates; they have to initiate conversations at bars and parties, they have to take the lead on sex.

I’ll take the reins of this post back if Ms. Wakeman doesn’t mind.  Because I think I have a few things to say on this particular topic.  Because, you see, I’m the sort of guy who fits in to the category of, “Doesn’t get out much.”  I don’t much like dating, so I don’t do it too often.  And I still have enough baggage hanging on from my days as a babe in fundyland to be a bit squeamish talking about sex with people who are, for all intents and purposes, complete strangers.  Basically, if you want to imagine me initiating a conversation with a woman I barely know about sex, just plug in a copy of 40 Year-Old Virgin and skip to the part where Steve Carrell is talking to Elizabeth Banks and she’s getting totally turned on while he has no idea he’s talking about sex.  I’m slightly savvier than that.  But not much.

Anyway, I have talked about sex on first dates.  And, believe me, I have not been the one to bring it up.  I have found phone numbers shoved in to the back pocket of my jeans before.[7]  I have had everything from women strongly suggesting I should ask them out to begging me to do so to flat-out asking.  I’ve been out with women who pay for themselves.  Hell, I went out once with someone who paid for me.[8]

I don’t say this to brag.  I don’t say this happens all the time.  I’m just saying that it has happened to me enough that I categorize “women being aggressive seekers of relationships and/or sex” in to the “not terribly uncommon” category of my “things that happen” list.  And I’d hazard a guess that I’m not some special, unique snowflake in that regard.

Anyway, back to Hymowitz.  Because I know you want to see how far this hole gets dug.

Women can take a Chinese menu approach to gender roles. They can be all “Let me pay for the movie tickets” on Friday nights, and “A single rose? That’s it?” on Valentine’s Day.

I can’t believe that I, of all people, have to explain this one.  I can’t.  Fucking.  Believe it.  Me, of the nearly unbroken three decades of not having to give a rat’s ass about Valentine’s Day.  So let me re-write this a couple different ways.

Men can take a Chinese menu approach to baseball games. They can be all “Meh, there’s always tomorrow,” when Paul Konerko strikes out with a runner on, two outs, and the team down a run in the ninth inning of a random game against the Yankees in May, and “Dammit! How do you miss that one?” when he takes a bad hack at the last pitch of Game 7 of the World Series.

Bosses can take a Chinese menu approach to employee performance. They can be all “You need to remember that next time,” when an employee forgets to report his PTO, and “We’re going to have to take disciplinary action,” when an employee sexually harasses a customer.

Feel free to come up with your own versions of this one.

I mean, seriously.  Comparing a woman offering to pay for dinner on a random Friday night to a guy not putting any effort in on Valentine’s Day (with the understanding, obviously, that we’ve all agreed to give a shit about Valentine’s Day.  Which, for the sake of dealing with Kay Hymowitz, I’m totally willing to do) is like complaining that a seven-course meal is way worse than an apple because it’s so much easier to just pull an apple out of the fridge and take a bite.  I mean, she could at least try to come up with a proper equivalent.  Actually, no.  That’s asking too much.

We’re talking about a woman who actually tried to pass off an article entitled “Girl Talk: Ask Me Out On a Damn Date” that was written by a woman about guys who can’t actually do that as something that goes to prove a thesis that lead her to write a book called Manning Up: How the Rise of Women has Turned Men into Boys.  I would think that if the sky were actually blue in Kay Hymowitz’s world she would realize that she and Jessica Wakeman are actually on the same fucking team.

Of course, it hasn’t escaped my notice that Jessica Wakeman doesn’t have a book deal.  And she writes for The Frisky, as opposed getting published in the Wall Street Journal.  I wonder if there’s some sort of single, overarching explanation that would account for that collection of facts.

Hmmm.

Nah.  Probably not.

Anyway, we then have to deal with tired questions about why nice guys finish last.  And Hymowitz apparently rented a goddamn steam shovel to start digging the hole faster.  My guess is it’s because she was running out of space and wanted to cram as much stupid as possible in to every word.  How do I know this?

At a website with the evocative name Relationshit.com, (“Brutally honest dating advice for the cynical, bitter, and jaded,” and sociological cousin of Dating-is-Hell.com) the most highly trafficked pages are those asking the question why women don’t like good guys.

I’m no expert, but relationshit.com appears to be a joke that a couple guys cooked up one weekend.  And Kay Hymowitz appears to not get it.  I went to the About Us and read this:

Our staff is comprised of jaded, cynical, thirty-something's who've been through a number of relationships. As you may have guessed, mostly bad ones. That's why we created this site.  Not because we think we have all the answers. But because we now know many of the answers we do have are wrong. And while we don't know everything, there may be people out there who know even less and can benefit from our wisdom.[Emphasis theirs]

I’d like to offer Kay Hymowitz as someone who knows less than the guys at relationshit.com.  She seems to have made it her goal not to benefit from anyone’s wisdom, though.

Anyway, since Kay Hymowitz appears to be the gift that keeps on giving (wherein “gift” = “easy blog fodder”), I’m sure this isn’t over yet.  My only hope is that I’ll be able to get to the post I thought I was going to write tonight before that.

Stay tuned for the next installment, when I ask all the whiny, entitled jackasses I share the distinction of possessing a Y-Chromosome with to join me at Footnote 3.

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[1]One of WJB’s nicknames was “The Boy Orator of the Platte.”  This, in turn, was a reference to the Platte River, which was said to be “a mile wide and an inch deep.”  Yes, I did work that tidbit in to the most random possible post, thankyouverymuch.

[2]It doesn’t matter if you call it a “popular dating website,” either.  I’d call it “a website Geds had never heard of before yesterday” rather than “popular.”  I’d also call it “an entertainment and gossip website that appears to have all the intelligence of College Humor and the web design acumen of Yahoo’s OMG! celebrity gossip site” rather than “dating website.”  But that’s kinda long and unwieldy.  To wit:

“A writer at an entertainment and gossip website with all the intelligence of College Humor and design thoughtfulness of OMG! that no one has ever heard about before titled a recent piece “Call me and ask me out for a damn date!”

That’s just clunky.

Also, there’s a link on the front page of that website to an article called “Guys, Don’t Date Hot Women!”  I have chosen not to get out of the boat, as I’m going to assume the mangoes are quite rotten.  But if that’s the quality advice being offered at The Frisky…yeah.  No.  Just no.

[3]In fact, the “Guys, Don’t Date Hot Women” article is a response to something published in a serious journal somewhere that says some study indicates hot women are more likely to leave their lesser-physically-advantaged mates than the other way around.  It’s a short blurb that basically says, “Is this for realz?”  As far as random websites with dating advice and celebrity gossip go, it’s actually not all that bad.

[4]Weirdly, Wakeman is my porn star last name.  So I think there’s some alternate universe where the porn star version of me is married to a woman who writes for The Frisky.

[5]Seriously, this whole hilarious chain of events caused me to giggle and wave my clenched fists about in the manner of a small, happy child while sitting on my couch.  Daisy was so confused that she looked up from ripping the head off her stuffed cow in confusion.  Also, now I have to sew the head back on a stuffed cow.  Dammit.

[6]Just in case you have a big, important meeting to get to or something, the answer is, “No.  No it does not.”

[7]Okay, that happened once.  But, again, don’t get out much.

[8]Weirdly, I usually prefer to pay for everything.  Why?  Because that way it’s much easier to say, “Well, I bought you dinner, but I don’t actually like you very much, so please go away.”  Yes.  That’s right.  Most men pay with the expectation it means they can force the issue of getting sex.  I pay with the expectation that I can force the issue of going home alone and watching TV or something.

In retrospect, this seems like a really dumb strategy.  I’m basically saying, “Yeah, so I’m going to be a really nice guy and I’m going to pay for everything and you should take that to mean I want nothing to do with you.”  Tell me what’s wrong with that picture.

Doin' it Rong

Imagine, if you will, an article appearing in some sort of high circulation national or international publication.  The article is about race relations in America.  Specifically, it’s about the decline of white society and the rise of what the author refers to as “hip-hop culture” without ever really bothering to define the terms.  Imagine, too, that the article can be summed up thusly:

You know what the biggest problem white people have facing them is?  Successful black people.  If it hadn’t been for that Martin Luther King, Jr. everyone would be so much happier because white people would still know they were the powerful, awesome innovators who drive culture and the black people would have their own seats on the back of the bus and special schools where they could create their own hip-hop culture and enjoy it to their hearts’ content as long as they didn’t take it in to the white peoples’ houses and neighborhoods and such.

So what black people should do to make sure white, middle-class Americans aren’t afraid of them is to go back to the world before Martin Luther King, Jr.  Then we’d all be happy.

Now here’s the kicker of this perversely racist article: the writer is black.  It’s just that he’s one of those reflexively self-hating writers who the white establishment keeps around because he keeps writing the sort of absolute bullshit that makes them feel good about being racist douchebags.  Whenever somebody points out that they’re racist they point at that guy and say, “But if we’re racist why does he agree with us?”  At cocktail parties he also gets to be everyone’s token black friend.

Life works out pretty well for the writer, too. He’s got a regular gig writing absolute bullshit and doesn’t care that he’s selling out the Civil Rights Movement every other day because he gets five cents a word, republication rights, and invited to all the nice parties.  And all those black people he’s blaming for their own faults can’t touch him because he usually publishes his schlock in publications the very people he’s excoriating don’t often read.  Or, if they do, it’s only a small number and any outrage they offer fizzles.

Until he made it to that major publication.  All of the sudden everyone on the planet has read his self-hating bullshit.  All of the sudden 90% of the planet is pissed at him and sending him letters filled with righteous indignation.  So he decides to fire back.  He writes a new article and calls it, “Why Are White Men So Angry?”

In it he acknowledges that his article ignited a firestorm of controversy.  But, desperate to keep his position as the darling of white asshole newspaper owners happy, he decides to fire back.  The gist of his new article is this:

You know who totally agreed with my article?  The Ku Klux Klan.  And those guys have been around for, like, a hundred years or so.  They even have a website.  So they must have their shit together, amirite?  Amirite?

Well, guess what?  This has just happened.  No.  I’m not talking about Juan Williams.

I’m talking about Kay Hymowitz.  You may remember that I mentioned her pile of shit WSJ article[1] last week.  Well, when I saw that Echidne of the Snakes had a new post today entitled “A New Hymowitz Piece.  It’s Women’s Fault that Men Hate Them” I just had to go see how deep she’d dug that fucking hole.[2]

The entire article is an exercise in the First Rule of Holes.[3]  First, she decided to pick and choose her defenders from comments on random news websites.    I shouldn’t have to tell you just how fuck stupid that idea is.

There is one reason and one reason only to read the comments on a random news site.  If, for some reason, you are having a high level of hope for humanity and decide you just want to squash that right away so it doesn’t fester, go find yourself a nice Web 2.0 outlet and read away to your heart’s content.  You’ll soon find out that about 75-90% of the people who have the time and inclination to both read news articles and comment on them are sad, pathetic, angry loners who have no other way of getting out their serious message that everything that’s wrong with the world is that way because of uppity black people or uppity women or because the writer of the article is a moron who shouldn’t have a job.  Most of the rest are adbots trying to get you to click on their website that pairs horny Russian teenagers up with rich men.[4]

So, basically, everyone is a fucking troll.  Why?  Because newspapers don’t understand the one thing that every single blogger figures out as soon as they get more than two regular readers: moderation is key.  They seem to think that slapping up a comments thread is a quick way to drive circulation.  But, in reality, it’s just a quick way to find out that most of humanity possesses at least one absolutely abhorrent opinion about something.  And the joy of the internet is that they can congregate.

So when Hymowitz says this:

But a lot of the responses unwittingly proved my point—and another one: Men are really, really angry. Consider: “We’re not STUCK in pre-adulthood, we choose it because there aren’t any desirable American women. They’ve been bred to abuse men.”

My response is, “Yeah.  Good fucking job.  You found a self-absorbed, misogynistic asshole on the internet.  Want a cookie?”  But she’s not done yet, nosiree.

This fairly typical response that appeared at the Seattle Post Intelligencer website: “Sorry ladies. In the age of PlayStation 3s, 24-hours-a-day sports channels, and free Internet porn, you are now obsolete. All that nagging, whining, and stealing our hard earned cash have finally caught up to you."

Okay let me lay this out:  I own a PS3.  I own an Xbox 360.  I own a PS2.  I own a N64.  I own a Super Nintendo.  I own an original Nintendo.  I have DirecTV hooked up to three goddamn televisions.  I have high-speed internet.

I haven’t turned on any of my video game consoles in at least six months.[5]  I follow sports but rarely enjoy watching ESPN.  I don’t watch porn.[6]  I’m actually offended to be lumped in with the jackass who wrote that comment.  And you know what else?  Most of the men I know would feel the same way.

See, Mr. Seattle Post Intelligencer Commenter is a whiny, entitled jackass who is trying to make his whiny, entitled jackassery the fault of someone else.  This is what whiny, entitled jackasses do.  You can’t be a whiny, entitled jackass if you’re willing to engage in honest self-assessment and say, “You know, maybe the reason no one likes me is because I’m a whiny, entitled jackass.”

The problem is that if you’re the sort of hack idiot who does Phyllis Schlafly proud whilst selling out your own gender and the fruits of the women’s liberation movement, the only option you have to find men who agree with you is to find whiny, entitled jackasses.  You should also not be surprised to wake up and find the weeping ghost of Betty Friedan sitting at the foot of your bed.[7]    And just be glad you’re not getting the ghost of Susan B. Anthony.  I hear she will fuck your shit right up.[8]

Anyway, because the morass that is drive-by misogyny in the comments section of the Seattle Post Intelligencer just isn’t enough, Hymowitz decided to just drive the point home that she has no fucking clue what most men think.  And she did it with the boneheaded glee of child of sub-average intelligence running around in a poisoned candy shop.  To wit:

Check out the websites like names like MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), Nomarriage.com, or EternalBachelor.com (“Give Modern Women the Husband They Deserve. None.”). Or read popular bloggers like the pseudonymous Roissy, a ferociously caustic dissector of female “sluttiness” and “shit tests” (attempts to manipulate men). There are dozens upon dozens of gurus and counselors who publish posts like “42 Things Wrong With American Women” while chat forums ruminate over how “American Women Suck.”

As an experiment, I decided to see exactly how long it would take me to get offended by Hymowitzes list of e-supporters.  If you’re the sort of person who gambles on blog post and takes the over…sorry.  I clicked on the first (Not Safe For Anyone Ever) link.  I got this:

Below is an article published by the Times of India that attempts to reinforce the delusion that females-tending-towards-a-more-mature-disposition continue to perpetuate: "Women are at their attractive bets [sic] when they are 31— that’s the precise age when, according to a survey, they are considered most beautiful.”

For those keeping track at home, this is the very first paragraph in the very first post on the very first link Hymowitz slapped up.  It doesn’t get any better.  Really.  The article then asks the question, “Older women are attractive to who, for what?”

Because, really, what self-respecting man would want to bang one of those 31-year-old biddys, anyway?  Everyone knows that those dumb bitches are really past their prime once their old enough to graduate from college.  Really, 21-22 is the ideal age.  Their old enough to get drunk so you can tell the police that, yes, she consented.  She was just too fucking drunk to remember.[9]

Protip, Kay Hymowitz:  the whiny, entitled jackasses you went to in order to find men who would defend your excrement hate you.  How do I know that?  Well, number one, you’re a woman and they fucking hate women.  Number two, you appear to be above the age of 23.  And they hate old women more than they hate women, with “old” being any number above the number of Natty Ices in case they just bought so they can party all weekend with their PS3s and internet porn and whatnot.[10]

See, the problem with men isn’t that women suddenly have a place in the world.  The problem with men isn’t that they’re a bunch of boneheaded frat boys.  The problem with men is that some of them are whiny, entitled jackasses and you’re pretending that all of us are, therefore, like that.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is as simple as it is depressing.  As much as Kay Hymowitz hates and disrespects women, she hates and disrespects men more.  She just likes that the checks they write for her Aunt Kay routine pay the bills.  That being the case, she’s more than willing to pretend that the most odious of men are actually the ones who get it all right.

Now if only we could get the ghost of Virginia Woolf to pop in and tell Hymowitz to STFU.  She’s really fucking it up for everyone else…

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[1]Book excerpt.  Whatever.

[2]Since I was kinda busy at the time, though, I outsourced the initial outrage to Personal Failure.  She’s good at that sort of thing.

[3]When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

[4]Yahoo News comment threads: the most traumatic place on Web 2.0.  I think I’d rather watch 2 Girls 1 Cup.

[5]In the interests of full disclosure, I have been playing Mass Effect and Empire: Total War on my laptop a bunch lately.  But the point still stands, dammit!

[6]I spent all my time when I was a Christian assuming that if I ever watched porn I’d get addicted.  Then I actually saw some and I realized that it’s actually a waste of time.  I compare it to horror movies.  When I was little I assumed I shouldn’t watch them because they’d be terrifying.  Then I saw some of the ones that had scared me in commercial form and realized they were pretty damn stupid.

That said, a good psychological horror film can still be terrifying.  Event Horizon messed me up good.  Cube…oh, man, don’t even get me started on Cube.

[7]My desire to make a pun on “the feminine mistake” is overpowering right now.  I’ve decided to isolate it to the footnotes, where it can do the least amount of harm.

[8]For some reason I always have to look Susan B. Anthony up to make sure that I’m thinking of the suffragist and not the woman who, according to legend if not fact, made the first American flag.  Why I get Susan B. Anthony and Betsy Ross confused is completely beyond me.

[9]If you need me, I’ll be in the tub attempting to wash my soul.

[10]For the record, if you want to see some actual good articles about dating on the internet, you could do much worse than the oktrends blog sponsored by OKCupid.  They actually base their arguments off of statistics and hard evidence gathered on their website.  Particularly apropos to this discussion is an article entitled “The Case for an Older Woman.”  And, yes, that is an article written by a man.  Why do you ask?