Transcript of "Men not marrying? How deep does "the problem" go?"

Okay, so an online friend of mine was spitting mad after reading this recent effort on the part of I can only assume to be a traditionalist woman, in trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with men these days. As so many traditionalists and feminists before her, she missed the mark by a freaking mile, even though she did dance dangerously close (within 100 miles or so) of a few of the core issues that currently discourage men from being good little married drones like they're supposed to be, dammit.

Despite being critical of feminist attitudes that she rightly sees as anti-male, the article was absurdly gynocentric. It was very much about what women want, and there was a lot of expectation that men *should* do what women want when they want it--that is, get married and have babies on HER schedule as decided by her. One has to wonder if she even bothered to ask any actual unmarried males WHY they are refusing or not bothering to "man up" before writing her article.

But as I said, it did at least poke at the surface of the festering boil that is the systemic nature of "the problem", even if it didn't give it the lancing it truly deserved. Her conclusion was "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? And why get a good job when women are so independent they can just give the milk away for nothing?" Both are backhanded criticisms of women's behavior (yay, for someone brave enough to blame women for their own troubles), but they fall far short of any sort of true examination of the issues.

So I'm going to give it the old college try, and give a bit of an overview of what I believe has become a multifaceted problem.

A recent examination from Heartiste said a very great deal, and with some serious literary flair (pearls of wisdom from that pit of social nihilism that is the pick-up artist community). I'm just going to quote some of the relevant bits and leave a link to the article below:

If you want to know why men are running away from marriage, children and beta provisioning, one major reason is that the women available to these working class men are flat out disgusting. Take a look for yourself. What man of normal mental health and active libido wants to romantically woo and date, let alone marry, a beastly, waddling tatted mountain of pustulence with the issue of three other men barking and nipping at her cankles?

And let’s not forget that economically empowered and government-assisted women, slaves to their hypergamous impulse for higher status mates than themselves, can’t help but winnow the pool of men deemed acceptable marriage material. When women say “there are no good men left”, what the astute observer hears is “there are no good men left thanks to a combination of my increased expectations and decreased attractiveness.”

He goes on to say: 

to the factory-farmed ivory tower sociologists studying marriage trends and turning out paper after paper of half-assed hogwash: there’s a whole other world out there. It’s the world of men, and in that world, men’s desires matter. You should think about incorporating that ugly reality into your theories.

Hey, Heartiste--why don't you tell us how you really feel. As blistering as that little snippet was, it raises some very important points, I think the most important of which is that MEN'S DESIRES MATTER. When men cannot find women THEY desire who are willing to partner with them, why would they partner?

And I think it's important to note that the reality of divorce and family law in our culture plays a HUGE part in men's growing contempt for marriage as an institution. It's not that men are commitment-phobes. It's that women seem increasingly commitment-incompatible. The word "commitment" has in fact, in female parlance, come to mean, "up until the moment I'm no longer 100% satisfied with the person I married". And that attitude is only going to lead to more and more divorces as more and more successful women effectively set their sights higher than they reasonably should while their youth and attractiveness wanes, leading to a growing number of them feeling like they settled even if they didn't--even if they scored someone 2 points above them on the overall attractiveness scale.

And oddly enough, no one, least of all women, seem to really give a shit what MEN desire in a partner. Why can't men just be happy with what's available? Well, let's look at what's available to the *average* man in his 30s: a 35 year old woman who hollers yes over the jangling of her biological clock while unable to keep the grimace from her face because he's a bigger loser than the 5 guys she dumped in her 20s and now she has to settle, a divorcee who's already financially annihilated and emotionally crippled at least one man, and a single mother who's collecting reams of child support from one poor schmuck while her other baby daddy manages to duck his obligations because he's a drug dealer and his income's off the books.

And yes, I'm exaggerating, but you see my point.

And no, not all women are like that. But frankly, the consensus among today's women seems to be that this state of affairs is the new normal, and even responsible women will often frame such destructive choices on the part of other women as somehow valid and defensible. The sentiment in the mainstream is that men should just man up and go along with Pairing Up 2.0: Who Cares What Men Want?, that essentially, a given woman's behavior and life choices should have no effect on whether she is able to attract a good, reliable man...this does not speak well of the principles of even those women who are more well-situated. In fact, I think it's safe to say that the fewer female voices of reason there are out there the more men are likely to wash their hands of the entire idea of partnering.

But I honestly think it goes deeper than even the baggage the average unattached woman now carries, or the danger of ending up an emotionally and financially devastated statistic with "generous" every-other-weekend access to one's children that is keeping men from "manning up".

I've been thinking of the White Feather Girls. For those who don't know, it was a group of young women in the UK during WWI who bestowed a white feather of cowardice on any man they saw in civilian clothes, to shame them into enlisting.

And when I consider how vulnerable so many men were to those kinds of shaming tactics, vulnerable enough to enlist in a war that killed 10 million to preserve their manhood in the eyes of women they'd never met, I simply can't believe that it's only the risks of marriage, as onerous as they are, that have rendered men impervious to the kinds of shaming tactics employed by traditionalists and feminists who seem increasingly desperate to strong-arm men into their old roles.

I think at the very core of it, it's about a positive male identity. Male identity almost always revolves around doing, rather than being. Most of that doing has always revolved around being of use in a uniquely male context. Most of men's usefulness through history has derived from learning "male" skills and performing them well, embodying a male role in the service of women or society. In the more turbulent past, those roles needed to perform a valuable service to women or the community that women could not--or should not be expected to--perform for themselves.

This is the most common path to a positive male identity BECAUSE MEN LACK A MECHANISM FOR AUTOMATIC OWN-GROUP PREFERENCE. Simply put, they do not relate to other men automatically, just because they're men.

Women have this bias, which provides them a natural ability to form cooperatives, relate to other women, and seek consensus though their strong mechanism for own-group preference based on gender alone. Given their gender roles through most of human history, this mechanism makes sense. Their individual value as, to put it bluntly, breeders, meant that in a survivalist environment, you didn't throw a woman on the trash pile without a pressing reason. Adjustments were made when possible to keep as many women as you could within the sisterhood. This is where you find a ton of attention in female spaces given to things like "tone" and "being nice" and "getting along" even when there are disagreements. It's all about comfort level and feelings of acceptance.

Men, however, lack the hardwiring to form a preference for maleness based merely on maleness. And that only makes sense when you think about men's roles for the last couple million years or so--roles that involved things like beating the guys down the valley to a pulp when they threatened his women and children, and competing against other males within his community for a shot at the mating game. Given those roles, automatically siding with one's own gender over the other is...well, it just doesn't work.

And it's not that men cannot manifest a form of own-group preference, it's just that when own-group preference manifests in males, it can't be based on maleness alone. There must be a common purpose, a common set of ideals, a common duty or cause, a common doing or a common position in the status hierarchy.

Men can indeed identify with each other and be team players among other men--you see it in churches, military units, fraternities, sports teams and even sports fans, political parties, movements, project teams. While they will often form hierarchies within those contexts, those realms can be sources of a sense of loyalty and brotherhood among men.

The myth among feminists that men will insult each other for displaying feminine traits because they see women as inferior is just that--a myth. Men do this because women have a trump card that bestows intrinsic value on them--their uteruses--and they retain that value even when they gender-bend a little. A woman who acts like a woman is not seen as inferior. A man who acts like a woman has always been seen not as a woman, but as a "woman without a womb". He has no female value, and he has no male value. Therefore, he has NO value at all. And unlike women, men who were not "useful" did--and still do--get thrown on the trash heap of society.

In the currency of reproduction, an ovum goes for a thousand bucks, a uterus is worth a cool mill, and an ejaculation about 10 cents. To be acceptable mating material, and worth keeping around, a man had to do more than generate sperm. And when the only thing keeping you from becoming completely disposable as an individual lies in differentiating yourself from the feminine, well, guys gonna enforce that shit.

This is why men have always tended to define themselves by their roles. Father, husband, working man, soldier, career man, family man, middle class man, politician, activist, etc...in other words, roles to exist in which allow them to relate to other men who also occupy those roles, and to derive a positive and meaningful identity from performing their masculinity through those roles.

And I think this may be why suicide rates for men skyrocket after divorce--you have not just taken away his kids, his wife, his assets and a chunk of his income. You've effectively stripped him of a huge part of the male identity he's built around himself.

So I'm thinking that for most men, forming a positive male identity in relation to other males requires a couple of things--a male role that is differentiated from the female one (or at the very least, a male-oriented environment) and, well, positivity.

Men used to be able to derive a positive male identity from marriage. That is, through the respected and uniquely male role of husband and father. When that identity is increasingly characterized by society as superfluous, obsolete, or in the words of Harriet Harman, unnecessary to social cohesion, it is no longer a way for a man to defer his disposability, is it? Moreover, when that identity can be unilaterally stripped from him on the whim of the increasingly fickle and hard to please female even when he does everything right, marriage ceases to be a positive way for men to define themselves as men. It becomes a way for men to define themselves as chumps and idiots, and who wants to define themselves that way? Moreover, from sitcoms to romcoms to TV commercials, to billboard ads, the role of husband/father is increasingly one of playing the incompetent buffoon to sassy, smart, together wife or even child. In the mass media there is nothing noble or respectable about husbandhood or fatherhood anymore. Further, when the roles within marriage become virtually indistinguishable and interchangeable, a man's role becomes less and less...well, uniquely male. It's just a role. It can be a path to meaning and fulfilment (if he's lucky), and it may be something he desires to do and become, but it's not necessarily a path to defining himself AS A MAN.

So we can scratch that one off the list--even for men who've been living under a rock when it comes to divorce law. Marriage and children no longer offer a reliable path to a positive male identity. It is no longer positive, nor is it significantly differentiated from the feminine.

The workplace is yet another milieu that has largely lost its maleness. And that's not to say that women ruined everything. It is not so much the presence of women but rather the alterations in environment and interaction many women demand when they want to engage the world through the paid workforce. A male space that leads to a positive male identity need not be free of women, but it still needs to be male--men need an environment that suits their psychology, not one in which they must be metaphorically castrated in order to steer clear of trouble with HR. And I'm not even talking about vulgarity or expressions of sexuality, but aggression, ambition, ribbing, competition, passion, authority, and plain speech--all of these are often discouraged when women are present, in order to spare feelings and prevent discomfort. Outspokenness is replaced with drawing room rules of discourse and ingenuity with protocol, all of which render a feminized workplace, though tolerable to men, no longer a path to a positive MALE identity.

Because it is no longer a male space, and no longer appeals to the psychology of men, the workplace has become a ladder fewer men feel driven to climb in order to construct their identities. Combine this with the fact that we handicap men through quotas and affirmative action for women, well... a large number of men are not only becoming disenchanted with the expectation to perform in an environment that does not feed their natures and has set them up to fail--in the absence of those uniquely male-centered psychological rewards and motivators, a growing number are finally opening their eyes and waking up to the negative aspects of wage-slavery. And that is a pill that, once taken, cannot be unswallowed.

In every space males congregate where women have elbowed their way in and demanded changes, you seem to find large numbers of men giving ground and eventually losing their drive to perform there. And again, I don't think it's the presence of women that does this--it's the enforced necessity to change one's behavior in order to maintain a proper decorum around them, and the changes in how those places function that women often demand. It's the expectation that the environment and the men in it adjust to suit women's needs, rather than expecting women to adjust themselves to the environment.

A few bastions of maleness remain, places where women are often welcome right up until they begin to demand the environment change to suit them, at which point the male protests begin. Hell, you can even see this tolerance on the part of men when women sneak into the men's room when the line-up is too long for the women's bathroom. It's all good unless she takes offence at men behaving the way men do in a restroom by farting and pissing in her presence.

So where are men retreating to? The internet, and the few men's spaces that have not tailored their rules of conduct to suit women's easily offended natures and need for comfort. The MRM, where a common set of ideals and values bonds the community and allows them to define their maleness irrespective of society's or women's approval. A place where words and ideas are more important than the tone or the smiles that may or may not lie behind them.

The hierarchy and uniquely male objectives of the pick-up artist community, where competition and scorekeeping are indeed still allowed, where there are men for others to admire or to mentor, and where they thumb their noses at what women say they want. Society wasn't working for them, so they invented their own society and they're running with by their own rules.

Video games and related forums. Online venues where refusals to police speech are deemed misogyny and the men there don't give much of a fuck.

Men going their own way, who've taken a stand based on a realistic assessment of what's in it for them, and maintain their self-respect not by complying with society's expectations but by disregarding them.

Beer and buddies, hook-up culture, and part time jobs men tolerate but don't care about.

Gynocentrism--the manginas and white knights who supplicate and pander to the feminine even when it's ugly or amoral, differentiating themselves from the feminine through their blind worship of it.

And why? Because all of the "approved" paths to a positive male identity, the paths society both endorses and depends on, are gone. And even when men don't consciously realize this, they know it somewhere in the backs of their brains. Men have always worked and sacrificed and sweated and bled if they were rewarded with a means through which to see themselves as worthy of respect. But when every role society wants to cram you into is no longer a way to respect yourself, then it's time to throw those roles away.

And one thing the apexuals at the top, like Bill Bennett and Obama, feminists like Kaye Hymowitz and Katie Roiphe, and traditionalists like Suzanne Venker, will never realize is that using shame to try to coerce men to do what is expected of them isn't going to work this time, because while it's possible to shame a man into giving his life for his country if there's a promise of respect in it, it's impossible to shame someone into working his ass off and risking his future just for the joy of looking in the mirror and seeing Homer Simpson or Ray Barone looking back at him.

When the cost of society's approval is the self-respect you derive from a positive identity, it ceases to be worth it to a lot of men.

Transcript of "Fempocalypse!!!"

Okay, someone commenting on my last video scoffed at my assertion that unless our attitudes change, society will, sooner or later, reach a...well, let's call it a "fempocalypse". That is, that feminism will eventually help bring about an economic and social collapse.

Many people are simply unable to wrap their heads around that idea, because we've all been told, ad nauseum, that feminism is a cause of prosperity, when in reality, it is largely--perhaps entirely--a consequence of it.

I mean, let's consider patriarchy, or to put it another way, the social contract of marriage and fatherhood. This system benefitted all parties in a world of largely manual labor (much of it, since the agricultural age, beyond the physical capabilities of women). Remember that we are also a species whose offspring have one of the longest periods of complete helplessness and immobility of any on earth, and whose maternal parent lactates to provide nourishment to offspring for up to four years.

Because men were not burdened with the gestation, lactation and care of children, as individuals they could subsist and survive while expending only a small percentage of their capacity to perform work. When male animals of any kind don't need to do more than survive, there's often a great deal of lying around going on--and this isn't necessarily laziness, but efficiency. Expending more energy on work than you need to, especially when that "work" is physically demanding, negatively impactful on your health, and dangerous, is just foolish.

Because women were burdened with the gestation, lactation and care of children, because those children have a prolonged period of helplessness, and because women had no real control over their fertility until just a few decades ago, women were unable to work at their full capacity for a large portion of their lives, and I would suggest that during the periods of extreme vulnerability shortly before and after birth, unable to reliably and consistently perform the necessary labor to even keep themselves alive, let alone their very helpless offspring. 

The mutual dilemma was that those individual men who only had to expend a small amount of energy to subsist probably wanted to pass on their genes as much as anyone else did. And those individual women needed help and support in order to successfully raise their children in a world with no daycare, social safety net, maternity leave, baby formula or safe, easy jobs offering flex time and health benefits.

A man could not have children without the cooperation of a woman, and a woman could not raise her children effectively and safely without the cooperation of...well, someone.

And I'm going to borrow a bit from another blogger, Rob of the blog No Ma'am, and read a portion of his description of patriarchy and lifelong monogamous marriage, because he explained it EXTREMELY effectively.

When one stands back and observes the whole lot, we see that both males and females have a surplus and a shortage: 

Males have a surplus of labour but a shortage of reproductive ability. 

Females have a surplus of reproductive ability but a shortage of labour. 

Now, perhaps, you can see why marriage is an economic contract.

The male “sells” his surplus labour to the female in exchange for her reproductive ability. 

The female “sells” her reproductive ability to the male in exchange for his surplus labour. 

In order to “sell” something, you first must “own it” yourself, and upon “selling it,” you are agreeing to transfer ownership of it to the buyer. This is the basis of economics, and as you can see, it is based on property rights. 

In the economic contract of marriage, the female agrees to transfer the ownership of her sexual reproductive ability to the male, and she takes ownership of his surplus labour as payment for it. 

So, yes, while the feminists harp on and on that women were once “owned” as chattel, there is truth to this because in a very real sense, a woman’s sexuality became the property of the husband. He very much was considered to “own” her sexuality and the products of her sexuality (children). The children of a marriage became his property, because he paid for them. 

(Note that while the children of a marriage are supposed to belong to the husband, children born out of wedlock are the property of the woman. A woman who is not married owns her own sexuality and the products/children of that sexuality are also her property). 

This is also why, in the past, women were so much more harshly condemned for adultery than men. The wife's sexuality was no longer hers to give away. 

This is why, in the past, when a woman was raped it was considered an act of theft against the husband. Someone “stole” the sexuality which was his property. 

This is why, in the past, it was considered impossible for a husband to be found guilty of spousal rape. How can you possibly steal your own property? 

So, feminists are somewhat truthful when they claim that women were “owned” as chattel. A wife’s sexuality (NOT her person), was very much “owned” by her husband and it was in fact used as a means of production: The production of the husband’s own children. 

But, as always, feminists are only capable of speaking in half-truths. The part of the “women were owned as chattel” song leaves out the second verse, which is “and men were owned as beasts of burden.” 

Now as an aside, one thing I find very interesting is that a recent experiment with capuchin monkeys found that once you taught them the concept of "money"--chips that fit in machines that dispense food and treats--it wasn't long before the male monkeys were trading their chips for sexual favors, and the female ones happily obliging them and spending away on things like grapes and jello. And at its most basic, money is representative of labor. So the idea that a woman's reproductive capacity is a valuable commodity men are willing to pay for (whether through marriage or prostitution) is not a purely human social construct designed by men to oppress and exploit women. If it is exploitation, both sides are culpable. I mean, sheesh, considering how quickly those monkeys took to prostitution, is it any wonder it's considered the world's oldest profession? 

It also bears mentioning that an expectation of chastity in women was socially enforced under patriarchy largely in the service of women's interests and wellbeing--that is, a woman who had no husband to assist her in raising a child was bringing that child into the world at an extreme disadvantage, and putting herself at a disadvantage as well. 

And it ALSO bears mentioning that, because of the gendered roles of patriarchy, men were penalized with a great deal of social censure for not living up to THEIR part of the marriage bargain--that is, just about the only thing that could earn a person as much scorn as being a slutty woman was being a deadbeat, shiftless, layabout husband/father.

And it ALSO ALSO bears mentioning that the *lifelong* component of the  marriage contract arguably protected and benefitted women living under difficult socioeconomic conditions MUCH more than it benefitted men. Men's value in the "economic contract of marriage" was likely to increase over time as he accumulated job experience, savings and property, while a woman's value (her reproductive capacity) peaks very early, and disappears long before she'll die of old age. Lifelong marriage protected women from husbands who might abandon them when their fertility (and all her options) were gone in favor of someone younger--from a man essentially using up the best, most valuable years of her life, and then trading her in for a newer model. In a sense, he owed her "pension benefits" long after her primary contribution to the economic contract was gone.

A few other details:

Men who are married and have children--especially if they have a sense of ownership, in the philosophical if not property-rights sense, of their children--are more motivated to labor at full capacity. Historically, within marriage, when a child is born, a man will often scale up his participation in paid work. And it's been shown that divorced men who have no access to their children are the most likely to default on child support, while as access and involvement increases, so does the likelihood of him paying that child support in full.

Women are also, for the most part, consciously or unconsciously hypergamous. Even women who would never dream of uttering the words "I want to marry for money," usually have standards of success before they will consider a man a long term prospect. The standard, even now, is usually "as successful as, or more successful than, I am", and from many of the articles I've read from even feminists, disillusioned and still single in their late thirties, the idea of "settling" for most women often has as much to do with income/career potential as personality, sense of humor, or how often a guy is willing to do the dishes.

So let's look at why this social construct of lifelong monogamous marriage (with all its attendant shunning of fallen women, enforcing of gender roles and placing authority over children in the hands of husbands and fathers) has always been considered so important to society.

Well, in order for society to function, you need two things: Strong backs (literally or figuratively) to perform the necessary labor to keep everything going--to build the roads and plough the fields and slaughter the cows and haul the bricks--and people whose job it is to replace the strong backs as the old ones wear out. 

Men are very good at being the strong backs that were much more necessary in the past than they are today, and women are...well, good or bad at hauling bricks, they're the only ones capable of generating more strong backs to replace the old ones. It was very much in society's interest to keep women at that work, because without modern medicine and other such luxuries, infant mortality rates and lower life expectancies required more babies born in order to keep things chugging along. And I think it's important to note that the VAST majority of both men and women through history had zero access to educations that might help them perform work that didn't require lifting, lugging and frequently...well, dying.

Patriarchy worked very well for society overall, because it provided women with the surplus labor they required in order to raise their children in the best possible circumstances AT NO COST to anyone but husbands and fathers. And men's ownership of their children motivated the vast majority of men to do more than just subsist--to essentially labor at more than minimum capacity. That meant that a lot of work got done, and the economic surplus men generated was handed directly to the women who needed it. Of course this arrangement benefitted some women more than others (the ones who married rich), and some men more than others (the ones whose wives didn't turn out to be barren), and could easily benefit one party in a particular marriage more than the other. But for the most part, in its function as the smallest building block of society, it worked like whoa and like damn. 

In fact, it's been suggested by anthropologists that the Neanderthalers died out because they employed an egalitarian division of labor in a world that did not lend itself to maintaining and growing populations through equal distribution of labor and equal distribution of risk to life and limb, and once the hapless neanderthalers met up with modern humans, who had a more gendered division of labor based on prioritizing women's safety, it was all over for them.

And this is generally what has happened to all societies based on arrangements other than patriarchy--the few matriarchies that existed through history tended to be small, poor, and disappear the moment they came into contact with patriarchal ones.

Now I've heard some people posit that there's no reason to believe a matriarchal society can't be just as successful as a patriarchal one, now that the world, technology and the nature of work has changed. 

I think there is plenty of evidence already to the contrary. 

For instance, the UK has essentially become a partial matriarchy wrt the base unit of society. Neither children, nor women's sexuality, is owned by men--on the contrary, even children born into marriages are essentially more the "property" of the mother. In addition, single motherhood is a growing norm over there, with about half of all babies born to unmarried women, and at least 20% of children currently living in single mother households.

However, even now that we have safe, easy indoor jobs that pay decently, women still seem to require the surplus labor that used to be provided by husbands and fathers--in the form of maternity benefits if nothing else. They get that surplus labor now from the state. Men contribute a disproportionate amount of tax revenue to government coffers, and women pull a disproportionate share of the benefits. Women also get that surplus labor in the form of forcible extractions  through alimony and child support from divorced fathers, or from single men who often did not consent to become fathers.

The UK government has also been rather...blase about the idea of fathers having access to their children, and as I mentioned above, when fathers do not have access to their children they are generally less productive and pay less child support. Fathers who never wanted children are pretty much in the same boat as those who are banished from the lives of children they did want--especially since they are penalized for their productivity. The more they earn, the more is taken in child support. So not only are they not motivated to be more productive through a sense of ownership of their children, THEY ARE INCENTIVIZED TO BE EVEN LESS PRODUCTIVE than they might have been, because any surplus they generate will be seized anyway.

And because this surplus of labor is not willingly handed directly from men to women--that is, because it has to be extracted in one way or another from men--that means a growing bureaucratic machine taking it from men and handing it to women, eating a share of it as it performs this service. 

I keep hearing the term "nanny state" used by political pundits, but really, in effect, we have a "daddy state". Men pay into the system in taxes and direct payments, and women withdraw from it in the form of alimony, child support, tax benefits, subsidized health care, day care and housing, government sponsored after school programs, income top-ups, welfare and food stamps. Not every woman with children is a drain on the system, but women as a group very much are. Not every man pays more into the system than he takes out, but men as a group very much do. This is why the system works...for now.

But let's look at some of the other costs of single motherhood--especially when fathers are completely absent--through the statistical disadvantages to their children These children face a 2 to 10 times greater risk of:

• substance abuse
• truancy
• health problems
• being abused
• behavioral problems and personality disorders
• criminal behavior
• gang activity
• suicide and running away
• dropping out at all levels of education
• incarceration as youths and adults
• sexually transmitted diseases
• having children outside of relationships
• becoming teenage parents

So we basically have a lot of direct and indirect costs attributable to the breakdown of marriage as the base unit of society, all of which will increase as those last two pesky items--single and teen parenthood--beget more and more single mothers generationally. 

But wait, there's more!

When a man defaults on child support, we incarcerate him, to the tune of about $60,000 per year. This not only directly costs us, but we've also removed his earning and taxpaying capacity while he's incarcerated and further, have handicapped his ability to return to a productive role once he's released with a criminal record. We are essentially paying for him to become less productive and more of a burden. It's lose-lose!

Consider, also, that when a family breaks up, you suddenly need two households and almost twice the money to support the same number of people--all of that money flows upward toward corporate coffers, rather than staying in people's savings accounts and helping them build futures. And since women control 80% of consumer spending in the west, the more money you put in women's sole control, the more of it gets spent on consumer goods and bonuses for CEOs.

And the really awesome thing is it all looks great on paper, because a divorce actually boosts the GDP--anything that causes money to change hands boosts the GDP. To the bean counters, the harmful, rotten beans are just as good as the nutritious, fresh ones. A multi-vehicle collision that kills several people may actually up the GDP more overall (through money shifting to and from insurance companies, doctors, nurses and other medical staff, funeral homes, EMTs, tow trucks drivers, accident investigators, law suits, prosecutions, etc) than if it hadn't happened and those people had lived to a ripe old age. So a divorce might boost the gross domestic product, even though there is little that's productive about it--even though it actually increases poverty. It's the lawyers and their yacht salesmen who are getting rich, as well as corporations, mortgage brokers,  bureaucracies, credit card companies, and banks, not families.

Once a family breaks up, then both parents usually need to work at full capacity to provide a quality of life for all of them that will still be less comfortable than it would be were they still together. And the really awesome thing is, the more people you have who MUST work at paid endeavors at full capacity, the more competition there will be for existing jobs, and the more power corporations have to negotiate compensation downward. It hardly seems surprising to me that between the flood of bored housewives glutting the workforce after the advent of the pill, and the rise in divorce and single parenthood, wages have failed to keep up with inflation. 

At the same time, our demand for the things corporations produce--jobs and merchandise--only ballooned as the nuclear family disintegrated and all those single-dwelling families turned into multiple-dwelling families with twice the consumption rate. The more family is eroded, the more us plebes need both jobs and goods, and the more power those corporations have to up the cost of living through inflating prices (and executive salaries), while lowering wages at the same time.

Again--lose lose.

And as all this is going on, the machine required to extract men's obligations from them, to provide their surplus labor to women and their children, gets bigger and fatter and less efficient and more hungry, and the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us gets wider and wider as we find ourselves having to work harder to provide a decent quality of life to our children.

But wait, there's still more!

Remember all those kids from all those single mother homes? You know, the ones who face all those increased risks of a host of social maladies that will lead them to become burdens on, rather than productive members of, society?

Well, here's how that goes. 20% of men under 25 in the UK are considered essentially unemployable. The London riots were blamed on fatherlessness. And that much is true--the false part is in blaming fatherlessness on fathers rather than on a system where fathers are considered superfluous to their children's lives, other than as ATMs, and encourages women to force fatherhood on unwilling men by not holding those women fully accountable for their unilateral reproductive decisions. This system has had the effect of discouraging the development of long term partnerships by skewing the power balance fully in favor of women the moment things get bumpy, while skewing the accountability balance even more toward men than it was during patriarchy.

Various feminist organizations have been fighting tooth and nail against a presumption of shared custody or equal access after divorce since it was first proposed, and they throw around super-scary (and super-flawed, super-one-sided) domestic violence stats to do it. The moment you mention an idea like legal paternal surrender--which would, essentially, shift full ownership of (and full responsibility for) single women's sexuality onto those women--feminists almost uniformly take up the cry, "What about the children??" 

Feminism scrapped tooth and nail to make no-fault divorce a reality--not to make divorce as available to women as it was to men, but to make a unilateral divorce without wrongdoing by either party a legal reality. And lo and behold, now we have 70% of all divorces initiated by women, and the leading cause given is "dissatisfaction." Not abuse. Not adultery. Not even irreconcilable differences. Just, "I'm not 100% content." And then they claim that men denied custody or access to their children is "sexism against women," and alimony is "benevolent sexism" though it's "sometimes necessary", and therefore "too soon to do away with it."

Feminists fought and still fight for women's reproductive freedom, but they don't seem to worry too much about the lack of responsibility demonstrated by women's growing penchant for getting pregnant and having children out of wedlock at rates of up to 60%, at a time when they have almost total control over their fertility. And despite women having 100% power of decision over reproduction (no matter what the man does or doesn't do), very few feminists believe those women should be held 100% financially responsible for those decisions. Not only should abortions be free, but child support automatic. Despite having no say in any of these decisions, men are still held partly responsible, and we ALL are as well, through the increased social spending required to make all reproductive choices on the part of women as burden-free as possible. 

Reproduction may be women's burden, but it's their power as well, and feminism seems happy to not only indulge any irresponsible exercising of that power, but has suggested and implemented measures designed to ensure every decision a woman might make wrt her reproductive capacity, whether wise or foolish, comes with as little cost to the woman making it as possible.

And let's look at some other feminist initiatives. The pendulum in both basic and post-secondary education was already swinging in women's favor in the 80s, yet during the 80s and 90s feminists insisted on measures like gender quotas, affirmative action and women-only funding, as well as changes in primary school teaching (such as the whole language method) that raised outcomes for girls relative to boys (insanely, the whole language method has been shown to handicap both boys and girls compared to oldschool phonics--it just handicaps boys MORE). The swinging pendulum was thereby given a firm and expensive push in the direction it was already going, and we're seeing the results now.

Men are now the minority of high school graduates, and the majority of drop-outs at all levels. They are the minority of university students. There are more women than men alive today with high school diplomas and bachelor's degrees. Women under 30 in US cities now earn an average of 8% more than their male peers. 

And while quotas, incentives, gender specific funding and scholarships and similar measures should no longer be required to assist a demographic that is already dominating at all levels of education (other than stem fields) and already out-earns their male peers, no feminist organizations seem to think it's time to do away with them, or to introduce gender specific measures to assist men. We have prioritized women's opportunities for career success, at the expense of the success of men, and at great cost to all of us in all the spending it requires.

Now let's look at how that plays out in the real world, by examining the very cut and dried profession of medicine. Spots in medical school are limited, because the cost of training doctors is so onerous that tuition doesn't even begin to cover it. Money is given directly from government (and private donors) to medical schools to cover those "invisible" costs. So let's put a dollar value on the cost to all of us to train a doctor--let's say it's a half million dollars. 

Now let's look at the return on investment between male and female doctors. A male doctor will almost always end up working 44 hours per week or more for about 35 years. During that time, he'll pay flipping great wodges of income tax, and provide 44 hours or more per week of necessary service to communities. He is also more likely than a female doctor to work unpleasant but essential shifts--such as overnighters in the OR. If he has children, in all likelihood, he will work more, not less. And with his ginormous income, he generates spending power that pays off in sales taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, value added taxes and all that jazz. 

A female doctor usually has her first child within ten years of earning her MD. At this point, she'll take as much as a year off, and collect maternity benefits. When she returns to work, she will likely work 35 hours/week or less. If she has another child, she'll take another year off, perhaps more. And may opt to work even fewer hours if and when she returns. She may drop out of the workforce entirely at some point before official retirement age. A large minority of professional women have decreased to part time, or ceased altogether, their participation in their careers within ten years of getting their credentials. On average, male doctors work more hours per year and per lifetime than female ones. 

And when a huge percentage of your doctors are women, suddenly you find yourself waiting 3 weeks just to see your GP.

On average, we get a LOT more out of a male doctor in actual...you know, doctoring, than we do out of a female one, for our half a million dollar investment. And because that female doctor took one of a finite number of spots, well...we really are talking zero sum game--another qualified candidate was bumped so she could be trained. 

And that's not to say that motherhood is not important, or that she is not being productive. Just that she has not exploited her expensive training to its full economic potential, and she's given us a smaller ROI.

And while there are plenty of men out there who get university degrees we all help pay for and then do nothing with them, men are, over their lifetimes, more likely to pay that money back to us, and then some, simply because over lifetimes, men still earn more than women, pay more taxes, and take less out of the system. 

By prioritizing women in education at all levels, we have handicapped men's ability to be as productive as the system needs them to be to maintain itself. By encouraging single motherhood and allowing women to banish fathers from their children's lives, we're creating half a generation of boys who risk becoming unemployable and expensive burdens on the system as adults, and half a generation of girls who are more likely to perpetuate and exacerbate the problem by becoming single mothers themselves. 

By turning marriage into a risk for men that a compulsive gambler wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole if he had two brain cells to rub together, we've motivated men to be less productive than they otherwise would or could be. And by inserting a ravenous middle-man into the contract between men and women for men's surplus labor, we've only managed to increase the size of government, its mountains of expensive red tape, and the deficits it routinely operates on. 

The weaker fatherhood becomes as a concept, the weaker society becomes. Demoralized men in Japan have started a trend called "grass-eating", where 60% of men under 30 have no interest in marriage, children or getting a job that more than pays the bills. Japanese economists are freaking out over it, because women and children still need men's labor no matter how it changes hands, and Japan's economic dominance was built on the productivity that surplus labor generated.

So, to summarize:

Now that the transfer of surplus labor from men to women must go through a middle-man, who takes a slice of that pie only to get fatter and hungrier, you actually need more and more productivity on the ground to both provide for women and children, and feed the beast of government. In western countries, that beast has grown to 100x the size it was before women's suffrage, and has begun pulling out the visa card willy nilly--pledging the labor of our children to foreign governments to finance the largesse of today.

But what have we done? We've removed all the motivation men have to be economic generators by removing all the benefit to them of marriage and children, so more and more are refusing to do the 50 hour a week thing and are opting for part time jobs, beer and x-box instead. Others are simply so damaged and handicapped by the system we've created that they are incapable of being productive at all. So we actually have LESS productivity on the ground. And those children we're relying on to get us out of hock when foreign governments start calling in the debts, are only going to become less able to save our asses with every generation of them raised in single mother households.

Men paying a greater share of the taxes is what's been funding all of this. But because of our decision to prioritize women's educations over men's, this generation of men are now more likely to drop out at all levels of education, less likely to attend post-secondary, and already earn 8% less than women do under 30. We are actually handicapping the earning power of the people who fund the system women need, and prioritizing training and education for the people who are least likely to exploit it to its full economic potential. We are allowing women to banish fathers from their children's lives at no cost to themselves--in fact, the rewards to women for doing so are myriad and tangible--when we KNOW this disadvantages children and generates current and future costs to society. And we are disincentivizing men's productivity by offering them no realistic opportunity for children that are actually theirs, or marriages that will last longer than a few years, after which all benefit to them is gone, while all the costs and obligations remain.

And while economists in Japan are freaking out over Japanese men going their own way, men don't actually have to consciously go their own way to bring about a fempocalypse. They don't need to start rioting all over the place like in London, or begin waking up en masse to the fact that the "male privilege" they supposedly enjoy amounts to "shut up and get to the back of the line" the way it did at the Occupy protests. All that needs to happen is for us to keep right on giving women everything they want and keep right on marginalizing men, and eventually there won't be enough surplus productivity on the ground to hold up the increasingly bloated system women require, and it will fall. 

And no, not all of this is the fault of feminism. There are a lot of other factors paying into this fool's gamble. But feminism seems to be the one of the loudest lobbies out there demanding entitlements and freedoms that cost us all a crap-ton, and will only keep on costing, rather than paying off in return. 

Transcript of "Those privileged blue bundles of joy."

Okay, I had another topic planned for today, but then youtuber PasswordOVER9000 sent me a link to an article by a blogger at 5 cities 6 women called "When women don't want daughters."

I'd like to start with a caveat. When I got married, I was marrying two stepsons along with my husband, and our first child together was a boy as well. I remember being in labor with my second, and what I'd assumed would be my last, child, and gritting out between my teeth, "It had better be a girl!" If my daughter had turned out to be a son, I can't say my disappointment would have registered more than a 0.1 on the richter scale of let-downs, but with three boys already, I'll admit I'd been hoping for a girl. Little did I realize that my girl would end up less verbally and socially wired, and more rough and tumble than any of her brothers, more prone to using the kitchen chairs for evil, more ingenious at breaking gates and making a run for it at age two, using the oven racks to climb up on the kitchen counters before she was a year old, and more interested in leaping from heights that were potentially bone-breaking right from the time she started walking at 8 months.

She wasn't your typical girl, and she still isn't. She's not prone to a lot of the emotional maladies the article's author, Erin KLG, claims scare some women away from having daughters. She was tough on the blood pressure and I think I probably produced more adrenaline in her first five years than your typical base-jumper, but she was never "moody or dramatic", nor "manipulative and dangerous (to anyone other than herself)" nor "too girly," some of the justifications in category 1--Girls are harder to raise than boys.

My own daughter may have been hard on the adrenal glands, but she certainly wasn't hard on my emotions. And while I'd guess that girls are probably more likely than boys to be hard on a parent emotionally, well, that's as much about a parent's choice in how to respond to the negative behavioral traits more commonly found in girls than in boys. You can let those behaviors fly, and you can let them bother you, or you can tell her to pull up her big girl panties and that you're not buying her diva act today or any other day.

Boys and girls, in general, do present different challenges, and for a woman who was raised with, or by, a challenging female--a borderline, or a narcissist, or a manipulator, or a diva, or a drama queen, or a high maintenance princess--I can see hoping to avoid that particular set of potential challenges in favor of the "easier way". (And just to clarify that I put "easier way" in quotes, because just yesterday a friend called to tell me her five-year old son had been sent home from school early for intentionally peeing on the bathroom floor and intentionally plugging the toilet, because, in his words, "I hate it here, so I want people to have to walk in my pee." So as you can see, boys are ALWAYS much easier on a parent than girls.)

However, this is not my main complaint with this article. In fact, that part of the article was...refreshingly free of things I can reasonably criticize. Reason #2 as to why some women prefer to have sons, however, is...sigh.

#2: “I don’t want a girl because the world is harder for girls.” Surprise! It is! But when we’re not dodging rapists or avoiding math and science, we do like to have some fun (I mean, fun we can afford; our paychecks are only78% of our male counterparts’ checks). This is the camp that most of my friends agree is a more reasonable one – after all, it is The Truth. It’s hard out there for an XX. When women say this, it usually comes from a place of personal experience, and their hope is to avoid being part of a process that inflicts more pain on another human being – that is, giving birth to a girl. I can understand that.

Really. The world is "harder" for girls? I think the 80% of youth suicides who are male might have a thing or two to say about that. Or the 4 to 8 times as many boys as girls who are doped with ritalin so they can tolerate the modern school environment. Not succeed in it, mind you, because nearly twice as many girls as boys can read proficiently by the time they graduate, and boys' test scores and marks have been slipping year by year relative to girls--just tolerate it, while quietly and inexorably becoming a less fidgety but increasingly marginalized education underclass. Classrooms adjusted in the 80s and 90s to better serve girls have left boys adrift in a world where competition has been outlawed, amid a sea of pig-tail-wearing, socially savvy classmates who are a hell of a lot better at sitting still, being quiet, using their listening ears and doing reams of open-ended practice work.

In the school attended by my friend's toilet-plugging son, games like dodgeball and tag have been prohibited, because they encourage aggression and lead to bruises. The new, PC mantra, "We don't keep score here, we are all winners," stifles boys' natural competitiveness, and turns even sports into an exercise in going through the motions as pointless to boys as all that open-ended cutting and pasting and rote memorization. And when those boys then turn to video games to exercise the hardwired skills, learning styles and interests more common to them--hands on "doing", achievement, competition and score-keeping--that have been fully excised from the school environment, they're written off as lazy time-wasters.

Boys also have the insidious feeling that female teachers (the vast majority of teachers right up until high school) have it in for them. And the scary thing is, they're right. New research done in the UK found that female teachers scored boys an average of 3% lower than gender-blinded evaluators--subconscious contempt for all the squirming and disrupting, perhaps? And all that squirming and disrupting might explain why boys are suspended at 2 to 4 times the rate girls are, something that has been shown to negatively impact their likelihood to attend and graduate college.

In the case of my friend, a psychological evaluation of her son was demanded by his beleaguered teacher, and much to her dismay, he was found to be bright, emotionally intelligent and well within the range of "normal" by the psychologist. Oddly, in the three months since the psychologist suggested a number of strategies in dealing with him, his teacher has yet to implement even the simplest and most effective and effortless of them--to stop saying, "Can you please," and start saying, "Bet you can't." By simply making a request in the form of a dare or challenge, his performance went through the roof--if that doesn't tell you the sedate tea party of the modern classroom is a poor fit for boys, I don't know what will.

Still think boys have an easier time of it, Erin? Really?

Well, maybe this will make you stop and think. You mentioned the wage gap, that same old tired chestnut feminists of all stripes drag out to prove women have it worse than men--when in reality, when you explore the causal factors of the gap, you'd find the opposite. According to CONSAD, the US government and multiple other sources, the more variables you account for that are based on personal choice, the narrower the true gap becomes.

Same field, same amount of training, same age, same company, same number of uninterrupted years of work, same number of hours worked, same flexibility when it comes to inconvenient shifts and overtime, same level of absenteeism, same everything, and surprise surprise, you get the same wage. On the astronomical chance that you'll ever actually listen to a video that isn't filled with feminist propaganda, I'll direct you to the stellar series, "Why men earn more: the startling truth behind the wage gap."

Women earn less because they have the social and financial freedom to prioritize things like personal fulfilment, shorter commutes, flexible office hours, safety, nicely padded office chairs and family over their earnings.

Due to social pressures and gender enforcement, men are a crap-ton more likely to put earnings at the top of their priority lists, leading to things like longer commutes, camp work, more exposure to the elements, less personal fulfilment, less time with family, more hours worked per day, year and lifetime, inconvenient shifts, more travel, more overtime, and a risk of death on the job 20 times higher than that of women.

And for all of that, he gets paid more than a woman, the oppressive bastard. If he attends college, that is, something that young men are increasingly unlikely to do. Young women have a 50% higher likelihood of finishing high school, and a 50% higher likelihood of attending and graduating from post-secondary, which has in fact led to current average earnings for women under 30 in US cities that is 8% higher than those of their male peers.

Are you waking up yet, Ms. KLG?

Well if not, here are some other "perks" of being male in our culture. Aside from the higher risk of suicide and death on the job, your friend's little blue privileged bundles face at least 10 times the risk of homelessness, 20 times the risk of being incarcerated (with consistently longer sentences for the exact same crimes), a 3 to 4 times greater risk of being a victim of violent crime, an exactly equal risk of being a victim of domestic violence (along with a roughly 0% chance of being offered a bed in a shelter), an exactly equal risk of being forced into sexual intercourse (but the privilege of having it not be considered rape in 80% of those cases simply because the perpetrator was female), twice the risk of having a spouse initiate a divorce, 20 times the risk of losing custody of his children upon divorce, a higher death rate wrt 14 of the 15 leading causes of death, a lower life expectancy, and the understanding that despite this, roughly 8 times as much public money will be spent on the health of the opposite sex.

And some doozies that that little blue bundle of "privilege" gets to enjoy that girls and women NEVER will--the privilege of being forced into the burdens of parenthood against his will, the privilege of having a child he wants aborted against his wishes, the privilege of paying child support at age 14 to the 30-year-old woman who raped him, the privilege of being laughed at or jailed when his girlfriend or wife batters him, and all the potential joys of having his genitals mutilated as an infant, and then growing up to hear women freely opine on their preference for mutilated men.

And if that's not enough to convince you that boys do not and will not have it "easier" than girls, I will direct you to this lovely gem in your article:

By having a boy, they can breathe easier. This is why women fret over the safety of their future daughters, but not over whether their future sons will be rapists or serial killers. (And if you have had such a worry, I salute you.) By this argument, we worry about having a victim, but don’t change the structure that produces the victimizers. 

Really, Erin. Fucking really? You think that on top of all that stuff I just talked about, a boy's life is easier than a girl's, when a woman who is so absorbed with our culture's propagandized cult of vagina-gazing that she actually believes WOMEN are more likely to be victims of ANYTHING than men, believes it's somehow progressive for a mother to fret not about any of the hideous challenges their boys will face as they grow into manhood or those they will face as men, but about whether they're gestating a future rapist or serial killer?

You honestly believe that growing up in a culture so eager to equate maleness with all that is evil that we've sunk to painting boys as potential rapists and serial killers before they even emerge squalling from their mother's wombs only to have their parents encouraged by doctors to have half the skin and nerves in their dicks chopped off without anaesthetic, is fucking "privilege."

I think I'm starting to understand why the suicide rate in young men is so fucking high, Erin. Our culture is so determined to convince boys they're privileged when they are anything but, that when those boys actually wake up to the extent and extremity of the lie they've been told all their lives, it's not like finding out Santa Claus isn't real--it's the equivalent of watching Santa Claus being torn to pieces and eaten by his own reindeer, after which they piss on all the shiny presents he was supposed to deliver.

And if, after watching this video, you still believe your article is any kind of reflection on The Truth, all I can do is relay a personal message to you from my sons: Fuck you.

Transcript of "All those dangerous woman-haters!"

I've mentioned more than once how I've come across people who are able to get behind some--even many--of the causes championed by the men's rights movement, but who are essentially put off or even scared away by the anger, misogyny, aggression and generalizations of women (or even feminists) commonly found in MRM spaces. I think it's probably every other week that someone posts in r/mensrights on reddit that if only the gang would tone down the language, not be so accusatory toward feminism, and stop generalizing women, that they'd be more comfortable there, because...oh, because feminism did accomplish some good things, or because not all women are like that and it's unfair to generalize, or because anger and hostility will scare support away from the causes. (One thing I think these people don't realize is that men's advocates tried that for almost 30 years in the field of domestic violence advocacy, and I think we can all guess how well the whole "asking politely and calmly" thing worked for them.)

This squeamishness of would-be supporters when they're confronted with the levels of frustration in the MRM is kind of ridiculous, all things considered. When people's rights are trampled, you can expect them to get mad and to express that. And when I look at even mainstream articles, no one seems to be shy about generalizing men or masculinity, or criticizing large subgroups of men for either embodying masculinity or failing to embody it "properly". Hell, Obama's father's day address admonished black fathers--a demographic that faces some serious social and economic challenges--for failing to man-up to their paternal responsibilities. (Of course, there was no Mother's Day admonition toward black mothers to, say, woman up and not have babies until they're in stable relationships, or to facilitate their children's access to their fathers, when both behaviors heavily contribute to the problem of fatherlessness in the black community in the US. And why wouldn't he? Because that would be generalizing and unfairly critical, right?)

Anyway, a week or two ago, I stumbled across a video wherein a prominent and popular online feminist vlogger, Jessica Valenti gave a monologue on misogyny, and her estimation of the MRA community online, trying to portray it as some festering, oozing, pathogenic ulcer of misogynistic sentiment and hateful anti-feminism (who don't really do anything for men, no less). And from the histrionics and accusations of a recent commenter on my channel as to the misogynistic nature of my entire audience, I'm pretty sure Ms. Valenti isn't alone.

Okay, I can't say I was shocked watching Ms. Valenti speak on this topic, or even disappointed. I think it's fair to say I rolled my eyes so hard at her desperation to connect the MRM in any possible way, no matter how absurd, with misogynistic violence and hate, I may have actually sprained my eyeballs.

I can't be sure whether Ms. Valenti feels so threatened by any expression of maleness that does not comply with the drawing room decorum demanded by feminists, that she hied herself to her fainting couch before learning one damn thing about us, or whether she knows what we're about and is deliberately smearing the movement with the flimsiest of accusations, hoping that if she paints us all in a poor enough light no one will bother to go look and see if she knows what the hell she's talking about.

Neither possibility reflects well on her, or on others who agree with her.

First bit of ignorance, she conflates anti-feminism with misogyny, and immediately after, she conflates the men's rights movement with the game community (otherwise known as pick-up artists, or PUA).

A little background on the MRA/PUA thing for those of you who might be new here. Both "movements" are based at least in part on an acceptance of the empirically supported biological reality of gender differences in behavior and psychology. Both movements recognize the system we currently have in place, largely due to rampant and unchecked feminist advocacy acting in concert with traditional white-knighting, is...well, fucked. Annnnnd that's pretty much where they part ways.

MRAs want to fix the system, or create a new one based on real equality. PUAs either think the system is beyond repair, or don't care to fix it. After all, if they fixed it, they wouldn't be able to exploit and capitalize on all the openings provided by its fucked-upness in their endless quest for low-cost fun and poon.

MRAs often characterize PUAs as pussy-worshippers, while PUAs disdain MRAs as pointless and counter-productive beta-grovellers who could be milking the broken system for all it's worth if they'd just get the right attitude, some decent clothes and weren't so busy whining. There is a fair amount of cross-over as far as each being interested in some of the writings and activities on either side, but to conflate the two and lump them into one big bag of male discontent is as foolish as claiming fundamentalist islam is the same as Buddhism, because both are based on spirituality.

So to recap: PUAs are happy with the status quo, and even if they see a collapse coming, they're happy to fuck and drink and carouse all they can while it all falls apart. MRAs are trying to prevent said collapse.

Now these distinctions are important, because of the fact that unless someone like Valenti can connect the MRA and the PUA communities into some kind of organism with a common purpose, you can't say things like this: "George Sodini, the man who shot those women at a gym in Pennsylvania not too long ago this past year, was kind of peripherally involved with some of them online," in the context of a discussion of the MRM.

Because I looked for quite a while and the only connection I could find between Sodini and the men's community online is the fact that he attended a seminar on how to be more successful with women--I'm assuming he was there to learn Game. And you can be sure, if someone like Valenti had something more concrete, she wouldn't have been circumspect enough to say, "peripherally involved"--she'd have named names and told the camera exactly where and with whom online this guy was hanging out. So there it is. A single seminar on how to learn Game Theory.

So here's a guy who's arguably been slowly going crazy for a long time, who hasn't been laid in 20 years, who happens to attend a single PUA seminar in the months before he finally flips his nut and shoots a bunch of women, and this is indicative--according to Valenti--of the misogyny in the Men's Rights Movement, and that's how she can rationalize her way into saying: "So I do think that kind of paying attention to the misogyny and the anti-feminism that's happening online and the way that these men are bolstering each other and supporting each other in really violent views about women, it's something important that we need to pay attention to. Blah blah, hateful toward women, danger, blah blah blah, violent misogyny, violent views, blah blah, hate women, blah blah, no accountability online, blah blah, want to kill women, blah blah, place where people are like 'yeah me too'." And she can say all of that and frame it within the context of a discussion of the men's rights movement.

Because George Sodini attended a PUA seminar sometime before he went off his rocker, he is now ONE OF US.

Now, there was a lot of discussion in men's communities online about Sodini, and the very worst of it was pretty bad, but largely if not entirely confined to the comment sections of various blog posts, most of which occurred in the PUA community--a community of social nihilists, mind you, who look down their noses at the MRM for trying to fix the system that provides them with all that cut rate pussy. A few of those commenters praised him overtly or in a roundabout way, but most of the comments were of the "canary in the coal mine" sort--the kind you might see when a woman does something awful and people believe they know why, and then discuss the systemic problems that might lead to more people doing more horrible things of that nature for the same systemic reasons.

In other words, most of the discussion revolved around how the system marginalizes men, and how we can fix the system so that we DON'T end up with more George Sodinis.

Right or wrong, Sodini felt that our feminist society had cheated him out of any kind of normal or decent life. A lot of people in the MRM feel the same way to one degree or another. So I'm going to repeat this: most of the examination of Sodini in the men's rights community was about how society can change so that we don't get more Sodinis.

But it seems that the very fact that men were discussing it in the larger context of systemic discrimination against men rather than simply condemning Sodini as a monster and then shutting up about it...this is a clear sign to feminists like Valenti and other hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers that MRAs hate women and have violent views about women. Despite the fact that on most MRA blogs, any kind of incitement to violent action, either against isolated women or against the system, is swiftly and sternly rebuffed, and even though MRAs want to fix the system that creates men like Sodini, it must have been MRAs who brainwashed Sodini into hating women enough to kill a bunch of them.

Oh, noble Jessica, and noble noble feminism, a movement that is benign and peaceful and has everyone's best interests at heart.

So I was just thinking we should examine another famous shooter, one who went by the name of Valerie Solanas.

For those of you who don't know, Solanas is the feminist author of the infamous SCUM manifesto, whom many feminists today have tried to characterize as a satirical work (yet more revisionist history right there, but I'll get to that in a minute). Another feminist told me just the other day that it was, at its heart, wholly nihilistic, calling for the end of humanity altogether--which I found interesting, since the manifesto actually calls for the systemic extermination of the male sex through violent rebellion on the part of women, after which said women could live the rest of their lives in peace, at which point why would any of them want to burden themselves with children. To conclude that the main point of the manifesto was some sort of egalitarian vision of nihilism wrt humanity as a whole is basically equating the genocidal killing of males with the free choice on the part of women to not spoil their male-free Utopian existence by having children.

In other words, the brutal murder of a man is exactly the same as a woman choosing not to have a baby, in the mind of at least one feminist I've spoken to.

Solanas' other claim to fame was as the person who shot and nearly killed Andy Warhol. She actually attempted to kill three men that day, shot Warhol and art maven Mario Amaya, an associate of Warhol's, and put the gun against the head of Warhol's manager, Fred Hughes, at which point the gun jammed. If the gun hadn't jammed, there's no reason to believe three men wouldn't have ended up dead.

Not as well known to most is the fact that Warhol wasn't even the man Solanas had set out to kill that day. Her intended target was her publisher, Maurice Girodias, whom she felt had wronged her. As a condition of him publishing the SCUM manifesto through Olympia Press, which he owned, he'd required her to give him the right of first refusal to all her future work. This is a common clause in publishing contracts, and simply stipulates that the author will bring all future, or all related, work to that publisher first, at which point the publisher can offer for it or decline, and the author can accept the offer, negotiate better terms, or decline altogether and offer it elsewhere. Ms. Solanas took this agreement to mean that Girodias now owned the copyright to all her future works. So clearly if the redundant and meandering, incoherent drivel of the manifesto itself was not indicative enough of the woman's extreme level of crazy and stupid, the fact that she never bothered to ask anyone what that agreement meant--either before complying with it or after, or indeed before setting out to kill because of it--should be evidence enough of some serious deficiencies.

When Solanas went looking for Girodias, he wasn't at his office. For whatever reason, she decided Warhol would be a suitable stand-in to vent her spleen at men, and claimed to police and at her hearing that Warhol--who had done nothing more than give her a couple of bit parts in two of his movies--had "too much control in her life", had her, "tied up lock stock and barrel" and was "going to do something" to her that would have "ruined" her. At her hearing she insisted she was right in what she did and had nothing to regret. After some very well-needed stints in Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, she pled guilty to reckless assault with attempt to harm, and was sentenced to three years. She was reported at that time to be dedicating "the remainder of her life to the avowed purpose of eliminating every single male from the face of the earth," and though aware of the feminist movement of the time, she considered them a "civil disobedience luncheon club."

In essence, even the most radical second wavers were not radical enough for Solanas. They might hate men, they might want to liberate themselves completely from men, but they weren't prepared to eliminate all males from the face of the earth--at least not yet--so Solanas had no time or patience for them. They were merely "playing" at being feminists, apparently.

But as much as Solanas couldn't be bothered to associate herself with the radical-but-not-radical-enough feminists of the day, those feminists practically jumped at the chance to associate themselves with her, once she flipped her nut and pulled a Sodini.

Robin Morgan, a prolific feminist author who eventually became editor of Ms Magazine (arguably the most influential feminist rag there is) joined demonstrators demanding Solanas' release from prison. Ti-Grace Atkinson, feminist author and then president of the NY chapter of NOW, praised Solanas as "the first outstanding champion of women's rights." Florynce Kennedy, a lawyer and active member of NOW, who went on to found the feminist party and the women's political caucus, called her "one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement."

Wow. So if a few comments on PUA blogs sympathetic to George Sodini is a sign that the Men's Rights community online is filled with misogyny, what does the fact that prominent feminist writers and thinkers beatified Valerie Solanas say about misandry within feminism?

And it's not like I have to go very far back in history to find feminists glorifying violence against men and pedestalizing the women who commit it.

Lorena Bobbitt, whose initial statement to police--according to the NY Times--was "He always have orgasm and he doesn't wait for me to have orgasm. He's selfish. I don't think it's fair, so I pulled back the sheets and then I did it,"--was hailed as a national folk hero, an obviously terrorized battered woman striking back at her oppressor. Never mind that there was plenty of evidence of reciprocal violence in that relationship. Never mind that he was in the process of leaving her, and they'd been discussing divorce.

The feminist narrative reared its ugly head, and the case was crammed into that model, complete with a rape accusation that could not be proven in a court of law, and a story that repeatedly changed gears, from her initial statement onward, to fit the dogma of domineering, abusive husband and terrified, cowed wife. Before she had even she cried abuse, the feminists of North America picked her up on their shoulders, a display of sisterly solidarity with a violent offender that culminated in carnival-style demonstrations outside the courtroom, including the dispensing of cocktail wieners slathered in ketchup, t-shirts extolling the sweet virtues of revenge, and feminists selling buttons nominating Bobbitt for surgeon general.

Mainstream magazines hailed her as a feminist heroine, and perhaps most disturbing, a major feminist group in Ecuador, Bobbitt's home country, not only bankrolled her defence, but threatened to castrate 100 innocent American men if she went to prison for mutilating her husband.

Nope. No misandry evident in any of that. Or violent sentiment. Or terrorist leanings. At ALL.

I mean, feminists must be super-aware of terrorism, since I've been warned by well-meaning feminists that supporting men who go their own way is an act of terrorism because MRAs sometimes use harsh or colorful language, so I'm sure the vast majority of prominent feminists loudly and firmly condemned that group in Ecuador for the terrorists they are, and admonishing the movement as a whole for associating with such groups....oh wait. Never mind.

Anyway, even as recently as a couple months ago, the very same danger Ms. Valenti claims runs rampant within the men's communities online--the danger that "because there's no accountability online the same way there is in real life, all of a sudden you can say like, "yeah, I hate women, I wanna kill women," you can say that online and not only will you find a place to say it, but you'll find a place to say it where people are like, "yeah, me too.""

Which brings me to a little corner of the online, feminist universe called RadicalHub, and some lovely quotes found there:

A feminist child care worker, speaking about the boys in her care: "I honestly have been reassessing the fact that I am giving care to these little future rapists....I know it is kinda going against my principles to support and care for these little fuckers."

A feminist web developer: I'm one of those bad, shameful feminists who wish we could all just kill the fuckers (whether it's a practical tack to take or not).

A feminist and fellow Canuck: "Females don't have to kill baby boys. Just not nurture them. Females are forced to birth baby boys, but beyond that a female's physical actions are her own. Males will die without the constant infusion of female energy that they get from our wombs and from our lives.... Females need to not be emotionally and intellectually invested in a male future."

A UK feminist lobbyist: It needs to be so unfashionable to have boys, and then they would be aborted before seeing the light of day...violent revolution is the only answer...

And a feminist and bestselling novelist: ...your proposal to exterminated the male entirely a la Solanas is to me more of a last resort.... I assume you object that lowering testosterone levels would not necessarily end the oppression. You may be right.

These aren't random, unemployed internet kooks who live on chee-tos and haven't seen the sun in years, either. They're lobbyists, community development coordinators, they work for Arts Councils and Chambers of Commerce, teach special ed and care for children, lawyers and bestselling authors. These are not basement dwelling losers, they're respectable people with jobs that involve public trust. Other contributors to Radicalhub include noted feminists, Julie Bindle and Sheila Jeffreys.

I'm starting to wonder just how atrocious a feminist would have to behave in order for others in the movement to accept the kind of guilt by association that they're so quick to apply to the MRA and men like George Sodini, whose association with the MRM consisted of attending a seminar on how to pick up women.

I don't understand how Paul Elam saying, "Men going their own way IS fucking feminists' shit up" qualifies as terrorism in the MRM, while a publicized threat called into several media outlets to sever the penises of 100 random American men if a violent woman spent a night in prison wasn't enough to so much as dampen the carnival atmosphere and feminist glee outside the courthouse at Lorena Bobbitt's trial. I really don't understand how feminists can now rewrite history and claim the SCUM manifesto was a work of satire, when not only did its author take it to its logical conclusion on a small scale, but other feminists of the day who have since risen to prominence lauded her violent and murderous actions as those of a feminist champion.

Seriously. What the fuck is going on? You put a monster in some strappy sandals and lipstick and suddenly it's not a monster anymore but a hero, or harmless? I just don't get it.

And at the same time, the moment a man gets angry or speaks passionately, everyone's ducking and covering because some lunatic who shot a bunch of women made some of the same criticisms of the system that influences all our lives, and attended a single seminar on how to pick up women?