The baby boom had a long fuse. While the social mass of having such a large number of people suddenly added to a culture would naturally displace the center of social balance toward the values of younger people, the impact of the boomers was disproportionately greater than the percentage of the population they represented. The reason for this unusually large impact came from the convergence of several long-term trends and influences which converged at the time of the boomer generation to produce a sort of “Demographic Perfect Storm” which wrought fundamental changes in the culture.
When I say they were used to “demolish” it, I mean to fundamentally change the values which had defined the culture up until that time. Any culture is defined by its values, and when you change those values you change the culture into something else. Using the social mass of the boomer generation like a wrecking ball, they were slammed into a culture which was already undergoing fundamental changes in social organization and the institutions which perpetuated that organization. The large scale trends that came together as the boomers were being born and raised were -
- Demographic Displacements and Shifts
- The Rise of Mass Media
- Consumer Culture and
- Marxist Thought.
First Demographic Displacements and Shifts
World War I was fundamentally about the end of the old hereditary aristocracies in Europe, but it had a subtle and unforeseen effect on the US as well. The long term trend of movement of the population away from farms, rural settings, and agrarian lifestyles toward urban settings and industrial employment got a huge bump from the servicemen leaving the farms to go off to war and not returning to the farms when they came back. Instead they tended to stay in the cities and feed the work force for the growing industrial output of the US.
About 1920, the first of two huge demographic crossover points was passed – when the majority of the population no longer worked on and drew their livelihood from farms, but instead lived in urban areas and was employed in industrial production or commerce. During the Depression and Dust Bowl eras of the 1930s, this rural to urban movement increased as many landholders lost their land and were forced to move to the cities and find employment where they could.
World War II was a repeat of the pulling of farm boys into the armed forces and then dumping them back in the cities, with the added twist of the GI Bill which allowed many of them to attend college who otherwise would have never had the chance to do so. This sudden increase in the proportion of the population with college degrees raised income expectations and did, in fact, result in increased personal incomes for a while, which in turn drove a growing housing market and the rise of “suburbia” as new living spaces were constructed on the edges of cities already at saturation point in terms of the number of people they could hold.
With the end of the war, the US was left with massive industrial production capacity but no longer had the majority of that output being destroyed by war and thus needing constant replacements. The suburban population centers with their newfound affluence and disposable income were one obvious outlet, as was post-war Europe and Japan in rebuilding mode. But, even with all those markets the unbelievable production of the US industrial engine would have soon saturated demand. The two concepts of “Planned Obsolescence” and “Conspicuous Consumption” were wedded with the newly emerging mass media of television to produce an advertising-driven culture of perpetual consumption.
No longer were people accustomed to producing most of their own needs like food, fuel, and even furnishings. They were entirely dependent on trading the wages for their labors with other people for all the necessities and luxuries of life. This played very well into Keynesian economics, or the “velocity economy” in which the economy was measured not by total wealth, but by how many times and how often a dollar changed hands.
These were the parents of the boomers, and the environment into which the boomers were born.
Consumer Culture
About 1960, one of the most profound demographic shifts in history occurred virtually unnoticed in the US: the number of people involved in the production of anything – agricultural or manufactured goods – slipped into the minority and there became more people involved in selling, distributing, or managing those goods than were involved in producing them. In other words, the US shifted from being a nation of producers to a nation of handlers. This laid the groundwork for being able to use such phrases as “service economy” or “information economy”, which would play a very significant role in how the expectations of affluence created by the circumstances of the boomers’ upbringing would be met as they moved into and through adulthood.
The boomers were raised on a steady diet of television, parental competition to “keep up with the Joneses”, and the repeated refrain from their depression-era parents that “we don’t want our kids to have it as hard as we had it.” They were also indoctrinated virtually from birth that they would carry on the tradition of being college educated which may have only started with their parents, but which was definitely seen as the key to “a better life” – which at that time generally meant “having more stuff.”
The Rise of Mass Media
After WW I, two new mass communication technologies really began to take off and spread – film (movies) and radio. These two technologies covered two very important aspects of culture – information dissemination and entertainment. Radio had the advantage over print media like newspapers in being immediate and timely, as well as being one step closer to direct human experience – hearing is a direct sensory experience, while reading requires intellectual processing and literacy in addition to sight. Literacy was far from universal at that time, so people could be reached by radio that could not be reached by newspapers, books, or magazines.
Film put the experience of “theatre” within the reach of the common people. While everyone might not be able to afford tickets to a Broadway play, almost everyone could scrape together the 5 cents for which they could purchase an hour or two of complete escapism. This escapism gained even wider appeal during the Great Depression when a great many people had really difficult lives from which they loved having the ability to purchase an hour or two of complete escape.
The film industry spawned an interesting side effect based on the social tendencies of people – the phenomenon of celebrity. Stage actors and other entertainers had always had a degree of fame and celebrity, but the mass market venue of film provided a much broader potential audience and a whole host of new niches for celebrities to fit into and exploit. It was possible to have only so many great Shakespearean actors or operatic divas, but movies provided the opportunity for many different types – from the buffoons of the 3 Stooges to the cowboy actor – to gain a following.
Radio and film merged their potentials in television. Sight, sound, and immediacy were a very potent combination. The propaganda potential of radio was well recognized and exploited in the years leading up to WW II and during the war, and the advent of television on a mass scale made it a propaganda device on steroids. In addition, it also made a very nice consumer good to occupy those factories, as well as being a self-perpetuating outlet for consumption because it created demand through advertising.
Radio also spawned a related industry which would eventually come to figure very heavily in the “information economy” to come – recorded music. While it was a product with some continuing market from its introduction up through the war years, it really started to become a force in its own right when presented with a market comprised of suburban teenagers with lots of time on their hands due to lack of involvement in any economic activity but still with disposable income.
So, all the fragments were arranged – massive production, massive consumption, high degree of wealth relative to what had gone before, mass media with both propaganda potential and the ability to create demand for consumer goods by emotional manipulation, and a number of products with no direct need or worth as necessities of life which were easy to produce and easy to distribute – when the baby bomb was detonated and sent those fragments tearing through the foundations of cultural values.
Marxist Thought
Now the plot thickens.
All of the above is merely descriptive – laying out the conditions that existed when this huge mass of new future citizens was dumped onto the scene.
Marxist thought goes back, of course, to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. However, the portion I’m going to highlight starts in 1917 with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Rob has covered this extensively, so this is going to be an extremely brief synopsis. For a far more complete picture, go to http://menforjustice.net/library or http://no-maam.blogspot.com.
The Russian revolution failed to spark the world-wide uprising of the proletariat to kill the capitalists which the Marxists had expected. In analyzing the reasons why it didn’t, Marxist theorists saw the cultural institutions of religion and religious values, family, patriotism/nationalism, and education as being too strong in maintaining and transmitting cultural values for such a major shift to take place. In order for the Communist revolution to come about, those institutions would have to be weakened and undermined and the cultural values they transmitted be destroyed.
One of the best ways to go about this was to deal with people’s baser appetites and motivations and weaken their intellectual and moral control of their behavior. A perfect model of how this might be accomplished was provided by Freudian psychoanalytic theory with his “id, ego, and superego” – the id being the reptilian brain and the animal appetites and emotions, the superego being social and moral consciousness, and the ego mediating the conflicts between the two. Appealing to the id, and weakening the superego, puts the ego in service of the id.
The Frankfurt School was a center of Marxist thought established in Germany in the early-mid 1920s. Their goal was to meld psychoanalytic thought with political action as a way of weakening cultural institutions supporting restraint, by endorsing hedonism and short-term gratification. The prime strategist was a man named Antonio Gramsci, who laid out a plan for a “Long March Through The Culture” which would leave every cultural institution which had defeated the Bolshevik revolution in a pile of rubble in its wake.
So, now the stage is set.
Fearing the rise of National Socialism, the Frankfurt School relocated to New York in the mid 1930s. Most of the members were Jewish, so they had real reasons to fear the anti-Semitic sentiment which was rising in Germany, and they were able to come into the US without attracting much attention because of the large influx of other Jewish intellectuals and professionals fleeing Germany for the same reason. Once here, they set out to infiltrate and become strong influences in the media, education, and psychotherapeutic communities. There was an easy symbiosis between these, particularly due to the chic and trendy nature of psychoanalysis in the post WW II US.
Despite the way that McCarthy has been ridiculed and demonized, there really were communists active in the entertainment industry during the post-war years. They didn’t concentrate as much on strictly Marxist themes as they did on indirectly attacking cultural values. Instead of a direct attack on religion, for example, a competing idea of nihilism was introduced and promoted – e.g. “Rebel Without A Cause.”
The boomers were sitting ducks for all this because they were children in the stage of life when the purpose and goal is to learn and internalize cultural values. Instead of the parents, churches, and communities which provided most of the input for previous generations, the boomers were raised by television, radio, and film. The monumental sexual drives of adolescence, which every culture has to find a way to grapple with and restrain, coincided with a generalized loosening of sexual mores and restraints. More and more sexual imagery started appearing, and the Pill conveniently arrived – separating sex from reproduction and making “recreational sex” a real possibility – just as the first boomers hit puberty.
During the “turbulent 1960s”, there were two major cultural phenomena which strained generational relationships even more than the classic and inevitable tensions between the old and the young – the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. The high level of distrust engendered among young people for the older generations, the “establishment”, was captured in Abbie Hoffman’s famous dictum “Never trust anyone over 30.” ”Traditional” values were seen as corrupt, exploitive, capricious, and often dishonest. A major youth movement/trend developed whose participants were called “Hippies” with values directly opposed to and reacting against the values of their parents and older generations. It was actually termed the “counter-culture”, which was an very accurately descriptive term because the values which defined it ran directly counter to prevailing cultural values of the time. ”Sex, drugs, and Rock’n'Roll” was the mantra, “Make Love, Not War” was the passion, and “Free Love” was the ideal goal. Hedonism became the highest good, and even members of their parents’ generation wanted to join the party and have some fun. The developmental period of adolescence got greatly extended, with many parents sitting down to smoke dope with their own kids, if not being the ones to introduce their own children to the drug subculture.
The expectations of affluence, plus the expectations of their parents, plus the Vietnam War sent the boomers to college in unprecedented numbers. Here is where the Frankfurt school had really been busy. A huge number of their members had achieved professorships in prestigious institutions, and by the late 1960s they owned the academy. Hardly any discipline outside the hard sciences was untouched. Their thinking pervaded the social sciences, the arts, philosophy, and even theology. The boomers were at college to LEARN, so that is what they did. Few had the critical facilities to question and analyze what they were being taught. Some of us renegades who did question saw the early beginnings of Political Correctness taking shape as refusing to conform to the ideological indoctrination would be severely punished. If you wanted good grades, and that meant the carrot of a “good job” that they dangled in your face, you toed the party line.
And, into this volatile mess, they injected feminism.
The family, paradoxically, was at the same time both the strongest cultural institution and one of the easiest to attack. The age old tensions between men and women, dubbed “the battle of the sexes” were easily exploited to get women to see themselves as an “oppressed” class. The sexual revolution was in the news, but not in everyone’s minds yet. The boomers were raised mostly under the old cultural mores and values regarding sex, and then suddenly turned loose with a new toy they weren’t quite sure how to play with. Mis-cues and misunderstandings between the sexes on what sexual “liberation” actually looked like were easy fodder for exploitation in the next phase of the gender war – the escalating issue of “rape.”
The establishment of “Women’s Studies” departments in the academy metastized the cancer, and gave the hard core haters an entrenched “bully pulpit” from which to spread their Marxist theory and hatred against the “class” of men.
Boomer men were on the horns of two-pronged dilemma They were at the stage of their lives when their primary goal and task was to find a mate and form a family, yet their pool of potential mates was developing values which were fundamentally different than the values that men had been led to expect to find in the women they would choose as wives. Trained in one set of skills and attitudes that had been attractive to women in the past, men were now finding women who were not attracted by those characteristics and were demanding something different. However, the specifics of what was demanded no longer followed any sort of cultural pattern but were mostly based on the preferences of individual women – their much vaunted “choices.”
No-fault divorce and the rise of “rape consciousness” fundamentally changed the relationship dynamic within marriage. The idea that a man could be convicted of “raping” his wife totally erased the long held tradition of “marital duties” and turned sex from being part of the foundation of the relationship between man and wife into an instance-by-instance exercise in the gratification of personal whims.
The Marxist concept of “class oppression” combined with the sex-fearing dysfunction of women like Susan Brownmiller severed the most basic marital bond in one blow.
This class warfare was extended by placing all sexual activity on a “continuum of oppression” and set up a situation and consciousness that men could not possibly do anything but lose – the fundamental attraction between the sexes which is essential for the continuation of the human race became proof of “oppression” and a constant and perpetual source of justification for claims of female victimhood. The class consciousness of the “sisterhood” hoodwinked women into believing that they had more in common with women living on the other side of the world, or with women who had lived and died years before they were born, than with the man with whom their shared their bed, their children, and their lives.
This “unity based on type” was exactly what the socialist and union organizer Eugene Debs was saying when he said -
“while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
“Brotherhood” and “sisterhood” are the same basic concept, and are illustrations of the same type of “ideology over everything else” that sometimes found members of the same families, sometimes even biological brothers, on opposite sides in the US war between the states, or civil war. A woman might have a splendid life – a comfortable home, a loving husband, decent kids – but as long as there was one woman anywhere who was “oppressed”, then so was she. ”
“The personal is political and the political is personal” destroyed people’s ability to have personal relationships and turned all relationships into political relationships. A man and a wife might be having a typical couples argument, and suddenly the man became responsible for the mistreatment of women in the Middle East, the binding of Chinese women’s feet, and the lack of women’s suffrage a century ago.
In the face of this onslaught, most men felt an unbelievable sense of betrayal, but they were stuck in marriages to these women and their only choices were a lifetime of conflict or to just surrender and give in. Most men chose keeping their family together over falling on their swords of principle, and just caved in. Some even went so far as to exhibit a form of Stockholm Syndrome and became dedicated feminists, denouncing themselves in weird displays of schizophrenia and self-abdication.
Those that didn’t soon faced the Soviet-style “re-education camps” created by the DV industry which was based on the Marxist idea that all Domestic Violence was a conspiracy by men to perpetuate their “oppression” of women. There is no more purely Marxist bit of thinking at work in feminist countries today than the Duluth Model of domestic violence.
Demographic and economic shifts, and growth of mass media and consumer culture continue
This gradual infiltration of Marxist thought occurred against the backdrop of continuation of the social, economic, and cultural trends which took off a half century before. During the 1960s mass media exploded. For many years there had been only 3 TV broadcast networks and only people living in or near major cities had access to all three. As the distance increased, reception decreased and people living 60 or more miles from an urban center often could only get all 3 stations reliably if the weather was clear. Throw in a bit of rain or fog and most people got vague ghosts on the TV and slightly warmed rain or fog between them and the broadcast tower.
These remote communities soon saw a business opportunity open up in the form of Community Antennas, or Cable TV. Entrepreneurs built huge towers and installed signal boosters, filters, and amplifiers and delivered the signal to homes via coaxial cable. The low cost of this kind of distribution system led quickly to the development of original content specifically for cable, which eventually became cable networks like HBO, Cinemax, and MTV. The expansion of content drove up demand, and demand drove the expansion of content. An entire new “industry” was born which in turn spawned many new jobs.
The transition from a nation of producers to a nation of handlers in 1960 was the key to an economy which would have to absorb more new workers than ever before in history. A purely production-based economy could not have done so because there were not enough markets to absorb greatly increased output. At the end of the decade of the 1950s, the US, with 2% of the world’s population, was absorbing over 50% of the world’s industrial output. The rebuilding of Europe and Japan were essentially complete, so any increase in production would require opening new markets. But, opening new overseas markets would require spurring development in those areas so that those countries would have something of economic value to exchange with the US. Only a strategy of globalization provided enough potential for perpetually expanding markets, and one of the first functions to be “outsourced” to other countries was industrial production.
This fit perfectly with the white-collar expectations of the new generation who never once considered following in their fathers’ footsteps and becoming blue collar workers.
The boomers were a double-whammy to the labor market because not only was a larger number of men than ever before looking for places in it, but also a large number of women were following the feminist script to compete with men economically and for the available jobs. The “service economy”, and “information economy” ideas led to the rapid development of a generalized “managerial” class, which required skills which transferred seamlessly into a rapidly growing government bureaucracy.
As the boomers seeped into the workforce between 1964 and about 1986, the economy slid into the doldrums. The petroleum crisis in the mid 1970s ended cheap gasoline, dealt a crippling blow to the US auto industry because they were too slow to respond to trends and downsize their offerings, and opened the US market to Japanese autos of much higher quality than the US produced models. Globalization had begun in earnest.
Interest rates spiraled out of control in the early 80s, going over 20%, which depressed the housing market and sent ripples through the rest of the economy. The displacement of farm families of the 1930s was repeated as rising fuel costs and a weak economy forced a large percentage of the remaining family farms out of business.
Through all this, men and women had been stroking away, coping as best they could, trying to work out some sort of new balance and mixture of gender roles, and managing to get along.
And then the feminists unveiled the nuclear device of the gender war – the redefinition of normal sexual relations between men and women as “rayyyype!”
The notion of women as an “oppressed class” had simply failed to gain the traction it had needed to completely split the normal attraction between the sexes, so the obvious strategy was to attack that attraction itself. Susan Brownmiller had laid the conceptual foundations in the mid 1970s with “Against Our Wills”, and Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin had carried the water of the concept forward with sexual harassment law and Dowkin’s sex-hating, man-hating, prose. All it took was for Mary Koss to fabricate her bogus bit of research in which she mysteriously “found” that “1 in 4″ women were being “rayyyyped” and the wedge to sever the trust and attraction between the sexes was set.
The feminist movement had pretty much stalled because most women still didn’t see their husbands, brothers, fathers, and male friends as the enemy. People were slowly working out new roles and people were adjusting to dual income families. The Equal Rights Amendment had failed back in the 1970s, but the real barriers to the kind of equality it envisioned were more in the slowly changing social attitudes. Things had changed blindingly fast as social change normally goes, but still not fast enough for the feminists.
And then, along came Susan Faludi, with her Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.
If there ever is a trial for war crimes of the gender war, I hope Faludi hangs. Despite what were actually huge strides toward a new more equal social system, including the fact that women had been getting the majority of college degrees for a full decade, she dismissed all that and re-kindled the sense of victimhood among women of a certain age group. There wasn’t a war before her book, but things certainly became one as a result of it.
In the brief cultural span of less than 50 years, every social value which was in place half a century ago has been swept aside. The idealistic boomers, fresh out of college with their Marxist ideas went into every aspect of government, and rode Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” into a welfare-therapeutic state where they controlled education, social services, and most branches of government as a result of having become entrenched in the multitude of bureaucracies spawned by the notion that every human problem could be solved if you just threw enough money at it.
The right to kill one’s own children and call them “choices” was enough of a blow to the culture, but when people started seriously using “same sex” and “marriage” together, the Long March Through the Culture was complete – absolutely nothing meant the same thing it had 50 years before.
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The Locusts were the first generation to truly reap the rewards of vaccines and that alone changed things.
And the generation that raised them, spoiled them like no generation before them.
There was a war before Faludi, it just became more open after the book.
I have been reading some essays written before WW1 in about 1910 which attack and expose feminism in a way that would be familiar to anyone reading The Spearhead. Indeed if you did not know that these articles where written over 100 years ago you might have thought them composed yesterday. So this idea the present can be explained in terms of the ‘perfect storm’ of the last 50 years is not completely convincing, although not without merit.
But this aside it has to be said that even though ‘harmful’ ideas may have been generated by the Frankfurt school or whatever there was no necessity for anybody to adopt them. They could have just stayed as ideas that nobody bothered with. So there must have been something within them that appealed intrinsically to lets say women.
The idea people at university where indoctrinated only partially appeals and begs the question if they had not been indoctrinated in feminism what should they have been indoctrinated in? How do I know that you are not indoctrinated Zen? Is it a case of regarding people who think otherwise to oneself as being indoctrinated?
For sure some people have gained a lot of benefit from feminism in terms of employment and money. So they have acted in their self interest for sure, and done this cynically. But do you expect people to act against their self interest?
I did however like the way your article ended. I too would like to see retribution.
Oh, they appealed just as much to men. Any time you start talking about “free love” you are going to get horny young men signing on enthusiastically to whatever else you are selling. And the Vietnam war was a festering sore in the relationship between younger and older men. Young people always rebel against the values of older generations until they mature and understand the wisdom of those values. But, no generation before the boomers had a massive media feeding and supporting that rebellion.
Oh, certainly I am am indoctrinated. I bought the whole business hook, line, and sinker. But, eventually I began to realize that it wasn’t working and began to study why it wasn’t.
Everyone gets “indoctrinated” in something. That is the process of growing up and becoming acculturated. Once a set of values gets incorporated into a child’s view and conceptual construction of the world it is very difficult to change. The world is full of examples of clashes between groups of people who have been indoctrinated into different value systems.
I don’t deal much in “shoulds”. Thinking that one knows what “should” be the case comes partially from indoctrination and partially from emotionality. When most people say “this is how things ’should’ be”, in most cases they are really saying “this is how I want things to be.” I tend more to look at how things are, and ask “how is this working out?”
No, in fact exactly the opposite. In general, no one ever does anything against their self interest. But, there is often a conflict between short-term self-interest and longer term self-interest.
One of the reasons for such massive media support was the sheer numbers of boomers. Their cause and outlook on life was not about being righteous and being correct, it was about tens of millions of loud, youthful voices embracing the counter culture and the mass media realizing that these voices represented an enormous consumer base with billions to spend.
Zammo
That´sort of what were seeing now, with women and children, isn´t it ?
Maybe people should ask who was in charge during the passing of the Certificate of Need laws in the 1960s-1970s. During the passing of the divorce laws 1960s-1970s. During many of the crazed Regan ‘reforms’. Paul Volcker and his declaration of war on many parts of the American Economy. Oh yeah, the Vietnam debacle to. Can’t forget that.
The list of outrages is actually so huge that it would take me hours to remember the endless line of idiotic nonsense inflicted on future generations in the 1960-1970s.
At what age were the Boomers in the 1960s? Could they even vote? They weren’t in any positions of power, that’s for sure. I kind of blame the Greatest Generations PARENTS for the 1960s.
But the 1970s? The Greatest Generation was behind the wheel for that, full-stop.
About the only thing the Boomers could possibly take ‘credit’ for is the more than quadrupling of American’s behind bars between 1980 and 2006. And even that started with Regan’s reforms. After all, after you kick the mentally ill out of the hospital, those that don’t die have to go SOMEWHERE.
The Greatest Generation however COULD vote through all of this, and they most definitely were in positions of power(or getting close) by the 1960s. They were unquestionably in positions of power by the 1970s. The Greatest Generations power did probably peak in the 1980s, from 1990 onward they started hitting retirement age.
Maybe the Boomers were responsible for the 1990s bubble…. but Easy Alan is the one who started it with his 1987 bailout of the stock markets.
So what was your point, Zed? Oh yeah, let’s blame the young’n. Even from the crib that vile creature plotted the ruination of this nation.
Is it any wonder that the English have a world-wide reputation as worthless parents? And a well-deserved one at that.
Remember what all the oldsters ‘Tea Baggers” said against public health care, it’s not fair to make someone else pay your bills. And in any case, giving young people public health care could limit the Medicare provided health care that the young people are ‘providing’(at the point of a gun) for the old people.
Certainly women tend to vote as a block more than men. Also, the boomer generation did create something of a demographic bulge when they started having kids.
The biggest social trend (and the one most likely to destroy our rights) is the “for the children” rationale. A bunch of paranoid and idiotic safety moms are trying to bubble wrap our culture so that kids are protect from every type of evil.
Wow, if you think that is my point I just completely wasted all the time it took to write this.
Let me spell out a few of the points I was making –
1) Everyone lives through history, they just don’t realize it until they have. Day to day life of today will be “recent history” in 20 more years.
2) The social forces and trends we are seeing have been at work a very long time. It isn’t possible to understand anything by a simple and naive observation of it as it is happening. It is necessary to study and understand as many of the causes as possible.
3) The only way out of the trap starts with understanding how others got caught in it.
Zed:
Oh, they appealed just as much to men. Any time you start talking about “free love” you are going to get horny young men signing on enthusiastically to whatever else you are selling.
Free love is impossible without the pill, abortion, and easy access to condoms. that is why that promise could have been made in the 1960’s but not in the 1900’s.
While men thought free love was free love, they never thought it would mean no love. Hell, they never would have imagined that “no love” would come at a higher price than “not free love”…
Actually, sexual freedom has been one of the goodies used to sell communist thinking since the mid-1800s. Many collectivist settlements were formed in the last half of the 19th century which had some degree of sexual freedom embedded in their core philosophy. Probably the most famous was the Oneida colony. One of the first things the Bolsheviks did was try to get rid of the idea of traditional marriage, make divorce easy, and encourage sexual freedom.
What was different after the Pill was that people actually believed that would allow purely recreational and consequence-free sex. The older attempts at “free love” understood that children would inevitably result from sex, and dealt with that by suggesting communal raising of all children – in a “kibbutz” type of arrangement, or the “It takes a village” approach.
I’m sure the question is rhetorical, but it is worth making its point very explicit – the oldest boomer reached voting age in 1967. The youngest boomer in 1982. Bill Clinton was the first president from the boomer generation.
An example of the greed of the “Greatest Generation” that I observed personally came when a change in Social Security law in the mid-1960s allowed a lot of people who had previously not been eligible for Social Security to become eligible by making one year worth of payments. I saw many people pay in very small sums of money, and then every month get more from the goverment than the total they had paid in. Like any Ponzi scheme, the ones who get in early cash in the most. The rising collections from the income of the boomers masked the effect of people who had not contributed much drawing out huge sums of money that they didn’t really need.
All the “Great Society” legislation passed before Lyndon Johnson left office in 1969. The entitlement mentality which has plagued the US for the past 40 years was totally entrenched before the first boomer ever cast one vote in an election that made much difference on the national scale.
Zammo said:
I think the ultimate symbol of “For the Children” in American culture is the drugging of millions of American Children with Ritalin. Like all “good things” the Americans do that some might think ‘bad’, hard data is hard to find.
http://www.wildestcolts.com/mentalhealth/colorado2.html
It’s amazing that MILLIONS of children have are so troubled they need medication. MILLIONS.
Bigger, older kids beating on younger, smaller kids is also considered just fine. This is how Jack Donovan “Tough Guy” views bigger kids beating on younger, smaller kids… often times in packs.
And no Jack, I didn’t have that problem, because my schools didn’t let a 17 year old get away with beating on a 15 year old. I did get beaten up a few times, but that was because I didn’t put up with somethings even if it got me a (provoked) beat-down. And then we were both punished. But you, Jack, would you do the same in my situation? Without the 70+ extra pounds of muscle you got in the genetic lottery?
That’s a pretty good question, Tough Guy.
Zammo
“bubble-wrapped kids !!
Control-always with the control,–>freaks !!!!
Control=No Fun…
Might as well be a doormath or a vacuum cleaner…
Or a hole in the ground….
If the day ever comes when there are “war crimes” trials for the gender war, I hope the people who pushed for and participated in this abomination are executed in a suitable manner. I think this practice is also the ultimate symbol of the phrase “the banality of evil.” The unbelievable hubris of short-circuiting the normal developmental processes of millions of children, most of them boys, is very likely to have unbelievably destructive effects on society over the next 50 years as these little “experiments” in playing God age through the culture.
The tiny bit of cover provided by the weak excuse of social acceptability masks a monstrous indifference to the effects on the experimental subjects akin to Dr. Mengele and the infamous “Tuskeegee Experiment.”
http://www.tuskegee.edu/global/story.asp?s=1207586
Some of these Marxist ideas also made their way into family law. Consider the concept of “no fault alimony” (NFA), which is now the law in most states. It removes fault from who gets to pay/receive alimony. Under this type of law, you can have a cheating wife get caught, have it proven in court, yet she will still be rewarded lifetime alimony. Her “prize” for doing the UPS guy on the living room floor.
NFA is a perfect expression of the Communist ideal. You take from the one with the money (the ex who makes more) and give it to one without money (the ex who makes less). No where do you consider whether he deserves such a lifetime punishment, or whether she deserves such a lifetime gravy train. The higher-earner one always get the stick, and the lower-earner always gets the carrot. This IS Communism in microcosm; two comrades at a time.
Some points:
Hippie males were and are stupid, they didn’t realize that “free love” means 80% of the females with 20% of the males.
Joseph Sobran, although he has skewed views about Iraq (That I feel that come from ignorance about the Taliban), nailed the essence of Communism in those words. That concept, that attack against the best part of human nature and defense of the worst one, is, just as the snake that tempted Eve, an utterly evil concept that mankind is just too weak to resist on their own.
That’s why checks like Christianity and the nuclear family were created. Of course that they are the first targets of Communists.
The funny part of the “For the Children” supporters is that they don’t want to have kids, they don’t want the responsability of raising a child, so they do activism for transfering said responsability to society, and as we all know, that works so well.
And example is that not letting little Billy play Grand Theft Auto would mean paying attention to the ESRB tag that says that is for 18+ years old. Parents don’t want to do even that because they just want little Billy to shut up and be distracted so they can forget about him.
Thomas Sowell, yet another guy that has seen the reality of this world, said the above quote. Check his Wikipedia page (scroll down on it):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell
Funny how an economist has a better understanding of reality than the entire left party. Maybe is, because, I don’t know, he actually RESEARCH his stuff before talking.
Excellent piece!
It is very refreshing to see the “Feminist Hole” being filled, as while there are many who speak out about Marxism invading our culture, even the most intelligent of them lack the courage to point the finger directly at feminism… or if they do at all, to actually go further and point out the reasons “why” it is so destructive. The ladies silence even the most intelligent of those, and it is up to us who are battle hardened veterans of the gender war to shovel gravel into this hole… nobody else has the guts nor the know-how, it seems, to do it – even though it is the “hub” for all of the other “Marxist spokes” on the wheel.
For Example: The need for mass third world immigration into Western Civilization is caused by 1). The destruction of the family, which produced 3.9 births per couple in 1970, has been demolished to well below replacement levels today (anywhere from 1.1 per couple in Spain to 1.6 per NON-IMMIGRANT American couples in the modern day), while at the same time increasing our National Debts to astronomical levels to fund the Welfare State neccessary to facilitate such a destruction of the family. (The only system that truly works on the Marxist principle of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”, is the nuclear family). If we stop taking in immigrants, our taxes will sky-rocket as our population decreases, and Capitalism will die as we go broke – A major goal of Marxism. If we DO take in immigrants, they are neccessarily going to have VASTLY different cultural values than ours, and as more and more of them pile into our countries to prop up our economies, they bring in their third-world values which are highly contrary to the values of Western Civilization… thus, altering by stealth the values which created the West – ie. The Province of Ontario recently almost allowed Sharia Law to supercede the law of Canuckistan. (Try pulling that shit 50 years ago, eh?). Thus, the push for “Multi-Culturalism” rather than the proven success of the American “Melting Pot.” Btw, there is a good book out there written by Thomas Chittum, called Civil War II, in which the author (a former mercenary, often working in the Third World), illustrates how when two cultures clash, when the minority reaches 30% the size of the majority, it is human nature for mass violence to erupt… and once that happens, the government is forced to intervene and use force against its own citizens to “stop the madness”, and once a government gets violent against its own citizens, the deep hatred against the government gets so intense that it often leads to genocide… shoot my mother, and I will fight you with my last breath… The Former State of Yugoslavia, the Middle East, the tribal genocides in Africa – these are all examples of Multi-Culturalism at it’s finest… and are a great way to encourage the masses to BEG the government to impose totalitarianism to “stop the madness,” – another massive Marxist goal.
Marxism is a way to control the mass-psychology of a population – to mind f*ck them out of reality, as it were. There are two ways to do this. The first is to follow the way of V.I. Lenin, who used violence to speed up the process, and the other is the way of “gradualism,” which is what is being foisted upon us.
Lenin took over Russia in 1917. By 1921, he proudly declared that there was equality between the sexes. Lenin is the founder of “International Working Women’s Day”, which we still “celebrate” here in Western Civilization each March. In four short years, he foisted State Run Daycare upon the people, he co-opted the school system to indoctrinate children into the Marxist way, there were state-run kitchens and sewing halls etc, abortion was available to all, as well as easy divorce, childsupport etc. etc… all to enable women an equal place in the work-economy. (Stalin reversed many of these policies in the 40’s, as they were so destructive to the family, that with the addition of the war, they needed to save their bacon more than their ideology). Those women too, found out that “work” was not all glamour when they were handed a shovel and told that callouses would appear soon, to ease their aching palms.
What Lenin did in 4 years by way of violence, Gradualism does over a longer period of time without blatant violence. In 40 years, we have done what Lenin did in four years… but, the end result becomes the same: Totalitarian Government. Cultural Marxism also took things farther than classical Economic Marxism, and attacked even more institutions – but again, over a longer timeframe, making it less visible until one looks back into history.
There is a reading list near the top right-hand side of my blog (click my name above this post), that will give anyone interested, a good overview of “what” and “how.” I promise you that you will not be bombarded with wild theories about Masonic societies, aliens, lizard people and whatnot… while I don’t wish to argue the validity, nor non-validity of such positions, the sole goal of my blog was to create a “dam”, filled with evidence that “the theory” is indeed being foisted upon us… once one is convinced of that, they can “spill over the top” and seek out for themselves “who” or “why.”
This article has made that reading list.
It is much appreciated!
This is terribly true. My life has been filled with agonizing sexual frustration, humiliation, confusion, lonely despair. Growing-up I felt like a monster for having sexual urges, felt the pangs of guilt for being a a “male chauvinist pig”. Long term depression has me contemplating suicide constantly and I’ve figured the easiest most painless way to go…I’m just too scared to do it now.
I’ve gone to school and learned trades but every attempt to find economic security evaporates into job outsourcing and barriers imposed by the new culture to exclude men from the workforce.
I was a rebel in school and recognized the perversity and was thus drummed out. For example, in English class, we were required to write a paper supporting an article entitled “Love is Pathological”. Since I did not agree the English instructor failed me.
The fear of dying homeless in the street makes the idea of suicide a welcome refuge.
The mass hypnosis being used by the media including music has given me a very interesting realm of study…”fascinating” as Mr. Spock would say.
This article blames Jewish people for communism. Is this an antisemitic article? Jews were in a terrible predicament, subject to pogroms and horrific oppression, please consider this context before laying blame. What is the author’s affiliation, is it Roman Catholic, out of curiosity. This is an excellent article full of great criticism, and my curiosity is piqued, what is the author’s political and religious affiliation? The nazis were Catholics and my research has found that many antisemites prech hate against Jews without revealing their affiliation, that they are Roman Catholic. I count Muslims as a brand of Catholicism since the Koran was inspired by Khadijah, a Catholic nun, who married Mohammad. Note the similar black shawls.
This is a fantastic article and much appreciated, but leaves some unanswered questions. What constructive steps are needed to fight communism? Is religious totalitarian rule any better? Recall the Inquisition as an example of how religion historically until very recently treated people. Slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, was the norm throughout history until very recently.
The constitution is an inspired document granting human rights following the French Revolution and the Magna Carte. With the Age of Reason came the fall of the power of The Church. The Church could gouge your eyes out for daring to reveal scientific evidence that the earth revolves around the sun.
Fascism, Communism, religious fundamentalism. are all the same…Totalitarianism.
So the question remains: What is the ideology, religious affiliation, political affiliation, and ultimate goal of The-Spearhead? Are they agent provocateurs? Do they maintain that communism is a Jewish plot against the world?
Thanks for this really great article. Clarification of the above points would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks again.
“Boomer men were on the horns of two-pronged dilemma They were at the stage of their lives when their primary goal and task was to find a mate and form a family, yet their pool of potential mates was developing values which were fundamentally different than the values that men had been led to expect to find in the women they would choose as wives. Trained in one set of skills and attitudes that had been attractive to women in the past, men were now finding women who were not attracted by those characteristics and were demanding something different. However, the specifics of what was demanded no longer followed any sort of cultural pattern but were mostly based on the preferences of individual women – their much vaunted “choices.””
I don’t think it does that. It just points out that members of the Frankfurt School fled Germany because many were Jewish.
It’s pretty clear that Jews themselves were deeply divided in the 1930s. Some were traditionalist Orthodox, some Zionists, some were Capitalists, some Trotskyites and others Stalinists. There was overlap, to be sure, but to call them a monolithic entity would be absurd.
In fact, the Red Scare and blacklisting was in part a struggle between different Jewish factions — Roy Cohn was no gentile, for example.
Wonderful post and comments. I could be here quite some time agreeing with lots of things in each comment and asking questions.
There is a man I know who teaches parents, police and other youth workers about the youth. He says that each decade brings a new trend and that this started predominately early 1900s. I guess it was the same even before then but he doesn’t use it. Each decade is given a name like the depressed youth or the lost youth and so on.
But in the 60’s television came into peoples homes in New Zealand and I am sure it was the same elsewhere. It opened up everything. Brave women spoke to wives as a way of educating them and soon women were discussing what else was happening in the home. Maybe it was inventions also that changed the environment. The pill was just one of them.
Hey, I heard on the radio today that the average life expectancy of children born after the year 2000 is 100 years of age. And that even though there is a gap between women and men’s life expectancy at the moment it is going to disappear within the next 20 years. Wow! Even that changes everything.
It does not. Read it again. The Frankfurt School was overwhelmingly Jewish, that is simply a fact, not blame.
If by “author” you mean me, zen buddhism.
There is none. The writers here are not clones of each other. We each write from our own particular perspective, and there is probably no more than 20% consensus between all of us.
I don’t think that even Welmer, who built the infrastructure, can answer those questions for “the Spearhead.” The writers have their own personal agenda, but we all agree that there is something quite wrong and disturbing about the trends of the culture in which we live.
Ideas which are pro-survival will survive by helping those who believe them to survive. Ideas which are self-destructive inherently carry their own punishment for believing in them – you will have fewer surviving offspring to carry on those ideas than others.
The more ideas, the more NEW ideas, and the better ideas, we get out there, the better the chance we have of getting one which will start to take hold and work.
A disciple of the great Bodhidharma.
I know it as “Chan” Buddhism, of course.
Welmer:
Thanks for that. I believe that you are correct. I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but it has been a lifetime of being antagonized, and it is ubiquitous, the hatred, the corrupt complicity of world governments including the USA.
This is truly frightening watching the USA fall to communism. Thank goodness for the internet, it has really unlocked the Gutenberg lock. Watch the politicians scramble as the old paradigm of mainstream media falls to internet bloggers. But while corruption, treason, and breach of the Constitution, etc, are exposed, it just continues unabated! Very scary.
In the final analysis my belief is that we are the victims of our own human nature and that doom and horror are inevitable as the cycle of human tragedy and triumph turns. Sad but true.
As for me, I am living for the moment, snatching a few moments from eternity. I have and always will support the Constitution as an enlightened document written in the spirit the highest progress for humanity.
All I can do is to behave myself. Incidentally, I am noting that there are the women I see lately are more traditional, that is, dressed and behaving like ladies, the type that I knew as a child, the type that I expected to marry someday. Now it is too late for me. It is such a pleasure though, to see a well mannered lady, with no displays of misandry. I will never take a true lady for granted again. They are the heart and soul of our culture. I would never have imagined how easily they can become so grotesque. Now I really do appreciate and am grateful to see a good normal lady.
The idea that a man could be convicted of “raping” his wife totally erased the long held tradition of “marital duties” and turned sex from being part of the foundation of the relationship between man and wife into an instance-by-instance exercise in the gratification of personal whims.
This is an important point. Marital duties died at that point. The next step was “going on strike” in your own home and then “going off to find yourself”.
I think the ultimate symbol of “For the Children” in American culture is the drugging of millions of American Children with Ritalin.
Absolutely. I am absolutely horrified by this.
Hippie males were and are stupid, they didn’t realize that “free love” means 80% of the females with 20% of the males.
Yeah, guys tend not to realize that. It’s like the whole idea of polygamy. You just have to look at the old-time Mormons to see how that ends up. Can’t they do the math?
Thomas Sowell, yet another guy that has seen the reality of this world
Thomas Sowell is brilliant. I don’t always agree with his conclusions but his arguments are always well-formed. He is also the author of “The Einstein Syndrome” which has been of great use in this household.
For example, in English class, we were required to write a paper supporting an article entitled “Love is Pathological”. Since I did not agree the English instructor failed me.
Wow. Just wow.
An equally important, and very subtle point, is that the entire concept of “marital duties” died in both directions! It is not possible to keep men bound with a sense of psychological obligation when they are fully aware that obligation is one-sided.
I think kis’s husband can be much better understood if one considers the psychological viewpoint of “well, if you aren’t going to be bound by convention, then neither am I.”
In a purely transactional sense, if my employer no longer felt bound to give me a paycheck, then I would no longer feel bound to show up for work.
Individual case-by-case agreements sound fine in theory, the problem with them is that without cultural enforcement and pressures to conform, human capriciousness pretty much dictates that some people will choose not to live up to their obligations at least some of the time.
Welmer
Re: Buddhism. Thanks again for that. I am also a long time yogic practicioner, tai chi, qigong, and all that sort of thing.
Everything has become politicized including yoga and Buddhism. I stopped attending yoga classes because of all the propaganda. The left or liberal movement has become infected, as you know, by the communists or whatever you might call them. Even Buddhism is rife with political propaganda. Beware of brainwashing! Even the most intelligent and strong willed can fall prey to insidious mind control and cults! I am not saying that you are; just saying. It really hurt to realize how the propaganda of hate has infected everything that I like or believe in, including yoga, Buddhism, liberalism, politics. Now I practice on my own.
There was a possible turning point recently when Obama refused to meet the Dalai Lama favoring the despotic Chinese regime instead. Now even the most fanatical Obam supporters have removed his graven image from their shops. It is interesting to note blog comments where women feminists are supporting Obama’s dissing of the Dalai. Talk about a schism within the feminist culture!
http://frontpagemag.com/2009/10/20/dissing-the-dalai-lama-by-dennis-prager/?dsq=20638159#comment-20638159
Hey I really appreciate your article(s), and look forward to visiting your blog again.
zed,
The ‘Marxist thought’ thing : will that decline as boomers age out of the core demographic? Or is there permanent damage.
On a separate note, the impending retirement of boomers means that no one should buy a house anywhere in the US. No one. For the first time ever, we will have more retirees than new entrants into the workforce. This spells devastation for the net worths of people who own homes, with 20% equity and 80% debt, or even worse ratios.
@TFH,
I think the change from the “old values” is permanent. Now that Marxism is the “new values”, there will be another change. The new “new values” may look more like the old “old values”, or they may be something no one has even imagined yet.
Zed:
You are being evasive: the writer of this particular article then; what is the ultimate point that they are trying to make? Surely the publisher of this blog has a point of view and a message. This article and others on this blog have a definite political slant in one direction. Would you publish an article in support of the Communist Party? I hope not! Evasive answers lead to suspicion. Are you afraid to say what you truly believe?
” So the question remains: What is the ideology, religious affiliation, political affiliation, and ultimate goal of The-Spearhead?
There is none. The writers here are not clones of each other. We each write from our own particular perspective, and there is probably no more than 20% consensus between all of us. “
My criticism is that the Frankfort School was merely the latest iteration of a long tradition that went back to at least the 80’s … the 1780’s, of viewing the family and marriage as a prison.
For example, Mary Wollstonecroft (mother of Mary Shelley) preached free love and open arrangements. That most Christian of poets, William Blake, created poems describing Marriage and Family as bondage. The Oneida Community of the 1840’s preached Free Love and open marriage, as did many of the romantic poets. Marx himself was mostly a Romantic who rejected the Enlightenment.
The noxious effects of the Baby Boom were always implicit in the West, and waiting for prosperity and peace to express themselves.
Women WANT: unfettered sex with the few, 20% dominant Alpha men. Period. They don’t want monogamy, the nuclear family, and any restriction on their sexual freedom. Women WANT, for the most part, some form of single motherhood matriarchy with several kids by different fathers.
Any time the West became rich enough, with enough cheap contraception, this was bound to occur. It is the flip-side of the West’s material advantage 1000 AD — 1965. Which was strong, unshackled women making mostly free choices of men based on largely, provider attributes and faithfulness, giving most men a deep stake in society and creating a very resilient society that had wealth and power deeply spread around. BUT … there was always a weakness.
Women with enough power don’t need or want ordinary men, and in fact resent their having a stake in society. Women ideally prefer a system of vast social distances, of hereditary aristocracy, and dominant/cruel men at the top, where a beautiful woman can achieve partial success by having a kid or kids with said men. Marxism, Romanticism, Free Love, Blake-Wollstonecroft, all mere justification and lip service for the alliance of dominant, hereditary, and “cruel” Alphas and most women.
It is the flip-side of the West’s material advantage 1000 AD — 1965.
Slight correction : While European colonialism started from the 1490s, the GDP domination of the West only started in the 19th century.
As recently as 1820, India + China was still 40% of world GDP (falling to a shocking 2% by 1975, rising to about 10% now).
As the writer of this particular article, some of the points I am trying to make are –
1) it is not possible to cure a disease until the causes are understood
2) the causes of the current cultural disease go back a long time and about half of them are ill-conceived attempts to cure it
3) history is one long series of reaction, counter-reaction, counter-counter-reaction, counter-counter-counter-reaction, and counter-counter-counter-counter-reaction. This is fairly easy to trace back a couple of thousand years, but this is a blog post, not a Doctoral dissertation
4) falling into the same traps as those who went before you will assure that you make exactly the same mistakes they did.
5) there is a lot of human nature that we are fighting and are probably going to lose. Most people are not willing to make the hard choices which are required to make a difference. For example, if I tell someone that TV is poison to the mind, they will almost invariably come back with some lame justification about there being “some good stuff” on it and cite things like the History Channel, etc. We will never get to the point of understanding that sitting on your ass and letting other people tell you what to think is one root of the problem. People always try to justify what they are already doing, or have already decided to do, and will almost never engage in the self-examination and serious effort it takes to change their own behavior no matter how much it contributes to the problems they complain about.
There is no “the Spearhead” as an entity. It is nothing more than a Marquee which Welmer set up, under which a lot of different authors with a lot of different points of view could thumbtack posts promoting their particular POV.
Remember that Jews and Catholics came to this country at more or less the same time (1880-1940) and both came through the cities, so there is a natural competition, on top of the old European grudges. My Irish grandmother hated the Jews something fierce. Me, on the other hand, grew up in a hippie-guitar-mass-love-everyone-and-give-them-hugs version of the church, so I had no idea what made her so upset.
Catholics are definitely not Muslims.
The organizing idea behind The Spearhead is to create a place where male voices and perspectives can be aired and disseminated. It isn’t slated, per se, in any political or ideological direction, per se, although for the most part it is rather anti-feminist. That may make some think of us as being pro-conservative, but while some of our writers are, a good number are not, and most of us are quite critical of contemporary social conservatism, for example.
Note to commenters:
No attacks on any particular religion. This is not the place for holy wars.
Great article, a little more lengthy then the average post but does provide a historical background for our ailments today.
Don’t really have much to add personally. I will say in the past year I’ve gained a new found appreciation for older, wiser men.
That may make some think of us as being pro-conservative, but while some of our writers are, a good number are not, and most of us are quite critical of contemporary social conservatism, for example.
And then there are the Catholics, such as I, who don’t fit well into any particular group. We acknowledge evolution, believe in traditional marriage and the sanctity of human life, study the application of market forces, and vote for universal health care. We’re just all-over the place, which is why Protestants don’t like to join forces with us; they see us unreliable partners.
re: religion, what I would think would be the MOST interesting potential eventual outcome of something like this would be to get Muslim men on board a pro-male movement. The fact is, in Islamic societies life is very hard on young men, that’s why there are so many willing to kill and die. If they could be diverted from strictly following Islam to considering their own benefit as men, that would be huge.
Not saying it’s likely, but it’s a possibility to keep in mind.
Well, it’s certainly true that the mainstream rank and file Catholics are like that. The more conservative Catholics, though, have long been political allies of conservative Protestants — people like Pat Buchanan, Antonin Scalia, Paul Weyrich, etc.
I would argue that those, like myself, who are applying traditional roles to their marriage are not, in fact, conservatives. We are not trying to conserve something but rather trying to reinvent marriage by applying old rules to a new context.
The more conservative Catholics, though, have long been political allies of conservative Protestants — people like Pat Buchanan, Antonin Scalia, Paul Weyrich, etc.
Pat Buchanan is Catholic? Wow, news to me. I always thought he was an evangelical Protestant. I guess that shows how radical he is.
Yep. He attends the Tridentine Mass at a Catholic church in downtown DC. Not one of the out-of-communion Mel Gibson ones, but a parish of the DC archdiocese that has permission to use the Latin mass. Local boy, too, went to Gonzaga HS (Catholic) and Georgetown.
Weyrich used to be the deacon in the Catholic parish I once attended, and he practically founded the Christian coalition, really.
The thing about Catholics is that, as you say, they are all over the map politically, so it’s really hard to generalize about them.
They certainly are Wellsprings of Knowledge.
The feminists of the 1850s to the early 1900s were the wives of wealthy industrialists. Women’s rights eventually broke the unions. Follow the money.
As someone who has participated in other forums with Zed, and being a fellow baby boomer, I can see what he is trying to say here. Unfortunately, it appears that some people can’t. Let me have a shot at it. After painting the picture of how things were Zed is essentially saying:
Every time we came to a fork in the road we took the wrong damn fork.
This is not a dissertation on religion. Nor is it a political statement. He acknowledged one group when painting the picture and referenced another when discussing the methodology. Hell, the last two thirds of the post is aimed at feminism. Feminism=Marxism. Let’s not lose the forest because the trees get in the way.
Now on to the “witness” portion of my post.
As someone who was in high school in the late 1970’s I can bear witness that the 80/20 rule was NOT in effect. And trust me on this one, I was nowhere near a “20″ but I had plenty of chances with the “80″. The combination of the pill and women’s sexual freedom pretty much gave everyone a shot at pairing up, unless you were extremely fat, which very few women were, or a complete dork. As a side note, there actually was a time when women occupied dresses instead of addresses. What was considered ugly by guys back in the 1970’s would rate anywhere from a 7-10 today.
So how did all of this shit go down? Gradually, that was the key. What feminism did was recruit guys with the promise of/the delivering of sex. And we bought it. Why not? We figured if this is how it’s gonna be, then hell yeah we’ll give you what you are asking for.
Then came the gradual decline. The spousal rape case that is being referenced? Google John and Greta Rideout in Oregon 1978. There’s your answer. I believe this was the same year that Mick Jagger lost a palimony case. In a pattern that would repeat itself, the guy was figured to have “gotten what he deserved” in both cases. Men were now seen as potential rapists even when married, and a source of income even without getting married. Clouds were on the horizon.
On to the decade that should be tried for war crimes for merely existing, the 1980’s. This is where the strangulation really took hold. The feminists use two main tools to back guys into a corner. The first item, AIDS. Now, before anybody jumps up and down and gets all in a huff, save it. Do yourself a favor and google “the myth of heterosexual AIDS”. If some of you people thought Y2K was overhyped, you should have gotten a load of this. The next item, and most powerful, was cable television. A two pronged approach was used here. Massive amounts of sexuality was unleashed here, as cable tv was not subject to FCC regulation. The second prong, victim tv. You know it, you love it, you can’t get enough of it. That is, if you’re a woman. Any guy that showed up on these shows was lower than pond scum. This is the time when the 80/20 rule reared it’s ugly head.
So, in the mid/late 1980’s as a guy in his mid 20’s, this was our landscape:
We could remember when women actually liked men, now we were seen as potential rapists, walking wallets, carriers of a deadly disease, and pond scum. Meanwhile, everything we saw on tv showed everybody fucking like rabbits.
Confusing, no?
Hello 1990’s. Hello rampant lesbianism, obesity, artificial insemination, and child support laws on steroids. Women had won the war and were now shoving it in our face and moving in for the kill. For myself, I fucked married and/or taken women. Nothing for me to gain, nothing for me to loose. There was one good thing to come out of the 1990’s. Hint: you’re using it now.
What I have provided here is a first hand, detailed account as to how things played out. Our generation’s greatest mistakes were listening to women and listening to the mass media. Think Henny Youngman, “doc, every time I do this it hurts” Doc (Zed) “don’t do that”.
Simple enough.
Both capitalism and communism support feminism
)
and both even have the same structures:
School school school then wage slave wage slave wage slave then die
What is the diffrence?
One is a huge mega mega mega corporation tied to the state and the other is various individual corporations?
(also tied to the state ofcourse
I think kis’s husband can be much better understood if one considers the psychological viewpoint of “well, if you aren’t going to be bound by convention, then neither am I.”
Well, I actually kind of wish I’d stopped having sex with him when he first began abdicating his responsibilities. It was why his use of the term “wifely duties” burned my ass so bad in the last few years, when I finally started to avoid sex. I just wanted to scream at him that he’d been avoiding his “husbandly duties” for years, so why the fuck should I not do the same?
They don’t want monogamy, the nuclear family, and any restriction on their sexual freedom. Women WANT, for the most part, some form of single motherhood matriarchy with several kids by different fathers.
I can’t imagine anything more…difficult than to have kids by more than one father. Blugh.
To whiskey,
My gosh, women full stop are doing this. OK, so not the women here but a hell of a lot do. Especially young women. They seem to have no problem setting up males against other males. I just want you to know that I understand how bad it is. It is terrible. It is horrifying. It is scary. It is unsafe.
Fifth Horse
Seems dubious. Link please.
That’s a great one paragraph description of the breakdown of modern marriage. It might have been best for everyone if you had stopped. Both of you might have figured out that the marriage was broken sooner, and not ended up tormenting each other so badly. And you might have ended up with fewer kids for you to have to support now.
All this “liberation” doesn’t come without a price. When we, personally, get freed from convention, so does everyone else. They are probably not going to be any more enthusiastic about living up to the parts of their old roles that we want them to than we are about living up to the parts of our old roles that they want us to.
I’m a lot like you. I thought the old roles for my sex absolutely sucked. What I saw of marriages growing up looked like a bad compromise in which a man gave up most of what he wanted out of life in exchange for little bit of bad sex once in a while (if he was lucky) and children. I never really wanted children (having been taught to absolutely hate kids by my old man) and it looked to me that sex in marriage was a means wives used to control their husbands – stingily doling it out when the husbands did what the wives wanted, and “cutting off” sex to their husbands when they didn’t do what the wives wanted. And, I got the impression that women hated sex so much that once the man was trapped she could quit having sex unless she wanted to have a baby and there wasn’t much he could do about it. I think that is why no-fault divorce looked attractive to a lot of men – it gave them an opportunity to have a sex life again.
I found it very odd that so many women of my generation were so anxious for me to “oppress” them into that horrible institution. If I had $1 for every time I have heard the phrase “can’t make a commitment”, I would be set for life. And while they pretended to actually like sex, it never seemed to me that they really did. I got the impression that they were using it as bait to trap me into marriage rather than really enjoying it for their own sake. That is why I am such a strong supporter of female sexual agency.
At the same time, I still had some old-fashioned values and believed in marriage for those people who wanted to give it a go. I got very sick of married women coming on to me. If I had been several years younger like Arthur, I would have probably given them a go. But, there were plenty of divorced women out there looking for some action, so I didn’t have to stab another man in the back in order to get my ashes hauled.
But, as Welmer just pointed out, looks, and sex, and big tits aren’t enough to get a man to sign on for the “Until death (or me getting tired of you) do us part” deal. People can only spend a small percentage of their time getting it on, and the rest of the time needs to be something other than a competitive control-drama in order for it to be worth it.
So, what we have now is a pretty good world for the genderqueers and the guys like me (and it sounds like your husband) who don’t like being in harness. Interestingly, women like Hestia and B&G are finding out that they actually like being women. Who’da thunk it 40 years ago?
Maybe your best bet, kis, is to look for another genderqueer person – either male or female – and hammer out a long and explicit pre-nup clearly and explicitly spelling out exactly which of the old roles each of you will fulfill and which you won’t.
Feminist mantra…
Women are victims…
Women are equal…
Women are victims…
Women are equal…
Women are victims…
Women are equal…
Brain dead intellectually deficient children…..any idiot can see these two ideas are diametrically opposed….if they allowed themselves to be victimised they are not equal…if they are ‘equal’ then they are responsible for their own victimisation…..they should have stood up for themselves centuries ago.
Women played the role they did in society because it worked for both men and women….and, indeed, it worked better for women that it ever did for 99.9% of men. No women were pressganged into the navies of the world. That was a purely male ‘privilege’…as were so many other privileges that usually led to early death. Women are not so willing to be ‘equal’ when they might end up dead as a result.
julie October 22, 2009 at 11:39 pm
“It is unsafe.”
Yes, Julie. The world is about to get very, very unsafe for women and children. Oh, and men too, but we will defend ourselves…the ‘women and children’? The cull has begun in the UK.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20091020/tuk-swine-flu-vaccine-drive-under-way-6323e80.html
It beggars belief that anyone is brain dead enough to take the swine flu vaccine. But there are a lot of women out there so I guess they are going to get a lot of people to take it. They will also get the kids of single mothers…all they will have to say is “if you don’t give the kid the swine flu we cut your benefits” and the women will offer up little Johhny and she will rationalise it away as ‘well the doctor said it was safe’ and when little Johnny is dying from some chronic disease in a few years time she will not be responsible for that either…..I have been telling women that one reason for feminism is to make women and children easier to kill for about a year now and they laugh at me….well, laugh all the way to your swine flu jab ladies.
To paraphrase the old Virginia Slims advertising campaign –
“You can’t have it both ways, bayyyybeeee.”
Globalman,
You nailed it out of the park!
I have noticed time and time again, that all totalitarian schemes recommend a female led society.
Auguste Comte, the founder of the “Social Sciences”, wrote several volumes of books describing how to use the non-absolute, ever-malleable Social “Sciences” to rule the world with an iron fist… one of his major recommendations? To displace the male role in family and society, and lead by the feminine principle.
Karl Marx said the following: “Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex – the ugly ones included.”
The reason he says this comes from the same notion as Hegel describes here: “… Women may have happy ideas, taste, and elegance, but they cannot attain to the ideal. The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions. Women are educated–who knows how?”
Men learn, and are led by principles. Women learn, and are led by fashion. The herd is always right.
Men will keep on insisting that 2 apples plus 2 apples equals 4 apples, and they will be certain of it, will prove it over and over, and will stick to their guns once they have convinced themselves of it – no matter the feminine shrieking that it isn’t so. (Well, until all the men are pussy, feminized wimps, I suppose).
Women will say, and truly believe, that 2 apples plus 2 apples equals 5 apples, so long as all the other women also believe it equals 5 apples. It is because other women believe it is the correct answer which makes them certain it is right, absolute proveable principles be damned. Fashion makes right more than solid principle.
If you want to screw with society’s collective mind, make ever-malleable fashion the ruler of “right and wrong.” Solid, proveable, logical, masculine principles are quite difficult to manipulate in comparison.
Zed,
awsome post dude….that very neatly sums things up as they really are, not as I perceived them. I thought my ex really loved me. Nope…just a ‘honey trap’…and that is all ANY of them are…just honey traps trying to get ‘babies and money’. Women don’t like that characterisation? TOUGH! It’s true 10 times more often than not, if not 100 times more often than not. As far as sex goes. My ex claimed to LOVE sex and I also developed my skills such that she was well taken care of in that department. Yet even then she used it for ‘domination and control’ in the face of ‘love and commitment’. And pretty much all the other women support this. If women didn’t want such a bad wrap they’ve had 1,000 years to do something about it. But they don’t. I know lots of guys who refer to women in the same vein as leeches and cockroaches. I’m not there yet…but I am a lot closer to that than I am to idolising my wife as I did when I married. The bad wrap western women have now is well earned. It’s not going to go away by them throwing ’shaming language’ at us. And they seem to underestimate the amount that young men will listen to older guys opinions.
Question October 22, 2009 at 9:36 pm
“Both capitalism and communism support feminism”
There is no such thing as capitalism in the western world. The western world has been communist since the 30s with the thinnest veneer of capitalism sprayed on the top to fool people….I admit I was fooled. Once you know how money works you know the world is entirely communist and has been since the depression. If you don’t agree with this fact watch ‘the money masters’. There is no money. This is really important to understand.
fedrz October 22, 2009 at 10:05 am
Nice to see someone who has done their homework!
cadbad October 22, 2009 at 11:03 am
“This is terribly true. My life has been filled with agonizing sexual frustration, humiliation, confusion, lonely despair.”
Young man. You might also want to drop in on http://www.menarebetterthanwomen.com/forums. There are lots of other young guys like you who were told they were total shit just for being men. We do our best to let them know they were betrayed by their mothers and female teachers and there is nothing at all wrong with them…..they are normal. The forum/discussion format provides a different mechanism to the magazine format here.
And yes, us men do often suffer from “sexual frustration, humiliation, confusion, loneliness and despair” especially married men with children. You are not Robinson Caruso there, so welcome to the club. A part of being a ‘real man’ is to never feel lonely. The only people who feel lonely are people who can’t stand their own company. I am alone much of the time. But since I divorced I have never been ‘lonely’. Nothing was more lonely than a man in a house with a wife and four kids, cut off from his friends by heavy work schedule and demanding wife. You want to think about how lonely that might be. That was much lonlier than I ever felt as a teenager or young man.
kis October 22, 2009 at 11:12 pm
“Well, I actually kind of wish I’d stopped having sex with him when he first began abdicating his responsibilities.”
Kis,
Feminism has made marriage a ‘race to the bottom’. When men well know that what they work for all their lives can be taken away from them without fault a lot stop…Duh!! Where is the surprise in that? I was one who kept going like the little energiser bunny I am. What is my reward from women? Hatred. Less than zip. Actual abuse and damage. 23 months and not a cent from the proceeds of my 27 years of labour? And women support this? Kidnapping of my children? And women support this?
If you women want good men to marry then you had better demonstrate that by acting justly towards men like me. Since I was abused I will spend the rest of my life telling men to divorce, refuse to marry, refuse to support women, refuse to support children, refuse to have children….I will tell men to get off the ride because women practice geneder politics now. Women laugh at me? Are you laughing at your husband? Are you laughing at me now? I CONGRATULATE your husband and APPLAUD him for stopping living up to his so called ‘responsibilities’ first. He got in early? GREAT!!! MORE MEN SHOULD!!
Maybe, just maybe. If you are pissed off enough about it you might start telling other women “Hey, really good husbands have been getting screwed over for 40 years and us good women did nothing about it! Now there are far fewer good husbands to have. They quit because they know that in all likelyhood they will get screwed over. Our ’screw the husband over’ wimmins culture has left us with men who do not want to take on ‘responsibility’ because they know full well a woman will not make a ‘commitment’. She can ‘change her mind’ because ‘princess is not happy’. LADIES. WAKE UP. WE ARE OUR OWN WORST ENEMY.”
Now, go off to feministing and say that if you actually want to make a difference. You come to a mans place to talk about a man abdicating his responsibilities? How about the 100M+ women who broke their vows, abdicted their responsibilities, and screwed over good men who had done no wrong? Could this have ANYTHING to do with your husband? Gee…I wonder? Could that have ANYTHING to do with men quitting the whole idea of marriage, which has ALWAYS been far more onerous on the man than on the woman? Gee…I wonder? I LOVE it every time I hear a woman bitch about her husband now. I really do. I think GREAT he got in first, well done! Did you ever read zenpriests article ‘hate bounces’?
I got very sick of married women coming on to me. If I had been several years younger like Arthur, I would have probably given them a go.
Drives me bugfuck, Zed. Probably more than half the guys in town actively pursuing me are married. No joke. 1) it’s a small town, nothing stays secret for long, do they really think I want my freaking tires slashed? 2) if you’re unhappy with your wife, leave her, but don’t make me the catalyst for it because I can’t live with that shit. 3) in my experience, women are much more likely than men to leave their spouse for an extramarital lover. Men tend to cheat until they get caught, at which point their wife might leave them, but maybe not. Either way I’m not interested in being anyone’s thing on the side.
Maybe your best bet, kis, is to look for another genderqueer person – either male or female – and hammer out a long and explicit pre-nup clearly and explicitly spelling out exactly which of the old roles each of you will fulfill and which you won’t.
I’ve thought about that. I’ve also thought about a three-person arrangement–f/F/m. I’ve seen such things work for other people long term, and I have to admit it holds a huge appeal. Though making that work while raising three kids in a small town? Oy. And finding it? A herculean task likely doomed to failure from the get-go.
As it is, I’ve got a profile up on some dating sites and the results are…discouraging. 1) you can either be a woman seeking women or a woman seeking men, but there’s no way to set up a profile as a woman seeking men and/or women. 2) the closest compatible women I’ve found thus far are about a five hour drive away. I love my small, isolated community, but it does narrow my options as far as dating goes.
Nothing was more lonely than a man in a house with a wife and four kids, cut off from his friends by heavy work schedule and demanding wife. You want to think about how lonely that might be. That was much lonlier than I ever felt as a teenager or young man.
Which just proves I was the man in my marriage after the first four years or so. Because that’s exactly the way I felt.
Feminism has made marriage a ‘race to the bottom’. When men well know that what they work for all their lives can be taken away from them without fault a lot stop…Duh!! Where is the surprise in that? …
Could this have ANYTHING to do with your husband? Gee…I wonder?
I don’t think that’s what it was for him. It was an innate tendency toward laziness and lack of ambition that he cld overcome for only as long as circumstances forced him to. He was always an “easiest rather than best” kind of man. The moment I’d take up some slack, he’d realize he could let more out. By the time we were done, he felt irrelevant and emasculated because I was doing things he never wanted to do in the first place, and would have resented being asked to do. The free ride was killing his sense of self, but he never would have gotten off the bus and started walking on his own two feet if I hadn’t kicked him off.
The way we’ve both behaved since only confirms it for me–I haven’t asked him for a dime and I still have to practically force the kids on him. Money and kids and a nice home were things he wanted, but only if he wasn’t the one who had to do the work.
So no, I don’t think feminism destroyed my marriage. I think it’s what kept me in my marriage far longer than was right or healthy for either of us.
Sometimes a man is just a turd. Only difference is the system is biased so that even good men are treated like turds and turd-women are treated like good ones.
it looked to me that sex in marriage was a means wives used to control their husbands – stingily doling it out when the husbands did what the wives wanted, and “cutting off” sex to their husbands when they didn’t do what the wives wanted. And, I got the impression that women hated sex so much that once the man was trapped she could quit having sex unless she wanted to have a baby and there wasn’t much he could do about it.
It is like that a lot of the time. But not with everyone.
I’ve tried talking with some married women I know about this but they just don’t understand men very well. I didn’t either. I had to have it all spelled out to me R.E.A.L S.L.O.W. It’s like Napolean said, “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” A lot of us have been told our whole lives that men are just women with different sex organs and it’s quite a shock to find out that that isn’t true. I had to read about 15 different books and really have it spelled out by older, wiser, married women in order to change my views. After all, I was fighting against everything I’d ever been told or read.
I was not prepared for my husband’s sex drive. At all. I thought sex was something you did once a week or less just to “get it out of the way”. I had no idea. Sure, women are horny when they first date you; that’s just infatuation. Once they “settle down” they tend to cool off and the guys are left wondering, “What the hell happened?”
I think modern men are also just so adept at hiding their libido that they’ve convinced us all that they’re basically asexual. Some married women I know were completely shocked at how often their husbands want to have sex and just assume that he’s abnormal somehow. “He’s such a horn-dog.” “All he wants to do is have sex.” “He just won’t leave me alone.” Etc., etc.
Yeah, there is the problem. The old roles weren’t a perfect fit for almost anyone, but they were an ok fit for a lot of people. Take any two random people, one of each sex, and they could probably get along and make things work without driving each other absolutely insane. Now people seem to want a relationship tailored exactly to them and finding that one person out of thousands who are exactly what they want means a lot of people look a long time and never find.
Yeah, your posts pretty much reek of that. And, it sounds like he was the woman –
It took a lot more effort and pressure to keep men constrained in their old roles than most people realized. Once the idea got put out that women could do it all and they didn’t need men, a lot of men headed for the exit. This sort of left women holding the bag.
I wonder if the future of the US, Canada, the UK, Oz and NZ are going to look a lot like other post-Marxist countries like the Former Soviet Union – lots of women carrying the whole load and lots of drunk men dying young.
Indeed.
The thing is that marriage was, in large part, designed to corral men into providing stable support for the raising of children — to make men more future oriented. But the price for that was providing for the male libido in marriage, hence the old-fashioned “wifely duty”. Which was a poor thing, really, because it was based on some kind of oppression of female sexuality, at least in part. But the mismatch between male and female typical libidos has been noted by our species for some time, and marriage was one way of addressing it.
When you get rid of marriage, or devalue it, what you’re left with is (1) women deploying sex more openly to attract men to commitment (they hope) and (2) lots of itinerant men being sexually excluded and violent with other men (and their women). This was likely what developed in human culture when we transitioned from hunter-gatherer (which was more male egalitarian in that it was pair bond oriented) to agriculture (which was more hierarchical and big-man polygamy oriented, due to the stratification which meant quite a few men had little to offer most women). Our society is sliding again towards the latter, and the mancession, spoken of with glee by so many female columnists and commentators, is accelerating this trend. The pendulum will swing back, eventually, or the thing will just collapse — because a society which both has lots of stratification combined with weak marriage customs basically can’t survive long-term without some paradigm shifts, like state-raised children and so on. It may come to that — the state raises the kids, a certain % of men are castrated and so on, to prevent the itinerants from wrecking the society. But the future is kind of bleak unless the pendulum swings back fast enough.
Already happening, Zed.
What is starting to dawn on people is the following: women are invested in having their own children, but men will only invest in them if it is, on the margins, worthwhile for them to do so. Much of civilization consisted in creating institutions which “tamed” men in terms of incenting us to invest in women and the children they bear (hopefully by us, which was also the subject of its own regulations). We’ve diligently dismantled almost all of this, and yet we expect the same behavior patterns to prevail among men. That is the greatest exercise in wish thinking perhaps that we have ever engaged in as a species, and our forebears would be ashamed of us because they, as unsophisticated as they were, knew better than us about this.
The fact is that without a male role, incentives and so on, men will invest much less than women in children and the future because men are situated differently than women are. And certainly a society which practices a sexual-free-for-all as ours does, one which leaves many men high and dry in mating terms, is destined to be a failure in terms of producing sufficient successful offspring. That is the issue. It is dawning on people that you can’t really paper this over with laws about child support and so on, compelling what men are not incented to do other than through the jack booted thugs of the state. That works in the very short term, but in the longer term creates disincentives for men to invest at all. And THAT is the elephant on the table.
Yeah, your posts pretty much reek of that. And, it sounds like he was the woman –
LOL. Not in any of the ways that would have made it work. As I’ve said, I’d have been fine with him taking on the more traditionally “female” role–housekeeping, child care, etc. Hell, I’d have worked full time and probably could have supported us all. But he wouldn’t lower himself to that. Sigh.
Now people seem to want a relationship tailored exactly to them and finding that one person out of thousands who are exactly what they want means a lot of people look a long time and never find.
Yeah. I mean, I absolutely refuse to settle again, but that doesn’t mean I need a man (or woman) who’s perfectly compatible in every way. And before anyone jumps down my throat–my idea of “settling” is maybe a lot different from other women’s. I don’t mind average when it comes to looks or income. I like average. I think social awkwardness in a man can be hot. I just don’t want to spend the next fifteen years as a slave.
I’ve thought about the idea of compatibility, though, irt people like me who aren’t “normal” by any definition. I mean, it’s not just whether a man would be a good husband to me, is “me” what a given man wants in a wife? Thought about trying eHarmony, but they wouldn’t let me post a profile because I’m technically still married. In my mind, I’m 100% single, but according to their terms of service I’m not. Bluh.
But I think tailor-made relationships are the way to go for people like me. I’d rather be alone and miserable than be miserable and make someone else miserable too.
I wonder if the future of the US, Canada, the UK, Oz and NZ are going to look a lot like other post-Marxist countries like the Former Soviet Union – lots of women carrying the whole load and lots of drunk men dying young.
Oh yeah. I mean, feminism doesn’t just allow naturally lazy men to indulge their laziness, it encourages regular guys to become those lazy, drunk men. Sad.
I had no idea. Sure, women are horny when they first date you; that’s just infatuation…..Some married women I know were completely shocked at how often their husbands want to have sex and just assume that he’s abnormal somehow. “He’s such a horn-dog.” “All he wants to do is have sex.” “He just won’t leave me alone.” Etc., etc.
I think men can employ ways to keep women’s libidos up. I mean, part of female libido is being the object of desire. That doesn’t mean bugging for sex once you’re in bed. I mean, which one of you guys–Hawaiian Libertarian?–said he knew his wife would never leave him because her loins quiver whenever he looks at her or something? That rocks.
And men don’t have to expend a lot of energy to do this. A few desirous looks throughout the day can help a lot. When my ex stopped giving me those looks, that’s when our sex life slowed down–though it didn’t die completely for a long time. Giving your wife or girlfriend “that look” a few times throughout the day makes her feel like “He want’s me.” Looking at her like a roommate all day, then tapping her on the shoulder once you’re in bed makes her feel like “He wants sex.”
The disinvestment is happening, for sure. What I’m not certain about is the future course that men will take. The FSU was a totally different animal from 1917 – 1989 than the Anglosphere is today. They never really had an industrial base, and went directly from peasantry under the Tsars to peasantry under the Communists. Different day, different name for the masters, same old shit. It had to be the only country in the world where there was a market for burned out lightbulbs.
I wonder if the whole “equality” thing is as much of a pendulum as it is an evolving concept like voting rights. The franchise has been constantly expanding from a starting point where voting rights were actually fairly limited. I don’t think the SoCon line of thinking can hold on much longer as the ranks of divorced men and fathers continues to grow. Men seem to be making some real strides in awareness of fatherhood issues and support for shared parenting. As soon as the last vestiges of the old roles are destroyed and men are as likely to get child custody, child support, and spousal maintenace as women, men won’t need to invest as much and will be able to ride along on women’s investment just like kis’s husband did.
I think a big part of the question is whether women actually need men to care about them. The old “empty nest syndrome” is really going to kick in with a double whammmy when the kids leave and there is no one left. Past generations of women still had a husband around, but a lot of the current generations are not going to have that. The kids will leave and they will start coming home to an empty house and no one who cares in the least whether they live or die. At that point they may start looking for someone to fill the void.
It’s going to be really interesting to see what sort of values that the boys raised by single moms end up having. Kis seems to be raising her sons to be kitchen bitches so they might fit in a lot better with a woman like her than her husband did. When I was growing up, my old man would kick my butt out of bed at 03:30 to go hunting, because “we have to provide for the family, that is our job.” With somewhere around 60% of all children spending some part of their lives before age 18 in single parent households, fathers are not going to be indoctrinating their sons in those values. “Provider” won’t be part of their identity the way it was mine, and even with all that I was able to shed it like a snake’s skin when given the chance.
For all the talk of Game, there is a growing awareness among young men of the staggering STD rates among young women. The CDC estimates that 26% of girls 14-19 have one of the 4 most common STDs. Mother Nature has a lot of tricks up her sleeve that we don’t understand yet, and that 20% of men who are supposedly getting all the action may end up sterile. Sperm counts have been falling worldwide for the past 50 years anyway, so even a lot of married men are having difficulties conceiving with their wives.
“Always in motion, the future is.” I think there are still enough wild cards in the deck that the future might surprise a lot of people.
I suspect that in the coming years it will be men’s libidos that need the boost more than women’s. With the unbelievable trend toward obesity of women in the Anglosphere, it’s pretty difficult to view a lot of them as any sort of object of desire. HL may be working LTR Game for the time being, but if his wife blows up to look like 100 kilos of cold mashed potatoes shoveled into a garbage bag he might be just as happy if her loins don’t quiver for him.
I don’t know how much of this current buzz about “cougars” is hype and how much is reality, but it seems that past a certain age women don’t seem to have to worry all that much about getting too much sexual attention from men in their own age group. I think it is actually a positive development for younger men because middle-aged women will provide them with sexual outlets as the middle-aged men get so burned out that they are no longer willing to pursue and court women.
I think it is actually a positive development for younger men because middle-aged women will provide them with sexual outlets as the middle-aged men get so burned out that they are no longer willing to pursue and court women.
I’m glad someone else thinks so. For a while now I’ve suspected that young men and middle-aged women have more in common with each other than either does with the opposite sex in their own age group. (hope that made sense.)
To Zed,
Ummm, we are way past this point. Women have already filled the gap. There is soooo, soooo, soooo, much to do. The choices are endless. For as long as a woman can get out of bed and into the community, she is set.
But it makes no difference from the past when women married older men. I can’t give a number on the amount of women in their 60’s who are waiting for their husbands to die who are in their 80’s and 90’s so they can have a life but I know the number is high.
Men score big time when they marry young women. They don’t just get a young woman who can raise children well because they can chase them around, but also a woman who will take care of them in their older age. Women are just as sceptical about men these days as men are about women when it comes to marriage.
Kis seems to be raising her sons to be kitchen bitches so they might fit in a lot better with a woman like her than her husband did.
Hey! I totally resent that! My older boy does the odd load of dishes, but mostly he helps me with things like heavy lifting and household repairs and yardwork. My daughter still does the majority of the “women’s work” when I’m not home. And my little guy mostly cleans up his own messes and looks after the dog.
I’d love to have my boys have a “providor” role model. But that role model was not their dad.
HL may be working LTR Game for the time being, but if his wife blows up to look like 100 kilos of cold mashed potatoes shoveled into a garbage bag he might be just as happy if her loins don’t quiver for him.
But won’t she be more likely to not turn into The Blob if he keeps making her feel desirable? I mean, once a man’s libido becomes impersonalized like that–once it trasforms from “he wants me” to “he wants sex”, well, wouldn’t that be the point where a woman stops caring about her appearance? If all he wants is sex, she can provide that to him no matter what she looks like.
I think it is actually a positive development for younger men because middle-aged women will provide them with sexual outlets as the middle-aged men get so burned out that they are no longer willing to pursue and court women.
No matter how hot I find a 20 y/o guy, I always get stuck on the whole, “OMG, he’s only five years older than my son” thing. Maybe I should just forget about that?
So, what you are saying, julie, is that the answer is “no”, women do not need men to care about them.
I think this is why we will continue to see the rise of Game. It’s quite clear that women don’t care about men, and if they don’t need men to care about them then men are probably going to go for what sex they can get and not worry so much about all the rest of it.
Personally, I think it is unfortunate that things are turning out that way, but I’ve had to accept a lot of things in life that I considered unfortunate.
One of the first posts here at the Spearhead was about Benjamin Franklin. He was something of a rake in his day, and there is a legend that he advised a young man of his acquaintance to avoid marriage, and if he had to have a “consort” to choose an older woman. Franklin’s reasoning is that women past 40 seldom conceive (with their own eggs, and there was no IVF in those days). They are emotionally more stable than younger women, and not as prone to emotional outbursts. Given that they have often attained a certain respectability in life, they are discreet. And, given that men their age just do not have the stamina and enthusiasm that a younger man has, they can be very appreciative. Or, in short – they don’t swell, they don’t yell, they don’t tell, and they are grateful as hell.
I think this idea has always been around in cultural wisdom – lots of men have had their own “Mrs. Robinsons”, and the idea of an older experienced woman initiating a young man into the ways of love is almost a cultural cliche.
I remember that essay! It’s in his autobiography. He also said something about all women looking the same age from the waist down anyway. lol
Tom Jones – probably the first modern British novel – has a bit of that.
zed October 23, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Ummm, we are way past this point. Women have already filled the gap.
Well, gosh, didn’t you say in another thread you tell women to get lost so they figure out how to do life for themselves? You don’t want to be needed, you want to be liked and respected just as you are. You want your freedom and to give because you want to give. You want it to be a choice so that you know if you do give, it is something not being taken for granted.
You of course would give it all knowing that it was all in your control, would you not? (BTW, this is directed as if you are speaking for all men not you specifically)
But you can’t have that if women are so dependant on you. Then you just feel like you are trapped to serve.
What if you believed giving from your end was on a level of self sacrafice because you chose it? Wouldn’t that make you more comfortable to look twice at a woman?
Julie, I thought my ex would assume “She doesn’t need me, she stays because she wants to” and feel good about that, but he didn’t. He felt emasculated. At the same time, if I’d been totally dependent, he’d have felt I was only there because I had to be, and would have resented my dependence.
Damned if I do and damned if I don’t.
Yes, I did, julie, because I started hearing 40 years ago how little women needed us, how little they liked us, and how annoying we were to have around.
Stow the “emasculation” crap, kis, it is totally worn out.
Now, a news flash for both of you grrls – MEN ARE NOT WOMEN!!!!
What motivates YOU is not what motivates US.
It’s 05:00 am, and the alarm goes off. A man asks himself, “would I rather get out of bed and go to my suck-ass job, or roll over and go back to sleep?”
Now, if it all boils down to a matter of what he “wants” to do, of course he is going to roll over and go back to sleep, because, you see, no one needs him to get up and go out and do something to take care of them.
Men need to feel like they matter to someone, not like they are an accessory of the moment. They need to feel like someone else’s life would be diminished if they were not around. We need to feel important to someone, because the culture at large considers us totally disposable.
Being needed by someone he loves will get a man out of bed in the morning when nothing else will.
Women automatically have being needed built into motherhood. That tiny infant (assuming the woman did not abort it) needs her. That gives her a sense of worth as a person.
It isn’t that women have “emasculated” men, it is that they have totally dehumanized us.
kis
You’re right. You had no way of making him do anything. You can’t control another human being and certainly men who have never been married can even comprehend for real what went on.
My godmother was so fat, I mean fat at the largest level. She had a gland disease and she gave her daughters absolutely everything she could never have. She was the only breadwinner in tho house as a fantastic high school teacher and she took her daughters to the best of model agencies, acting classes and singing classes and even had them involved with a club like the Mickey mouse club that Brittany Spears came from.
I called her Aunty and that meant her husband was my Uncle too. He never worked but by gosh, he had the greatest stamp collection. He was up with the world’s best I would say and that was his cave. He didn’t sleep in the same bed as my Godmother but he sure loved her. Her daughters were bitches IMO. I grew up with them but they were shameful to be seen with my Godmother. I certainly wasn’t. I tried to find her when I followed my husband to another country for his work but I think she died. I wonder sometimes if I meant the world to her. *Gosh, I have a few tears writing this*
All I want to say Kis is that it is not your fault. He did what he wanted to do and he could have chosen different paths. There are many ways to save a marriage if you really want it.
Men need to feel like they matter to someone, not like they are an accessory of the moment. They need to feel like someone else’s life would be diminished if they were not around.
Yet I hear so much on this site about how men see marriage as slavery and I get the idea that they’re resentful of that burden. I mean, feeling needed is important, I agree wholeheartedly. But it is a burden as well.
What bothers me so much about my ex is that I did need him to be more than what he was. If he’d been that, if we’d banked my checks instead of using them for necessities, he could have felt needed and we’d be in great shape for him to retire in ten years. But that burden wasn’t what he wanted.
And yes, I think dehumanized is a better word for it than emasculated.
And, how did you go about letting him know that? I’m not giving you, specifically, a hard time. I’ve been weaving all my posts toward making a specific point, kis. Women are fighting cultural messages that men get about women. B&G talked about how she had to unlearn all the stuff she had been told about men in cultural messages. Well, men do not read minds. They are not women. We do not think like you do. We swim in a sea of messages about how much you hate everything about us, and if you want us to think differently you probably need to find ways to make that clear to us.
Men cannot hear what women do not say. Take an honest look at the sea of misandric cultural messages men swim in and ask yourself honestly how the hell we are supposed to know that you, individually, think any different?
What men resent is not the load. It is not a burden if it is appreciated.
What men resent is when women stop appreciating it and convey the attitude that they are simply entitled to it because they are women and we are their slaves.
All a woman has to do is show a little appreciation for a man and he will walk through fire for her. But, the moment she starts acting like she has him over a barrel and can demand anything she wants and there is nothing he can do about it, then, yes, he does begin to bitterly resent that.
The really nauseating thing is that the so-called Free World is almost four generations deep into this particular form of biocide. Freud said it out loud over a hundred years ago: masochism is a distinctly feminine characteristic; leading to mindless consumerism, hemorraghic misdirected compassion and warm and fuzzy values instead of iron-hard value judgements. Remember Honor, ladies and gentlemen?
zed October 23, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Well, gosh, didn’t you say in another thread you tell women to get lost so they figure out how to do life for themselves?
.
Well, I guess if you are going to live 40 years ago, I have hardly any hope of talking with you.
News flash for you Zed, men and women can relate far more than you can even know. Women need a cave too BTW.
Dream on. Hormones aside we both are just human.
Well, that depends. I get up every morning @5am. My sons goes to work at that hour. Not for another human being but because he likes his job.
5am, shite, every kid used to get up that early to watch Thunderbirds. And then we would ride 20 miles to school.
But if you were like my Uncle and be told you had to drive you wife to hospital to have a baby, you would put on your clothes and go to work immediately. My Aunty had to phone another relative to take her. Sorry Zed, I couldn’t resist telling about my uncles weird way if handling things.
But seriously, nearly all families involved in business get up at 5am. If you both work the business, you both work as a team.
Your son is a teenager, or at most a young man. Knowing one male does not make you an expert on all of them.
No, you dream on, julie. This whole “gender is a social construct” is the most destructive idea of recent history. There is a lot of research coming out that shows that men’s and women’s brains are fundamentally different.
But, this is a perfect illustration of the dynamic which has torn men and women apart – women will not believe what men tell them about themselves.
Remember, “women cannot hear what men do not say”?
Well, certainly no one can accuse me of not saying it.
Have you “heard” it?
I rest my case.
Giving your wife or girlfriend “that look” a few times throughout the day makes her feel like “He want’s me.” Looking at her like a roommate all day, then tapping her on the shoulder once you’re in bed makes her feel like “He wants sex.”
Yes! That’s absolutely true. Woman have a long warm-up time. Except sometimes when they just want it all the time and over and over and over. LOL. We do get horny SOMETIMES, we’re just not that constant. Or as my husband says, “With women it’s like you just have an ON/OFF switch. There’s no dimmer.”
Although, to tell the truth: I’m okay with “just sex” sometimes. It doesn’t always have to be a big production. And it’s always at least pleasant, if he has any clue about what he’s doing.
It isn’t that women have “emasculated” men, it is that they have totally dehumanized us.
Agreed.
Men need to feel like they matter to someone, not like they are an accessory of the moment. They need to feel like someone else’s life would be diminished if they were not around. We need to feel important to someone, because the culture at large considers us totally disposable.
That’s probably the most profound thing I’ve read in a while, Zed.
Isn’t that what separates the “happily married” men from the rest? They feel like they are important to their families: their wives respect them, their children look up to them, they provide and protect, and all that good stuff. They have a reason to wake up and be a productive member of society. They feel comfortable in the present and are able to look forward to the future.
You got it, B&G, which is why you have a husband and good marriage, and so many other women have neither.
Yep, and in a more natural state, without femstate laws, you would be killed for doing that. Killed, and righteously so.
Yep, and in a more natural state, without femstate laws, you would be killed for doing that. Killed, and righteously so.
That’s what I meant before about living life on the fringes.
That seems pretty heavy-handed to me, Novaseeker. Other than Islamic states, where are middle-aged women killed for consorting with younger men?
zed,
You have me at a disadvantage. Thanks for resting.
What men resent is not the load. It is not a burden if it is appreciated.
*nodding*
I’ve found the best way to show appreciation is to just say it. Just say, “I really appreciate you doing X. That’s made my day so much easier.” “I’m so lucky to have married you, I don’t know where I’d be without you.” “You look so sexy when you come in all sweaty like that.” “You’re such a wonderful father.” If you’re walking down a dark street at night, put your arm through his and then say, “I’m glad you’re with me. I feel so much safer with you around.”
Then love on him for emphasis. Or just love on him without the talking. That works, too.
And then there are the more round-about ways, like complaining that “You just spoil me terribly.” or praising him indirectly to your children, “If you keep eating like that you’re going to grow up to be big and strong like Daddy.” If someone comments in front of your husband that your daughter is smart say, “Oh, she has that from her father.” That sort of thing.
Of course, all the talking only works if you follow through with your actions. The words alone are hollow and corny if you’re not sincere. I really value my husband and I just try to show him that. I totally lucked out. I love and admire him MUCH MORE now than when we first got married; that was just infatuation. I didn’t even realize at the time how great he was. Something that has given me new respect for arranged marriages, by the way.
One thing I have noticed is that simply saying, “I love you.” doesn’t have the same effect as praising something specific he’s done or a specific attribute. “I love you” seems sort of vague. Guys like more specific comments. Or am I wrong about that?
You got it, B&G, which is why you have a husband and good marriage, and so many other women have neither.
But what I don’t understand is: do other women really not understand or do they just not want to understand? What is the deal? There’s so much information out there for someone who wants to find out the truth.
For instance, I asked my husband once what he was thinking and he answered, “Nothing.” I used to get so angry about that. Why won’t he share his thoughts with me? Then I thought (duh): maybe he really IS thinking about nothing. He doesn’t seem to have hyperactive squirrels in his head like I do (lucky him). So I asked him again, “Really? Do you really just think about nothing sometimes?” “Yeah. You know, when I’m just trying to clear my brain.” That completely floored me: CLEAR MY BRAIN? How can you clear your brain? But I believed him. After all, why should he lie?
Now if I ask him, “What are you thinking?” and he says nothing I just shrug and go back to what I’m doing. My girlfriends say it’s impossible that anyone could be thinking “nothing” and that he’s obviously trying to hide something from me. But maybe he really IS thinking about nothing. I figure he’s more of an expert on his brain than they are. These are the same geniuses who thought he was “cute, nice, but sort of dull” while their own husbands were running around shagging the neighborhood.
Look at this thread here, and I think you will have your answer, B&G. I have explained it, and explained it, and explained it, and gotten a lot of pushback and argument.
And, from a man’s perspective, there really isn’t much difference between malice and incompetence – which kills you more dead, being gored by an angry rhinocerous, or crushed by a lumbering elephant?
It doesn’t much matter why they don’t get it, the bottom line is that they don’t. Unlike Globalman who is still really strong in his anger phase, I don’t dismiss all women. I engage them, I explain things, I tease them and play with them and get them to illustrate the points I am making.
The women like you who want to have a man in her life and want to get it, will do both. The women who are fine without a man, or who just want a blank screen to project their fantasies of men on, and don’t want a real live human being in their lives who is very different from them, with his own set of needs and priorties, will blame the men who were in their lives but aren’t any more, and continue to focus on what happened 150 years ago instead of yesterday.
We each suffer according the level of our own bullshit.
And, how did you go about letting him know that? I’m not giving you, specifically, a hard time. I’ve been weaving all my posts toward making a specific point, kis. Women are fighting cultural messages that men get about women. B&G talked about how she had to unlearn all the stuff she had been told about men in cultural messages.
Before we got married we had a long discussion about what kind of marriage we wanted to have. It was decided between us that he would work and I would stay home and look after the kids. Everything was bliss. Yes, we struggled–quite spectacularly–but we were a team. Then he talked me into going back to work and he quit his job, and it all went downhill from there. If I even asked how his jobsearch was going, he’d get defensive. I’m not a nag. I hate myself when I do it, so I just don’t. But the things that B&G did for her husband–mine saw as criticism. I knew what his ex was like, and I kind of understood how he might be oversensitive in that respect, so I went out of my way to not be like her. So yeah, I was probably too subtle letting him know what I needed him to do.
Then again, when we started to really struggle financially–we’d been paying some of our bills with our line of credit, and he told me I needed to cut our spending, I finally told him no, I couldn’t cut anymore–we were already living on a shoestring and had been for years. We needed more income. He went off on a rant about how he worked hard (25 hours a week at that point), and maybe I should think about picking up more shifts. OMG I felt like smacking him.
I don’t know if by then it was just too late. If I’d let things slide for too long, or what. But I got the impression that with him, he wanted to feel necessary, but he didn’t want to be necessary.
If I ever get married again, I’ll spend a little time each day letting him know how important what he does is to me. I get it. I do. I just don’t know if it would have worked for my marriage. Maybe. I readily admit, I enabled him to be the way he was. And in a lot of ways, I think the marriage ending was the best thing for him.
I think it would have, kis. When I read what B&G has to say, it is easy for me, as a man, to see why her husband would walk through fire for her. She gives him what he needs most, and in doing so encourages him to be even more of his best qualities. She commented that he was an even better man that she realized when she married him – to which I respond “Of course, the way you treat him brings out the best in a man. He is better because the way you treat him makes him better and want to be better. ”
As far as you ever getting married again, I don’t know how things are in Canada, but you are entering the age range where men and women are so sick of each other in the US that a huge number of them don’t even date any more. I understand that Canada has same-sex marriage, so you might be able to find a fem woman to marry who will be the wife and let you continue on being the man in the relationship. I can’t imagine a man who has the kind of value system to live up to your traditional expectations of him, finding a woman like you very appealing. I would bet that it would be more likely that you would find another husband much like your last one. The kind you are looking for is most likely married to a feminine woman, like Hestia or B&G, who complements him rather than competing with him, and such men don’t end up back on the market very often. The available men are mostly other women’s ex-husbands, just like yours was when you married him. If they didn’t like him enough to hold on to him, chances are you won’t either.
I think that is probably true. I know that a lot of men have a very big thing about keeping their commitments, so divorce is incredibly difficult for them to initiate. After the initial shock, he probably breathed a big sigh of relief. And, I gather from your descriptions of him now versus then, that getting out of the marriage allowed him to get away from some conditions which were very toxic to him.
I think it would have, kis. When I read what B&G has to say, it is easy for me, as a man, to see why her husband would walk through fire for her. She gives him what he needs most, and in doing so encourages him to be even more of his best qualities.
I’m still not sure. I mean, when I go back to his childhood and early adulthood–bumped up a grade in school, but never bothered with college or university, a history of menial jobs, etc. He’s extremely intelligent but has never wanted to excel in anything really. He’s expressed intense interest in things (like chef’s school) over the short term, but the interest never seemed to last, no matter how successful he was. He got into the military just under the age cap to pursue engineering, but managed to mess that up (spent some time in military prison for brawling, heh, followed by an honorable discharge).
In other words, I think maybe he’s scared of success? And sabotages his own efforts the moment it looks like he’s on the cusp of having something better.
I can’t imagine a man who has the kind of value system to live up to your traditional expectations of him, finding a woman like you very appealing.
Perhaps not. Again, I’m not sure. I think I might have been appealing to such a man back then, but my marriage has changed me and how I view myself. As I mentioned, I thrived in the “woman” role (with a few exceptions, like indulging my yen for carpentry) when it was available to me. I took on extra shit like continuing to work outside the home because it was necessary. I wish now I hadn’t, because I see how it affected how he perceived himself and his role in our marriage, but I just didn’t feel like I had a choice. It snowballed.
And yes, I’ve been thinking about finding a woman–I’ve gotten so used to wearing the pants I can hardly remember what it’s like to wear the skirt anymore. Though I still find something very appealing about being supported financially so I can focus on my home and family, and having the burden of major decision-making and things like that eased. I’ve always been a bit of a gender-switch in romantic dealings with men vs women.
The available men are mostly other women’s ex-husbands, just like yours was when you married him….I think that is probably true. I know that a lot of men have a very big thing about keeping their commitments, so divorce is incredibly difficult for them to initiate.
Actually, he’s the one who left in all the previous relationships he’d been in. I’m the only one of his wives/girlfriends so far who’s done the leaving. He walked away from his previous marriage while his wife was pregnant with their second child–though after getting to know her I didn’t really blame him. Plus, she cheated, and he always felt she got pregnant as a way of keeping him.
After the initial shock, he probably breathed a big sigh of relief. And, I gather from your descriptions of him now versus then, that getting out of the marriage allowed him to get away from some conditions which were very toxic to him.
Yup, toxic to both of us. I took great care in explaining to my kids that though it was my decision, their dad was no happier in the marriage than I was, and we were both to blame. And we were. I don’t know if what happened would have been avoidable–because any returning of the marriage to its initial dynamic would have required a concerted effort from both of us–but we both had a hand in it, for sure.
I’m beginning to see signs that the dialogue which has been so one-sided for so long is beginning to re-balance itself. It’s hard to say whether you and your husband could have managed to pull things out of the fire. It’s kind of like walking or running and stumbling and losing your balance – most of your energy goes into trying to keep from falling down and as often as not you won’t manage to avoid it. Under the old social contract, you and he would not have been given much choice – you would have been forced to work it out, or to continue tearing at each other until the entire family was consumed by the conflict. Of course, under the old social contract you would probably have never been married in the first place because he would have been forced to work things out with his first wife.
I can’t really say which way is “better.” I thought my parents’ marriage pretty much sucked and could never understand why they didn’t just cash it in – other than the fact that it just wasn’t done in their day. One of my uncles was married for 62 years to a woman with a perpetually broken wing. She milked the tyranny of the weak for all it was worth. One of her daughters was petrified when she went in for her first pap smear, because her mother would always “take to bed” for at least 3 days after she had one. When she got it done, she just laughed and said “oh well, that was mom.” Both of my older siblings’ marriages went down in flames, as did those of most of my HS and college friends.
As the old saying goes, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. You can’t create a new social order without breaking the old one, so we’re all pretty much the eggs in this New World Omelet that is being cooked up.
Personally, I think it all could have been done without all the hostility and hatred. I, personally, was more than happy to let women out of their traditional roles, because the idea of being maimed in a factory, or getting black lung from working in a coal mine, was definitely not my idea of a good time.
I think we are going to see a lot fewer bad marriages in the future, because we are going to see fewer marriages in general.
There are still a few kinks in the new plan that haven’t been worked out, though.
I’m beginning to see signs that the dialogue which has been so one-sided for so long is beginning to re-balance itself. It’s hard to say whether you and your husband could have managed to pull things out of the fire.
I don’t think we could have. I mean, now that I look at how and why he ended things with his previous wife–the things that made him unhappy, even before the cheating–reflected a general reluctance to being the “one who is counted on”. I even see that now in his work history–he’d stick with a job until he got near the top, then quit, because he didn’t want to be in charge. His ex nagged and pressured him to do his part, and I refused to do that. If I had given him no choice but to be the sole providor, I wonder if maybe he’d have walked away from me early on, rather than staying. Who knows?
So I think a lot of it was doomed from the start because maybe he’d fooled himself into believing he wanted things he didn’t really want. I think he was honest with me before we married–I’m just not sure he was honest with himself.
I think we are going to see a lot fewer bad marriages in the future, because we are going to see fewer marriages in general.
There are still a few kinks in the new plan that haven’t been worked out, though.
I wonder, though, about the logistics of it. I mean, if men don’t want the burden of day-to-day care of kids, and they don’t want to be seen as only wallets full of child support, and they don’t want to be married and provide that way, it leaves the entire burden of raising children on women. I mean, I’d like men to have some role in their kids’ lives and make some contribution to their wellbeing. I’d certainly like my ex to take a larger part in their lives than he has since we separated. I’d envisioned him living here in town, and the kids just hanging with him after school or in the evenings a few days a week, but he moved far enough away that such an arrangement is impossible. Sigh.
One of her daughters was petrified when she went in for her first pap smear, because her mother would always “take to bed” for at least 3 days after she had one.
Holy crap, that’s funny. I mean, there’s no dignity in being in the stirrups, but taking to your bed?
That never works. Or, maybe it does some of the time but it is whole lot more likely to get a woman nothing except what she beats out of a man. It wears her out trying to nag things out of him, and eventually becomes less effort to do it herself. Praising him when he does his part, as B&G does, will get him to do even more because he will get addicted to the praise and how good it feels.
Uh, yeah, that’s one of those kinks I was talking about. I think a lot of men get harassed and tricked into having kids. Many of them get very attached to the kids once that has happened, but not all of them. Before I was out of HS my older brother’s marriage was in deep trouble. His wife threatened him that if he divorced her she would take the kids, move out of state, and he would never see them again. Of course, that was back in the days when it was a given that he would pay alimony and CS. He moved back in with her, and typical of what I have seen a lot of women do – the way to fix a troubled marriage was obviously… to have another kid.
He stuck it out until the youngest graduated from HS, then told his lawyer “Get me out of this with as much of my skin left as you can manage.”
I guess one solution would be to let men have and support their hobbies – motorcycles, boats, whatever – and let women have theirs – kids. I don’t know of many men who get baby-rabies the way women do. It seems that a lot of women are going the “single mother by choice” route these days, but I’m old-fashioned enough that I still think it is a bad idea.
One strategy for men has been the marriage-children-and-relationship strike. When those of us who have no interest in children at all take ourselves off the husband market, theoretically it should raise the market value of those men willing to be husbands and fathers, in women’s eyes. Maybe then the women lucky enough to snag one of these guys will value what she has a little more and treat him a little better than I see most wives treating their husbands.
Odd how much that looks like the old pre-feminist marital contract, isn’t it?
One thing I don’t think will work is conscripting men into fatherhood. Paternity fraud is one of the classic MRA issues which will really get my blood boiling. Frankly, I could never take the risk of dating a woman with children lest the court judge that I had gotten into a “meretricious relationship” and “acted as a parent figure” and assess me Child Support based on my “imputed income potential” from my old years in the corporate nightmare. I could never come close to making that kind of income again, and would certainly be headed for jail when I could not meet the CS payments.
So, I really don’t have any answers. Under the old social structure, genderqueer women often did not get to have kids. Now they can, but there seems to be shortage of men willing to take on their assigned role in that little domestic drama.
That is what happens when you start busting apart the old roles and responsibilities – if you get out of yours, someone else gets to get out of his. If the new freedom is worth the loss of the old supports, then everything is groovy. If it isn’t, then the choice pretty much boils down to “which do you want more, or want to happen less.”
Life has always had some tough choices in it, and as easy as we have had things in the modern world, I don’t think that part of it will ever change.
The tyranny of the weak – just like those women who got “the vapours” when something bothered them.
The family joke about the woman is that she “enjoyed ill health” all her life. And, you bet she enjoyed it. Since she so obviously had no ability, and plenty of need, she got everyone in the family, including her husband, to wait on her hand and foot.
Talk about power!!!!
Praising him when he does his part, as B&G does, will get him to do even more because he will get addicted to the praise and how good it feels.
Oh, I did. I was “that wife”, you know, the one who greets her man at the door with a beer and the newspaper, rubs his shoulders, draws him a bath so he can relax, shooes the kids away with a “Dad needs to unwind, he’s been working hard all day, you know.”
I just didn’t have the time or opportunity or energy for it anymore once I started working, because we worked opposite shifts. He got home and I left, and by the time I got home, I was too tired from doing the mom/housewife thing all day, and the work thing at night. And there was usually a sinkful of dishes waiting for me and kids that needed to be jamma’ed and tucked in when I got home too. There were too many other things that NEEDED my attention. And frankly, he didn’t give me that kind of consideration–there was no glass of wine waiting for me when I got home from work. Just a house that was clean when I’d left it but a pigsty when I got back and a man who’d greet me at the door with a “tag, you’re it,” and disappear into his cave.
So yeah, I think it wasn’t having kids, but me going back to work that was the end of it. Neither of us coped well. We both felt unappreciated. I think the only reason he stayed was that he had his cave–all I had was kids crawling all over me and work to do every bloody moment. And I can not only have that by myself, I’m financially better off now and the only thing that’s changed is he isn’t here, and I don’t have anyone criticizing me for not keeping a spotless house.
I don’t know of many men who get baby-rabies the way women do.
LOL, that is so funny. Because my ex was the total opposite of most men in that regard. He loved holding and playing with the kids all through that phase when most men kind of don’t know what the heck to do with them. He related really well to them as toddlers–enjoyed reading them stories and taking them to the beach to look for crabs under the rocks. He’d still get down on the floor and help my youngest build a train track until the kid was maybe three or four. But just when they got old enough to ride a bike, throw a ball, stuff like that, he kind of…lost interest.
In fact, I think he wouldn’t have protested me getting my tubes tied nearly as much had I done it when our youngest was still a baby. But he bemoaned the fact that there would be no more babies–not no more children, no more babies.
Frankly, I could never take the risk of dating a woman with children lest the court judge that I had gotten into a “meretricious relationship” and “acted as a parent figure” and assess me Child Support based on my “imputed income potential” from my old years in the corporate nightmare. I could never come close to making that kind of income again, and would certainly be headed for jail when I could not meet the CS payments.
Yeah, I totally understand your fear. I mean, even here in Canada, they base CS on the father’s actual income rather than his income while married, yeah, there are cases where stepfathers have been dinged. My ex’s ex was receiving CS from both him and her ex after him for quite a while. Totally ridiculous and grossly unfair to both men.
Life has always had some tough choices in it, and as easy as we have had things in the modern world, I don’t think that part of it will ever change.
I hear ya.
Well, what can I say, kis? Your husband was obviously a total shit who didn’t deserve a fine woman like you.
It could have been worse, though – you could have ended up married to a guy like me. Then you would have known what true misery felt like.
Well, what can I say, kis? Your husband was obviously a total shit who didn’t deserve a fine woman like you.
Are you humoring me, Zed?
Honestly, I don’t think he was a total shit. He’s a really likeable guy outside of all this marriage business. His little brother idolized him in a lot of ways, but at the same time once said to me, “I don’t know how he keeps finding women willing to put up with him.”
And really, I think it was his dishonesty with himself that doomed us. If I’d known he’d feel pressured being the sole providor–being necessary–and I’d end up working not to get us a few luxuries, but to just make ends meet, I wouldn’t have married him. But I honestly thought he’d come to an epiphany with the dissolution of his previous marriage. Kind of an “I now see what’s important in life/time to grow up” moment. I wasted a lot of time and energy trying to hold something together that should never have happened in the first place.
It could have been worse, though – you could have ended up married to a guy like me. Then you would have known what true misery felt like.
Hell, I don’t want to marry you. I’m still up for a quick lay, though, if you’re interested.
You catch on real quick, kis, gotta give you that.
Nah, I told you before, you’re not my type – you’re too short and your tits are too big.
Real sporting of you to offer, though.
Well, I’m a woman of my word. Never one to renege when an offer’s on the table…
Well, I always got the impression that you were an honorable woman, even if you are a bit, dare I say, “queer.”
Thanks for the banter, kis, it has been a treat.
Some interesting issues we got tossed on the table, eh?
Yup. Interesting, frustrating, illuminating… all in all a good day.
Black&German–
So you agree then that men are fools to ever let women have so much security in a relationship and in their economic hold on their man that they can “settle down”? I put it to you that American women settle down more than most any other because they’re way too secured due to feminist divorce law changes, and cultural popaganda.
My solution as an older guy, a tail end of the baby boom guy, post no kids divorce long ago has been to not remarry. To sometimes date and more often let a (much younger) girl move in with me, but not marry.
Guess what. It works on the sex front. And other fronts as well.
It works without kids. With kids it is more complicated.
I think, in this specific example, women are fools, the men are just being normal.
Black&German–
So why should we alpha men agree to let you have kids by us then?
It’s seems to be a truly rotten deal, always potentially, and in most cases actually, in feminist America these days.
I don’t know a lot of 5 or more years in happily married men. They’re almost all sexually unhappy, if they aren’t cheating.
Why isn’t permitted male just or almost just sex playing with wife veto over the almost just issue the way to go, given as you said, honestly to your credit:
I fail to see why you didn’t OWE him the right to step out, with rules designed to keep him from wanting to step way. It’s up to you to restrain your jealousy, since you felt female entitled to not step up to his natural male sex drive.
Am I not right?
So why should we alpha men agree to let you have kids by us then?
Don’t want an alpha. Sorry.
It’s up to you to restrain your jealousy, since you felt female entitled to not step up to his natural male sex drive. Am I not right?
No, you assume I didn’t “step up”.
Yeah. To me, alpha = skeezy. Always has. Every once in a while you see a really good-looking guy who’s all buff, and he doesn’t come off as an arrogant ass in the first three minutes of conversations. But not very often. Not often enough for me to even consider alpha an option.
Only high betas need apply. A girl has to have standards.
I’m emailing my friends links to this article.