Males Need to be Proud

Greg Swann goaded me into speaking again. Truth be told, I've been feeling guilty about all of the loose ends I haven't tied. I have unfinished posts about rape and the rational human mind that need to be posted, but, they're not easily completed.

I've been thinking a great deal about pride lately, since reading and digesting Greg's excellent e-book Man Alive and what it says about egoism.  I realized that fostering pride in youth is important because it is pride in oneself that helps us avoid bad decisions. Pride helps one resist harmful temptations. When I read the post that Greg's tweet was referring to, I realized that pride works right into that subject. I wrote the following comment there, incorporating the concept of pride:

Boys need something that they can feel good about. Mastering the kick-flip is a reason to feel proud. It gives you membership to the kick-flip club. You're inspiring others who now look up to you. You get cred from those who are already in it. You're bringing your own style to the move and expressing yourself to this society, earning a unique spot in the hierarchy.
In Dogtown and Z-boys, technical prowess was highly prized, but it was nothing without good style. You couldn't look like a dork on the board and hang with them, even if you were a good skater.
Boarders are creating their own world. It's come a long way from its subversive, anarchic beginnings, but, it has kept its rebellious nature. It burst forth from the streets to demand acceptance. Skate parks were built to contain and disperse its energy.
The question is, what is the boy looking for when he makes his way to the skate park? He is looking for something he can take pride in. Meaningful pride, not the fake "self-esteem" they manufacture at school. Pride is meaningful when it can be expressed outwardly, when the source of pride can be demonstrated. Self esteem is inward, feminine. It's the image one has of oneself. Pride is affected by how others view you. There's nothing worse than the poseur with false pride, the guy that acts the part but can't back it up. Skate parks obliterate that.
In the older days, everyone played baseball. Kids hung out at the diamond and played pick up. Bikes were utilitarian. No bar spins. No jumps. No bunny hops. No half pipes. My father used to put is .22 over the handlebars and ride out to his favourite bush for some rabbit. Riding home with dinner hanging over the handlebars gave him a sense of pride like no other. He understands pride. He may not understand skateboarding, but, he knows why it exists.
Boys today aren't allowed to feel proud of themselves. Pride is masculine. Boys being proud are shamed for the "sins" of their fathers. The masculine has been demonized, poisoned. Masculine pride is sullied by its supposed connection to the patriarchy.You want to be a proud father and husband, you're proud to be an oppressor. Proud to be part of a system that abused and enslaved women.
Skating rolls right around all that bullshit. Its as artistic as painting. It's a dance with no partner. A sport with no rules. No one gives a fuck where you're from or what you think. Land that trick and you're cool. You're allowed to be proud.
Pride is not a negative trait. It's essential for a person to make good decisions. When every action is first acted upon oneself, only a proud person can be counted on not to commit malicious acts against others. Want to prevent rape? Want to reduce bullying? Want to reduce suicide. Foster pride. Foster pride by self-expression and self-determination.
Want good men? Pride will turn more boys into good men. Men who can stand alone and be admired by women.

Who knows? Prideful men might even inspire women to show develop some pride.

Kevin Ware - Men Are So Unemotional

If men are so unemotional, then why do these tough elite athletes break into tears when one of their fellow players suffers a devastating injury?

http://aol.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketball/story/2013-03-31/kevin-ware-injury-gruesome-leg-louisville-duke-ncaa-tournament

What is Your Desired Outcome?

I have not had a lot of time to blog, my familial and corporate duties are demanding at the moment, but there is much going on in my mind.  I have managed to take time off from colouring Easter Eggs with my family to point out the parallels between recent events and my own blogging life leading into a brief statement of my mission.

I have serious disagreement on parts of Amanda Blum's measured take on Donglegate, but I appreciate her tone and agree on the overall point, that Adria Richards made it harder for women in tech and we all lost because of her actions. I would just like to point out the advice provided for anyone faced with a similar situation:

All she had to consider was “what outcome am I looking for?”.

In Adria's case, if she had asked herself the question and her answer was to gain more attention for herself and her blog, destroy the life of the offender and raise a hoopla over nothing, then she accomplished her goals and much much more. One should also consider the potential negative outcomes of one's proposed action.

I remember thinking that exact phrase when debating what to do in my own situation when faced with offensive material displayed publicly. My primary desired outcomes were: to stop this person from spreading hatred more towards men, make a point about the true nature of contemporary feminism and to put feminists on notice that their public displays of hatred will not go unchallenged.

I admit that the idea of gaining notoriety was enticing, but, this was not the way I really wanted to go about it.  If that was really my primary motivation, it was certainly a risky method - there obviously were people supporting this author of the posters. I did not want to hurt anyone, including the author, despite her opinion of me. I thought long and hard and initially tried to send this to a prominent MRA, but, had to post it myself when nothing came of it. Once the ball was set in motion, I was not going to let it go, so the AVFM article came about.

In the end, my decision to take the actions I did was demanded by the primary goal of this blog - to inspire others to challenge ideas - any ideas - which seem contradictory to reality or common sense. I am not afraid to challenge ideas which are generally accepted by the masses, simply because they are told that they must and they do not have the tools or knowledge to challenge them themselves. If I was truly The Cul-De-Sac Hero, it was time to stand up and show it.

Science and the lexicon of political ideology are weapons used against individuals who would challenge the powers who use them. I am not the best equipped to fight them, but, I have the most important weapon in anyone's arsenal, no matter who the foe. I have an independent, human mind.

With this tool, anything is possible. I hope that more people read this and make the same choice that I did - stop accepting the lesson presented by The Greater School System that is contemporary media and take appropriate action to bring more rationality into the common discourse.

Subjective Sexual Harassment -

Let's think of a reverse situation to the forking dongle episode experienced by Adria Richards.

There was an office party thrown by the executive in charge of my group. A few of us decided to share a cab, just because we were all working on a project together and working late. I sat in the front seat and three ladies sat in the back.

These ladies were a little older than me. I think of them with a twinge of sadness because they are the type of women who sacrificed their chance at raising families for their careers.

One of them once awkwardly mentioned how she wanted to have kids, when we were talking about mine. This was before I found the Red Pill, but I still realized that, pushing forty, she had little chance of meeting a man and having kids with him. I felt sorry for her because she seemed not to realize that her strategy for getting married and having kids was just not working out for her and the time was nearly up. I knew women her age that were hitting menopause. It was very awkward.

So conversation turned to our houses and gardening and one asked me if I enjoyed gardening. I do, in fact, since it was one of the first activities I enjoyed with my father who taught me a lot about growing vegetables and flowers.

"I like to watch things grow." I said, innocently.

"I like to watch things grow!" One of the women said.

I have to be honest, the joke went right over my head, partly, because I was facing front and couldn't see the facial expression and partly, because I was thinking about the state of the plants in my garden at that time. The snickers made me wake up to the connotation that had been made to the male member, but I was too slow and it was too late to make a come-back.

Now, it was a little uncomfortable to be in that situation because I was the only guy in the car (besides the driver) and I hadn't caught the joke. I realize that this is different than the situation in the conference, but, I bring it up to show that women are just as capable of making rude comments. I've been in many a public situation where similar things happened with women making lewd comments. Why are women making lewd comments empowered, while men doing so are harassing?

The problem with the word harassment in this situation is that focuses on the listener. It's subjective on the situation. If you make a joke to one person, everyone has a laugh. Another person becomes deeply offended by the exact same joke. Richards brings her traumatic past into it, her misinterpretation and the trigger of a little girl brought up in the speech to register action-worthy offense. I'm sorry, that's just too subjective to condemn a man or woman as a bad person who doesn't deserve to be included in society. People deserve leeway when it comes to their interactions. You can't designate one segment of society as the arbiter  of offensive comments and give them the power to ruin others. Feminists like to talk about language being a form of violence, but, the real form of violence is the action taken to silence and punish, especially when it's done on behalf of authority.

If I had been trained to see every awkward inducing comment as harassment and punishable, and men were seen as victims by society and society even considered harassment of men a problem, perhaps I would have felt obligated, empowered to report the comment in the cab. What would it have accomplished? Nothing but misery on all sides. I might have lost a coworker and created distrust at my workplace.

It's interesting, because I have done something similar to Richards. The artist who created those posters directed them toward the public, not a private conversation. They were blatantly hateful toward men in general, not a puerile joke. For holding feminist to the same standards to which they hold men, I was laughably accused of appropriating the language of the oppressed and using it against them. But, in Feminist Land, two wrongs make one wrong and a right (when the oppressed group performs one of the wrongs). Richards has received much praise and support as well as backlash and the loss of her job. No doubt, feminists will rally around her to support her chastising of behaviour that everyone does.

Richards doesn't know it is an unwitting victim in the feminist play. Now that she has been fired, she becomes a martyr for the cause, a casualty of the war on men. Trained to sacrifice her happiness for the feminist agenda like a foot soldier in the army.

I hope, at least, that she demonstrates to all, the pitfalls of the victim mentality. You can't rely on authority to protect your delicate sensibilities. This will only lead to a world with animosity and suspicion.

Rape Culture vs. Chivalric Code

It seems harder to get Feminists to challenge their belief in Rape Culture and Patriarchy than it is to get a devout theist to question the existence of perfect beings capable of creating imperfect worlds and then abandoning the inhabitants to go it alone. Both usually come by their beliefs through indoctrination and intense psychological abuse. Religious people are indoctrinated in churches, synagogues, temples and mosques. Feminists receive their beliefs from government institutions called schools.

Both groups have unfounded beliefs and customs that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. Religious people believe that they must adopt certain formalized manners of dress and behaviours as dictated by the leaders of their faith. Feminists have no formalized codes of dress, but many have fashions that could be described as counter-cultural identifying their members through rebellion against perceived oppression. Feminist orthodoxy states that adherents must believe that women are oppressed by the Patriarchy. This Patriarchy is not indestructible, but, it is enduring, ever-present and oppressive, a bit like the omnipotent beings believed to exist by many religious people.

Well, I am not trying to draw comparisons to famousphilosophers, but, this has to be said:

The Patriarchy is dead.

How do I know that Patriarchy is dead?

Women can vote.

Women can own land.

Women can hold positions of political power.

Women can work anywhere.

Women can start businesses.

Women can hire people.

Women can fire people.

Women can marry a man and keep her original name.

Women are not considered property.

Women can divorce their husbands.

Women usually have custody of children after a divorce.

All of these things were not true under the patriarchy. Today, women have equal or greater rights in every modern Western country. Due to intense indoctrination techniques feminists still believe that patriarchy exists, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Another odd belief related to Patriarchy, Rape Culture. Oddly enough, I’ve never seen it. Somehow, these feminists have grown up in another culture within the same culture in which I grew up.  I grew up in a culture of chivalry. There was nothing rapey about the culture in which I was raised. The rape narrative went something like this. If a member of your family was raped, your whole family was destroyed and shamed. You failed to protect her and you must avenge the act to achieve justice.

Here are two examples of common narratives of this culture:

1. A girl is raped. Her brother kills the rapist. He now lives in jail where he is regularly raped by the scum of the earth who also reside there.

2.  A father dies in jail where he was spending time for fighting. His last words to his son are that there is no honour in fighting and it shows more character to be passive. His son lives by these words, but, this perceived cowardice means that worthless thugs believe that his girlfriend is unprotected. He becomes enraged when he discovers she’s been raped and realizes that his ethos must be adjusted in certain circumstances and enacts his revenge.

How is rape excused in this culture? Did I miss something? I find this behaviour rather chivalric.

Feminists in this case are kind of putting the cart before the horse. They assume that rape exists because it was allowed by society. Well, this is completely backwards. Rape has always occurred since the dawn of humanity. As society became more civilized, it began finding ways to reduce the risk of rape, first, by civilizing men. Institutions like marriage were developed to protect women from opportunistic men. Chivalrous knights and later security forces, police and courts were formed. Of course, incest and other types of rape still occurred, but, as society became aware of more types of rape, and more techniques were invented to prevent rape more efforts were put forth to stop it.

The risk of rape is reducing as time and civilization progresses, much like the risk of being eaten by predatory animals has been all but eliminated. Every decade, fewer and fewer lives are lost due to predatory animals because we are dealing with the problem with increasing knowledge and techniques. 200 years ago, the land where I live was populated by bears, wolves and probably other predators that caused the residents a certain amount of realistic fear. These days, people react with hysteria when a coyote approaches their pet dog's kennel. The risk has been largely, but not totally, reduced due to the increase in civilization. If you were to say that coyotes attack dogs because society allows it, I'd say you're attributing a little bit too much power to the organs of society. We are trying to deal with coyotes, but, dammit, those creatures are wily and their nature makes them much more difficult to eradicate than wolves were.

If you don't believe that society is dealing with rape better than ever, look at the amount of furor and the level of punishment leveled for the Stubenville assault case.  If this type of assault is treated with every bit as much outrage as a brutal, traditional rape, we must realize that the world is much nicer than at any time in the past. Mind you, the publicity of You Tube makes this case unlike any other in the history. The outrage over rape is actually increasing even as the expanding definition of rape makes the crimes covered by the term less extreme and traumatic.

It doesn't matter if the rapist is the Gattlin boys in the Kenny Rogers tune or football players, rapists are considered the lowest form of criminal.

A burgeoning Rape Culture (later snuffed out by Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little)