Posted on 07/15/2003 1:45:35 PM PDT by Nick Danger
Many males in western societies seem to be behaving very badly these days.
They seem to be becoming more involved with crime. They seem to be growing more dishonest. They seem to be increasingly hostile and aggressive toward others. They seem less committed to their partners and to their families. They are clearly doing less well in terms of their education. And they seem to be more pre-occupied with their own narrow self-interests than they used to be.
Why is this so?
What can possibly account for this apparent deterioration in the behaviours of western men?
Have their genes suddenly taken a dive for the worse?
Or are they simply responding to the way in which western societies treat them these days?
In my view, the major cause of what seems to be a significant deterioration in the behaviours of men is, quite simply, feminism.
Indeed, the evidence that damns feminism is overwhelming.
The evidence shows that feminism is not only the primary cultural cause of the current-day bad behaviours of men, it is also the primary cultural cause of very many other current-day serious societal problems.
Before demonstrating to readers how it is that feminism is largely responsible for the current bad behaviours of men, it is important to understand the two following points.
1. Feminism - together with political correctness - has been the most influential ideology in western societies for the past three decades. There are no other ideologies that even come to it in terms of the extent to which it has penetrated western societies.
Feminism has penetrated very deeply western governments, western laws, western social services, western universities, western colleges, western schools, western media, western families, western bedrooms and western minds.
And it has done so for three decades - a decade longer than even Hitler had - with far fewer resources - in which to stir up his mass hatred toward the Jews.
Feminism has been hugely influential.
And one of its main successes has been the wholesale demonisation of males.
2. Political correctness has been aggressively supported and strongly buttressed by feminists. Indeed, feminists have done their level best to promote any activity which undermines men - particularly white heterosexual ones.
And political correctness has been a very useful weapon for them in this respect.
But the point here is this.
Every ill that can be blamed on political correctness, can also be blamed on those who endorse and underpin it. And no group has done more to foist political correctness on to western societies than the feminists.
For three decades, the feminists and the politically correct have engaged in a wholesale onslaught against white heterosexual men.
White men have been persistently accused of being racist by highly vocal racial activists and racial minorities, and their history and their forefathers have been thoroughly undermined and blackened - to the extent that many racial activists are now demanding reparations for past slavery.
Heterosexual men have been continually portrayed as being violent, abusive, oppressors of women by mainstream feminists and a whole plethora of abuse professionals who have a vested interest in portraying men in this way.
Heterosexual men have also been represented by the beautifully orchestrated gay lobby as being bigoted and fearful of their own sexuality.
All men have been assaulted almost ceaselessly by various women's groups, children's groups, social service workers, therapists and analysts who have sought to indoctrinate the population with the view that men are abusers of children.
The ubiquitous feminist-fearing mainstream media have consistently sought to demonise and humiliate the entire male gender - a typical example of which can be seen in the recent vindictive column by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times entitled Incredible Shrinking Y.
And the all-powerful western governments together with the legal profession have almost disempowered men completely when it comes to their families, their relationships and their homes, on the grounds that women and children are often better off without them. (The Federal Bureau of Marriage? by Professor Stephen Baskerville gives a good insight into how this is being achieved.)
In view of all this, is it surprising to find that men are behaving badly?
If A keeps telling B that he considers him to be worthless, and continues to accuse him of things that he has not done, and persistently undermines him in relation to his family and to his children, and continually seeks to portray him as an abuser and an oppressor, who should be surprised if B finally turns his back on A?
Indeed, who should be surprised if B decides to give A a bloody nose?
Well. This is the kind of thing that has been going on in western societies for a long time now thanks to the wholesale demonisation of males by the feminists.
And many millions of men are - and have been - responding to this by turning their backs on their own societies.
Indeed, they are not only increasingly refusing to support their own societies, many are, in fact, responding by giving them a bloody nose! - crime, violence etc.
Well. Let us look at some of the reasons why western men might have become this way as a result of feminism (and, indeed, as a result of political correctness).
1. The constant feminist-inspired demonisation and denigration of men throughout the west has resulted not only in many of them feeling worthless, with the result that they now reject the worthwhile values of their own societies (with some turning to crime, drugs, irresponsible behaviours etc) it has also undermined any reason for them to shape up.
You might as well be hung for being a sheep as a lamb!
Furthermore, the ubiquitous negative descriptions of men that continually pour out of the mainstream media simply make many men feel quite entitled to behave in accordance with those very same descriptions!
For example, I once saw a headline in a newspaper complaining about the fact that, "Men do not do housework."
As a taunt to my partner, I cut out the headline and stuck it on the notice board in the kitchen. But I added the following words underneath it. "Well, if men are not doing any housework, then neither am I!"
The point is that if men are persistently deemed to be slothful - or whatever - then many men, with much justification, will see no reason to behave any differently from the way in which they and their fellow men are being depicted.
2. The western educational system has been so heavily biased against boys for the past few decades that they are doing very badly at school. Not only have the educationalists been using diabolically poor teaching methods (e.g. in their teaching of reading skills) but the curricula have been so feminised and politically corrected that boys quickly lose any interest that they might have had in being 'educated'.
This, coupled with poor standards of discipline, has led to our societies having to bear the burden of having millions of undisciplined, uneducated males in their midsts.
3. The effect of feminism and political correctness in education - e.g. in the study of History - and in the mainstream media, where 'great white men of noble character' are hardly seen to exist any more means that there are few good role models for boys in their growing years. And the images of men that are daily inflicted upon young men and boys are overwhelmingly negative.
Is it surprising, therefore, that so many men actually have no real concept of what a 'good man' is?
Such men do not exist in the world that is being presented to them.
4. Thanks to the wholesale corruption of the family courts and the "no-fault" divorce laws, men no longer have any real motivation to devote most of their lives, their love, their money etc into bringing up a family. Why should they - when it can all be taken away from them at the whim of their partners?
Furthermore, prejudicial 'relationship laws' - such as those pertaining to domestic violence and child abuse etc - make men feel very insecure within their relationships.
And to add to all this there is the daily carpeting of man-hatred that pours out of the feminist-dominated media telling women and children to report their partners for abuse of some sort.
Well. There are only two main ways in which men can deal with the relationship insecurity that all this brings about.
Firstly, they can stop caring very much about their relationships so that they are not too hurt when they eventually break down.
Secondly, they can refrain completely from committing themselves to, or from investing in, any long-term serious ones.
And, indeed, this is exactly what the research shows western men to be doing.
5. The welfare system hotly promoted and buttressed both by the feminists and the politically correct supports single motherhood. And the same is true for the laws concerning child-support payments and alimony.
These not only make fathers and husbands redundant, they also encourage their very own women and children to see them in exactly this way.
Men are, therefore, easily rejected, and they are often also treated with contempt.
They are, after all, redundant.
And another word for 'redundant' is, of course, 'worthless'.
6. Family and marital breakdown are the major cause of misbehaviour and poor socialisation in males. Indeed, those who are brought up without their fathers at home are far more likely ...
... to live in poverty and deprivation
... to be trouble in school
... to have more trouble getting along with others
... to have health problems
... to suffer physical, emotional, or sexual abuse
... to run away from home
... to experience problems with sexual health
... to become teenage parents
... to offend against the law
... to smoke, drink alcohol and take drugs
... to play truant from school
... to be excluded from school
... to leave school at 16
... to have adjustments to adulthood problems
... to attain little in the way of qualifications
... to experience unemployment
... to have low incomes
... to be on welfare
... to experience homelessness
... to go to jail
... to suffer from long term emotional and psychological problems
... to engage only in casual relationships
... to have children outside marriage or outside any partnership
But feminists have always done their best to break up traditional families and to exclude fathers from them, because they believe that traditional families are oppressive to women.
And this particularly huge catalogue of societal ills that has arisen directly from their assault on marriage and family was successfully repressed by the mainstream feminist-fearing media for two decades.
7. The encouragement of immigration - legal and illegal - by the left-wing politically correct (supported heavily by feminists) has led to a breaking down of the main culture and to a large increase in the size of the criminal underclass. This, together with all the factors mentioned previously, has led to millions of young men engaging in crime or in being closely associated with others who engage in it.
In the UK, one-third of all men have a criminal conviction. In the USA, some 2 million men are in prison and another 4 million are somehow currently involved with the criminal justice system.
8. As Lew Rockwell readers will know only too well, taxes are far too high as a consequence of the ever-burgeoning government and its ever-increasing activities.
Well. It is women - and feminists in particular - and other 'minorities' - through their politically-corrected activists - who are the main supporters of big government and heavy taxation.
And the result of heavy taxation is that people are less motivated when it comes to working for a living and, for many men, it makes crime and sloth an even more attractive option.
Well, I could go on and make many more connections between feminism and the poor behaviours of men.
But do I really need to?
If you glance again at the 8 points above you will see that they allude to huge negative influences that impact, in some way or other, upon all males. And they each affect all males very badly indeed.
Furthermore, every single one of these huge negative influences directly arises from ideas and policies promoted and buttressed by feminists.
Indeed, feminism is the main cause of the most pressing problems facing western societies.
None of the above is to suggest that genes do not play a part in the bad behaviours of men. They surely do - just as much as they do with regard to the bad behaviours of women. And neither is it necessary to make any claims about whether children are 'born good' - and are corrupted by society - or 'born bad' - and need to be disciplined and socialised.
The point is that we do know that the way in which societies are constructed, the values that they hold, and the methods through which their aims are sought, have a great bearing on the way in which the people within them behave - e.g. just look at the effects of fatherlessness listed above.
And when an ideology has been hugely pervasive, influential and dominant for three whole decades it should not be allowed to escape from being seen as significantly responsible for the social consequences that are very clearly associated with it.
Furthermore, if western men continue to be persistently attacked, accused, vilified, undermined and demonised, disempowered within their families and discriminated against through the justice system, their behaviours are likely to grow considerably worse!
And if feminists continue to pursue their aims without regard to the way in which they are alienating millions of men, my guess is that in the not-too-distant future both they and their supporters (e.g. in the media, in academia and in government) are going to be in for a very nasty shock.
Finally, given that feminists have ruthlessly pursued their aims without regard to the well-being of men, why should men not now do the very same?
For example, why should men strive particularly hard to support their families given that some 50% of them will eventually lose them; and much else besides - with a further significant percentage remaining in unhappy marriages because they have no realistic alternatives? Why should they labour to set themselves up for so much serious hurt?
Why should men work for long hours? - particularly if they have onerous jobs and given that the state will take much of their earnings in taxes.
Why should men with limited resources bother to save any money when their governments will tax it and subject it to significant devaluation?
Why should men commit themselves to one particular woman when so many are now available for fun and frolics?
Why should men not seek hours of pleasure from superficial pursuits - such as those deriving from their various gadgets, toys, sports and videogames? Do not women spend many of their hours gawping at celebrities and soap operas, and thinking about fashion, cosmetics and romantic fantasies?
And what, exactly, are men supposed to be aiming for?
Why should men not be aggressive or offensive toward women given that women are nowadays aggressive and offensive toward them?
Indeed, why should men pursue 'nobler' aims when these are persistently undermined by feminists and their governments?
The bad behaviours of men mostly reflect the fact that western men are now following more their own desires and their own predilections. And they are caring less about how this may affect others.
In other words, they are doing exactly what the feminist handbooks and many women's magazines have been urging women to do for years.
The 5th column has actively pursued the destruction of American society through an indoctrination of generations of women AND men that they males are primitive, violent, dishonest, untrustworthy and ultimately unnecessary in the family by providing economic security and raising their biological children. Talk about learning something ugly the hard way... when I was young you could not have convinced me in a million years that a mere media-driven propaganda fest could cause such changes. To me it seemed obvious that men and women were on this planet together, and we had figured out how to make that work. Here we were and doing pretty well. There were billions of people now. We had electricity... flush toilets... amazing machines that whisked us around at 70 mph. We didn't have to worry about tigers jumping out of the bushes at us. Humans were doing pretty well. Could women be taught to hate men? It sounded preposterous. People promoting such a thing would be fighting biology. They'd be fighting the evidence all around us that we've come a long way together. Naww, it'll never happen. But it did happen. It actually worked. A depressing number of women have no clue what they sound like anymore. They're bigots. Kind-hearted bigots... bigots who care. But bigots nevertheless. It's way down in there... they don't even see it. Aside from the shriekers, it's not even in anything they say. It's in the assumptions that underlie what they say.
I hear this stuff and it thoroughly saddens me. It's hard to see how a society comes back from this without going through some gut-wrenching trauma to cleanse it out. Some very evil people did this, but it's done now. It's taken on a life of its own. The Grand Cooperation that took humans from the trees to the Moon is falling apart all around us. It's all 'competition' and 'me, me, me', and 'my government will squash you subhumans like a bug.' I'm not surprised anymore that we never went on to Mars. Or even went back to the Moon. Striving for Big Things? That's what men do. And there's almost no point to it anymore. Get by, have fun, and stay away from the buzzsaw. That's the plan. |
Nick - in all of your pondering and wondering what went wrong in our culture, I'm wondering if you noticed that there is a common denominator.
Did you ever stop and ask yourself- why is it that the liberals stand for everything and anything yet they remain united against the conservatives? Conservatists on the other hand have a much more narrow definition of who is considered friend or foe.
What's the key? If you want to be united with the liberals, all you have to do is hold a belief against Christian and biblical principles - then you're part of the team. You see, our country was founded on Christianity and biblical principles - the founding fathers were all Christian. Our laws were even written with reference to specific verses of the bible back then. Our Bill of Rights was derived from the Magna Carta and the Ten Commandments. (Goggle "Magna Carta" "Ten Commandments") - so all you have to do to join the united liberal front is oppose a tenet of Christianity and the bible. I strongly recommending reading America's Real War written by a Jewish Rabbi. Since most people have fallen away from taking their faith seriously, most cannot see this otherwise obvious connection.
The Ten Commandments is the foundation, a well defined foundation, to build civilization. Take that away, then nothing can be agreed upon and laws are made that contradict each other and before you know it what is right is wrong and oppression sets in. Most conservatists don't understand this, they only know that they want what the constitution lays out but without understanding the context of how it came about. It's Christain Christain Christain - not multicultural nor is it Libertarian where God is removed from the picture.
Christiananity is misrepresented and dismissed by popular culture as oppressive, backward, and closed minded in this country - that is exactly the cause of this cultural demise you ponder without end - and exactly where those who want to bring down this country attacked first in the culture war.
Nick, you give far too much credit to those 'few' feminists that have such influence. You see, they are pawns to the evil that unites the liberal forces against God, truth, and reason. The Evil Empire and Axis of Evil, that two conservative presidents spoke of, is in our own backyard. Feminism is only one part of it.
The woman agrees to:
1) recognize the man as the leader of the family unit (not tyrant, but leader...a distinction that escapes the feminists).
2) remain faithful to him (so that he knows that the kids are his)
3) Work to take care of his kids and the household
The man, in return, agrees to:
1) Work to earn a living for his wife and kids (the average married guy probably spends 80% of his income on his wife and kids...not a ratio which can appeal to self-interest alone).
2) Remain faithful to his wife so that she knows that his work will not be divided with other women and children.
3) Protect the family from physical danger.
The feminists came along and unilaterally threw the deal out because it was unacceptable to them. They changed the terms and radically altered the contract in a negative fashion for men.
Furthermore, they created two things which allowed women to toss men out completely: child support/alimony and welfare. In traditional societies, if something happens to the man, the woman and children are facing starvation. Its the worst thing that could happen to them. But today, the courts will wring the guy dry...and if he is a bum without assets, the other guys in our society will support her and the kids via taxes (which brings up another interesting issue: namely, as more and more men turn away from society in general and become perpetual adolescents....just who are the feminists expecting is going to be around to pay the taxes to support all of these liberated moms? Clearly, feminist culture is parasitizing the remnants of traditional society by forcing the married men in traditional families to cough up money to support the "alternative arrangements" that are becoming so popular today. Clearly, matriarchy carries with it the seeds of its own destruction)
Men generally have three options in dealing with this:
1) Get married, buy into the system, and hope for the best. Pray that she doesn't decide to toss you out and strip your bank account.
2) Perpetual adolescence. Turn away from the system altogether and live like a teenager.
3) Marry a foreign woman and hope that she doesn't catch on too quickly how things operate here.
One of the problems that men have in our society is that we haven't created alternative, supportive living arrangements for ourselves outside of the traditional family. We tend to either end up in the marriage thing, or living miserably in a small apartment by ourselves.
I predict that, in the not too distant future, men will begin to come together to form alternative living arrangements for themselves which do not included women and children. I envision some sort of adult version of fraternity houses where straight guys can live their lives with other guys rather than the pathetic loner in the apartment. These sorts of things have existed in the past (the Japanese have traditional sumo clubs, for instance, that offer young men a place to live with older guys...complete with a gym, maid service, etc. They tend to function like fraternities...the youngest guys do a lot of scut work and gradually move up the heirarchy).
Once men find some sort of arrangement that offers a nice life outside of the traditional woman/kids deal....you will see a massive movement of middle class, educated men away from the lousy "new deal" that is offered to them by the feminists. The cries that we are hearing from young gals now about there being no good young single guys will turn into a rage. But, they've made this bed for themselves.
Living in a fraternal relationship with 10 or 15 other guys sounds mighty tempting as opposed to being kicked out at 40 with no money, no house, and only rarely getting to see your kids.
5. The welfare system hotly promoted and buttressed both by the feminists and the politically correct supports single motherhood. And the same is true for the laws concerning child-support payments and alimony.
These not only make fathers and husbands redundant, they also encourage their very own women and children to see them in exactly this way.
Men are, therefore, easily rejected, and they are often also treated with contempt.
They are, after all, redundant.
And another word for 'redundant' is, of course, 'worthless'.
Lyndon Baines Johnson's "Great Society" Welfare programs destroyed the Black Family and that gave the example for the rest to follow.
Whining about Political Correctness and Feminists is silly. Both were virtually powerless at the time the damage was done in 1965. It is the fault of all do-gooder liberals, not just a couple of subsets of liberalism.
They just can't help themselves.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of the very first to warn about this happening, but he could never stop himself from voting to make it happen.
So9
The other side of the vice that crushed the head of the black family was the War of Drugs. A misnomer. I've been in a court and seen a young white surburban kid get probabtion for a bag of reefer, same court, same day, same judge, same charge -- a black kid gets 9 months in the workhouse.
If it wasn't that the war in drugs puts so many young black men in jail at the time they would be starting down the path of marriage and fatherhood ... even those poisonous welfare programs alone would not have done the black family in.
The welfare, the vile fatherhood diminishing liberalism and feminism that was the vice plate on the left.
The Drug War, the over-zealous law-and-order -- many a "conservative" fostered that from G Gordon Liddy and Nixon onward. That was the vice plate on the right.
Both those forces twisted the vice screws and the plates busted open the skull of black fatherhood. And left us all a legacy of a generation -- *generations* now -- of fatherless black children, with all the anger any bastard, for the accident he had no cause in of being a bastard, has.
I prefered living alone to living with roommates. At least alone, I had a better chance of creating an atmosphere most peaceful and agreeable to my own needs.
Call me old fashioned, but a woman's company is not the same as a man's and there are times I desire a woman's company and not just for anything sexual - but to have their point-of-view and their beauty and tenderness.
Unless a man finds some woman he wants to spend *all* his time with (and she agrees), the real dilemma for most men is that the woman demands more from the man than the man needs from the woman. So either the man goes along as the cost of having the woman around when he wants one or he returns to his solitude.
Plus, a bunch of men living together brings back the whole "gayness" concept to anyone outside the arrangement who doesn't understand it or wants to discredit it.
I find your suggestion unpalatable - though that's only my opinion.
I recall seeing the concept of a state-sponsored half-way home for men owing child support payments - sort of like a debtor's prison for men whom would be sent to prison for not making full payments. The state would allow them to exist in these homes if they worked to pay child support. Being that child support awards have become unreasonable, especially to men who lost high paying jobs, the idea sounded like something out of science fiction where women take over and enslave men saying it's "for the children". The idea sent chills down my spine.
But heck, it's happened twice now that law enforcement wants to take DNA samples from whole groups of men to find a rapist. Why should I be shocked at anything anymore.
The Free State Project - although I think this is more of a Libertarian group.
Nick should do like Fred Reed, do a net column, then when he has enough stuff package it up into a book. I think Nick's stuff is better thought out than Fred's, and Fred makes a decent living off it all, it appears
This is a necessary step in the creation of the Almighty State. The State is a jealous god, and will tolerate no loyalty before it.
The family is more than just the parents and kids. It is an independent decision-making unit, working in coordination with the extended family, which is the original safety net. If there are working extended families, there is less need of the State as the source of benefits and protection
There are several interlocking incentive systems working against the family:
But for the most part this is only true if you are a warlord, are connected to a warlord, or have money (which you only get to keep if you are connected to a warlord)
We already have Somalia, in most of our "inner cities" (which I prefer to call "abandoned areas"). If you are a woman in the abandoned areas, you are either under the protection of some gang, or you are prey for any gang member who chooses to look at you. Are the police going to protect you? You'll be lucky if they even show up after dark.
If you are a gang-banger, you can get laid whenever you want to (which, lets face it, is a very big incentive for a young male to join a gang). In the absence of civilization, a woman is the chattel property of whoever chooses to be her protector
Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamazov says "without God, everything is permitted." (Brothers Karamazov)
What he means by that is that, if there are no consequences for actions that can be imposed after death, then death is the end of the game. Whoever dies with the most toys, wins. Whoever has had the most fun, screwed the most women, had the most laughs, has had the "best" life. Many things follow from that premise, none of them good for the survival of civilization.
The only law then becomes "Do as you Will, just don't get caught". We see that attitude alot in our elites.
We already have those things:
You should be SYNDICATED my friend.
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