| [To H. Bergeron -> ] Basically, you have a problem. You are a gamma level, or at best beta minus mind trying to present yourself as an alpha through pretentious vocabulary and trivial criticism of form.
From what I've seen so far, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss H. Bergeron's criticisms. Section 10, at least, strikes me as an example of the sort of thing it claims to denounce. To set out to assist the ladies by explaining to them just how horrible other men are (compared to you, of course) is in fact just a form of trying to get laid; it is one of the tired old stratagems that you decry as being scheming and dishonest. In saying this I don't mean that you wrote the piece to literally 'get laid' because I suspect you're old enough to not give a damn, but the instinct to do those sorts of things is still there, and it seems to me that you have succumbed to it... I suspect to the point of even making up horror stories. Also, I think it's fair to say that your view of women -- at least up the point I stopped reading -- is basically demeaning. Everything you discuss is from the point of view of someone who considers men to be the only actors in this world. In this view, women are just passive "things" that cannot act or react... they are merely helpless victims of scheming and conniving men, with no wills or brains of their own. How chivalrous of you to blame only men for the acts of all who tangoed. Chivalrous, but unrealistic and ultimately dismissive of women as human beings. Although I don't have time right now to refute them, some of your stated facts set off my crap detector. I would like to see a source for the statement, "During the 1960s, the suicide rate of women increased to 150 percent of what it had been, while the suicide rate of men remained constant." Having studied historical suicide rates a bit, my temptation is to suspect that you made that up as a way to add heft to the rhetoric. Either that, or the rate did go up but the absolute numbers were so small that percentage changes are meaningless. What's your source for that factoid?
Yes, that does sound like a joke. The premise seems to be that somehow, in the nineteen hundred and sixtieth year after Christ, men suddenly and unexpectedly developed a desire to manipulate women into bed, and that much that is wrong with our society today came from this wholly unanticipated event. Women everywhere were caught so off guard by the idea of men trying to get in their pants that society's entire moral base collapsed on the spot. C'mon, you couldn't sell that at the county fair to people who just bought a set of ginsu knives. Perhaps my attitude will change as I examine the other articles, but so far it looks to me like you're proceeding from the fundamental assumption that women have no say in events; that they are just these passive objects who are acted upon by men. This leads you to see only men as possible causes of the phenomena you seek to explain. Since that leaves out half of the explanatory variables, it is unlikely that you will find any truth by doing this. About the only thing one can say for the approach is that is has the delightful property of assigning all blame to men, which will make your theory highly popular among those women who choose to smile when being dismissed as inanimate objects, if that lets them off the hook for anything that happened. If I had to summarize Section 10 in three sentences, they would be these: "Ladies, you wouldn't believe how horrible men are. In fact, I am the only man you can trust. Can we go to bed now?" |
I went over to the orlingrabbe site and went through most of Section 10 very carefully, even taking notes. I just don't have time tonight to go through the whole thing, but maybe at some point I will.