From the Chateau: Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education and Drug Czar, correctly identifies and laments the declining fortunes of men…
The data does not bode well for men. In 1970, men earned 60% of all college degrees. In 1980, the figure fell to 50%, by 2006 it was 43%. Women now surpass men in college degrees by almost three to two. Women’s earnings grew 44% in real dollars from 1970 to 2007, compared with 6% growth for men.
…but then reverts to blind, deaf and dumb traditionalist form by laying the blame for men’s ailments at the feet of… I know the suspense is killing you!… men.
If you don’t believe the numbers, just ask young women about men today. You will find them talking about prolonged adolescence and men who refuse to grow up. I’ve heard too many young women asking, “Where are the decent single men?” There is a maturity deficit among men out there, and men are falling behind. […]
Man’s response has been pathetic. Today, 18-to- 34-year-old men spend more time playing video games a day than 12-to- 17-year-old boys. While women are graduating college and finding good jobs, too many men are not going to work, not getting married and not raising families. Women are beginning to take the place of men in many ways. This has led some to ask: do we even need men? […]
Movies are filled with stories of men who refuse to grow up and refuse to take responsibility in relationships. Men, some obsessed with sex, treat women as toys to be discarded when things get complicated. Through all these different and conflicting signals, our boys must decipher what it means to be a man, and for many of them it is harder to figure out.
Oh, those precious, pedestalized princesses, incorruptible vessels of Mother Mary love, doing what’s right and suffering the slings and arrows of men’s failings in reward. What’s a haloed lady to do when her heart is open to the love of a good man and all she gets is a parade of losers in her bed? The burdens of her gilded womb she will bear in martyrdom.
The bubble boy boundaries of the conservative imagination are never more evident than in its grappling with the sociosexual differences between men and women and the workings of the dating market. An appalling lack of understanding, of even a tangential blow with the truth about female nature, suggests that traditionalists and their offspring — Promise Keepers, Iron Johns, (some) MRAs, evangelists, etc. — have an allergic reaction to plumbing the depths of the human sexual soul, a revulsion likely concocted in a cauldron of sheltered life experiences and morbid fear of their own temptations.
Someone, anyone, has to pull the wool from their eyes, because their ignorance compounds a problem they rightly see as anathema to civilized prosperity. Their haste to lay the fault at the feet of men and to wholly absolve women of any responsibility gives the id monster free reign to lay waste to their utopian ideal. This is because it is the shackling or the unleashing of the female id, not the male id, that ultimately controls the destiny of a society.
So, a sincere plea to Bennett and his ilk: Get your heads out of the sand. You can start by repeating the following to yourself every morning in the mirror:
What’s wrong with men? Nothing that isn’t also wrong with women.
Men don’t “refuse to grow up”. They drop out, (or rather, beta males drop out), and with good reason, because the sexual market has been reconstructed to pander to female hypergamous impulses. Men can no longer achieve the clearly-defined status over hypergamous women they once could because the traditional field of battle that afforded them relative supremacy and, thus, attractiveness, to women — the corporate office — has, via managerial despotism strengthening PC and diversity to a state religion, lopped their balls clean off. And so men retreat from the corporate drone working world to achieve their status elsewhere.
Men don’t avoid marriage and family because they have a “maturity deficit”. They rationally avoid marriage and family because, as the institutions are currently constituted, they are a raw deal for men. Marriage is a risk made too great by misandrist divorce laws, and kids are a cost made too high by falling wages and tightening housing markets, of which part of the blame must go to women who have been voting for increasingly leftie and feminist-friendly governments since suffrage.
Men don’t play the field because they “avoid responsibility”. Men play the field because they can; because women, in their zeal to delay marriage until their careers have been established, to hop a parade of alpha cock during their roaring twenties, and to reward the players over the providers with their prime sexual access, have opened the field to men.
Men don’t “treat women as toys”. Men get the sex while the getting’s good because women allow — nay, PREFER — themselves to be toyed with by the kinds of men who are good at it.
In other words, Mr. Bennett, women GET EXACTLY THE KINDS OF MEN they deserve. Even more dispiriting to your conception of the universe, women get the men they WANT.
Women are the gatekeepers and the hadron collider tubes of sexuality. This has never changed, and likely never will as long as our biology remains rooted in the material world. The shape and direction of man is primarily an effect, not a cause, of the pathway laid out by women. The ancients you revere knew this, which is why they found it perfectly natural to restrict female power where they could.
For boys to become men, they need to be guided through advice, habit, instruction, example and correction.
Nice sentiment. But guidance and advice are worse than useless when they lead astray. Your advice should be customized to the reality you live in, not the comforting unreality you wish were real.
Someone once characterized the two essential questions Plato posed as: Who teaches the children,
Stone cold experience.
and what do we teach them?
To accept the darkness.
We need to respond to this culture that sends confusing signals to young men, a culture that is agnostic about what it wants men to be, with a clear and achievable notion of manhood.
The lunacy of thinking the culture is ultimately well-intentioned and all it needs is a proper scolding is the mindset of the fool, or a pity whore. What good is a “clear and achievable notion of manhood” if such a notion is unvalued by women? How achievable is this notion in a culture dictated by a cognoelite that has no use for it?
The Founding Fathers believed, and the evidence still shows, that industriousness, marriage and religion are a very important basis for male empowerment and achievement.
If conservatives are serious about restoring a traditional concept of manhood to the modern man, I have a few suggestions for them.
1. Industriousness will only be a worthwhile pursuit for men if they can extract some real status out of it to satisfy their guiding compulsion to attract women. This means removing women from the workplace, where female career growth acts indirectly to undermine male provider and leadership status, and directly through the feminization of the workplace.
2. Marriage will only be a worthwhile goal for men when divorce laws are gutted and reinvented to stop massively favoring women at the expense of men. No-fault divorce should be abolished. Child support changed so that men and women have automatic equal share of custody if the man wants it. Alimony abolished so that we never again see a callous situation where the ex-husband is writing checks to an ex-wife who initiated divorce and is now banging a new lover. Women who initiate divorce for any reason other than provable physical abuse should be kicked out of the house and made to get by living in an apartment.
3. Religion is dead in the water. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil has been bitten, and no one who matters in the developed nations can take it seriously again until they and their shrinking descendants have been purged from the human pool. But if you want a fighting chance to return religion to some honorable place in society, and to have men return to the fold, the constant, sanctimonious drumbeat of chiding men to behave must stop, and be replaced with sermons that take into account the fallen nature of women. Remember, women WANT to be led. They won’t abandon the church if their natures are examined candidly and honestly, and without fear.
Now naturally, few conservatives will take up this call to arms. Have you heard any of them discussing the possibility of rearranging contractual marriage, the workplace, and religion to make it easier for men to ascend to a gloried position in society? Have you heard any discuss the natural disposition women have toward men of higher status, and that catering to this disposition will result in healthier relationships? I haven’t. That’s because most conservatives are pussies. “From a pussy, ye shall stay a pussy” would be an accurate conservative credo.
Since none of the above recommendations will ever see the light of day, let alone become the law of the land, the Chateau counsel to forge a new creation by learning game remains unchallenged in its effectiveness and its nobility. The map men navigate has changed; their status and their honor now issue from a wickedly precise understanding of women’s sexual natures, an acceptance of the new culture that pervades, and a fearlessness in exploiting what was bequeathed them to personal advantage.
The answers conservatives do have are laughable. Bill Bennett gives his:
We may need to say to a number of our twenty-something men, “Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself together, get a challenging job and get married.” It’s time for men to man up.
Yes, men, man up. That’s the ticket. When she cuckolds you, man up. When she rejects your gentlemanly kindness for an aloof badboy, man up. When she unceremoniously files for divorce because she got bored of your beta personality after she went off the pill, man up. When she takes the house, car, dog and half to fund her live-in boyfriend’s porn habit, man up. When she writes love letters to terrorists and serial killers on death row because her honorable hubby doesn’t amuse her anymore, man up. When she boffs the first douchebag DJ who comes along but makes a courteous accountant wait three months for sex, man up. When she devours pulp romance novels and vacuous feminized trash that desensitizes her to the value of real life men she can reasonably hope to attract, man up. When she gets aroused by a backhanded compliment but remains unmoved by a sincere compliment, man up. When she cries to HR about what she thinks was an inappropriate flirtation, man up. When she “forgets” to take the Pill and puts you on the hook for the 18 year enslavement, man up. When she gets multiple degrees that price her out of the mating market, man up. When she gets legal protections and favors that aren’t given to men, man up. When her every misdeed and misbehavior and poor choice is excused, man the fuck up.
Wow. What man wouldn’t want to sign up for this program?
Men will man up when women man down. The one must follow the other. The polarity cannot be reversed.
