I gave Stephen Marche some treatment last year after he took a swipe at the Manosphere in general and TRP in particular. Much as I dislike having to defend TRP, I will do it when confronted with Feminist acolytes clucking their tongues and wagging their fingers at men.
But Marche is back and like most of the Progressives, he is struggling through early-onset Trump Derangement Syndrome. Combined with his pre-existing Feminist sickness results in a very aggressive and likely untreatable form of TDS. He wants to shame men into his particular brand of politics.
Let me knock down a beer and get to business.
The situation has, in one sense, simplified enormously. The elaborate labyrinths of identity politics have crumbled and left behind basic questions of fundamental human decency. Trump’s actions as president, more than his demeaning behavior on the campaign trail, are deliberately keeping women from power and attacking programs that promote their health, both in the US and globally. Feminism as humanism – the very basic idea that women are people – is now under threat. Any man who claims to possess a shared sense of humanity with women must stand with them.
Demeaning behavior on the campaign trail, including calling one-quarter of the electorate “deplorable”? Demeaning behavior like firing up a rumor that the front-runner in your party’s primary isn’t a natural-born American citizen in order to undermine his entire campaign? Or circulating a photo of Obama in a turban to emphasize the point? Demeaning behavior on the campaign trail like using party apparatus to limit debate and sandbag Bernie Sanders’ efforts? Spare me the disingenous gasping and clutching of pearls. Hillary Clinton is one of the dirtiest, most hardball campaigners in American history.
The Mexico City Policy is much simpler: He who pays the piper calls the tune. If you want Big Daddy Government’s money, guess what? You dance to the tune he calls. Don’t like it? Get your private money donation game up so that you don’t have to live and eat off of federal grants. Simple, yes? I guess it’s not simple for Progressives. They have this peculiar idea that they are entitled to spend other’s money on things they don’t support (Americans are split on abortion), to say nothing of the propriety of taking money from Americans and sending it abroad.
The evidence has become too glaringly obvious. Who could embody more perfectly “rape culture” than a man who was elected president of the United States while boasting about sexual predation?
Let’s see: A choice between a guy who said that “And when you’re a star they LET you do it. You can do anything.”
Notice the words of permission, there.
On the other side, we have a woman who brags about destabilizing foreign nations (Libya), resulting in the deaths of thousands, and exacerbated the “refugee crisis” by adding Libya to the mix.
President Warmonger vs. President Consensual Pussy-Grabber.
Not even a close choice.
What more proof do you need that women face structural disadvantages in their work lives than Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and still losing?
Today I learned that Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, and Al Gore were women who faced “structural disadvantages.”
Two contradictory processes are at work. One is the rise of women to dominance of the middle class; the other is the intractable continuation of male power at the top. Since 2000, women have increased their workplace participation in most countries in the world. Across the OECD, the pay gap declined significantly between 2000 and 2011. In the United States, the number of households led by women has been increasing since the 60s and currently stands at around 40%.
“Dominance”?
But I thought dominance was a bad thing? I thought “Feminism means equality”?
Oh that’s right, dominance is only bad when men do it.
Got it.
At the same time, women are kept from the top positions. There are any number of ways to register this fact, from a comparison of the salaries of male and female movie stars, to the number of women who are full professors, to the scandalously few women who are equity partners in law firms.
Women are kept from the bottom positions. There are any number of ways to register this fact, from a comparison of the sex-ratio of workplace fatalities, to the number of women in dangerous or high-risk occupations, to the scandalously few women who are loggers.
But what am I saying? “Feminism means equality” and “equality” only matters in the C-suite, not on the back of a garbage truck.
We cannot shape men until we have some kind of critical understanding of the mechanisms of masculinity. And simply put, we do not have that understanding. The first graduate program devoted to masculinity studies in the US began in 2015.
Here’s the money quote, right here. For the last 50 years, Feminists have raised a mighty howl, that no man should even dare to entertain the idea of telling a woman what she ought to do. Meanwhile, Feminists have waged a campaign by which they not only have the privilege, but the duty to alter, shape, mold and change men into something that suits their purposes: New Soviet Man…I mean, NEW FEMINIST MAN.
There have been calls for men to join in the feminist movement from its beginning, with two main difficulties: the first is that feminism is inherently about women. And so feminism’s message to men has always been pretty simple: behave better to women.
While creating no similar obligation of women to behave better to men.
The other problem is that men do not talk explicitly about their own gender.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Is this guy for real?
Men talk about their sex. We talk about it and matters pertaining to it. The problem that Feminists like Marche have is that when we talk about it, we proceed down lines of thinking towards conclusions are in no way useful to Feminism.
See Men’s Rights.
See MGTOW.
See The Red Pill.
And to Feminists, men discussing manhood in the absence of Feminist supervision is not acceptable. Can’t have the proles engaging in Wrongthink or the slaves discussing freedom.
Those facts, in themselves, reveal how far the way we talk about gender has deviated from its reality in American life. During a campaign stop for Hillary Clinton early in 2016, Madeleine Albright declared: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” – a line that has appeared on Starbucks cups. Forty-two percent of American women felt otherwise, as did 62% of non-college educated women.
A comment for which Albright was roundly and rightly blistered. Albright reserved her own seat in hell by sponsoring a war that led to thousands of deaths and the raping of hundreds of women.
Gloria Steinem famously declared that women’s liberation will be men’s liberation, too. Trump has clarified that the opposite – women’s bondage, men’s bondage – is also true. It is men who need to say “this is not us.” But then we would have to think about who we are.
“Liberation” from what?
Women don’t owe men anything. Conversely, men don’t owe women anything. Not time, not attention, not labor, not blood, and not happiness. Consequently, I don’t “need” to do anything on the behalf of any woman.
They are our equals. Let them do for themselves.