
A while back, I was having a conversation with an acquaintance of mine who could fairly be described as a feminist. Not a conservative feminist — a feminist in the traditional sense of the word these days.
I remarked to her that over the last few decades, women’s ideals, in everything from dating, to careers, to their life in general, have changed quite a bit while men’s ideals, hopes, and dreams have been much more static over that same time period. She agreed and said feminism hasn’t done a good job of “helping men” reach their potential. My response to that was that when it finally arrives, she probably won’t like the men’s revolution any more than most men enjoyed the feminist version.
I was reminded of that as I read Dr. Helen’s piece at Pajama’s Media, “Manning Up or Wimping Out: Men Don’t Exist to Serve Women’s Desires.”
After 45 years of being told they are pigs, sexist, and good for nothing, men have quit trying to please others, so they slap on a baseball cap and don’t talk much. And with good reason.
Trending: He Watched 9 Guys Run a Train On Her & Then Later Married Her
…What do you have to offer these men you call child-men if they do man up? Are you going to ensure that they have fair access to their children should they divorce? Will you make sure that they aren’t hauled off to jail if the wife makes false accusations of domestic violence? Will you let them keep the earnings and property that they worked for over years rather than have them turned over to their wife, even if she cheated and was abusive? Will you shield the millions of men who live in fear of their significant other but have nowhere to turn for help? Will you make marriage, in other words, as valuable to men as you think it is for women?
I doubt it. What Hymowitz and other authors in this area – see Kathleen Parker’s Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care for another example – seem to want is for these men to marry women and make them happy. Rather than recognize that they are autonomous beings who are living for themselves and fulfilling their own needs and not a woman’s obligations, these analyses of the “man problem” seem to be all about what women want.
The changes that have occurred in the last few decades have opened up a lot of possibilities for women. Women are now even more educated than men on the whole, they can thrive in the workplace, and their views are much more represented in politics, entertainment, and society in general. Those are good things. However, you could also make an excellent argument that American society has become over-feminized and that the playing field has been generally tilted in favor of women. Most women wouldn’t see it that way… but, that ties into the point I’m going to make. Most men, even if they don’t have the cajones to say so, feel like women have gained ground at their expense in a lot of ways.
That doesn’t mean that the average man wants women to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen — that’s simply not true — but it does mean that men tend to be much more aware of the negative aspects of liberal feminism. It’s the anti-men, victim-oriented, women should be able to destroy your life with an unprovable accusation, masculinity is bad and men exist to serve women’s desires attitude that has become all too mainstream. It’s all very “Boo-hoo, the patriarchy is keeping me down! Men have it easy, while we have it hard! Where are all the good men and why don’t they listen when I berate them about their flaws?”
So, what happens when men start to adapt to the uglier side of the feminist movement instead of just trying to ignore it? It has already started to happen in some quarters. The slackers who’ve given up, work menial jobs, live in their parents’ basements, and play video games and watch TV all night are one facet of it. Incels and the MGTOW movement are another. Fifty years ago, men like this might have gotten a job in a factory, gotten married, and settled down to raise 2.5 kids. But today, being a generally good guy and having a decent paying job is generally just a prerequisite to a relationship as opposed to the whole kit and kaboodle. Rather than work through the seemingly endless series of requirements women have added since the sixties, these men have become resentful of the whole process and have largely given up.
Another facet, one that I think is going to become much, much more prevalent in the coming years is the men who could be philosophically described as the descendants of the pick-up artist culture that flowered in the nineties. They’re perfectly willing to have sex with women and some of them may even be willing to cohabitate, but they have no interest in any kind of permanent commitment like marriage with a woman. In their mind, marriage is a rigged game, and men are foolish to play it.
Red Pill culture is also on the rise. While a lot of different things get called “Red Pill,” it’s really just a better, more accurate way of describing modern gender dynamics. Put another way, it’s looking at things like marriage, what women want & single motherhood not through a traditional lens or a feminist lens, but through a masculine lens that looks at the world as it is rather than how it was 50 years ago. I don’t know what the future of the Red Pill movement is going to be, but I can tell you that the intellectual framework behind it is being woven into the thinking of millions of young men coming up today. Will they call it “Red Pill?” Will they not? I don’t know, but the ideas are going to help shape how they think.
What women should realize is that eventually, the culture is going to dramatically shift for men the same way it did for women in the sixties. When that happens, women aren’t going to be “guiding” the shift, nor are they likely to be big fans of how it ultimately plays out, because the underlying aim of a genuinely powerful men’s movement is going to be to take back some of the power that men have lost over the last few decades.
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