Give Men a Break
Speaking as a woman trapped in a woman's body, I like men. I like them a lot. Almost every one of my closest friendships have been with men. When I call to mind my best buddies, I think of
There's a certain school of thought among feminists which preaches the unbridled hatred of men. This attitude really bothers me. Adherents of this school insist men are all would-be rapists and sadists just waiting for the chance to throw off their civilized masks and torture their wives and daughters. Since many feminist attitudes are taken as matriarchal gospel, it follows that all men should therefore be distrusted and despised.
This is insane. This is like saying all women should be suspected of keeping an ax in the broom closet just because
allegedly hacked her parents to death. If anybody dares generalize unfavorably about women, the Thought Police are down on them with truncheons flying. Not so for men. Too often these days men are condemned wholesale with no formal trial and not the slightest chance of appeal. If you accuse such feminists of applying a double standard, you'll likely be told A) to shut up, B) you're wrong, and C) since men have been torturing women with double standards for ages, it's nothing more than they deserve.
Feminism is quintessentially PC because you simply aren't a woman these days if you can't claim some sort of victimization. Adequate victim pedigree is required before you can join the new PC nobility who exercise the sovereignty of the oppressed. These days all every woman has to do to establish her pedigree is point to the nearest man (by marriage, blood, or simple proximity) and charge him with God knows what list of heinous offenses. Whether or not he's actually guilty of them is irrelevant. The fact that he had the bad taste to be born male proves he must be guilty of some crime against women. The way things are going, having the wrong combination of chromosomes may soon be deemed a "genetic crime" against women. Wouldn't surprise me a bit.
I'm well aware of the fact that there are some twenty-four carat bastards out there. I've suffered at the hands of a few, including one who abused me mentally and another who did so physically. There are most definitely women who have been brutalized by animals in human guise. Those women have every right to cry out for help and receive it through every channel available. God bless the people who make it their business to help such women and their children. What I'm talking about here is the kind of feminist who has some bone-deep loathing for men that goes beyond all sense or reason, who expects every woman around her to support such loathing as a natural and basic attitude toward men. I don't know why these women feel the need to persecute all men in the most blistering terms. I suspect it has a lot to do with individual men on an individual basis, blown up into a universal contempt. Such contempt can be hidden under the mantle of false charity by cloaking the social genocide of the male sex within the crusade for women's rights.
These are the feminists I'm talking about, ready to flog anyone who commits a "hate crime" against a woman, especially a woman of color. Yet these same champions of liberal values commit hate crimes against men every day. The public speeches against abusive men, a smaller target than they would have the public believe, may be made in a spirit of compassion and with a genuine desire to help, but the other side of that coin is a castrating viciousness unlike anything I've ever witnessed. I once read an excerpt from a book by
that furthered her particular all-sex-is-rape agenda. I haven't seen that much venom fly since I watched a film on milking rattlers for antitoxin.
Just look at the feminization of the military currently underway. The feminists are so determined to get girls into every boys' club they're doing all they can to get women into combat positions. Do the feminists think their protégés will transcend human nature, especially on the battlefield? That they as women will finally prove themselves superior to men physically? It's not going to happen, and it isn't happening now. A recent article in The National Review mentioned 70 pregnancies among female members of the armed forces in just last year. Every year there are around 500 pregnancies occurring among servicewomen aboard ship in the Navy. What happens to those children? Do all of those couples marry and settle down together? I hardly think so. How many of those servicewomen will exercise their right to choose? Those innocent children, those babies that are killed, become casualties of the madness that flings men and women together in potentially life-threatening circumstances, then expects them to ignore the urge to procreate that's the instinctive response to such circumstances.
What's more, those women in the military who are already mothers are being encouraged to abandon their babies and run off to fight alongside the men. Linda Bird Francke has written GROUND ZERO: The Gender Wars in the Military. Focusing primarily on women serving in the Gulf War,
claims the "interchangeability of father/mother roles is essential to downplay a mother's indispensability to her young children and allow her to pursue a guilt-free life outside the home." The operative phrase there is "guilt-free." When the feminists are so hell-bent on proving women as good as men or better, to the point of telling women they shouldn't feel guilty about neglecting their children in order to risk getting killed in combat, the only thing they do prove is how little they value human life compared to achieving their agendas.
It always comes down to sex, consensual or otherwise. Usually the first rallying point, that gets shoved aside when it doesn't further the feminists' goals, as in the military conflict above. Most of the time the image of men as sexual predators is paraded in all its gory and unrealistic detail. Where do these rabid man-haters get the idea that every single male over the age of ten is walking around simmering in some seething hormonal cauldron of lust?
Back in the bad old days before PC arrived to save us from ourselves, there was a condition known as Old Maid's Insanity. Lonely spinster saw lustful advances where there were none, pinning this wilted rose on the mailman, the bank clerk, the bag boy at the grocery store, etc. It's called projection, and it's a relatively common event in everyday psychology. Am I suggesting these rabid feminists are projecting their own desires onto men at large? I wouldn't call them desires so much as obsessions and agendas. Rarely have I encountered intensely passionate feelings of any sort without there being some kind of hidden issue motivating them. As I said above, it all comes down to the individual, both the individual man-hater and the original man she decided to hate. I will give these feminists credit for true egalitarianism on this particular issue. Regardless of race, creed, or color, all men are held to be insensitive egotistical domineering bastards.
Whatever their individual motivations, I'm getting tired of hearing these feminists characterize all men as lustful brutes with no thought for any other living thing. I hate to break it to you, ladies, but that simply isn't the case. No matter how much you want it to be that way, most men I've known are basically decent guys just trying to struggle through the horrible obstacle course feminism has made of daily life on this two-gender planet.
The other day one of the new converts at church asked me if I'm an ultra-feminist. I don't know where
It's no wonder men are so angry these days, especially those pigeonholed as White European Males, given the daily injustices wreaked on them in the name of equality between the sexes.
