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He's just a dick.. enough said.

Why dont we (the people) subject Simon Cowell to a show trial and then make him do forced labour?

I was not writing on topic because this is already "not just derailed" but the thread has run through Oceans. Whatever that means.

But look at the Lady. Why is she so serious. The reason why I brought Indian Slum is just as way of comparison that probably money has very little to do with happiness.

Third World Vs British Society is something we can debate another day.

Who are the creeps that have invaded this blog?

What's with all the feminism bashing?

The yards of tosh above does not describe my life.

Is it some American far right christian fundamentalist group posting 'life stories' to teach us heathens a few lessons?

NS put in a bar on any comment over 20 lines - it's tedious in the extreme.

If you regularly spend your time underneath a sun bed and get the the ludicrous orange perma-tan, that's a matter of choice. Your natural skin colour isn't.

With respect, the writer attempts to be champion the poor but I think she is missing the point. The poor are not just the people out of work. In fact, there are people who actually get out of their house, leave their children (who I am sure they would like to spend time with) and work for a pittance. After paying their rent and council tax (both of which I am sure you know can be paid by the govt whilst someone is 'on benefits') they have less take home pay. Its not that the unemployed have it so good, its that low earners have it so bad. It would be nice if the minimum wage was increased and better measures were in place to enforce this- in places such as restaurants, packaging factories, care homes etc. However, this is not feasible at the moment because it stifles economic growth as businesses have increased costs and it also means they can afford to hire fewer employees.

The poor should definitely be supported, even when the economy is dire. However, the poor is not just the unemployed. Go and visit a number of tower blocks, as I have, and you will find many families with parents who work, yet they are living in near squalor.

All in all, I think cutting unemployment benefits is one of the few things in reducing government spending I agree with. I have been supporting the rights of low earners for many years now and its good to finally get a government that thinks hard work should pay off, its just a shame its a govt that doesn't want to use public spending to create jobs, and yet wants to increase a regressive tax!

I know Buckskins, I just can't help myself..

Confession of a feminazi

As I write this, I am aware that I am probably going to offend some readers, but, then again, I have found that we in society are afraid and unaccepting of the truth, therefore taking offense. I can not apologize for what I am about to say, however I can only hope to attempt to undo the wrong that I have done.

To start with, here is a little bit about myself. Before I was married, I was an extreme feminist, with the hopes and dreams of equality, having the same thoughts and beliefs as others in the fight for true equality. It wasn't like the feminists of today, who only want to gain complete control, power, and to have revenge, destroying everything that the true feminists have fought so hard for (true gender equality). It is my hope that by posting my story and comments, that it will encourage other women, (we/you know who you are), to come forward and to tell the truth about themselves and their experience. Here is my story, as shameful as it may be.

I am a single mother of two. When I decided to leave my marriage, (I was bored), I went to three different lawyers for advice. I was asked by all 3 of them if I was ever abused by my husband. My answer was, never in any way shape or form was my husband abusive towards me. To my utter disbelief, all of them told me the same thing. Unless I accused my husband of abuse, I would not gain sole custody of my children. They also told me that by making these allegations against him, that I would get EVERYTHING and more. When I asked them how we would prove the allegations, I was told that the courts don't require proof, and to go to a women's shelter, and that they would help me, and that it would support my allegations of abuse.

Having been brought up in a very religious family, I was very uncomfortable with this advice. I was then told by the lawyers, that if I wanted the full support of legal aid, I had no choice but to make the allegations against my husband. Having no money to pay for legal expenses, I did as I was advised. Reluctantly I took my children to a women's shelter. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. On the outside, it appears as they want the public and their funders to see it. This is however, far from the truth.

This place was a form of a cult, (for lack of a better term). Male bashing was a top priority, and the administration was very adamant about recruiting yet another woman (me), to join this man-haters club. They even have a game plan on how to win in court. By following their simple plan step by step, I would not only get sole custody of my children, but also the car, house and land, plus finances for the rest of my life.

However, if I did not follow their game plan, but if I played fairly, I would lose everything, and I would be endangering the lives of other women, and would jeopardize any funding for them. The administration must have noticed that their brain washing techniques were not working as fast as they wanted, so I was 'thrown' at the other women staying there.

Terms such as 'sperm donors', and that all men were abusive and must die, were used on a daily basis. They were very convincing, and not wanting to jeopardize my fellow house mates, I went along with their game plan.

As soon as I said that I would follow their game plan, things moved very quickly. I saw the man that I was once married to destroyed emotionally, financially and physically. I was granted sole custody of our children, and because of a restraining order, I gained the house and car, so that our children wouldn't lose everything that they were used to.

Not only was there a restraining order against him, he was also charged with assault. The man who had equally created our children, helped raise them, and who loves them dearly, was ordered to stay away from them, and to pay me, (more than I ever needed), support for them. Like I said, I destroyed him, leaving him with very little to survive.

My brother is now going through a custody battle, where my former sister-in-law is playing exactly the same game that was taught to me by a women's shelter, and my brother is in the same shoes that I once put my ex in.

Knowing how I destroyed my ex, and seeing the wrong that I had committed, I have made it my personal endeavor to help my brother with his fight. He recently joined a men's group, and he receives messages on the net from shared parenting, epoc_news etc.

As he was thrown out of his home, he now lives with me, which gives me the opportunity to read the messages from these groups. I must admit, sometimes there is a message or two that is of great help, but for the most part, these groups have to stop playing 'Mr. Nice Guy'.

Ref: http://www.invisionplus.net/forums/index.php?mforum=ct4m&showtopic=1522

Once again I apologize to all, for the HUGE word count in this post but not for it's content.

A Middle-Aged Princess Grows Up

On the cusp of my 45th birthday, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror. It wasn't the bathroom mirror, it was a photo I had from graduate school. I looked at myself 20 years ago and had a startling and clear epiphany. It wasn't a happy moment. It was a terribly sad moment. It was so sad that I involuntarily burst into tears, something I haven't done since the dark days of my divorce.

I looked at the photo and came to the conclusion that I had made a real mess of my life. I felt the utter misery of my life come in waves of sadness, regret, anger, and loneliness. For almost an hour I cried as I looked at the photo of a younger me. I was 24 with a fresh MBA from an excellent school. I was eager to conquer the business world. I was eager to prove that women could do anything. I was so much thinner. My clothes looked stylish, almost sexy. Of course the hair style was awful but that was the 80s and such styles could be forgiven. I saw the brightness in my eyes, the sparkle of life, of the great opportunities that were open to me. The world was there for my taking and I was ready.

But somehow, some way, it never came to be. My life evolved into something painful and difficult. But until that moment when I looked at my photo from over two decades ago, I always blamed someone else. It was never my fault for the bad decisions I made. Typically, it was the fault of men - my father, my boyfriends, my husband, my boss, my sons. Never, ever was it something that I had done. When I commiserated with my women friends, they always supported me. They even supported me when I had my affair, telling me that my husband was not giving me the attention that I needed. I read the women’s magazines and every article was about how women were always strong, intelligent, morally righteous, unable to make bad decisions. Worse, I believed that any of my needs, no matter how frivolous, no matter how many times I changed my mind, no matter how miserable I made the men in my life feel, were more important than anything - motherhood, career advancement, a healthy marriage, whatever.

I hate the world for teaching me those lessons. I remember complaining about how my husband never grew up. But as the tears streamed down my face, I came to the conclusion that I had never grown up. I never learned about compromise, trust, tolerance, niceness. I was a bitch, pure and simple. I know now that being a bitch is not about strength or independence. Being a bitch is about being repellent, unpleasant, unhappy, and lonely. Being a bitch is nothing more than being a spoiled princess who is too selfish or stupid to accept the joy in life.

I had become a fat, unpleasant, middle-aged princess because I had refused to grow up. Sure, I had taken on grown-up responsibilities (marriage, career, house, motherhood) but at the core of my psyche was a 13-year-old girl who stamped her feet and whined when she didn't get her way. Of course, I had stopped whining years ago but I simply replaced the whining with emotional manipulation and ornery bitchiness. No wonder I was still single and my two teenaged sons spent all their free time with their father.

When I was growing up, being a dilettante feminist, I swallowed the standard line that women can have it all. I wanted it all and I wanted to make no compromises, to assume no sacrifices, and to feel completely validated in all of my lifestyle choices. The biggest mistake in my late teens and early 20s was to let other women - women whom I thought to be strong, independent, and intelligent - determine which lifestyle I was to follow. I was simply too spoiled and lazy to look inward, to embrace the kind of introspection necessary to find one's own path in life, the path that could lead to real fulfillment and happiness.

I remember college well. It was a fun time and I thought, at the time, an enlightening time. The parties were exciting, the political debates intense, the string of boyfriends and casual sexual encounters pleasant. I studied hard and I played hard. I attended the campus feminist meetings and listened to diatribes from sturdy and self-righteous peers about the evils of masculinity. I learned to scorn men when I didn't need them for selfish reasons - study partners, shoulders to cry on, willing sexual partners. But I was never hesitant to bat my eyelashes or let my skirt ride up on my then-slender thighs if I needed something from a man. Men were handy to have around occasionally, but certainly not required, as my female peers kept insisting.

I learned that the only place for a woman was in the boardroom and that motherhood was beneath my intelligence. I "took back the night" at a few after-dark rallies with hundreds of young women eager to prove to the world that all men were rapists and potentially violent criminals.

When I got pregnant my sophomore year, it was easy to get an abortion. The campus health center was almost eager to make sure the procedure was done quickly and quietly. I never told my parents. I never told the fellow who made me pregnant. I don't even remember his name, I only vaguely remember a wild night with the college hockey team at an off-campus party. Only now do I consider the irony of how I was attracted to college athletes in school - the type of men who liked being in control.

Pursuing my MBA once I completed my undergraduate studies was a foregone conclusion. I was destined for the board room, or so I had convinced myself. Graduate school was tough. I was competing with some very bright people, mostly men. Those men were destined for success and they knew it. But I had something that I exploited. I had my femininity and I used it ruthlessly when I had to. I tried to convince myself that the affair with my married finance professor had nothing to do with grades. Of course, finance was the most difficult course and when I managed surface at the end of the semester with a B it was hard to rationalize that the secret trysts with the professor had nothing to do with it. But the ends always justifies the means and there was no way I would not succeed. The other few women in my class were doing the same if they could get away with it. We never talked about it, but it was understood and we sometimes giggled about it and gloated that we had something the men would never have.

I met my husband that last year in graduate school. He was pursuing a degree in sociology. The chemistry with him was quite intense in the beginning. He had long hair and a motorcycle. He was the classic bohemian and I felt the need to rein him in, to make him a better man (or at least my definition of a better man). He was irresponsible and sometimes unruly but I loved him with all my heart and soul.

After graduating, I found work in a big corporation. Every day I went to work with my power suit and shoulder pads under my jacket. I walked in my sneakers and changed into work shoes when I got to the office at 7AM to put in another 12 hour day. I was married by then in a wedding straight from Modern Bride magazine. My husband had finally cut his hair after much insistence from me. He would later call it severe nagging but I got my wish so it didn't matter.

He found work in a consumer research organization. He didn't get paid as much as me but that didn't matter. My income was big and growing bigger. We bought a house I found in the suburbs. He had recommended something more modest and closer to downtown where we both worked. I would have none of that. My success had to be readily visible with a big, traditional house and a big lawn. I made sure he took care of the lawn despite his resistance.

After five years, I felt the need to have babies. It wasn't a mutual decision. I wanted babies. No, I desperately needed a baby. I felt empty inside without kids. It was a completely irrational feeling for a high-flying career woman hell-bent on being the next corporate CEO. My husband was cool towards the idea. He asked how we would balance the demands of being parents and supporting a rather expensive lifestyle. I didn't care. My womb was empty. I had needs. Neither reason nor logic affected my needs or my feelings.

So, the first baby came. Instantly, life changed. I couldn't put in the hours I needed to maintain my career trajectory. My husband changed as well. He quickly lost his bohemian attitudes. He sold his motorcycle and became a devoted father to our son. Of course, I had been pushing for this since we had gotten married. His words, as revealed during the divorce, were "shrill, nagging harpy who relentlessly pushed me into fatherhood". But he loved our first son and even offered to work only part time to allow me to keep on with my career. That would not do. I was the mother, the queen, the all-knowing and wise creator of my son. My husband was clearly an incompetent boob who didn't know a diaper from a car seat.

My boss saw that I was distracted with my new duties as super-mom. He looked at my productivity and knew I couldn't perform like my single or childfree colleagues. So, I was "mommy-tracked". They didn't call it that then. But when a male colleague was promoted over me, I knew what was happening. I hated it. I was livid. How could I not have it all? So, I played the feminine card again, this time with a stick, not a carrot. I paid a visit to Human Resources with a veiled threat of a discrimination lawsuit. It didn't work, of course, because it was very clear that I was putting in fewer hours with the resultant loss of productivity. It was all documented and defensible. I was furious. How dare they. I summoned up all the righteous wrath I could. I consulted an outside attorney, a ferocious female lawyer who was quite prepared to sue until she made a pass at me. Open-minded I was, but certainly not a lesbian. I let the legal issue drop and sullenly accepted my reduced role at work. After all, we had expenses to pay and my salary was certainly needed.

I watched my husband evolve from bohemian to responsible father. He was astoundingly good with our first son. Of course, at the time, I didn't recognize that. I thought everything he did was wrong. Only I, the supreme mother, could raise our first boy. We struggled for a couple of years. It wasn't easy. So, when I got pregnant again - unplanned by my husband, completely planned by me - the stress continued to grow. Money wasn't tight but the pressure to maintain our lifestyle and that big house was mostly on my shoulders. I resented my husband for that. He had chosen a career he loved but the pay was not nearly as much as mine. I really had to work and with being on the mommy track, there was no way I could achieve what I had expected in my career.

We did use day-care and a part-time housekeeper. Actually, we went through eight housekeepers. They were never good enough for me. Nothing was good enough for me. My shoes didn't fit, my clothes looked bad, the car wasn't clean enough, my husband wasn't up to my standards. Looking back in brutal honesty, I was a stark, raving bitch. I don't think I said a nice word in years. I am amazed that my husband put up with me. I didn't take him seriously, he was just a man, after all.

In my limited social life, I spent time with women like me. We were an unhappy group of 30-something moms with powerful careers. But we also smiled and pretended that life was perfect. We all had the right homes, the right cars, the right schools, the right careers. We convinced ourselves that we did have it all. Occasionally, one of us might vent some frustration at the situation. When that happened, we always had convenient scapegoats - our husbands, our bosses, our housekeepers, the schools, whatever. It was never, ever our fault because we were female.

With one son at five and the other at seven, it fell apart. Rather, it exploded. My husband just gave up. He had been supportive to me and good with the children. So, it caught me by surprise when he just gave up. I guess I should have seen it. I was always using sex as a weapon with him. If he didn't do exactly what I said, if he didn't bend over backwards to fulfill my every whim, he didn't experience any kind of sexual pleasure. I remember I caught him playing with himself one night. I was furious. How could he experience sexual satisfaction without my control being somehow involved?

As a healthy woman, I did have my own sexual needs. So, rather than enjoy sex within the context of a marriage, I had an affair. It was easy. I was still somewhat attractive. There were men around. "Why not?" I easily rationalized to myself. My husband doesn’t give me enough attention, it’s all his fault. The affair was inconsequential, just some sex on weekends and on business trips. I needed it so therefore it was OK. While my husband was being a father, I was being an empowered, independent woman visiting cheap motels with a man who could give me orgasms.

The affair lasted three months. My husband never found out. He didn't need to, he just gave up. Interestingly, he channeled his efforts into a side business as a marketing consultant. This proved to be quite lucrative for him. Within six months his income had exceeded mine. Our savings account grew substantially. "It's for the boys' college tuition" he told me over and over again.

I was unhappy. My career was stressful and unrewarding. My two sons were closer to my husband than to me because of all the hours I was working. He had quit his full-time job and was thriving as a marketing consultant, a job that he could do out of the house with just his computer and a phone. I felt frustrated and unfulfilled. My female friends recommended counseling. So, we gave that a try. I subtly picked a counselor whom I know would be sympathetic to me. The sessions were actually fun in a very unpleasant way. The counselor and I spent 50 minutes picking on my husband. He quietly sat there and took it, apologizing and promising to change. I didn't have to promise to do anything. The counselor - a woman much like me - made it very clear that my needs were paramount and his needs were completely irrelevant.

Naturally, the counseling didn't work for us. My husband retreated into fatherhood and his growing business. I contemplated another affair. Unfortunately, I was gaining a lot of weight. At a size 12, it was hard to get attractive men to look at me. My friends recommended that I consider divorce. I look back and think about my "friends" from that period in my life. They were a group of unhappy women trying so hard to validate their own, poor life decisions. I let them influence me when I should have been strong. That was an enormous mistake.

I didn't hate my husband I just didn't love him like I used to. I wanted a new and better life. I could raise my sons without him. I had been reading that kids really didn't need fathers. I was feeling so unfulfilled. When I served my husband with divorce papers, he didn't seem surprised. I had consulted with a good divorce attorney and she strongly recommended that I go for everything - house, cars, custody, alimony, child support, everything. "It's a war and as a woman, you have to win" were her words.

The divorce was ugly and despite the fact that I did get the house, the car, the kids, child support, and the savings account that he had filled, I ultimately lost. My ex moved out, leaving me to take care of the house and kids. He moved into a very modest apartment and we agreed that he could see the boys on weekends. The court actually ordered that to happen. I was happy to force him out of their lives completely but he was rigidly insistent and that damned judge agreed.

I was single again. I was ready to date again. But at 38, dating was not like the wild times in college and graduate school when I was young, alluring, and desired by men. No, I was a single mom now. I had cut my hair short and my figure was almost past the point of no return. The kind of man I wanted to date had no interest in me. Those powerful and successful men had younger, prettier, nicer girlfriends.

The divorced men were the worst. They were either so disillusioned that they couldn't handle a relationship or they were just hopping from bed to bed, not willing to be exclusive. I so much wanted to be swept off my feet into the arms of an attractive man to take care of me and make my troubles go away. I still thought of myself as a princess. I was still silly, stupid, and immature.

Yet the men I was attracted to wouldn't give me a second thought. The men who did want me were totally unsuitable. It was astounding to me that I wasn't attractive any more. So many men in college were after me. I remember mocking all the guys who approached me at parties. If they had the slightest flaw, I pushed them away, usually with a pointed insult or two. I never thought twice about the men I rejected, some of them decent and sweet when I look back on it. My girlfriends and I called them "mamma's boys" while we let ourselves be taken by the cocky, arrogant pricks who always made us feel overpowering attraction and lust.

To make matters worse, I couldn't fix anything in the house. My husband had tended to all those matters. My boys were pre-teens and very difficult for me to handle. They hated the fact that they could only see their father on weekends. Their grades dropped. They started having discipline problems in school. Naturally, I blamed their father. It was all his fault that we divorced and that he lived apart from them. I tried not to say bad things about him in front of my sons but the feelings were just so strong. I said terrible things about their father, especially when I was drinking, which I did a lot of back then.

If I was unhappy when I was married, I was now wretchedly miserable as a single mom looking for love again. I tried hard to convince myself that I was a strong, independent, and intelligent woman. Sometimes it worked, especially when I was browbeating subordinates at work. I actually hated my job. I made a good living, yes. Yet I had reached the zenith of my career and the board room was not one bit closer. I still felt terribly conflicted about being a good mom and being the corporate woman.

I had lots of blame to dole out. There was no way that the current state of my life was the result of my decisions. My single girlfriends all told me that, many, many times over copious cocktails in sundry singles bars. I read a lot of women’s magazines and the advice I got said pretty much the same thing - a woman is never to blame.

I tried to lose weight but it was so very difficult. When I was hungry, I simply had to eat, usually ice cream or something with chocolate. I had to buy new clothes, again, because the weight kept piling on. I was set up on a blind date and the man had the sheer audacity to say "I'm sorry, I'm just not attracted to you because of your weight." I never thought about my own hypocrisy about trying to find a man to whom I was attracted to physically. Men must be attracted to me, I am a woman, after all.

The past few years have been kind of a blur. My ex husband had found a new love of his life and I naturally hated him for that. I tried to increase the child support payments. When that didn't work, I tried to prevent my sons from visiting him. They fought me on this. I took out my frustrations at work. My boss threatened to fire me. Only my girlfriends gave me any support. We had boozy nights where we ate and drank too much. Frankly, we were a bunch of fat, unhappy, single women who heaped blame upon the world for the state of our lives.

So when I saw the photograph from college, the epiphany hit hard. Through the tears of anguish, rage, bitterness, and denial came the incredibly painful realization that I was responsible for my own unhappiness. I finally figured out that I had not grown up and had not truly embraced adulthood. This was six months ago.

I've made some profound changes in my life since then. First and foremost, I stopped blaming everyone else for my own problems. This was the hardest. For my entire life I was told - and I believed - that as a woman, I could do no wrong, that I was not responsible, that I was always the victim in some way. Over and over I had to tell myself that only I am responsible for my happiness.

Once I learned to stop blaming the world, I taught myself to be pleasant and nice. This was hard as well. I had always mistaken pleasantness for weakness. This is not the case. A new colleague at work - a woman from the South - showed me very clearly it's quite easy to be nice and be strong at the same time.

I also dumped my girlfriends. This was easy. This group of unhappy and negative women was actually encouraging me to do stupid things like divorce a perfectly good man because of my selfish and very arbitrary feelings of the moment. I finally learned that acting solely on feelings is the realm of children, not adults. Maybe those women will finally learn that. But I doubt it.

I'm at the gym every day. After being rebuffed by so many attractive and decent guys, I decided to apply standards of real equality to the whole dating thing. After all, if I believe in physical attraction, why should not I understand that men are the same way? Being fat means not being physically attractive to many, many men so it's up to me to do something about, not be angry with men about the situation. The weight is coming off. It's a battle, to be sure, but it's coming off. I'm also letting my hair grow and getting rid of that awful "mom" hair style.

I no longer read those loathsome women’s magazines nor do I watch a lot of TV. When I freed my mind from so many complete misconceptions about men, I learned that men are actually wonderful people. My sons saw my transformation. As they grow older and become men in their own right, I have stopped nagging them about "feelings" and "sensitivity" and encourage them to be men. I doubt I'll ever mend fences with my ex husband, all I can do is hope that he finds happiness and joy in his life. I have a new respect for him, a respect born from understanding that men are very different, not worse, just different. My ex is also an excellent father, I am blessed for that.

I've learned to accept that my needs aren't the center of the universe. That was actually quite liberating. No longer am I a slave to the whimsy of my often shallow emotions that can't be reasonably fulfilled. This means I complain less. If I can't change the situation, why complain about it? Winter is cold, my complaints about the temperature will do nothing to warm the air.

The biggest regret I have in life is being so weak as to not to have made the serious introspection until this point in my life. If I were truly strong, truly intelligent, I would have really thought about what is important to me instead of following the herd. In retrospect, clawing my up the corporate ladder was a very bad decision. Exploiting my femininity to manipulate men was even worse. I love being a woman but using sex to get what I want is no better than a man using brute strength to get what he wants.

I'm still single and dating still eludes me. There is a glimmer of hope, however, a very nice man complimented me on my smile. At 45 years old, that was the first time anyone has noticed my smile. My eldest son noticed it too, "Mom, I've never seen you smile until now." Life must get better for me. That's my responsibility, no one else's.

Amazing how sometimes people suddenly "find themselves" and become born-again humans once their sex appeal fades and they are FORCED to live on their humanity alone...

Domestic Violence: On Real Victims

by Paul Elam on October 27, 2010

From A Voice for Men

For those of you who have read my short bio, you know that I became involved in men’s activism because of misandry in the mental health field, where I worked as an addictions counselor for 20 years. The recent debate on this site between myself and a generic feminist took me back a few years to some very familiar arguments that were commonplace with my peers when I was counseling.

That feminist reminded me of the ideologues I used to work with. What he does not know, and doesn’t want to know about the subject could fill Lake Superior. And despite his allegations of indifference, even sadistic enjoyment on my part about violence against women, his knowledge about me is equally lacking.

In the world of drug addicts and alcoholics, violence in the home is as common as lost jobs, DUI’s and a litany of other life problems. And my experience in dealing with it leaves an impression in my mind vastly different than you see broadcast in public service announcements, and what you hear from gender activists that make their bread and butter from the problem.

Somewhere in all of us, I think, by virtue of systematic brainwashing, is the idea that domestic violence is epitomized by a frail and battered woman, quietly weeping and huddled in a dark corner. We have been trained, through the hypnotic repetition of misinformation, to conjure the image of male monster driven by the insatiable need for control, pummeling his wife or girlfriend because her independence threatens him.

The rest here:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/2010/10/27/domestic-violence-on-real-victims/

Oh and I forgot this youtube video

Feminism Sucks by The Amazing Atheist

Ref: http://youtu.be/qt_0ko4njmc

I have three main objections to feminism.

1 The political territory which feminism claims to occupy is already covered by classical liberalism. We already have perfectly good theories about human rights and civil rights and political equality, and we just don't need another one. Under a liberal reading, women are no different from anybody else: there isn’t really any such thing as ‘women’s rights’, any more than ‘left-handed people’s rights’.

2 The intellectual quality of the analysis offered by feminists is desperately poor. Feminists have appropriated the domain of sexual politics for themselves. 'We are the authority on this matter', they claim, 'if you want to know about sexual politics, come to us, and we will tell you what to think. Your opinions are not welcome'. Not only is this a deeply authoritarian attitude, which should arouse our hostility in itself, but having seized power in this area, they have, from society's point of view, done a spectacularly poor job. Surely the first task of any such organisation would be to produce an analysis, a model of the task domain. Yet not only is feminism's analysis of sexual relations pathetically inadequate, it is, even worse, dangerously misleading, dogmatic, self-serving and divisive.

3 They are not fulfilling their responsibilities to society. Surely, the role of any organisation which claims to address problems in sexual politics should be, first and foremost, to act as an honest broker. Feminists should be the UN peacekeepers of the sexual landscape, the impartial police who arbitrate in disputes, who identify potential sources of conflict and pour oil on troubled waters. The primary role of any such organisation should surely be to promote harmony, good relations and communication between the sexes. Yet feminists do precisely the opposite. Far from impartial, they act only in their own narrow interests, they regard men as an enemy to be defeated, they stir up hatred and moral panic at every opportunity. They are not police but vigilantes.

Forever married to the outdated Marxist and Psychoanalytic dogmas of the late 1960s, their analysis of issues can never improve. The 1960s counter-culture produced an outlook on life which is deeply anti-social and maladjusted to say the least.

The society in which we grew up, the safest, wealthiest, healthiest and most liberal society in history, is regarded as the root of all evil in the world. The whole society in which we live, our own culture, must be completely razed to the ground. Only then can we rebuild a New Jerusalem from the ashes. To say that this is an irrational belief is putting it mildly. Revolutionary politics is misleading and pessimistic, because it teaches us that social reform is impossible. We cannot change anything unless we change everything. Yet that is the political outlook, derived from the most unsavoury role models, Marx, Lenin and Mao, that the hippies of the 1960s adopted.

Feminism is the Western world’s last surviving bastion of that totalitarian thinking. Feminists have concentrated their efforts on attacking marriage, the family, heterosexuality and men in general. The fact that they think women’s interests will be served by this indicates just how deeply deluded they are.

Coupled with this destructive and irrational hatred of one’s own culture was a peculiar narcissism. Experimentation with ‘alternative lifestyles’ was probably inevitable once a sufficiently wealthy and liberal society appeared. The data is now in, and the results are deeply unedifying. What the 1968 generation – the last surviving remnant of which is the feminist movement - gave us was widespread social collapse. Divorce, fatherlessness, family breakdown, abortion, crime, drug abuse, child neglect, sexually transmitted infections, personal heartbreak, educational failure. Single-parent households living off public funds, leading to an increase in traffic, pollution, housing shortage, taxation and the intrusive power of the State.

The feminist movement has served the short-term selfish interests of middle-class white women, but its effects on the wider society have been catastrophic. They are under the delusion that they are trying to save a misguided world from its own folly. The arrogance of this position is stunning.

There are several reasons why feminist theory is so intellectually bankrupt. One cause is an inherent left-wing distrust of the establishment. Any theorizing done by the male establishment must be rejected. Thus, science and logic cannot be pursued in any honest way. Aspects of mainstream science and philosophy will be appropriated (and then arbitrarily dropped) if they happen to suit short-term political convenience, but that is all.

The second factor is that women are very socially-focused creatures. I know from my own experience that men will discuss science, economics, history and philosophy, but women only ever talk about themselves and other people. They find men’s conversation on these subjects boring and geeky. They concern themselves with the minutiae of personal relationships, almost to the exclusion of all else. This tends to militate against any kind of large-scale theorizing, which the feminist project requires.

A second outcome from this preoccupation with social issues is a desire to fit in and be accepted. This tends to mean that women will latch onto any passing fad or trend. Most of the feminists I have known in my life are interested in every kind of mysticism from astrology to reiki to homeopathy. It’s easier and more fun than reading evolutionary psychology. With a lack of intellectual rigour and a desire to be trendy and popular, every kind of nonsense is actively embraced. This tends to make for very poor theory. Post-modernism comes to the rescue by claiming that every theory is just as good as every other, a notion as intellectually bankrupt as it is possible to get.

Thirdly, there is the dogmatic moral arrogance of feminism. Anyone who dares to ask questions is pilloried as a misogynist. This is a deliberate tactic used to suppress debate and silence criticism. Naomi Wolf recommends that dissenters should be subjected to female psycho-social violence around the middle-class dinner table. At every social gathering, the unfortunate victim will be subjected to scorn, filthy looks and verbal abuse until they cave in and stop disagreeing with feminists. This is an openly totalitarian mindset. It is the middle-class equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. This behaviour can have real and very severe consequences, including the breakup of relationships and damage to people’s mental health. For some reason, feminists seem to think that they are immune from scrutiny or criticism. Such attitudes simply cannot be accepted in a democracy.

Lastly, feminism is a modern-day religion, and its adherents act like any other religious believers. They dare not question the Holy Writ for fear of excommunication. They hold established religious ideas in sacred reverence. Anyone who does not do so is a heretic or an infidel. They create cults of personality around significant past leaders, whose wisdom cannot be questioned. This religious mindset is anathema to free intellectual enquiry, which, again, makes for very poor theory. Once a bad idea has become established, it is very difficult to displace it.

Feminists are not fulfilling their responsibilities towards the wider society because they simply do not believe that they have any; they believe only that society has responsibilities towards them. I don’t have to do anything, I’m already perfect. It is a cult mindset which strokes the ego of insecure and dysfunctional women.

It is long past the time when this bizarre cult must be openly challenged.

Ref: http://hereticalsex.blogspot.com/2008/06/poverty-of-feminism.html

Once again I apologize to all, for the word count in this post but not for it's content.

Dear ladies,

Let’s talk feelings. Actually, forget that. I’ll talk feelings, because if you talk feelings, I won’t get to talk at all.

I know, that sounded insensitive. Well, it was insensitive, and quite intentionally so. But keep reading, there is a method to my malice, and a message that you really need to hear. I don’t want you to miss out on it because you’re in a huff over the fact that I regard your feelings at best, as obstructive, and at worst, the primary and overarching cause of failure in your love life. And worse yet, as a source of abusive control for anyone crazy enough to get close to you.

As ironic as it may sound to you, if you want a good love life, the first step is to get your feelings out of the way, or at least quit using them as a weapon. So let’s get out of Oprah mode and just use our brains long enough to sort this thing out.

It starts, like most of your problems, in childhood. That’s the cute and annoyingly whiney phase of life that boys, unlike you, are forced to outgrow. You don’t get all the blame for that, but if you really want a meaningful relationship, you’d better start taking some responsibility for correcting it.

Babies, whether blue or pink, are pretty much alike. When a child gets hungry or dirty or tired or sick or lonely or scared, they tend to react by screeching until someone does something about it. It makes sense. Babies, after all, can’t take care of themselves.

But not too far along in life the paths of boys and girls, emotionally speaking, fork into two very different directions. By the time both have some measure of language and cognitive skills the reaction to all that caterwauling changes, and not so subtly.

Pretty early in a boys life, about the time he can speak in complete sentences, tolerance for remaining a baby wears thin. His wailing is met with everything from ridicule to threats. If “big boys don’t cry,” doesn’t work, then, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” usually does, especially after a few rounds of following through.

Psychologists will tell you that this is where we harm boys, that we dissociate them from their feelings and shut down their emotional selves. They even call it emotional abuse.

But in most cases, unless taken too far, it doesn’t abuse boys feelings as much as it teaches them to start mastering them. That kind of self control is a pretty good skill that comes in handy for a lot of things, like, say, being an adult. You see, before the psychologists came along to tell us what rotten parents we were, we had a different name for the effect we had on boys, although not so catchy and marketable.

We called it growing up. It was all the rage.

We knew, even without a Ph.D. in conjecture, that not maturing was a bad thing. It resulted in all sorts of problems, like permanent childhood and self centeredness.

And women.

That’s because while we were insisting that boys learn real life skills, girls got a different message. Actually, they got the same message that they’d been getting since birth. Namely that squawking loud enough will get you what you want. And that is why that while boys your age grew into manhood, you just got older, hairier and more irritating.

And more vulnerable to being exploited.

The self help gurus have zeroed in on that one like chicken hawks and turned your feelings about your feelings into a cash cow. For a fee, they tell you to express your feelings, write them down, trust them, affirm them, discuss them in groups, put them in a journal, confront people with them, list them, learn more words for them, read about them, mouth them through a sock puppet like a neurotic ventriloquist and above all, get them validated as something sacred by all in your life.

That have led you to attend the Church of Emotionalism, where your tears are holy and Kleenex are passed right along with the collection plate. Can I get an amen?

But they aren’t telling you anything really different than the same bulls--- you have been told your whole life, and that you now tell yourself. When you have pain, or even a sense of slight annoyance, someone else is supposed to by God fix it.

And so you remain, born again baby that you are, stuck in self delusion until you get some things straight.

Despite what your therapist told you, or what you saw on Oprah, your feelings don‘t have any inherent value compared to say, facts, logic or a good cheeseburger. Most of the feelings you think are so important are as transient as campaign promises and worth just about as much attention.

What you feel right now won’t be the same thing you feel in a few hours, or, if you are like a lot of women, in a few minutes. So expecting your man to stand constantly at the ready, as though his purpose in life is to validate and honor every fleeting emotion you have at each and every point of their temporary existence is a non starter. If that is what you expect, you don’t need a relationship, you just need a better therapist.

And the same for taking your relationship straight into turmoil because you use your feelings to undermine communications every time a logical solution undermines your agenda.

You know exactly what I am talking about. The more reason and logic point to your being wrong, the more unreasonable and illogical you become. It is calculated and intentional. It’s the tried and true plan of “If being reasonable doesn’t get me what I want, I will just be increasingly unreasonable till I get it anyway.” Nothing like frustrating someone into compliance.

And in a really twisted, perverted way, it makes sense. Heck, you’re a slave to your feelings, why shouldn’t everyone else be?

For a while, in many cases, it even seems to work. But it ultimately blows up in your face because all this nonsense is just a recipe for him to eventually cook up a great big casserole dish full of f----this-crazy-b----.

Are you feeling me?

Ladies, the only real purpose for your feelings is to tell you there is a problem you need to fix. After that, continuing to dwell on them, or childishly forcing your partner to obsess on them with you, only keeps you from finding solutions.

It may annoy him into fixing things for you, as surely as you were still laying in a crib, but at this point in your life that is only to shut you up, and leaves you less respected, and less respectable, every time it happens. And so when your man gives in to this, he isn’t meeting your emotional needs, and you certainly aren’t meeting his. All you have accomplished is pressuring him into changing your diaper.

If you think that is the path to a healthy relationship, think again. Jerking people around on an emotional leash is only good thing if you are a psychopath.

Hostility will always be the natural result for people who use emotions not to connect or to create intimacy, but as a weapon to control and manipulate. It is hostility well deserved.

Now, there has been a long running misconception about men and women that has been around about as long as igneous rock. That is that women are somehow more gifted in the emotional department than men.

Of course, that’s more bulls---. Training half the population to be childish, emotional puppeteers in ways that ultimately sabotage their own emotional fulfilment is hardly a gift. It is more like a cruel joke. And it may seem funny with you are 20. But it may seem much different at 45 when you are rapidly graying, cooking for one, and wondering why so many men get tired of listening to you in about 5 minutes.

With that in mind, if you want to see evidence of real emotional acumen, consider the following names:

Shakespeare, Keats, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Gibran, Kipling, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelly. Or even the great contemporary songwriters, Simon, King, Kristofferson, Dylan, Hiatt, Lovett and Henley. This list is a drop in the bucket, and if we added to it till we covered every genius in world history in the realm of the human heart, we would have to address 95% of them as mister.

In fact, truth be known, most of the men in your life who you have dismissed as emotional zeros more likely belong on that list than you do. You just never knew it because you are such an emotional mess.

Feminists would tell you that this is sexism, and perhaps they are right, though as usual for the wrong reasons.

It may well be sexist to the core to raise half the population, your half, to be emotional cripples while telling them they are emotional giants.

Ref: http://www.avoiceformen.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id...

And the video version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7RTd-4RVL8

Once again I apologize to all, for the word count in this post but not for it's content.

(Authors note: For the interpretively challenged, this is the disclaimer: This is a some what tongue-in-cheek column that also contains very serious advice. If you are a woman and the opinions expressed here don’t apply to you, then you have no reason, or right, to be offended by them. If you are offended “on behalf of all women,” then stick around. I can do wonders with grandiosity.)

Dear Ladies,

I thought it best to start my column off here at The Spearhead with a personal introduction, and to give you a general overview of how and why grabbing you by the collar and holding a mirror up to your face will lead you to a happier life.

I am Dr. Paul. And I am to self help what Dr. House is to diagnostic medicine. That is to say, I’m a complete jerk, but the jerk you want to call when you’re in real trouble. And if you are a woman in western culture, you are most likely in trouble.

You should know up front that your feelings are about as important to me as your opinions, which is to say that they aren’t important at all. In fact, your feelings and opinions are the problem. By fixing them we can fix you, and everyone goes home happy.

You see, I already know how so many of you feel and where you are in life. I know about your struggles with men, how disappointed and disenchanted you have become. I know you are tired of guys that look great in the beginning but end up hurting and disappointing you.

That’s why you have been watching Oprah and Dr. Phil, and why you read magazines like COSMO for advice on relationships. You’re yearning for answers, and in fact you have probably spent a fair amount of yours or your man’s money chasing after them. Your bookshelves are filled with everything from John Gray to Gloria Steinem and it hasn’t done anything but leave you wondering if there are any good men left in the world at all. You are on an unending quest for an elusive solution, and you don’t see anything promising in sight.

It’s not entirely your fault.

From the time you were born, and I am going to put this in bold italics because it is very, very important, the whole world has been lying to you . And when all you hear is lies, you can only get the net result of where you are right now:

F----- up and clueless as to what to do about it. The only thing you are sure of is that none of your problems are of your own making.

You see, all these lies have convoluted your expectations. Your sense of self-importance has been inflated to the point of psychic mutilation; your sense of responsibility proportionally reduced. It starts in childhood with unicorns and Prince Charming, Daddy’s little princess and sugar and spice. Yes, you are what little girls are made of. And while that as all sweet and gooey, it pretty much screws the pooch when it comes to creating a tenable relationship with a grown man.

Being Daddy’s little princess is a cozy role for a child, but a piss poor ambition for a grown woman. And while the world pinched your cheek and cooed at you in your youth, it should have told you at some point in your life to take the tiara off and grow up.

But the world did just the opposite.

By the time you were a teenager, hormonal boys were telling you whatever they thought you wanted to hear just to get in your pants, or at least cop a feel of your tits. They would tolerate any amount of your smugness and indifference just for a chance to be near you. And with this, they continued to enable you and reinforced the illusion of your flawlessness. It made you feel powerful, important. Obsequious comment by obsequious comment, they helped you perfect the expectation that life would never demand from you humility or fairness. They taught you what your fathers did, that respect was not to be earned, but handed to you, by a man, regardless of your true nature.

And for years you lived with this as a constant, as there was always at least a few guys hanging around trying grovel their way into giving you the high hard one.

You could have a man and toss him away any time you wanted and you knew it. As a result you only gave attention to men who told you what you wanted to hear, and performed for you as expected. And even when you did follow your primal instincts into riding bitch on a Harley with a guy who didn’t spoon feed you bulls---, you made it your mission to mold him, too, into treating you like a princess. Often you succeeded.

And you ate it up like a beggar at a buffet.

Then you got a little older and feminism picked up where fathers and suitors left off. You learned that you were not only a princess with all the entitlements that come with that, but that you were also a victim of history; that all this entitlement that had been lavished on you was really oppression, and that you were owed even more.

And what’s more, you were able to quickly deduce that you could hang on to all those “oppressive” entitlements and take advantage of all the new doors being opened at the same time. All while you were more and more deeply entrenching yourself in the idea that you were not getting everything you deserved; that some man was responsible for it; that some man should fix it.

No wonder you’re so F----- up! Who wouldn’t be?

The world set out to produce an entire generation of personality disordered females and that is exactly what we got. Exceptions notwithstanding.

And so that leaves scores of you now here, in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction and disillusion. Many of you are downing anti-depressants like popcorn at a matinee, spending half your time ripping men, the other half looking for one that will fulfill your insanely unrealistic expectations of what he should be. And then wondering why it isn’t happening.

All the while, your relationship shelf life is ticking away. Your looks are fading and your options are narrowing. But you can’t seem to grasp the notion that it has anything to do with you. That is in part because all the mainstream self help options to which you have availed yourself have only made things worse, fueling the fires of your entitlement and aiding your projective denial. Your gurus and therapists and talk show hosts have only fed you more of the same that ultimately led you back to where you started, minus whatever portion of your earnings you gave up to them.

They are in business counting on the fact that everything I am saying here is true; counting on the fact that you won’t buy anything unless it is what you want to hear. You have been a good customer, which means you have been screwed. And since you can’t blame them or yourself, you just add it to your list of reasons to blame men.

It is a trap you can’t get out of because you have been taught to shun accountability like an AIG executive and point the finger of blame like a snitch in a drug bust.

It is time to grow up. And unless you do, you will never get out of that ditch, whether you know you are in one or not.

It won’t be easy. Growing up at 30 is a bitch; at 40 a nightmare; at 50 a lost cause but for a precious few.

Your ace in the hole is right here, though. I will help whip your mind into shape. It’s a hard job because right now your cranium is just a bucket for a glob of disoriented, infantile mush. The only cure for it is very high doses of the truth on a regular basis.

You won’t like it because I won’t mince words; because I won’t feed you the same poison that has ruined your life. If you want sugar coated, go get a doughnut. COSMO has one on every page, but Dr. Paul doesn’t do junk food.

Most of you will come back here again and again hoping for another column. Why? Well, for different reasons. Some of you will just come back to hate me some more. You are addicted to that sort of thing with men, and those of you the most far gone will only seethe and seethe more at my words.

But others, though you will curse me even in your sleep, will come back to visit me at The Spearhead because I am the first human being in your life to ever shoot totally straight with you. And you will come back because you are, though in terrible shape now, capable of understanding that getting the truth for free is much better than paying money for a pack of lies. And let’s face it, you do free pretty good.

We are on a rebuilding project here, ladies. And relearning. Through this column I will give you the re-education you so desperately need. We will cover communications, intimacy, trust, and friendship. You will learn new concepts, like your man has feelings and desires of his own; new, radical ideas like making your man your emotional pincushion is actually a bad thing. I will teach you that you are not the center of the universe, that you never were; that you were never supposed to be.

You will grow from a child-woman into a paragon of mature partnership material. And it will bring you the happiness that only a grown up can know.

And all you have to do is understand that humility is better for you than hubris and abandoning any notion that you are royalty will free you from a depraved trap.

I know you will thank me later.

And remember, ladies, I am not a real doctor, but I play one on the internet.

Ref: http://www.avoiceformen.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id...

Video can be found at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwW4Cvggtcw

There is a problem with the women in this culture.

Yes, I know, there are problems with men, too. Believe me, I have heard about them for the last forty years. Some of it true and fair, much of it neither. It was a necessary dialogue just the same. So is this.

To understand this we need a brief look at history. Women, in the past, were denied voting rights, couldn’t own land and didn’t have much access to employment that would give them the freedom to make it on their own.

This needed to change, and of course, did, as can be confirmed with a cursory glance at the world around you. I laud those changes. But the problem was in how we got here.

The reality is that the gender roles of our history were traps for both men and women. Women were relegated to home and children; men to sacrificial roles as protectors and providers. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just a matter of survival, and for many thousands of years it worked quite well to that end.

But once men made the environment safe enough for women to metaphorically "leave the cave," it was only natural and right that men change and allow that to happen.

And ladies, we did.

This is the simple but accurate truth of the matter. Men and women developed gender roles that facilitated the survival of the species. And once those roles were not necessary, they did begin the often complicated path to change.

The problem here is that your knowledge of these historical events is largely shaped, convoluted rather, by feminism. Feminists taught you that your history with men was of unremitting evil; that you were chattel, slaves to men who held all power and shut you out with extreme intent. They even gave it a name.

Patriarchy.

It is a word that has become synonymous with oppression. But feminists were loathe to remind you that “Women and children first,” was the patriarchal mantra, and that much of the social norms, even when misguided, were a product of a code adopted for the sole purpose of preserving your life. It wasn't always fair, but the unfairness wasn't always yours. Men died by that code, and trained their sons to do the same.

The fact that we still do is the subject for another essay.

So what happened? As feminist distortions were increasingly embraced, and intertwined with the legitimate need for change, men did what they usually do. They reacted to the message and not the messenger and unblocked the entrance to that cave.

Many of you spit on us on the way out. Many of you still do.

It has to stop.

This isn’t just about decency. And it is not just about the chasm of mistrust that separates us from each other, or the legions of the walking wounded from this godforsaken gender war. It is about our future. The vilification of men that you have accepted as appropriate now translates to catastrophe for our sons, for your sons.

The problem is that what we say, think and feel about people invariably translates into what we actually do to them. Nowhere is this more evident than with our sons, in the here and now.

If you take an honest look at the academic environment to which our boys are subjected, you will see that their masculinity itself is under attack with ideology that teaches them they are inherently flawed.

Christina Hoff Sommers documented this in her highly recommended book "The War Against Boys." She writes, "The pedagogy is designed to valorize females, such as teaching history in a woman-centered way. Boys are to be inspired to revere Anita Hill and to “enjoy” quilting. At the same time, schools discourage activities that are natural and traditional to boys, such as playing ball together."

She goes on to say, with sad accuracy, "Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools.”

What Sommers didn't add to that but I will is the fact that most parents have no idea about this because they choose not to.

As girls and girls programs increasingly flourish, boys are falling to the sidelines in ever growing numbers.

The results of that are chilling.

Boys are more likely than ever to drop out of school and engage in delinquency and other problems. They are representing less college graduates every year. With this diminishing education and wholesale marginalization, they are on a fast track to being the “second sex,” that position that so many feminists touted as the greatest evil of human history when they claimed it applied to women.

This is the lasting legacy of spitting on men. Your sons will not be the exception.

Young men now grow up to be destroyed in corrupt family court systems where women are encouraged to and even praised for using children, their children, like pawns in order to drain the father of assets. And those same children also have their badly needed connection to their fathers severed in the process. When those exploited, abused children start quite naturally to act out and get in trouble, we blame the father who was removed against his will, for of all things, being absent.

And the "freedom" women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization? It doesn't appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home.

But we don’t speak of these things. We are not supposed to. In your position as the identified victim, and mine as the identified perpetrator, there is supposed to be an indelible silence on these matters. For the most part, there is.

That silence is destroying us.

And it is a silence that is maintained with the collusion of shallow, weak men and misguided, self-serving women, which is to say most of the culture. The only answer I can think of is for men, and for women, to change.

Perhaps you will consider this before concluding that men's rights activists are whiners or woman haters or products of bad mothers. You might actually decide that most men's rights activists are men who above all else, seek justice. For their children, for themselves, and ultimately for you.

I hope that a few of you will read this and consider it the next time you hear someone say “men are pigs,” or when you hear a woman refer to her first born child as “the insurance policy,” or before you nod your head in unconsidered agreement with whatever negatives about men happen to be making the rounds. All of this will be visited on your sons, and their sons.

I hope too, that some of you look at your sons and think, and ask yourself what kind of world in which you really want them to live.

When your sons choose wives and marry, I hope you consider the agony they will go through when “taken to the cleaners” and robbed of their children in the family courts. You will be forced to stand by powerlessly and watch them have their hearts ripped out. As always, it will look much different to you when the system you help maintain with your silence crushes your son, and not just some obscure, unknown male whom you quietly think is getting what he deserves.

It will happen to more than half of them.

The best prevention for this last one is to teach our sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and work to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger. or even whether it is wise any more to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo?

And therein lies the rub, ladies. It is indeed time, just as it was for men, for women to be held to scrutiny, and to account. More importantly, it is time for women to do this on their own.

I’ll do my best to provide a fair and compassionate mirror in my writings. It is always up to you whether that mirror is a place you want to look.

Ref: http://www.avoiceformen.com/2010/04/02/a-message-to-women/

Oh come on John Global why would anyone want to travel halfway around the world just to live in that hot hell hole?

rk,the hypocrisy of socalist states like india is mindblowing,50 million people living in abject poverty,5 million underage girls and boys working as prostitutes in the major citys,and still this socalist state can spend billons of rupees on there space programme,nuclear weapons,commenwealth games and not to forget this bigoted class system based no worse than the one we have in the uk.if this is how a socalist state treats its own people well i wonder what this word socalism is all about.

@stuart: there is nothing wrong with taking time out for a little R and R.

Is just a word. " Each according to their worth" is one definition. Nebulous stuff. Don't worry about it. Chaos reigns in India. I cycled through Kerela, South India and they had children working in textile mills under the machinery. And Kerela is a democratically elected 'communist' state and has the highest literacy in India.

And you're telling me these words like socialism and communism are hard to pin point.

@MartinL: everyone justifies their own lives, the decisions that we make. Justification of one's decisions are not the sole domain of people who receive state benefits. Your 2k holiday for instance, was justified in your words as being one earned. As indeed it was. Where did you go? And I hope you had a good time.

There is a great deal of taxpayers money that is wasted. And two wrongs don't make a right. But stuart didn't really justify himself. He didn't hide. He freely admits he cheats on his welfare and tax. And that he is quite content being drunk and drugged most of the time. At least he was honest. There are many like him and it's a growing number.

What else is there in your life stuart? Don't you want to see things apart from a screen?

What is Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) about?

It is basically a statement of independence, and irrelevance - men declaring themselves free of the social expectations of women and western culture as a whole, because both have come to hate men - "we are independent, and you are irrelevant."

Western culture has turned on men. Phrases like "male violence", "toxic masculinity" and "testosterone poisoning" heap shame and blame on men, for no other crime than having been born with the set of genitals which is not currently in fashion. Men and women, masculinity and femininity, have been cast as opponents in a death struggle for dominance. Dozens of castrati in academia literally howl over "The Decline of Males" or anything talking about the end of men.

At the same time, while women have been freed of their old traditional roles and expectations, with increasingly frequent outrageous and destructive results, men have been locked by an increasing body of anti-male laws into a very rigid caricature of their traditional roles and expectations. In consumption-driven western culture, the male role has been boiled down into provider of money and designated perpetrator for whatever constructed victim hood any woman tries to claim.

Yes, certainly some men do want to have a family, or at least children. But women seem to suffer more from not having had them, and men have had a lot of years to get used to the idea recently. It doesn't make much sense any more to breed more little reasons for the government to intrude into your life so you can support its massive ponzi scheme of social entitlements which relies on an ever growing population to support it.

Men have figured out that both women and government need them a lot more than they need either.

Women and daddy government have essentially criminalized any interaction men can have with women these days. Anything that makes a woman "fee-yuhl unsafe" is enough to land a man in jail, or cost him his career and his social reputation, or cost him a lot of money, or all of the above. A father exists in the lives of his children not as a fundamental right, but at the indulgence of the mother.

Men basically have most of the rights we need, as long as we treat women like they have the plague. The vast majority of the new intrusive laws govern what used to be the most intimate interactions between men and women. They have all been redefined in terms of power, and conflict, and the ever present "oppression."

If the only way men can avoid "oppressing" all these strong-as-men-but-oh-so-fragile-when-offended princess wannabes is to steer as clear of them as possible, a lot of men are quite ready to do that.

Don’t Marry

Why Modern, Western Marriage Has Become A Bad Business Decision For Men
The Marriage Strike

with 8 comments

The Marriage Strike
By Matthew Weeks

For those of you who know me in real life, this will not come as a surprise, but I have no designs on ever getting married. Now, it appears I am not alone in my disposition.

“Why Men Won’t Commit: Exploring Young Men’s Attitudes About Sex, Dating and Marriage,” a study released by researchers Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, concludes that men are, indeed, more apprehensive about getting married than before.

“The median age of first marriage for men has reached 27, the oldest age in our nation’s history,” Mr. Popenoe remarked in the Washington Times. “If this trend of men waiting to marry continues, it is likely to clash with the timing of marriage and childbearing for the many young women who hope to marry and bear children before they begin to face problems associated with declining fertility,” he continued. You know this is a collegiate study when an examination of a trend that is affecting men is used to fret about the state of women.

The study contains several possible explanations for this phenomenon, based on interviews with 60 single men, 25 to 33, who live in four parts of the country. While that level of measurement certainly is not statistically significant enough to reflect any kind of a national trend, responses generally revolved around the possibilities of suffering huge losses if the marriage ends in divorce. (“An ex-wife will take you for all you’ve got” and “men have more to lose financially than women” were common
refrains, the study reports.)

To humor the study’s results for a few minutes, let’s examine whether or not these young men’s concerns are justified. If we accept the old feminist argument that marriage is slavery for women, then it is undeniable that — given the current state of the nation’s family courts — divorce is slavery for men.

Take a hypothetical husband who marries and has two children. There is a 50 percent likelihood that this marriage will end in divorce within eight years, and if it does, the odds are 2-1 it will be the wife who initiates the divorce. It may not matter that the man was a decent husband. The reality of the situation is that few divorces are initiated over abuse or because the man has already abandoned the family. Nor is adultery cited as a factor by divorcing women appreciably more than by divorcing men.

The new trend that has taken hold of the court system is what as known as the “no fault” divorce, in which the filing party needs only to cite their general discontent with the marriage in order to be granted a hearing. Women initiate these unilateral divorces-on-demand 3 times as often as men.

While the courts may grant the former spouses joint legal custody, the odds are nearly 40 to 1 of the wife winning physical custody. Overnight, the husband, accustomed to seeing his kids every day and being an integral part of their lives, will now be lucky if he is allowed to see them even one day out of the week.

Once the couple is divorced, odds are at least even that the wife will interfere with the husband’s visitation rights. Three-quarters of divorced men surveyed say their ex-wives have interfered with their visitation, and 40 percent of mothers studied admitted that they had done so, and that they had generally acted out of spite or in order to punish their exes.

Then, of course, there is the issue of financial losses due to court-imposed payments. In the end (99 times out of 100), the wife will keep most of the couple’s assets and –if they jointly own one — the house. The husband will need to set up a new residence and pay at least a third of his take-home pay to his ex in child support, on top of whatever alimony payments the courts impose upon him. These can run as high as another third of his income. (Add the cost of taxes to that and the man gets to keep exactly 13% of his take-home pay — he’d better pray that’s enough to keep him alive.)

But as bad as all of this is, it would still make our hypothetical man one of the lucky ones. After all, he could be one of those fathers who cannot see his children at all because his ex has made a false accusation of domestic violence, child abuse, or child molestation. Or a father who can only see his own children under supervised visitation or in nightmarish visitation centers where dads are treated like criminals.

He could be one of those fathers whose ex has moved their children hundreds or thousands of miles away, in violation of court orders, which courts often do not enforce. He could be one of those fathers who tears up his life and career again and again in order to follow his children, only to have his ex-wife continually move them.

He could be one of the fathers who has lost his job, seen his income drop, or suffered a disabling injury, only to have child support arrearages and interest pile up to create a mountain of debt which he could never hope to pay off. Or a father who is forced to pay 70 percent or 80 percent of his income in child support because the court has imputed an unrealistic income to him. Or a dad who suffers from one of the child support enforcement system’s endless and difficult to correct errors, or who is jailed because he cannot keep up with his payments. Or a dad who reaches old age impoverished because he lost everything he had in a divorce when he was middle-aged and did not have the time and the opportunity to earn it back. Our imaginary man might consider himself lucky if he knew what his life could have been.

Over five million divorced men in America are currently experiencing the situation I just outlined. Without a doubt, their stories and experiences are heard by unmarried men. Can anyone truly blame the men for having apprehension? They stand to gain little and lose everything they’ve worked for in their entire lives should they “take the plunge”, so to speak.

So ladies, if you have a problem with this, speak to your feminist brethren. This is the legacy which they have left behind. By erasing the stigma of premarital sex and encouraging physical liberation, they have eliminated one of the most powerful incentives in history for men to tie the knot. By advocating government as a surrogate husband in the case of single motherhood, they have eliminated the disincentive for women to file for divorce. And through decades of litigious activism, they have given rise to the bloated and intrusive family court system and stacked it so egregiously against the men of this country that it now appears they are subconsciously engaging in what could be called a “marriage strike”, preferring to play the odds rather than assume a massively disproportionate amount of risk.

As for the men, make no mistake, they are slowly beginning to realize that the power is now in their favor. They have more and more perfectly legitimate reasons for remaining unmarried every day. Given a choice between not marrying one’s lady friend — assuming no risk whatsoever and still having the historical benefits of marriage (sex, companionship, etc.) available to them, or marrying the woman and having a 50-50 chance of their lives being utterly destroyed should the woman so much as be “unhappy” with the marriage, the decision is a no-brainer. What women perceive as a “fear of commitment” is really nothing more than a pragmatic assessment of the odds facing men in the prospect of a marriage.

Therefore, the trends evident in this study are not much of a surprise. I would wager that if the study were conducted nationally, similar results would be produced. Of course, such a study would invariably seek to address the grievances of the dejected single women of the country. My advice to them would be simple: offer to sign a prenuptial agreement that outlines the exact terms of a possible divorce: how assets would be divided, how any alimony and child support would be handled, and other vital elements that may be causing apprehension. And don’t be insulted if your potential mate asks you to sign one, or if he desires terms that will be equitable to him. No matter how strong your love may be for one another, the demand for eligible bachelors willing to commit to marriage is currently exceeding the supply, and if you won’t sign it, odds are that there’s another woman out there who will.

NOTE: Statistics in this article (and, in effect, much of its text) are drawn from Glenn Sacks and Diana Thompson’s Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed of 7/5/2002 entitled: “A Marriage Strike Emerges as Men Decide Not to Risk Loss”

Ref: http://dontmarry.wordpress.com/the-marriage-strike/

@Nick: actually the church owns a lot of land that could be turned into communal housing. Graveyards for instance would make excellent vegetable gardens.. all that decomposing. And church building could be subdivided into smaller flats. What is the church doing with its money .. keeping the roof on?

@ Hans Castorp

//But Cowell, like any businessman, can never admit that failure is what makes his business work, as this would be tantamount to admitting the immorality of what he does.//

Excellent, very memorable line indeed.