Adam's Stapple

"Back in elementary I thrived on misery

Left me alone I grew up amongst a dying breed

 

You wanna last? Be the first to blast

 

Don't trust my lady

'Cause she's a product of this poison

I'm hearing noises"

 

2Pac - So Many Tears

 

 

I made the mistake of catching up on some news the day after "international women's day" and naturally was unable to find even the few scraps of relevant information one expects from our propaganda outlets these days. Front and center was one of the staple Big Lies of the modern age: violence against women. "One in three" women are victims, we're told, supposedly this time by the World Health Organization itself. Apparently, either no men in our World have ever suffered violence, or their Health isn't worth mentioning. Take your pick.

Right below that, a report about Mexican women rioting against "femicide" which is just a lovely example of our time's tendency toward Orwellian linguistic re-framing. Yes, of course we need a separate term for the killing of a woman, to distinguish actual crimes from the more mundane disposal of those born the wrong sex. What's funny is that, journalistic spin aside, the World Health Organization collects statistics. Like, a shit-ton of statistics, freely available on their site. Death, interestingly enough, counts as a health issue. So let's look up the actual killings in a few countries around the world by sex.

 

 

Hooooly mother of fuck!

(And I'm appealing to the holy mother here because the holy father's probably already face down in a ditch.)

More modern, peaceful places are managing to butcher "only" twice as many men as women. Ummm... yay? But I swear to all that's testicular, the next guy who tries to sell me on the merits of machismo's getting a one-way bus ticket to Mehhicoe! Mexican women are getting killed eight times less than men, but yeah, obviously it's "femicide" we need to worry about. To contextualize this further, let's look at mortality statistics by age, including all causes of death:

You can basically see the death curse of the Adam's apple bulging those numbers. Here, boys skyrocket from a presexual death rate of 120% that of girls to 250-300% from their mid-teens onward. While I'm using Mexico's data once again (because... well, you pissed me off today, Mexico (seriously though, worse than Nigeria?)) you will find the same pattern across decades and continents. At the age when boys stop being cute, they die.

THIS IS OUR SPECIES' "NORMAL"

We are descended of mammalian societies consisting of a core of reproducing females clustered around a murderous prince charming and a periphery of hopeful (hopeless) males cast out at puberty. Moreover, the peculiarity of our clawlessness and fanglessnesss and our debilitatingly prolonged infancy has selected for females best able to secure the help of others and males willing to sacrifice themselves to provide said help. If we no longer automatically exile men, it is only so they can provide labor and protection to women, and this precept of male instrumentality occludes even basic physical reality to the point we will gleefully prance over eight male corpses to weep for one female.

 

Man, this is getting depressing.

Screw it, let's just watch a movie instead. I'll grab myself a Leffe, you find something bearable on Netflix. What's this? An apocalyptic cross-continental adventure with... Forest Whitaker, hell yeah! How It Ends how it begins with a woman packing her fiancé off to inform her own parents of their impending procreation and shotgun wedding (not in that order) despite the fact her father hates her boyfriend. Then [something happens] and the groom and father drive off from Chicago to Seattle to rescue the damsel in tectonic distress. (Don't look at me like that, this spoiler was painfully obvious from the rumbling noises.) Driving into several sunsets, they rake in a death toll in the double digits (all male) and get browbeaten for it by a young female of a morally superior race, get aided by another woman and reassured by yet another that women can do no wrong except when forced by men, and the two heroes bond over the noble thought of a man taking the blame for a woman's mistakes. Then Whitaker suffers the usual heroic mentor's fate so I kinda lost interest (apparently so did the writers given how slow the scenes get) but eventually the hero justifies his existence by pistol-dueling a rival male to the death and whisking his lady love out of danger on wings of [product placement] four-wheel-drive. The End. Thankfully.

You might wonder at this trite choice of example. How It Ends is the basest summer action/disaster flick dross, churned out by the dozens every year, albeit duller than most. This is our normal. This is universal. Every human tribe in history has thought little of shoving men out into the wilderness to secure resources and prove their worth, to slaughter each other in inter-tribal conflicts for the coveted position of provider and protector of a female and her brood. And, while women will voice perfunctory outrage over men's animalistic violent tendencies, they've also never had any compunctions against raking in the spoils and pensions and loving a man in uniform. Or in gang colors. Any harm incurred by men is normal, mundane, beneath notice. Any risk to women sends us into an overcompensating frenzy, lest we be branded anti-woman. Don't believe me? Let's ask Wikipedia.

 

The latest mass kidnapping in Nigeria's Muslim north follows an increasing trend: bandits, religious or otherwise, have evidently figured out they can get more international press-ure on the government to negotiate if they target girls. So that's what they do - and said international press is only too happy to collude in providing months-long paroxysms over violence against women. Specifically women. Hey, here's a fun exercise: Nigeria was one of the countries whose homicide victims I looked up earlier. Why don't you scroll up and... yeaahhh. For a bonus, riddle me this: do you imagine those bandits don't have wives and girlfriends? When the government finally catches up to them, who do your think will be left sitting on the pile of proverbial bacon they brought home before being bested by higher-ranking males? Do you imagine all those Mexican drug runners aren't contributing their take to their local tribe's females? How does a guy get laid more easily - by stuffing a rolled-up sock in his crotch, or a bag of cocaine? Yet if those same women turn around and denounce their accomplices, their suppliers, their hired muscle, the world will treat them as saints and martyrs.

 

This is our normal.

The art of propaganda has yet to find any justification more universal than a perceived threat against women. Whether you want to get rich quick, topple a regime, start a war, put yourself in command of a private army, land yourself a university sinecure, of all the myriad justifications in the world none shows up with such regularity as "save the women" from defilement by evil, evil men. You can justify anything by saving the women. From the jews. Or the krauts. Or the japs. Or the commies. Or the jews again. Or the blacks. Or the jews again. (... jeez, how many of those did they print?) Or the Trojans. It got particularly funny two decades ago at the start of the "war on terror": Americans attacking muslims to free women from the threat of headscarves while muslims were attacking everyone in reach to free women from the threat of miniskirts. If you're campaigning against marijuana in the 1930s, build your propaganda around a woman's attempted rape and murder. If you're campaigning against alcohol in the 1850s, do it by accusing men of beating their wives. No sturdier platform for self-aggrandizement than "save the women" and what gets me is the monstrous hypocrisy of it, the willingness of women to have any number of men slaughtered in their name just so long as they can retain their plausible deniability. The same women planning the best way to smuggle their sons across the Canadian border, should the U.S. reinstitute the draft, in 2008 would still be debating the possible merits of John McCain as presidential candidate, the guy whose one-stop solution to all the world's problems was bombing half of it into a fine powder. Well, yeah. That's what Prince Charming does. He beats others to a pulp in your name.

Hey, don't worry. They're evil.

 

For those of you still reading... thank you, and I congratulate you on your attention span. Turn to your friends who stopped reading in the second paragraph and ask them why they discount the statistics on male victims of violence unto murder. Odds are, you'll get some balderdash about "risky behavior", some variation on the theme of "boys are stupid" and blaming men for their own victimization. Never mind that in most cultures (including subcultures within Western countries) there simply is no alternative, and that it is women who validate these social norms by their consensus. Losers aren't sexy. A fourteen year old boy would be considered incapable of informed consent in most any context... unless he can serve feminists as a statistic. Then being press-ganged into your local tribal conflicts thus securing your mother and sisters' protection by proxy, whether in Chicago or Zamfara or Gaza, becomes entirely your own fault. As an American town gets poorer, you can count on four types of businesses springing up like mushrooms from the compost: loan offices, strip clubs, churches and military recruitment centers. All prey on the desperate, but only one explicitly deals in murder. And women love a man in uniform.

 

When I was eight, I was playing make-believe about being in Jules Verne's Deux ans de vacances. I would be the youngest yet most precocious and daring boy in the group. Sometimes, I'd also imagine an extra female character, maybe shipwrecked separately, adventure story islands being inevitable magnets for shipwrecks. I would defend her from a bully or mountain lion or the pirates, get hideously wounded in the process and she'd nurse me back to health. Sound like a familiar plot? Eight years old, and I was already holding my own life forfeit to female interests.

This is our normal.

Or maybe your friend has heard that androgens suppress the inflammatory response, explaining some of men's susceptibility to disease and therefore mortality. Which is well established, and not just in our loopy species either. Even on a physiological level, females' safety comes first while males are expected to remain active until they drop dead. You can read classic texts in biology like Robert Trivers' Social Evolution and see him flat out deny (somewhat embarrassed the issue even came up) the claim that men get a raw deal, because hey, it's just their hormones. Of course in other contexts, such a claim might spur us to alarm and action. Do you see anyone shrugging off osteoporosis because, hell, those women should've known better than to menopause themselves into brittleness? And even though men are about 20% more likely to get cancer, take a wild stab at the cancer research getting the bulk of the funding. Hint: everybody loves boobies - as the WHO's website proudly proclaims today, in honor of international women's day. I'm sorry, is there a day in the year when breast cancer funding doesn't dwarf all others?

It is a hangable offense, by feminist morality, to tell girls they're bad at math. Would you rather have that, or be taught by Forest Whitaker that you exist to die for the fairer sex? What is worse, being an inferior engineer or computer scientist... or being saddled with the instinct to lay down your life for your wife and daughter and indoctrinated, from the cradle onwards, that you are less deserving of life itself than a woman?

Man bad, woman good.

Repeat the mantra.