"Always keep me under finger
That's the spot where you might linger"
That's the spot where you might linger"
Velvet Revolver - Slither
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"That's all I am to you? Protection?"
Oglaf - Yojimbae (and being Oglaf, do I really need to warn you that it's at least vaguely NSFW?)
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"All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can -and must- be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly and no doubt will keep on trying."
Robert A. Heinlein - from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long
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"he neither advised with Friends, nor turned over Ancient or Modern Authors, nor prudently submitted to the Correction of such as are, or such as think they are good Judges, but with an English Spirit and Genius, set out upon the Forlorn Hope, meaning no hurt to any body, nor designing any thing but the Publick Good, and to retrieve, if possible, the Native Liberty, the Rights and Privileges of the Subject."
Mary Astell - introduction to later editions of Reflections upon Marriage (1706) (yes, I'm being very sneaky with my truncating)
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I recall very little of my grandfather getting his foot broken by the ox wagon: him mumbling commands, the massive placid beast snorting, the yoke clinking and creaking. Mundane. But on this particular uninteresting occasion of hundreds, the animal got distracted, confused, lurched and rolled one of the wheels straight over his foot. The other adults shooed me away while he howled in agony, struggling to prop himself up. I was pretty scared. Not of danger - the ox had stopped again in confusion - but grandpa wasn't supposed to whimper and cry out in pain. Grandpa took care of business, argued and badgered, occasionally got mad, but didn't complain about his lot. Not until Alzheimer's wore him down and he could no longer remember why his foot hurt constantly or that he wasn't supposed to complain about it.
On a lighter note, I've had a house sparrow nest above my apartment's deck for the past several years. As an invasive species here, technically I should be doing my civic duty and destroying their nest if not killing them outright... but I just can't bring myself. Being both symbolically and literally "under my roof" I feel a weird responsibility to refrain from harm. (Plus they're too damn cute.) But my observance of the law of hospitality does not extend to interfering in the internecine strife of Class Aves. Every morning until noon over a week or two this spring they'd receive a couple of visits from a male starling, chitter and squawk aggressively at each other, squaring off as they lined up along the railing, the smaller pair squatting defensively and puffing themselves up like angry little beige dustbunnies. Weirdly he never attacked them, so this wasn't predation, and if he'd been stealing their eggs it wouldn't have taken two weeks and they'd have given up the fight once the nest was empty.
Sooo... wtf Sturnus?
Then one morning after much squawking the invader flew away with a little clump of straw in his beak. He'd been robbing my sparrow couple of construction materials! (Yes, male starlings are the ones that build the nest; females bring the sofa cushions.)
But here's the thing. I had ample opportunity to observe a score of such face-offs. Though both sparrows reliably showed up to defend their nest from a burglar easily outweighing them both and then some, they queued on the railing with the male sparrow always closer to the starling* and the female sheltered behind him. Only once did she take point. Well, one's better than none. Good on you, chicky, give 'em hell.
On a completely non-bird, non-ox topic, having spent quite a few paragraphs and pages over the past decade predicting the fascist upsurge resulting from authoritarian social "justice" policies and especially feminism's unending inquisition, I'm not particularly surprised, now that it's happening all over the developed world, to find the media consensus straining to double down on existing bias: blame men! Take articles like this one, with lines like:
"Lee, the candidate, vows to shut down the ministry of gender equality, speaking to an issue that resonates with men like Lee, the voter, who particularly resents that only men have to do military service."
and
"they blame feminism, many believing that women are preferred for jobs"
Wait, did you seriously say 'believing' as if they're just imagining it? Countries have laws on the books mandating women be preferred for jobs! They have endless college scholarships solely for women to get them better jobs over men! They've been running a decade-long sex-crime witch-hunt to allow any female to order any male fired without evidence and take his place! It's you, the feminists and more broadly (pun intended) the social justice warriors, who've been trumpeting all of this and more as righteous victory over the vile testicular menace all of our lives; you don't get to pretend now that we somehow just came up with the notion.
Note the weasel-wording: a man 'resents' the all-male military draft being left untouched by every government's so-called 'equality' offices, as if it's only his interpretation that's at fault and not the practice itself, as if life and death were not measures of equality! Even if your country lacks compulsory military service condemning young men to be tortured and brainwashed for two years it's overwhelmingly men who get pushed into it economically, and noone can doubt that in case of inter-tribal conflict it'll be men tearing each other to pieces while the women on both sides sit back taking bets. As a generic catchphrase you'll always hear about men taking women for granted, which is to say somehow faltering in showering women with favors and attention. But not a one of the endless rando' chicks, dames 'n broads I pass on the street doubts for a second the granted presupposition that I exist to die for
her, that I am a disposable commodity to be tallied toward her well-being. Dulce et decorum est pro harpia mori.
If, when your preferred victim of abuse finally mounts the
nerve to argue he doesn't deserve to be raised in self-hatred and
abnegation, you then still find yourself in a position to scream in
bloody outrage 'how dare you defend yourself!' like schoolyard bullies across every publication
and Hollywood movie - then in all likelihood <YOU> are the asshole. That's not a hero's line. Instead of acting outraged men are voting for the other guy, try asking yourselves what exactly you've done to court their vote.
However...
Despite all my disdain for the lunatic caricature now representing "left-wing" politics (remember when the left wing used to stand for the underclass? like... all of it, everyone who's not a billionaire, not just the 0.1%"intersectional" superior breed?) I must concede the basic truth that any man voting for conservative, right-wing, religious, traditional, or in any other way reactionary movement is not only an accessory to tyranny but being swindled into voting against himself. Any backpedaling from modern ideas of individual rights will harm men more than women, because the precept of "women and children first" is a primitive one.
Or do you imagine that male sparrow placed himself closer to danger because he was guilted into it by Tumblr feminists? Because some government lawyer appointed their relative spacing on my railing? My grandfather was not injured by feminism. Trust me, in his village half a century ago, with the outhouses and the hauling buckets of well water and the children whittling their own toys and the moonshine with every meal and all that, nobody'd heard of Betty Fuckin' Friedan. They'd barely heard of Betty Rubble. But it was understood that the more dangerous or physically demanding a task, the more it should harm men and be spared women, just as it has since the beginning of time, no negotiating, end of story. Sparrows' brains don't need a line of code explicitly reading "if a male starling comes to rob your nest of straw and twigs, the spa-he-ro should edge 26% closer than the spa-her-ow"; nor have peasants historically needed stone tablets explicitly telling them line by line that large livestock can cause casual yet grievous injury and therefore thou shalt be handled by men, and if anyone risks venomous snakes and thunderstorms and rabid foxes and the occasional wild boar attack out in the fields and woods, that shalt be men too. And if there was heavy lifting to be done... well, you get the idea. We just assume we must assume every risk and hardship, instinctively. We protect our tribe's females because that's what monkey-men do. Nevertheless, religion, patriotism, traditional governance of every stripe has doubled down on our instinctive bias from the dawn of the species, shackling men to protect and provide unto eternity.
I don't blame my grandmother. She worked her wrinkled ass off every day I knew her in her own sphere of activity, in conditions harsher than any modern woman endures. But she did outlive her husband by well over a decade. As do modern women by slightly less than a decade. Such egalitarian outcomes fit no ethical principle I know of, yet no politely "progressive" university-educated urbanite will dare question them. And so that backward thinking, that primal presumption of duty and sacrifice, is endlessly exploited by activists who expand the definition of harm to include any and every political talking point up to and including spreading your knees on the subway, because they know we'll accept anything worded as a favor to women. Exactly where we should hope for true progress we find only an even more fanatical primitivism.
One of my past jobs involved handling slightly hazardous materials. Despite known increased health hazard to men, every worker in our half-dozen-ish department was male, except for one woman who mostly handled the bookkeeping, procurement, communication and other office tasks. No complaints from me on her performance in that regard. Nevertheless I did a double-take when told she was officially also cleared to do the practical part of our job, and do not doubt she counted toward some government-mandated gender quota to that effect. Said government seemed not to care that no matter what training she'd received, she was too morbidly obese to fit into the protective suit, much less spend hours standing on her feet in that suit. Hell, she broke two office chairs in one year!
Most may be too stupid to formulate or verbalize it, but a decade or three's endless such demented pretense of "equity" fuels men's anger toward progressive posturing. Yet again I must remind you feminism only skewed such favoritism even more blatantly in the direction it always lay. Females' exploitative behavior itself predates our society and even our species. Our mass media produce plenty of jokes about backward men refusing to do "woman's work" - I'd rather see men refuse to do men's work. If you don't remember your Trojan War stories, there's a bit at the start where the army's trying to recruit mighty heroes, not all of whom prove particularly eager to sail off on a mad crusade to rescue one princess. Odysseus tries to dodge the draft by pretending insanity, grabbing a plough and mindlessly running it over the same field over and over again. They catch him out by placing his infant son in front of the blade, forcing to him to stop in accordance with sanity.
You could say more men are now crossing that threshold from mad into madness, willing to butcher the future by voting for reactionaries. But it is also true that Ulysses' wife Penelope never had to make that decision, only whether her husband or new suitors would be more profitable to herself. Somewhere backstage of my avian burglary drama lurks the villainess of the story, conveniently distancing herself from the conflict she engenders: the female starling, sitting back to judge the quality of plunder her potential mates provide. And she never needed Cosmopolitan checklists to inform her of her entitlement. There's an evident yet universally ignored truth running contrary to modern pushes to enrich women over men: that no matter how rich a woman is, she will demand a husband even richer than herself, who elevates her status even higher in society. Your average female favors no heavy lifting but gold-digging.
"many young South Korean men felt unable to meet society's expectations:
find a good job, get married, buy a home and start a family"
Who's that "society" exactly? At the core of the issue, who's expecting a male to provide a nest for the nesting instinct? And protect it from straw-burglars? Men should protest not that they are hobbled from meeting such demands, but that such demands were ever placed upon them.
Let's not pretend such issues have ever been rationally, ethically argued, or just deserts apportioned. With all due respect to Heinlein's "pregnant women and young children" suffice to say my 60yr-old grandmother was not pregnant at the time of the accident. We value female well-being higher not from rational consideration, but from unthinking instinct exploited by the unscrupulous for abuse and profit. Nor do such norms come into play "in emergency" but are abused every moment of our lives to induce men to accept poorer quality of life and surrender all their energy toward women's demands, regardless of straits more or less dire. Heinlein left a word out of his diatribe: not "societies" but "human societies" are structured thus, if a human is presumed to be the same social ape running on mindless impulses it's always been. A fairer world would require inhuman progress. Yet there you're once again faced with the insistence of "progressive" movements that there is no place in the future for men, that men (at least heterosexual ones) are the enemy, to be
exterminated or put in their place as blue-collar labor, as an impediment to the unfairer
sex' magnificence. It's a testament to women's mind-control abilities that they've kept their victims voting for such garbage as long as they did.
Still, there is no way but forward. Feminists' overt, unifying hatred of men raises the issue to consciousness but (absent the repurposed Marxist class warfare rhetoric and postmodern sophistry) their core principle, that men should sacrifice and be sacrificed for the benefit of women, has always been the most backward, primeval traditionalism imaginable. With regard to antiquated religious dogma, Bill Maher once asked "can you think of anything else that we still cleave to from the bronze age?"
Well I don't know about the bronze age but there's nothing more stone-age than dudebro Grog needing to risk and surrender his very life for reproductive access. Every government and religion has only monetized that impulse (long before any declarations of sentiments did the same) whipping men into a frenzy with imagined threats to their women from foreigners and heathens. The way forward now would have been not primitivist backsliding into patriotism and religion, but expanding the freedom from traditional burdens and restrictions which women claimed in the 20th century to the other half of the population. Traditional family life will only see you working yourself to death for the undeserving, unless an opportunity arises to outright forfeit your life.
Let me leave you with a couple film recommendations, anti-war movies having always been just about the only medium or genre in which it's borderline acceptable to express any sympathy for men as persons. You've probably heard of them, as each appears to have made a well-deserved splash.
In 1917, the British soldiers muse on why the Germans don't go back home, with one caustically positing: "They hate their wives and mothers." The same wives and mothers who will be cashing in their military pensions long after their death. As if it hadn't been those same British men's own wives and mothers publicly shaming them into leaving home in the first place to rot in the trenches. The very same women demanding an expansion of their own political power were carrying placards with"intern them all" - not only all foreign nationals but any men not joining the war. Female interest, not opposed but colluding with warmongering. But that realization is never allowed to hit home, the film banking on other reversals of expectations, like the extremely long takes lending the protagonists' journey a hauntingly mundane quality despite their danger, and casting major actors in bit parts in counterpoint to the protagonists' insignificance. Aside from that it sticks to a few common war movie gimmicks, like a woman with a baby supplying an opportunity for heroic beneficence.
I was more impressed with the new version of All Quiet on the Western Front. Germans may rightly bash it for mangling the source material, and maladaptation habitually infuriates me enough to agree that, fine, maybe you should've changed the title. But most other criticism seems to complain that it's... too much of a war movie. Well... yes? They complain that it throws too much brutish, dehumanizing gore at the viewer, unglamorous and painfully detailed. That... is in fact its subject matter? And that it intersperses such scenes with blatant attempts to humanize the men being butchered. Terrible, I know. How dare. And they complain that it's Oscar bait... because the Oscar bait was supposed to be about transsexual abstract painters with Down syndrome or whatever instead? Well, lemme give ya something to cry about:
After dressing new dead men in old dead men's uniforms, women are absent from the story. Conspicuously so. Even when one of the soldiers runs off for a night with a random chick, she's only a distant, blurred impression, a rumour in the barracks, though he returns with her scarf as keepsake. Not that it does him any good. The scarf passes from hand to hand as the men die off, being taken up again in the final scene. The same scene lingers a long moment on a theater poster keeping the corpses company, in place of WWII's pin-up glossies.
Soft, pastel splashes, completely out of place among the ruination of man making up the desolate final images. I doubt it's by accident that these idealized emblems of the fairer sex who sent them off to die survive the men who carried them. Oh, I'm sure you could reinterpret the scene however you want. The movie crew were cagey enough not to summon a lynch mob upon themselves. But there are signs, these days, that men are finally waking up to just where they stand in relation to their better halves.
Mentally, I've been calling this the "where were you" shot, and it's long overdue.
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* Granted, the sparrow example may be skewed. Assuming the same male staked out my deck as territory all through spring, he was a certified badass. One quiet morning in early February he took up position on the railing, fluffed himself up, stuck out his chest and give a loud *cheep!* ... Then he looked around in confusion. Deathly silence. No females in earshot. In fact nothing else moved. He turned around, puffed himself up and tried again: *Cheeep!* Nothing. No movement anywhere. Indoors, sipping a hot jar of tea, I was cracking up with laughter. "A" for effort my man, but you've got a lot to learn about females... like the fact they ain't looking for love at minus twenty degrees centigrade!
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