What Men Need To Be

     There are subjects about which I shouldn’t write. Not because I have nothing to say about them, mind you, but because even thinking about them raises my blood pressure close to the catastrophic failure level. Worse, those subjects have been multiplying at an alarming rate. It suggests that fairly soon I’ll be reduced to doing my frothing at the mouth in total silence.

     Whether for good or for ill, my Gentle Readers send me links to all manner of articles, including articles on subjects of the variety mentioned above. (No, I’m not about to ask them to stop.) So regardless of my cardiologist’s recommendations, I daily confront examples of irrationality and viciousness that light my boilers and get steam pouring out of my ears. And before you ask: Yes, I have one before me this morning:

     Women are challenging incumbents up and down the ballot, banding together to demand action on gun violence, going undercover to fight misinformation online, pushing for consequences for perpetrators of sexual assault, organizing against laws restricting access to reproductive care.

     And every so often, we stop to look for the men in the room. We scroll through our Twitter feeds, our group text threads, our email chains. We look for the ones who chimed in, took a stand, organized their workplaces or their communities.

     Too often, we’re left craning our necks. We have male allies in Congress and in our workplaces and at home who’ve made important contributions to the fight for gender equity, to be sure. But we have many, many more men on the sidelines.

     If you’re a conservative – of either sex – the above ought to incense you. At the very least it should have you repressing some very naughty language. As Dad was a Navy man, I assure you that I’d be right there alongside you.

     “Action on gun violence.” Excuse me? Don’t we already have laws against assault with a deadly weapon? Or do you have it in mind to take our guns from us?

     “Perpetrators of sexual assault.” Got anyone in mind? Bill Clinton, perhaps? Maybe Joseph Biden? Or is this an attempt to refuel the “#MeToo” wagon that’s making men shy away from women in more and more venues?

     “Misinformation online.” From what sources? The New York Times’s recent attempts to persuade us that the duly elected President of these United States is actually a Russian agent? Or its more recent initiative to persuade us that America’s founding principle has always been slavery? Or are we talking about “progressives’” drive to censor Americans who disagree with them?

     And what’s this about “restricting access to reproductive care” – ? Is your concern about the expense of in vitro fertilization services? Do you have even one example of a pregnant woman being denied gynecological or obstetrical services? Or is this another veiled attempt to conflate “reproductive care” with abortion?

     If the authoress of the article is hoping for male allies for those “causes,” I wouldn’t advise her to hold her breath while she waits.

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     It’s been said that we all get more conservative as we get older. That pattern isn’t without exceptions. I’ve known a couple of people who got more left-inclined over time. I haven’t seen one of them in some years, but I’m still in touch with the other, so the “aging makes you grow more conservative” rule does have exceptions.

     What aging does seem to do to each of us, quite reliably, is to reduce our tolerance for bullshit. Life’s too short always to be mucking out one’s mental stable. That includes feminist bullshit. I’ve certainly had enough of it, and I know I’m not alone in that regard.

     This Reshma Saujani appears not to be in touch with the trends: specifically, what she and her feminist allies have done to drive American men away from women. For that is the direction in which American men have been moving for nearly twenty years. Let’s list some of the causative influences:

• Employment law’s preferential treatment for women;
• The “guilty until proven innocent” standard on women’s allegations of male sexual misconduct;
• The destabilization of marriage through “no-fault” divorces;
• The destruction of fathers’ rights under modern family law;
• The pauperization of divorced men through specious “child support” provisions;
• Women’s increasing disdain for families and children, including their own;
• The feminization of education, from grade school through university education.

     Those are just the ones that come to mind at this early hour. There are others.

     While all that’s been going on, with the entirely understandable consequence that American men are retreating from engagement with women, women have come to exhibit many of the maladies that were once regarded as “men’s problems:”

• Drinking to excess;
• Shortness of temper;
• Constant fatigue and mental lapses;
• Slovenliness, vulgarity and foul speech;
• A tendency to lash out at family members;
• And of course, constant complaints about being unappreciated.

     Could there be any better evidence that the supposed gains women have made since the advent of post-war feminism have actually been losses – for all of us?

     Yet women are still demanding more privileges – free birth control, free abortions, special workplace accommodations, seat quotas in corporate management, et cetera – and whining about not having any “male allies.”

     If Miss Saujani expects men with any significant amount of self-respect to sign onto that, she’s seriously deluded. Yet her article appears in Fortune, a place I’d not have expected to see such nonsense. Nor is it her first publication there.

     Better do your ally-prospecting among the soyboys and beta cucks, Reshma baby; you won’t get much action from genuine men.

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     As I’m feeling even more exercised at the moment than I was when I first set my fingers to the keys, allow me a brief personal statement.

     As the song goes, there’ve been some women in my life. You could say I’ve known my share. Most of them have been decent sorts, even those who parted company with me on unfriendly terms. But the emergence of aggressively demanding, “entitled” women, including a growing number who openly proclaim men to be “the enemy,” has made it harder for me to trust any woman. They don’t show the telltales quickly enough for me to award the classical “benefit of the doubt.” So I tend to avoid them in just about all venues and all circumstances: socially, occupationally, at my parish, and in my neighborhood.

     My attitude is hardly unique. I’ve known just as many men as women. Ever more of them are taking a noli me tangere attitude toward the “fairer sex.” It’s safer that way, even if can make one’s nights a bit lonely.

     When I met the woman who is now my wife, I was on the verge of vowing to stay away from women for good. And there have been moments since then when I’ve wondered if it might have been the best course even so.

     To any American women who have suffered through this diatribe: It’s time to choose. You can be an “entitled” harridan enlisted in the war on men, or you can be a decent person who takes us as we are and asks nothing more. Men are not going to award their love, their respect, or their fellowship to the former sort of female, no matter how good she looks in a bikini. We’re certainly not going to ally ourselves with your anti-male “causes.”

     Consider yourselves warned.