I was on another thread about the unification of all countries on earth and someone suggested that "feminization of men" should be read. While not sure what he was referring to, I googled it up and came across this article on askmen.com As I was reading this bs, I couldn't believe how insulting to men the author was being. At one point he even says, " Let's face it: A man's needs are pretty minimal. All he really asks for is regular sex and a cold one." and he also says,"As always, women -- shrewd and manipulating as they are -- know full well that most guys will do just about anything to get laid." Really? So men are just mindless idiots functioning at the mercy of their hormones? Completely incapable of resisting a slut's temptations? Really? ALL men are like this? I am certain there are plenty of men on this forum who are quite capable of being a man, burly and hairy even, without being a slave to their penis.
You'd be suprised as to how true this is in todays world. I don't think ALL men are like this but admit there are many that seem to fit that description to a "T". I know I don't and those who I know don't either but when listening to what some men say , at times, I'm really taken aback as to how shallow some men actually are. There are some that, over time, come to their senses and actually improve themselves along with a womans help in many cases.
Actually I and a friend of mine call the reverse, "The dumbification of men." My buddy, Todd, is the quintessential man. I cannot be more blunt. The guy is chiseled out of stone built and -- though not my type -- apparently quite attractive from the eyes of ladies. He served in the army for four years. He's Lt. in the Cleveland Fire Department. The stories he's reluctantly told me are harrowing, horrifying, disturbing and inspiring. He's gotten severely burned so many times that his hands, neck and legs are covered with terrible scars. This is not a guy to "cry", but the story he told me about going into a burning building to save a screaming little girl, only to have her legs and arms peal off when he grabbed her made me realize how much of a hero he his and how much horror he sees on a regular basis. It's really amazing. This is a guy who's parents neglected and abused him as a kid, stole his entire savings from a bank account when he was overseas with the Army. He got his high school sweetheart pregnant and married her despite not being "in love" and stayed married to her for 10 years and had five kids. He's covered in tattoos, is a former competitive skateboarder and really one of the brightest most intelligent people I've ever known. I don't say "I love you" to many friends, but with him I make sure to occasionally remind him that he's a "friend" that I'm proud to have (and maybe a bit braggadocios about). He had no roll models to teach him how to be a dad, but he is the most passionate, most committed dad I've ever seen. And he risks his life every day to save perfect strangers. That's Todd and he's an amazing guy and great friend. He's also no guy to fuck with. Sure, sure, guy's brag about their fighting skills, but despite being a pretty committed pacifist, I've seen Todd pushed to the point where he cleared a room. He's married to his second wife and they live in a town in the burbs of Cleveland. So, anyway. What does this all have to do with the "effeminizing" of men. Well, from him it's a big "fuck you". This is a guy who's passionate about his kids and wore a pink Tutu for his daughter when she wanted to dress him up. Who bakes his kids birthday cakes to show them he loves them. This is a guy who cleans the house, runs the vacuum and isn't afraid to show each of his kids how crazy in love with them he is. I remember seeing Todd's face and eyes welling up with tears when his kids went away on a two week vacation. I keep pressing this point because Todd would be called a pussy a girly-man by other men in this and other generations. And that's fucking ridiculous. Just because men are now asked to stop bottling up their emotions doesn't mean that they don't remain tough, strong, direct, decisive and quick-to-act. It doesn't mean that they back down from a fight or that they don't go in--every day--and risk their lives to save complete stranger from burning buildings. It means that they learn new skills that men have never had to learn. It means that they evolve and continue to evolve to meet the challenges of the era. Only those insane theists who deny evolution and think that Men have some cosmic, unbending roll designed by God think otherwise (I'm glad Todd's an atheist like me). At a poker tournament at my parent's house one day, my asshole uncle said something about, "All these men cooking and cleaning and doing woman's work. Damned shame that we're being feminized" and it provoked the best response I've ever seen. Todd stood up, took his shirt off and pointed out every scar, the three skin grafts and explained his line of work and his history of serving his country. He explained that it's actually the reverse that's going on, that society is actually trying to "dumb down" men and tell them that "women are always right" and "only women can effectively parent children" or that "women are better at XYZ because of their nature." He gladly pointed out his skills at cooking, his commitment to giving his wife and kids a clean house and asked my uncle -- who "pussied out" of the US army because it was too tough for him -- if he'd ever served his country and had the service records to show for it." He turned and walked out and left. My uncle was left dumbfounded because nobody in my house could even hold a candle to Todd if it came to fisticuffs, and nobody could doubt his manliness. It was one of the finest moments I've ever seen. And it highlights a point and reminds me [[queue Nerdy Star Trek example]] of an episode of some Star Trek series where Worf is being made fun of by a few other Klingons who make taunts about how he's lost his warrior spirit, how Star Fleet has tamed him and how he's become weak and pampered. Worf retorted that the Klingons were, in fact, the weak ones because they were doing ONLY that which came natural and easy to them. The stronger person always fights the battle that is the hardest. That the toughest war to fight is with yourself, to always improve yourself and to see something bigger than your natural compulsion to do a thing. In this case, I like to remind "manly men" that if they are only fighting the "physical fight" then they aren't being as tough and brave as possible. They are merely doing those things that come easy to them that are natural to them. "Danger rarely approaches from the direction we bravely face" and all men assume that since they bravely face physical danger that they are brave when in fact they are cowards. The truly brave individual identifies their area of weakness and forces themselves to "bravely face it" and learn from it. If fist fighting and grunting and fixing a car comes easy for you--then you aren't BRAVE for taking on those challenges; you're brave when you do the thing you most fear, most hate. If drawing out logarithmic formulae and talking about science comes easy for you--then you aren't BRAVE for doing those things; you're brave when you learn to fight and develop your body. It doesn't mean sacrificing or neglecting your core, it means expanding your skills and challenging yourself in ways you never imagined. Most men will fight and use sexist and homophobic language to avoid having to do that as evidenced by the massive number of men who do just that. Those men are the cowards, those men have no honor. For men, this doesn't mean giving up on sports, Hooters, beers and a good time with the boys, but it means strapping on a set of balls and being a man and changing diapers, cleaning a house, listening to your children cry and hugging them and showing them your unending love. It means learning to prepare healthy meals instead of take-out so that your children grow up healthy instead of obese pigs. I asked my dad about that, "If you would die to save your kids' lives. If you would take a bullet to ensure their health. Why wouldn't you learn to cook after mom died to ensure that two of your children would one day not have to get gastric bypass and so that your third child would not have to invest thousands of dollars to retrain his life to get to a healthy weight?" And that points out the fundamental laziness . . . . wimpiness of men. Men want to fight the fight THEY want. They want to call all other fights "for pussies" or "for wimps" or "beneath them". In this, women are far braver. In the past 50 years women have had to maintain EXACTLY the same attention on their homes and children while entering a man's world all while suffering ridicule and discrimination from men "in that world". They've put up with having their tits grabbed and asses slapped. They've put up with being asked to "make everybody some coffee" despite having a Master's Degree in Engineering. They've done and conquered BOTH worlds while men get to sit and bitch and moan about the notions of their "masculinity" being lost because they are being told to stop pissing on the seat, to pick up their fucking clothes, to make dinner HOME MADE for the family every now and then and to turn off the fucking TV and be a part of their family. If a man's masculinity is so fragile so thin that being forced to add a few other areas of skills and responsibilities to his repertoire destroys it, then it was never the added responsibilities that made him a "pussy" to begin with. He was a "pussy" all along and nothing could ever change that. ~String
Good for Todd. Good, too, for all the intellectual, altruistic, justice-seeking and creative men who keep working to improve the world, is spite of their knuckle-dragging contemporaries. If women have had some influence - and the mothers must have! - on such men, good for the women, as well. What is having a terrible effect on men today is mass media. The dumbing-down campaign targets boys more aggressively and comprehensively than any other demographic. From advertising to sport broadcasting, from movies to situation comedies to reality shows, the depiction of masculine stereotypes is atrocious; the propaganda against literacy, good manners, reflection and compassion is unrelenting. Yob or pussy - that's your choice of masculine identity, and the latter is not safe to exhibit in the company of peers. When you find a girl to marry, that's what she has to work with, god help her.
I think women are targeted just as heavily if not more so. Google "miss representation" for an excellent example.
As the series progressed and they developed the Klingons into three-dimensional characters, we eventually learned that Klingon women are arguably even tougher than their men. Someone asked Worf to describe a Klingon mating ritual. He got a faraway look in his eyes and said wistfully, "The women stalk us and throw heavy objects." When asked, "So what do the men do?" he replied, "We read romantic poetry to them... and duck a lot." Nonetheless the women were not treated equally under Klingon law. I don't remember it precisely, but a widow was in danger of losing her husband's estate if she didn't remarry within a prescribed time period. Quark the Ferengi smelled a profit and offered to marry her to solve her problem, if she'd share some of the swag with him and then divorce him. They went through with this and after everything was settled he was quite ready for the divorce. He asked her with some trepidation how divorce was done among Klingons. She said, "Easy." She picked him up, threw him to the floor, yelled some ritual chant full of guttural Klingon consonants, and spit in his face. Cultural habits change slowly, and this has become a problem in recent centuries as our technological development has accelerated. Look no further than the Third World, where just a couple of generations ago women had to bear as many children as possible to make sure that a couple of them survived to keep the bloodlines alive, take care of the family business, and provide for the elders in a society with no safety net. Today sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics keep ten of those twelve children alive and it's ruining their economies, but they can't change who they are. Not long ago even we in the West had hard lives requiring women to stay home bearing and nursing children in safety, while the men went out to battle predators, other men with uniforms and weapons, or the topography as they laid railroad tracks and built steel mills. Every generation passes down its own values and customs to its children; after all, how else do children learn? Those of us who lived through the Generation Gap in the 1960s saw a singularity, as a whole generation rejected our parents' values regarding race, religion, war, sex, intellectualism and many other things. Nonetheless, for every traditional value we rejected there were twelve that we unconsciously accepted. We speak proudly of feminism and it was indeed a real breakthrough, but it hardly overturned 100% of the traditional role assignments. Look at Helen Gurley Brown and her so-called "stiletto feminism," in which women were taught to get what they want by manipulating men via our libidos. We old hippies are proud of the advances in the male/female dichotomy in the last fifty years, just as we are of the advances in race relations. But just as an Afro-American in the White House doesn't mean Jim Crow is dead (Voter ID, anyone? there's less than one case of voter fraud per state per year), the fact that a woman came close to getting the nomination he won doesn't mean that there isn't still a caveman or cavewoman lurking inside each of us. Try to identify your stereotypical male behaviors. Analyze them. Some of them are okay because for the goddess's sake men and women really are different, duh? But if you find one that is not okay, just spend some time thinking about it. Is it something that would improve the world if you could fix it, or is it just something silly that makes life interesting? Put your effort into the things with the greatest payoff. You know what I have trained myself to do? Always put the toilet seat down. I don't care what arguments you guys can muster for not doing it. My rejoinder is: "If you can make a woman that happy with such an infinitesimal amount of time and effort, you have to be a real oaf to not do it." As many of you know, my wife and I have been living on opposite coasts for several years due to my job. And as many of you may also know, since I have no interest in sports and I don't enjoy being drunk (right there I've failed the he-man test), most of my friends are women. She really worries about me. She says, "When you walk out of one of your female friends' house, and she goes into the bathroom and sees the seat down, she probably comes running out into the street banging on the trunk of your car, shouting, 'Hey wait a minute! You come back here!' " What manly things do you other guys do to make women chase after you? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Awesome essay, String. You covered a lot of ground and made some excellent points. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! For the life of me, I don't understand why technology has not designed a self-cleaning toilet that automatically returns the seat to the preferred position for the female. :shrug: It really seems like a 'blue' task to design such. Maybe some of you fellows can get on it? Set the bar a bit higher for Fraggle. He's getting off too easy. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
String your post had me almost in tears and I was totally in agreement until you started elevating women towards the end. I don't think women today are as wonderful as you claimed they are. I don't see women fretting over keeping house and cooking while working 8+ hours a day. Maybe its the socioeconomic social group I have grown up in but I see more often that traditional "women's work" is being delegated to the husband and children while the woman pitches in. I am not saying this is a bad thing. I just don't see women personally fretting over domestic chores as being a priority to them while trying to maintain a job as well. Women 30 years ago put up with all the sexist behavior but they fought that battle so that women today DO NOT have to put up with it. I see men and women coming to terms with the reality that there are simply better behaviors to adopt regardless of gender. We as a human race are learning better communication techniques and usually that means compromise.
While women must cope with stereotypes and girls are particularly challenged by body image, there are far more clever, self-aware, civilized, ambitious, articulate female types depicted in commercial entertainments than male ones. I didn't mean the quantity, but the quality and variety of popular role-models.
I do agree with you there. Anyone remember the dr Pepper ten commercial that had women in an uproar. It totally confused me that women where the ones insulted by the commercial. I saw it as showing that men are into mindless violence and behave as overgrown children. But no women seem to get upset that all the weight loss products are primarily targeted at women. Sometimes I think the female perspective is way out of whack. Getting all upset when a man says she cant have something, but when an anonymous genderless "they" imply that women are worthless unless they are skinny and fit into a cookie cutter definition of beautiful, they are all ok with that. In case you don't know what commercial I am referring to you can see it here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iuG1OpnHP8 Personally I think the media needs to stop dictating how any social group should behave in order to be accepted. People should just act as they do and get on with life. Of course those who's actions are detrimental to the safety and welfare of others should perhaps be ostracized for the good of us all.
Maybe some teenagers. I feel belittled really to think I'm thrown in with "ALL MEN ARE LIKE THIS". I'm not like all men. An before I was married I have been approached by women an I had chose not to be lead by my hormones or penis. An several times I chose to "not go there" because I was not "shallow" but because I had always said if I where to settle down would this be that someone. Or would they understand. An I was not going to have mindless sex an with any number of women an get god knew what.
Men tending to children and chores around the house are pretty much the norm these days but other male stereotypes seem slow to change. For example, stay at home dads, child/spousal support, custody, domestic violence, or as in these two stories, pedophiles, and cowards. Would this even be an issue, if the father had the children and the woman had fled? Virgin Australia Rethinks Seating Policy after Man Asked To Move Away From Children [video=youtube;qrITeCsgQiY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrITeCsgQiY&feature=related[/video] However, do some of these stereotypes remain only because most still view women as incapable and weaker? Hmm…I wonder, “women and children first,” is this simply a misconceptions about human behavior in disasters? P.S. Does Todd wear flannel shirts?
Though there maybe some sterotyping of women in society, there is some natural reasons for this. Men were built, biologically, to protect their offspring and the mother from danger that could potentially kill them, which this is also an animal behaviour as well. Women aren't, to say, weaker but their biological build up is different which makes them meant for certain things, as men are as well. For example, while women were meant to be able to sustain more pain due to pregnancy, men are not capable as much of pain. However, men have a bigger build up allowing them to protect the family and to make sure the offspring live on for a continuing reproduction. This, in fact, is a biological build up not a sterotyping. Though, I still don't get why a lot of women don't like the protection provided by the men for free, not stating that women cannot defend themselves either.
That's all fine and dandy and no one is arguing that men and women are biologically identical. Of course there are some activities that are better suited for men and some for women. But our society has evolved to the point that most women do not find themselves in life threatening situations on a daily basis and most men do not find themselves in situations requiring them to rescue a damsel in distress on a daily basis. The article was suggesting that if a man cooks dinner or has feelings for something other than getting laid or drunk he is a pussy. This characterization of men being mindless goons is what is offensive.
As far as "chores" go I actually doubt it has much to do with women's influence at all. What percentage of people live by themselves or with housemates before getting married and for how long in the generation before the baby boomers, the baby boomers, gen x and gen y? Sure there is a trend going back the other way due to increased house prices and rental prices but a fair percentage of the baby boomers and the next 2 generations (at least in Australia) will live by themselves at some stage early in there adult life. Even those y' who are staying home latter or moving back in with mum and dad are more self sufficient because they will have already lived by themselves and mum and dad are probably spending a fair percentage of there time away leaving them by themselves. Basically if you can't cook for yourself you stave, if you don't clear away the dishes you can't cook etc So when you enter a relationship you already have a background of doing things for yourself. In my opinion the difference is in the level of housework men vs women expect done but that could be because my better half comes from a defense home where the inspections are more rigerious than normal rental inspections.
Love how someone references capitalism here. But really, society has fallen under the impression that men are just mindless animals that don't really give a crap about what people feel and will just kill for the fun of it. I guess that Bill Gates isn't a man then because he gives a crap about the advancement of human beings.
By inverse would not the "masculation of women" improve the world greatly: if what all women wanted was "regular sex and a cold one" they would be so dam easy to please!
