American Feminism, Part 2

(This continues discussion begun in Part 1.)

(So much of what comes out of the mouths of young people today reminds me of Chatty Cathy.  Chatty Cathy was a “talking” doll that was quite popular around the 1960 period, well before micro-circuitry made possible much more sophisticated toys.  Chatty Cathy dolls had a string exiting from the doll’s upper back; if you pulled the string out, it wound a coil inside the doll that played a small phonograph record over one of about a dozen different phrases or comments.  As the coil pulled the string back inside the doll, the doll seemed to be “talking”.  But, of course, no deviation was possible; the doll repeated only what it had been “programmed” to utter and nothing else.  Chatty Cathy people today are still reciting the same dogmatic nonsense promulgated by interest group lobbies in the 1960s – as if nothing at all has changed in our society over the past half century.  When you see a society ostensibly frozen in time despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you know that there is no thinking involved, that it’s all mindlessly rote memorization, programming.  I just want to reach out and pull the string, even though I’ve heard the same “talk” thousands of times before.  It’s frightening, actually.  So many American women today are the same whiny teenaged girls of the 1950s, just with ever more imaginary embellishment.  Of course it’s bad enough when women do the Chatty Cathy thing, but it’s really scary when “men” mindlessly recite the same nonsense.)

Snobbish Elitism

There has always been a snobbish elitism among the forefront of American “feminism”, an arrogance that attempts to apply a set of entitlement beliefs on to all women.  This elitism is firmly based in the privileged upper class, not in the vast majority of average women.  It is top-down dogma, gospel from on high. It holds that the vast majority of women are both permanently stupid and helpless and need these elitist snobs to educate them to demand whatever they want, to show them the way, to seize whatever they want – as their birthright.  It is their birthright through their “eternal victimhood”, their incessant “oppression” at the hands of “evil” men.  “The only way to view the world is “my” way, the way I want to engineer reality to suit “me”, and I will have my way.  I will have the world I want handed to me.”  It is a world view born of little girls always handed from daddy whatever they wanted.  It is best articulated by professional academics living in permanent socialistic utopian comfort on the nation’s campuses and actually paid to devote their whole lives to self-interest, to studying their own navels, to glorifying “me”.  You can see it in women like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, to whom effete arrogance comes so easily, so naturally, not as mere women, but as spoiled princesses accustomed to issuing orders to lowly servants.

This arrogant philosophy can be seen in the designation of “feminist” assigned to Louisa May Alcott writing idyllic novels of triviality in the luxury of a privileged New England family while her doctor father was away tending to male bodies torn to pieces in the American Civil War.  Just forty miles from her comfortable mansion, in the disease-, rat- and crime-infested slums of Boston, another American women, a recent immigrant from Ireland, who possessed neither money or education, was working very hard just like men against great adversity on her own to lay the business foundation of what would become an American political dynasty leading all the way to the White House – solely on her hard work and merit.  But Alcott is a “feminist”, and Bridget Kennedy is not?  One becomes an icon, and the other is buried and forgotten?  How many of us know of American women who, from 1900-1940 invented really nifty things, built and ran huge factories, created and owned large businesses employing thousands of people – on their own effort and merit?

It is this elitism, this arrogance, this sense of inherent superiority that has always made a mockery of American “feminism”, and twisted the minds of so many who fail to see it for what it is – a demand for birthright entitlement, an expectation of privileged position as a right without effort, without risk, and without responsibility.  These are self-involved jerks concerned only about “me”, damned anyone who gets in the way of what they want for themselves. They incessantly demand everything that men at the top have, but without the lifetime of single-minded dedication, great risk, adversity, competition and sacrifice that it took those men to reach such positions.  “I am special. I have a right to it. Give it to me!”

Even though I have always been fully supportive of equality for both men and women, for all Americans, in whatever they choose to pursue, the word “feminist” to me has always been an expletive, the dogma of authoritarian dictatorship for “me”, of birthright entitlement, damned anyone else. American “feminism” is the origination of the asinine notion that rights come without responsibility, that “someone else” must take the blame, pay the bills and do the hard stuff for “me”.  But I come from a different place; for me, equality gives equal weight to both rights and responsibilities.  Neither the Constitution or the dictionary accepts any “special” in “equal”.  American Baby Boomer “feminism” was never about equality; it was always about privilege.  Its defining characteristic has always been self-involvement, and its primary objective has been to shift dependency– from husbands and fathers to Big Daddy Government.  The self-proclaimed “eternal victim” status is fundamental to avoiding responsibility for one’s self, and for anyone else, too.  It all harkens back to the same self-serving “thinking” among European nobilities, the self-anointed “special” people of their time, owing their position to nothing but birthright entitlement, a great magical gift accompanying mere birth, idly discussing profits made from their trade in “sub-human” slaves while sustaining their unearned lifestyles by simply confiscating wealth from others.  In the idiotic “burden” of despotism, self-interest is paramount.  American feminism was born in European nobility, in the world of princesses and queens; as such, it has always been, and remains, alien to American democracy, to the fundamental principle of equality.

Real life below such “feminist” ivory tower delusion is starkly different.  It is the difference between “feminists” like privileged Pelosi and Clinton, versus average women of far more worth such as Lara Logan, Megyn Kelly, Army Sergeant Hester and Private Brown, even TV characters Agent Ziva David and Detective Joss Carter.  One of the most offensive and wide-spread characteristics of most Americans today is their inability to see the world from the vantage point of others; it’s little mystery where this trait originates.  Before they go about imposing their will on others, American women should pause to consider that everyone does not think “just like me”.  Precisely because you have never been challenged is all the more reason to suspect that your thinking may very well be flawed.  This is all the more likely the more simplistic, myopic and dogmatic is that thinking.  Having spent most of my life outside the United States, where I have been constantly challenged to defend or alter my beliefs, listening to privileged American feminists now is like listening to the “deathly seriousness” of a “dumb and dumber” cartoon.  They are without doubt the very poorest of role models for the rest of the world’s much more substantial women, women who still have a strong sense of responsibility to accompany their rights, while also accomplishing far more for their societies under far worse conditions than American women ever experienced.  Sadly, the only thing such “feminists”, with all the “special” rights and privileges they have garnered for themselves, have to offer the world is the dwindling American money and might they inherited, plus an astounding degree of delusion.

.

“Progress has never been a bargain.  You have to pay for it.  Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “All right, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance.  Madam, you may vote, but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat.  Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”      These are lines spoken to a packed courtroom by Spencer Tracey playing “Henry Drummond” (who is actually Clarence Darrow, one of the nation’s foremost attorneys) in the 1925 “Scopes monkey trial”.  The lines were written by screenwriter Nedrick Young for the 1960 Stanley Kramer film “Inherit The Wind”.  Young was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writer of a Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, since the film was based on a play of the same title written in 1950 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.   So writers in 1950 were describing American cultural norms of the period 1920-1950.  In 1922 the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which in 1920 had guaranteed the right of American women in all the separate states to vote.  Sometime between 1950 and 1970, however, American women figured out how to retain both the right to vote and the right to retreat at will behind their “special” status, i.e., to reject the responsibility parts of their rights whenever it was convenient to do so.  “Never stop whining.”  They were able to insert “special” into “equal” and focus solely on “me”.  Here there was no price to be paid by the beneficiaries of “progress”.  Today, American women have rights; they do NOT have responsibilities.  Everyone else has the responsibility for ensuring whatever rights women decide to demand at any moment in time.  This is, of course, ultimate privilege, and there’s no equal in privilege.

.

Long Live The Queen

I marvel at the birthright entitlement ease with which a totally oblivious Clinton could ascend to the State Department throne over a man like Richard Holbrooke, who had spent a half century in the trenches all over the world in the toughest of assignments actually earning that position – and still win the “admiration” of women for her unearned affirmative action appointment.  Holbrooke eventually died where he began – trying to resolve yet another stupid war.  If I were Clinton, I’d hide under a rock and never be seen again, but Clinton prances around the word pontificating like a queen. This stuff makes me ashamed of being an American.  I feel the same way about Susan Rice at the United Nations, busily running about imposing her imperial view of the world on everyone else.  Of course, I also felt the same way about affirmative action appointees Madeline Albright, a WW II Euro-centrist academic after the “Cold” War had ended and the “NATO” mission was completed, and Condoleezza Rice, an academic expert on the long-gone Soviet Russia – both the very worst choices for their most critical moments in history.  (What was needed most was a fresh brilliant mind looking far ahead, not two students remembering and thinking in the past with what they learned in school.  But, unfortunately, everyone’s thinking got all twisted up by State Department “geniuses” proclaiming the “end of history” with the fall of Soviet Communism threatening the holy altar of Western Europe.)

Women like Albright, Rice, Clinton, with almost no real experience in the larger world beyond their myopic privileged cocoons end up using the military they despise as their primary “negotiating” tool, their giant threatening club wielded to impose their will.  (And this includes a modern Irish-American Samantha Power, pulling the levers of power from behind the White House curtain in the name of her definition of “human rights” – another of those legions of pontificating feminist “leaders from the very safe rear”.  Her Irish heritage alone should have guided her in the reality that, if the cause is just, then there is only one way to lead, and it is NOT by screaming orders to others from the shadows without being held accountable for what comes next.)  Since 1990 there has been nothing out there that has not been fully predictable.  But we seem unable to think beyond next week’s checkers move, when we should be playing Viswanathan Anand chess twenty years ahead.  Our thinking is far too simplistic, naïve, emotional, transient.  These “diplomats” have no understanding of the fact that war represents the failure of diplomacy, that using the military reveals the level of their own incompetence, their own impotence.  Yet, after a half century of this twisted perversion, this affirmative action entitlement of the “special” people, it has become just the accepted “norm” – ascending to the top by clinging to the flagpole – something that once filled all Americans with revulsion.  There is now absolutely no reason why such advancement is any more defensible for women than for men, why women are not held just as accountable as men – in any field.  I can think of no greater example of the power of “feminist” pervasive self-serving propaganda, forced indoctrination, double standards and sense of entitlement, beginning at birth and continuing through school and throughout life – for two whole generations.  It’s small wonder why today only a tiny handful of Americans, all young male rebels, ever hear a different drummer, break from the herd, and blaze great new trails on their own merit.

Just consider the new US Embassy in Iraq.  To depose an evil despot who threatened the entire region, the US military had invaded the country and conquered it.  At great cost, the country then belonged to the US military.  As that US military was scheduled to be pulled out of the country, the State Department naively and grandiosely envisioned “taking over the mission” – with civilians.  They got a trainload of money from Congress to do just that.  Much more interested in getting the military out of the way so it could do things “the right way”, they then allowed a country owned by the US military to dictate the conditions for keeping residual forces in place long enough to complete the mission and leave behind a viable country that could defend itself.  It was all a concept based on gross stupidity and even greater incompetence. Unfortunately the gigantic fortress Clinton’s State Department built doesn’t work and has far too many people sitting around drawing top pay and very generous extra “hardship” bonuses – with nothing more to do than complain about how difficult it is to get their daily luxuries now that the US military isn’t there to smooth the way, do the necessary paperwork, provide their security and transport the goodies from America to Kuwait and in to their fortress. Without the US military, the whole monstrosity is nothing but a stinking beached whale.  Since Iraq is not much interested in being ruled by the US State Department, the staff is essentially confined to the embassy, unable to interact enough with ordinary Iraqis to even begin justifying the horrendous $6 billion annual operational price tag.  The compound, a campus of adobe-colored buildings with all the amenities of downtown Washington sitting on 104 acres and surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire, is America’s largest in the world, probably the largest embassy in history.  It cost an astounding $750 million to build.  It is staffed by an incredible 16,000 people, 2,000 of whom are “diplomats”.  (Resurgent Turkey, which is Iraq’s largest trading partner and wields much more economic influence in Iraq than the US, is an appropriate sized embassy; it employs roughly 55 people, and the number of actual diplomats is 8.)

Even worse, there never has been an agreement between the US and Iraq concerning US diplomatic representation or its operations in the now-sovereign country of Iraq.  The Americans just did it on their own.  Such unprecedented arrogance is simply astounding, as if the State Department was setting up shop in the center of the Mid-East in order to run the Muslim World from “Baghdad Colony” – all according to Queen Hillary, damned any niceties like formal diplomatic agreements.  Now every request for a staffer to do something or go somewhere, or for a goodie to come in, has to be submitted on the proper paper form in the proper number of copies to eventually be approved, weeks or months later, by the very top leadership of the Iraqi government.  No one at State seems to have ever considered what it all might look like to others, including average Iraqis.  After all, just how would Americans react if the Iraqis decided on their own to build such a gigantic ostentatious fortress in the center of Washington DC, anoint all its 16,000 occupants with diplomatic immunity, and require a continuous mercenary-armed convoy to keep it supplied from the Baltimore docks?  This sort of absurdity is not supposed to happen in the real world, and to my knowledge never has.  But no one wants to upset Hillary.  (“Always tell ’em whatever they want to hear.”)  So now, with nothing for them to do, State is considering paring down the size of the staff.  Brilliant!

Since the US military mission of standing up a viable and professional Iraqi military that could defend the country without becoming involved with internecine tribal disputes and animosities, it is only a matter of time before the country descends into tribal warfare – which external extremists are guaranteed to exploit for their own purposes and objectives.  All of this, of course, will render the US military effort, at a cost of 4,500 “expendable” dead soldiers and trillions of American taxpayer dollars, entirely wasted.  It will go down in history as a sterling example of the way the brilliant American Baby Boomers so easily an so predictably snatched abysmal defeat from the jaws of very hard-won victory.

This is the “Face Of America” – supreme arrogance totally oblivious to the views of others, unable, even unwilling, to see the board from the other’s side?  We destroyed their country to remove a dictator and bring freedom and representative government to all Iraqis, and we now treat them no better than did the dictator?  What kind of person could ever possibly “think” like that?  Only someone who has never been challenged, who is above reproach, who is safely ensconced on the throne of her very own fantasy world and protected by a thousand legions of obedient Centurions.  How better to quickly undo the sacrifice of 4,500 American dead soldiers plus another 35,000 maimed soldiers?  Richard Holbrooke, witness to Saigon and a man of conscience, would have gone ballistic.  “We” have become our own worst enemy.  Such women, with a million rights and no sense of responsibility, are way out of their league, and we all pay the price.

You can see the blatant sexism and double standards even in Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor equating someone lying about having been awarded the Medal Of Honor to someone she’s dating making claims to her that aren’t true.  You can safely bet your last dime that she sure wouldn’t be so incredibly cavalier about such things if she had been awarded the Medal Of Honor, but since this is something of little or no relevance to her or to women in general, she can easily cheapen the whole discussion to gutter level – as if any man who had been awarded the Medal Of Honor, or any other actual man, would ever even consider dating such a self-involved “special” ass.  And she made such a stupid comparison in a country that actually has laws, regulations and policies that require men to lie to women, to avoid hurting their ever fragile and capricious feelings and thus risk being charged with “sexual harassment” – laws, regulations and policies enforced by women on queenly pedestals like Sotomayor.  This is a despicably arrogant woman who has never been required to consider anything except herself, who has absolutely no understanding at all of men, of honor, of bravery, of self-sacrifice and responsibility for others, who has never been required to view the board from the other side.  The only thing of concern to her is herself.  She’s just another supremely insolent jerk who is able to exist in an insulated world for the “special” people as a simple matter of birthright entitlement.  And this is a “leader”?  Only in the totally delusional mind.  With so very little about us left that is not fake, that is not lies, some things must be sacrosanct, and the Medal of Honor definitely is one of them.  A date’s lies to a Sotomayor should be as expected as the student’s “right” answers on the teacher’s test; both are part and parcel of the same American “feminist” dictate.

.

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire (1694-1778), prolific French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher, famous for his advocacy of freedom of religion and freedom of expression, despite the risk in which this placed him under the strict censorship laws of the time – a half century before the American Revolution against the British birthright entitled aristocracy.

.

Of all the world’s industrialized countries none is home to a society more ignorant of the world beyond its borders than is the United States.  This is all the more frightening given that the US, thanks to the Greatest Generation, also owns the military force that, however briefly, makes it the world’s single super-power.  Even worse, we actually believe that we know it all.  To others, viewing all that might in the hands of such ignorance, we are often just terrifying, the inevitable consequence of lifetimes spent contemplating navels and glorifying “me”, secure in the absurd delusion that everyone thinks “just like me”, that everyone else “owes” me their complete and unquestioning obedience.  How far off the mark we are, on all counts.  We are “admired” mainly for our money, and our insatiable urge to spend it on almost anything, however inane.  Furthermore, I do not serve the queen in her army; I serve the people in their army, and I absolutely despise birthright entitlement.  Still every bit as childish, irresponsible and self-involved as Anna Karenina ever was a century and a half ago, the principle accomplishment of American “feminism” has been to change the rules so women no longer have to pay a price for such traits, while the main thing they still have not bothered to accomplish is how to view the landscape from the other’s perspective.  The idle nobility’s gospel of “me” still burns brightly in American “feminism”; in their minds, the Bolshevik Revolution never happened.

These are women who spend twice as much on their own clothes as all of us together spend on higher education, and yet they benefit from higher education at twice the rate as men – and still want more “free” goodies to support their own lifestyle choices?  Now just where is the equity in that absurdity?  Just where does such obscene birthright entitlement come from?  Just how did things get so perversely bent out of shape?  Because males have simply become willing road kill on the way to women’s ever increasing self-involvement?  Does anyone really think that there eventually won’t be prices to pay, consequence to be reaped?  Eternal victims have rights; the responsibility is for “someone else”.  Some of us have been bending to that nonsense every day of our lives for the past fifty years.  What happens when we’re gone?

.

“Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.” – Winston Churchill (who lived at a time when most others were perceptive enough to understand just what they were being told).

.

America was founded by those who had a near universal hatred of birthright entitlement, of the despicable notion that certain classes of people were “special”, above reproach, “superior”.  The notion of birthright entitlement has led to every oppressive regime in history, including the European monarchies above reproach who dealt in human slavery for profit and exported it to the New World.  It does not, and never did have, a legitimate place in America.  One advances in America by the fruit of their own efforts, on their own merit, on a level playing field of the highest standards.  One assumes leadership only on the basis of their proven record of acceptance of responsibility for others.  These things I believe.  Anything else is a perversion that must be resisted, countered, excised.  In my book, one Private Brown is worth twenty Princess Hillary Clintons.  All those rights do come with responsibilities.  Women who control our schools, for example, who have proven themselves unwilling to ensure equal opportunity for all students, including boys, have proven themselves unfit for leadership, have not earned the right to lead, to accept full responsibility for others.  If you advance your own interests by failing boys in school, just what can anyone expect you will do when you run the nation?  Any twit off the street  can scream orders to idiots from the very safe rear.  And only idiots follow those orders.  Shifting dependency from daddy to government is not the solution.  That merely ensures stagnation, represses growth, makes a mockery of America’s most cherished principles, destroys our society.  American “feminism” made its choices a half century ago; it’s long past time its adherents accepted the consequences of those choices.  We now have a range of monumental societal problems that threaten our very existence, and they need fixing, fast.

All of the early jet pilots and astronauts and submariners, for example, were men, but they were all military men in very tough meritocracies, who had proven themselves the best in their class – who were still nevertheless expendable, and at extremely low pay.  (The Baby Boomers have always tried to hide the fact that those men were, in fact, military officers.)  Their machines had names like F-86, X-1, X-2, Nautilus, Mercury, U-2, SR-71.  It wasn’t until enough of those men had risked everything and even died developing and testing brilliant innovation, invention and technology that it was all deemed safe for women.  The same inexplicably remains true today, and yet women incredibly view this past as “being denied opportunity”.  I was there; I sure don’t remember many women demanding an opportunity to lay their lives on the line for their country, for the future, for mankind, with very low probability of survival, and they definitely were not lining up anywhere to join the military during wartime. The simple truth is that women then were deemed too important, played other more important roles in society, to risk their lives on crazy adventures that could very easily just blow up or vanish.  And I sure don’t see any women blazing any such trails today, as did their great grandmothers in the early years of the 20th century. Whining women today, with their self-serving manufactured version of “history”, just make me nauseous.  I often wonder what that history would sound like if those inherently evil men had stuck a woman in one of those early tiny capsules into space, and it and its human guinea pig just kept on going to Proxima Centauri or didn’t survive re-entry to Earth.  It would probably be just a slightly different version of the same eternal “victimhood” whining that we still must endure anyway – along with shrines to “women saints sacrificed for men’s stupid schemes”.

.

“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.” – Mark Twain

.

The more women wallow in their eternal victimhood, the more they will realize their own expectations.  If women are eternal victims, of course, then they are victims of inherently evil men, and they will create the very men they despise by viewing their sons in the same way they view their fathers.  Pity our daughters; their future is tomorrow’s hell.  Jerk male losers do not create themselves.  When women fill their heads full of their own self-serving nonsense, while their actions belie their words, why is anyone surprised that so many of those boys find alternative views of the world? (See Footnote #1.)  Women need to make better choices, think further ahead, assume, embrace, full responsibility, and accountability, for their actions.  (See Footnote #2.)  Welcome to the target line, ladies, where self-indulgence is no excuse.  It’s inexplicable why any sane man would ever place himself into the hands of women in professions such as those mentioned above.  After all, the only thing these “special” people have ever done is use privilege to gain an education.  Routinely shifting blame and perverting even truth in their own self-interests, the only people who concern them is “me”.   None to my knowledge has ever done anything to actually earn the respect and trust they absurdly demand of men as another birthright. And just look what they’ve been doing to American boys with impunity for the past forty years. (See Footnote #3.)

Today these “feminist” creeps, fearing any attention being taken away from their own “victim” status, won’t even allow mention of boys in public discourse, including in the news media, unless they do something wrong.  This, of course, coupled with the miserable condition of American boys, is a degree of sexist bigotry that far exceeds anything in America to which women were ever subjected. The notion of rights without responsibilities has now gotten completely out of hand, even to the point of sanctioning pervasive discrimination, even misandry, against half of our population while they are still children.  American children now incredibly have only one gender.  Guess which gender it is.  The more you marginalize those boys, turn them into “me”, the more they will seek ways to destroy your world.

Over 56%, and steadily rising, of American women between 18 and 48 have never been married and never had children.  In most metropolitan areas of the US, single childless women in their twenties and thirties have much more education than men plus incomes from 10% to 20% higher than those of men – yet they STILL get a huge one-third subsidy from men every month in their Social Security and Medicare and health care premiums, still enjoy gratis all the societal benefits which their grandmothers actually earned by having and raising at home the healthy and educated children the nation needed to become future productive taxpaying workers, to enable the nation to survive and thrive.  Despite incessantly churning out the same 1960 phony propaganda that women earn only 77% of men’s incomes, essentially, such privileged women are freeloaders on the gravy train of birthright entitlement, benefiting no one but “me”.  (See Footnote #4.)

Huge subsidies women get from men in Social Security, Medicare and similar social “entitlement” programs, plus what 25,000,000 of them get to assist them in setting up and maintaining one-person “small businesses”, etc., are only a part of the story.  For example, in order to get the 10 or 11 TV channels men actually want, they also have to pay for a dozen or more women’s channels they don’t want because women don’t support their own channels enough to make them self-sustaining.  (I “block” those women’s channels so I’m not constantly reminded that I have to pay for all that drivel.  It’s bad enough that under this stupid system that I also have to pay for the ‘privilege’ of watching inane commercials directed mainly at women – on all channels.)  In stark contrast to the truly enormous MegaBucks that American taxpayers and charity-givers have poured into “women’s health” over the past half century, in 2012 there still existed not one single US national professional organization to promote “men’s health”.  Now, under the new health care law, men even have to pay to underwrite the costs of women’s decisions about their own elective sexual behavior.  Next up is a proposed universal pre-school program, which, in addition to all the other programs like day-care public schools, men have to pay to further relieve women of responsibility for their own children.  Sometimes I have nightmares about being a member of a small minority struggling to survive in a society populated mostly by blood-sucking leeches.  You have to wonder if women will ever pay their own way, change their own diapers, assume some responsibility to go along with all those rights and choices.

As opposed to women of the Greatest Generation who advanced solely on their own merit, today American women “get ahead” far more by forcing society to adjust to their incessant self-serving demands; by claiming a million rights and choices devoid of responsibility; by being completely unassailable and unaccountable; by censoring the conversation and tightly defining its parameters before it even begins; by invoking the enormous power of many dozens of lobbies, unions and special interest groups; by wielding a range of deadly clubs like “harassment” law suits and demanded quotas; by dependence on Big Daddy Government; by laying down a whole minefield of illogical things that just might get them upset without warning; by using their schools to garner for themselves twice as many university degrees as men; by their super-majority vote concerned only with “me”; by wallowing in their eternal victimhood to suck the life out of every other social ill in our society; by demanding countless double standards under some asinine self-serving definition of “equality”; by wielding a book full of old social conventions, laws, regulations, rules, policies and practices mandating deference to women (and their stupid shoes); by blaming all those inherently evil men for all their own shortcomings; and by crippling boys in their schools and homes before they can even get started.  Actual competence is very far down on the Real List.  No woman in America advances solely on her own merit without dozens of phony crutches now interwoven throughout our entire cultural and political world.  They also benefit, of course, from a really huge number of really stupid men they’ve manufactured in the shadows.

Unless men are being systematically rendered brain-dead, sooner or later there will be a male revolt against the tyranny of a majority that cares only about itself.  In fact, many millions of young men have already begun that revolt – by simply dropping out, and leaving the bills, blame and hard stuff to “someone else”, just like they’ve been taught by women for the past forty years.  Many of them recognize that they can’t “win” against such a well-organized self-involved mass mind-set, so the best they can do is not contribute to it.  They can’t even defend themselves without running into a firestorm of asinine labels like “sexist” and “misogynist”.  Others are dramatically raising the price of the services women want them to provide.  Since there can be no room for double standards or birthright entitlement in a democracy based on equality, there are always unintended consequences to a stacked deck.  The days of women being able to evoke their “eternal victimhood” in order to avoid responsibility are rapidly coming to an end.  The days of women being able to avoid criticism and accountability for their direct role in our society’s monumental problems is also coming to an end.  Sadly, it may already be too late.

We are over thirty years overdue in instituting a universal three-year national service requirement for all Americans – to get us all back on track as equals, to help us remember that we are all on the same team in a game with only one set of rules for everyone.  As Clint Eastwood says, “It’s halftime in America.”

Unfortunately, we’re already down by five touchdowns, and our strongest opponent is us.

.

(See “American Feminism, Part 1” and “We Are Owed It!”, posted separately.)

____________________________________________________________

Footnote #1:  Children:  Many middle class women cite the high cost of raising children as a “reason” not to have children, but they overlook that much of those costs are usually a factor of “someone else” paid to do tasks, such as “day care”, formerly considered throughout the history of mankind a normal part of being parents.  They also ignore the fact that their taxes are reduced for each child they are raising; that schools, public libraries, and various medical and social programs now pick up a lot of expenses that were previously borne by responsible parents; and that a lot of other expenses are self-imposed – such as the “need” for expensive clothing, toys, transportation, extracurricular activities, cell phones and even artificially manufactured doll-teeth for those children.  All of that together is still not worth simply having a mother always around to help with their homework and a father always available at least on weekends to attend their events.  And turning boys into “men” who are what women don’t want to be is not a solution.

Full-time day care for one child in a credentialed center now ranges from $16,500 in Massachusetts to $5,000 in Mississippi.  In nearly two-thirds of the country, average annual child day-care costs are greater than yearly tuition and fees at a four-year public college.  Other costs of having both parents employed outside the home add to the day care costs another $10,000 to $20,000 annually.  A logical person would conclude that, unless they were earning very high salaries, it would be more economical for one parent to forego salaried employment and remain in the home with the children.  It also, of course, would be better for the children.  And that, of course, would be far better for society.  But logic doesn’t have to be factored in an equation that’s all about “me”.   So the effort is relentless to get society to pick up more and more of the costs of choices made by women, serving themselves, while the child provides the phony “cover”.

The Greatest Generation had and raised a staggering number of the healthiest, happiest, and best educated children in history – completely on their own.  And they did it while also creating the biggest economic boom in history.  Having and raising children properly is very serious business, a business that quite obviously cannot be “farmed out” without major negative consequences all around.  Furthermore, the costs of poverty in America are rising almost as fast as the costs of retirement, and yet all any American has to do to have a 98% chance of avoiding poverty is (1) graduate from high school, (2) get a regular job, and, most important, (3) avoid childbirth until establishing a stable marriage.  Even during the Great Recession, the poverty rate for white married couples is 3.2%; for white single-mother “families” it’s a staggering, and extremely costly, 22.1%, and no one anywhere is forcing women to have those children, i.e., it’s freely chosen elective behavior.  (Beyond this I would add a plan for both parents to devote a percentage of their spare time to acquiring more training or schooling, preferably in some technical area.  Avoiding poverty is one thing, but getting ahead is something else.)  Can we make this a law?

No one is forcing American women to do anything.  Blaming “someone else” has just become a programmed response.  An objective adult would conclude that women should decide as adults during their twenties whether they want to be mothers or employees, and be required to stick to that decision.  If they want to be mothers in a proper family with two genders as parents, then they deserve, have earned, society’s assistance.  If they want to be employees, then they are subject to the same exact standards and responsibilities as are male schmucks in the arena, and nothing else.  If they “want it all” – choose to be both mothers and employees – then they should be prepared to meet the consequences, including the costs and responsibilities, of their own choices.  Over half the children born in this country are born to single mothers.  A very major problem with our society, actually its most important problem, is the fact that most of our children are being raised by part-time parents and a vast financially driven “village” – which only short-changes the children in the interest of an adult arrested-development “me”.  The costs those children then place on society both as children and when they become adults is just staggering.  And we still blame them for the screw-ups or failures they became?  This is just incredibly stupid, all to serve the incessant whining of today’s women.

Only about one in four boys in this country reaches age 18 with a constant father.  Just whose self-involvement do you suppose is having and “raising” all those legions of loser males out there?  There is some truth in the observation that “until American boys become adult screw-ups, their chief purpose is to provide a source of sympathy, self-imposed “martyrdom”, government money and fake “self-fulfillment” for their single “mothers” – without accountability.” And then we blame the boys for creating themselves, blame them for realizing obvious, predictable, expectations?  Trophy commodities as boys, onerous plagues as men.  We have become a blame-shifting surrogate society, with no adequate surrogates.  Why do I have to pick up the tab, assume responsibility, for that, for such irresponsible choices of others?  Despising their jerk sons, I blame their irresponsible mothers, those with all the choices. All the self-serving propaganda in the world isn’t going to change such hard realities one bit.

Over half of marriages in America now end in divorce, leaving most of our children in single-parent “families” or living with revolving door “parents”.  “Fathers” have become interchangeable spare parts, as needed at any moment in time whose chief purpose is just another source of money for self-involved women.  Previously most single-parent families were the unavoidable consequences of huge numbers of male deaths in wars or workplaces.  Now it’s just another very popular lifestyle choice of grown-up children, in which the real children, and society in general, pay the highest price.  And usually the parent who keeps the kids also gets the house, the car, the alimony and the child support, plus mountains of societal sympathy and benefits.  In our society there are now actually financial incentives to divorce, to single parenthood.  It’s not surprising that guys like me so easily view “marriage” as just another extortion racket, one we definitely do not need.

I don’t want to pay for what I don’t need.  Neither should society.  If women are going to engineer for themselves the best societal advancement through education and then take the best jobs, why should I be required to pay taxes to support those schools, pay for all their other wants?  Why shouldn’t women be required to pay premiums commensurate with their costs in social welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare and the new health care law?  Why should I have to subsidize their hypochondria in health insurance premiums?  Why should men be required to pay for women’s birth control pills, abortions? (The term “families” used incessantly by politicians is political code-speak for “women”, and the word “free” before some government benefit (another “right”) is just a lie.  Nothing  in life is “free”; it is always paid for by someone, usually by “someone else”, for “me”.)  Women have simply become too expensive, offering absolutely nothing commensurate with the ever rising costs of their lifestyle choices, of all their damned “rights”, in return.

I reserve my respect for full-time mothers and for those who compete with me as equals in the arena without stupidly trying to play two games at once.  I do not owe anything to women who choose to dabble in both worlds, who childishly think they can “have it all”.  If men can’t “have it all”, why should women?  There is no “special” in equal.  All those equal rights do come with equal responsibilities.  If it is all about rights, where is my right to tell you what you can do with all those impositions on me that favor yourself?  Well over half of adult women, and steadily rising, have chosen not to get married and not to have and raise healthy children; these are women who essentially freeload on the traditional wife-mother model for the benefits society established to compensate such women, including huge subsidies from men in premiums for Social Security and Medicare and health care, but without meeting the critical responsibilities for which society created such benefits.  The only way it’s possible to justify such rewards is totally absurd “birthright entitlement“, another unearned privilege for the “special” people due solely to accident of birth.  And yet such women even offensively call themselves “feminists” while demanding ever more “rights” without responsibility?  Women who chose to make such lifestyle choices should pay the costs of their own choices, their own behavior.  Furthermore, those cowards who fail to hold women responsible, and accountable, are equally at fault for the mess.  Those women who choose to wait until mid-life, well into their forties, for example, to have their designer trophy child know that the possibility of birth defects rises with their own age, and should not expect society to meet the costs of their own self-involved lifestyle choices, including the most shameful cost of all – children born with disabilities.  On the contrary; just who is going to care for that child in adulthood?  Why should women be able to impose the costs of their self-involvement, their lifestyle choices, on others?

I am not interested in someone who can’t decide who or what she is, or what she wants. And neither should any man.  Children work those things out during their teen years and then move on with life as adults.  “Teenage” is not a permanent “lifestyle” option.  Men are NOT responsible for the condition of women, and they don’t “owe” women anything.  Just because most men no longer have spines and politicians need women’s votes does not change truth in the slightest – no matter how much women try to convince themselves, and everyone else, otherwise.  It’s time to take “women” out of “Women and other children first.”  It’s time to throw out of their campus ivory towers all of those navel contemplating “feminists” dictating to everyone else, issuing their incessant demands, re-writing the rules, revising history.  Those who find some perverted sense of pride in identifying themselves as American “feminists” could do us all a favor – by identifying those most responsible for the colossal mess they have made of our society.  It’s time for everyone to just grow up and become adults.  If 18-year old boys are responsible enough to serve and die in wars, and be fully accountable for their behavior, then 18-year old girls certainly are responsible enough to make adult choices about child birth, and be fully accountable for their behavior.  Well over 60% of voters are women – in a nation whose elections are almost always decided by just 1% or 2% of voters.  Twice as many women as men are now ensured college educations.  About 54% of our society is female, another 30% are now just loser males.  And all of that leaves much less than 20% of American citizens with all the responsibility.

That’s not a society; that’s a Ponzi scheme.

Footnote #2:   The Blame Game.  Peter Bregman is CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm which advises CEOs and their “leadership” teams.  (He earned a B.A. from Princeton and an M.B.A. from Columbia.)  In April 2013, Harvard Business Review published some of Bregman’s views on blame-shifting, views which had been integral to most American thinking up to about 1970.  Today, however, Bregman’s advice, no less true than it ever was, is far easier given than accepted:

We should all quit playing the blame game.  We learn to point fingers “at an early age, usually to escape parental anger and punishment, but also to preserve our own self-esteem and self-image.”  But it’s regrettable that we persist with those bad habits well into our adulthood and even carry them into the workplace. 

“Blaming others is a poor strategy.”  First of all, everyone else can see through it.  It’s dishonest, it damages relationships, and it actually weakens our self-esteem rather than strengthening it.  But the worst thing about blaming others is that it “prevents learning.”  If you insist that “something isn’t your fault, then there’s no reason for you to do anything differently”—which means you’ll just repeat the same mistakes in the future.  “That will lead to more blame.  It’s a cycle that almost always ends badly.”

A better solution is to just take your lumps.  In fact, “take the blame for anything you’re even remotely responsible for.”  It may seem counterintuitive, but taking the blame is a “power move” that bolsters your position and shifts the focus to solving problems instead of pointing fingers.  “Once you’ve taken responsibility for something, you can do something about it, which gives you strength.”

Fundamental to this thinking is the simple fact that responsibility is meaningless without accountability.  Anyone in a position of “responsibility” who is not accountable is nothing but an interchangeable widget, an inanimate figurehead, signifying nothing, hiding behind a phony title.  Societal convention and interest group censorship prevent Bregman from signaling out any group other than his own, of course, but it’s the avoidance of accountability that invites blame-shifting, that has made blame-shifting so incredibly popular among American women – who have essentially replaced their brains with their eternal victimhood so as to remain blameless, in their own minds.  It’s just incredibly stupid, for example, to keep blaming the other half for their “shortcomings” when it’s your own self-involvement that created the other half.  Just what kind of “mentality” does it require to keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result each time?  It’s that myopic self-involvement in the face of inevitable calamity that crowns American “feminists” as “The Ugliest Humans On The Planet”.

(Just because certain inconvenient truths are heavily censored in our society does not mean that guys with brains don’t know those truths; they are just required not to verbalize them in public.  “I demand to be lied to.”  That’s just crazy.  God help us all when women and their clones use their super-majority vote to have one of these delusional twits ascend to the throne.  They all actually believe their own bullshit.)

(See my 2011/04/13 reply to a reader’s comment on “More On Dumb American Men” for some insight into what happened to our earlier views about responsibility.  See also Footnote #3 to “Marry Me” for the role played by excluding relativity from “women’s studies” so the subject can be viewed in a vacuum that does not exist in nature.)

Footnote #3:  Curious observation:  Have you ever noticed that, in all forms of American dramatic entertainment for the past forty years, that the only people who are portrayed as incredibly stupid idiots or twisted perverts, killers and assorted other really creepy people … are always white heterosexual males?  This one group, which constitutes less than 20% of the population, provides 99% of our worst fears about stupid idiots, bad guys and evil. This group, of course, is the only group in the US without a lobby to complain on its behalf. And, after forty years of this stuff, the most amazing thing is that there are still some white heterosexual boys who somehow manage to grow up in that world of incessant negative programming and not end up dead or in prison.  Of course, only a moron would ever assume that all those millions of women and their clones who now over-populate our social “sciences” are not completely aware of all this.  (Their explanation no doubt is that these creeps and jerks simply “create themselves”, right there on the street corner, like magic.)  So I keep wondering when our legions of “feminists” will just pass a law that all white heterosexual males when born will simply be “terminated” or castrated – as a matter of women’s “choice”, naturally.  (Most male adults still running around loose are little more than spineless eunuchs anyway.)  But then their problem would be finding that essential “someone else” to take the blame, pay the bills and do the hard stuff … for “me”.  It’s a conundrum, for women.

Another Observation:  Have you ever noticed that it’s always the biggest loser women, those who never accomplish anything themselves, those who simply sit on the sidelines and pontificate, who are so eager to destroy male icons who did and do accomplish worthwhile things far beyond themselves – on the basis of nothing more than their relationships with other loser women?  I long ago lost count of the women “victims” who professed to have had “secret relationships” with that “evil” man Jack Kennedy – while men the same age as those women were being drafted for war – solely to make money from other such women with their pathetic gossipy “exposés”.  I, on the other hand, always wondered how an actual man like Kennedy could have survived after deadly war and painful injury and brutal campaigns only to be faced with nothing in his few off-time minutes but that insufferable tight-assed privileged aristocrat Jacqueline, whose main contribution was the number of votes she could garner for her husband – from similar other women.  Face it ladies: Jackie was a barely endurable prop who owes her fame solely to her husband.  Jack Kennedy was a guy who met all the demanding requirements of extraordinary job and enormous family and never once uttered a single complaint, not even in all the books he wrote.  Only the very most sanctimonious among us could possibly fault his alleged occasional stolen moments of privacy.  (And, to be honest, his alleged affair with Marilyn Monroe was one of the things that significantly elevated his status in my mind.)  Destroying actual men, and male icons, is second on the list of things in which feminists excel, the first being incessant whining, and the third being destroying boys before they can become men.  It demonstrates the degree of hatred and bigotry such pathetic women have for males – whom they blame for all of their own considerable shortcomings and which they readily communicate to, instill in, boys in their charge.  There must be a special place in hell for such pathetic women with all their misandry.  Will they ever “get in touch with their masculine side” and just grow up?  I can’t stand the legions of spineless, worthless, effeminate, conflicted male jerks they are creating – in their own image.  I’m tired of suffering all those dumb men out there, too.  (How come we never hear about an equal number of women who routinely cheat on their spouses?  And, even if we did, would our holier-than-thou women demand the same level of accountability of them?  Of course not.)

Footnote #4.   Income Disparities.  The figure that women’s lobbies use as their percentage of men’s incomes hasn’t budged 1% since they first started using it in 1960 – over a half century ago.  It’s pure propaganda, designed to keep the absurd myth of American women as “eternal victims” alive and well, long after it ceased having even a modicum of validity.  “Studies” purporting to show huge income disparities, a so-called “gender gap”, published every few months by women’s lobbies, either rely on false data or purposefully omit key qualifiers, such as the free choices women make – which invariably leave the impression that American women are being “oppressed” by those inherently evil men.  It’s just more of the usual bullshit, serving the “special” people.  (Think about it a moment, logically.  Companies in a competitive capitalist society exist to maximize profits. If they could save all that money by hiring “low-pay” women, why would they hire any “high-pay” men?  Obviously there is more at play here than is ever stated by women’s lobbies, including companies just trying to stay in business with an effective and reliable workforce in the real world.)

No one is forcing American women to do anything.  Women have a very wide range of rights and choices.  Men are NOT responsible for the choices women make, or for any income disparity that may or may not exist between the two genders.  An actually careful study conducted in 19 US metropolitan areas in 2012 found that women working full time were earning an astounding 119% of the earnings of men working full time, and steadily rising – a natural consequence of the female-dominated public school industry ensuring university degrees for twice as many women as men every year for the past quarter of a century (and this, too, is steadily rising).  (Victims wallow in their self-proclaimed victimhood so as to dodge responsibility, and accountability.)  And those incomes don’t include all the subsidies women get from working men, subsidies originally instituted when American women actually EARNED them by doing far more important things, outside the marketplace.

After the humongous one-third subsidies they’ve long received from men under both Social Security and Medicare, they’ve just scored really huge additional subsidies from men under Prescription Drugs and ‘Obamacare”, too.  Next up: “free” pre-school day care paid by “someone else” (mostly by those who make responsible choices) for their one designer child needed to “earn their stripes”.  With all those subsidies and all that farming out to others of things they were once actually good at, you have to wonder just what American women now actually contribute to all of us, what use they actually are.  They certainly are NOT worth such exorbitant extra costs.  Next to the “health” industry needed to care for those improperly “raised” people who no longer know how to remain healthy in the richest society on Earth, the biggest US growth industry is that doing things that women once did for themselves, only much better.  And an industry of which they have always been in total control, the most expensive public “education” industry in world history, continually performs at ever worse Third World levels, and most especially for boys.  (Are women “advancing” on the purposefully crippled minds of boys?)

American women have long been the most pampered, the most protected, the most promoted, the most privileged and the most powerful group on the planet.  They and their lobbies have decided every election in America since 1980.  They have a million rights and no responsibilities.  Still relying on the long-gone image of “mom and apple pie”, their total compensation for full time employment is now nearly twice that of men, depending on which free choices they make.  But as far as I can see they are today just more schmucks in the arena, but extremely privileged schmucks, and still whining, still complaining, still demanding – as if it were still 1813.

And who needs that?  Certainly not any society based on equality, steadily sinking under all that dead weight not even paying full fare.  Sometimes, after you’ve been listening to this same stupid stuff every day for fifty years, three generations, you just want to stand up and scream, “Shut up!  And DO something!  Before we ALL go belly up!  It’s NOT about “me”.  It’s about “us”.  ALL of us!  What have you EVER done for the OTHER half of us?! And that includes our boys!  Our grandchildren can no longer afford you!”