“I read Kay Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, recently. ... I do believe Hymowitz tried to be sensitive to the plight of today’s men, but the book presents as being more concerned about how men fit into the world of women rather than how men actually feel themselves.”
“According to Hymowitz, these child-men are all used to a freewheeling life of going from girl to girl and video game to video game. Hymowitz mistakenly believes that men are suffering from the limits of American individualism.
Though she reluctantly admits that the “materials available to young men are meager, and what is available contradicts itself,” she comes up with this ridiculous conclusion: “At bottom, they are too free, a fact epitomized by their undefined, open-ended, and profoundly autonomous pre-adulthood.” She ends the book suggesting that young women will have to get a better understanding of the limitations imposed by their bodies (Huh?) and young men need to man up.
My question to her: Why should they?
What do you have to offer these men you call child-men if they do man up? Are you going to ensure that they have fair access to their children should they divorce? Will you make sure that they aren’t hauled off to jail if the wife makes false accusations of domestic violence? Will you let them keep the earnings and property that they worked for over years rather than have them turned over to their wife, even if she cheated and was abusive? Will you shield the millions of men who live in fear of their significant other but have nowhere to turn for help? Will you make marriage, in other words, as valuable to men as you think it is for women?”
All too true. After reading Dr. Smith’s article, I am reminded of the fact that feminism is wrong not so much in what they say about the ‘patriarchy’ but in what they don’t say. What feminists neglect to mention is that in a traditional society, women have a huge normative role in male behaviour with the choices that they make: if you aren’t a stable, responsible, hard-working man (i.e. if you aren’t good-provider material), you don’t get to be married and therefore you don’t get sex.
But after trashing traditional marriage and/or making its cost exceed its benefit to men, is it any surprise that men aren’t interested in marriage any more? So men become slackers.
Feminists make things worse by telling women its OK to be a slut. They think they are doing women a favour by empowering them, but they are not. They are actually disempowering women by taking the power they used to have in controlling negative male behaviour away from them. Freeing men to be pump-and-dump, alpha male cads.
Who is all this good for?
Not men.
Not women.
Not society.
But this is what you get when you replace customs and traditions that have evolved over a long period of time with a theory concocted by ivory tower intellectuals.
It really tees me off when I think back to my youth when I had to wine 'em and dine 'em. Where was all this when I was a young guy? I wouldn't have had to work; if my latest love interest was no longer able to support me in the style to which I wished to become accustomed, I could simply pack up and leave; i could have lived a life with no responsibilities. Where was the feminist movement when I needed it, and why were all us guys so stupid as not to have encouraged it sooner?
Posted by: Powell Lucas | February 24, 2011 at 02:13 PM
your bang on in your assessment there Cinncinatus.
i am irritated to no end when i hear some loser with a lib arts degree or social science bachelor telling us how society should work rather than just leaving us all alone and letting society be.
these people create policies to fix the previous policy and when that one fails they attempt to fix it again. they never think of taking away these policies and letting natural law reassert itself. the family is not free and that is why its in trouble.
Posted by: brad | February 24, 2011 at 09:43 PM