What’s the story?
Let me pitch it.
There’s this guy—he’s massive; tall, muscles, good looking, on an airplane. Terrorists take control; he stands up to them—courage. This guy’s got it. A woman is watching—he saves her life; he saves everyone’s life—and she falls for him. She’s, like a gender studies professor, or some shit like that (he never went to college—built his own life). They hook up. One evening—at a dinner party, say—she has her friends over and asks him to read a section of her poetic work. He refuses—agitated by her demands; gets angry. (There’s gonna be a bidding war for this one, I tell ya’.) Her friends say he’s misogynist because he won’t read her work; but, you see, there’s been hints all long in the movie about him; and they didn’t see the hints. Hints. Wait for it. Are you ready? He screams out: “I don’t know how to read!” Got that? He never learned to read as a kid. This guy—courage, good-looking, hunk, solid—built his own house, farms his own land, carves his own furniture—but he never learned to read. Together, they work it through, overcoming his stoicism; teaching him to feel his pain, own his shame. Big scene at the end when he tries to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 47 to her, for the first time—stuttering over words. He proclaims his devotion to her. Cut to romantic music; fade to black; roll the credits; accept the Oscar.
Am I right?
Let’s green light that one.
Another one?
This guy—same kind’a guy: morally remote; hard to read, you feel his pain—sits on a ledge over NYC, ready to jump. We call the movie “That Day” —working title. His therapist comes to sit by his side on the ledge—she’s all decked out for some formal dinner she was at. She leaves the boring dinner to be with him; to save him. He threatens to take her with him when he jumps. He shouts that “no one knows what I saw that day.” She tries to tell him he is a good man, despite what happened “that day.” She shouts at him “Tell me what happened that day.” He shouts back “I can’t say the words about that day.” Fade to darkness. Screen fades black as he begins to tell the story, on the ledge, on a cold night in NYC, of what happened, on “That Day.” In a movie theater, sitting between the flickering frames of light and dark, poised on a pinhead, flashes of explosions, black silence, caves of hostages, black silence, blood on grass, black silence, firefight, black silence, impacting bullets, black silence, gore, death. That Day. How he saved the lives of girls kidnapped by Boko Haram or, say in Kandahar, and witnessed something horrifying—some baby killed or some shit; shot in the brain—all his Navy Seal buddies dead. PTSD. The Fisher King meets Full Metal Jacket. He comes back from war, clamps down, stifles his emotions, stoicism; he wanders the streets of NYC alone, Army awards him Medal of Honor but only if he sees a special therapist—they pick her. Will the war in his head will ever end—this war that brought him to the brink of sanity on a ledge of masculine loneliness, jumping to conclusions. At the end of the movie, on the ledge, he says to her, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.
He says to her, “You made me a better man.”
Let me thank the Academy—again.
Let me pitch you one more—just one more.
This guy—stoic, strong, confident, poised—has to fight to find his home through life’s obstacles. He perseveres, he grows; on his own—no one to help him. He teaches himself how to be a better man.
Trifecta, right?
Give me another Oscar.
What? No?
Why not?
But that last one is the story of Odysseus. Homer. The Odyssey.
Not interested?
It’s the greatest story ever told.
Like these…
The Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Hamlet, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, Gulliver’s Travels, Catch-22, Candide, Invisible Man, The Aeneid, Oedipus the King, The Magic Mountain, The Old Man and the Sea.
The media no longer shows men conquering themselves. It shows men damaged; fixed by women; fractured into masculinities, reinterpreted and redesigned.
How did this happen?
Hollywood did it—stretching back 100 years because that is what women wanted to see on the silver screen.
Why did this happen?
So that some men could climb on the backs of the good ones.
Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer? Fuck ‘em all to hell. They made their bed sidling up to a mediocre media, maligning masculinity, kissing matriarchy’s ass, throwing decent men under the bus, as they climbed their ladder. Yes, they were men (we must own the damage that some men did to masculinity), but women were the consumers of Hollywood’s assault on men. Harlequin is still doing it—and they still don’t call it verbal porn.
Then what story should we tell our boys?
The only story that ever was.
The one about the dragon.
The darkest demon of all.
The dark side of testosterone.
When a man conquers testosterone, he conquers himself.
It’s a horrifying hormone.
It’s a destructive hormone.
It’s a magnificent hormone.
It’s a creative hormone.
It’s a dragon.
All boys feel the restlessness of that continuous surging and ebbing of testosterone that they make in their body, not inject once a month to enable an impulse transition. Long before he knows it is testosterone, he senses the continuity of that flow. Huck Finn knew the flow—it made him sail the Mississippi. Only a brotherhood can guide men to redirect the flow and channel it as a force for good.
Feminists insisted the old stories were about toxic masculinity. Then they believed their lies. They created the fiction. Then, in their envy, took a magnifying glass to a handful of men, using that exaggeration as a self-aggrandizing crucifixion of masculinity (not talking good women, here; talking toxic feminism; there’s a difference as you know—perhaps feminists did more damage to women).
The average man has always held the bad in check—kept the testosterone dragon in its cave. We didn’t need the help of toxic feminists to do this (we never asked for their femsplaining, either); just like feminists say they don’t need mansplaining, or manspreading or manslamming or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah —whatever the fuck they’re whining about now. Toxic feminists kicked the decent man in this shins when he was distracted, and the dragon has escaped. They are to blame for the Harvey Weinsteins and Rose McGowans—the johns and their prostitutes (except that Weinstein’s “whores” called for a script revision: now they are “victims”).
The average man was telling good stories, before the feminists swapped in toxic masculinity after they got tired of the rom-coms they previously swapped.
You got mail?
No, brother.
You get male.
Take back the beauty and power of your sex.
Say it aloud: “masculinity created civilization.”
“But women did not get the chance,” they whine.
Masculinity created civilization.
Toxic feminists will accuse you of sexist indifference to what their fictional script revision say they did.
Masculinity created civilization.
“But men are born of women,” they remind you, expecting you to genuflect.
Masculinity created civilization.
“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” feminists roar.
Masculinity created civilization.
All the seven seas, the hearts of darkness, the revenants hunting their down their anger in the wilderness of North America, are allegories, for men, to redirect testosterone’s surges and channel it for the good. We need these old stories, written yet again for a population deafened by feminism’s self-indulgent whine of “me, me, me, me, me, it’s all about me, it’s only about me.”
Feminists have convinced themselves men’s stories are war stories because they don’t know what those stories were about. Our stories were never about the enemy without, but the enemy within.
Feminists lied—that is all they do.
Today, feminists urge college men not to get male, but to get Gillette, while demanding men respect women.
Respect women?
Not on your life.
I’d just as soon respect a rock.
Respect is earned; and rocks don’t earn it. Some men do, some women do.
Only toxic feminists and their insatiable egos demand unearned respect.
Teach your sons to respect the achievements of masculinity (and femininity).
Teach them to love being male. This will make them a better man.
Respect masculinity as an ideal, a goal, an aspiration; respect the people you wish to emulate. Everyone else, you treat with civility.
The American Psychological Association suggests that if a man insists he is not masculine, that that is masculinity, too. WTF? This validates the void story—for them, there is no story; they are busy re-pitching and ditching masculinity. They say there are masculinities. Just the word itself sounds like feminist toxicity—do you see their duplicity? Femininity vs. Masculinities: they keep the singular for themselves; for us, they assign the plural.
There are no masculinities—that is a feminist fiction to fracture the brother hood (divide and conquer). There is one masculinity, one story—a diamond; with facets, good and bad—both one and the same: the creator and the destroyer of civilization (not life—good women do that), the worker and the leader are one, in each of us.
Masculinity is the penis, the testicles, the prostate, the testosterone, the ejaculation, the heaving chest in orgasm, the man loving his good woman (or his man), the father, the soldier and the dancer (their stories: gay and straight; we must welcome gay men into our circle to destroy the feminist scourge) the muscles that caress a flower’s petal and which eases the earthly descent of an autumn leaf, snowflake or a meteor; the mind and hand that created almost all the art, science, music and engineering (that’s non-fiction); the self-reflecting stoicism (toxically redefined as loneliness in their world), on a cliff overlooking the city that history built.
What story?
His story.
This story: treat other men as you wish them to treat you—like a brother: black, white, straight or gay; male friends matter.
Then live your life as you want and write your story to share with your brothers (feminists have their fingers in their ears and up their ass).
Fuck feminism.
Fuck Hollywood.
Fuck the media and her matriarchal writers (they never learned to code).
Fuck Oscar Night. On that night, read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”
It’s not about a green knight.
What’s it about?
It’s about boys.
What’s the story?
Let me pitch it.
Boys will be boys.
