I’ve already taken Antiwar.com to task in a couple of previous articles, and unfortunately, I feel the need to do it again. I fear that harping on one particular website may become repetitive, but at least the repeat of the offense is highly instructive. Therefore, before I point out what is becoming increasingly obvious, I’d like to side-step the major points of two articles at Antiwar (one linked and one original), a third article from a blog that is frequently linked from Antiwar, and point out the most infuriating parts of each. I single out this website because I visit it frequently, but what I am finding is not the fault of Antiwar. It is deeply ingrained in the culture. Thus, it is inevitable that it will reveal itself in the words of thinkers who have obviously never had to think much about misandry.
The first article is by Noam Chomsky and was linked from Antiwar’s homepage. Much of it is taken up with articulating historical points that have been buried and forgotten concerning the Vietnam War. Not having studied or verified any of these particular points, I cannot say whether I agree or not, but I do find it provocative.
I find it even more interesting that he was able to work in the Founding Fathers, and the unavoidable fact that what they had in mind was an idea of freedom married with a particular view of prosperity in keeping with ancient English law and philosophy. In other words, Chomsky claims (and I also believe) that what the Constitution enshrines as the bullet points of “freedom” was not originally designed to include certain groups of people. Chomsky is factually correct when he says, “Native Americans were not persons. Neither were slaves.” True. Even as late as the Dred Scott Decision, the best and brightest that the Federal government supposedly had to offer wondered aloud for all to hear: “Can a negro [sic], whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied [sic] by that instrument to the citizen?” Try saying that at a cocktail party with a straight face.
The native tribes were pushed off the land they needed to survive, the buffalo they needed for basic necessities quite possibly made endangered deliberately. Dred Scott, a dude, fought and fought and fought for the opportunity to be left alone, and didn’t just fight for himself, but for his loved ones, both male and female. Punishments for slaves who were noncompliant were severe and unconscionable. So far I’m digging what this Leftist has to say.
And then, like so many other Leftists swallowed whole by feminists and misandrists, he says, “Women were scarcely persons.”
Really? Scarcely? How so? Were their buffalo slaughtered? Were they pushed as a group onto “reservations,” to be made into drunkards? If any American women of the eighteenth or nineteenth century wanted to leave the house or the grounds without permission, were they whipped and beaten? Were they made to work all day against their will? Were they brought from another continent on ships where the smell of shit, piss, and vomit was so extreme that the men who worked on the ship refused to go down to their holding cells? Were they paraded around naked at Caribbean auctions? Did somebody ransack their teepees and longhouses? Were they given blankets with small pox so that they would just hurry up and die? Were they routinely referred to as “savages,” and “n*ggers”?
Only if the women in question fit into those subcategories as well, and probably less often than the men.
When one spends just 30 seconds thinking about that last sentence of his, about the “non-personhood” of women, in the context of an article where Chomsky points out that “the bombing of rural Cambodia, surpass[ed] the level of all Allied bombing in the Pacific theater during World War II,” it becomes, in every way except grammatical, a thoroughly indefensible statement. The supposed oppression of women simply does not compare to wiping out Cambodia – men, women, boys, and girls – from the air. This, like more and more of what I encounter written and linked at Antiwar, is just too painful. All that Chomsky is doing with that sentence is repeating a cultural shibboleth that has no basis in fact. Furthermore, by doing it, he is doing his own sex no favors.
He is not alone in the anti-war crowd, and most certainly not alone among men. Arthur Silber is also a writer frequently linked from Antiwar. In an article on the myths surrounding American immigrants, and in keeping with this great cultural myth about women, he wrote: “…that is, they are willing to be ‘Americanized,’ self-reliant, and independent in the mode adopted specifically by the ruling class in America — which is to say, by affluent, white (and until very recently, exclusively male) Americans, who have always determined the particular content of the term, ‘American.’” As if women had no say in the matter. As if no woman was consulted. As if not a single wife of a single Founding Father spoke up at the dinner table, or in bed. As if not a single female was allowed to enjoy the fruits of those precious votes.
Two otherwise extraordinarily intelligent men seem to forget something significant, and, unlike the above cultural tenets, very true: It is men who do the dirty work. When you want smelly immigrants/Negroes/tribesmen to stay away, it is men who will do your bidding. It is men and women who will give their consent – vocally, politically, mentally, emotionally, and even sexually – to the men doing the dirty work of empire and coercion. It reminds me of an episode of “WKRP in Cincinnati”, where the radio station’s sales manager Herb Tarlek complains about his wife: “She thinks sex is a reward: [in falsetto] ‘C’mon, Herb. Mow the lawn, or no num-nums tonight! Uh-huh, uh-huh!’”
The reason two men who know a lot about the state’s hidden history know next to nothing about herstory is because the women, by choice, are usually not out in front doing. This isn’t like the glass ceiling or its Patriarchy, neither of which can be proven. This is, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, self-evident. Women, for the most part, prefer to stay behind the scenes, where they wield more power than Chomsky and Silber can imagine.
The occasional portrayal of brutality toward women, frequently from other cultures (for a reason) and oftentimes cultures with which the ruling elite of this land mass wish to make war, is trumpeted loud and clear after it is conveniently filtered from what is happening to the men; the women who are influencing the men who are out in front doing are silent (just about the time that the whole brass section falls silent) and in the background. Too busy shopping.
But there is another phenomenon at work while a falsehood whips its way around the world at light speed. Original Antiwar writer Kelly Vlahos, to her credit, does not repeat any pointless platitudes like “Women were scarcely persons.” However, in an article talking about adverse medical problems suffered by many veterans, the word “men” appears three times, once in reference to two male doctors who are discovering something they call “Iraq-Afghanistan War lung injury.” Thus, one time that the word is used is not in connection to victimhood. The two other times it is used, it does indeed concern the medical problems suffered by victimized veterans, but then it is simultaneously and deliberately included with “women” (just so we don’t leave any of our plucky little gals out of the victim narrative).
Even though the article is about veterans’ issues, and even though the vast majority of veterans are men, absent one anecdotal story of one male veteran — and a sprinkling of the words “he” and “his” here and there — the rest of the language used to describe those who suffer is littered with sex-neutral words: veterans, soldiers, people, servicemembers, individuals, etc. Interestingly enough, the first link in Vlahos’s article, concerning “the high suicide rate among veterans [emphasis mine],” does not make the same unthinking slight: “The suicide rate among 18- to 29-year-old men who’ve left the military has gone up significantly [emphasis mine].” I bring up these articles in order to point out two of the central memes of our rotting cultural muck, for which these articles have provided ample evidence, even though they are about other subjects:
1. Women have always been the victims of men.
2. Men can seldom be victims as men; merely as sexless people.
I am sure that if you look back in history, you will find evidence of women being put down as inferior in certain circles, having property taken by a court, and being denied the opportunity to vote. I am also sure that if you look back in history, the same history that Chomsky decries in his article as being “unhistory,” you will find evidence of men being put down as inferior in certain circles, having property taken by a court, and being denied the opportunity to vote. Furthermore, I am dead certain that, like the use of racial epithets, you will find examples that affect men or even married couples more than women.
Chomsky probably believes as most others do, that women who wanted the “right” to vote were just like Glynis Johns in Mary Poppins, innocently throwing eggs at the Prime Minister in her off hours. (Speaking of Mary Poppins, I’d like to know why the father is the only one to get a lecture in that movie, since neither parent shows much of an interest in the kids. Beyond that, what is the mother doing hiring a nanny, a cook, and a maid, when she has two adorable kids, a gorgeous house her husband worked hard to obtain, and no need for a day job?) How was the denial of the vote to women close to anything that native tribes and people with dark brown skin have suffered with? Were the latter two groups whipped, beaten and exterminated because they didn’t have access to the polls?
Suffragettes were indeed arrested, imprisoned, and force-fed. But please keep in mind that “[b]y 1912 women still didn’t have equal [sic] voting rights with men and the suffragettes launched a more violent campaign that initially involved smashing shop windows. Eventually this campaign escalated to burning stately homes and even bombing Westminster Abbey [emphasis yikes].” Violent children often throw tantrums. Violent adults often end up in prison. I don’t believe they should be force-fed or tortured, but the suffering of women arrested in this regard does not compare to extermination and enslavement. They were not protesting, like black and native peoples, because of the harsh treatment they received; they received the harsh treatment because of their violent protests. Regardless, it takes center stage in the third wave act of Victim Theater.
The suffering allegedly suffered by post-suffragette women does not necessarily need to be widespread or statistically impressive. It just needs an audience, which men readily provide due to their sexual and social programming. Then the first statement – “Women have always been the victims of men” – can be true, even if it’s not technically, contextually, or even literally true. It can be “true” in the sense that it makes you feel good to say it: Women have always been the victims of men.
The second meme – Men can never be victims as men; only as sexless people – is so fucking easy that it needs no explanation. Just read Vlahos’s article again and try not to shake your head. Here are a whole bunch of things that routinely happen to boys and not girls that I’m sure have escaped Ms. Vlahos:
1. Rough and tumble play, which is more likely to end you up with scrapes, bleeding wounds, and broken limbs.
2. Teasing, oftentimes physical, as a form of bonding and insult.
3. Being told by a great many adults (both male and female) to clam up, take it, deal with it, you’re on your own, etc.
4. Violent fantasies geared toward males in video games, television, and cinema.
5. Social stigma coupled with evolutionary impulse to protect women and children, especially female children, and violently so. The more impressive the violence, the better.
6. A government schooling environment that seems more stifling, since it hardly involves any physical activity, and now includes being legally drugged into submission.
7. Erections that, for the first few years, won’t go away through willpower alone, making sexual arousal visible to others. (A woman’s sexual arousal is always and everywhere easily hidden.)
8. Growing up in a culture that singles out members of your sex for derision when their genitals are mutilated. When the culture isn’t doing that, it’s shaming you for continued possession of the same.
9. A serious lack of access to older members of your sex, with boys subdivided all day long and lectured to by women, unilateral divorce with preference for the mother, and a culture that is suspicious of single men who spend time with boys.
All this suffering, in keeping with what is learned at an early age due to #3, is suffered in silence. No trying to burn down Westminster Abbey. No throwing eggs at anyone. No handing out feathers. No call to get your “representative” to actually represent a single one of your views. No buttons and pins. No marches in the streets. Just quiet suffering as you show everyone else in your platoon that you’re just as much of a man as they are. There is no comparable contest of femininity for females. If a woman or girl feels like being weak or just admitting weakness, most other women will rush to support her, making her feel like she belongs. A man is far more likely to be left behind by the other men, if there’s even a group of men to belong to; hence, the manly suicides in the military, as opposed to the small number of female ones.
But we can’t even talk about possible root causes of all this suffering if we are not permitted to divulge the sex shared by the sufferers. Once we are able, we can take the above nine phenomena and link them to the second cultural truism: “Men can seldom be victims as men; merely as sexless people.” How true is that truism now?
The truth is that once the culture creates a certain level of hatred toward any category of humanity, actual victimhood is probably not far behind. What the culture hates will simply not grow. Watch this rather odd but very revealing collage of semen samples from NBC’s “Law & Order: SVU”. It confirmed what I suspected from watching a spare minute of this awful program every once in a while. Every time I chanced upon seeing a bit of it, someone somewhere said “semen.”
Now, think about that. This is a show that has been on the air for more than a decade, a spin-off from another program more than two decades long, dedicated to entertaining millions of Americans every week using salacious, graphic language about terrible crimes. Semen. Semen stains. Semen samples. Semen on a dead body. Crime. Law, order, crime, and semen. Am I setting up a straw man argument here? I don’t think so, but I’ll knock it down anyway.
Semen is disgusting, if I am to conclude anything from watching this program. How is it that a show that continually mentions semen in connection with horrific crime can remain so popular for over a decade? Millions watch, but virtually no one notices. It is as if the ejaculation of semen is something that the world puts up with but secretly detests. Since only men make semen; since it is usually voluntarily ejaculated except for certain cases of rape and nocturnal emissions; and since the voluntary giving of this life-giving substance is usually frequent; what are men supposed to think if the culture embraces mainstream entertainment that virtually equates semen with crime?
The conclusions we are supposed to draw seem pretty obvious to me: Women and sexless children are the victims of semen, the victims of men. Men are too quick to indulge their semen-connected desires. Pornography is directly connected to men, semen, and the oftentimes unavoidable crimes that result. Once you indulge a penis, all bets are off. Unless, of course, he’s been thoroughly trained.
Men who are raised not to take their feelings seriously will probably feel a little tinge that is quickly ignored when semen is mentioned in a silly television program. Men who are used to being teased will grin along with the giggling girls who laugh at a man whose penis is not only severed, but shredded in a garbage disposal, so that he can spend the last several decades of his life without one. Men who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in government schools will go on wistfully believing that our government doesn’t take the sex of the accused into account because, after all, that lady is blindfolded, isn’t she? Men will ignore writing like this article, because too much is being made of that which men should be able to handle. The following is a list of what men get to handle, continued from the above list of boys’ concerns:
10. The vast majority of workplace deaths.
11. A culture that takes a dim view of sexuality, especially male sexuality, including semen.
12. Shorter life expectancies.
13. A roughly equal number of prostate cancer victims to breast cancer victims, with a great deal less funding.
14. The vast majority of difficult, back-breaking, weather-beaten work (without which we’d all be living in tents and caves).
15. Fighting, dying, and being maimed for life in all wars for all states, everywhere, all the time.
16. Fulfilling all traditional male expectations in romantic relationships with women.
17. Losing in family courts on a routine basis, many times after being falsely accused of any number of semen-related crimes.
18. Keeping his mouth shut about what he can remember from 1 through 9 above, and 10 to 17 after that.
19. As a direct result of 18, a much higher suicide rate.
As far as waking up the culture to misandry, that’s a lot to tackle, and I never even wanted to play touch football. The same Silber that I mentioned above gave me the clue, however. In one of his other articles, he mentioned a book entitled Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild. I haven’t finished it, but I must confess to finding it quite inspiring thus far. It concerns the fight to end the institution of slavery, a battle that began in earnest in eighteenth-century Britain, when, according to what is written on the back of my copy, “twelve men – a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and others united by their hatred of slavery – came together in a London printing shop and began the world’s first grass-roots movement, battling for the rights of people on another continent [emphasis you-know-whose].” From the introduction (also quoted by Silber) we learn: “At the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped uniforms [like now], but of various systems of slavery or serfdom.”
In other words, eighteenth-century culture thought in terms of slavery, as our culture thinks in terms of male disposability, utility, and culpability. 12 men started the abolitionist movement. They didn’t finish it, but boy did they start it. Do we have more than 12? I think we do. And we’ve already started something, haven’t we? Perhaps someday, we’ll be able to replace those two ridiculous cultural memes with something a bit more sensible, like:
1. Women, as a group, have seldom been victims, but have far more often been protected and nourished, for the most part, by men as they were able.
2. Men as a group are victims of ingrained cultural hatred; women as a group are not.
3. You wouldn’t be reading this if some dude hadn’t ejaculated his semen years ago.
Changing a culture’s beliefs takes time, effort, and patience. I find it heartening to think that some other guy out there put together that “Law & Order” video without me ever even meeting him. What does that tell you? It tells me that the effort is already well under way. It tells me that the effort is organic and self-directed. It tells me that I am not in control of it, and that I don’t need to be. It tells me that it is gaining momentum.
It tells me that I’m not alone. I like what I’m being told.
