Holiday …

The Weather Channel girl
With her perfect weather curl
Is talking cold, cold, cold …

You can’t get out of bed,
You can’t remember what she said –
You’re feeling old, old, old …!

– Jimmy Buffett, “Holiday”

I went looking all over YouTube, in hopes of finding a video of Jimmy Buffett playing that song live with the steel-drums intro, as it’s recorded on his Meet Me In Margaritaville CD. I thought it would be the most appropriate way to break the news gently, as if the news really mattered.

For the next two weeks I’m going to take an official and declared holiday.

I’ve brought Bossa Nova, the trailer-boat, back from her parking spot at Maryland Marina to the side-street in front of my townhouse. I’m loading up the clothes, food, and other items that I figure I’ll need for a two-week trip down to Florida. I’m going to set up the “wireless tether” on my Android phone, so it can link to my laptop, and I may try to do an article or two while I’m on the road, but I plan to be busy enough that I won’t be able to keep any promises.

Bossa Nova, my funny-shaped travel trailer.

This is a good trip for me to make with Bossa Nova, as she can serve as a funny-shaped travel trailer on the way down and back. In point of fact, there are a couple of road trips I’d like to make with Bossa Nova this spring and summer – a fact I’ve used to justify keeping her for at least a couple more months. After this jaunt, though, she’s going to her new home at the marina where I keep Halcyon; it will be cheaper and more convenient to keep her there, and soon I’ll be listing her with the yacht-broker who sold me Halcyon last year.

Meanwhile, though – after the months of getting Dear Auntie settled in “Shady Pines,” of clearing out and cleaning up her old house, of getting it on the market and getting it sold – plus the incidental work I did on Halcyon, and the work I’m starting on my own abode – I think I damn-well deserve a holiday.

So take a holiday …
You need a holiday …
Grab a pack and hit the trail,
Hoist your sail and wind up in some moonlight bay!

——————————

Food for thought – a few good posts, not all of ’em new:

You Are Not A Princess! (A Shrink For Men, 15 Dec 2009) – Dr. Tara Palmatier lists twenty-five points for men and women to consider. A common thread – respect, don’t just expect.

Despite All the Risks – Why Young Men Still Get Married (The Spearhead, 26 Mar 2012) – “…with feminist divorce and child support laws, buying the cow costs so much the cow could end up owning YOU.”

How feminists define gender traits (A Voice For Men, 23 Mar 12) points at the most succinct statement of the feminist creed – “woman good, man bad” – and opens it out with a simple chart to reveal what sorts of behavior are labeled as “innate” and what sorts are “learned.” The author follows it up with Alleged “gender-based” treatment (AVfM, 25 Mar 2012) … and how much deeper will we go, down the rabbit hole?

MISOGYNY – Designated Victims and the Poisoned Benefits (GendErratic, 21 Mar 2012) elucidates the origin and structure of “victim culture” from a simple postulate – “Typhon’s Law : Men are seen as agents and women as patients.”

Daddy’s little princess (The Sanctuary, 25 Mar 2012) goes with Failure to launch and the Mama’s boy (16 Mar) – both targeting “the sins of the parents” that seem to be driving our culture to dysfunction, one child at a time. (I admire Spacetraveller for the way she is building on related themes!)

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Female limitations, male obligations

(The title of this post is from a comment to Lessons from nature: Brain in a vat, A Voice For Men, 27 Jan 2012.)

The Feminist Narrative, for the past fifty years, has been that “Women are strong, Women are independent. Anything men can do, Women can do better. Women are powerful, and men are obsolete!”  Funny thing, though; it’s a narrative that is way too apt to break down when something goes wrong – when a car won’t start, or the lights go out, or the plumbing gives trouble, or a small and unwelcome creature shows up in a particularly unwelcome space.

All of a sudden, “strength” gives way to timidity. “Independence” gives way to “I don’t know what to do.” And “men’s obsolescence” gives way to “Please, Mister, please help me!”

When Woman reaches her limitations, there the matter becomes one of male obligations. Whether it’s a matter that requires technical proficiency, or fearful distaste, or actual danger, the matter suddenly becomes A Job For A … man.

(In a fashion reminiscent of the scene from Blazing Saddles, where the Mayor introduced Cleavon Little as “Our New …” Yeah. That scene.)

There are exceptions; there are exceptional women.

A woman who really, truly, has no man to help her, will buckle down and solve the problems that would usually “take a man.” My own best example comes from a couple of women who have sailed solo around the world – Naomi James, Tania Aebi, Jessica Watson, and most honorably Dame Ellen MacArthur KBE, who won her knighthood by breaking the “solo around the world” record. When you read their accounts, you find them using sea-sense and common-sense and grit and everything “a man” would do, to handle their problems and rescue themselves from near-catastrophe.  And I name these heroines because they brought their sailboats home, safe, to harbor. They put their signatures on history, in a form & style of achievement that I am exploring for my own future. I would feel privileged to sit at their feet and learn what I could from them – but solely because they are sailors who have accomplished something that (so far) is only my dream.

Today’s polemic has a superficial polish of “woman-power,” but when you look closely it becomes apparent that “women are powerful where they feel empowered.” For example, take a look at any of the construction sites you’re apt to see in your city during the upcoming summer. How many women do you see on the job? Typically, you might see a woman working as “flag-man,” holding a “STOP/SLOW” sign to split-off the traffic on a single lane while the big burly men do the muscle-work (and the power-equipment work) on the closed lane.

Are “the ladies” limited to this job because of The Patriarchy? Hear the hollow laughter! They are limited by their strength and their stamina, and/or their willingness and serious desire to learn to run the power equipment.

So, where the ladies will not go, the men are obliged to go.  The men are obliged to do the arduous, gritty, dangerous tasks on the work-site; and “the ladies” raise a constant, deafening hue-and-cry because “those dirty men” get paid for their muscle, their strength, and their risk. “Equal pay for equal work” means, to them, that “waving a flag” should be paid as well as rolling out hot asphalt on the road-bed.

This is just a small and easily-observed facet of the problem of “female limitations” and concurrent “male obligations”.

I can get along easily with the truth: If a woman can’t do it, a man must.

What offends me is that the woman who can’t do it treats the man who does it with such contempt, such suspicion, such animosity, such enmity.

And the best response I can reason about this is –

I’ll do it for myself, or for the Grand Plan, but not for you, Cupcake!

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What Obligation?

A recent post on A Voice For Men elicited this quote in one of its responses:

“What obligation, if any, do women feel they have to men?”

It’s a key question – and a reversible question: “What obligation, if any, do men feel they have to women?”

When I look back over my life, it appears to me that I have (had) an obligation to those women who helped raise me to adulthood: my mother (who hosted fetus-me to term, and nurtured me as best she could from birth to adulthood), my grandmother (the materfamilias of the household in which I grew up), and my aunt (who was the owner of my boyhood home). I discharged my perceived obligation to the best of my ability, in regards to Mom and Grammy; and I am doing so, in a fashion tempered by old wounds and wrongs, for Dear Auntie.

Do I have an obligation to any other woman, beyond common civility and “doing unto others as I would want them to do unto me”? No. More pointedly, I have no obligation beyond the civility I’d accord to a man.

And I don’t even expect “common civility” from a woman! I only offer “common civility” for my own amour-propre – the social-mechanistic price I exact upon myself for my own self-respect.

Now, to return to the original statement – “What obligation, if any, do women feel they have to men?” – I will answer from my own observations: Damn if I know. I haven’t perceived any evidence that Team Womyn sees “obligation” as other than a one-way street; perceives, that is, that “obligation” is something a man has toward Womynhood Enthroned. Or maybe that “men are obliged” to atone for the actions, the support, the behavior, the white-knight favoritism, that Femmunism has re-defined as “oppression.”

Ma’am, if you define “oppression” as holding the door open for you, I will note that I hold the door open for anyone – after I’ve gone through it. But if you define “oppression” as not throwing myself down face-first in a mud puddle so you can use me as a stepping-stone – well, I offer a pepper-greased dildo for you, and a burr under the saddle-blanket for the horse you rode in on.

I’d use the time-honored phrase “fuck you and the horse you rode in on” – but I wouldn’t fuck you with a generic dick, and I have more respect for the horse!

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Victim Power!

One of the major things I see as raising Civilization above mob rule is justice. Please note that I don’t say “law” – I say “justice,” because justice and law are not the same.

Justice, to me, starts with what the Rig-Veda calls “karma.” Let’s not get into the religious ramifications of karma; I’d prefer to use it as shorthand for “what goes around comes around.” You reap what you sow. Take care of your family, your friends, your neighbors – and they’ll take care of you. Screw people over, and you’ll get screwed over, somehow, in turn. Not necessarily directly, and not necessarily “from outside;” our lives will balance things out, and I would rather put more “good” out into the world just for the sake of having more good in the world.

My definition of justice goes on to include the notion that the “little guy” gets justice, too. The wealthy, the powerful, have no more of those “inalienable rights … (to) life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” than the poor, the humble, the powerless. Might does not make right, to put it simply; not might of arms, nor might of power, nor might of wealth.

Nor might of law. In my own naive opinion, “law” should be a code to clarify the Rights of the Individual and the less-definable Rights of the Community, and a system to judge disputes and determine which party – plaintiff or defendant – actually is right. I say “should” because that’s not what I see in law, in this society, today.

What I see instead, in law, are politics, and special interests, and a self-perpetuating system that’s all about more laws. And more special-interests. And more work for more lawyers, for more judges, for more policemen. And no longer to “support Justice,” but to support the Rights Of The Victim.

With special emphasis on Defining The Victim. 

One of the great sea-changes in modern law has been that of expanding the case from the individual, here-and-now circumstances to the inclusion of “historical wrongs” as a matter of current jurisprudence. It’s not enough, say the jurists, that an individual should atone for his own wrongs against another individual. Now it’s regarded as “right” that an individual should atone for the wrongs visited by his imputed ancestors against the ancestors of a “historically victimized” group. Since a long-dead group of my genotype, call us “Group C,” once oppressed a long-dead group of (let’s call them) “Group I” – the current members of “Group I” see fit to blame me and my current members of “Group C” for those historical wrongs; and the courts look favorably on their case.

This has led to the remarkable situation I call “Victim Power”. I describe this as “the empowerment, the special regard, the grants of special aid and special advantage, that should be afforded the Historical Victim in any, every, and all situations that might imply or include the existence of an Historical Oppressor.”

Victim Power does have some constraints, though, to its utility. The “Historical Victim” must have a “history of oppression” to point out, in order to make the case. The group must be able to hold up evidence that they are still suffering, somehow, from this “oppression”. To maintain their case, they generally must portray themselves as “helpless,” “manipulated,” “held down” by the Oppressor Class, even as they insist that they “could do it all if it weren’t for the machinations of those Oppressors!”

This works pretty well, for a while, if you have a Historical Oppressor. If someone actually invaded your land, killed your grandfathers, imposed their rule, and continue to exploit you in a blatantly-unfair system, or one you can allege is “blatantly unfair,” you’ve got a case. You can find champions, you can win redress … for as long as you continue to be obviously “downtrodden.” This doesn’t work any more, though, when you and your “fellow victims” get to the point where you’re living better than your supposed “oppressors”.

What’s a victim to do, when they’ve won way more than they ever lost?  Could you enjoy your victory and live well on the fruits of it? Worse yet, what happens to your champion; can he live on your sincere appreciation alone, after he’s won the day for you?

Apparently not. The “victim business” is just too lucrative. Our society takes very good care of “victims,” so it’s worth a lot to maintain your “victim” status.

The answer, apparently, is to show off more ways that you’re a victim; to display more and more-varied ways of oppression, to allege that you’re still oppressed, to stretch the shadow of your Victimhood as far as you possibly can imagine. And if you can’t point out your “victimhood” any more – because you have been so much, so often, so long the Actual Victor – then you’ll just have to resort to inventing oppression, even to the point of using a tiny slur to justify firestorms of public outrage. Piling up that outrage, then piling up others’ response to your own outrageous acts to present it as more and more outrage – piling Ossa upon Pelion, to be classical about it.

Probably the most successful “Professional Victims” in the modern world are women. Team Womyn have turned generosity into obligation, well-intended advice into deadly insults, their own blatantly-felonious wrongs into “justified response,” and the privilege of a tiny, tiny few into “obvious discrimination.”

Victim Power is, now, the societally-sanctioned axiom that “It’s all the Man’s fault.” And it continues to be used as the false front of a system that is reaching beyond Equal Rights – and for Women’s Supremacy.

There is a certain irony that the State where I grew up, the Commonwealth of Virginia, used Victim Power (though maybe not so blatantly labeled) in its State Seal, which is slightly modified in this graphic. I have not used the new Politically Correct version, devised by recent Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to hide the “wardrobe failure” of the original seal. I prefer to be honest:

“The New Tyrant” is among us, and she does indeed have tits.

____________________

A Few Good Links:

Cause and Blame: The Myth of Victim Blaming (Constitutional Daily, 1 Oct 2011) points out the fallacy of holding up a well-meaning individual’s advice as a “shaming tactic.”

False Victimhood (A Voice For Men, 19 March 2012) is another article that prompted me to publish this one. I’d kept it “on the spike” for a while …

Divorced Dads and Little League (The Spearhead, 20 Mar 2012) is a great example of Victim Power in operation, with the Tearful Concerned Ex-Wife contriving to slap an Emergency Order of Protection on her ex-husband expressly to deny him from even coaching their son’s Little League team.

The Fundamental Cause of Feminism(In Mala Fide, 21 Mar 2012) – “Society is an apparatus for providing women with resources.” This ensures survival in a world of scarcity – but what does it do in a world of abundance?

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Expensive Toys

There is a saying familiar to women everywhere, and this one isn’t even (all that) misandric:

“The difference between men and little boys is the price of their toys.”

I represent that remark … so much so that if some little-old-lady type made a needlepoint sampler of it to needle me, I’d frame it in the place of honor in the main salon of my boat. I can count my own expensive toys on the fingers of – oh, and my toes, too – say, can I borrow a couple of extra hands for that count? No, I’m just joking; just barely joking.

There’s my “economy” car that Mitsubishi tarted up as a rag-top roadster. (It gets 30 mpg, same as a contemporary Galant.) There was the Snowbird, a Piper Tri-Pacer airplane that carried my Mom and myself on many a hundred-dollar hamburger ride. There’s the scuba gear – tanks, fins, regulators, buoyancy-compensator pack, and custom-fitted wetsuit; at least I didn’t go “technical,” as that amount of scuba-gear would pile up price-tags of three to five times as much as what I’ve got now.

And there’s a succession of boats, culminating now with my Bristol 29.9, “Halcyon.” Which is, itself, a more expensive toy than the rest, because it needs toys of its own. But I like to style Halcyon as “more than a toy,” because it becomes my summer cottage on the shore of the Bay … the wet side of the shore, which is even more fun.

What do I mean, “Halcyon needs toys of its own?” Well, the boat itself isn’t enough by itself. You need to equip it in order to sail it, and the way you equip it is based on the kind of sailing you’re going to do. For instance, I needed new sails this year; I wanted more ventilation, which meant opening portlights; I needed safety gear, such as my marine band walkie-talkie and a GPS satellite-navigation receiver (both of which I already had). I needed a better anchor, after the original “hook” dragged time and again in my favorite overnight anchorage. And there were a bunch of “little incidentals” that add up, over time; like the twenty yards of Sunbrella upholstery material that I got for $4.50 a yard at the Annapolis Seagoing Flea Market.  (Part of that is already the new slipcovers in Halcyon’s main salon.)

The other day, I received the “next big thing” for Halcyon: a solar-panel setup for electrical power, while I’m sailing or at anchor … or off the boat, while she’s at the dock in the marina. I’m going to put them on the “hatch garage” atop the cabin, so I held out for special rugged solar panels that won’t be hurt if I step on them. And, since I have to remove the hatch garage to install them, I also bought a new “mainsheet traveler,” or mainsail control track, which will replace the old (and, to my mind, inadequate) traveler that Bristol Yachts Inc installed on that hatch-garage when they built the boat in 1979.

There are a whole lot of things that I’d like to add, aboard Halcyon. But my “un-met friend” Fatty Goodlander – the writer who is the reason I subscribe to Cruising World Magazine – once published a “natural law” whose sensibility and rightness I cannot deny:

If it doesn’t make your boat safer or stronger, don’t buy it.

I try to follow that. I try real hard.

New sails fit in both the “safer” and “stronger” categories, as does the jiffy-reefing setup I added last September. The “mainsheet traveler” goes to “stronger;” the solar panel system, I can log as “safer” because it makes sure I can run my electronics and still start the engine tomorrow morning – or next week. The new windows? That’s a stretch; but better ventilation at anchor or at the dock may tip the balance for “safer,” and the stainless-steel and tempered-glass construction (compared to the old, cracked, crazed Plexiglas deadlights in their corroded aluminum frames) may possibly qualify, at least minimally, for “stronger.” Never mind; I’ve spent the money and it’s gone, I’m pleased as punch with the results, and I’m looking forward to that first warm summer night where the breeze through those portlights will comfort me.

There are some even-stranger “additions” that my hamster spins wildly to ratiocinate as “safer/stronger.” Like the five bottles of Cru 82 vodka that I bought and drank, this winter, so that I could use the stainless-steel bottles for stove-alcohol storage … each 750-ml “empty” will fill one Origo stove cartridge properly without over-filling, and five are enough to store a gallon of stove fuel. (Denatured alcohol is pricey – but for the price of a new propane stove, plus propane bottles and a safe way to store them, I can buy a hell of a lot of stove-alcohol.) And the Cape Horn steering system I described in Steering The Singlehanded Yacht will keep Halcyon straight on course whether I’m on the Bay – or out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  When I buy and install it.

I have to keep a balance about these “expensive toys.”

But my solo, single, MGTOW life means that Halcyon doesn’t have to compete with a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, or fiancée, or wife, or Mother Of My Children. I refer to Halcyon as “my fiberglass mistress” for fun, and because a wife would call her that – just as it’s traditional for a pilot’s wife to call his airplane “his aluminum mistress.” That’s because women set themselves into deadly-serious competition with anything that their men enjoy, or desire, or play with – animate or inanimate.

For those of you men who have girlfriends, or fiancées, or wives, or Mothers Of Your Children – I invite you, with some asperity, to add up the money you spend on your Significant Other (from courting, to maintaining, to placating and paying-off) and determine that proportion of your net income that her “maintenance” represents. I don’t doubt that you spend a greater fraction of your bottom line on “paying her off” than I spend on Halcyon.  And, though Halcyon does indeed “talk back” to me, it does so silently … and it doesn’t continue to incriminate me for past mistakes, world without end, when I learn to handle her better!

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Settlement, AKA Closure

“Closure” is an interesting term for an interesting concept in psychology, psychiatry, sociology and a whole lot of “soft ologies” that have been cooked up to explain or excuse a whole range of human damnfoolish behavior. There is an authentic fetish to “achieve closure” in such events as disasters – be they “natural” (i.e. a tornado or an earthquake) or “man-made” (a pseudonym for TERRORISM – witness our current Administration and its effort to “explain away” terrorist acts that don’t violate its mantras). We are supposed to seek “closure” for catastrophe, or to provide it out of whole cloth for the next-of-kin.

I’m certainly qualified as next-of-kin of my Dear Auntie – in addition to being her last “close relative,” and her attorney-in-fact, I’ll be her sole heir and executor when she finally has “Gone West.” But, this morning, I have brought about a “closure” to her former life, in the form of a real-estate “settlement” on her former home … and my boyhood home.

I’ve pondered this situation for some years, before the chain-of-circumstances that left her unable to fend for herself – and left me “choosing her nursing home,” a duty that should have fallen to her son, my cousin. Dear Auntie is not, by any means, my favorite person in the world; she’s the one who evicted me and my mother from the place where I grew up. I can excuse that, now, because I’ve done better than her in the long run … much better, in an awkward way, because there was nobody but me to take over when she came to the point that she was unable to take care of herself.

But, as her last living close relative after her son and her sister died, I’ve tried to do the best for her. I found a nice assisted-living facility, and got her a “studio apartment” (bed-sitter in Brit-speak) that has a big bay window (and a southern exposure for lots of reading light) at the sitting-room end and an “efficiency kitchen” with space for a microwave and a fridge for her ginger ale and ice-cream bars. They also have a nice dining room, and the meals they serve her are better than what I get for myself at home (way better than what she was cooking for herself).

Dear Auntie lived on her own for nearly 25 years, after her only son died. She had paid off the mortgage on her house, a house in a very-desirable “near suburb” of the one city that has always benefited most from the Federal Government … Washington, DC. It’s lost some of the inflated value it had in 2008, but I sold it for 25 times the price Dear Auntie paid for it in 1963.

I have spent the last six months clearing out “the old house” (as I call it, in her presence); finding and sequestering the valuables, taking away or throwing away or selling the stuff that couldn’t fit in her new home. I scraped the peeling paint off the walls, I tore out out the rotted paneling in the basement, and I paid to have the whole house painted and its original oak floors sanded and refinished. (They looked great, as the buyer’s realtor told me this morning.) I was able, finally, with the help of Dear Auntie’s former neighbor Elizabeth – a real-estate broker – to put it on the market a few weeks ago.

This morning, at 11:00 AM, we went to settlement. The buyer paid cash, which simplfies Dear Auntie’s situation (and mine) very wonderfully. He’s going to renovate the house and “flip” it, probably for some $100,000 more than the price-tag that Elizabeth and I were able to get from him. I’m not all that concerned; the purchase price will net Dear Auntie something like ten years’ lodging at “Shady Pines,” and I’d be surprised if she lasts another two years before she Goes West (God rest her soul). My concern is that she will be comfortable, and well cared-for, till her end – and that I will have my freedom.

My last visit to “the old house” – my boyhood home – was a couple of days ago. I hauled away the very last remnants of the things Dear Auntie had put away, stashed, and forgotten. Including my little-at-the-time cousin’s Fisher-Price “radio” music box, stashed in the most inadvertent place of all; something quaint and amusing that would have been thrown away in the renovation. Maybe I’ll give it to a “Kitsch Museum.”

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It Must Have Been The Shoes

Last week, Mississippi State University engaged in a peculiar event designed to shame every possible man on campus. It was not a fraternity “hazing” ritual, although every fraternity on campus participated – on threat of sanctions from the Intra-Fraternity Council. College staff, including the campus police, were “invited” – more properly, required and coerced through administrative and social means – to join the March of Shame as well, carrying signs and placards proclaiming the self-shaming messages that are at the core of this event, while being jeered and sneered by a mostly-female audience.

The name of the ritual is “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes.” And it is enacted at college campuses all over the USA, as a hazing of men by women, thinly veiled as a “voluntary” effort to “raise awareness” about sexual violence.

Dorothy's ruby slippers would have been much more comfortable.

Every male participant was required to buy a pair of high-heeled shoes … the “sponsored” version being a stylish pump at a price-tag of nearly $100.00, made available by a company who profits mightily from every “Walk A Mile” event at every university or college that adopts the “Walk A Mile” event. A pair of shoes that they would wear, almost certainly, only once. And they would wear them only to be shamed and mocked by the women of the campus as they tottered around the “racecourse” in their 4-inch heels. Some of them would be given “canned” speeches and apologies, like the ritual confessions of Stalinist “show trials;” some would carry placards proclaiming “male shame;” all would bear the Masculine Evil Aggressor label placed on them by the organizers and spectators of this “playful” event.

The reason I am highlighting MSU is because one of the Engineering students at that school is a subscriber to the “A Voice For Men” website.  This is a “virtual space” which is the ONLY area where “Ben,” as he calls himself on AVfM, can speak plainly about the MISANDRY that he and his fellow male students face on a day-to-day, every-day basis.

College used to be the place where young people – note my careful and intentional, gender-neutral label of “people” – learned and developed the knowledge and critical skills to “think for themselves” and extend, increase, widen the boundaries of “human knowledge” – another statement in which I have carefully and intentionally neutralized “gender”. Let’s face it, the word “gender” itself denies any possibility that one’s chromosomal make-up might influence one’s behavior.  But guess again – many, many studies have shown and proven and displayed the truth of the concept that “male and female He created them,” or “male and female they evolved.”

This is anathema to the “Gender-Raunch-Identity-Supremacist” women – more precisely, harridans – who actually rule today’s colleges. “How dare those evil, defective, misogynist bearers of the Y-chromosome dare to have anything resembling an opinion about ANYTHING WHATSOEVER??!!!”

The result is a campus like Mississippi State Uni-FARCE-ity.

The result is a college that MANDATES the participation, by the “co-ed” males, in a shaming ceremony where the women lead, the women demand, the women jeer and mock and laugh at their participation, and the women REQUIRE that they parrot canned speeches and “ritual apologies” about their ritually-imagined culpabilities in a crime that the apologizing men would certainly never commit!

The result is a college plastered with anti-male propaganda portraying men as nothing more than raping machines, with special shaming events throughout the year – like the “Clothesline Project” and “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes” – and men-shaming posters everywhere, even to anti-male placards over the urinals in the men’s bathrooms.

The result is a hostile learning environment … for the men.

The appropriate target for this “Walk-A-Mile” shaming would be the thankfully-tiny class of men who will NEVER show up for this supplicating, fem-supremacy-acknowledging, male-groveling ritual! The real “potential rapist”, the guy who would authentically grab a woman after midnight and drag her back into the bushes, will not be joining this school-mandated, commercially-profitable, “foundation”-enabled “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes” shaming event.

Dish out enough shame to the men, the males, the penis-owners, and they WILL leave the scene to you!

And to the sociopathic males who WOULD rape you, if they didn’t fear the men who WON’T.

Maybe a better strategy would be to appeal to the kindly instincts of the men, though; an authentic smile will get you better results than a nasty sneer …

And, Ruby, don’t wear those shoes to town!

____________________

The Southern Poverty Law Center has published a list of Men’s Rights organizations and websites that SPLC accuses of “hate crimes” – including A Voice For Men, The Spearhead, The False Rape Society, S.A.V.E. (Stop Abuse and Violent Environments), In Mala Fide, and others … Beyond The Sunset, though, was somehow overlooked. So was Radfemhub.com, a website that frankly advocates killing off most of the men in society, and who is raising money for SPLC!

Speaking of “hate speech,” The Spearhead (13 Mar 2012) has the story of how Gloria Steinem and “Hanoi Jane” Fonda called for the FCC to censor Rush Limbaugh.

Also on The Spearhead, guest writer Ethical (11 Mar 2012) posted the Top Twelve Indications that the Law in Family Courts is Feminist.

The Counter-Feminist is another one of the “SPLC Twelve,” and I might have added it to my blogroll just on that distinction. Fidelbogen’s conceptual map of counter-feminism, and of countering feminism, deserves more attention….

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Steering The Singlehanded Yacht

Halcyon, my Bristol 29.9, is small enough and handy enough for single-handing. I took her out sailing dozens of times last summer, and I had company for exactly two of those voyages – one of those being a couple of hours’ sailing with my 90-year-old Dear Auntie, who could do nothing but sit and watch (and who damn-near had to be swayed on board and back to the dock in a cargo net!) Halcyon is simply equipped, sloop-rigged (no inner stay for a storm sail), rugged but not sophisticated. That rugged simplicity is suitable for my current needs and goals.

But I have the classic problem of the single-handed sailor; I cannot contrive to be two places at once, for example keeping Halcyon straight on course while I go up to the mast and take in the mainsail. Or going below for something, such as my lunch. I can lock down the helm for a minute or so, but I’m spending 99% of my time right there at the wheel. This isn’t much of a problem for a day trip, or a regular Bay gunkholing cruise from harbor to harbor; but before I can point Halcyon’s bow beyond the horizon, I’m going to have to deal with it.

So I’m very interested in fitting Halcyon with a self-steering system; a device to keep her pointed in the right direction, while I do whatever I might need to do to “take care of the boat.”

I could install an electronic autopilot, like the one I have on my trailer-sailor, Bossa Nova. But “Otto” doesn’t hold a course very well, it uses a lot of electricity – and the “zzzt – zzzt – zzt – zzzzzzzt – zzzt …” noise of its drive, turning the wheel for every little quirk of wind or wave, is obnoxious enough that I use it only when I must. Halcyon actually came with an older autopilot system, but (dammit!) it didn’t work when I tried it out on my first sailing excursions … and the manufacturer went out of business years ago. I haven’t found anyone who will work on it. So it’s in the basement, on its way to the recycling bin.

There is an alternative, usually called a “wind vane.” This is an apparatus that keeps the boat on the heading you set, with respect to the wind; and that is actually more valuable in a sailboat than an autopilot’s ability to keep the boat on a set compass course. It also doesn’t use any electricity, so I don’t have to worry about it running down my batteries. But it is about three times the price of “Otto” on Bossa Nova, and installing it is major surgery.

An autopilot will try to keep the boat on the same “compass course,” with no regard to the wind. A “wind vane” system follows the wind, and if the wind changes direction, so will the boat – but it will sail efficiently with respect to the wind, and it’s the captain’s responsibility to adjust the wind-vane AND the sails for any course correction. (The autopilot will “try to maintain course” regardless of the winds. This is not a good thing, in a sailboat.)

I only know of four wind-vane-steering-system manufacturers at this time. The one whose product looks best to me, right now, is Cape Horn; its owner sailed a 30-foot boat around the world, by way of the Cape of Good Hope (Africa) and Cape Horn (South America), with the prototype of his gear. That is very close to the size of my boat, and he guarantees his rig for “one circumnavigation or 28,000 miles” – whichever comes first. I have sent him a request for information about my particular make-and-model boat, and I may be installing a Cape Horn rig on my boat later this season.

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What if men couldn’t …?

As a child, a boy-child growing up in a houseful of women, I got it impressed on me early on that men were the bad guys in the social scene. I was immersed in their talk of it – my Grammy’s disdain, my Mom’s disappointments, my Dear Auntie’s scorn.  There was nobody to show me the man’s side of the story, save for Dear Auntie’s sugar-daddy (who “helped her” with buying the house that we lived in) … and the more-exciting types I’d catch a glimpse of, when they took Dear Auntie (and sometimes Mom) out for dates. I imbibed the Kool-Aid that “women don’t want it,” as if it were in my mother’s milk; and not even the Sexual Revolution, that surrounded me through my teenage years, shook me free of it. (I spent that time interned behind feminist lines, as an enemy alien.)

So the idea of looking on women as “off limits,” as “forbidden fruit,” is way familiar to me.  And it doesn’t surprise me, not in the least, to hear women talking and sqawking and ranting and raving about “Villainous Predatory Men,” or to see them marching with their signs and slogans about “Teach Men Not To Rape.” I’ve risen to the level where I’m disappointed, but not surprised.

And yet, I can’t ignore the mountains of evidence that women still “want it,” still “enjoy it,” and many go way out of their way to “get it.” When I was a child, a teenager, I rationalized “it” as meaning “the attention of handsome, exciting, preferably rich men.” I was familiar with the Gold-Digger meme; I’d grown up with one in Dear Auntie, and less of one in my mother, though Mom had given up even “looking for love” after a hysterectomy when I was ten years old or so. But Playgirl, and Frederick’s of Hollywood, and Victoria’s Secret, and Sex And The City, make it inescapably evident even to me that women want sex, too.

They just don’t want men to have any control in the matter. They don’t want “the wrong man” approaching them.

So I would like to invite you to consider a possibility that could resolve this, by putting the whole approach scene into the hands of women.

I would like to invite you, Cubs and Cougars alike, to imagine a world in which men were banned, by law, from initiating any step of the Mating Dance. They could posture, preen, strut and display on the “lek;” they could brag about themselves, their virtues, their capabilities, in open audience; but men would not be permitted, under penalty of law, to make even the slightest suggestion of a “sexual advance” toward a woman they might like to approach. That would be the province of the woman.

Yes, ladies, it would all be up to you. No longer could you just coyly invite his attention; yours would be the power, the privilege, in fact the necessity, to offer the first approach. The first “Hi.” The first smile. The first touch. The first kiss. The first caress … and so forth, and so on, all the way to the “Ride ‘Em Cowgirl” climax of the sexual process.

Would you, Woman, experience this as “liberating”?

Would this fulfill your self-image as “independent,” as “strong,” as “supreme”?

Would you find it empowering, validating, satisfying, a privilege, to have this ultimate control over every step of the Mating Dance?  Would it strengthen you, liberate you, If you had to blatantly show your interest; if you had to take every step of initiative, from “Hello” to the first kiss, to dragging his hand to your erogenous zones, to bringing him to your lair, to caressing and undressing him, to initiating every phase of the sexual process?

Would you … initiate … anything?

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E-Yenta, aka Tawkify

In Mala Fide had a post yesterday on a new matchmaking service called Tawkify. Let me resort to minimizing irony by saying it wasn’t a compliment. Tawkify is the online embodiment of the old-fashioned matchmaking service, or of the Yenta in Fiddler On The Roof, who picks out “The Right Boy” for the client’s girl and proposes to serve him up, as it were, on a platter.

But it gets better. Tawkify is just possibly the most female-enabling such service, yet; because it not only gives all the control to the woman, but all the information, too. Men pay $8 for the privilege of getting a seven-minute phone call from an unknown woman – who, on her side of it, signs up for free, got your dossier (including photo, profession, no-doubt your salary and possibly your credit-rating, too!) and decided you were a likely bicycle for her phishing trip.

You, sir, on the other hand, should feel way more than $8 worth of privileged, just to get that seven-minute call from the Secret Princess. All you need to know, in the Tawkify business model, is that she is Ready To Be Worshipped, and that you were selected for her personally by E. Jean Carroll and her trusty sidekick Kenneth. All you have to do – all you get to do, in the Twatkify universe – is to lie back in an imaginary field of daisies, stare up into an imagined sunny blue sky, and build yourself a delusion of loving excitement sparked by the voice, just the voice mind you, of your designated Goddess.

How are they doing, business-wise? Here’s a quote from the BetaBeat (!) article that introduced Tawkify – I think it expresses the essential misandry of E. Jean and her service, very concisely:

How many people have signed up so far?

Let’s say lots of women. And it’s not that we don’t have men signing up, we have not as outstanding… I can’t match these superlative women with these dudes.

Wow. That’s remarkable, E. Jean. Or “E. Yenta.” Or “E-Yenta.” Do you do Pavlovian dog-training, too? Like, perhaps, teaching the “dudes” to get aroused when you ring the little bell?

I join the bloggers below in wishing Twatkify “plenty of fish” – and no bicycles!

Staged Reality
Bronan the Barbarian!
Fly, Fresh and Young
Chad Daring/Chef in Jeans
The Legal Satyricon
Rollo Tomassi
Michael Byc
Amateur Strategist
The Geographer
Ian Ironwood
Scatmaster
Robert Stump
J. DeVoy
Omega Man
Invictus III
Dennis Mangan

In Mala Fide’s article, Tawkify is an Anti-Male Toilet

BetaBeat’s article on Tawkify, 26 Jan 2012

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