Man, As Utility Device

I ran across that phrase – “man, as utility device” –  while I was following the comments to an article on The Spearhead – Decoding The Behavior Of American Women. Codebuster, the author of the comment, had this to say:

Even more insidious than hypergamy in the sense of women choosing better is hypogamy in the sense of women choosing less. Let’s face it… women do often seem to go out of their way to choose bottom-feeders. But in the end, both hypergamy and hypogamy are ultimately related to the same one thing… man as utility device. When a woman chooses an idiot with neither looks nor brains, she is ultimately only choosing him because he is more predictable, less likely to stray and less likely to threaten her delusions of moral of superiority.

Men, we are told, select the women they will pursue solely on the basis of their lust. Do I prefer blondes, brunettes or redheads? Do I prefer a pretty “girlish” face, or a sexy “womanly” face? Do I prefer big, ripe, womanly tits, or do I prefer small, girlish boobies that are less likely to sag when my love-object grows older? Do I prefer slim, shapely legs, or do I prefer a ripe, sexy ass?  Expressing any of these preferences would be held as evidence that I am “objectifying” women, seeing women only as sex objects, judging them only by their physical assets. There’s a special word for that, “lookism.”

And yet, somehow, it’s “not sexist” when a woman dresses to show off her curves, in a silky blouse unbuttoned to show off her cleavage and a short skirt to show off her legs, with paint and powder to enhance her looks and perfume to enhance the bait  … and goes to the office dressed like that. Showing off her goodies in the workplace is “empowering.” Admiring the view, though, is “sexual harassment,” unless you are one of the favored few that she wants to attract.

What makes you one of the favored few? Her perception of your utility. If she doesn’t see you as valuable and useful, and usable, you’re a sexist creep for even letting your eyes stray her way.

In the feminist view, You Are The Enemy. Your Y-chromosome is viewed as a genetic flaw, one that contaminates your bodily structure as well as your mental and emotional characteristics. Your size and strength are constant threats; your penis is seen as nothing more (or less) than a tool of oppression; your sexual interest is dangerous, and your sexual response is tantamount to rape. Never mind that you are in control of yourself, by means of your intellect: Women can’t feel the power of the male mind; at best they label it another “difference” to be hated, or feared, or scorned and dismissed.

But if your strength, your intellect, your imagination and your power can be turned to a woman’s favor, you can make her life much easier and much more secure. If you can be tamed, you will become a valuable … utility device.

I was an “utility device” for my mother. She was 38 when I was born, fresh from divorce, without a “putative father” for my sake. By the time I grew to adulthood, she was nearly sixty – and I was ready to pay my way and hers, as I did for the following twenty-eight years, especially while the nubile “girls” of my generation were marching in the streets with placards that denounced any trace of male behavior as “The Evil Of Masculinity and the Patriarchy.”

By the time there were women who recognized some value in me, I was “beyond the pale” because I acknowledged that “Mom NEEDS me.” And Mom’s well-being and happiness were more important to me than that of the “potential girlfriends” out there. Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe. But I took good care of my Mom, clear to the end, and that leaves me able to regard myself in the mirror with a certain amount of self-respect.

Sexist? Follow the hot-link.

The women of my adulthood, of the Seventies and Eighties, were insistent upon getting everything for themselves. They did not want to marry the CEO, they wanted to be the CEO – and they insisted on it, heedless of the fact that they had no idea what a CEO did, or what made a good CEO valuable to an organization, or anything of the sort. They might as well have demanded to be bowerbirds; a function that might have worked better for them, as they seemingly had their attention on “presentation” far, far more than on “nutrition” or “the menu.” Women could insist on all the “prettyfication,” if that’s acceptable as a word, of the structure and engineering and heavy-lifting that had been performed by men since the origins of genus Homo. Women insisted that this “prettyfication” was far, far, far more important than the man-devised, man-built, man-maintained structure that it decorates.

A man is a “utility device” that fulfills Women’s – or a woman’s – needs or wishes or desires. He may fulfill her survival needs, by providing food and shelter for her and her children. He may fulfill her status wishes, by working himself to death for the sake of her House Beautiful, her fine clothes and fine car and fine jewelry. He may fulfill her desire for excitement, by being the big rough tough thug that she “has managed to tame.”

Anything men build, make, or do, in this women-first model, is regarded (or disregarded) as “mere utility.” And therefore it is that men – that Man – is regarded, or disregarded, as “merely the utility-device.”

I, among others, am aware of this disregard.

What if I choose not to obsessively offer this “utility” to others?

What happens to “your society,” ladies, if I retreat from it; if I decline to provide for you, by the sweat of my brow and the blood of my self-sacrifice? What happens when you have fewer, and fewer, and yet-fewer “self-sacrificing” White Knights, and those knights find fewer and fewer victims to deliver to your blood-soaked altars? What happens when Men decline to continue in that role of “utility devices”?

I will not claim to be speaking for other men when I say this. But I claim my own utility, and the fruits of it, as my own, alone, and I will not offer them to any woman who is not bound to me by blood and necessity. (There is my aged aunt, but I’ve provided for her by moving her into an Assisted Living facility where they’ll take care of her, and feed her, and protect her, and keep her from wandering away. She is in such witless condition that she must be kept from wandering away.)

One of these days … I am going to have my last “blood obligation” sloughed off of me, by Dear Auntie’s death. By then I hope to have sold my own house, used a moiety of its equity to buy an ocean-worthy boat, and prepared myself to get out of Dodge. When Dear Auntie goes west, I hope to be prepared to sail South … and, eventually, Beyond The Sunset.

Ladies, you can go forth and fulfill your own needs.

———————

No to the stick, no to the carrot (A Voice for Men, 19 May 2012) – John The Other points out, very pointedly, the more and more evident path that men are taking in the “sex-object vs. utility-object” conflict: Just Say No.

Clues on Marriage and Sex During Roman Empire (The Spearhead, 20 May 2012) – A long quote from Tacitus, describing marriage and chastity among the German peoples in the Roman era, shows by contrast how the Romans treated marriage … and frankly, our modern society looks very much like Rome in decay.

The Fall of the Female Gatekeeper (In Mala Fide, 15 May 2012) – The female is the gatekeeper who determines the future of the human race – she’s the one who chooses the father of her children. With this power comes great responsibility. Are the women of today handling this power responsibly?

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On Point

A couple of days ago, I posted a bit to MGTOW Forums on a thread that asked, “Are we the fringe?”

The original post asked if “Men Going Their Own Way,” understood as the proper occupants of that forum, were “the tip of the spear” when it comes to recognizing the uncomfortable realities of male-female relationships. (This is a good point for me to expand the description, as it deserves, to “male-female-Government-Society relationships.)

The response to my post was enough to convince me to blog it here. (For those who aren’t familiar with it, “on point” refers to the lead position in a military formation – the “point man” is the one most likely to draw fire.)

There have always been men who went their own way – and they have always been “on point,” one way or another.

Odysseus went his own way; so did Gautama Siddhartha, and Moses, and Lao-Tze, and Jesus, and Mohammed, and Davy Crockett, and Buckminster Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. So, too, did a vast number of unknowns who tried and died, or tried and succeeded but had no one to write of them and carry their story onward.

Those who go their own way don’t fit well with the rules, the expec-tations, the strictures and requirements of the society that they leave. That is why they go another way, turning aside from the well-worn highway to the well-known ends, looking for something more satisfying – or a place where they can shape their own lives, their own way. They’re pushed by discomfort or led by a vision. They seek … solitude, or the freedom to live life their own way, or even the view of something that nobody has seen and described before.

The pioneer, the explorer, the voortrekker, went out into physical wilderness to hew out a new home. There isn’t much unclaimed land to do that, nowadays – but there is still the realm of ideas, of beliefs, and of lifestyles. We may not be as able to “light out for the Territories” to escape the fetters of Society; but fortunately, we don’t actually have to go that far. We are instead going past the boundaries of Conventional Thought. It is enough to turn aside from the herd path, the path of conformity and accommodation and homage to the accepted gods, for you to be able to re-shape your own life in a more livable manner. And honestly, Society has no whip save your “guilty feelings” to swat you back into line.

Going Your Own Way, whether in the formal sense of The Book Of Zed or in the looser way of Just Doing It, is largely something you’re doing for yourself. It’s a turning-away from conformity and altruism, a rejection of Society’s imperative to “give your all for others’ sake.” Most notably, the way I hear it described and practiced on MGTOW Forums, it is a rejection of Society’s imperative to “find a Goddess and worship Her; give your all for Her sake, for man is nothing but Womyn is all-deserving!”

Our choice to ignore nature’s imperative to reproduce, and Society’s imperative to “worship The Goddess,” puts us at odds not only with Society, but with our own sexual nature. It is anti-survival, on the genetic level; but we recognize that it is not only pro-survival on our own individual level, but also pro-survival for the future of Humanity, which cannot go on under the immature will-o’-the-wisp caprices of the Child-Goddesses that women have proven, at their essence, to be. To those of us who have children – I sacrifice my never-to-be-born children to the Cause, willingly, with wistful sadness for what might have been, but no anger toward the survivors; with no, or at any rate with stifled, regret.

There are a lot of ways that men “take point,” not only as soldiers. Men “take point” when they take on the difficult jobs, the dangerous jobs, the jobs that take muscle and occasionally take lives. Men “take point” when they try to turn a new idea into a new business, and also when they start their own business in an established field. Men “take point” when they stand up for principle instead of going on with Society’s expectations and conventions. Men “take point” when they stand up against tyranny, especially a popular tyranny like feminism; most especially, when they’re ready to “go it alone” if no one will join them.

In the broadest terms, in the long run, we’re all headed for the same place. As my “Old Pilot” confrères would put it, we’re all going West; we’re all heading toward the sunset of our lives.

Most of us strive to make that journey in company, in the herd, getting along by going along, following the well-worn path of conformity. Some of us choose different paths, riskier and less certain. Some of us forge our own paths and go it alone, like the Men Going Their Own Way.

As an old pilot, myself – and as a new mariner who is planning to Sail Beyond The Sunset, in fashions practical and poetic – I am all-too-well aware that my hopes, my dreams, and my plans are contrary to those who would encourage us to reside in a quieter, kindlier, blander, more ineffectual world. After watching my Dear Auntie live in an Assisted Living facility for the past seven months, I can assure you in all honesty and gravitas that I would rather die alone at sea than spend my final years like that.

As Jimmy Buffett put it, “I’d rather die while I’m living than live while I’m dead.”

Get my point?

———————

The mother of all lies (A Voice for Men, 12 May 2012) – Robert Franklin introduces himself to AVfM with a review of the New York Times’ recent in-print debate:  “Has women’s obsession with being the perfect mother destroyed feminism?  In particular, has this trend of ‘attachment parenting’ been bad for working moms?”

Deconstructing the TIME Breastfeeding Cover (The American Thinker, 15 May 2012) – Wow. Now this is what we can an “attention whore”! Actually a conspiracy of attention-whores … Jamie Lynne Grumet, the lactating mommy in the cover photo; plus TIME Magazine, who made her into their cover-girl with a supporting role for her “three-year-old” (and awful big for three!) suckling son.

Vote With Your Ass (In Mala Fide, 14 May 2012) – Jack Donovan, frequent contributor to IMF, lays it on the line with this excoriating dismissal of “the power of the vote” in today’s America. Gods above, I wish I could prove him wrong. (This last sentence is what a high-school friend once referred to as  “praising with faint damns.”)

Just by way of “full disclosure” – I am hoping to Sail Beyond The Sunset before 2016. I hope the election of 2012 will help to “turn things around” in Washington, but I put not my faith in princes, or in Congress, or in the Senate, and most particularly not in the Executive Branch of the US government. Is it time for me to “get out of dollars” and buy gold? I’m thinking about it …

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Dear Mom …

Sunday, 13 May 2012 – Mother’s Day, by USA reckoning

Dear Mom,

I know it’s odd of me, writing you a letter after all these years. They’ve been lonely years for me; it was a blessing to me, that your Passage was such that it left me not in grief but in bright wonder! But that was nearly ten years ago, and the wonder has given way to anger, to grief, and finally to acceptance.

But this isn’t about my grieving. It’s about the way our life together shaped my solo life afterwards, and permitted me to shape my future. It’s about sacrifice and “lost opportunities,” that disappointed me at the time but whose unforeseen consequences are, thankfully, much to my benefit.

You started my life, that is to say you got yourself pregnant, with a man whose qualities you most wanted to have expressed in your child. It’s unfortunate that “the sire” was not the man you had married before he “went to war for you” in 1941! I don’t know when and how he found out that he was listed as the father on my birth-certificate; I thank him for being compassionate enough to ask the Navy to consider me a “dependent,” so my childhood illnesses (including asthma) could be treated at a Navy clinic. And let me note – there was nothing else that the courts of 1953 could demand of him. (Oh, my, how that has changed! But, Mom, you can look at that from your “Other Side” viewpoint … and smile. I suspect your “ex” and my genetic father are laughing too.)

Nowadays, and probably since “Murphy Brown”, the notion of a woman raising her kid on her own is unremarkable. You and I were remarkable in the Fifties and early Sixties. You moved in with your mother, and your sister … and this worked until I grew to adulthood, and your sister’s son (the child of her second husband, or so she says) reached puberty. “Dear Auntie” kicked us out, but you were able to get us an apartment. That’s when I left the seminary, where you’d encouraged me to study (and to use up $1000 of money you had on deposit there), and went out to get “a real job”.

Your insistence that I “go to seminary” – even though it was the Academy of the Founding Church of Scientology – may have kept me from being drafted and sent to Vietnam! (Although a draft-lottery number of 347 out of 365 might have helped more.) At any rate, I was a civilian when we moved out of Dear Auntie’s house – and I did manage to get a “technical aide” job with the major employer in our town, the Federal government.

We lived together during my prime pair-bonding years, and I felt “responsible” for your survival, and well-being, and even your happiness. As I “climbed the ladder” I paid more and more of our living expenses, although your Social Security (after you stopped working at age 65) covered food and the phone bill. I turned aside from dating and/or “looking for Love in all the wrong places,” for your sake … it’s interesting that my last “girlfriend,” Susan, had a colleague in the Geographic Names Division, who moonlighted as a realtor, and who helped me buy the house that you-and-I shared for the last years of your life. (Susan and I broke up the year after she bought her house and I bought yours – the one you, Mom, shared with me.)

After Susan broke off with me, I devoted my life to your comfort and pleasure and happiness. We – along with your sister, after her son died of a brain tumor at 26 – followed a different spiritual path … Today, it’s interesting that we all three followed “the professional path” of a spiritual-enhancement system that gave us all that our previous beliefs promised but couldn’t deliver … and yet I was the active marketer and the active teacher of that new course. Well, you’d had me trained up as a “spiritual counselor” of the belief-system you’d been following when I was born.

And I followed that new belief-system, took you and Dear Auntie to the first course and the further courses, until you turned aside for a will-of-the-wisp “parallel” course … and we were no longer accepted by “Star’s Edge,” the proprietors of that course. To me, it didn’t matter – I was still working for the Federal Government, I’d found a specialty in which I’d become “The Expert,”
and I was asked to teach that specialty to other mapping agencies in other countries! This was a privilege far beyond what “Star’s Edge” could offer.

I was still involved with that agency, and its training center, when you succumbed to your final illness. I’m grateful that my supervisor let me rearrange my course-schedule so that I could stay at home during your last weeks of life. He was startled-as-hell when I reported back to the office the Monday after you died – but you didn’t need me any more, as you know, and I was ready to get back to work.

I was 48 years old when you died. And I was so completely accustomed to my “pariah” status, in matters social (and even more sexual), that I didn’t do anything to put myself back into the “Meet Market” – until a colleague, a fellow in the International Office, put in a request and furnished the funding to bring me down to a South American country where the women are hungry for men!

And yet, even though it was 18 years since my last “romance”, I had little-to-no motivation to find a romance there. My life with you, Mom, from mychildhood through puberty and adolescence through adulthood and even to (48!) grandpa-ready maturity, had taught me that Men Aren’t Necessary, that I personally (as a male) had no value in the Sexual Marketplace, and that it was not appropriate for me to seek to sire a child.

And … I didn’t. Not in the USA; not in South America; not in any of the places where a “mikuk salam” ( pardon my poor alphabetization of the Korean language!) or an “hombre norteno” – or any other suitable transliteration of a “male from the USA” – might have found a woman who would have been more-than-delighted to have a wealthy mate who’s a citizen of the USA.

That’s OK with you, Mom, I’m sure. You hung on to me as your “meal ticket” from the time I was old enough to work. I never learned that any woman could want to raise a family with me, because you needed me to support you … and, out of gratitude or duty or whatever, I stuck with you and kept you with me.

Meanwhile … “family law” in our community, our state, our nation, went completely crazy and “out of bounds”.

My married colleagues were going through purgatory, and then through hell! My female colleagues – I was in a career field (mapmaking) and a work environment (the Federal government) where women were entirely capable of the highest levels of competence and professional ability – became, in some cases, my supervisors. And I put your well-being ahead of any woman who might be “interested in me” – after all, Christine and Nancy and Susan only “desired” me, and you NEEDED me to take care of you financially (and finally, physically!)

So I never married. I never had children of my own, despite the “superior DNA’ you’d sought out to sire me. And, of course, you died before you had any grandchildren … and died without knowing whether-or-not I would sire children of my own and continue your genetic heritage.

Well … I haven’t. And I don’t expect I ever will.

And that, even if it means your genetic line ends with me, is a blessing itself!

I never had a wife, which means I never had a divorce … or alimony.

I never sired any children, which means I never had to pay Child Support.

The home I bought for you? I paid off the mortgage before I retired.

I’m sticking around for your younger sister, the “Dear Auntie” who kicked us out of my boyhood home in 1973. Incidentally, she has “lost it all” to dementia … I am her “attorney in fact” … and, last September, I had to put her into Assisted Living. I’ve sold off her house, and the proceeds ought to keep her “in comfort” till she dies. I am glad that I didn’t have to take care of her – and even more grateful that you died as you did, in compos mentis to the end.

And the years since 2002, the year of your death, have helped me learn I don’t need “another” – I am complete, a full human being, on my own, all by myself.

So, Mom, your final inadvertent “gift” has been the autonomy to Go My Own Way. You taught me, by example, that I don’t need a member of the opposite sex to make me “complete”. Living with you, from the years when you paid our way through the years when I paid our way till the day you left me all by myself, taught me finally to live on my own – and, if you look at the manner of my living, you may judge me as “fucked-up”, but I’m not being fucked over by some “independent-but entitled” bitch.

You taught me better than that, even if you didn’t mean to do so.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you – and I still miss you.

Rest in peace, Mom.

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Good Providers

One of the guys on A Voice for Men had a story to relate, recently, about one of his co-workers. “Stu” happens to be from Australia, so please realize this is not based on my own accent or slang.

I tried to talk this guy a while back out of getting married. Only about a year ago. He used to go down to the gym after work a few times a week, used to go away camping and shooting and fishing whenever he felt like it. Young fit bloke. Even one day before his wedding I came up to him as we were knocking off and said, it’s not too late yet, you can still cancel. He just laughed.

People at his wedding said he seemed like the happiest man in the world. He was on fire, like he just won Tatt’s Lotto. Since then, he’s sold all his guns, doesn’t go shooting anymore, or camping, or fishing, never goes to gym after work, or anywhere else for that matter. He rushes home to wifey. He’s put on about 15kgs and looks sad faced most of the time.

He’s just started to realize that he signed up for a ball and chain……literally. He goes nowhere without permission. I asked him recently whey he doesn’t do overtime much anymore, he just said, what’s the use, what am I going to get out of it, more money for her to spend, that’s all it is.

Think about it. He’s gone from being “his own man” … to “a good provider.” And nothing else BUT “a good provider.” As one of the other followers of A Voice for Men has put it, he has allowed his wife to put his balls in her chains.

Once upon a time – and not so long ago that I can’t remember the days – the “good provider” got a “fair-dinkum” trade for his status. (Since I’m not an Okker myself, I’ll have to ask you to look up “fair dinkum” in an Australian-English dictionary for yourself.) The “good provider,” whether Aussie or Brit or Bloody-Damn-Yank, got a woman who appreciated his labors to keep her warm and dry and as comfy as might be. When he agreed to buy the cottage-for-two (with room for Itty-Bitty-Junior when the time came!), and move out of the inadequate little flat that was ample for a single guy, that was a big, big deal. And conversely, when Cupcake grabbed his hand and said “I think it’s time we head for the hospital,” that was a big, big deal for both of them, too!

Raising their child, or more likely their children, was a struggle. And a solemn covenant. And … when Junior, or Sis, finally walked across the stage and received their high-school diploma, that was a great, great triumph!

Daddy was more, much more, than a “good provider.” He was Daddy. He was a role-model for Junior and a good example for Sis. He showed his children what it is, what it takes, what it’s worth, to be a Man. He was more to them than just “the bread-winner,” a replaceable and disposable unit of production valued only for the money. He was loved, and looked up to, and appreciated – and “they were his family.”

There were exceptions, there always are. There were independent, unmarried, and successful women; there were successful and well-to-do men who declined to “marry up,” too. And there were men – and women – who weren’t worth marrying, and didn’t get married. But I’m talking about the norms here, not the outliers; and the norm was that men provided and women nurtured, and despite the friction that comes and goes, they lived and worked as a team to raise children who would eventually go, and do likewise, and bring over the new baby to meet “Gramma and Grampa” some very happy day.

But times have changed.

Marriage and the nuclear family is increasingly “not the norm.” All the focus is on the wedding, not the years of married life to follow it; on the bride, not the couple. Family life is no longer focused on the family, which is to say it has lost its focus. The emphasis has gone from “we” to “me”, and the once-held-sacred vows of marriage are set aside for more and more trivial excuses. In the overwhelming majority of the cases, they’re severed by the woman, with the complicity of “Family Court.”

And the man, the Good Provider, is the one who Modern Society holds as “dispensable,” as “replaceable” (by Daddy Government), as “valueless and worthless.” You kids don’t need a Daddy any more, just a Good Mommy!

I can assure you, from personal experience, that this assertion on the part of Modern Society is a load of codswallop. I grew up without a father, without a role-model, without a mentor in masculinity … and I grew up, in my own opinion, irreparably “fucked-up” as far as my possible and potential role as a MAN in Society might be.

The wonder of it is … I grew up to be a Good Provider. For my mother, while I paid the rent for the apartment we shared, and later when I took on the mortgage and expenses for the town-house where she lived out the last sixteen years of her life … our life together. For her mother, the years that I drove Mom and Grammy out to vacations in Florida, in the automobile that I’d bought for my own; paying out of my own pocket for the hotels, and the meals in Morrison’s Cafeteria and the occasional Pancake House (Grammy had an ongoing joke with her plaintive declaration of “Pancake House!”), and the admissions to tourist attractions like Disney World and Cypress Gardens.  And, most recently, for my Dear Auntie, who kicked Mom and me out of her house (my boyhood home) and forced me to leave my “higher education” for the job market; she is now in Assisted Living, and it’s her disdained nephew who cleared out her old house and sold it for the sake of her monthly rent at “Shady Pines”, and who is not only her last-remaining Next Of Kin but also her “attorney-in-fact,” who handles her checkbook and pays the bills that she isn’t quite aware that she has.

But that counts for nothing, outside of Shady Pines. I’m “not Good Enough” for any Modern Woman to take me as a husband – pardon me, as a “bridegroom” – or take me on as the sire of her children.

I am truly, truly grateful.

———————

Cheap RV Living – This isn’t about living in a Winnebago, not even at WalMart. It’s about fitting-out a nondescript van or a panel truck with a comfortable RV-style interior, in such a way that nobody would suspect that someone was living inside – as a “stealth camper” that would fade into the background at any business park or light-industrial area. This could be quite the refuge for a man who has “lost it all” in a rough divorce …

The essential question (Apocalypse Cometh, 2 May 2012) – It’s a question that we should ask before any major decision, any major purchase, any major choice: “Does this bring any additional value to my life?” Well worth exploring.

The daughter he found (A Voice for Men, 6 May 2012) – Ed Green didn’t even know that a college hook-up had resulted in a pregnancy until his daughter – a “thin, pasty-faced” teenager whose short life had been filled with abandonment and rejection – showed up at his door. The mother hadn’t bothered to tell him, and Utah state law makes no provisions to find the father if an unmarried mother puts the kid up for adoption. “Rights of the child?”

The Unknown History of MISANDRY – False rape accusations, sexual blackmail, misguided “domestic violence” charges, female “predators” – none of these are new developments. Robert St. Estephe’s website is a history lesson on the lines of Kipling’s saying – “The female of the species is deadlier than the male!”

Strong, Empowered Women: The Alpha Female Myth (In Mala Fide, 10 May 2012) – IMF puts it more harshly that I would put it, but the fact is incontrovertible: “Strong, empowered” women, who set themselves up as our competitors, are not what men are looking to wed. Or even to bed. Anyone who says otherwise is pandering to her Alpha Hamster.

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Sofiastry: “What I’ve learned pretending to be a man”

This is beyond my balls.

Sofia, of Sofiastry, has built herself a “male-gender” profile on a matchmaking website. And she claims to have learned from her experience.

Sofia, you have more “balls” than me. And that is despite my clear-title ownership to a Y-chromosome, complete with supposedly-functional testicles and a working penis.

You wouldn’t have attempted that charade unless you’d recognized its importance to the future of the human race!

“Men” – and I won’t hesitate to include myself in the sardonic scare-quotes of that label – would generally rely on the obvious masculinity of their dialogue, their statements, their declarations, to define and declare themselves as convex rather than concave “where it counts.”

After forty years of being called “Miss” or “Ms” on the phone – because I have a fine high Irish-tenor voice, like my grandfather and my uncle – I fully recognize the ambiguity of my voice in defining my sex. NOBODY calls me “Mister,” or its equivalents, on the phone!

So maybe it’s time to take advantage of it, and “pretend I’m a woman.”

Women, in case the more Neanderthal among us haven’t noticed, have much the advantage of it in things social – and sexual.

Women get courted, get pampered, get cossetted. Men have to buy their way into the “Paradise” of sexual satisfaction.

Women get all the gifts, during courting, all the way to Holy Matrimony.

Women are worshipped, and put on a pedestal as the Princess.

Women’s children are HER children. They might be fertilized by her husband, her boyfriend, her “baby-daddy,” or by some anonymous sperm-donor identified by a “classification number” in a fertility clinic’s database. But there is no denying that Junior rode as a hitchhiker in her womb, and was pushed out in pain and distension and all the other life-threatening “stuff” that constitute childbirth in species Homo sapiens. Papa … who knows? (If this sounds extreme: My own mother confessed to me, on her deathbed, of how her former husband – the guy whose name is on my birth certificate – was NOT my “biological father.” And he knew it. His last e-mail to me included the question, “Have you ever looked-up your biological father?”)

I would like to experience the privilege that Sofia, my mother, my Dear Auntie, and every single possessor of a home-grown vagina enjoy from the ever-loving start – when they are celebrated as “sugar and spice, and everything nice.” But – even as a blogger – I am too completely wedded to The Truth, not to mention “too much of a wuss,” to engage in such a subterfuge.

My handle of “BeijaFlor” is ambiguous enough to have confused a few people in the Manosphere. I won’t relate the story behind that choice of handles, I will only admit that it is indeed “ambiguous.” Consider the relationship between a hummingbird and the flowers from which “it” (a term intentionally ambisexual) sucks its nourishment … does it truly matter, to the bird, whether it sucks-up the nectar from the stamens, or the pollen from the pistil? It’s hungry for both, and also for the insects that might be after the nectar. (I am grateful that I am human, and I can eat meat. Roast beef, rare, by preference, please.)

But I was born into a family, a household group, that had no men in it. I was the “man-child” of a household that reflected Feminist ideals, way before Feminism showed up on the political scene.  I grew up accepting myself, sexually, as unwanted and unwelcome. I did my very best, from puberty till the death of my mother, to accept and live with this “unwanted” identity.

So, you know, Sofia, I have spent my life pretending I am sexless.  Pretending, at the direction of my mother and grandmother and even my Dear Auntie, that my cock-and-balls and my Y-chromosome make no difference in Society. And my continued survival in Society tend to make me believe that I handled things correctly and well by maintaining this pretense.

You’ve been offered dates? As a “man”? You’re a better “man” than I am, Sofia!

You have, at least, pretended to be a man. I am pretending not to “be a man.”
I have given up on my own Y-chromosome.

———————

Just in the interest of maintaining the theme of “transsexual” Web-postings, I’ll open my “A Few Good Links” addendum with:

My inner Christina (A Voice for Men, 4 May 2012) – in which the accomplished, erudite, and very masculine Dr. Paul Elam relates how he “got in touch with his feminine side” and his experiences of a day of living as his “inner woman.” Warning: Do not be drinking hot tea when you read this one.

Who says men can’t be raped? (Salon, 3 May 2012) – Oh my, the coy equivocations, the precious-cute labels, that the mainstream press employs when a woman demands more than a man can deliver! Salon has news for you, dearies – trying to hold a man prisoner, to get him to give you more when he’s all worn out, isn’t coy or cute. It’s rape.

Circumcision – good or bad? (The Sanctuary, 4 May 2012) – Spacetraveller, you’re going to hate me for this, I just know it. But your portrayal of “poor little Kurt” almost resulted in me snorting rum out of my nose, and I’ll contend that’s a whole lot more painful than hot tea.

Douthat Takes on Fornication (The Spearhead, 4 May 2012) – Ross Douthat, of the New York Times, has entered the debate on a new HBO show, “Girls” … W. F. Price, in critiquing his critique, concludes that “Girls” demonstrates the Modern Woman’s sexual nirvana, with “the shirtless hipsters to have sex with them and the Ross Douthats to support them.”

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Trailer Yacht Trash

22:30 EDT, Saturday, 31 March 2012 – Lat 34°39.9’N, Lon 79°00.3′ W …

The north end of the Walmart parking lot in Lumberton, NC; not a place where you’d expect to see a boat heave-to for the night. A Toyota 4Runner, towing a 26-foot sailboat on a trailer, cautiously pulls in among the land-yacht RVs and travel trailers, parked across the stripes. The driver, not coincidentally the boat’s skipper, is a bit uneasy about this – what is the protocol for spending the night at Wally-World? Satisfied that he’s parked just like the others, he gets out of the SUV and walks down toward the Big Box emporium. He’s about to pass a gaggle of teenagers, standing around their parked cars, when the security-vehicle pulls up; seeing an opportunity, he crosses over to the driver’s window and asks directly, “Is it OK if I park there for the night?” …

Yeah, that was me, Beija-Flor, big as life and twice as weird.

I was travelling with Bossa Nova, my 26-foot sleep-aboard sailing dinghy. We were headed for a few days’ vacation on Lake Marion, SC – and in need of a place to stay the night. Some years ago, a travel-trailer-warrior friend of mine told me that Sam Walton himself – a travel-trailer enthusiast and bargain-hunter in his own right, I suspect, in the early, lean years before Walmart made him a billionaire – had directed every one of his store-managers to let travel-trailers park overnight in their store’s parking lots, on their way to their “real” destinations. Not only was it a gracious good-will gesture, but 99 out of 100 will need something they can get right there in the Big Blue Box. I was no different in that respect; it’s just that my own travel-trailer has a different shape. A boat shape, a yacht-y shape. Between boat-ramps, Bossa Nova is quite functional and even comfortable as what I call a “funny-shaped travel trailer.”

Serious sailboats do not go on trailers, unless you count the specialized “transporter” trucks that are used to haul the smaller ones across the country. It is no simple task, for instance, for the Island Packet folks in Largo, Florida to put a new 46-foot yacht on a transporter trailer and haul it to – let’s say – Rock Hall, MD; where Gratitude Yachts will step its mast, rig the rigging, and use a Travelift crane to gently lower her into her proper medium, the water. But many smaller vessels, such as sailing dinghies, live on trailers and are only launched when the owner wants to go sailing.

Bossa Nova is at the large end of the “trailer-boat” classification, at 25’11” long and 7’10” wide (abeam). She’s a good “weekender” boat, with (supposedly) enough bunks for 6 … but, in fact, with the stuff I carry and use and the way I carry it, maybe adequate room for two or three at most. Still,  she is quite functional as a “second home” – with a working galley (a single-burner butane stove, a tiny sink with an electric water-pump, and storage space for provisions and utensils – plus a 40-quart ice chest); a workable bathroom (a porta-potty in a little broom-closet that gives me just enough room to haul up my trousers after the deed); a reasonable dining table, across from the galley, so close that it’s almost part of the galley; and a couple of good sleeping spaces (the one I use is a quarter-berth, aft under the cockpit, which is a little bigger than a torpedo tube). Bossa Nova is only a “yacht” by virtue of the fact that its designer and builder calls his factory “MacGregor Yacht Corp.”

But … I can cook aboard, take care of my ablutions aboard, and sleep aboard Bossa Nova. For a limited time – and I have friends who have pushed the limits, out to months – I could live aboard this boat. She’s certainly more comfortable than a refrigerator box under an expressway overpass.

The day after my night in the Walmart parking lot, I headed down to Lake Marion, SC. I’d bet you’ll remember Lake Marion, if you’ve ever driven down I-95 to Florida; it’s the first really big body of water along the way, crossed by a bridge that’s nearly two miles long. A bridge that has a “hump” on the south end, high enough to accommodate the mast of a sailboat the size of Bossa Nova. Sailboats are a rare sight on Lake Marion, or so I was told by the matriarch of a family-group that took a picture of Bossa Nova from their overpowered pontoon boat – she assured me solemnly that Bossa Nova was the first sailboat she’d ever seen on Lake Marion.

As my vacation progressed, I came to understand why. Lake Marion was formed from the Santee River, as a feeder for a hydroelectric power plant; they did not cut down the trees in the river-bottom before flooding the area, and so there are plenty of snags that might be hit by the keel or rudders of a passing sailboat. Believe me, I found out about that. Repeatedly. Lake Marion feeds into a further-downstream lake, Lake Moultrie, where they did cut down all the trees. It’s a better lake for sailing, they tell me, but Lake Marion is better for fishing. It might have been sensible for me to take Bossa Nova down to Lake Moultrie – but it took me a hard and sweaty hour-and-a-half to raise her mast and rig her for sailing, and I didn’t feel like repeating the labor.

I stayed three days on the water, in a nice little hidey-hole around the corner from the marina where I’d parked the tow vehicle. I did use my “rubber ducky” inflatable boat to go to shore there, and I took the opportunity to hang out and chat with some of the folks who stayed at the trailer-park that surrounded the boat ramps and the tiny marina. I believe that I could have stayed in that hidey-hole for who-knows-how-long, paying $4 a day to park my car and trailer and nothing for the anchorage – and, ya know, I think it would have been worth it. It was definitely cool to cook up my dinner on the butane stove, then grab a “cold one” out of the cooler and sit up in the cockpit enjoying the stars. (Though it was all too exciting to be awakened by the bull-roar of an alligator at 1 AM!)

But, on day 2, the outboard motor on Bossa Nova was acting up. I decided to spend day 3 at anchor, doing some of the “cleanup” work that she really needs if I’m going to sell her later on this year. I rowed the rubber-ducky dinghy in to Bell’s Marina, and had a couple of really good meals in their restaurant … and Wednesday afternoon, April 4th, I got Bossa Nova out of the water, back on her trailer, and I stowed the mast and the boom for the drive home.  There were thunderstorms on the way, and I saw no reason to be on the water when they reached Lake Marion.

I spent my last night out at the Walmart in Petersburg, VA … and brought Bossa Nova home, the next day, to the marina where I keep my Bristol 29.9, Halcyon. The Bristol is no “trailer yacht” – she’s 10’2″ abeam, with a long fixed keel and a “keel-stepped” mast that will have to be pulled out with a crane some day, to check its base and re-wire its lights and its radio antenna. It’s going to be much more convenient, having both boats in the same place – and later this summer, when I’m ready to sell Bossa Nova (and when I’ve fixed her outboard motor), I can place her with the same yacht-broker who sold Halcyon to me.

Then I will no longer be entitled to call myself “trailer-yacht trash.”

———————

With a post as snarky as this, I really ought to direct you to MacGregor Sailors – a website devoted utterly to the trailer-sailors designed and built by Roger MacGregor, including the “Venture” brand that started his career as an unlikely trailer-yacht designer. (You may find some of my own modifications to Bossa Nova, under my own name rather than my Portuguese “nom de plume”.)

18 USC § 1384… (In Mala Fide, 2 May 2012) – this is a wonderful “kick in the face” to our Nation’s Military, as a follow-up to the media shitstorm from our Secret Service’s secret-services while President Barack HUSSEIN Obama visited the notorious den-of-sexual-iniquity known as Colombia. “Pay-for-play” is legal in that country, as it is in many other countries … but “18 USC Paragraph 1384” prohibits our young-and-horny US military personnel from disporting with the local “professional talent,” who are prepared to deal with their testosterone, and gives them a severe penalty for “getting their rocks off” in a clean, STD-aware, manly-approved fashion. I am pissed-off … royally … as much for the sake of the “girls,” who stand to lose a substantial portion of their income, as for the sake of the “boys” who must zip it up or “take matters into their own hands.”

You want privilege? You got it! (A Voice for Men, 2 May 2012) – Dr. Paul Elam speaks the truth. “Male privilege” includes way more responsibility than “privilege,” and way more liability/trouble/danger/deadliness than is ever faced by the “Strong, Empowered, Endangered, Independent, Needy, Subsidized, Insulated Woman” who demands so damn much subsidy for her to “be Independent” and so damn much protection to be “Strong”!  I can do no better than than echo Paul’s core concept: “If you want my ‘privilege,’ by all means you are welcome to it. All you have to do is pay the price.”

Maybe there is enough here to start me ranting again!

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Gateway Women, On Solo Street

Somebody on MGTOW Forums posted a link to the Gateway Women website, which is dedicated to single, childless women who are “coming to terms with a life without children.” He posted the link with a “LOL” notation, but as I followed the link I didn’t see much reason to laugh at it.

Whyzzat, you ask? I’m a red-blooded American Men’s Rights Extremist, am I not? And the first thing that faced me is this article, “Surviving the childless weekend blues,” that’s enough to give me my daily dose of schadenfreude? Why am I not laughing?

Because I’m living it too, in my way. I’m on the other side of the same street, Solo Street, and she is going her own way, no less than I am. The circum-stances are different; my experience is different, as my “way” is different; but our destination is the same.

How different is it for a woman to be alone? How is her experience different from mine? I can only hypothesize, or engage in projection – pasting my own feelings, or my beliefs about her feelings, into my mental-image picture of her. How did she get to this place, this state … from a past like mine, or from one very different?

Jody Day, the founder of Gateway Women, describes herself as “a writer and communications consultant; she holds a certificate in integrative counselling and is a trainee integrative psychotherapist. She spent 15 years hoping for a baby and is a Godmother and Aunt many times over but not a Mother. Now happily post-fertile….” I haven’t read anything about her childhood, or about her marriage and subsequent divorce (mentioned once in passing, in the first article I read on her site); all I know so far is that she’s a professional woman, in her late forties, and she’s not as sorry-for-herself now as she used to be.

And she makes no bones about that “sorry-for-herself” …

Right now, there’s a whole generation of women 35+ who aren’t in the right relationship and can’t afford to have a baby ‘by themselves’ (even if they could face it). Professional, educated, intelligent, capable, loving, emotionally-intelligent hard-working women. Women who’d be fantastic mothers. But it’s not looking like it’s going to happen. Where the hell are they supposed to take their bewilderment, their grief, their rage at how things have worked out? They’ve followed the script our culture set out: worked hard at school, gone to university, built a career, tried to build relationships with men based on mutual respect and decency. And where has it got them?

I see myself as standing pretty damn close to where it has got them. We’re both of us still on Solo Street. I worked hard at my profession, too; I learned from life and I’m still learning; I love my family, what’s left of it, and I would like to believe at least that I would have been, if not a “fantastic father,” a pretty-damn good one. And if I had gotten selected for marriage, back when I was young enough that there’d have been a point to it, I would have worked to be a good husband.

But I, like Jody and her “Gateway Women,” am also “child-free, by circumstance.” What sets us apart, aside from “the expectations of Society,” is that she’s concave where I’m convex. What chafes her worse is that femaleness is built for motherhood, and she didn’t.

Who am I to laugh at her discomfort? I failed at fatherhood, because I didn’t.

This is not to say that I “feel sorry for her,” or that I feel schadenfreude about her situation, or that I figure somehow that “life has thrown her a bum pitch,” or that “she’s wrong for it,” or “she’s been wronged” – or much of any roiling and inappropriate misemotion. What I do feel is compassion … because I’m single and “child-free” myself.

“Of course, it’s different for a man.” It is? I don’t know; I know how it is for me, but I don’t know how it is for you. Or her. I’m only able to experience my own experience; isn’t it really the same for you?

What’s the difference between a “Gateway Woman” and a “Man Going His Own Way”? Is there a substantive difference, other than sex? Which I believe is substantive enough.

———————

“The Cost Of Delaying Marriage“, on MGTOW Forums, is the thread where I found the link to Gateway Women. It also had a link-back to an article on “Boundless Webzine” …

The Cost Of Delaying Marriage, excerpted from Danielle Crittenden’s book What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman. Now, admittedly, “Boundless Webzine” is a website of Focus On The Family, a Christian organization devoted to getting people to marry up and raise families – and my MGTOW stance would seem to go straight up against that goal. (Ask yourself, though, why must it?)

A game not worth the candle (A Voice for Men, 24 Apr 2012) is a frank exposition of the misandry, the sexual politics, the “entitled and empowered” attitude and mentality that more and more men recognize (and find hateful) among the Modern Woman of Today.

VAWA and the war on men (A Voice for Men, 22 Apr 2012) – AVfM went from the personal (above) to the political with this article.

Good Sex, Bad Sex (The Spearhead, 2 May 2012) – The “sexual repression” from before the Sixties gave way to the “sexual expression” of the Seventies and Eighties – but now, W.F. Price argues, “we still face a great – perhaps even greater – amount of control where sex is concerned, and a lot more people are locked up for sex crimes than in the bad old days of ‘oppression.’ ” And guess what? It’s almost all blamed on men ….

Raising Breivik (In Mala Fide, 30 Apr 2012) – “Finndistan” describes a street-scene in London, wherein a young mother demonstrated to her child how “political correctness” and “multi-cultural acceptance” are more important to her than her own child’s safety … Is this what we’re coming to?

———————

I’ve been going through a rather “dry time” on Beyond The Sunset, for the past few weeks. There have been several factors in this; one is a certain and increasing level of acedia, of losing touch with the fire that ran through my earlier rants. The other is a growing level of apathy about whether-or-not my voice is actually adding anything worthwhile to the chorus of Men’s Rights.  And, of course, it’s sailing season …

Had a surprise at the Annapolis Spring Sailboat Show, last weekend; an acquaintance from the Seven Seas Cruising Association told me that she follows Beyond The Sunset. I was pleased, yes, but also vaguely alarmed …!

(That last item is why I’ve added the SSCA to my blogroll. If you sail, or you’re interested in sailing away some day, you owe it to yourself to check ’em out.)

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