Keyster, a frequent commenter on several mens’-rights blogs, came out with this thought-provoking statement a while back. If I remember correctly, this was on The Spearhead:
If men are purely optional to women, then why can’t women be purely optional to men?
Because independent women are heroes.
And independent men are zeroes.A man “needs” a woman.
A woman doesn’t need “any” man.
“A woman doesn’t need ‘any’ man” …?
I have seen a few women, in my life, who “didn’t need a man.” The only one who really stands out in my mind is my mother … and that, chiefly because she raised me without a dad.
I learned, from my mother, and my grandmother (the materfamilias of our household), that “men aren’t necessary.” This I learned by example, because I didn’t have a male role-model to “help me become a man.” Yeah, I’ve got the Y-chromosome and the danglies that go with it, but does that make me … more than just a “male” … a MAN? Read on, and judge for yourself….
I learned, after I left high-school and went to the seminary of the church where Mom had paid-up enough money for me to take the “Minister’s Program,” that my biological urges were something to be “transcended.” I’d learned this since age 12, when my gonads changed … but the Spiritual Call was supposed to flatten out my sexual urges and transmute me into an Androgynous Neutered Advanced-Being Spiritual Counselor. I did my very flat-out best to accommodate to this ukase. Honestly, truthfully, faithfully I did, and I have no idea who might have been shtupping the women I was counselling, honestly, truthfully, faithfully, really I don’t!! I only know that I didn’t touch them.
I learned, from my religion, that I was a spiritual being who was damn-well supposed to be beyond sex. Especially because I was in-training to be a Spiritual Counselor … and never the hell mind that my real father, not the guy whose name was on my birth-certificate, was the “exception that proves the rule” that a Spiritual Counselor in my religion was ordered to keep his paws the hell off his “preclears!” I comported myself in accordance with the demands. I kept my own zipper zipped and locked, in accordance with The Auditor’s Code. I didn’t get ordained, though, and I didn’t do my internship, because I couldn’t afford to go on with them – I needed to get a job.
Certainly, I was a Zero when I left them and started work as a “Technical Aide” with the Federal Government. No glory in that, just a paycheck.
Some years later, I graduated past “being a Zero” with a couple of women. One of them was far, far more experienced than me “in the clinches” … the next was less-so, but circumstances after our first time eventually changed our romance into a Let’s-Just-Be-Friends situation. How swiftly I went from being her Hero … to being just another Zero.
Meanwhile, Society itself was being reshaped, to reduce men at large from Heroes … to Zeroes.
The first great reshaping was started by the Vietnam War. The previous wars in the public’s memory had been serious conflicts, taken seriously; the veterans of World War II and Korea were treated as heroes, as were the “boys in blue” of the Air Force, on the front line of the cold war. But many did not see Vietnam in that same light; and too many of the boys who got back from that campaign were treated with contempt. Treated as zeroes.
Then came the “Women’s Liberation” movement. It seemed to a lot of men that it was mostly about women liberating their vilest bad nature. The party line was that women wanted all the “privilege” they saw as being enjoyed by men – equal pay in the office, equal opportunity at the hiring time, equal access to college, to loans, to mortgages, to professions. They wanted to break down all the “artificial differences,” and ignore the differences that can’t be broken down because they’re hard-wired into male and female nature. Oh, and they made it clear that they regarded most men as “the enemy” and the top-rankers as “the competition.” They demoted a whole lot more men from heroes to zeroes.
Next came the revolution in divorce law, the “No-Fault” divorce – which is more accurately labeled as the “His-Fault” model. Along with stripping the husband of his kids, his rights, his house and most of his money in the settlement, the goal of this system is to strip all men of their last shreds of “equal treatment under the law.” And of equal compassion under Society. This stage is still ongoing, but meeting with stiffer resistance as more men recognize the battle and join forces against the new tyranny – the tyrants whose rabble march in slut-walks, or cheer as manginas from the sidelines.
I won’t bother to recount the way I went “from Hero to Zero” with either of the two following American Women on my roster, nor speak of the couple of chicas in South America who offered me their favors. I will say this: By the time I was 50 years old, I had accepted that I would never again be a Hero, and I would forever more be a Zero to the ladies.
My last couple of attempts to reach “the sweetness” have been with women who were completely and entirely incentivized by my money. Cash at the counterpane, dearie. Call them prostitutes, as they are, but you of the Femmunist Brigades will call me much worse. You’re already blaming me, and my fellow men, for the fact that some women are willing to trade their sexual favors for a man’s money; under the “Swedish model” you would jail, and prosecute, and fine, and imprison the man who offers his own hard-earned money for an hour of “the sweetness we’ve been dying for.”
A Voice for Men put it well in Male sexuality, un-demonized (4 May 2012):
We starve men, then shame them for their hunger and then when they reach for what little food is within their grasp, we smack their hand away.
The pessimist in me sees this as the final chapter in the old tale of the “battle of the sexes.” That battle is over for me, and I have left the gene pool. I am preparing to depart the land of my birth, and seek refuge from the craziness in another land. Maybe I will follow Odysseus, and Joshua Slocum, and others who have sailed away and finally vanished from human ken.
We men are less than Zero in your view, aren’t we?
I, for one, have ZERO (in honor of my social status) for you.
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