Schadenfreude
Amy Butcher at Literary Hub penned an essay titled MIA:The Liberal Men We Love.
If you are curious about a psychology that is totally unselfaware while being totally self-absorbed, it is worth reading; or if you have a load of popcorn uneaten, and you need some idle diversion for a while while you enjoy it.
It is also enormously funny, but only if you are in a cruel mood, which, unfortunately, may indeed be the proper mood with which to greet an era dominated by unrepentant and utterly unconvincing liars.
http://old.lithub.com/mia-the-liberal-men-we-love/
Here is an excerpt:
To a certain extent, we expected it from the men who wear lobster-printed pants, the men from Connecticut, the Young Republicans of America with their gelled and parted hair, their summers in Nantucket, their LL Bean slippers worn on the porches of fraternities, 2pm on a Monday. But when my friend pulls me aside in a hotel bar and tells me it’s happening to her husband—a man who donates annually to NPR and voted twice for Barack Obama, who has a degree in Art History and works for a non-profit—neither one of us knows what to say.
We speak of it like an infection: has it spread to your household yet?
No doubt you’ve seen it, too: in restaurants, at corner tables, during the toasts at wedding receptions. It is evident often in Pilates classes, as women bend and stretch and grunt, pool beside the water fountain, pretend it is sweat that stings their eyes. A colleague tells me she has witnessed it at Back-to-School-Night, even, and on the beaches beneath the sunscreen. I see it sometimes in the grocery store: the way he scowls or rolls his eyes when she suggests the honeyed ham. It was witnessed most recently in the lobby of an Iowan daycare, pastel and suburban as it is, amid the many construction paper leaves, beside the giant pumpkin. It lives even—unfathomably—in the pews of American churches, as men and women clutch their Bibles, as they close their eyes in prayer and mouth the words, sweet hallelujah.
Everywhere across America, liberal unions once so strong in love—relationships founded on mutual respect and trust and commitment and loyalty—have found themselves upended, or at the very least foundationally rocked, by the political escalation as it relates, perhaps most specifically, to womanhood and gender.
Twenties or thirties or forties, children or no children, married or engaged or committed via long-term relationships: I have met more women than I can count in these past three weeks alone who have confided, in low voices—or once shouting, disbelieving, desperate, we have three children, one woman cried to me—of the disruption in their own home.
Of men—previously, pleasantly, progressive—rising up with unprecedented hostility, anger, abandon, and resentment.
Much has been written of the ways Trump gaslights, but far less has been said of the innumerable relationships drained of normalcy, of the ongoing and daily glare of current affairs in which somehow every day is worse. Who is it that said that when fascism eventually comes to America, it will be draped in the flag and holding the cross? I think it is worth adding that it will wear the face you love.
My husband worries about our daughter, she told me recently. That I’m only teaching her she’s a victim.
One day, while she was picking their children up from daycare, he burned a handful of her possessions: her Nasty Women shirt, her Hillary Clinton pins.
My husband filed for divorce, another confided a few days later. He said he loved me and shared in some of my frustrations, but “could no longer tolerate,” he said, the level at which I felt them.
Hours later, another wrote to tell me of a save-the-date no longer in need of saving.
My fiancé called off the engagement, she wrote. He loves me—he’s sure, and I believe him—but he’s “overwhelmed” with everything and “doesn’t know how to comfort me” and “doesn’t love who I’ve become.”
Who I’ve become: a phrase I’ve heard most frequently by women who have found themselves rightly riled, women who have perhaps never before—until recently—cited themselves as feminists report the fury, the frustration, the foundational shift as it’s occurring in the men they love so fiercely and the relationships that hold them as a consequence to the male gaze gazing now at their woman, riled.
It would be easy, I suppose, to dismiss this phenomenon as the manifestation of what has long been present, if buried under the surface. A friend theorizes that these men, on some level, actually hate women, have always hated women, and she is not persuaded when I cite their mothers, whose relationship they value, whose strength they find a pillar. There’s a difference between loving a mother, she tells me, and seeing a woman as your equal.
But I knew these men—I loved one myself—and they are far from misogynistic monsters. They are far from Trump supporters. These men, on the contrary, comprise a particular slice of American males: they are men who did not vote for nor support Donald Trump, but are reticent to admit his behavior, rhetoric, and policies are as outrageous and offensive—downright threatening, maddening—as their female partners perceive them to be. These are, make no mistake, men who wholly sought us for our strength, our independence and education. The jobs we held or coveted. The degrees degreed in our name. Our passions and pursuits and our can-do, want-it-all attitudes. They work as medical researchers or in the arts, in teaching or social work. They queue up the Saturday Night Live skits that humiliate Trump, to consume with our coffee on Sunday mornings, but find it unpalatable and unpleasant that our resentment and our fears linger long into the workweek.
Perhaps it was sexy, initially: how they saw in us an equal. But how quickly we lose our status when we as women are angry or upset, frustrated beyond belief, when we add our voice to the chorus of #metoos or feel daily symptoms borne of helplessness. When the solution to our problems is not a man or a new necklace, but a sense of elongated empathy emanating from the person we’ve chosen as our partner.
He’s from a very liberal family, the former fiancée said to me, baffled. And he is very liberal himself, which is why this is so alienating.
I’m noticing, admits another, that a lot of liberal men especially are finding it difficult to deal with the current feminist movements.
I’m frustrated and embarrassed, my boyfriend of three years said to me, with how worked up you are. He didn’t find palatable my rage, the anger I felt for Trump, for the men and women who voted for him, was in fact embarrassed that I led 90 students from my small Ohio university through the streets of Washington with half a million Americans. We’d ridden through the night on a Greyhound—some of my best and brightest undergraduates—and when I returned, delirious for sleep but feeling righted, in some small way satiated, he stood there in the hall and told me he was overwhelmed.
All of you women with your labia hats, he said. All of you with your clitoris signs.
The March, it seemed to him, was half a million people coming together in a collaborative act of inefficiency. Our anger was unpalatable—more than that, it was a waste. He shared in our frustration, agreed Trump was an embarrassment, a terrible man, but found himself exhausted by the outrage and activism borne of contemporary feminism.
And now I’m finding many other women confronting similar sharp edges that surprisingly will not soften. Still I love this man, as these women love their men, too. They are men who have stood beside us through life’s greatest hardships, through pregnancies or the death of parents or the labored progression of degrees. They are good men, is what I’m saying, who have otherwise demonstrated themselves to be partners in all things. Their behavior—until recently—is wholly unprecedented.
And while it would be easy, I suspect—and no doubt someone soon will try—to minimize my observations as a conflation of an individualized, interpersonal string of failures, or a coincidental series of heartbreaks, or delusional defensive rationalization, the pattern, it seems to me, is worthy of our attention. What we are witnessing among a more uniquely liberal slice of American masculinity is, to my eye, more than coincidence, more than people parting ways. It is not what was once hidden rising now to the surface. This, it seems to me, is a much larger, systematic response to female voices, female interpretations, female worries and frustrations. Its origins are rooted in January, or long before that, maybe, when he first began to come to power. What was the flapping of a wing in Washington became a tornado in our own homes: the exact formation and path dependent wholly on one man, miles east, in orange, his appendages beating furiously, his colors outlandish and embarrassing.
It goes on in like fashion.
My comment:
Ladies, you have been legally equal with men now for three generations or more, and by every metric one can measure, it has made you miserable, suicidal, infanticidal and crazy.
You see, because there a natural role for women that no mere decision of society can abridge nor undo: by and large, you are better at being mothers than being fathers, better at being queens than being kings. Woman naturally look to strong men for leadership.
If that embarrasses or wounds you, my dear ladies, then you should retire from the conversation and let the menfolk talk it out. When men talk to men, we can be blunt, because we know facts do not care about your feelings. But when the fairer sex is involved, a genteel regard for your more delicate nature often makes us reticent to speak bluntly.
This reticence, since the 80s has been fashioned as a one sided weapon to use against all men of good will, called Political Correctness. The theory is that tender young girls, and grown men as emotionally immature as tender young girls, cannot hear anything which would offend their gentle ears.
What is overlooked, of course, is that, like all social institutions, the art of genteel speech in front of ladies has a reciprocity, a price, a quid pro quo. The ladies must be ladies and not salty-tongued whores, not termagants, scolds, or nags; and certainly not baby-killing monsters, like some witch in a gingerbread house from a fairy tale.
Feminists are hypocrites root and branch. The kind of tough, sober-minded, serious woman who is the equal in mind and soul with a man is a conservative, and probably carries a gun to protect herself. She marries young, and comes a virgin to the marriage bed, and does not cohabitate with her “boyfriend” before marriage.
This is because such women — let us call them “ladies” as befits their noble character — are not fools, not self indulgence, and do not act on impulse. For a lady, the erotic impulse does not justify fornication, and fornication does not justify the need to kill the unborn to suit one’s own convenience, and likewise the need to kill the inconvenient life within, does not, for sober and noble ladies, justify turning to the government and asking Big Brother to rob taxpayers to pay for the red crime.
Also ladies, real ladies, are wise enough to know the truth about the mating dance and the role of masculine and feminine spirits in life not to need anything said aloud.
For those of you who have not decided yet whether to be a lady or a nasty girl, however, perhaps you can grit your teeth and bear the truth if it is said briefly: crazy women make make weak, and weak men make woman crazy. Woman want leadership from men, and if they cannot get it in private life, from a lord and husband, they will get it from Uncle Sam or Big Brother, someone strong to take care of them and avenge wrongs and slanders done them.
You see, because any feminist who was actually equal to men, equally emotionally, would never ask anyone aloud to help them find equality. Not one would go to Big Brother asking for equal gender pay laws — if you wanted a higher wage, you would go earn it.
So feminism is just a lie. It is the pretense that the relation between the sexes is a mutually exclusive power hierarchy, a master slave relationship, rather than a mutually beneficial complementary relation, each supplying the needs of the other.
From this lie springs a second lie: that the power relation should be reversed, so that women have the whip hand, and men be trampled. But, kinky as that sounds, that is not going to make as many people happy as the mutually beneficial complementary sexual relation of husband and wife.
Other lies have to be uttered to maintain the first two: feminists have to train themselves to be sensitive to micro-aggression, like a princess able to feel a pea under ten mattresses. They also have to be able to hear dog whistles.
Woman have a nature desire to see the hidden motivation beneath the surface. For this reason, they tend to be more spiritual than men, but also more sensitive to hurt. Left to itself, it is a useful adjunct to female psychology, and perhaps crucial when selecting a mate.
This natural female desire to deduce the inner and hidden workings of the hearts of others, under feminism, is perfected into a false pretense of insight: that the motives of others is always bad, and one’s own motive always pure.
In the risible essay above, for example, Miss Butcher speaks of an inner butler, that is, an unseen, unknown spirit being, which she and only she has the mystical insight to see. These butlers are an updated version of the shoulder devil from a children’s story, which whispers temptation in the unwary ear.
I cannot do justice to the absurdity. Get another handful of popcorn. I quote:
A psychology colleague suggests the mental butler—a well-known psychological phenomenon that argues our subconscious is so acutely aware of our tendencies, predispositions, and preferences that it influences behavior. He explains the idea via racially motivated shootings, arguing that while a white cop may not be overtly racist, his mental butler—who, over time, has come to associate African American men with athleticism, aggression, and larger stature—may cause him to act more quickly, confidently, and aggressively when encountering a black man as opposed to a white man.
If a man has somehow wrongly internalized that to be a feminist is to be hateful towards an entire group of people, angry for the sake of anger, condescending, inefficient, than perhaps no woman he has chosen or been tasked to love can shake him of his mental butler. Perhaps no man is capable of understanding, truly, what is always on the line when you are a woman, and how Trump and his toxic rhetoric threatens so very much of it. Perhaps no man can recognize the sinister in Trump’s threats because he has not endured them—in some form or another—for the whole of his life.
This ability to feel unreal aggressions and hear unspoken dog-messages allows the feminist to depart forever from anything resembling truth, fact, or reality — a masculine realm, after all, and once you hate men, you have to depart the realm where they are supreme — and retreat into increasingly insane Hieronymus Bosch or MC Escher inner landscapes of helpless rage and despair.
Do I exaggerate? I call Carl Benjamin to the stand, aka Sargon of Akkad. He is a gentlemen of the Left, hardly alike to me in political philosophy, but he has an interesting comment to make on the matter of the labyrinthine insanity involved in modern feminism.
Please note the modern, “woke” woman cannot agree on whether to go to the all women island because it might or might not also invite lesbians and crossdressers “identifying” as women.
I also call to the stand “Pose” actor Indya Moore. She will testify that the penises of biological men who identify as women are actually “biologically female penises.”
I swear by the all the saints in heaven, I am not making this up.
And since you are, by your own hand, cut off from reality, from truth, from honesty, everything in your life becomes flimsy and plastic and uncertain. Your brain is fog, and there is no bold, tall, dark and handsome prince willing and able to slay the dragon, to throw you over his shoulder like Tarzan, or to take command and start barking out calm, loud, clear orders like a sea captain in a sudden gale, and carry you out of the storm.
You are a slave of the empire of lies, dear feminist, and link by link and yard by yard you fashioned your chains yourself and fettered them to your own limbs. Has indeed it made you happy?
As one wag once said, a feminist is one who says she will not be dictated to, and so goes and gets a job as a secretary.
As for poor Miss Butcher, this woman lives for the absurdities and falsehoods of modern feminism, but when their low-testosterone male partners finally weary of the insane combination of feminist manhating and female needy dependence, and express discontent, she blames, not herself, not her weak male partner, but Trump.
Trump has the power, from Washington, to reach across time and space and smite her happiness in West Virginia.
Only folk who lose faith in Christ gain such gullible belief in mystic forces, witchcraft, systematic sexism, and unseen mental butlers. Moderns are more superstitious than any pre-Christian savage worshiping a carved and painted tree trunk or standing stone.
And now all they have done is recoiling on themselves, and who else do they blame, but the bad Orange Man, who has the same lax moral code they do, and is, in all but his patriotism and common sense, one of them, one of the Morlocks. Him they blame for their wrecked marriages and unhappy, unfulfilled, unfeminine lives.
You wanted to enter the man’s world, and wrastle, no holds barred, with men one or two weight classes over you, thinking you were fit enough to beat us at our own game — but you also wanted to keep the special privileges, courtesies and protections, strong and powerful gentlemen are wont to offer ladies worthy of their adoration, as a gesture of grateful goodwill.
If you see the wee small ghosts of dead and unborn babies hovering outside your window over empty cradles on a moonless October midnight, and their empty eyesockets turn toward you, who wear images of your sterile wombs on your heads, no exorcist can banish them. You cast these shadows.
If you drive away husband and paramour and friend, and find yourself alone, the solitude is of your own making. The Catholic grandmother with thirty or fifty or a hundred grandchildren, whom you mocked for not embracing the artificial sterility of The Pill, and not entering the ratrace for mere worldly lucre will not pity you, even if she does pray a rosary for you.
If false opinions, stubbornly idolized, have ruined your mothers’ lives and yours and your daughters, and no alternative opinions can ever be heard, you have none to blame, not the Orange Man, not any man.
As Francisco D’Anconia might say: SISTER, YOU ASKED FOR IT
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
